There is no denying that reversal is the cornerstone of Greek tragedy. Passion, revenge, agony, deceit, deliverance, exhilaration . . . all of these are simply decorations on a cake of reversals, of anomalies—a cake which is sometimes difficult to digest. If we were to serve a course of plays that would cause severe sentimental indigestion to their audience, then the Medea would be the main dish.
The biggest anomaly in the play seems to be the Euripidean twist of the infanticide. The sudden spate of this theme in Italiote vase-paintings in the 5th century BCE, the disputed chronological order of Neophron’s Medea, information mainly from Pausanias and a scholion on Euripides’ Medea line 10, has led most scholars to agree that the infanticide in Euripides’ Medea is original, at least within the context a full analysis of her character.1 Consequently, the play carries the notion of reversal to the extreme; presenting a mother willing to consciously kill her children and not only escape unharmed, but also who is rescued by a divine figure, the Sun.
I propose that opposing clusters of dark and bright images evoked in the course of the play predicate the emotional framework of the action that follows, by reversing the essence of negative and positive values; specifically by reversing the essence of brightness through the imagery of gold, the use of the adjective λευκός, as well as the imagery of Light and the Sun.
The action opens with an immediate juxtaposition between light and dark; the negotiation of the κυανέας Συμπληγάδας, the dark Clashing Rocks (2), marks the way to the πάγχρυσον δέρας, the brilliant golden-fleece (5) the Argonauts had set in search of. However, the bright imagery of gold is immediately associated with death. In line 6, the γάρ is strategically placed to explain that the consequence of the Argonauts’ voyage for the golden fleece was the arrival of Medea at Iolkos and the murder of Pelias by his daughters, persuaded by Medea (9) to do so. The first five verses of the play describing the bright deliverance of the Argo from the dark Clashing Rocks are equally balanced (through the explanative γάρ) with the next five lines, describing the dark crime of Medea. Immediately, gold is associated with death—an association which Euripides pursues throughout the play, reaching its climax in the scene of the young bride’s death.
The contradiction between gold and darkness which opens the play, strengthens the gold’s association with brightness. Χρυσός, gold, is used fifteen times either as an adjective or noun (lines 5: τὸ πάγχρυσον δέρας, 480: πάγχρυσον δέρας, 516: χρυσός, 542: χρυσόν, 632: golden arrows of Aphrodite, 786: πλόκον χρυσήλατον, 949: πλόκον χρυσήλατον, 961: χρυσός of the palace, 965: χρυσός more convincing than words, 978: χρυσέων ἀναδεσμᾶν, 1160: χρυσοῦν στέφανον, 1186: χρυσοῦς πλόκος, 1193: ἀραρότως σύνδεσμαχρυσὸς εἶχε͵ 1255: χρυσέας γονᾶς). An attribute reversed every single time it is mentioned, since it always precedes a description of a negative situation.
The adjective πάγχρυσον is used again in line 480 to describe the ram’s fleece, immediately followed by Medea saying how she helped Jason kill the serpent, thus giving him the φάος σωτήριον, the light of deliverance. The imagery of the golden fleece is darkened by the verb κτάνω (to kill), lulling Jason into a false sense of security with the ‘light of deliverance’—something that the audience knows to be reversed already from line five of the play.
In line 632, the reference to Aphrodite’s golden arrows is made only to stress that love can be catastrophic when it is excessive, as the Chorus has already observed in line 627 (ἔρωτες ἄγαν). All that glitters is certainly not gold, as Euripides reminds us in 516, when Jason complains to Zeus that he gave men signs for false gold, but not for false people. And the potentially destructive character of gold is prominent in line 961, when Jason seems totally preoccupied with the idea of the accumulated wealth in the palace, thus proving him the opportunist he has often been labeled. Medea herself says that gold is more convincing than words to men (965). She later states that she would willingly give her soul, not only gold (968), graphically equating her soul with gold; only by now the audience is convinced that gold is dark—as dark as Medeas’ soul.
