Euripides's Exploration of the Unthinkable and Unnatural (Medea, Part 1)

In Part 1 of our discussion on Medea, we welcome translator Sheila Murnaghan to discuss the historical and dramatic context in which Euripides wrote the play, its basis in the Medea myth, and the plays most prominent characters.

Sheila Murnaghan is the Alfred Reginald Allen Memorial Professor of Greek at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Disguise and Recognition in the Odyssey and numerous articles on Greek epic and tragedy, gender in classical culture, and classical reception. She is the co-editor of Odyssean Identities in Modern Cultures: The Journey Home and Women and Slaves in Classical Culture: Differential Equations.

To learn more or purchase a copy of the Norton Library edition of Medea, go to https://seagull.wwnorton.com/medeaNL.

Learn more about the Norton Library series at https://wwnorton.com/norton-library.

Listen to our Spotify playlist inspired by Medea: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2jHEa9BnjuCKUkb8JYWgks?si=95b63188d01d4562.

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Episode transcript at https://seagull.wwnorton.com/medea/part1/transcript.

Transcript

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[Mark:] You are listening to the Norton Library podcast where we explore classic works of literature and philosophy with the leading scholars of the Norton Library, a new series from W.W. Norton that introduces influential texts to a new generation of readers. I'm your host Mark Cirino with Michael Von Cannon producing, and today we present the first of our two episodes devoted to the Greek tragedy Medea by Euripides. To learn about this ancient text, we welcome its translator, Sheila Murnaghan. In our first episode, we discuss the Medea myth, we put Euripides into context with his historical moment and his famous contemporaries, and we will also be introduced to the play's prominent characters. Sheila Murnaghan is the Alfred Reginald Allen Memorial professor of Greek at the University of Pennsylvania. Among her many works devoted to Greek epic literature and tragedy and gender and classical culture, she is the author of Disguise and Recognition in The Odyssey. We are delighted that she joins us today. Sheila Murnaghan, welcome to the Norton Library podcast. 

[Sheila:] Thank you for having me; I'm really delighted to be here. 

[Mark:] We're delighted to have you to discuss your new edition of Medea by Euripides. Maybe we could start, Sheila, by talking about the author himself. Who was Euripides and how much do we actually know about him? 

[Sheila:] Good question. We really know almost nothing about Euripides. Almost—well, all the information that we have about ancient authors is mostly a series of anecdotes often taken from their works themselves. Authors are imagined to have had the experiences they describe their characters as having. In the case of Euripides, there's a lot of so-called knowledge about him that comes from comedy because the Greeks had a very rich form of comedy that involved a lot of commentary on contemporary events and contemporary poetry and Euripides was a frequent target of comic treatment. So we have kinds of silly bits of information about Euripides that are almost certainly not true. Really, the only way that we can know Euripides is through his surviving plays, and from them we get a picture of a really remarkable intelligence and remarkable creative powers, but actually someone who is extremely difficult to pin down in terms of what he believed or the particular message that he was sending. His plays are full of contradictions. They're full of questions. They have many more questions than answers.  

[Mark:] When you say remarkable—what made him remarkable? 

[Sheila:] First of all, he's working in this genre of tragedy of which we have three major playwrights whose works survive. Among the three—all of whom are pretty incredible—he stands out, I think, for his psychological insight. Particularly, and this is something that was noted about him in antiquity, his insights into psychological states, particularly of women, and he is also a brilliant producer of lyric. He also uses, to tremendous effect, the rhetorical—the techniques and tropes of the rhetorical culture which was an extremely important feature of Athenian life in his period. 

[Mark:] So the other two dramatists that you're talking about are Aeschylus and Sophocles? 

[Sheila:] That's right. 

[Mark:] Is Euripides’s work easily distinguished from the other two?  

[Sheila:] Yes. It's one of those things—they're more like each other than like any other authors and they're writing a genre that has its conventions and its particular concerns and so forth. But yes Euripides stands out for—this was something that was said about him in Antiquity—his characters, his language is less elevated and stylized. His characters sound more like ordinary everyday Athenians. That's not to say that these plays are in verse. They're never exact transcripts of the way people would have spoken, but they come closer. He is much less inclined—both Aeschylus and Sophocles in one way or another suggest that the terrible often incomprehensible, unfathomable things that happen typically in a tragedy are part of some larger divine, cosmic scheme that may not make very good sense to human beings but still can be perceived as operating and guiding the events that humans are struggling through, while Euripides really subjects that question. He makes many of the pressures on people—that Aeschylus and Sophocles present to a greater degree as being imposed from the outside— as coming from internal psychological states. His is a universe in which the role of the gods is dubious, questionable, much less easy to have confidence in. 

