Love Dishonored in Euripides’ “Medea” (Part 1)

Known for casting mythical heroes in human proportions, Eurpides has his hands full with Medea—homocidal sorcerous, granddaughter of the sun, and a woman who does not take betrayal lightly. Nevertheless, the poet is able to capture the agony of someone who has given up everything for love—family, home, and homeland—only to find her passion disregarded, and her sacrifices unappreciated, by a man who robotically puts practicality above all else. But can we sympathize with a woman who would kill her own children, just for spite? Wes & Erin discuss Ancient Greece’s most notorious battle of the sexes, and Euripides’ rumination on the question of whether the Athenian ideals of rationality and moderation sufficiently honor the instinctual side of human nature. 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Nevertheless, the poet is able to capture the agony of someone who has given up everything for love, family, home and homeland, only to find her passion disregarded and her sacrifices unappreciated by a man who robotically puts practicality above all else. But can we sympathize with a woman who would kill her own children just for spite? Today we discuss ancient Greece's most notorious battle of the sexes and Euripides, rumination on the question of whether the Athenian ideals of rationality and moderation sufficiently honor the instinctual side of human nature. This is Wes Alwan, and this is Erin Olanik, and you're listening to Subtext. So Erin, I was thinking of calling Euripides the Edward Albee of ancient Greek playwrights tragedians, but then I was reading one of the few secondary sources I read it is in the Michael Collier translation, which is not the translation we're using today. It's one of the ones I read. We started out with that. It's a more poetic translation. It's really lovely. I highly recommend it. There's an introduction there, and I don't know who that is by. Maybe it's Alan Shapiro, who's one of the editors, but I think I already thought of the Edward Albee comparison before I read that. Let's hope that I'm not just plagiarizing that. But whoever wrote that introduction, which is not Collier himself, says it's not going to turn out to be a who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Which I thought was an interesting thing to say in light of the fact that it is quite a knockdown drag out fight between Medea and Jason. 2:21 Erin: Does that make Sophocles the Arthur Miller of playwrights and Aeschylus, Eugene O'Neill or something? 2:28 Wes: Exactly. 2:29 Erin: That might actually line up a little. 2:32 Wes: It well could. Right, so we have three ancient tragedians for whom we have extant plays, and Euripides is the last of those tragedians. And so. Right. The first is Aeschylus, who in a way is a kind of throwback to a more archaic period. And then Sophocles is a transitional figure. And then Euripides is kind of a controversial figure. He has a reputation for being newfangled, for being representative of a very important transition in the culture of ancient Greece in Athens, one that's also represented by Socrates and by the Sophists. So you have this sort of cultural transition to valuing rationality, valuing the rhetorical, and a culture that is more skeptical of the gods. And it all shows up in Euripides. So historically, he's been attacked a lot for that. That starts with Aristophanes. He was ridiculed in several plays by the comic playwright Aristophanes. He was criticized by Aristotle, also praised a little bit, but criticized for being psychologically unrealistic. The Romantics, one of the Schlegel brothers, attacked him. Nietzsche ended up attacking him and making him, along with Socrates, the representative of this cultural turn towards asceticism, which he also associated with Christianity, to the ascendance of the rational over the Dionysian. And of course, so you can see why the Romantics would attack him and see a bit why Nietzsche in the Birth Tragedy would lay so much of his critique at the feet of Euripides. 4:12 Erin: So then why is this my favorite Greek tragedy? 4:14 Wes: Is this really your favorite Greek tragedy? 4:16 Erin: Yeah, that's the million dollar question. And why did it get third place out of three in the competition? That is what I know about it, is that it got last place in the competition. 4:27 Wes: Right, it did. 4:28 Erin: Presumably because people didn't want to be told. Here's a warning. Here's what might happen to you if you. Yeah. If you're not nice to surrounding your woman. Yeah, yeah, right. It's a cautionary tale. 4:38 Wes: Listen, if you want to marry another woman, you should ask your wife first. That's what I've gathered from this play. At a certain point, she says you should have. If you're really being honorable, you should have consulted me in advance. 4:49 Erin: But that's true. 4:51 Wes: Yeah. So this is one of the things he's noted for. Either he's a misogynist or feminist, depending on your interpretation, as Bernard Knox points out. So this is one of the other things I read in Bernard Knox. Also really wonderful entry on the Aeschylus. Sorry, I do this all the time on Euripides. They all sound alike to me. It's all Greek to me. But great entry on Euripides in the Cambridge History of Classical Literature. And by the Way that entry, I looked at the Wikipedia page as well for Euripides and for Medea, and by far the most cited source on that is this entry from Bernard Knox, who's a really wonderful classicist, wonderful writer. Okay, so this is what Knox says about Euripides. He was a problem to his contemporaries, and he is one still, over the course of centuries since his plays were first produced, he has been hailed or indicted under a bewildering variety of labels. He has been described as the poet of the Greek Enlightenment and also as Euripides the irrationalist, as a religious skeptic, if not an atheist, but on the other hand, as a believer in divine providence and the ultimate justice of divine dispensation. He has been seen as a profound explorer of human psychology and also a rhetorical poet who subordinated consistency of character to verbal effect, as a misogynist and a feminist, as a realist who brought tragic action down to the level of everyday life, and as a romantic poet who chose unusual myths and exotic settings. He