The potentially threatening imagery of gold reaches its climax in the scene of Creusa’s death as is vividly described by the messenger and the chorus in the fourth stasimon (976–81). In 978 we ‘watch’ Creusa wearing the golden coronet around her blond hair and this time Euripides openly links gold with death.
The bride will receive the golden coronet,
Receive her merciless destroyer;
With her own hands she will carefully fit
The adornment of death round her golden hair.
She cannot resist such loveliness, such heavenly gleaming;
She will enfold herself
In the dress and the wreath of wrought gold,
Preparing her bridal beauty
To enter a new home—among the dead.2
The ἀμβρόσιός τ΄ αὐγὰ πέπλον (983), the heavenly radiance of the bridal dress will lead her to the earthly gloominess of the dead, as she will νερτέροιςδ΄ ἤδη πάρα νυμφοκομήσει (985).
Medea had already informed us, since lines 786–88 that she would send the deadly presents with the children:
I’ll send them to the palace bearing gifts, a dress
of soft weave and a coronet of beaten gold.
If she takes and puts on this finery, both she
and all who touch her will expire in agony;
with such a deadly poison I’ll anoint my gifts.
The χρυσήλατος πλόκος of line 786 signifies death for those who wear or merely touch it. In line 1186 the χρυσοῦς πλόκος, already placed on Creusa’s hair, works together with the πέπλον and immolate her alive. She shakes her head in agony and tries to remove the golden coronet (χρυσός), but it is ἀραρότως σύνδεσμα (1192–93), irremovably attached to her head and the fire μᾶλλον δὶς τόσως ἐλάμπετο (1194) was redoubled every time she shook her head. There is no radiance more catastrophic than this. With the exception of the radiance of χρυσέας γονᾶς of the Sun, in line 1255, when, at the sixth stasimon, the chorus addresses the Earth and the Sun, reminding the Sun that from his golden race sprang the terrible, dark, infanticide. This is the last use of gold in the play, and it appropriately serves to connect not only Medea to her ancestor, the Sun, but also to combine opposites, like the Bright Lineage and the Dark Crime.
The adjective λευκός is used four times in the play. Twice as a simple epithet (lines 923 and 1174) and twice with the addition of παν- (πάλλευκος, allwhite, lines 30 and 1164).
In line 30, the nurse describes how Medea, who already knows that she has been wronged by Jason (line 26 πρὸς ἀνδρὸς ἤισθετ΄ ἠδικημένη) turns her πάλλευκον δέρην (all-white neck) from time to time crying for her father. The Medea that we are presented with here seems to be a remorseful, fragile, hurt woman, betrayed by her husband and deprived of her father in a strange country. The use of λευκήν here might resemble the repetition of the same adjective in line 1148 and 1189, used to describe the young bride, Creusa.
The association of whiteness with fragility and especially with women is not something that Euripides ignores.3 However, the use of λευκήν here is associated not with fragility but with death, since in the course of the play it always precedes such a negative scene, as if preparing us for a reversal in emotion and action. As she laments for the lost father and the family she left behind, the audience recalls the story of Apsyrtus, the brother she willingly killed and chopped in pieces in order to delay her pursuing father. Furthermore, six lines later (36) the grave statement στυγεῖ δὲ παῖδας οὐδ΄ ὁρῶσ΄εὐφραίνεται follows.
In 923, Jason asks Medea why she turns back her white cheeks (λευκὴνπαρηίδα) in tears, only to have Medea answer that she thinks of the children (924). In Color Terms in Greek Poetry, Eleanor Irwin argued against the Homeric tendency to regard ‘the response of the inner man to grief, danger, anger and other emotions as dark, but if for any reason he did not respond, his φρένες or whatever part of him normally showed emotion was white.’ She suggested that “this ‘artificial’ contrast is evidence of the Greek tendency to polarize sexual characteristics; that it describes a difference not merely of skin color, but of texture as well; and that it reflects an antithesis between fine-skinned, fragile women and tougher and hardier men.”4 Here, however, the whiteness of Medea’s complexion has nothing to do with the fragility that Eleanor Irwin argued about, but it is mentioned to cause shivers in the audience who know very well what Medea means by saying that she thinks of the children. In lines 816–17 Medea has already admitted blatantly before the audience that she will dare to kill them just to hurt her husband. Whiteness associated with weakness is used in 1164, after Creusa has worn the cursed gifts that Medea offered her as bridal presents.
