Classics 301B
April 22, 2025

Safran, Medea (1964)

Group Projects (Tuesday, April 29)



Seneca's Medea

Medea, Jason, Colchian Dragon & Golden Fleece (Apulian red-figure, 4th century BCE)

• Medea: archetype of female-helper (e.g. Dido) deserted by ungrateful hero
  
  
  Jason retrieves Golden Fleece (Athenian red-figure vase, 470-460 BCE) 
  
  
• mythic background of Seneca's tragedy:
  
  Jason, son of Aeson, nephew of Pelias – disputed kingship of Thessaly > quest, first sea-voyage, Argonauts & Golden Fleece (Colchis, Black Sea/Pontus)
  Medea, daughter of Aeetes (King of Colchis), granddaughter of the Sun/Helios, brother Apsyrtus
  Medea's supernatural powers (Aeson vs. Pelias?), Jason's trials in Colchis (e.g. overcome dragon guarding fleece)
  return to Greece: Corinth, King Creon & daughter (Glauke/Creusa), looming threat of revenge of Pelias' son Acastus
  
  Medea and Pelias, (pyxis, late 5th century BCE)
  
  
  
• Medea's opening prayer/curse monologue about Jason's betrayal ("Kill his new wife, / kill her father , and all the royal family . . . Now it is born, my vengeance delivered: / I mothered it", 17ff. ), already contemplating wedding/funeral
  
  Maria Callas in Cherubini's opera  Medea (Milan, 1953)
  
  Medea 35-55 READER: Leah
  Let Corinth, whose twin shores now block the gulf,
  burn up in flames and join two seas in one.
  Just one more thing: I have to take the torch
  to the marriage room myself; after the prayers,
  I will be the one to kill the victims on the altar.
  Find out a path to vengeance even in the entrails,
  my soul, if you are still alive, if you retain
  any of your old strength. Away with feminine fears,
  dress up your mind like your old cruel home.
  All the horrors witnessed back at home by the Black Sea,
  Corinth will now see. Evils to make
  heaven and earth both shudder equally
  are what my mind revolves: wounding, murder, death
  creeping through the limbs. But all this is too slight;
  I did those as a girl. Let weightier rage swell up:
  now I have given birth, my crimes ought to increase.
  Take on the armour of anger, prepare for destruction
  possessed by fury. The tale of your divorce
  must match your marriage. How could you leave your man?
  The same way that you married him. Enough delay.
  A family formed by crime must be broken by more crime.
  
  
• Act 2: still conflicting emotions & unclear plans
  
  123ff. (Medea to Nurse)
  What should I do? Madness is driving me
  in all directions. How can I be avenged?
  If only he, too, had a brother! But—he has a wife.
  Stab her in the heart . . .
  . . . Your past crimes urge you,
  and let them all return.—The golden glory of the kingdom
  stolen, and the wicked girl's young playmate [Apsyrtus]
  ripped by the sword, his murder forced upon his father's sight,
  his body scattered on the sea, and old Pelias'
  limbs cooked up in a bronze pot. How much blood
  I have shed by murder! When I did this
  I was not even angry; I was driven by painful love.
  But what could Jason do? Another's rule and power
  forces him to this.—He should have bared his breast
  to meet his sword.—Ah, no, find better words,
  my raging grief! If he can, let him live, still mine,
  just as he used to be. If not—still let him live,
  remember me, and spare the life which once I gave him.
  Creon is to blame. His untamed lust for power
  is breaking up my marriage, tearing a mother
  away from her children, ripping a close-knit trust.
  Let him be hunted down, may he alone
  pay as he deserves. I will heap deep ashes on his house.
  
  Pier Paolo Pasolini's Medea (starring Maria Callas)
  
  Trailer to the 1969 film; Return voyage of the Argonauts
  
  

• Medea: Senecan study in anger – psychopathology, Stoic anti-type (as Atreus); sympathetic character (mis-/abused woman)? proto-feminist as Euripides' Medea? mistreated/misunderstood foreigner? otherly/supernatural witch?
  