[Mark:] You mentioned that Euripides tends to write in a way that would capture everyday speech. As the translator of Medea, is that something that was paramount in the way that you approached the text? 

[Sheila:] Absolutely. That seemed to me to be an extremely important goal. This is a translation for people to read. It's not—some translations are produced specifically for performance, and that wasn't my goal, just because of the nature of this kind of edition. But I did really want the characters to sound like real people and to say things that real people might say in English. That is something that I think is often elusive for people who are translating tragedy, usually because they are so eager to stay very very close to the Greek text and to replicate its syntax. Obviously, I didn't want to go very far from the Greek text, but I moved a little further than many translators would with this aim of making the character sound like they were saying things real people would say. 

[Mark:] Your introduction to this edition got me wondering about Euripides’s popularity during his lifetime, because you were describing essentially a playwriting contest—a festival that he would have entered and perhaps he would have had pretty notable competitors such as Sophocles and Aeschylus—so was this a common thing? To me, this suggests a society that really values the arts and drama. 

[Sheila:] Oh yes. So, drama was an absolutely central cultural institution in classical Athens. It was really different from drama in our society. In our society, if you want to see a play, you decide to go on a certain night, you buy a ticket, you go with your friends to the theater. In Athens, these plays were put on—at least for the first time—in a once a year annual festival in honor of the god Dionysus, which was major civic and religious event. The civic and the religious overlap in ways in classical Athens that are a little different than anything in our society. This was a major event. People always point out that this festival in honor of Dionysus took place in March and that March was the beginning of the sailing season when it became, after the very stormy winter, when it became possible to navigate the Aegean more easily. So it would be a time when many foreigners would be in Athens. It was both a big event for Athenians and an event where Athens put itself on display for others. So yes, this was a major event, and it was also a competition. It just inspired a lot of interest, and it's clear that people went to the theater, they talked to each other about these plays, they learned passages from these plays. Another thing that has to be remembered is that the actors the performers were amateurs. These were citizens who had other lives that were performing in a chorus or even taking on the parts of actors. Towards the end of the period in which Euripides was active, there came to be more specialization and there gradually came to be professional actors. But really in the Classical period it was ordinary citizens who were participating and putting on these plays. We can really see the interest in this in, again, comedy because the comedies that we have by Aristophanes reflect contemporary concerns, and they're all about tragedy. He's particularly interested in Euripides, and he's always going after Euripides.  

[Mark:] Now, surely a play that we're reading a millennium after it was written won the contest that year? 

[Sheila:] Actually not! So, first of all, when you talk about a play winning or losing, you have to remember that each playwright competed with four plays. So, every year they would select three playwrights to compete, and very often they include—like Sophocles and Euripides were often competing against each other. Aeschylus was a little bit earlier so that didn't happen. But every playwright produced a suite of plays that was three tragedies and then—this is one of the fascinating mysteries of ancient Greek dramatic culture—each tragedian also produced a satyr play, which was a kind of raucous play with a chorus of satyrs who were definitely antisocial characters who basically were interested in drinking and sex. The plot of a satyr play would be a parody of a well-known myth. This would be produced by a tragedian and put on after three tragedies. It's fascinating because tragedy and comedy were seen as two completely distinct genres, and they weren't practiced by the same people. But the satyr play was part of what went with the three tragedies. So, we know in some cases who won which year but that doesn't mean that it wasn't specifically for that particular play.  

[Mark:] I see. 

[Sheila:] Yeah. So, it's famous that the group of plays that included Sophocles’ Oedipus the King didn't win first place, even though Sophocles usually did win first place. Euripides usually didn't. In terms of winning those competitions, he was less popular. However, in subsequent years, when these plays would be reperformed and in antiquity after the Classical period, he was the most popular. It's clear that he was much discussed and generated a lot of interest. As I say, we can see this in Aristophanes. 

