Tag Archives: Euripides

Euripides’ Medea:  Eloquent Heroine or Monster?

Posted on by
4

“We women are the most unfortunate creatures.”  –  Euripides’ The Medea, translated by Rex Warner

No tragic heroine is more vengeful than Medea. 

I had a sinking feeling as I reread Euripides’ Medea.  No, no, this is too much. That gruesome scene where she sends gifts to Jason’s new wife, Glauce, the princess of Corinth, and Glauce dons the poisoned gold dress and shiny diadem, and they burn and stick to her skin.  Her father, Creon, tries to save her, but the two meld together in fire.

 I shut the book and took a brisk walk.  The flowers bloom, the branches’ leaves make shushing sounds, but I was too abstracted to pay attention.  And yet one has to pay attention to every small detail in Greek tragedy. 

In the twentieth century, I finished my master’s in classics. I read Greek tragedy and comedy:  the two genres balanced each other. Reading Greek is a transcendent experience, and, as one professor said, “To read Greek is to know oneself.” But to read Greek tragedy is an unraveling; it breaks down the reader; we come to know the gods that destroy the characters’ lives senselessly, as in Euripides’ Hippolytus, when Aphrodite uses Phaedra as a revenge tool. Just when you think it can’t get any worse… it gets much worse. 

On this reading, Medea horrified me. There may be darker tragedies – Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, with the double murder of Agamemnon and his lover by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover– but Medea is even more macabre.  In both tragedies, the wife attacks her family – Clytemnestra kills her husband to avenge his murder of their daughter, Iphigenia (so he attacks the family first), and Medea kills her children as part of her revenge against Jason’s discarding of their family.  But if you had to choose between visiting Clytemnestra or Medea… well, you wouldn’t want to drink Medea’s tea.

Daniel Mendelsohn, the classicist, writer, and critic-at-large for The New York Review of Books, is an expert on Euripides, and his analysis of Medea is fascinating and illuminating. Though Medea is often labeled a monster or a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown, he says the play does not support this. He pays attention to Medea’s rhetorical language: the rhetoric proves she is in control of what she does and says.

Mendelsohn dissects her speeches, focusing on the rhetorical elements: her tone changes according to the audience.  When she addresses the chorus of Corinthian woman, she bonds with them (“We women are the most unfortunate creatures in the world”) and laments women’s insecurity in marriage.  When Creon comes to Medea to announce that she is exiled from Corinth and must leave before nightfall, she appeals to his masculinity and pleads meekly for one more day.  In another speech, she tells Jason submissively that he was right to marry the princess after all, and announces she will send gifts. (One wonders that he doesn’t suspect something.) Then she persuades her friend, Aegeus, king of Athens, to offer her refuge in Athens.  They make a deal. They are friends and equals.

All this makes perfect sense. Intellectually, everything adds up.

But one can’t deny one’s emotions. 

On an emotional level, I still regard Medea as a monster.  She isn’t quite human: she is the granddaughter of Helios, and Circe is her aunt. I feel moments of empathy for her, because Jason is unforgivable, but she goes way, way, way too far, an unstoppable machine. The messenger’s speech, which relates in detail the violent deaths of Glauce and Creon, is so shocking that I put the book aside. Of course, Euripides may have added some spicy details to his tragedy: in the original myths, Medea apparently doesn’t kill her children.   In fact, in one myth, she tries to make them immortal.

On my first reading, if I recall correctly, I viewed her as a strong political woman raging against sexism and “the machine.” I’m sure this reading could be defended, but I no longer see it that way.

A great tragedy, but read it with a cup of herbal tea. And perhaps use a teabag instead of loose tea… Medea may make you paranoid.

N.B. Daniel Mendelsohn’s new translation of Homer’s Odyssey was recently published by the University of Chicago Press. He is also the author of An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic; Waiting for the Barbarians:  Essays from the Classics to Pop; and Gender and the City in Euripides’ Political Plays

The Bewildering World of Bacchantes

Posted on by
2

“Gods should be exempt from human passion.” – The Bacchae

I’m not a Bacchante. You know that.  I’m a mad reader. I do not even drink wine. Iced tea, please. But wine is the chosen drink of Dionysus. And his followers, the Bacchae, get drunk and are possessed by the god, dance wildly, tear animals apart with their bare hands and eat the raw flesh, and perform other sacred rites. 

Perhaps rereading Euripides’s The Bacchae is a sacred rite.

I learned that Dionysus is a secret blonde.  Who knew? Early on in Euripides’s tragedy, Dionysus assumes the form of a golden-haired man. He does this to tease Pentheus, the young Theban king who despises the new rites and wants to abolish them. Pentheus’s mother, Agave, and other Theban women have already been driven mad by the god and lured from the city.

Euripides stresses the youthful nature of Pentheus, who considers the worship of Dionysus superstitious and morally suspect. The chorus of Asian Bacchae who have followed Dionysus to Thebes observe the young king’s rashness.

The chorus recognizes Pentheus’s hubris. They sing,

A tongue without reins
defiance,unwisdom -
their end is disaster.

