Medea of Euripides Part 1

Medea of Euripedes.

by Euripedes.

INTRODUCTION

The _Medea_, in spite of its background of wonder and enchantment, is not a romantic play but a tragedy of character and situation. It deals, so to speak, not with the romance itself, but with the end of the romance, a thing which is so terribly often the reverse of romantic. For all but the very highest of romances are apt to have just one flaw somewhere, and in the story of Jason and Medea the flaw was of a fatal kind.

The wildness and beauty of the Argo legend run through all Greek literature, from the ma.s.s of Corinthian lays older than our present Iliad, which later writers vaguely a.s.sociate with the name of Eumelus, to the Fourth Pythian Ode of Pindar and the beautiful Argonautica of Apollonius Rhodius. Our poet knows the wildness and the beauty; but it is not these qualities that he specially seeks. He takes them almost for granted, and pierces through them to the sheer tragedy that lies below.

Jason, son of Aeson, King of Iolcos, in Thessaly, began his life in exile. His uncle Pelias had seized his father's kingdom, and Jason was borne away to the mountains by night and given, wrapped in a purple robe, to Chiron, the Centaur. When he reached manhood he came down to Iolcos to demand, as Pindar tells us, his ancestral honour, and stood in the market-place, a world-famous figure, one-sandalled, with his pard-skin, his two spears and his long hair, gentle and wild and fearless, as the Wise Beast had reared him. Pelias, cowed but loath to yield, promised to give up the kingdom if Jason would make his way to the unknown land of Colchis and perform a double quest. First, if I read Pindar aright, he must fetch back the soul of his kinsman Phrixus, who had died there far from home; and, secondly, find the fleece of the Golden Ram which Phrixus had sacrificed. Jason undertook the quest: gathered the most daring heroes from all parts of h.e.l.las; built the first ship, Argo, and set to sea. After all manner of desperate adventures he reached the land of Aietes, king of the Colchians, and there hope failed him. By policy, by tact, by sheer courage he did all that man could do. But Aietes was both hostile and treacherous. The Argonauts were surrounded, and their destruction seemed only a question of days when, suddenly, unasked, and by the mercy of Heaven, Aietes'

daughter, Medea, an enchantress as well as a princess, fell in love with Jason. She helped him through all his trials; slew for him her own sleepless serpent, who guarded the fleece; deceived her father, and secured both the fleece and the soul of Phrixus. At the last moment it appeared that her brother, Absyrtus, was about to lay an ambush for Jason. She invited Absyrtus to her room, stabbed him dead, and fled with Jason over the seas. She had given up all, and expected in return a perfect love.

And what of Jason? He could not possibly avoid taking Medea with him. He probably rather loved her. She formed at the least a brilliant addition to the glory of his enterprise. Not many heroes could produce a barbarian princess ready to leave all and follow them in blind trust.

For of course, as every one knew without the telling in fifth-century Athens, no legal marriage was possible between a Greek and a barbarian from Colchis.

All through the voyage home, a world-wide baffled voyage by the Ister and the Erida.n.u.s and the African Syrtes, Medea was still in her element, and proved a constant help and counsellor to the Argonauts. When they reached Jason's home, where Pelias was still king, things began to be different. An ordered and law-abiding Greek state was scarcely the place for the untamed Colchian. We only know the catastrophe. She saw with smothered rage how Pelias hated Jason and was bent on keeping the kingdom from him, and she determined to do her lover another act of splendid service. Making the most of her fame as an enchantress, she persuaded Pelias that he could, by a certain process, regain his youth.

He eagerly caught at the hope. His daughters tried the process upon him, and Pelias died in agony. Surely Jason would be grateful now!

The real result was what it was sure to be in a civilised country. Medea and her lover had to fly for their lives, and Jason was debarred for ever from succeeding to the throne of Iolcos. Probably there was another result also in Jason's mind: the conclusion that at all costs he must somehow separate himself from this wild beast of a woman who was ruining his life. He directed their flight to Corinth, governed at the time by a ruler of some sort, whether "tyrant" or king, who was growing old and had an only daughter. Creon would naturally want a son-in-law to support and succeed him. And where in all Greece could he find one stronger or more famous than the chief of the Argonauts? If only Medea were not there! No doubt Jason owed her a great debt for her various services.

Still, after all, he was not married to her. And a man must not be weak in such matters as these. Jason accepted the princess's hand, and when Medea became violent, found it difficult to be really angry with Creon for instantly condemning her to exile. At this point the tragedy begins.

