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The Complete Tragedies, Volume 1: Medea, The Phoenician Women, Phaedra, The Trojan Women, Octavia
By Shadi Bartsch, Susanna Braund, Alex Dressler, Elaine Fantham The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2017 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-74823-8
CHAPTER 1
Medea
Medea, daughter of King Aeetes of Colchis, fell in love with the Greek hero Jason and helped him and the Argonauts escape with the famous Golden Fleece. For Jason's sake, Medea was willing to kill both her own brother and Jason's uncle Pelias. The pair settled in Corinth and had two children. But now they are under threat from the advancing army of Pelias' brother. If Jason marries Creusa, the daughter of Creon, king of Corinth, safety is assured — and it seems Jason is willing. Medea is outraged at this betrayal, and the play opens with her speech vowing revenge. After an interlude in which the chorus sings of the royal wedding to come, Medea's nurse enters and urges her to set aside her rage, but her counsel falls on deaf ears.
King Creon appears, impatient to see Medea gone. She pleads her case, arguing that if she must give up Creon's protection so should Jason, who is as guilty as she is. Creon is not persuaded by her argument but allows her one more day in Corinth and promises that her sons will be safe if she leaves them behind.
The chorus now sings of the end of an age of innocence brought about by man's travel over oceans. When Jason enters, lamenting his difficult circumstances, Medea begs him not to leave her and reminds him of the favors he owes her, but Jason scorns her attempt at involving him in guilt and refuses to let her take the children with her. He departs, and she starts the preparations for her vengeance.
The chorus observes that no one hath greater wrath than a woman scorned and expresses its concern for Jason's safety. Indeed, the nurse reports that Medea is gathering toxic poisons. Medea herself sings a long spell to ensure the efficacy of the tainted robe she will give Creusa as a wedding gift.
The messenger enters in shock: Creusa is dead and so is King Creon. The city is in flames. Medea exults at the success of her plan, but it is not complete: Jason must suffer more. She wavers back and forth over the dreadful option of killing their children then finally invites the fury Megaera into her chest and kills one son. Jason rushes in to arrest her just in time to see the slaughter of the second son. As Medea flies off in her winged chariot, Jason calls after her to witness that there are no gods in the skies above.
Introduction
Shadi Bartsch
As the Medea of Seneca's drama flies off in triumph on her serpent-yoked chariot and the play nears its horrific close, she shouts down to the earthbound Jason standing among the corpses of their children: "Lift your swollen eyes up here, thankless man. Do you recognize your wife?" Jason does not say; but whatever he may think has become of his once-loving wife, Medea herself feels by the end of the play that she is finally recognizable as "Medea": the madwoman with the bloody hands, the granddaughter of the Sun, the epitome of a drastic form of vengeance — the murder of one's own children in order to make their father suffer. And while Jason may stare in horror, we in the audience nod in recognition: yes, this is the Medea we know; this is how the story goes. It is a grandly metatheatrical moment, with the added twist that even Medea seems to recognize, anachronously, her place in the mythological and literary tradition.
Seneca's version of the tragedy of the woman who killed her children to punish a wayward husband has much that is unusual about it. Murdering what you love because of your rage at another, just to cause that person pain as well: we can usually only imagine this as a crime of passion, the doings of a woman driven out of her mind (whether temporarily or permanently) by anger and suffering. The Medeas of drama and literature themselves find the crime almost too shocking to commit, and part of the interest of each version of the story is the struggle within Medea, her teetering between the forces of love and hate as she debates the choice before her. Seneca's Medea is no different in this regard: she too has a decision to make between alternatives, and alternates between them. But there is something unusual about this Medea. It is the surprising fact that her language and actions at this point, her self-exhortations, her self-awareness, are all uncannily similar to those Seneca recommends for aspiring Stoic philosophers. For his Medea, Seneca has taken the techniques of self-questioning and character formation that he describes in his prose philosophical works and puts them in the mouth of a woman who seems far from a would-be Stoic. What are we to make of this? The Stoic philosopher's ultimate goal was both supreme self-control and also the calm that accompanied it; what could be less similar to this than the famously passionate character whose love and hate exceeded all bounds?
