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    Medea
    Medea
    Medea
    Ebook135 pages1 hour

    Medea

    By Euripides and Oliver Taplin

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    About this ebook

    In the centuries since it was first performed, Euripides’s Medea has established itself as one of the most influential of the Greek tragedies. The story of the wronged wife who seeks revenge against her unfaithful husband by murdering their children is lodged securely in the popular imagination, a touchstone for politics, law, and psychoanalysis and the subject of constant retellings and reinterpretations.

    This new translation of Medea by classicist Oliver Taplin, originally published as part of the acclaimed third edition of Chicago’s Complete Greek Tragedies, brilliantly replicates the musicality and strength of Euripides’s verse while retaining the play’s dramatic and emotional impact. Taplin has created an edition of Medea that is particularly suited to performance, while not losing any of the power it has long held as an object of reading or study. This edition is poised to become the new standard, and to introduce a new generation of readers to the heights and depths of Greek tragedy.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press
    Release dateFeb 1, 2015
    ISBN9780226203591
    Author

    Euripides

    Euripides was a tragedian of classical Athens. He was born on Salamis Island around 480 BC to his mother, Cleito, and father, Mnesarchus, a retailer who lived in a village near Athens. He had two disastrous marriages, and both his wives—Melite and Choerine (the latter bearing him three sons)—were unfaithful. He became a recluse, making a home for himself in a cave on Salamis. Along with Aeschylus and Sophocles, he is one of the three ancient Greek tragedians for whom any plays have survived in full. He became, in the Hellenistic Age, a cornerstone of ancient literary education. The details of his death are uncertain.