wrote plays which have been widely understood as patriotic pieces supporting Athens, war against Sparta and others, which may have been taken as the work of the anti war dramatist par excellence. Even as attacks on Athenian imperialism. He has been recognized as the precursor of new comedy and also what Aristotle called him, the most tragic of poets. And not one of these descriptions is entirely false. So that's a really great summary of the contradictions within. And I don't know if this explains some of what makes you fond of his play. I don't know if it's his plays or this play in particular. So he's rhetorically very advanced. He's known as a kind of an intellectual. His poetry is influenced, like I said, by the budding philosophical tradition in Athens at that time, including Socrates. In fact, he was accused by one of his critics of having Socrates as a co writer to his plays. Euripides appears as a character in some of our stuff plays, and there's so many great little jibes against him. But Aristophanes also accuses him of having someone else as a playwright. So he becomes kind of a representative, even at the time, of intellectualism, rationalism, sophistry, skeptical comportment of the gods, the sort of things that got Socrates executed, right? Corrupting the youth. He's a newfangled liberal, in other words, and he's a threat to the conservative and more traditional tendencies at the time. 7:49 Erin: Yeah, I'm not quite sure why this is my favorite Greek tragedy, but it is, I don't know it very well. I mean, I don't. Except for Antigone and Oedipus Rex, because I've taught them before. I don't know Greek tragedies very well in general. I've read a bunch of them, but I haven't paid close attention to a lot of them. But this one I have seen in performance. It didn't strike me as who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The thing I thought of was Fargo, oddly enough, for reasons I'll maybe get to later. But it does strike me as something that could be filmed by the Coen brothers or maybe has been filmed by the Coen brothers in part over the course of several films of theirs. So it strikes me as modern. And I think. I just. I like the speeches. I'm a simple fan in that way. I like Medea's speeches and the psychology, which seems to me to be just much more complex than any other Greek tragedy that I've read. 8:36 Wes: Yeah. So that's part of what he's known for. He gets much deeper into the psychology of his characters. He represents, in fact, gods and goddesses as if they were ordinary people driven by ordinary human emotions, which Bernard Knox says, well, really, that's actually a throwback to Homeric gods, because that is kind of what the Homeric gods were like. I think Aeschylus and Sophocles tried to elevate the gods a bit, to rationalize them as something more noble than as the way they appear. I don't know if this is true, but the way they appear in Homer. But we get much more crazy, passionate, irrational gods. And Euripides. And it's pointed to directly. So he'll have characters criticize the gods and say, you know, you're supposed to be gods. Why are you acting like human. Like crazy, irrational human beings with all these passions. How does that make any sense? 9:27 Erin: And Medea is a God herself. No. 9:29 Wes: Yeah. 9:30 Erin: You know, I found myself trying to come up with corollaries for what her magic therefore represents. The way that she's portrayed in the play lends the magic, I think, to a kind of metaphorical interpretation, because she doesn't seem to be divine in any other way. Right. So what's the purpose of giving this person. I mean, besides the fact that he's saddled with this mythological story, what's the purpose of making her someone with supernatural powers if not. Because it's trying to express something about. Actually about the situation she's in, about her psychology, about her marriage, about the threat that she faces from Creusa. Perhaps. Right. So for me, I found myself trying to figure out metaphorical corollaries, what this might represent. 10:11 Wes: That's a really good point. So, I mean, you're getting at. And we'll discuss this more as we discuss the play, should note for listeners, we're kind of doing something unusual here which involves me concentrating more on giving a lot of background. So it's kind of restraining us a bit from jumping directly into the play and hopefully that'll be helpful. Normally we're just jumping in these days, so let us know if that is helpful. But yeah, I think you're getting at. So he's doing something interesting with her magical power. Right. It's not just a mythological feature. It has psychological implications. Maybe it's a representative of the power of the feminine or the power of the rhetorical. As the introduction to the Collier translation, I think points that out. You could see it as representative of the power of language. Of course, both Medea and Jason will talk like seasoned lawyers as they argue their cases. But I think just to get back to what you're saying about psychology. Yes, there's this tension, and this is what Knox is pointing to, between the sophistication of Euripidean psychology and his featuring of the human irrationality and divine irrationality and the types of speeches that make it into his plays. These speeches that are accused of being overly rationalistic and philosophical. So here's for instance, what Aristophanes says about him in the Frogs. He's accused him of having a co writer who's influenced by Socrates. And then he says, so what's stylish is not to sit beside Socrates and chatter. Casting the arts aside and ignoring the best of the tragedian's craft to hang around killing time in pretentious conversation and hair splitting twaddle is the mark of a man who's lost his mind. So that's a representative of a number of Aristophanes direct attacks on Euripides. Aristotle criticized the psychological component specifically in Iphigenia at Aulis. Too quick of a turn from him where Iphigenia is trying to avoid being sacrificed, but then suddenly says, okay, I'll do it. He didn't like that. 12:13 Erin: Well, these women are too complicated and all they do is talk, talk, talk, you know? 12:17 Wes: Yeah. So the other argument is that these reversals actually reflect human irrationality and human psychology. 