Guastella. Virgo, Coniunx, Mater. The Wrath of Seneca's Medea

Virgo, Coniunx, Mater: The Wrath of Seneca's Medea
Author(s): Gianni Guastella

Source: Classical Antiquity, Vol. 20, No. 2 (October 2001), pp. 197-220
Published by: University of California Press
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GIANNI GUASTELLA
Seneca’s Medea is inevitably marked by the signs of wrath which are her liter-
ary inheritance, such as the frenÀn barÌj xìloj of Euripides’ Medea (Medea
1265). 1 Yet the wrath of Seneca’s Medea also takes shape in its own distinctive
context. 2 Speci cally, I will argue that the behavior and actions of Seneca’s Medea
recall still more closely a character such as the Atreus of Seneca’s Thyestes,3
although the revenge unleashed by Medea’s wrath will prove even more com-
plicated, elaborate, and methodical than in the case of Atreus and Thyestes. To
understand the “logic” of Medea’s revenge, I will analyze the way in which her
revenge, ultio, is driven by wrath, ira, based on the model of revenge which
Seneca himself proposed in his treatise De ira.4 The basic idea is that ira is a
passion that has gotten out of control, causing a sort of madness in the injured
party. The resulting desire for vengeance lacks any sense of justice and instead
seeks to repay the original injury with a crime that is entirely disproportionate
to the initial oVense. This model of ira and ultio provides the basis for a new and
complex understanding of Medea’s story, in which the subject matter of the myth,
the literary tradition, and Roman cultural reality are all inextricably intertwined.
An earlier version of the paper was presented at the 1998 Heller Colloquium at Berkeley, organized
by James Ker and Laura Gibbs, who also translated the original Italian text of this article. I wish
to thank her for her help and valuable suggestions. I am also grateful for some useful comments
from an anonymous reader.
1. See Knox 198. See also the famous Horatian prescription (Ars poetica 123): sit Medea ferox
invictaque .
2. For Euripides’ Medea, see Guastella 2000.
3. For an analysis of Seneca’s Thyestes in these terms, see Guastella 1994.
4. This notion is developed in Books I and II of De ira, and especially in 2.3.4–2.4.2.
Classical Antiquity. Volume 20, Number 2, pages 197–219. ISSN 0278-6656(p); 1067-8344 (e).
Copyright © 2001 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.
Send requests for permission to reprint to: Rights and Permissions.
University of California Press, 2000 Center Street, Ste 303, Berkeley, CA 94704-1223.
198 classical antiquity Volume 20 / No. 2 / October 2001
In particular, I will focus on the way in which the Romans understood the
role played by kinship, especially the bonds of matrimony and of maternity, in the
story of Medea’s ira and ultio. The central issue of Seneca’s play is the problem of
ending a marriage, and he addresses this problem in particularly Roman terms.
In the plot of this play, and also in its rhetorical construction, Seneca consistently
invokes the juridical terminology and reality of his day: these aspects of the story
thus depend on Roman ideas about marriage, and cannot be easily understood
outside this Roman context. 5 Obviously, we should not expect to nd that a
tragedy based on ancient Greek mythology would perfectly reproduce in every
detail the social reality of imperial Rome,6 but it is also true that the text insistently
invokes some speci c terms such as repudium and motifs such as the restitution of
the dowry which can be directly compared to the actual reality of Roman divorce.7
Jason’s rejection of Medea is something that she absolutely refuses to accept:
the divorce deprives her former life of any meaning, confusing the whole series of
crimes which Medea committed against her own family of origin in order to assist
the hero Jason and win his love. After all that she had done for him in the past, Jason
now abandons his coniunx, yielding to the demands of Creon, the ruler of Corinth,
who wants Jason to marry his daughter Creusa. Medea’s revenge, which consists
of burning down the royal palace and then killing her own children, is de nitely
meant to in ict injury on Creon and on Jason, as was the case in Euripides’ play.