Pentheus does not acknowledge Dionysus, the effeminate god of wine, intoxication, and ritual madness. But each god must be acknowledged, each must receive sacrifices. And Pentheus is punished violently for his hubris, his arrogance. He does not know his own nature yet, and does not understand the nature of the gods. In Greek tragedy, Dionysus is not a jolly lover of the grape. The destructive side of Dionysus is emphasized.

The Bacchae is violent and horrifying almost beyond imagination.  It is not just Dionysus, it is the violence of the Bacchantes. I used to be able to separate myself from literary texts, but no longer. The excess, the malice, and the cruelty of Dionysus exhausted me, despite the beauty of Euripides’s language.

What does Euripides mean by it? Why does Pentheus, so young he does not have a beard, suffer such a cruel punishment? And the ancient Greeks tended to be lenient to the young because they are impetuous, inexperienced, and unwise. Euripides seems to feel the injustice of the punishment, and is subversive in the graphic description of the ah-tay, or fall, of Pentheus.

Can I read this as a radical condemnation of the god’s violence?  I can and I will.  But there are other factors to consider, if I had time: the relationship between religion and government, the culture and the conventions of Greek tragedy,. There is usually a murder, a hero in disguise, characters who rant against injustice, and a fall, or ruin, after hubris. And the ravings of the chorus express the anxiety of the general population.

Necessity requires the Greeks to worship Dionysus.  It is necessary to indulge themselves, to get out of themselves, to be mystic, to forget self..  

But often they’re just at a theater festival -very popular – or even a Dionysian festival.

There will be wine!

The quotes are from the translation of The Bacchae by William Arrowsmith.

Matricide in Euripides’s “Electra”: Violence among Women

Posted on by
Reply

Electra is a killer with no blood on her hands.  She is the heroine of three Greek tragedies, Aeschylus’s The Libation Bearers,  Sophocles’s Electra, and Euripides’s Electra. Euripides’s version is messy, unpolished, and practically unknown. But his dark characterization of Electra is unique: he portrays her as  a spoiled young woman, furious over losing princess status, banished from the palace by her mother’s lover and second husband, Aegisthus, who is afraid of a coup by Clytemnestra’s children.

 Euripides is fascinated by the psychology of wicked women:  there is Medea the witch, and of course Phaedra, the would-be adulteress. Some think the wickedest woman of all is Electra’s mother, Clytemnestra, who killed her husband Agamemnon and his concubine, Cassandra, on their return  from the Trojan War. It was a revenge killing: the appalling Agamemnon had murdered their oldest daughter Iphigenia when a seer said this evil deed would bring  favorable winds for sailing to Troy.

Clytemnestra fascinated  the Romans as much as the Greeks.  In Satire VI, the  Roman poet Juvenal inveighs against  Euripides’ evil heroines, especially Clytemnestra. He writes,

Every neighborhood will have a Clytemnestra.  There is only one difference;  Clytemnestra clumsily held a two-edged axe in her hands; the new Clytemnestras use a small  amount of a toad’s lung for poison.

Euripides is many-faceted, brilliant even at his worst, and the conception of the play is fascinating. His Electra is a fierce, sulky, class-conscious, angry young woman.  Though she is obsessed  with her father’s murder, she is also furious about having been “married” off to  a  mountain farmer who is so  kind and respectful that he has never touched her.  But Electra shows little kindness to him. At one point she tells him that he is of “small” worth.

Nor does Electra honor the gods much. She is not pleased with them.   And yet she doesn’t have to pay the price so often demanded in tragedy,  death and dishonor.

Electra complains:

No god hears the cries of the ill-fated,/ nor of my long-ago ruined father. /Alas, my exiled brother, who, now ruined,/the son of a famous father, lives in another land,/ unhappily wandering in slave quarters./ I myself live in the home of a laborer on a cliff,/ pining in my soul, / exiled from my father’s house. / My mother lives married / to another husband and shares a bloody bed .

After the laments of Electra and the chorus, there is action. Her brother Orestes breaks his exile and returns with his friend Pylades: Apollo has ordered him to clean up the House of Atreus (their violent family) with revenge killings. Electra is so excited that she plans matricide.

First Orestes kills Aegisthus while he is sacrificing to the gods -surely such a killing is blasphemy. Blood-stained Orestes is proud of this murder but even he has qualms about matricide. Electra invites her mother to the cottage, claiming she has just given birth.   Clytemnestra and Electra talk about the past, but Electra does not accept Clytemnestra’s regrets and explanations.

This scene reminds me a bit of dialogue in Doris Lessing’s novels. Her heroines, especially Martha Quest in the Children of Violence series, struggle to love their mothers. Is Euripides’s Electra the Martha Quest of Greek tragedy? And isn’t she also a child of violence?

Clytemnestra only too well understands her daughter’s bond with Agamemnon.”O child, by nature from birth you always loved your father, and this is still so.”