12:23 Erin: Oh, so you're saying women are irrational, Wes? Is that what you're saying? 12:28 Wes: Yes. So you can tie yourself, you can fall into a number of traps 12:33 Erin: when talking To a woman, you can fall into many traps. 12:38 Wes: Is this where this is headed? So Sophocles also has a character complain that Euripides convinced men that the gods don't exist. In the frogs, he has Euripides pray, to quote, unquote, other gods, air my nourishment and intelligence. Basically, to himself, it's made out to be a irreligious narcissist. So he was accused of the types of things. Yeah, Socrates was accused of. I think the other important aspect of Euripides is the way in which his plays are supposed to speak to contemporary political life and to contemporary intellectual controversies. So we see that. I mean, women have extremely important roles in his plays. And he is often commenting on the place of women in society, but also on other political issues. And again, you can see this as a product of the political turmoil of the time and the transformation of a society by its kind of burgeoning intellectual renaissance. All right, so that's some background on Euripides. I don't think I mentioned that historically, this play was put on in 431 BC. So that is the year the Peloponnesian War started. And in fact, the war broke out, I think, just a few weeks before the festival Dionysia. 13:56 Erin: You could see why this lost then. 13:58 Wes: It's significant because the kinds of events that Thucydides describes that leading up to the war had been going on for some time. And they include a conflict between Athens and Corinth, Corinth, which is an ally of Sparta, in a way. It's a conflict between Corinth and Athens, which drags Athens into this conflict with Sparta in the Peloponnesian War, one that will turn out to be very disastrous for Athens. So that's just starting up. Attentions have been there for a while, so it's significant. Right, but this is set in Corinth. Also that Medea is an immigrant, essentially at a time when Athens naval supremacy has led to a lot of immigration, shifting social relations and power relations in Athens. So many political and social problems that we would recognize today. So I really got sucked into this background because of all that. The more you read about that, the more fascinating it is. But we should shift to the mythology itself. Just very briefly, give a background on the mythology. I don't know how much you have there. I can keep going. 14:58 Erin: I know a lot about it. I've read the Argonautica and just. Generally familiar with the mythology. 15:04 Wes: Yeah. So who is. Who is Medea? Who is Jason? How did these two crazy kids get Together. 15:11 Erin: It was really funny. Just, I told my sister, I'm in her office right now, and I told her I was going to be recording on Medea, and she just immediately goes, like, literally, without missing a beat. Medea did nothing wrong. My sister's a therapist too, by the way. So anyway, has she treated someone who 15:29 Wes: murdered their own children yet or. 15:33 Erin: She was being performative. 15:35 Wes: That's a mandatory reporting. 15:37 Erin: I know, right? She laughed as she said it, but yeah. So Medea is the secret of Jason's success, it turns out. So Jason and the Argonauts go to find the Golden Fleece. They sail across the Black Sea to what is now modern day Georgia, to a kingdom called Colchis. And his reasons for needing to get the Golden Fleece are that his uncle has usurped the throne of Iolcus, which is where Jason is originally from. Right. So his uncle usurped the throne, and his uncle says something. Forgive me if I'm misremembering, like, sure, if you get the Golden Fleece, like, you know, sure, if you do X impossible thing, then I'll give the throne over to you. Right. So assuming that he can never do this. 16:23 Wes: Yeah. Jason has actually grown up in exile, I think, because his uncle had tried to kill off anyone who would have a claim to the throne, so wrongfully took the throne from Jason's father, Aeson. Is that how you pronounce it? 16:37 Erin: Yeah. Is it like Jason with an I or. 16:40 Wes: It's A, E, S, O, N. So Aeson, just call him Aeson. 16:43 Erin: Okay. 16:44 Wes: Jason without the J. Yeah. Added a J for his son's name. Not very imaginative, but. So he was protected by his mother. His mother pretended he was stillborn, and then he was sent off. And then there's a prophecy that Pelias the uncle, knows of, but the contender to the throne will be someone with one shoe, one sandal. And Jason actually returns and loses a sandal on the river. That's when Pelias, who's the half brother, is the uncle. Right. Let's make sure I'm not mixing this up. Right. Aeson is Jason's father. The bad uncle is Pelias. And Pelias is the one that says, yeah, go get me the Golden Fleece from Georgia. Right, Georgia. Why don't you go down to Georgia, get me a pecan pie, bring it back, then you can have. Then you can be mayor. Mayor of the city. Wait, if he's sending them down to Georgia, he wouldn't have a Southern accent. 17:45 Erin: He's from Tennessee. We'll allow you. Yeah. So Jason goes to get the Golden Fleece with the Argonauts in the Argo. 17:55 Wes: Bunch of heroes, including Heracles and, and Atalanta. 17:59 Erin: It's pretty cool. They go to Colchis and Medea is there. She's. Is she, is she a princess too? 18:07 Wes: So they go to Colchis. Yeah. And the, the king of Colchis is Aeetes. 18:12 Erin: Oh, and that's her father, who's the 18:14 Wes: son of the Sun. 18:16 Erin: Yes, that is. 18:17 Wes: She's the granddaughter of the Sun. He's the son of the Sun. 18:19 Erin: Right, because what we, what we need to add. What we need to add to all these names are some homonyms. Yes. So she, he is the son of the Sun. S U N. And she has a brother. That's important. So she's a princess and she has a prince as a brother. Right. And her father is the king of this land, I think. And anyway, so Jason wants the Golden Fleece and Medea sees him. And I think there's some speculation as to whether or not she was actually hit with Eros's arrow or if she just fell in love with him. I don't know. Of her own volition. To the extent that one can have 18:59 Wes: volition, it's either we, you know, we give a psychologically reductive explanation, which Jason in a sense, tries to do. Well, he tries to do both at the same. Either explanation is reductive. But in the play she'll say, you know, you're ungrateful for my help. And he's like, well, you didn't have any choice but to fall in love with me because of Aphrodite hits, you know, her son or whatever hits you with an arrow. So. But yeah, she's the daughter of Aeetes who says to Jason, you can have the Fleece if you perform these three impossible tasks. Impossible. Unless you have the help of my sorceress daughter, who will use her magic basically to help you do each one. He doesn't say that, but that's what turns out to be true. 19:37 Erin: He could not have done any of that. You know, like the, like the faithful wife who waits tables so that her husband can go to medical school. Medea helps him with all of his tasks and irons his shorts, probably. 