The _Medea_ is one of the earliest of Euripides' works now preserved to us. And those of us who have in our time glowed at all with the religion of realism, will probably feel in it many of the qualities of youth.

Not, of course, the more normal, sensuous, romantic youth, the youth of _Romeo and Juliet_; but another kind--crude, austere, pa.s.sionate--the youth of the poet who is also a sceptic and a devotee of truth, who so hates the conventionally and falsely beautiful that he is apt to be unduly ascetic towards beauty itself. When a writer really deficient in poetry walks in this path, the result is purely disagreeable. It produces its best results when the writer, like Euripides or Tolstoy, is so possessed by an inward flame of poetry that it breaks out at the great moments and consumes the cramping theory that would hold it in.

One can feel in the _Medea_ that the natural and inevitable romance of the story is kept rigidly down. One word about Medea's ancient serpent, two or three references to the Clashing Rocks, one startling flash of light upon the real love of Jason's life, love for the ship Argo, these are almost all the concessions made to us by the merciless delineator of disaster into whose hands we are fallen. Jason is a middle-aged man, with much glory, indeed, and some illusions; but a man entirely set upon building up a great career, to whom love and all its works, though at times he has found them convenient, are for the most part only irrational and disturbing elements in a world which he can otherwise mould to his will. And yet, most cruel touch of all, one feels this man to be the real Jason. It is not that he has fallen from his heroic past.

It is that he was really like this always. And so with Medea. It is not only that her beauty has begun to fade; not only that she is set in surroundings which vaguely belittle and weaken her, making her no more a bountiful princess, but only an ambiguous and much criticised foreigner.

Her very devotion of love for Jason, now turned to hatred, shows itself to have been always of that somewhat rank and ugly sort to which such a change is natural.

For concentrated dramatic quality and sheer intensity of pa.s.sion few plays ever written can vie with the _Medea_. Yet it obtained only a third prize at its first production; and, in spite of its immense fame, there are not many scholars who would put it among their favourite tragedies. The comparative failure of the first production was perhaps due chiefly to the extreme originality of the play. The Athenians in 432 B.C. had not yet learnt to understand or tolerate such work as this, though it is likely enough that they fortified their unfavourable opinion by the sort of criticisms which we still find attributed to Aristotle and Dicaearchus.

At the present time it is certainly not the newness of the subject: I do not think it is Aegeus, nor yet the dragon chariot, much less Medea's involuntary burst of tears in the second scene with Jason, that really produces the feeling of dissatisfaction with which many people must rise from this great play. It is rather the general scheme on which the drama is built. It is a scheme which occurs again and again in Euripides, a study of oppression and revenge. Such a subject in the hands of a more ordinary writer would probably take the form of a triumph of oppressed virtue. But Euripides gives us nothing so sympathetic, nothing so cheap and unreal. If oppression usually made people virtuous, the problems of the world would be very different from what they are. Euripides seems at times to hate the revenge of the oppressed almost as much as the original cruelty of the oppressor; or, to put the same fact in a different light, he seems deliberately to dwell upon the twofold evil of cruelty, that it not only causes pain to the victim, but actually by means of the pain makes him a worse man, so that when his turn of triumph comes, it is no longer a triumph of justice or a thing to make men rejoice. This is a grim lesson; taught often enough by history, though seldom by the fables of the poets.

Seventeen years later than the _Medea_ Euripides expressed this sentiment in a more positive way in the _Trojan Women_, where a depth of wrong borne without revenge becomes, or seems for the moment to become, a thing beautiful and glorious. But more plays are constructed like the _Medea_. The _Hecuba_ begins with a n.o.ble and injured Queen, and ends with her hideous vengeance on her enemy and his innocent sons. In the _Orestes_ all our hearts go out to the suffering and deserted prince, till we find at last that we have committed ourselves to the blood-thirst of a madman. In the _Electra_, the workers of the vengeance themselves repent.

The dramatic effect of this kind of tragedy is curious. No one can call it undramatic or tame. Yet it is painfully unsatisfying. At the close of the _Medea_ I actually find myself longing for a _deus ex machina_, for some being like Artemis in the _Hippolytus_ or the good Dioscuri of the _Electra_, to speak a word of explanation or forgiveness, or at least leave some sound of music in our ears to drown that dreadful and insistent clamour of hate. The truth is that in this play Medea herself is the _dea ex machina_. The woman whom Jason and Creon intended simply to crush has been transformed by her injuries from an individual human being into a sort of living Curse. She is inspired with superhuman force. Her wrongs and her hate fill all the sky. And the judgment p.r.o.nounced on Jason comes not from any disinterested or peace-making G.o.d, but from his own victim transfigured into a devil.