[Mark:] It still feels like a snub to me, Sheila. 

[Sheila:] I don't know. You really don't know what the other plays that were chosen were, and what the considerations were, which I'm sure were many. 

[Mark:] Is there anything else about this society, fifth century BC, that we need to know that would help us contextualize who would be attending these plays and the world in which Euripides was writing? 

[Sheila:] To just start with your question about who would be attending: that is a much debated question around one of the issues that's absolutely central for this play, which is the roles and experiences of women. So, the evidence for who went to the theater is—clearly male citizens went to the theater, and it seems like it was pretty much everyone went, but whether women went to the theater is completely unknown. We have scattered anecdotes that again are entertaining but not necessarily all that informative. For example, one of these anecdotes is that when the Furies appeared in Aeschylus’s Eumenides, women were so shocked that they miscarried. Well, that could or could not be taken as evidence that women were there. I think that the serious discussions of this question make an important point, which is: if you think that the Festival of Dionysus was primarily a civic event, then women would not have been there because women really did not participate at all in political life. If you think of the Festival of Dionysus as primarily a religious event, then women might well have been there, because religious festivals and other kinds of religious rituals were the one kind of public event in which women were expected to take a prominent role. But the festival was really both and I don't know how you how decide about that. I think it's important to recognize that these plays were written by men, performed by men, and probably directed primarily to the men in the audience. I think that that's a useful way to think about them. Then that raises the question of why—and this is one of the big questions for trying to interpret Greek tragedy—why women play such a very very prominent role in these plays, and particularly in in the plays of Euripides, and particularly in this play. Why that would be? That's an interesting thing to think about. So, I think it's important to know that this was actually a very gender-polarized society and so any understanding of how gender is presented in the play has to take that into account. 

[Mark:] Yeah, that's an excellent point and in fact that leads us to talking about the Medea myth. You mentioned in your earlier explanation that myth was often used as a source for drama. So, what is the Medea myth, and would Euripides’s audience have been familiar with it? 

[Sheila:] Right. So, one of the striking things about tragedy is that with just very few exceptions, tragedies dramatized myths from the legendary past. We can see that these plays are very much bound up with the concerns of the world in which they were produced, of the contemporary world. But they always use events from the far distant past in order to address those issues. These plays were presented in Athens, and they almost always set their plots in other cities. Particularly plots where things fall apart and particularly plots where there's social breakdown. The setting of tragedy provides a kind of gap; there's a gap between the setting of tragedy and the setting in which tragedy was received that I think is one of the things that made it possible for tragedy to present such challenging, distressing events. To the Medea myth. So, the Medea myth had a long history, like most of the myths that are dramatized in tragedy. The story of Medea is part of the larger story of the Argonauts. Already in the Odyssey, which is one of our earliest surviving texts, from many centuries earlier than Medea, there's a reference to the ship that the Argonauts sailed on, the Argo, as known to everyone.  That's a kind of allusion to the fact that the story of the Argonauts was already well known many, many centuries before. Medea is a character from that larger legend when Jason goes to the Black Sea to retrieve the Golden Fleece. Medea, the daughter of the king of Colchis, falls in love with him and helps him pass the impossible tests that her father has set as what he needs to do in order to get the Fleece. Then she returns with him to Greece. There are a number of troubling episodes in this traditional myth. First of all, when Medea and Jason are escaping with the Golden Fleece, which her father doesn't want to give to Jason, and her father is pursuing them, she decides that she needs to slow him down. She's taken her brother with her, and so she kills her brother and chops him up in little pieces and throws them out into the water behind the boat. Of course, the father has to stop and gather up these pieces of his dead son in order for him to be properly buried. That allows Jason and Medea to make their getaway. So that's a pretty disturbing moment. 

[Mark:] Would that be looked on as being monstrous or heroic? 