19:51 Wes: Well, no, even worse than that, she takes all his tests for him and performs all his surgeries. 19:56 Erin: Yeah, that's right. Yeah, that's, that's even better. 19:58 Wes: So he has to do things like, you know, he has to use fire breathing oxen to plow field, for instance. And she gives him ointment to protect him from the fire. Stuff like that. 20:07 Erin: I just remember the dragon. The dragon teeth thing. Part of this is like common sense, or not common sense, but being clever. 20:14 Wes: Yeah. It's common sense to wear sunscreen if you're going to go out. And I mean, she's the. She's the granddaughter of the sun, so she knows that very well. So that is like SPF 300,000 ointment that she gives tonight from the sun, of course. 20:36 Erin: So. Oh, my God. 20:42 Wes: Sometimes it can go the other way, like burning up Jason's wife later on. But we'll tuck. Yeah. So there's also. Yeah. The drag sewing the. 20:52 Erin: The dragon's teeth in the ground. And then soldiers pop up the field 20:56 Wes: and they spring up as warriors and she tells them how to. 20:58 Erin: No, she tells him to throw a rock right among them. And then they all start fighting with each other. Turns them against each other, and then they all kill each other. 21:05 Wes: There's a dragon guarding the fleece, and she gives them a sleeping potion to put the dragon to sleep. This is a dragon that never goes to sleep otherwise. But. 21:13 Erin: Right. 21:13 Wes: She gives them potion, they get the fleece, and what's the next step here? What do they. To flee? 21:19 Erin: Well, he wasn't expected to get the Golden Fleece. Right. You know, Medea has betrayed her father by allowing this to happen in this way. She's very similar to Ariadne. This is a similar story with Ariadne and Theseus, where Ariadne helps Theseus escape the labyrinth and sort of betrays her own family to do so. And he's a jerk to her, too, so he gets it. With her help, they have to flee. She decides that she's going to leave with him on the Argo. And I guess the only way to get the father to stop trailing them, to overtake them, is she has to kill her brother and chop him up into pieces. And because I think of funereal laws about having all of the pieces of a body together to be buried, her father has to stop and pick up each piece of his son. 22:09 Wes: Yeah, you know, they do. They kidnap him or to just say, hey, come on, we're going on a road trip. You want to. You want to come along? I don't know which it is, but originally he's just along for the ride, and then, hey, my father's coming after us. What's the best way to distract him? Let's cut up your brother and throw him out into the ocean. That'll do it. 22:29 Erin: And this is really. I mean, it's all important. It's all important backstory. But she really can't go back to Colchis after this. She's probably not going to be welcomed back with open arms from people there. This is her farewell tour with no hope of a second farewell tour. 22:45 Wes: It's like hooking up with the criminal who came to rob your family. Right. Of their heirloom, the Golden Fleece, which is a really important history for Colchis. It's the ram that rescued Phrixus and Helle. 22:56 Erin: Oh, right, of course. 22:58 Wes: From their stepmother, Ino. 22:59 Erin: Good family friends of mine. Yeah. 23:01 Wes: Sent by their mother, Nephele. So Helle fell off the ram on the way to Colchis and died and held the Hellespont as named after her. Phrixus survived, married Aeetes' daughter, Chalciope. So Medea is basically the sister in law of the guy that the winged ram saved by flying to Colchis. So anyway, where were Phrixus and Helle from? I don't remember. 23:27 Erin: Alabama. 23:28 Wes: Alabama. Yep. To continue that. So anyway, it's an important fleece, and I don't think Aeetes wanted it stolen or taken. And that's why he put these impossible tasks together. So his daughter became an accomplice in that and then killed her brother. So the things people do for love. Right? 23:46 Erin: That's right. And then on the return journey, she also saves Jason a couple times. Right. I mean, I know she does the thing with Talos. So there's this large bronze man that's supposed to be. He's kind of like the Colossus of Rhodes. So I'm not really sure, but he's some sort of deity because he has ichor instead of blood. He's going to kill them. And Medea tells them, hey, there's this stopper at the bottom of his foot or something. Or in his ankle. I can't remember that. If you open it, all of his ichor is going to. You're going to exsanguinate him and kill him. And so anyway, that they do that and then they're saved and then. 24:26 Wes: And then. Does she get them through the clashing rocks which come up again and again? 