Then she placed over her head in a bright coronet, and began
To arrange her hair in a bright mirror, smiling at
Her lifeless form reflected there. Then she stood up,
And to and fro stepped daintily about the room
On white bare feet, and many times she would twist back
To see how the dress fell in clear folds to the heel.
Then suddenly we saw a frightening thing. She changed
Color; she staggered sideways, shook in every limb.
She was just able to collapse on to a chair,
Or she would have fallen flat. Then one of her attendants,
An old woman, thinking that perhaps the anger of Pan
Or some other god had struck her, chanted the cry of worship.
But then she saw, oozing from the girl’s lips, white froth;
The pupils of her eyes were out of sight;
The blood was drained from all her skin. The old woman knew
Her mistake, and changed her chant to a despairing howl.5
The association of whiteness with death abounds here. The παλλεύκωιποδί, the all-white feet of the princess (1164) will soon falter five lines later and will become τρέμουσα κῶλα (1165). Her lifeless reflection (ἄψυχον εἰκώ, 1162) in the bright mirror (λαμπρῶι κατόπτρωι, 1161), which makes her smile, turns into a menacing, graphical message to the audience. The latter will make the final connection of λευκός with death, in line 1174, in the description of the white froth emerging from her mouth, followed by blood. In the following line, the paleness of death is vividly drawn for the audience when the messenger describes how αἷμά τ΄ οὐκ ἐνὸν χροΐ (there was no blood in her body).
One thing that is taken lightly in the play is light itself. During the course of the play, the word φάος is used six times (contracted or not), only to prepare us for darkness. In line 482, as we have seen, Medea talks about the light of deliverance (φάος σωτήριον) that she offered to Jason, only to have her words followed by the description of the serpent’s death at the tree where it guarded the golden fleece.
Twice φάος is called upon in an invocation to Justice. Ὦ Ζεῦ καὶ Γᾶ καὶφῶς͵ implores the despaired Medea in line 144, asking for the ‘celestial flame’ (oὐρανία φλόγα) to pass through her head, since death is more preferable than her hated life, as she declares two lines later. And the image of death immediately follows that of light.
Ὦ Ζεῦ καὶ Γᾶ καὶ φῶς͵ implores the despairing chorus immediately afterward, in line 148, only to prepare us for their insight that σπεύσει(ς) θανάτουτελευτάν, the end, death, will come soon (153). Yet again, the image of death immediately follows that of light.
In 764, Medea calls upon Ζεῦ Δίκη τε Ζηνὸς Ἡλίου τε φῶς͵ (Ζeus, Justice of Zeus and light of the Sun), to witness how she will take revenge upon her enemies. Only this is a complete reversal of natural and social order as we know it, since Medea considers as enemies her own kin.
But the ultimate subversion of any sense of lightness and brightness in φάος, comes in the sixth stasimon, that we have already examined. Where the chorus, by evoking the παμφαὴς/ ἀκτὶς Ἁλίου (the illustrious ray of the Sun, 1251–52), realizes, as if for the first time, Medea’s lineage and her connection to the bright blood-line of the Sun. And the chorus continues (1258–60) in the most horrifying realization of all:
But, divine-born Light, prevent her,
Stop her, drive out of the house the wretched murderer
Whom Avenging Daemons turned into Erinya.
Medea has turned into the Darkest One. She has become the haunting, fearful, dark Erinya—perhaps a hint for her ultimate role, a substitute for the divine solution that the anomalous, impossible situation requires, just a few minutes before her exit in the Sun’s chariot enhances even more her divinelike status. As for the διογενὲς φῶς, not only will it not prevent her, but it will assist her after she has committed the crime.