In Seneca’s version, however, there is an additional dimension to this story of
vengeance and criminality: Medea’s actions now become a way of reconstructing
her own identity—an identity thrown into disarray by her separation from Jason—
while at the same time exacting a compensation for the crimes she had committed
in the past.
T HE PR EMISES OF THE R EVENGE
Already in the play’s opening lines, we encounter the motif of ultio, revenge,
as Medea invokes the Furies, the ultrices deae:
5. See Pratt 90–91 and Seidensticker 132. On the relationship between the De ira and Seneca’s
tragedies see Staley, who pursues an even closer relationship between these texts, forcing the
tragedies to serve as a kind of on-going demonstration of the Stoic theory which Seneca advances
in his philosophical writing. However close the connection between these texts may be, Staley’s
work is perhaps too much focused on the philosophical side of the question.
6. As opposed to the recent eVort of Abrahamsen who tries to demonstrate that the relationship
between Jason and Medea can be described as a matrimonium iniustum. Yet it is certainly the case
that many of the diVerences between the Senecan tragedy and Euripides’ Medea do depend on
the presence of these speci cally Roman elements. It is enough to consider the situation of the
children: in Euripides’ play, Medea refuses to accept Jason’s proposition that the children be raised
as illegitimate children in the house of Creon, while in Seneca’s version the children always remain
with their father, as would normally occur in a Roman case of repudium . On this topic, see Guastella
2000.
7. On this topic, see Treggiari 323–64 and 435–82.
guastella: Virgo, Coniunx, Mater 199
nunc, nunc adeste sceleris ultrices deae,

crinem solutis squalidae serpentibus,
atram cruentis manibus amplexae facem,
adeste, thalamis horridae quondam meis
quales stetistis: coniugi letum novae
letumque socero et regiae stirpi date.
Medea 13–18
Be present, be present you goddesses who avenge crime, your hair foul
with writhing snakes, grasping the smoking torch with your bloody hands,
be present now, as once you stood dreadful beside my nuptial bed; bring
destruction upon this new wife, and destruction on this father-in-law and
the whole royal lineage.
The “ill-omened wedding” was a popular element in Roman literature, at least

as early as its use by Vergil in the Aeneid, along with several such episodes in
Ovid.8 Seneca, however, puts this traditional material to a highly original use
when Medea links the funereal ritual of Jason’s rst wedding to his subsequent
marriage to Creusa. Both weddings are attended by the Furies, the goddesses of
revenge. The Furies had attended Jason’s rst wedding as a result of Absyrtus’
murder—and this murder will prove to be central to the development of Seneca’s
play. As we will see later on, Medea actually interprets her brother’s death as
a loss which she had to bear, a crime committed against herself which must be
avenged by the murder of her sons. 9 For the moment, however, Medea limits
herself to invoking the Furies so that they might now bring disaster upon the
house of Creusa, just as the Furies had brought disaster down upon her own house
when she married Jason. It is as if Medea were projecting onto this new wedding
the vengefulness which the shade of her brother had previously cast upon her own
wedding to Jason.
The parallel between Medea’s past and her present is the fulcrum of what
we might call the “psychology” of Seneca’s Medea. Her life is split in two by
this divorce: after the repudium, everything that Medea had previously done to
win her coniugium with Jason has suddenly been rendered null and void. This
dimension of the plot—the full force of Medea as an active character, making
choices and committing crimes in her original adventures with Jason—is strongly
emphasized by Seneca. We can see this, for example, in the way that both Jason
and Creon attempt to make Medea assume full responsibility for all of her crimes.
8. For a discussion of the motif, see Cleasby 45–46, Cazzaniga 8–16, Bömer 124–26, and
Pease on Vergil’s Aeneid 4.168. For Ovid, see Metamorphoses 10.1–8 and Heroides 2.117–20 and
7.96 (and compare Seneca Oedipus 644–46 and Trojan Women 1132–36). Quite similar to Medea’s
wording is a passage in the Metamorphoses where Ovid describes the wedding of Procne and Tereus
(6.428–34). Even more directly connected with Medea’s story is what Hypsipyle says in the Heroides
when she describes her own wedding with Jason (6.45–46). In all of these passages, we are dealing
with weddings that came to catastrophic ends.