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    Reviews for Medea

    4/5

    691 ratings15 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Penetrating psychological study of Medea, the wronged wife, and Jason, the unfeeling, selfish contemptible husband. Classic revenge tragedy.
    • 4/5
      Medea by Euripedes was a play I chose for my 2015 reading challenge. The play, only 47 pages took about 1/2 hour to read. My first thought was.....doesn't the woman on the cover look like Salma Hayek?The play centers around Medea, a goddess who falls madly in love, emphasis on MADLY, with Jason. She gives up everything for this man. We're talking killing, stealing, betraying her father and home, the whole kitten caboodle. She has 2 sons by him then one day, bang........homeboy hooks up with this younger chick, leaves Medea and the kids and marries this home-wrecker. Say what???? Say it isn't so........ oh, it's so!To put icing on the cake, this home-wrecker's daddy (Creon) banishes her from the land. Allowed to stay one more day she plots her revenge and baby she went for it. Unfortunately her revenge is an act that would cost a lifetime of suffering not only for her husband but herself as well.Medea, although a quick read, is very powerful. You will agree with Medea and understand her pain but will hate her for her decisions. Jason is a loser who tries to convince Medea that what he was doing was for a good reason. Let me tell you something, no one (woman) in there right mind would believe it. What's interesting is the mentality of both individuals. Medea was not afraid to show her emotions, whether sadness, fear or anger but Jason remained calmed and had no hatred towards her. She screamed at him, called him names, yet he thought they could still remain friends until the end.I had no idea what this play was about or how it would turn out. I just chose it for my reading challenge and I'm glad I did.
    • 4/5
      Not sure what I think of the translation, but I liked that this was annotated.
    • 5/5
      Surely, of all creatures that have life and will, we womenAre the most wretched. When, for an extravagant sum,We have bought a husband, we must then accept him asPossessor of our body. This is to aggravateWrong with worse wrong. Then the great question: will the manWe get be bad or good? For woman, divorce is notRespectable; to repel the man, not possible. (Trans Phillip Veracott)These few lines near the opening of Euripides' Medea pretty much describes what life was like for women in Ancient Greece: it was not pretty. What struck me when I read this play again (and it is one of my favourites) is how astute Euripides was to the plight of Greek women, and it was not as if it was any better elsewhere. Granted, women did have more rights in Ancient Rome (and would become very astute political maneuverers, such as Nero's mother Agripina) but in general the freedoms that women have won over the past 150 years are probably the furthest that they have come to participate in society than any other time throughout history (with a few exceptions).I should talk about about the play and its background (the legend that is, not the writing of it, which took place just prior to the Peloponesian War). The play is set sometime after Jason's return to Greece after obtaining the Golden Fleece from Cholchis. When he was in Cholcis, he had wooed Medea, the daughter of the king, and with her aid managed to steal the fleece and escape, but in doing so Medea was forced not only to kill her brother but renounce her citizenship of Colchis never to return. Years later, after they returned to Greece, Jason and Medea married and had children. However, Jason received an offer from King Creon of Corinth to marry his daughter and thus take the throne, so he pretty much ditched Medea, arranged for her exile, and shacked up with his new wife.If I can describe the play in one sentence, it would be 'hell hath no fury like a woman scorned'. Let all men out there understand this, and if there is one piece of literature I would recommend that all men who wish to have a relationship with a woman should read it should be this one. It is not so much that Medea is a noble character, she is not. She poisons Jason's wife and father-in-law, and then proceeds to murder both of her children, and this is after she forced an oath out of the King of Athens to provide her protection, no matter what. Medea is not a lovely person, and despite the argument that she was driven to this point by a nasty man just simply does not cut it. I agree that Jason is not a noble man either, but still does not justify Medea's actions.One can simply feel the pain of Medea in this play as she struggles with this change to her life. Yes, she acts on instinct and out of vengeance, but she has renounced her country and her people and fled to an alien land, all over the love of a man, only to discover that this man discards her once she is no longer needed by him. As she says, a Greek woman still has family and friends, whereas she has nobody (not quite true, as she secured sanctuary in Athens). We are reminded, over and over again, of the plight that is to be a woman, and an alien woman, in Ancient Greece, and it is not pleasant.Does Euripides' write a decent female character then? Well, that is difficult since we have fragments of only one female Greek poet, and that is Sappho. Everything else is written by men, though not necessarily about men. I believe Medea's character is representative of a woman scorned, seeking vengeance upon he who discarded her. She cries, and is in deep emotional pain, but then lines like 'it is the nature of a woman to cry' is clearly the writing of a man. However Euripides is different from the other Greek playwrights in that he stands up for the woman, and we see this clearly in this play. There are others where he covers such themes as well, but we will look at them when we do. Further, not all of Greek literature deals only with strong men and weak women. Homer's Odyssey is a clear example of this as Penelope is painted as a strong, loyal, and dedicated woman that we resist even the wise men to remain faithful to a husband that she believes is still alive. Further, we have gods like Athena and Artemis, who clearly break out of that mould that we like to put Greek women into (both of these gods are major gods, not married to any other gods, are warriors, and are worshipped by many Greeks of the time).Another thing that struck me in this play this time is the nature of children. Medea weeps about how it is difficult to know how a child turns out. Is all that time wasted in raising the child, only to see him either turn bad, or die in a war? Many parents fret and worry about that, and sometimes the more we worry, the less we actually look into ourselves and ask what can we do to make the situation better. This is a fallen world, and people die in fallen worlds: it is a fact of life. Death will always be painful, but sometimes we need to accept this. The more we try to mould our children into what we want, the more we force them away from us: many a piece of literature explores this (especially these days, just see Dead Poet's Society). However, Medea slays her children, if only out of spite.I have heard many people suggest that Christianity has made the world worse, not better, and that is something that I must heartily dispute. All we need to do is to look at the pre-Christian world to see how horrid and barbaric it was. In many of the Greek tragedies there are no noble characters. There are only two truly noble characters that I can think of in Greek antiquity, one of them being Penelope, the other being Leonidas. Athens, the beacon of freedom and democracy, oppressed women and maintained a slave economy. Further, during the early days of the Peloponesian War, they attacked the island of Mytilene, sacked the place, killed all of the men, and enslaved all of the women and children. While we may have had issues with the way the United States (and Britain) have acted in other lands, I cannot think (with the exception of the period of slavery) of any time where they have acted in such a way. Further, while birth control has always been around, the ancients would deal with unwanted pregnancies by breaking the baby's legs, and then leaving them in the wilderness to die.
    • 5/5
      An excellent look at the bitter experience that often comes with being alive. Everybody suffers in this story, and no one gets away unscathed. But this is what happens in our world when someone does wrong, and the victims choose the worst revenge possible.
    • 3/5
       This is rather though provoking. Medea has history here, we come in at the end of her story, this is set in just a few hours. But it would make little to no sense without understanding how she came to be in Corinth and why Jason, her husband in all but the legal sense, feels that he can up and marry someone else. Medea, unsurprisingly, doesn't see it that way. The play is dominated by her, with her presence on stage for the majority of the play. She faces Jason, Creon (the king of Corinth) and Aegeus (King of Athens) and manages to shock the first 2 severely. When the play opens, Jason's marriage to Creon's daughter (who, I think, goes unnamed throughout, which is interesting) has been planned and Creon banishes Medea, for fear that she may do him or his daughter harm. He allows her one day to leave - and calls himself a fool for allowing her the time - how right he is proven. I struggle to see how the chorus fit in here, if they were ladies of Corinth, would they really have stood by when Medea expands on her plot against the bride and her father? It feels unlikely, so I'm uncertain of who they are. In the play they serve as a foil to the action, taking the news and digesting it as we do the same, casting it into a different light or reviewing it. Medea leaves the stage under her own agency, relying on her lineage as the daughter of the son of the Sun, but she does so under her own agency. She leaves Corinth in a very different state than it was a few hours earlier. I can;t say that I understand her, or her actions, but she does feel real, which is a thing when this was written 2.5 thousand years ago. I wonder what this is like staged...
    • 4/5
      To be frank, I found this play in print to be less than my memory of seeing this on stage. In particular, Medea's murder of her two sons didn't come through as believable.… Of course, all plays suffer from this to some extent, and it may have been that this translation by Frederic Prokosch dampened some of the drama. I did find this translation quite easy to read though.
    • 5/5
      Grækenland i oldtidenJason har svigtet sin hustru Medea og hun tager en grusom hævn ved først at dræbe hans nye brud og denne far og derefter dræbe sine og Jasons børn.
    • 5/5
      I bought this book and read it just before seeing the play in London last week (starring the amazing Sophie Okonedo). Reading it and then seeing it made it absolutely clear to me why a play written almost 2,500 years ago is still being performed — and still shocking audiences. This is the ultimate revenge fantasy, a play about women and men, about racism and immigration, about power and corruption. The violence, which takes place largely off-stage, is horrific. This play will give you nightmares. Highly recommended.
    • 4/5
      Ancient greek feminist revenge fantasy