This was not the first time that the Athenian audience was presented with the horror of infanticide by Euripides. Agaue killed her son Pentheus and Hercules killed his own children. So, what is so special about this infanticide? The fact is that this one is conscious. This is why it cannot be forgiven or even convincingly explained, despite the fact that Medea gloats over her σοφίαthroughout the play.6 Even Ino, whom the chorus reminds us of in the antistrophe of lines 1282–92, killed her children only after being driven out of her mind by the gods (Ἰνὼ μανεῖσαν ἐκ θεῶν, 1284).
And she escapes. She stands on an equal footing with the Sun, in his chariot and she rises to heaven. She boasts to Jason that he cannot touch her in the chariot that the Sun, the father of her father gave her (1320–22) and Jason seems perplexed, unable to fathom the magnitude of the injustice. Even after he has witnessed the Sun’s impartiality, five lines later he wonders how Medea dares to turn her gaze toward the Earth and the Sun (1327), after having committed such an ἔργον . . . δυσσεβέστατον (1328). Of course, this might be placing the Sun on too high of a pedestal. Just because he is used in invocations and called to sanctify oaths, does not necessarily make him an image of metaphorical, as well as physical brightness. The audience might recall that the Sun has agreed to participate in the upset of cosmic balance before: once when he allowed his son Phaethon to drive his chariot, and oncewhen he agreed not to rise for three days, in order to allow Zeus (transformed into Amphitryon) to sleep with Alcmene for three nights that felt to her like one. The Sun’s ambivalent position is, in my opinion, vividly described on a white lekythos from the 5th c. BCΕ, now in the Metropolitan Musem of New York, which depicts him emerging between two opposites: the dark Night and the bright Eos. He turns his gaze to the right, toward Eos, but he stands between them. He makes visible the fact that nothing is only good, or only bad, but it is up to man to act according to one or the other.
In an early Lucanian hydria by the Policoro Painter (c. 400 BCΕ), Medea is alone in the divine chariot, which is just sent to her by the Sun, flying high over the heads of the grieving Creon, the dead children, the dying bride and Jason who raises his sword toward her but cannot reach her.7 It is a dragon chariot, just like the one Triptolemus was given by Persephone, thus making the association of the dragon-chariot and the black netherworld even stronger.8 Only this time, Medea’s chariot is pulled by even stronger dragons, as the painter shows.9 In this case, with the Sun being absent, Medea receives a sine qua non claim to divinity, as she assumes the role of deus ex macchina , ‘the protagonist integral to the whole plot who provides its resolution from without (not unlike Dionysus in the Bacchae).’10 As she, the Dark one, stands in the stead of the Sun, the Illustrious one, she visually reminds us that every shadow is cast by a light, and this contraposition is the essence of life. As Vellacott put it, ‘it is a reminder that the universe is not on the side of civilization; and that a life combining order with happiness is something men must win for themselves in continual struggle with an unsympathetic environment.’11 As other myths remind us ‘the Universe is black and white and it’s up to men to choose which direction they will follow.’ Anyhow, Medea’s ascension to the skies equates her to the bright Sun, while the Sun’s involvement in the abominable crime stains him and makes him a dark figure. The ultimate imagery of the play is the total reversal of Light and Dark, through the exchange of positions by Medea and the Sun; it is a reversal that further enhances the anomaly of the play.