9. On the literary precedents of this theme, see Bremmer 83–88.
This eVort to exonerate Jason requires considerable sophistry on their part, given
that Jason was certainly the bene ciary of Medea’s crimes, even if he did not
actually commit the crimes himself.10 Medea admits her guilt, 11 and tries in vain
to show that this is precisely what binds her to Jason, whose destiny Creon plans
to sever from hers. Despite all her eVorts, however, Medea is unable to regain the
coniunx acquired by the criminal acts she committed.12 As a result, those crimes
recoil against Medea, who is now left completely isolated, bearing all alone the
burden of her guilt.
But if Medea is now alone, what purpose, what meaning, can be assigned
to all her past and the crimes that she committed? What was the point of choosing
to abandon her own royal family and her homeland? What was the point of having
assassinated Absyrtus, a crime which aroused the Furies against Medea herself?
For whose sake did Medea dare such things, if the very bene ciary of those deeds
now pushes her away? This seems to be the point from which Seneca began
to develop his version of the myth of Medea. Seneca’s Medea reveals a deep
division between the Medea of once upon a time, the love-struck virgo ready
to do anything for Jason, and Medea the coniunx /mater, who has attained the
object of her love and consolidated her union with Jason by having borne him
two sons. It must be clearly emphasized that the functions of coniunx and mater
represent two sides of the same coin in Roman culture: the children are actual
tokens, pignora, whose existence, whose very bodies attest to the commingling of
the mother’s blood with the father’s. 13 This is why I would make a clear distinction
between Medea the virgo on the one hand and Medea the coniunx /mater on the
other hand, although we will see that Medea’s maternal function will become
increasingly problematic as the plot unfolds. The divorce strips away the meaning
of everything that the virgo Medea did in order to become the coniunx / mater.
Creon’s demands, following the normal rules of a Roman divorce, deprive Medea
of her coniunx and also of her sons. 14
10. Medea not only admits to having committed these crimes but also implies that this violated
the norm of behavior for a virgo: that is, the expectation that a virgo should defend her pudor
and be loyal to her pater (see Medea 238–41: virgini placeat pudor / paterque placeat: tota cum
ducibus ruet / Pelasga tellus, hic tuus primum gener / tauri ferocis ore agranti occidet ). On the
acknowledgement of guilt, see especially Medea 245–51, which is highly reminiscent of some lines
in Heroides 12 where the theme of conscious guilt is developed at length (see Heroides 12.106–32
and the discussion in Bessone ad loc., who supplies a long list of parallel passages).
11. Seneca’s Medea tries, for her part, to separate the idea of being guilty from the idea of being
responsible (see Perrenoud). These crimes are what link her destiny to Jason’s, since he was the
bene ciary of the crimes which she materially committed.
12. For a discussion of the end of Jason and Medea’s marriage, see Guastella 2000.
13. For a discussion, see Guastella 2000.
14. Medea 143–46: Culpa est Creontis tota, qui sceptro impotens / coniugia solvit quique
genetricem abstrahit / gnatis et arto pignore astrictam dem / dirimit. About the fact that in a Roman
divorce the children are supposed to follow the father, see the discussion in Guastella 2000. Given
that the function of marriage was to assure a male line of descent from the domus of a paterfamilias ,
and that divorce usually involved the removal of the wife from her husband’s house, it is clear that
Medea’s revenge is thus based on a logic of awesome precision, meticulously

matching the crimes she committed to become coniunx / mater with even greater
crimes that she will now commit in order to re-establish the identity thrown into
total disarray by Jason’s repudium:
Quodcumque vidit Phasis aut Pontus nefas,
videbit Isthmos. EVera ignota horrida,
tremenda caelo pariter ac terris mala
mens intus agitat: vulnera et caedem et vagum
funus per artus—levia memoravi nimis:
haec virgo feci; gravior exurgat dolor:
maiora iam me scelera post partus decent.