  
• Chorus' framing stereotypes – their identity?
  
  binaries (Jason vs. Medea)
  male ~ female
  order ~ chaos
  reason ~ emotion
  culture/civilization (Greek) ~ barbarism (Colchis)
  nativism ~ globalization
  
  songs:
  – celebrate royal wedding in Corinth; Jason to be liberated from "untamed wife" (102), unwanted foreign monster (Act 1)
  – nostalgically decry expansion & multiculturalism of Roman empire (Act 2)
  – misogynistic (spurned ex-wife simile, 579ff.), Jason a blameless Greek hero ("Jason acted on orders", 669) leading Argonauts cursed for first voyage (Act 3 )
  – fearful of "blood-stained Maenad" (849) after long conjuring scene (Act 4)
  
  
  De Morgan, Medea (1889)
  
  
• Romanized Act 2 Chorus: Medea emblematic of traditionalist anxieties about empire & dangerous Others, lost boundaries – Argo broke world's "strict partitions" (335), nostalgia for simple, homogeneous agrarian society ("[our forefathers] knew no wealth / except what their native soil brought forth" (333-4)
  
  Medea 366-79 READER: Niles
  Now there is no need of a ship made by Pallas' hand,
  rowed by kings, a well-renowned vessel—an Argo.
  Any old skiff can wander the deep. 
  All boundaries are gone and the cities
  have set up their walls in new lands:
  the world is a thoroughfare, nothing remains
  where it was. 
  The Indian drinks from the chilly Araxes,
  the Persians can drink from the Elbe and the Rhine.
  The ages will come, in faraway years
  when Ocean will set free the links of Nature
  and the great earth lie open, and Tethys will open [sea-goddess, wife of Ocean]
  new worlds, and Thule will be no longer
  the end of the earth.
  
  
  Waterhouse, Jason and Medea (1907)

• Jason's character (Act 3): self-absorbed opportunist ("My luck is always bad, and fate is always cruel . . .", 431); co-conspirator in Medea's crimes (Apsyrtus, Pelias), no response to Medea's "If you gain from a crime, / you did it" (500-1)
  
  
• Medea’s fatal realization after Jason refuses to grant custody, "Does he love his children so much? / Good! I have him trapped: there is a place to hurt him" (aside, 549-50); plan for poisoned cloak & necklace to be delivered by children
  
  
  Poster by Alfons Mucha for performance of Medea (Paris, 1898)
  
  
• Act 4 horror & Seneca's magnification of Medea the witch: Nurse describes summoning of dark forces, poisonous plants, magical chants before Medea's entrance ("I pray you, silent hordes, and ghostly gods, / Chaos obscure, dark home of shady Dis, caverns of ugly Death . . .", 740ff.) – grotesque catalogue of summoned monsters, underworld sinners, etc.; prayer successful (signs from Hecate), sends children off with wedding gifts; chorus aghast & fearful ("Who would believe her an exile . . . Medea cannot understand restraint / for anger, or for love. / Now anger and love have joined / to give her a cause: what will happen", 856ff.)
  
  
• Act 5: Messenger's report of Creon's & Creusa's destruction, palace fire, Medea not fully satisfied with revenge (cf. Atreus, 916ff.), tensions of mother/rejected lover horrifically resolved ("Children—once my children— / you must give yourselves as payback for your father's crimes", 924-5)
  

• final spectacle: Medea's metatheatrical self-awareness
  
  Medea 991ff. (after killing first child) 
  I have done it. Great pleasure steals over me against my will,
  and see! now it grows. This was all I was missing,
  that Jason should be watching. I think I have so far done nothing:
  crimes committed without him were wasted . . .
  (after killing second child)
  . . . This is the way I always leave a country. The way in the sky lies clear.
  Twin serpents lower their head, their scaly necks
  accept the yoke. Now, Daddy, take your children back.
  But I will fly amid the winds on my chariot with wings. 
  
  Medea's Dragon-Chariot (Lucanian red-figure krater, 4th century BCE)
  

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