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Euripides' Medea |
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1991 • 0-941051-10-2 • paper • 94 pages • 5½ x 8½ • $9.95 | About the Author | Table of Contents | Introduction | |
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Description English translation. Includes essays on the play's mythical background and the work of Euripides, an introduction to Greek drama and the dramatic tradition, plot summaries and suggestions for further reading. For both students and the general reader.
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Anthony Podlecki is professor emeritus at the University of British
Columbia where he has authored many texts and translations, including
Euripides' Medea for the Focus Classical Library. |
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Introduction
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It is clear from scattered references in our
sources that Medea and her various adventures belong to the earliest
stratum of Greek myth. The episodes that are most familiar to the modern
reader are those recounted or alluded to in Euripides’ play, in a short
passage in Pindar’s Fourth Pythian Ode, and in an epic poem which
survives, The Adventures of the Argonauts (Argonautica),
by the Hellenistic writer Apollonius of Rhodes. But there were other
stories, some perhaps of greater currency in ancient Greece than the
ones best known to us. The version we consider as standard makes of
Medea a priestess (or even a daughter) of the moon-goddess Hecate, and
herself a witch, daughter of Aietes, who was the brother of Circe, both
of them children of Helios the Sun-god. The locus of this magical family
was Colchis, on the remote eastern shore of Pontus, “The Sea,” known to
the Greeks also as “Euxine” (“Hospitable,” a title of hope) and to the
modern traveler as the Black Sea. But another series of stories placed
Medea firmly (if mythically) in the genealogy of Corinth’s ruling
family. According to this account, which had behind it the authority of
the Corinthian poet Eumelus (probably somewhat earlier than Homer, and
so before 700 B.C.), Helios gave his son Aietes Corinth—then known as
Ephyra—as part of his domain. When Aietes in answer to an oracle went
off to Colchis, the kingship passed to his brother Aloeus and then to
some of his descendants who, however, because of certain difficulties
they got into, made the people of Ephyra-Corinth regret that Aietes had
given up the kingship. So they summoned Aietes’ daughter Medea from
where she was living, Iolkos in Thessaly, and she became their queen;
her husband Jason followed her and they ruled jointly. Wishing to make
their children immortal (this was apparently because of a false promise
by Hera), as each was born Medea “hid” them (that is, buried them alive)
in Hera’s sanctuary at Corinth, but when Jason learned what she was
doing he, quite naturally, disapproved and returned to Iolkos, so Medea,
too, left Corinth and turned the kingdom over to Sisyphus (see note on
v. 405 below; in a variant, known to Pindar, she married Sisyphus and
presumably ruled Corinth with him). Although there are points of contact
with at least one event in Euripides’ play, her murder of her children,
this is a very different and somewhat more respectable series of
adventures than the better-known version. |
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Euripides' Medea