Accingere ira teque in exitium para
furore toto. Paria narrentur tua
repudia thalamis: quo virum linques modo?
Hoc quo secuta es. Rumpe iam segnes moras:
quae scelere parta est, scelere linquenda est domus.
Medea 44–55
Whatever horror Pontus or Phasis has seen, Isthmos will see. My heart
deep inside is planning wild deeds, unheard-of, horrible calamities at
which heaven and hell alike will tremble—wounds, slaughter, death,
creeping from limb to limb. Too trivial are the deeds I mentioned; such
were my crimes when I was a girl. Let my grief rise stronger; greater
crimes become me now that I am a mother. Arm yourself with wrath, and
be prepared for deadly deeds with the full force of madness. Let the story
of your divorce match the story of your marriage. How will you leave
your husband? Just as you followed him! Break oV now dull delay; the
home you gained by crime, by crime must be abandoned.
Seneca’s Medea declares that scelus, crime, has been the guiding thread of her
life, and so it will supply the means by which she can attempt to reconstruct her
own identity.15
This erce barbarian woman, whose cultural marginality constitutes a danger
for the city which has taken her in, is the ideal character to dramatize the eVects of
unrestrained ira and of a furor that exceeds the very limits of rationality. But
this ira is also subject to a precise and perverted ratio, a reckoning which is
extraordinarily accurate in all its calculations. Thus, just as the marriage between
Jason and Medea was the unconventional and unethical union of a Greek hero and
a barbarian virgo, their divorce also takes on a clearly anomalous and criminal
character: it is a separation whose “procedures” basically observe the requirements
the sons would need to remain, in normal circumstances, in the house of their father. See Treggiari
466–71 for a discussion of the rare exceptions to this rule.
15. In her last attempt to induce Jason to remain with her, Medea invites him to run away
together, even if it is a crime (scelus, 515). Alternatively, Jason could remain, as always, innocens ,
leaving it up to Medea to destroy every possible enemy (521–28).
of the Roman institution, but which will also involve drastic criminal acts. Because
Medea brought about her marriage with Jason by means of a series of crimes
committed against her own family in her future husband’s favor, the dissolution
of that marriage, in Medea’s perverse frame of mind, must now be accompanied
by a new series of crimes balancing out her past actions, or even exceeding those
old crimes with a new, unprecedented ferocity.
CR EDITS AND DEBITS
As Medea herself describes the development of her revenge,16 she begins by

considering the merita, the credits she had earned by helping Jason in his struggle:
Hoc facere Iason potuit, erepto patre
patria atque regno sedibus solam exteris
deserere durus? merita contempsit mea
qui scelere ammas viderat vinci et mare?
Medea 118–22
Did Jason have the heart to do this—having robbed me of my father,
homeland and kingdom, could he so cruelly leave me alone in a foreign
land? Has he scorned my well-deserved merits, having seen ames and
sea conquered by my crime?
Medea here juxtaposes her merita, which were systematically the result of criminal
activity,17 with three items she claims to have lost as a result of helping Jason.
These losses are, speci cally, her father, her homeland, and her royal position.
It is important to keep these items in mind, because they will return again later
(along with others) in Medea’s accounts of “giving” and “getting” as she calculates
her revenge. Unlike earlier literary versions of this myth, Seneca’s Medea does
not list her merita as an oVering of help made in vain to an ungrateful man;
instead, Medea expresses herself in terms of losses which she has suVered, and
for which she demands some form of compensation. 18 When she followed Jason
into uncertain exile, Medea had to renounce her family and her homeland, thus
also renouncing the safe asylum they would have been able to oVer her in case she
16. Medea, like Atreus, elaborates this plan in a sort of slow and painful “gestation.” On this
topic see Picone 1995 and on the traits shared by Atreus and Medea, see Staley 107 (and passim),
Seidensticker 126, Picone 1984: 111–12, Picone 1989: 59–63, and Picone 1995: 149n. 9. More
recently, see also Burnett 10–18.