The play might end with a disturbing sense of cosmic imbalance, due to the celestial figure’s involvement in an abominable crime, yet the scales of imagery are finely balanced by Euripides. The final exodos of Medea, her flight to the deliverance that Athens has to offer, is the antipode to the imagery that the audience was presented with at the opening of the play. The false sense of deliverance created by the passing of Argo through the κυανέας Συμπληγάδας(the Dark Clashing Stones) is matched by the unjust escape of Medea from the crime scene to Athens. At the end of the day, both escapes signify catastrophe, and they are both used to remind us that the reversal of cosmic order is never just, rational or justified; that is why the imagery of escape through the Clashing Stones is used again by the chorus in line 1263, seconds before the realization of the terrible crime. Furthermore, Jason’s first passage through the Clashing Stones aboard the Argo is equated with his own destruction in verses 1386–87, when Medea reminds us of another version of the myth saying that Jason will be killed by a piece of the Argo falling on his head when he lies to sleep in her shade.12
At the end, the final lines of the play make more sense than they actually sound: τὰ δοκηθέντ΄ οὐκ ἐτελέσθη͵/ τῶν δ΄ ἀδοκήτων πόρον ηὗρε θεός (what we expected to be done, did not happen, the god found way to do the unexpected, 1417–18) . A terrible crime was committed and the perpetrator escaped unharmed, not justified by the gods, only assisted by a partial god who should have been the pillar of justice. The reversal of cosmic order is bewildering. This is enhanced by the reversal of every image of Light in the play, which becomes as threatening as any image of Darkness. Medea radiates as the most illustrious dark figure in the history of literature, and this is definitely something more than s-light anomaly.
1. According to the tradition that Creophilus used, the Corinthians blamed their own unlawful crime on Medea. In a way, this tradition preages the elements for Medea’s infanticide. Nevertheless, the purification rituals of the Corinthians in honor of Hera are a fact hinting at an unlawful crime weighing upon the city. So, Wilamowitz seems to be right (Hermes, XV, p. 486) in saying that Euripides—or, in a way, Attic Tragedy—created the image of the Infanticide Medea. On this, one can recall an unverified but interesting anecdote (Schol. on Eur. Med. 10) that Euripides received five talents from the Corinthians to ascribe the infanticide to Medea, and so “free” them, on the Athenian stage, from a tradition that weighed upon their shoulders. One can even see in lines 1381–83, an attempt by the poet to blend the new element with the old tradition of the Corinthian rituals.
The important issue is that Euripides was the first to introduce the infanticide into the myth. Of course there is always the problem of the Medea of Neophron. As was reported in the first Hypothesis of the Medea, Euripides used the work of the Sikyonian tragic poet Neophron. The scholar who wrote the Hypothesis (it is anonymous) calls upon the authorities of Dikaiarchos and Aristotle in Hypomnemata. Diogenes Laertius (II, 10, par. 134) talks about Euripides’ Medea, “that is said to have been inspired by the Sikyonian Neophron.” The Scholia on Medea, also, refer to two extracts from Neophron’s play, and a longer one is found in Stobaeus (Anthol. , XX, 34). However, it is still a very controversial matter whether such a work existed. The problem is that our information about Neophron (or Neophon) comes from Suidas, after the 10th century, and is not very illuminating. It is indicative that Neophron was said to have been killed by Alexander the Great (along with Callisthenes), but he seems to bealive in the 4th century, and even to appear as a predecessor of Sophocles and Euripides. Then, he was supposed to have written 120 works, of which none survives. Aristotle does not mention him in the Poetics, when he talks about the Medea of Euripides. As for Dikaiarchos, he is not a reliable authority, and the Hypomnemata was not written by either Dikaiarchos or Aristotle. Then, in the Hypothesis by Aristophanes Byzantius, a more reliable source (ii, 35–40), it is said that neither Sophocles nor Aeschylus dealt with the myth—Neophron is not even mentioned. Even the surviving extracts of Neophron can be considered as imitations of Euripides’ play.
2. The translation is from P. Vellacott, Euripides. Medea and Other Plays, Penguin books, London 1963, 47.
3. E. Irwin, Color Terms in Greek Poetry, Hakkert, Toronto 1974, 118, esp. n. 21.
4. E. Irwin, Color Terms in Greek Poetry, 116–17.
5. P. Vellacott, Euripides’ Medea and Other Plays, 53.
6. ‘In the Bacchae, a divine figure at the end of the play justifies the events, no matter how unjust or cruel they appear; and in Heracles a friend (who is a demigod) offers peace and forgiveness and hope for restoration. The striking difference between these two plays and the Medea is that in Bacchae and Heracles parents killed their own children while driven mad, out of their minds, by some divine agent. Agaue thinks that she has killed a lion, not her son; Heracles thinks that he has killed his enemies, not his children. Medea, on the other hand, committed her crime with a sound awareness of whom she was going to murder, having planned the crime in a most cold-blooded way.’ S. Syropoulos, Gender and the Social Function of the Athenian Tragedy, B.A.R. International Series 1127, Archaeopress, Oxford 2003, 44, col. 1.