24:29 Erin: I think so. 24:30 Wes: So I think at the Bosphorus, there's supposed to be these rocks that kind of bang together as ships try to go through them. So you got to time the ship going through. This is brought up again and again by the chorus. You know, you did all that you had the children, you raised them and. And you got through the clashing rocks, and now you're gonna throw all that away. I think. Jason lets a dove fly between them to help time it. The dove, like. 24:51 Erin: Oh, he actually does something, gets it 24:53 Wes: loses its tail feathers, and then he ends up getting the ship through with losing only, like, part of a stern ornament at the end. But I don't know what her role is in that. 25:03 Erin: So then they go to Iolcus. And so Pelias is like, oh, crap, you actually got the Golden Fleece. I was not expecting this. Deal's off. Just kidding. Forget it. I still want to be king. And so Medea. This is the best. 25:20 Wes: So no one lives up to their bargains in this particular mess. Yeah. 25:24 Erin: Medea's like, I'm going to get rid of Pelias for you now. So Pelias has two daughters. And Medea does a magic trick for them where she takes this old ram and she cuts it up and puts it into this magic cauldron. And then a young ram jumps out. And I guess Pelias at this point is pretty. You know, he's looking like the king of Rohan, whatever his name is. Like when before Gandalf comes and. Thank you. And performs at exorcism. He's. He's on his last leg. I can make some contemporary references here. Never mind. So it's like, what if. What if you could have the Biden of 1970? No. Okay. So the. 26:09 Wes: Look, just jump in this cauldron and I'll turn you into Kamala. 26:13 Erin: So she. So Belleus, his daughters are amazed, and they're like, wow, definitely do this for our dad, who's aged and infirm. So she's like, okay, just cut him up into pieces and I'll put him in the cauldron. Only this time, she doesn't do the magic ingredient, whatever it is. And so instead, they just cut up their dad. And then it doesn't work. And then they have to flee from Iolcus. And so they end up in Corinth. And the beginning of the Euripides play is that they've been in Corinth for a while now, I suppose, and have two sons. I know it's a matter of. You know, there's some inconsistency about how many children they actually had. According to myth, I read somewhere that it was seven sons and seven daughters. Anyway, in this play, they have two sons. Unless they have daughters that just don't deserve mentioning. 26:59 Wes: I'm not sure if Euripides has modified the myth there. I mean, I think it's widely accepted that in the original myth, Medea isn't actually the one who kills her children. That is Euripides invention. 27:11 Erin: Yeah, that's the big invention. Right. That he adds to the myth. So, in a sense, Jason is kind of a hero under false pretenses. He's not really responsible for his own success in any real way. He goes in the Argo and he takes this voyage. But everything that happens once he lands in Colchis, including the return journey and how he ends up in Corinth, it's all because of Medea's help and intervention. 27:34 Wes: You know, I think traditionally, an Athenian audience would have just thought of this, okay. These are mythological heroes, and there's a certain amount of honor that goes along with that. And part of the shock of Euripides is this kind of naturalizing or deflationary thing that he does where it looks pretty sordid. Right. Jason is now going to try to take a new wife, and he's going to turn out, in Euripides retelling to be this kind of cold on the spectrum type of guy who can rationalize his betrayal. And then Medea is going to be someone with borderline personality disorder, basically. So two insane people. 28:10 Erin: Oh, I don't read either of them that way, but okay. 28:13 Wes: Okay. All right, well, we'll have to discuss that, But I don't think either of them, of course, comes across as looking very good. So if the mythology is something that you've been raised treat with some sort of reverence, I think this is a pretty Euripides treatment of these things is pretty radical. And it is in general, in his plays, the way his treatments of the gods and heroes and demigods. All of that, I think would be shocking. 28:37 Erin: I think that's a good summation of where we are when the play's action starts. Wes, do you want to talk a little bit more about background? 28:45 Wes: Well, I just wanted to add one more, to read one more quotation to kind of set the mood for what it would have been like to actually see this perform formed in Athens at the time. We've gone a little bit into the political background, the mythological background, so I think that was important for kind of understanding how this would be received. But now just. I think this is kind of a charming description in the introduction to the Collier translation of what it would be like to see the play. So here it is as the sun rising above Mount Hymettus lights up the packed wooden bleachers on the south slope of the Acropolis, some 15,000 Athenian citizens and resident aliens, their retinues and guests from abroad, revived by warming wine, readjust their cushions, pull their cloaks around their shoulders against the early morning chill, and gaze down at the wide circle of the deserted dance floor, or orchestra, as it's called. A short while before, just after dawn, it has been a bustle with purifications, libations poured by generals, chief among them Pericles, announcements of gold chaplets awarded to the city's benefactors, panoplied war orphans eligible for the first time to bear arms against the foe, and buckets of gold and silver tribute from subject states. But now the tribute has been removed and all the VIPs have taken their seats at the foot of the hill in the front row, toes to the orchestra's rim. The year's most prominent office holders and other notables flank the priest of Dionysus at the center and the 10 judges chosen by lot, who will soon cast their votes for the year's winning poet, not destined to be Euripides, who will come in third or dead last. Nearby stands the old wooden statue of the wine God, brought in procession to the festival and thought to be as eager as the human spectators to watch the show. The trumpets have sounded. Anticipation has settled into stillness. In the backdrop spanning the rear of the dance audience, palace doors open. The Medea, a new play by the notorious Euripides, is about to begin. What a lovely description. So the play begins by giving us a little bit of this mythological background. Not a lot. And that's kind of the excuse in the beginning to have the characters of the nurse and the tutor having a little conversation about that. In the beginning, it starts with the nurse saying, I wish the Argo had never gone to Colchis, and I wish the Jason and the Argonauts had never gone to get the fleece as Pelias commanded, and so on and so forth. It's an interesting way to do the background. It's about as interesting a way as you can do it, I guess. I don't know. 31:25 Erin: Yeah, it does a good job of summarizing things. There's some nice language here. I mean, she's like, you