17. For merita, see also Ovid Heroides 12.21–22 and the discussion in Bessone 90–93. Although
Seneca’s Medea does not dwell on reproaching Jason with the things she did on his behalf (as both
Euripides’ Medea (see Medea 465–72) and Ovid’s Medea do), Seneca’s Medea’s way of talking
about her past merita resembles that of Ovid’s Medea in the rst half of her letter in the Heroides .
18. Liebermann 205 has treated this problem thoroughly: “Medea fordert bei Seneca nicht Lohn
für gute Taten, sondern schlicht Schadenersatz.” Inside the frame of his revenge plan, Seneca is
emphasizing the motif of loss and deprivation that was already at work in Euripides’ Medea (for
this speci c aspect of Euripides’ tragedy, see Menu 119–21).
was abandoned by her husband. Moreover, to free herself of her family and her
homeland, Medea committed a series of crimes, most important of which was
the murder of her brother Absyrtus. 19
How then is Medea going to be compensated for these losses? At this point,
Medea begins to imagine a series of future crimes that will parallel those crimes
of the past:
Unde me ulcisci queam?
Utinam esset illi frater! est coniunx: in hanc
ferrum exigatur.
Medea 124–26
Whence can I get vengeance? I wish he had a brother! He has a wife;
let the sword strike her heart.
Medea wishes that Jason had a brother so that the murder of this brother could
compensate for the murder of Medea’s brother Absyrtus. But Jason doesn’t have a
brother—what he has is a wife, and it is this wife who will be the rst of Medea’s
victims.
MY THS OF INF ANTIC IDE: THYE ST ES AND PHI LOME LA
Yet by itself, the murder of Creusa will not be enough: in order to fully realize
her revenge, Medea intends to repeat all the crimes of the past with exact precision.
The crimes of the past have to “come back” (cuncta redeant, 130),20 recreating the
same circumstances in which the virgo Medea had once found herself:
Scelera te hortentur tua
et cuncta redeant: inclitum regni decus
raptum et nefandae virginis parvus comes
divisus ense, funus ingestum patri
Medea 129–32
Let your own crimes urge you on, and let them all come back—the bright
ornament of the kingdom stolen, and the wicked virgo’s little companion
torn to pieces with the sword, his murder forced upon his father.
Medea does not see the murder of her brother simply as the loss of a blood relative,
but more precisely as an injury in icted on a father: funus ingestum patri. The
importance of understanding Absyrtus’ death in these terms becomes clear if we
compare these lines from Seneca’s Medea with a parallel passage from Seneca’s
Thyestes, along with another close parallel in Ovid’s famous account of Procne
19. This is also the Ovidian version of Absyrtus’ story: see Heroides 6.129–30 and especially
Tristia 3.9.
20. For the notion of redire and retro verti in Seneca’s tragedies see Schiesaro 91–95.
and Philomela in the Metamorphoses; taken together, these passages constitute

what seems to me a highly signi cant cluster of allusions. 21
Let us take the Thyestes passage rst, where Atreus contemplates the horrible
crime that he is about to commit, using words very similar to Medea’s funus
ingestum patri:
tota iam ante oculos meos
imago caedis errat, ingesta orbitas
in ora patris.
Thyestes 281–83
Already before my eyes its the whole picture of the slaughter; his lost
children heaped up before their father’s face.
Seneca’s description of orbitas, the lack of sons, ingesta...in ora patris brings
us to Ovid’s text, where we nd a similar expression used to describe the moment
when Philomela throws Itys’ severed head at his father Tereus, in ora patris:
Ityosque caput Philomela cruentum
misit in ora patris.