From any such judgment there is an instant appeal to sane human sympathy. Jason has suffered more than enough. But that also is the way of the world. And the last word upon these tragic things is most often something not to be expressed by the sentences of even the wisest articulate judge, but only by the unspoken _lacrimae rerum_.

G. M.

MEDEA

CHARACTERS OF THE PLAY

MEDEA, _daughter of Aietes, King of Colchis_.

JASON, _chief of the Argonauts; nephew of Pelias, King of Iolcos in Thessaly_.

CREON, _ruler of Corinth_.

AEGEUS, _King of Athens_.

NURSE _of Medea_.

TWO CHILDREN _of Jason and Medea_.

ATTENDANT _on the children_.

A MESSENGER.

CHORUS of Corinthian Women, with their LEADER.

Soldiers and Attendants.

_The scene is laid in Corinth. The play was first acted when Pythodorus was Archon, Olympiad 87, year_ 1 (B.C. 431). _Euphorion was first, Sophocles second, Euripides third, with Medea, Philoctetes, Dictys, and the Harvesters, a Satyr-play._

MEDEA

_The Scene represents the front of_ MEDEA'S _House in Corinth. A road to the right leads towards the royal castle, one on the left to the harbour. The_ NURSE _is discovered alone_.

NURSE.

Would G.o.d no Argo e'er had winged the seas To Colchis through the blue Symplegades: No shaft of riven pine in Pelion's glen Shaped that first oar-blade in the hands of men Valiant, who won, to save King Pelias' vow, The fleece All-golden! Never then, I trow, Mine own princess, her spirit wounded sore With love of Jason, to the encastled sh.o.r.e Had sailed of old Iolcos: never wrought The daughters of King Pelias, knowing not, To spill their father's life: nor fled in fear, Hunted for that fierce sin, to Corinth here With Jason and her babes. This folk at need Stood friend to her, and she in word and deed Served alway Jason. Surely this doth bind, Through all ill days, the hurts of humankind, When man and woman in one music move.

But now, the world is angry, and true love Sick as with poison. Jason doth forsake My mistress and his own two sons, to make His couch in a king's chamber. He must wed: Wed with this Creon's child, who now is head And chief of Corinth. Wherefore sore betrayed Medea calleth up the oath they made, They two, and wakes the clasped hands again, The troth surpa.s.sing speech, and cries amain On G.o.d in heaven to mark the end, and how Jason hath paid his debt.

All fasting now And cold, her body yielded up to pain, Her days a waste of weeping, she hath lain, Since first she knew that he was false. Her eyes Are lifted not; and all her visage lies In the dust. If friends will speak, she hears no more Than some dead rock or wave that beats the sh.o.r.e: Only the white throat in a sudden shame May writhe, and all alone she moans the name Of father, and land, and home, forsook that day For this man's sake, who casteth her away.

Not to be quite shut out from home ... alas, She knoweth now how rare a thing that was!

Methinks she hath a dread, not joy, to see Her children near. 'Tis this that maketh me Most tremble, lest she do I know not what.

Her heart is no light thing, and useth not To brook much wrong. I know that woman, aye, And dread her! Will she creep alone to die Bleeding in that old room, where still is laid Lord Jason's bed? She hath for that a blade Made keen. Or slay the bridegroom and the king, And win herself G.o.d knows what direr thing?

'Tis a fell spirit. Few, I ween, shall stir Her hate unscathed, or lightly humble her.

Ha! 'Tis the children from their games again, Rested and gay; and all their mother's pain Forgotten! Young lives ever turn from gloom!

[_The_ CHILDREN _and their_ ATTENDANT _come in_.

ATTENDANT.

Thou ancient treasure of my lady's room, What mak'st thou here before the gates alone, And alway turning on thy lips some moan Of old mischances? Will our mistress be Content, this long time to be left by thee?

NURSE.

Grey guard of Jason's children, a good thrall Hath his own grief, if any hurt befall His masters. Aye, it holds one's heart! ...

Meseems I have strayed out so deep in evil dreams, I longed to rest me here alone, and cry Medea's wrongs to this still Earth and Sky.

ATTENDANT.

How? Are the tears yet running in her eyes?