know, oh, if only none of these things had happened. And then she says, then we wouldn't be here, where Medea has won warm welcome by being such a good wife. And then she's like, you know, this is what keeps a marriage intact more than anything. She says, when a husband can count on complete support from his wife, okay, so Jason has already left Medea, who has supported him completely. So already we're getting into some complicated territory here where the nurse seems to be spouting. You know what I find interesting about this character is she's spouting a lot of. I don't know what you want to call it. Conventional wisdom, maybe, or cliche. That doesn't seem to be fun fitting this circumstance at all. 32:11 Wes: It's an odd turn. I mean, I made note of this myself because she's there to give some background, and she's saying the gist of it is, if only this wouldn't have happened, this mythological background hadn't been there, she wouldn't have done all those awful things as the implication, including killing her brother, and she wouldn't be living in exile here. And as we have to have found out, she wouldn't be so vulnerable to the betrayal of her husband. So oddly, she tacks onto that. She says, but she's been warmly welco here. And what does she say about. What is it exactly? She says about pleasing your husband as good wives do. How does she turn to that? I don't have good enough notes to. We got to look at the play here. Can you give me a page number as well? 32:52 Erin: This is. Well, I have this edition. It has three. 32:55 Wes: Page one. 32:56 Erin: Yes, page one. 32:57 Wes: Oh, yeah, so we forgot to mention we're using, I think, the Davie translation. The Penguin. Devi translation. There are multiple Penguin translations, I think. 33:05 Erin: Yeah. 33:06 Wes: And the Davie. It's a prose translation. It's really excellent. I've mentioned the Collier poetic translation, but this is the one I would recommend as being more literal, closer to the original ancient Greek. I looked at a lot of translations. I was not happy with them. This, in my opinion, is the best for accuracy. 33:23 Erin: Yeah, so she says she's an exile who won a warm welcome from her new fellow citizens and who seeks to please her husband in all she does. This is what keeps a marriage intact more than anything. 33:33 Wes: Sorry, what's the page again? 33:35 Erin: 51, I think. 33:37 Wes: Okay, so the very first page. 33:39 Erin: Yeah. This is in the first paragraph of the speech of the play. 33:43 Wes: Sorry, so she's bemoaning, you know. Yeah, she's bemoaning. I wish this had never happened and that she hadn't come here to be 33:49 Erin: warmly welcomed, implying she has a good reputation, which also is a little suspect. We come to learn she's not been accepted, perhaps in the way that the nurse believes she's been accepted. Maybe that's part of the problem. 34:00 Wes: Well, Medea doesn't Think she's been accepted. Yeah. But also, I think Medea's quite paranoid. But Medea will have lots to say about. 34:08 Erin: I don't think she's paranoid at all. Creon comes to her and basically says, you've never really been. You know, we've always been afraid of you. 34:14 Wes: Yes. I mean, it's both. Right. Her standing as an outsider is bleak, and that's important. But she also says many things which I'll point to as we go on. You know, I'll show you where I think, you know, when we get to it, where I think she goes beyond the reality into this sense of something persecutory. And in essence, she's. 34:32 Erin: But. 34:32 Wes: But we'll get there. 34:33 Erin: Well, she's a little upset too. You know, she's. She's not in a great frame of mind. 34:38 Wes: She's been betrayed by her husband. She's dependent on him. She's a foreigner in a strange land. 34:43 Erin: He's. Currently, she's getting married to another woman. 34:46 Wes: Right. 34:46 Erin: Right in front of her. So she's obviously very. You know, I hate to pathologize in this way, but she's obviously very depressed. Someone calls her depressed in the play. Forget about. If only she hadn't done this, that or the other. If only she had gone to college with Bette Midler, Goldie Hawn and Diane Keaton. She'd have a support system of first wives bent on financial revenge. And then she wouldn't be alone. But she's very alone. 35:10 Wes: Well, she killed her support system. Right. So that's a big part of the play is this tension between having family and having a homeland, those two things, and having a lover and romantic love. So there's familial affection. There's affection for one's homeland, one's nation, fatherland, motherland, however you want to put it. Those two things are quite related. Those affections are contrasted to the affections involved in romantic love, which, when you think about it, are really strange because it's a stranger. At some point, I think this is pointed out, the person you fall in love with is a stranger. Your family you've been raised with, you have a common culture. Same thing with the nation, in a sense. There's a very, very significant groundwork that. That undergirds familial affections. But running into some guy who's there to take an heirloom from your father. 36:01 Erin: She loves a bad boy, saying, okay, 36:03 Wes: that stranger is now the center of my world, and then running off with him. That's the problem. And in doing so. Right. So the mythology. And then, as Euripides plays it, he wants to really, really ramp up the factor of. Okay, well, I've burned my bridges with my family now, and all I have is this romantic partner whom I'm dependent on. And not just in the typical way of, okay, I've become dependent on this person for affection. Right. But I'm dependent on. Because I now live in a foreign country and it's not even his country. Right. I can't even hang out with his family. There's no family to rely on. There's no one to fall back on. Not my own, not his. We're just foreigners in this kingdom and at the mercy of others. So they are, in a way, fugitives. And all they have is each other. And then he abandons her and betrays her. But also she put herself there. And in fact, she, you know, she chummed her brother and threw him into the ocean. So you gotta keep that in mind. 37:04 Erin: Okay. Yeah. 37:08 Wes: Don't chum your brother if you want to go back home for Thanksgiving. 