Seneca's Medea is in this sense a paradox, a master of self-control in carrying out a deranged act. Indeed, even as she carries out the act, she seems to think of it in terms of progress toward an ideal — not a philosophical one, of course, but a mythological and tragic one, the woman who can kill her children. This is a perverse version of progress, to be sure. The Roman Stoics emphasized the idea of accomplishing one's potential to be an ideal version of oneself, a wise man completely at one with the universe, and they urged the use of a model to keep before one's eyes. As Seneca tells us in Letter 11.8–10, Epicurus himself told us to take "some man of high character, and keep him ever before your eyes, living as if he were watching you, and ordering all your actions as if he beheld them." Choose therefore, Seneca continues, a Cato or a Laelius, and "picture him always to yourself as your protector or your example." Medea too has such a model, but it is not a famously wise Roman, but Medea. For, faced with Jason's betrayal, she has been planning her revenge from the start in a way that repeatedly evokes the existence of her namesake in myth and literature. Her will to reach this "ideal" permeates her conversation with her quaking nutrix (170–71):
NURSE Flee!
MEDEA I wish I never had.
NURSE Medea —
MEDEA — I will become her!
The tinge of metatheatricality here has been noted ever since the German philologist Wilamowitz commented that Seneca's Medea had obviously read Euripides' play of the same name.Medea will in fact name herself eight times in this play, in comparison to the single self-naming of Euripides' matching play.
Later, when Medea has murdered Creon and his daughter, she signals the end of the process of shaping herself to meet her goal by her famous claim (and the last evocation of her name), "Now I am Medea: my talent's grown through suffering" (910). As it happens, the announcement is premature; Medea will continue to struggle between opposing desires (to kill her sons or let them live) until she has slaughtered both her children, but the metatheatrical implications are unavoidable. We might compare her to Atreus in Seneca's play Thyestes, who is similarly driven to match himself to a negative exemplar — he has his family, whose precedent in the art of cooking children stands before him like a mockery of more traditional ancestral masks: "Look at Tantalus, at Pelops," he exhorts himself, "these are the archetypes my hands are called to match" (242–43). Where the Stoic aspirant can look to the model of a Cato or imagine what the sage would do in trying circumstances, Medea and Atreus seem to look to the history of their selves and their family line. It is Seneca's manipulation of this and other parallels to Stoic procedures in the Medea that raises the question of just what Medea's self-transformation can be taken to suggest.
There are many examples in the play that we could turn to. Medea's promise "I will become Medea" presages a process much like that of the philosopher who strives to become fully "himself" by embarking on a series of mental operations to bring him to his wiser self. As she prepares herself to "become Medea" in her great final monologue, she turns several times to address herself and to deliberate on which of her desires is correct, borrowing the self-exhortations and self-reproving of the Stoic's arsenal. Urging herself onward to the climactic murder of her sons, she starts with a reproof of her animus for shying away from the task: "Why are you faltering, my mind? Follow up this happy start!" (895). This and lines such as "Why do you delay now, my soul? Why hesitate?" ring with the sound of the Stoic addresses to the self, both in urging to action and in self-criticism, that we find scattered throughout the prose works.
Indeed, as Medea continues to harangue herself into action and lays claim to coming into her own, she stiffens her resolve by another Stoic practice, a review of her actions to date (911–14):
I'm glad — so glad — I ripped my brother's head off, I'm glad I hacked his limbs up and robbed my father of his secret treasure, I'm glad I gave those daughters means for their father's murder. Seek inspiration, anger: you won't bring unskilled hands to any crime.
Her introductory formula here — "I'm happy to have done X" — is familiar as a component of the Stoic self-review, occurring even in the comments that Seneca puts in Nero's mouth at the beginning of the De clementia and appearing frequently in the letters as a form of encouragement (e.g., Letters 78.14 and 108.7).
One of the rules that the aspiring Stoic must remember is to conduct himself in a manner worthy of himself. There seems to be some flexibility in terms of the behavior this might actually designate for a given individual, as shown by Epictetus' famous refusal to cut off his beard rather than lose his head (Discourses 1.2.29); conversely, a Roman Stoic might argue that all sorts of demeaning behavior is appropriate when it comes to preserving the integrity of mind over matter. More generally, however, the consideration of what befits each individual or what is worthy of him or her serves as a guiding principle to the forms of behavior that suit the persona one has adopted, and this rule holds equally valid outside the dramas and within them. In the Medea, as in the other plays, the question of what exactly befits Medea's persona or is worthy of it also arises, as when she comments of her role as parent that "now that I'm a mother, what befits is — greater crimes" (50). In the same way, Oedipus remarks after putting out his eyes that "This face is right for Oedipus" (Oedipus 1003) and Atreus comments on his plan for child-cookery that it is "A crime that matches Atreus, and fits Thyestes too" (Thyestes 271).