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      The ultimate story of betrayal and tragedy.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      One of the more interesting plays I studied in low level Classical Studies.
    • 4/5
      Despair, Anger and Hatred

      "Anger arises from offences against oneself, enmity may arise ...because of what we take to be their character. Anger is accompanied by pain, hatred is not;... for the one would have the offenders suffer for what they have done; the other would have them cease to exist."
      --Aristotle in "The Art of Rhetoric"

      Medea,  princess of Colchis and granddaughter of Helios, was both angry and hateful toward her husband Jason, who dishonored her by deserting her and their two children and marrying another woman, after he had sworn a solemn oath to her, and she had left her father, home and country to be with him. In revenge, she not only murdered Jason's bride and the bride's father by a cunning scheme, but also killed her own two children, for she knew that it would make him suffer the most, though she herself was also pained.

      By killing Jason's bride and two children, Medea made him suffer for what he had done to her, he would feel the pain of losing everything and the only thing that he cared for -- for her the love of her husband and the honor and integrity their marital union, for him the advancement and security of his political status; Not only that, he would have no children to build his fame and continue his line, nor any chance of begetting others since his bride was dead. He, "the basest of men", would live to suffer, and yet cease to exist.

      There is a precedent in Greek mythology. Procne, princess of Athens, killed her son and fed him to her husband King Tereus of Thrace, after the latter had raped her sister Philomela and cut out her tongue to silence her. The motive for the filicide was similar, i.e., to make the offender suffer and perish at the same time.

      If the aim of tragedy is to arouse fear and pity, as Aristotle wrote in "Poetics", this Greek tragedy by Euripides has certainly achieved its aim: it arouses fear in men and pity in women.