37:11 Erin: Sure, sure. Yeah. I mean, this is the bedrock of Internet dating. I don't know. 37:16 Wes: All right, say more about that. I like that. 37:18 Erin: Well, you know, you call someone up on your. On your magic rectangle, you know, who you don't know anything about, especially if you don't have good Google stalking skills or whatever. And then, you know, you both move to Denver and you pray that he doesn't kill you. I don't know. 37:38 Wes: Denver, the Corinth of the American. 37:42 Erin: Yeah. Imagining that, you know, your families live on either coast and you, you go to Denver to work at a startup. 37:48 Wes: Oh, yeah. 37:48 Erin: And. 37:48 Wes: Right. Very good. 37:49 Erin: You know, he's a transplant. You're a transplant. You hope bad things don't happen. 37:54 Wes: Yeah. Don't move to Denver for someone. 37:55 Erin: Yeah. And all you have in common is that you both love craft, beers and rock climbing. That's why Denver is your chosen city. 38:03 Wes: Before you know it, before you know it, you're killing your own children. 38:06 Erin: Yeah. 38:06 Wes: Let that be a lesson to everyone. 38:09 Erin: Just saying, you know, don't jump into anything. That is what this play hinges on. 38:15 Wes: That's a good point. Yeah. So that, that factor of. That the romantic partner is a stranger. 38:21 Erin: I mean, everyone's a stranger. You know, that's the thing. 38:24 Wes: No, but I was just. I just was saying I like your dating app comparison. I think that's very apt. Because that more than. Maybe this is about what you're about to point to, but. Yeah. There were traditionally your Potential partner was less of a stranger because they might have been a cousin, half sister. No, they could well have been related to you. They would have been someone you grew up with, knew, very likely in a different society at a different time, or you would have had the containing effect of a political alliance between families, arranged marriages, all that stuff. So there is something about dating apps which accentuates this strangeness factor. 39:03 Erin: This is also the attraction with Jason, right? I mean, this is part of the attraction is that he is. I mean, sure, Medea likes a bad boy and part of the. Part of the bad boy appeal, right, is the person that you don't know who's. You don't know what they're going to do. They're a wild card. I mean, this is part of this strangeness is what's needed in the romantic relationship. I mean, she has the very same. You know, we can argue that she has a quote unquote exotic appeal for him by this very same token, right? Because she is from. You know, this is why I love the. I mean, there's so many reasons why I love the Pasolini Medea, did you watch it? Did you? 39:43 Wes: No. 39:44 Erin: Oh, okay. 39:44 Wes: Not yet. I do want to see it. 39:46 Erin: But it really highlights the strangeness of the culture in Colchis. Everything feels really strange and foreign in that film, including the culture in Corinth, as it should, Right? Because it does. It feels like really far removed from us. But Colchis is especially strange and disturbing and the fashions are super different. The landscape is really crazy. You know, he uses Cappadocia, I think, for Colchis, which is not the right kind of feel at all for something that I imagine would be really lush on the Black Sea. And, you know, Cappadocia is instead quite stark looking, but it's a great shorthand for just a place that's really different from this beautiful kind of stone edifice and very blank stone edifice of Corinth where the action takes place in that city. And. Yeah, so you get the sense that this is part of. I mean, you don't. Within the myth, like it's Medea falls in love with Jason. I don't know that there's any psychology commensurate to that in him in which he, you know, she suddenly just is like, along for the ride. Because I guess, you know, she's such an asset to him that he figures it's good for her to be around. But we don't. We don't get the sense that he really loves her. 40:57 Wes: I mean, as Euripides portrays it. He uses her, and he's a robot. I mean, again, I. I think you disagree with this, but hopefully I'll persuade you he's on the spectrum. 41:07 Erin: He's a. I think he's a social 41:09 Wes: climber and he's a social climber. And. Yeah, I mean, that's probably the more prominent aspect. 41:13 Erin: I think very few people who are social climbers are on the spectrum. 41:17 Wes: But he argues he's emotionally obtuse in the way that he presents his arguments. So. And so, yeah, obviously it's a joke. I'm joking that he's on the spectrum. 41:26 Erin: No, no, no, no, no. 41:27 Wes: I mean, he's, you know, he's a representative of logic and rationality, but he takes it to an extreme and it's almost comic in its effect. Yeah, or it could be comic. I mean, there's a lot. Right. Euripides has been. I think one of the refrains that I got out of the background literature is that he pushes these characterizations in their realism or naturalism to the point of the. Of being comic. And so he's not. When he's naturalizing gods and heroes, it's in a way that you might see as debasing. It's almost, at some points, it's like laughable. Like, they turn out to be worthy of mockery, essentially. 41:59 Erin: I think he's a really selfish, obtuse man who wants what he wants, and he's just willing to cut people out of his life when it serves him to get something else. And he uses this logic idea to calm down this crazy woman who wants to stand in the way. Like, I think he's a narcissistic, obtuse male who is upset that Medea is upset with his behavior because it really puts a crimp in his special day. 42:26 Wes: Yeah, she's not unreasonable for being upset, but she is also unreasonable. 