[Sheila:] Medea tries to spin it as heroic in in the Euripides play, but I don't think it would have been ever perceived as trouble-free or un-disturbing. That's an event with a long history. She also does another sort of strategic murder when they get to Greece. So, she would be known as—she had magical powers and used them to help Jason win the Golden Fleece. So, she would have been seen as someone with magical powers, someone perfectly capable of performing strategic murders, and someone who came from a faraway, exotic place. So not a completely normal person. But this story could be spun in various ways. The version of it that's earlier than Euripides that we actually have, which is by the lyric poet Pindar, really stresses her as having prophetic powers, and emphasizes something that Medea herself also emphasizes in Euripides’s play, which is that she was really driven to do what she did by being made to fall in love with Jason. And that's a very important part of her story, is that Hera, the goddess who was Jason's protector, in order to further his cause, made Medea fall in love with Jason. So, she's a victim of love as well as someone capable of doing some pretty bloodthirsty things. The myth of Medea also does involve her ending up in Corinth, the Greek city where Euripides’s play is set, and there were already traditions that her children died there. But in some cases, it seems like maybe she killed them inadvertently or maybe the Corinthians killed them. It's not really clear what these other versions were, but what does seem very likely is that Euripides himself made up the plot point, which is really the key thing in his play, which is that she herself deliberately, sanely, purposefully kills her own children. That would have been an innovation on Euripides’s part. When the audience of these tragedies went to these plays, they would have known this kind of mythological background; they would have been familiar with these episodes and they would have known various different ways of telling these myths and they would know what the subject of the tragedy was. But they wouldn't know particularly what spin this playwright was going to put on it. I think that would have created a lot of interest and suspense, and that is a lot of the impact of tragedy, is: look, look at what I'm going to do with this myth. 

[Mark:] Right. So, what does that suggest about if Euripides was going to extend this myth to have this horrifying element to it? 

[Sheila:] It becomes really a very thoroughgoing and searching exploration of the question of how can someone do something that we really think of as completely unthinkable and unnatural? How can a mother kill her own children deliberately and purposefully and for her own for her own aims?  

[Mark:] I think of something like Beloved by Tony Morrison or Sophie's Choice—that, when something like this happens, it almost gets you to think about the world that would have pushed the mother to this extreme: slavery, the Holocaust, and, say, look at how inhumane the situation is that would cause her to do something inhumane. Does Euripides present the same kind of extreme situation? 

[Sheila:] I think it's strikingly different. I mean, Beloved is considered to be a modern version of Medea, and it's based in part on a true-life story about a woman who did kill a child in order to prevent it from being returned to slavery, who was known as the modern Medea. But what Euripides presents is something quite different because Medea—at a certain point, she says something about—when she so compromised her children that she can expect that the Corinthians will come after them, she says, well, it's better for me to kill them than anyone else, but she really kills them, not to save them from some terrible fate, which is what we see in a number of these modern retellings of Medea, in which it's just what you're saying: that the world in which these children find themselves and in which they are forced to be, is so terrible that a loving mother feels that death would be preferable. That is not Medea's situation. Medea really is killing her children to get back at Jason, and she's killing her children because she feels shamed and humiliated, and she wants to repair that. That makes Medea much more challenging than many of these modern retellings. Another later way of accommodating the stories is to have her—and I think there were ancient versions of this as well—to have her not know what she's doing or to be suffering a fit of madness, but Euripides’s Medea is completely sane, completely rational. She knows exactly what she's doing, and she suffers for doing it. It really is an amazing portrait because it's not as if she is just a cold-hearted person who has no maternal feelings. There's this amazing moment where she really hesitates, because she truly does have maternal feelings. She really loves her children. She feels completely the horror of what she's doing, and yet in the end her need to get revenge on Jason is so powerful that she's willing to do that. In giving us that, I think Euripides has given us a more challenging version of this story than really any other. 

[Mark:] Sheila, we've mentioned Jason a couple of times. How does he appear in this play? does Euripides give him a kind of inflection? What are we to expect from Jason as a character? 

[Sheila:] Yeah. I think Jason's really a fascinating character. I hope that I was able, in my translation, to bring out what he's like. Jason is an opportunist. Medea has helped him get to the point where he's at, but they've come to Corinth as kind of outsiders, and he wants to make his way in this new city, and Medea is helping him. She's being friendly with the Corinthians and so forth. But then he gets this golden opportunity to marry the king's daughter. This is obviously a way of advancing his interests, that he can't let slip by. So then, he basically abandons Medea. So, he's an opportunist, but he's talked himself into thinking that this is really a good thing to do. There are just these amazing moments where he tries to explain to Medea that this is really for everybody's good, and won't it be great for their children when he has new royal offspring who will be their siblings and that will make their children be part of the top family in the city, and when Medea says, ‘Oh you know you've fallen out of love,’ and he says, ‘I'm not in love with the princess, not at all; I'm doing this for the benefit of the whole family, can't you see that?’ He is so toned deaf; he is so condescending; he really is so patronizing. 

