Medea

Euripides opens his play in media res, or in the middle of things, with an expository prologue from Medea’s slave, the Nurse. In 12 lines the playwright glosses a complex mythological history that would have been familiar to his ancient audience. Here is a summary of the story’s mythological background and where things stand at the outset of the play.

The Greek hero Jason, the rightful king of Iolcus (modern Thessaly, in Northern Greece), was squirreled away as a child and raised in secret after a coup by his uncle Pelias. When Jason returned to Iolcus as an adult and demanded the throne, Pelias required that he first go on a quest to secure the Golden Fleece, a family heirloom that was being kept by King Aietes in Colchis, on the far eastern end of the Black Sea. Jason assembled a crew of some of ancient Greece’s most famous mythological heroes—including Hercules and Orpheus—to man his ship, the Argo. Collectively, Jason and his men are called the Argonauts.

When the Argonauts reached Colchis, King Aietes’s daughter, the sorcerer-princess Medea, fell in love with Jason. She used her magic to help him accomplish the “impossible” tasks her father required as payment for the Fleece: to plow a field with a team of fire-breathing oxen; to defeat soldiers sprung from the dragon teeth Jason sowed there; and finally, to kill the dragon guarding the Fleece itself. After nabbing the Fleece, Jason took Medea and fled. In some versions of the story, Medea killed and chopped up her brother, dropping his body parts in the water to delay their father, who was compelled to stop and collect them.

On the journey back to Greece, Medea became an important member of the Argonauts, helping them out of several sticky situations with her magic. In return, Jason promised to make her his lawful wife. But according to Euripides’s version of the story, the couple were exiled from Jason’s kingdom of Iolcus after Medea orchestrated the murder of Jason’s uncle, the pretender king Pelias. Now, the duo are political exiles and residents of Corinth.

The Nurse’s brief summary underlines just how familiar the story of Jason and Medea was to the Greek audience. As a quasi-historical foundational myth, it was as familiar to the Greeks as stories like George Washington and the cherry tree or Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot are to modern audiences. But while the characters and their story are legendary, Euripides immediately pulls us from the realm of myth into the domestic sphere. The introductory speech is given not by some famous burly hero but by Medea’s elderly Nurse. While prologues are a standard feature of Greek tragedy, it is unusual for the speaker to be a slave, much less the slave of an immigrant. Through the Nurse Euripides signals to his audience that Medea will fixate on marginalized members of society, especially those rendered desperate and powerless by their status.

While Medea is not a slave, she certainly enjoys a less privileged position in society than her peers. She and Jason are political exiles, an extraordinarily vulnerable position in ancient Greece, as an exile is completely dependent on the goodwill and generosity of their alliance network. Even more ostracizing is Medea’s status as a foreigner. A “barbarian” woman from beyond the Black Sea—an eastern and therefore fundamentally uncivilized place in Greek thought—she will always be held at a distance by native Greeks, even those who show her compassion.

One such group of Greeks is the Chorus, Medea’s neighbors in Corinth who befriended her before tragedy struck (129-31). While the Chorus is friendly and solicitous, their social status is fundamentally different from Medea’s, a fact that Medea never lets them or the audience forget, asserting, “But I’ve been talking as it our lives / are the same. They’re not. You are Corinthians / with ancestral homes, childhood friends, / while I, stripped of that already, / am now even more exposed” (271-75). The Chorus, as married, freeborn, native Greek women, are comfortably situated in a network of supportive alliances. Medea, however, was completely ripped from this social fabric by Jason’s divorce.

Medea’s vulnerability as a foreign-born, exiled divorcee cannot be overstated. In ancient Greece all relationships—friendships, marriages, even rivalries—were part of a complex web of mutual obligation. The dire importance of allies, of being treated respectfully and with the honor due to one’s station, is at the core of the conflict in Medea. While Jason has found an escape from his status as an exile via his new marriage into the Corinthian royal family, Medea does not have the option. A Greek man could divorce and remarry with impunity, but as a woman, Medea is damaged goods—and a foreigner to boot. She burned all her bridges at home in Colchis by helping Jason escape with the Golden Fleece; she uprooted herself in moving with him to Greece. In other words, she put it all on the line for Jason, and without his alliance network, she finds herself dangerously exposed and alone. The divorce was conducted “so quickly and suddenly […] I wasn’t given time to […] build alliances with friends” (236-38).

This vulnerability is underlined by Medea’s initial refusal to leave the house, though eventually the Chorus clamors for her to emerge, to move her sorrow from her private quarters out into the street. As a drama about societal perception and public relationships, all the ugly interpersonal conflicts of Medea will take place in this embarrassingly public arena.

In her most famous monologue, Medea outlines the helpless position women often found themselves in in Greek society. Marriage solidified alliances between the men of the household, but women were beneficiaries of little of the spoils. “Think of how we buy ourselves husbands,” she says, “power and alliances for them, slavery / and conquest for us” (243-46). While men made themselves more powerful by marrying, a woman made herself a “slave,” subject to the sexual whims of her husband, snatched from the familiarity of her ancestral home, and unable to petition for divorce without condemning herself (249-54). Some women are content to make the best of it, Medea acknowledges, but she refuses to live life this way or be treated so abhorrently (256-60). Already, the Nurse foreshadows Medea’s absolute rejection of society’s expectations of her as a woman: by the end of the play, Medea will murder her own children.

Interestingly, Medea’s monologue convinces her neighbors, the Corinthian women of the Chorus, of the righteousness of her anger. They empathize with her. The Chorus leader speaks for them all, saying, “Now I understand your grief […] Go ahead, I won’t tell” (285-87).