42:31 Erin: Yes. I mean, there is a. 42:33 Wes: In the degree to which she takes. I mean, they are both pictures of excess in a way. Excessive, quote, unquote, moderation. Right. So Jason is representative of this new ethos that has taken over Athenian culture. And it's part. Socrates is in part responsible for it, and the Sophists are to some extent responsible as well, but moderate. The concept of moderation is idealized and idolized, and so increasingly is rationality. So what's getting a bad rap? The irrational passions. Right. And by the time Plato is going to write the Republic, he's going to be attacking the poets, attacking this depiction of irrational human behavior on the stage. Because it's corrupting. So, oddly enough, he's going to make this argument about corruption in the opposite direction. That's the people who are inflaming the passions of their audiences by representing these irrational characters on stage who are having the corrupting effect. So I think Euripides is using this myth to play out this conflict or to explore this conflic between these two opposing cultural forces now in Athenian society, one which is more representative of their Homeric heritage and what the divine represents in Greek culture, which has something to do with the instinctual and the irrational, and then the new rationality that is set in opposition to it and is deflationary with respect to the gods. And could be the sorts of accusations that were leveled at Euripides. They're explicitly explored in his plays what it means for a society to become philosophical and be threatened with loss of its core beliefs, belief in the gods. So, anyway, sorry to interrupt there. I don't know if I interrupted or not because I talked so long that I forgot. 44:25 Erin: No, 44:28 Wes: but, yeah, that's what I was trying to get at is these sense in which both Jason and Medea are sort of limiting cases. They're representations of different types of. Of excess, and they allow Euripides to explore this very interesting social conflict, cultural conflict. 44:44 Erin: What I find compelling about this is that it feels so modern to me. So therefore, perhaps I'm bringing a reading to Jason which is overly contemporary or which is reliant on what I think I understand about a marriage like this. I'll put that in quotes to maybe be discussed at length later. But what I see is Jason using Jason having passions, having a strong desire for Creusa. So I actually think he's, you know, he's throwing Medea over because she's older and he's not interested in her anymore. And I think that. I mean, there are complex reasons for this, but I think that basically he desires a younger, less threatening woman. I think this is politically expedient for him, of course, but I think also he desires Creusa. And he's using. So he has these passions and he's using a logical defense to try and get the better of Medea and highlight her passion. So he's cloaking himself in this sort of logical argument to try and make Medea look and feel crazy and irrational for having the. What I think is a fairly. I mean, up to a point, a fairly, like, realistic, psychologically realistic reaction, obviously, very quickly goes off the rails. Right. But she's devastated. Yeah, she really was in love with him, is still in love with him, and he's leaving her for a younger woman, and she has no one. Yeah. So I think he's. He's motivated by passion. I have evidence for this. Not just, you know, the fact that I think this is a kind of familiar story for some people. Yeah. And I think he's using this. This logical defense of, like, hey, you know, I'm just doing this because this is good for us. Like, you know, this is, you know, this sort of classic psychological manipulation tactic is essentially what I'm trying to convey here with. With how I. How I see this working. 46:32 Wes: I mean, I think it's. It's complicated because she's the granddaughter of the sun. She is nuts. It's also. She's. It's perfectly understandable. It's perfectly understandable. Human passion. Right. Euripides is mixing all these things up in a cauldron. That's a perfectly psychologically realistic depiction of the anguish of rejection and also of powerlessness and being alone in a foreign land. All those things. But she's someone who chummed her brother, betrayed her father, did all this terrible things. She is actually a sorceress. So I think that's the tension here. On the one hand, she's the representative of human irrationality, and it's its limits, its passions, I should say, because there's an irrationality to Jason's rationality as well. But also, she is, to some extent, was meant to be a psychologically realistic depiction of someone who might as well be a human being. Right. It's not just mythology anymore. She's not just a cipher. She's not just a representative of some psychology. She has that psychology. There's something more naturalistic and realistic about it. So he's doing those two things at once. In other words, the context for the plot is very unrealistic. It's mythology and it's granddaughter, the son and all that. And then there's an interesting tension when you try to introduce psychological realism into that and in particular, these horrible murderous acts. Because the psychology of being upset by rejection is one thing, but then the psychology of what I've called her paranoia and her worry about being a laughingstock and people making a mockery of her, that's something else. 48:16 Erin: Oh, I have so much to say about this. 48:18 Wes: The psychology that leads you to kill your children is also something else entirely. But I'm eager to hear your defense of Medea. 48:25 Erin: I have, by the way, a lot to say about this. 48:29 Wes: You're saying Medea? 48:30 Erin: No, I said no, no, no, no, no. When I say it out loud, I say Medea. When I say it in my head, I say Medea. So one time, I think it slipped out a couple times just to. 48:40 Wes: All right, just make sure I'm not. 48:41 Erin: No, no, no. Okay, well, we should probably end here. So I'll just say maybe it would be useful to talk about how this magic, how her sorcery is working as a metaphor. Maybe how I see it working as a metaphor. I don't know if you have a reading of this, but this divine element of Medea, maybe that's something we could begin part two with of our discussion and talk a little bit about the significance of the sorcery to the marriage. That's what I'll say as a teaser. 49:07 Wes: All right, so we got through page one. That's the end of part one of our 37 part series on Euripides. Medea. No. So I think this will be a four. We'll do two recordings, which will mean four parts. So this is the end of part one. Otherwise you can just wait a week. Okay, thank you. 49:33 Erin: Thank you. And thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast. Please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to lettersubtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook subtextpodcast and on Twitter enjoysubtext.