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Euripides' Medea

Euripides' Medea

Anthony Podlecki

University of British Columbia

1991 • 0-941051-10-2 • paper • 94 pages • 5½ x 8½ • $9.95

| About the Author | Table of Contents | Introduction |

 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.

 Author                                                    

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.

 Table of Contents                                     

Introduction
    The Mythical Background
    Medea in the Work of Euripides
    The Design of the Ancient Greek Theater
Euripides' Medea
Appendices
    Plot Summaries
    Sugestions For Further Reading

 From the Introduction                               

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.