[Mark:] Gaslighting. 

[Sheila]: Medea brilliantly exploits that. Those are horrible characteristics, and they're ones that we don't like in people we meet who have those characteristics. But do they merit the response of Medea? Medea completely destroys him in every possible way. His favored role among the Corinthians can hardly survive what she does, and she kills not only the children, but she kills his new wife, therefore preventing him from any possibility of having children. And one thing to know about the society is that having heirs, and particularly legitimate heirs, was an extremely important, highly valued thing. She completely destroys him. What she does is so huge. It's so heinous. It's so out of proportion, that when Jason shows up at the end of the play—and it's really a brilliant piece of stagecraft because we've seen Medea go into this stage building which represents the house. She's gone in to kill the children, and there’s this absolutely chilling moment where we hear the children crying out from inside the house, trying to get away from her, and we know that they won't be able to. Then we see Jason show up. He doesn't know yet that she's killed the children, but he knows that she's arranged for the princess to die that he's supposed to be marrying. He shows up; he's banging on the door and demanding to be let in. Medea appears on the top of that building on the top of that stage building in a chariot. And this is the moment when we really realize that she is no ordinary woman, and this chariot has been sent to her by her grandfather who's the sun. And she looks down on him and speaks to him in these triumphant, condescending ways. Nothing about what a kind of sleazy character Jason has been in the past prevents you from just feeling how unfairly overmatched and how cruelly mistreated he is at that point. There's a real pathos there. Euripides is brilliant at that. He draws you into one view of a character and then tells a story that just makes your views flip. 

[Mark:] The last thing that I think I'm going to ask about, that would be really helpful, is the chorus. Because I think the chorus plays a fascinating role in this play and might be helpful for you to lend some insight into it. 

[Sheila:] I think the chorus is very important. The chorus is important in every tragedy but plays a particularly telling role in this one. It's interesting to think about the fact—I was talking earlier about how these playwrights would be telling extremely familiar timeworn myths, but they would always be giving their own particular spin to them. One of the decisions a playwright made every time he decided to dramatize a myth is, what role was he going to give to the chorus? Because every tragedy has a chorus in it which plays an interesting role as both a kind of detached commentator on the action and as an interested bystander. The interventions of the chorus, the commentary provided by the chorus, gives a really quite important perspective on the action, or it really can affect the way that the audience perceives the action. Euripides has made the chorus of this play be a group of ordinary Corinthian women who arrive on the scene because they hear Medea crying out—Medea is crying out in rage and pain because she's discovered that Jason is abandoning her. They show up out of with sympathetic concern, they say they're her friends, they want her to come out, they hope that they can cheer her up and Medea comes out and describes her situation to them and describes it in a way that really emphasizes the commonality between herself and the chorus. She talks about the difficult lot of all married women, and the chorus is extremely sympathetic to her. When she says that she would really like them to help her by keeping quiet about any plan she may make to take revenge on Jason, they say they're fine with that. They're really sympathetic. They really guide us in the initial sympathy for Medea that we have. But when they finally understand that her plan includes killing her own children, that is the point at which they just cannot follow her any further. They themselves are mothers. It's not just that they think it's a terrible thing to do; they cannot understand how she can bear to do it. I think that they therefore play a kind of role in that trajectory where we are really drawn into sympathy with Medea. At a certain point, though, we just realize that we cannot go all the way with her. 

[Mark:] And the chorus is a kind of a conscience in that respect?  

[Sheila:] Yes, but I think that the immoral quality of what she's doing—I mean obviously they're concerned about that—but what they, in a way highlight, is just how impossibly painful it will be for her. 

[Mark:] Sheila Murnaghan thank you so much for joining us on the Norton Library podcast to discuss Medea by Euripides. 

[Sheila:] Thank you for having me. 

[Mark:] The Norton Library edition of Medea by Euripides, translated and with an introduction by Sheila Murnaghan is available now in paperback and eBook. Check out the links in the description to this episode for ordering options and more information about the Norton Library including the full catalog of titles. 

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