Medea

"in my workshop recently, I I read a passage from Medea, uh Euripides' play Medea... her humanity, her suffering, her willing herself to do something, that internal monologue she has, it's a timeless experience."

"All of the Attic plays that we have would have been composed for this yearly festival. In fact, there were two festivals. A lot of the comedies that we have were composed for the Lenaia, which was probably the smaller of the two. The other ones we’ve got were for the Dionysia, which was a festival in January, before the beginning of spring, but a great part of the Athenian year. You would have the three tragic poets each year who would be putting on their trilogies, and perhaps a satyr play as well. I’m not sure whether it was always the same or if it changed. People were very competitive, fighting for a prize. The Medea was one of those that, in fact, did not win. I think it came bottom that year. But it’s still one of the most exciting ones to us. That’s maybe more of an image than reality. Euripides, we are fond to read, is the one who shakes things up whereas Sophocles is more serene. But Sophocles can shake things up too. There is a story told in one of the modern books that I’ve chosen, of Gladstone—the prime minister—asking the Cambridge classicist Jane Harrison who her favourite Greek author was. The answer was supposed to be Homer, whom Gladstone had written a lot about and greatly admired, and she said Euripides. The conversation stopped dead. Euripides was far too much of a shaker-upper. But I think there is something that we can still feel in Euripides’s plays. Perhaps it’s not too far away from some of the things I was saying about Herodotus, where you monitor your own prejudices. You feel uneasy. And Medea certainly would have made people feel uneasy, and makes people uneasy still, I think, either in the theatre or in reading. It’s a shocking play. It’s very difficult to feel comfortable at the end of it. It’s about a woman who ends by killing her own children. It isn’t that she doesn’t love them: she does love them. That is why she kills them, because it’s a way of getting back at her husband. Her husband Jason has taken her away from her homeland, she has sacrificed an immense amount for him, oaths were exchanged, they were married, they have children. But now they are living in Corinth and Jason has a chance to advance himself. If he gets rid of Medea, he can marry the local princess and everybody would be very comfortable. Jason is not a very attractive figure, it is fair to say. And this is itself pretty remarkable because he was conventionally a great Greek hero, but he’s treated in ways here that make him look anything but. He’s very complacent, he says he only did it for the children. “I did it to advance them. It’s in your own interests! Look at all I’ve done for you. I’ve brought you to Greece, it’s so wonderful here, and I’ve taken you away from barbarian land.’ And Medea absolutely wipes the floor with him. There’s no doubt about who wins their particular exchanges. Medea extends the discussion. She’s a very clever woman, clearly far more intelligent than Jason. She also has magic powers—which is rather disturbing. Jason doesn’t know what film he’s in, basically. He’s wholly out of his depth. She also has divine connections and that’s going to be important at the end. But she delivers a wonderful speech, early on, to the women of Corinth who are the chorus—the group of singers and dancers who are always there—to win them to her side. She just talks about the terrible lot which is that of women. ‘It’s all right for men. When they get bored of the marriage, they can just go out and enjoy themselves and have a great time. While we stay at home, there’s nothing we can do about it. They say they take all the trouble—Ha ha! What about childbirth? I’d prefer to stand in the frontline of battle three times rather than give childbirth once.’ For an audience that is certainly largely male, this is tough stuff. They can’t laugh that one off. It probably was true that the statistical dangers were worse for women in childbirth than standing in the frontline, dangerous though that was. Standing in the first line of battle was the absolute criterion of masculine valour. You don’t know how to cope with that really. She is very manipulative. You feel fearful, that’s part of her danger, and that’s part of the way that Jason doesn’t know what she’s about. It may be hard, even for that audience, to not see it from her point of view—from a woman’s point of view. That’s pretty shocking. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter And then it goes on, you suddenly start being shocked rather more. ‘Hang on, I was sympathising with that woman and now look what she’s gone and done. She’s just gone and killed her own children.’ How can we arrange our own thoughts and sympathies? At the end she is given, by her relative the sun, a chariot to take her away to Athens. Here we are in Athens and we are implicated, as it were. We are the ones who are going to give her a home. It’s difficult to know how to cope with this, at the end. But it’s a very interesting way of actually entering into a psychology—a bizarre one. One that you’d expect to be immensely alienating. It’s a deeply masculine society in lots of ways. You have to be male to be a citizen. Women could be ‘carriers’ of citizenship. Women staying indoors and men being out in the sun talking to each other was an ideal—though probably only practicable in the upper classes. You can’t get away from that, any more than you can get away from the fact that it was a slave society. And often a woman’s role had quite a lot in common with a slave’s. But, at the same time, the Greeks are interested in women, and for more reasons than one. Women can think. That was disconcerting—this feeling that women actually see things and understand things and may even do so better than men can. Aristophanes makes great play with this in his comedy of women taking over the state and having some good ideas after all. I remember writing, in another book, that women are good to think with. It may not be quite as extreme as ‘what would a Martian think of Brexit? or the World Cup, or the National Lottery?’ but something like that. Somebody who clearly has a brain, and a very good one, who sees things from a slightly different and an off-centre point of view (from the masculine perspective), can come up with startling insights. There’s a lively debate about what the tragic genre actually means. It may come down to, ‘they are plays that could be put on at the Greek tragic festival’—as they do vary a lot. Some have almost happy endings, and some have very sad endings. Some are very patriotic, and some are quite subversive. What they tend to have in common (with one or two exceptions) is that they’re not set in the contemporary world. They’re set in the distant world of legend and myth. They use myth and that is an interesting mode for presenting issues that are live—probably eternal—in a way that gets away from the complicating, maybe even confusing, details that always surround real moral dilemmas that we have in everyday life. Quite often you can see moral dilemmas in a slightly filtered way. It’s almost like playing a game of Scruples or the games that philosophers like to play—do I turn the train on to a branch line where it will kill one person rather than let it go ahead and kill five? It’s very simple, but actually, because they put things in a very crystallised and clear way, they enable you to think quite hard. I think that’s one thing that they do have in common. They make you think quite hard but in a lot of different registers. And, doubtless, not all the audience are thinking quite as hard as others, or thinking along the same lines as others. There were judges from the different tribes, but they were probably heavily influenced by the clap-o-meter. It was a sort of ‘Athens’s Got Talent’ type of competition. A lot of the plays we admire most didn’t win. There is a tradition that Oedipus Tyrannus , a great play of Sophocles, didn’t win either. Of course, we don’t know what the other plays were. Perhaps they were even more spiffing."