No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Euripides’ Medea: Mythic Context and the Sense of Futurity
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 February 2022
Extract
Despite the high praise it has received from critics and the interest it has inspired in nearly every age, Euripides’ Medea offers certain problems in interpretation which have never been satisfactorily resolved. It is rather paradoxical, in fact, that a play of such enduring vitality should so often have been found unsatisfactory in one aspect or another. Adverse criticisms generally have been directed at three problems: the interpretation of the character of Medea, the purpose and relevance of the scene with Aegeus, and the resolution of the play. The first source of difficulty, a certain ambivalence in Euripides’ characterization of Medea, has evoked contradictory claims: that she is “one of the most tragic figures of the tragic stage,” but that she arouses no tragic pity in the spectator; that she is a brilliant achievement in humanizing a legendary figure; that, on the contrary she is not intended to appear human but primarily supernatural and demonic.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © 1958 The Tulane Drama Review
References
Footnotes
1 The quotation and its qualification are from Bates, William N., Euripides: A Student of Human Nature (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1930), 165-166CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Emphasis on Euripides’ humanization of Medea is found in Harsh, Philip W., A Handbook of Classical Drama (Stanford University Press, 1944), 177Google Scholar. The theory that Medea was intended to appear demonic is developed by Cunningham, Maurice P., “Medea AIIO MHXANΣ,” Classical Philology, XLIX (July, 1954), 151-160.Google Scholar
2 Aristotle’ s objection to the play's resolution is familiar: ”… the Dénouement also should arise out of the plot itself, and not depend on a stage-artifice, as in Medea …” Poetics 1454b, tr. Ingram Bywater. See also Euripides, Medea, ed.L., Denys Page (Oxford University Press, 1938), xiv.Google Scholar
3 Pausanias ii. 3. 10. Pausanias attributes the story to Eumelos, who lived in the middle of the eighth century B. C.
4 Pausanias ii. 3. 6. Apollodorus Library i. 9. 28.
5 The conjecture that Euripides took this part of the plot from a play by Neophron has been rejected by most modern scholars, who generally agree in assigning Neophron's work to a later date. See D. L. Page, op. cit., xxxi-xxxvi. In opposition to this opinion, however, is E. A., Thompson, “Neophron and Euripides’ Medea,” Classical Quarterly,.XXXVIII (January-April, 1944), 10-14.Google Scholar
6 Poetics 1461b, tr. Ingram Bywater.
7 Norwood, Gilbert, Essays in Euripidean Drama (University of California Press, 1954), 33-34CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
8 These and similar justifications are given by Grube, G. M. A., The Drama of Euripides (London: Methuen and Company, 1941), 157Google Scholar. See also Harsh, op.cit., 175-176, 419.
9 Euripides, Medea, tr. Trevelyan, R. C.(Cambridge University Press, 1939), 32-33Google Scholar. All subsequent quotations from the play are from the same translation.
10 Pausanias i. 27. 7-9; ii. 3. 7-8; ii. 32. 7. Apollodorus Library i. 9. 28; iii. 15. 6-7; iii. 16. 1. Apollodorus Epitome 1. 5-11. Plutarch Lives, “Theseus” 2-7, 12-13, 22. The Medea-Aegeus-Theseus relationship was almost certainly the subject of Euripides’ lost play, Aegeus.
11 The Greek valued his children in part because they insured that proper honors would be paid him after death, hence the special association of children with the future and the particular dread of childlessness, as illustrated in Aegeus’ attitude. Murray, Gilbert, Euripides and is Age (New York: Holt and Company, 1913), 85Google Scholar.
12 Those who argue that Medea killed the children because she thought that they would in any case be killed by the Corinthians, and that she wished only to protect them from death at the hands of strangers, seem to be guilty of sophistic reasoning. Admittedly, this is obliquely suggested in the play (lines 1059-61), but Euripides was using certain parts of the legend as he found it and hinting at the orthodox ending. If Medea could carry away the dead bodies in the chariot, there is no reason why she could not carry the children away alive and to Athens, as line 1045 clearly indicates.
13 DeCharme, Paul, Euripides and the Spirit of his Dramas, tr. James Loeb (London: Macmillan, 1906), 172Google Scholar.
14 This interpretation is also strongly suggested by the-performance of Katina Paxinou in the role, in the production of the Greek National Theatre Company. Paxinou played the final scene as though Medea, were already desolated by knowledge of future suffering; it became a scene of immolation, rather than of defiant triumph. What is implied in the play as future development was here made an immediate actuality, and the tragedy consequently conveyed a sense of completeness not achieved in other productions I have seen.