These formulations of self-address in the drama add up to a form of self-preparation that smacks of the Stoic's training in the service of an entirely different ideal: reaching philosophical wisdom and equanimity. The result is that at points in the drama our heroine's assertions cannot be distinguished at face value from that of a Stoic. This is particularly striking in dialogue as well, such as a stichomythic passage early in the play in which she and the nutrix duel in maxims. When the nurse bids her keep quiet in the face of the outrage done her, Medea responds boldly: "Fortune fears the brave and treads the cowards under foot" (159). And to each further comment, she has a Stoic reply (160–63):
NURSE Bravery deserves approval only when it has a place.
MEDEA Bravery can never fail to have a place.
NURSE Hope offers no way out in your afflictions.
MEDEA If you have nothing left to lose, then why fear loss?
Elsewhere, she will defend her behavior by allusion to how far above circumstance her spirit stands, indomitable and unable to be crushed. To Jason: "Every form of Fortune has always been beneath me" (520). Or, again to her nurse: "Fortune can take my wealth, but not my spirit" (176). Like the good Stoic, Medea scorns the vagaries of fortune, believes that virtue should always be a guide for behavior, and recognizes the illusory pull of hope. Rich or poor, successful or a failure, what is important is her "spirit," the one thing that is in her control.
Of course, all of these coincidences of language and behavior fail to mask the massive ethical difference that when Medea chastises the part of herself that she feels has gone awry or urges herself to action, what she is chastising is what most societies and stoics would call basic morality, while the voice that urges her to select murder as her choice takes on the role of the "moral" voice that usually warns one not to transgress despite the presence of the desire to do so ("I really shouldn't be eating this cake ..."). The irony with Medea is that these roles are so upside down: the desires she has to argue against are precisely those that we would consider normative, such as not wanting to kill one's children. And yet, like Seneca, she, too, seems to believe that these forms of reflection on one's desires are the best means of effecting a change in her ruling faculty. This Medea in the grip of the "wrong" form of reflection on her original emotions and desires is comparable, say, to a murderer hesitating outside the house of his victim: "Get a grip on yourself!" he might say. "Be a man! Do the job, and don't act like a coward! Don't listen to the voice telling you to run away while you still can! What would so-and-so think?" — an effort at self-control that entails urging the agent to live up to the expectations of a watching self even if the larger framework of this ideal is "bad." Medea is the perfect mirror to the Stoic sage, but one whose final goals wreak havoc with the idea that such self-transformation and self-control is automatically a good. Seneca certainly never considers the question of whether self-control can be a bad quality in his prose works; to work toward this via self-transformation is always treated as a plus. But his drama seems to occasionally open the back door to a world in which an informed self-control has nothing to do with a willful movement toward virtue.
What might Medea illustrate for us about the conditions under which philosophical solipsism might go astray? Most obviously, she is isolated in her situation, and in this she parallels to some degree the isolated Stoic philosopher whose judgments are not necessarily informed by common morality. Seneca himself had mostly a pack of depraved men for company at the imperial court: he often fantasized about withdrawing and tried unsuccessfully to do so at least twice. And Seneca seems to highlight the way in which Medea's framework for judging her actions is solitary by a number of innovations. The chorus of the Medea is far less sympathetic to our Colchian exile than its Euripidean counterpart, generally deploring her behavior and singing, near the beginning of the play, the idealistic marriage-hymn for Jason and Creusa. And Seneca also innovates here as in the Phaedra by supplying his heroine with a nurse who represents the voice of normative morality and is emphatically rejected. All of the nurse's advice to Medea is turned on its head by its recipient. Moreover, Medea increases her own isolation by rejecting her role as a family member, stripping from herself the role of not only wife but also mother ("anger leaves, and the mother takes its place," 927–28 — and then the same thing in reverse). As Fitch and McElduff (2002, 26) note: "The process of 'becoming Medea' ... involves destroying the self-in-relationship, viz. as mother of Jason's children and therefore still connected to him." Her very monologues reveal her sense of solitude, so that, as Gill (1987, 36) observes: "This conflict centres on Medea's thinking about herself (turning on the question of whether she can sustain her image of herself as the perpetrator of ultimate evil) rather than on her responses to others; and so the 'madness'— or solipsism — of 958ff. provides an appropriate context for its resolution."
It seems Medea lives in a solipsistic world by the end of the play, a situation that poses an important problem — as yet unsolved — for ethical philosophy. She has only her own ideals to rely on for judgement, and in this case we might find them problematic. True, her decision is grimly personal — but, for me at least, it resonates with questions about morality, murder, and self-righteousness that are present in today's world as well.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Complete Tragedies, Volume 1: Medea, The Phoenician Women, Phaedra, The Trojan Women, Octavia by Shadi Bartsch, Susanna Braund, Alex Dressler, Elaine Fantham. Copyright © 2017 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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