Matricide is the greatest of sins in the eyes of Euripides. Electra urges Orestes to go ahead when he tries to renege on his promise. And Orestes immediately regrets the killing. He laments: Clytemnestra is the woman who gave him birth, she bared her breast when he was killing her, he saw her pubic hair. Electra regrets, too. She regrets never having been able to love her mother. But she also wonders what kind of marriage she can make now, since she and Orestes must go into exile. Orestes says Pylades must marry Electra. And so this tragedy also has a bizarre marriage plot, if not a happy ending.

The translations from Euripides and Juvenal are mine.

The Chastity Question:  Juvenal’s “Satire VI” and Euripides’s “Hippolytus”

Posted on by
4

It is fair to assess Juvenal as a sexist, and to admire Euripides for his sympathy toward women.   And that’s why I was startled to read Juvenal’s satire on chastity (Satire VI) and Euripides’s Hippolytus and realize they were writing about the same subject.

Two writers could not be more different in style and approach. in fifth-century Athens, Euripides was often satirized by Greek poets and his tragedies were not appreciated until after his death. Juvenal, a satirist in Rome in the late first century and early second century A.D., was a stand-up comic poet who dealt in jeers and gibes: he lampoons every hypocrite, hack writer, whore, adulterer, aristocrat, politician, shopkeeper, and street vendor. in his view, Rome literally stank. Satire VI is a comical but overlong and often tiresome invective against unchaste women.

 On the other hand, Euripides is a compassionate realist who parses the emotions that drive his characters. Euripides is generous; it is the gods who are unkind.  In Hippolytus, Queen Phaedra, who honors the goddess Aphrodite, falls in love with her stepson, Hippolytus, a fanatically chaste, arrogant worshiper of Artemis.

But let me start with Juvenal’s one-sided perspective on unchaste women. He begins Satire VI at the beginning of time, when the Earth was new. (The translations of Juvenal below are mine.)

“I believe,” Juvenal begins, “that Chastity lingered for a long time on Earth, when Saturn was king, when the cave provided homes and the fire and household gods and masters were covered with common darkness, and when the mountain wife strewed the woodland couch with leaves and and straw and skins of wild animals.“

After this pastoral introduction, Juvenal  begins to rage. Comic rants are the gist of his satire.  He raves that men should not marry: they would be better off sleeping with pretty boys than being married to cheating women. 

Here’s why women won’t be chaste:  Juvenal says they would rather have sex with gay actors, or run away with ugly, famous gladiators than stay with the boring husbands who support them.  Aelia is in love with a queer actor who plays women’s roles in tragedy, while Hispulla is having a passionate affair with another tragic actor.  Juvenal asks if young Hispula can really be expected to prefer an aging professor, Quintilian? After this brief taunt, Juvenal returns to lambasting women.

But here’s my favorite passage:  Juvenal says that bluestocking women are even more disagreeable than the unchaste women.  When an educated woman talks about poetry at a dinner party, it stops all conversation. 

She praises Virgil, forgives Dido about to kill herself, and compares poets, balancing Virgil on one side of the scale and  Homer on the other. The grammarians yield to her expertise, the orators are overcome, the whole crowd is silent, and neither the special pleader nor the herald speak up. And not even another woman.

Euripides’s Hippolytus is complex and sympathetic, sensitive to the plight of a powerful woman.  Phaedra, the wife of King Theseus, is restless and disturbed: she has fallen in love with her stepson, Hippolytus, a chaste devotee of the goddess Artemis. Hippolytus spends his time in healthy pursuits, riding horses and driving chariots on the beach. No doubt he flexes his gleaming muscles and enchants everyone. Phaedra is lovesick but has no intention of telling her love..

She is cynical about chastity. The following passages are translated by David Grene.

Truly, too,/ I hate lip-worshippers of chastity who own/ a lecherous daring when they have privacy./ O Cypris, Sea-Born Goddess, how can they/ look frankly in the faces of their husbands/ and never shiver with fear lest their accomplice,/ the darkness, and the rafters of the house/ take voice and cry aloud?

And then a disaster occurs. Phaedra’s nurse betrays her, thinking that Hippolytus will reciprocate Phaedra’s feelings and rush into her arms.  The nurse does not understand the complexity of the situation.

rHippolytus’s sneering, hubristic reaction is similar to Juvenal’s rant.

Women!  This coin which men find counterfeit /  Why, why, Lord Zeus, did you put them in the world,/ in the light of the sun? If you were so determined/ to breed the race of man, the source/ should not have been women.

And now we reach the impasse, aporia (literally “no way out”). Phaedra is “ruined” by her nurse’s interference;. Hippolytus sneers at her and looks forward to telling his father.  Who is right?  Who is wrong?  Phaedra intended to keep her feelings private: it is the nurse who took it upon herself to play the go-between. Hippolytus has an extreme case of hubris, and yet we understand his repulsion. Both characters are out of balance because of their failure to honor both Aphrodite and Artemis.

Nothing good will come of this. There is no deus ex machina here.

I love Euripides, but, as always, have mixed feelings about Juvenal.