7. A. Trendall and T. Webster (edd.), Illustrations of Greek Drama (London, 1971), 97 (Policoro, Museo Nationalle della Siritide).
8. Triptolemos, a son of Celeus and Metaneira or Polymnia, or according to others, a son of king Eleusis by Cothonea (or Cyntinea or Hyona, Serv. ad Virg. Georg. i. 19 ; Schol. ad Stat. Theb. ii. 382). Others again describe him as a son of Oceanus and Gaea, as a younger brother or relation of Celeus, as a son of Trochilus by an Eleusinian woman, as a son of Rharus by a daughter of Amphictyon, or lastly, as a son of Dysaules. (Hygin. Fab. 147; Apollod. i. 5. § 2, Paus. i. 14. § 2; Hom Hymn. in Cer. 153.) Triptolemus was the favorite of Demeter, and the inventor of the plough and agriculture, and of civilization, which is the result of it. He was the great hero in the Eleusinian mysteries. (Plin. H. N. vii. 56; Callim. Hymn. in Cer. 22 ; Virg. Georg. i. 19.) According to Apollodorus, who makes Triptolemus a son of Celeus and Metaneira, Demeter, on her arrival at Eleusis in Attica, undertook as nurse the care of Demophon, a brother of Triptolemus. who had just been born. In order to make the child immortal, Demeter at night put him into a fire, but as Metaneira on discovering the proceedings, screamed out, the child was consumed by the flames. As a compensation for this bereavement, the goddess gave Triptolemus a chariot with winged dragons and seeds of wheat. According to others Triptolemus first sowed barley in the Rharian plain, and thence spread the cultivation of grain all over the earth; and in later times an altar and threshing floor of Triptolemus were shown there. (Paus. i. 38. § 6.) In the Homeric hymn on Demeter, Triptolemus is described as one of the chief men of the country, who like other nobles is instructed by Demeter in her sacred worship (123, 474, &c.); but no mention is made of any relationship between him and Celeus. In the tradition related by Hyginus, who makes Triptolemus a son of Eleusis, Triptolemus himself was the boy whom the goddess wished to make immortal. Eleusis, who was watching her, was discovered by her and punished with instant death. (Ov. Trist. iii. 8. 2.) Triptolemus, after having received the dragon-chariot, rode in it all over the earth, making man acquainted with the blessings of agriculture. (Comp. Paus. vii. 18.§ 2, viii. 4. § 1; Ov. Met. v. 646, &c.) On his return to Attica, king Celeus wanted to kill him, but by the command of Demeter he was obliged to give up his country to Triptolemus, which he now called after his father Eleusis. He now established the worship of Demeter, and instituted the Thesmophoria. (Hygin. Fab. 147; comp. Dionys. Hal. i. 12; Ov. Fast. iv. 507, & c.) He had temples and statues both at Eleusis and Athens (Paus. i. 14. § 1. 38. § 6.) Triptolemus is represented in works of art as a youthful hero, sometimes with the petasus, in a chariot drawn by dragons, and holding in his hand a sceptre and corn ears. (See Müller, Anc. Art. and its Rem. § 358.)
9. K. Kerényi, Die Mythologie der Griechen 1966, part B; here utilized the Greek translation by D. Stathopoulos Estia editions 1074, 519.
10. M. P. O. Morford and R. J. Lenardon, Classical Mythology, O.U.P., 7th ed., 2003, 600.
11. Vellacott, Euripides’ Medea and Other Plays, Penguin Books 1963, 9. 12. Σ on Euripides’ Medea 1387. Cf. Apollodorus Mythographer 1. 9. 28, who speficies the location as the temple of Poseidon at the Isthmus, where Jason had dedicated the Argo.
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