      Quote:

      Jason: "Yea, men should have begotten children from some other source, no female race existing; thus would no evil ever have fallen on mankind."

    • 4/5
      This play is more about Medea than Jason. Obviously. And primarily I think it is about the horrors that can befall people when they let passion for revenge overtake them. There is also a streak of feminism here too. I like that Euripides was different. He went against all kinds of traditions and rules. A female chorus. No tragic hero. No real sympathetic character at all really. No interference from the gods. This was written around the time of the decline of Athens. Things were being questioned and people were turning to rationalism instead of absolutism. Euripides brings it all to the forefront in his play. What's the point of live, he seems to be saying. Anyways, I liked the play. It's different than the other plays of its time. And Medea is a strong woman. A little insane with vengeance yes, but still very strong-willed. I don't know how authentic this translation was but I thought the dialogue and what is said between characters was also what made the play so memorable. If you like reading Greek plays, this is a must.
    • 3/5
      Disturbing, uninteresting, melodramatic-which makes since it is a drama. Helpful for studying that time period and greek myths but not a fun read if you are otherwise inclined.

    Book preview

    Medea - Euripides

    Notes

    MEDEA: INTRODUCTION

    The Play: Date and Composition

    Euripides’ Medea was produced in 431 BCE as the first of his four plays entered in the annual dramatic competition. The other plays have been lost: Philoctetes, Dictys, and the satyr-play Theristae (The Mowers). Euripides took the third prize. Although Medea is one of his earliest securely dated plays to survive, he was probably over fifty years old when he wrote it and had already been competing in the dramatic contests for more than twenty years.

    Some ancient scholars report that, according to Aristotle and his student Dicaearchus (fourth century BCE), Euripides revised a play called Medea by a certain Neophron (a prolific and successful rival Athenian dramatist) and passed it off as his own; a few even claimed that Euripides’ Medea was in fact completely the work of Neophron and should be attributed to him. Various ancient commentaries cite passages from Neophron’s Medea adding up to about twenty-four lines; these do not coincide exactly with Euripides’ play, but they are very similar in content. Modern scholars are divided about what to make of all this: some think that Neophron’s Medea did indeed precede and influence Euripides’; others have maintained instead that Neophron’s play came later and that those who thought otherwise in antiquity were mistaken.

    The Myth

    Medea is a well-known figure from archaic Greek epic and legend. Her name is derived from words meaning counsel, plan, cleverness. Grand-daughter of Helios (god of the sun), she possesses magic powers with which she can help or harm male heroes. In this regard she is similar to her aunt Circe. In some versions of the myth, Medea is a goddess, in others a human. She plays a crucial role in the popular ancient Greek epic stories that told how the Argonauts, led by Jason, sailed to far-off Colchis on the Black Sea and overcame various challenges and obstacles in order to bring back the Golden Fleece with them to Greece—all aided decisively by Medea, who, out of love for Jason, betrayed her own family (the rulers of Colchis and guardians of the Fleece) and chose to put her sorcery at his service. It was through her powers and advice that Jason succeeded in putting a dragon to sleep and killing it, then harnessed fierce oxen with which he plowed furrows to sow the dragon’s teeth, killed the armed men who sprang up from the teeth he had sown, and then managed to escape from Colchis and avenge himself on his enemies.

    After Jason and Medea escaped they took up residence in Corinth, where they had children together. But Jason subsequently decided instead to marry the daughter of the king of Corinth (Creon). It is here that the action of Euripides’ Medea begins: we see how Medea kills this new bride and her father and the children she had had with Jason, and then escapes from Corinth to Athens. Various ancient poets and local historians, some of them writing before Euripides, mentioned the death of Jason and Medea’s children at Corinth—the local cult in which they were honored there is well attested—but gave different explanations for just how the children had died: that the Corinthians murdered the boys in a temple of Hera out of hatred for Medea; or that, after Medea had killed Creon and fled to Athens, leaving her children at the temple of Hera, Creon’s relatives avenged themselves by killing the children; or that Medea tried to make the children immortal but something went wrong and they died. The idea that Medea deliberately killed her own children may or may not have been a new invention by Euripides (or

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