Metamorphoses 6.658–59
and Philomela threw the bleeding head of Itys in his father’s face.
In both cases we are dealing with children who are killed in order to carry out a
revenge that punishes a guilty father. This is not precisely the situation in the case
of Medea’s father, Aeetes: although Aeetes is a tyrant, his son is murdered only in
order to put a stop to his pursuit of Medea and Jason. 22
Nevertheless, Medea considers this act of infanticide to be an injury in-
icted on the victim’s father.23 The words Medea uses to describe the murder
21. While I believe it is worthwhile to read these texts together in order to see more clearly
the cultural elements which are the common parameters of stories that are so fundamentally similar
to one another, I am not attempting to establish which of the plays was written rst, a task which
seems to me impossible to achieve. For a review of the hypotheses on the dating of Seneca’s plays,
see Fitch, Zwierlein 1983: 233–48, and Tarrant 10–13.
22. There is also an analogy between these stories of infanticide and the story of Harpalyce
(Parthenius Erot. 13; Hyginus Fab. 206, and Euphorion frag. 24a), who takes revenge on her father,
Clymenus, who committed incest with her and killed her husband. Harpalyce supposedly fed to her
father the esh of her brother (or, according to one version of the myth, of the child she herself
bore to her father).
23. Ovid too had already described in a similar way both the killing of Absyrtus and that of
Itys. In Tristia 3.9, Ovid describes Medea’s deeds in a way that is very similar to Metamorphoses
6.619–60, where Procne’s infanticide is described. In both cases the child accidentally comes into
the room while the woman is seeking a solution to her dilemma; in both cases the child does not
understand what is happening; and in both cases when the body has been dismembered it is the hands
and feet which are shown to the father (Tristia 3.21–31: Dum quid agat quaerit, dum versat in omnia
vultus, / ad fratrem casu lumina exa tulit. / Cuius ut oblata est praesentia: “Vicimus, inquit; / hic
mihi morte sua causa salutis erit.” / Protinus ignari nec quicquam tale timentis / innocuum rigido
perforat ense latus / atque ita divellit divulsaque membra per agros / dissipat in multis invenienda
of Absyrtus—funus ingestum patri—point both towards the murder of Thyestes’

sons and to the murder of Itys, a comparison that will achieve its full realization in
Medea’s nal crime: by murdering their children, Medea punishes Jason in a way
that is analogous to the way in which Procne punished her husband Tereus (in
revenge for Tereus’ having raped her sister) and the way in which Atreus punished
his brother Thyestes (in revenge for Thyestes’ having committed adultery with
his wife).
FROM AMOR TO IRA
As Medea gradually unfolds her plans for vengeance, we see that there are
two juxtaposed emotions which drive Medea’s crimes, past and present:
et nullum scelus
irata feci: saevit infelix amor.
Medea 135–36
None of my crimes did I do in wrath: my unfortunate love rages on.
The scelera of the past were prompted by amor, but from now on it is no longer
love but wrath, ira, which will drive Medea’s revenge. 24 As the chorus itself
observes, this revenge will arise from a fusion of ira and amor:
Frenare nescit iras
Medea, non amores:
nunc ira amorque causam
iunxere: quid sequetur?
Medea 866–69
Medea does not know how to curb her wrath or her love: now that wrath
and love have joined cause, what will the outcome be?
The criminal career of the virgo Medea was driven by love,25 while that of the
coniunx /mater will be marked by the consequences of that same love, now deeply
wounded. 26 It is this fusion of amor and ira that will give Medea the means to
locis— / neu pater ignoret, scopulo proponit in alto / pallentesque manus sanguineumque caput— /
ut genitor luctuque novo tardetur et, artus / dum legit extinctos, triste moretur iter; compare, for
example, Metamorphoses 6.513 with vicimus here at line 23). For the analogies between these two
accounts, see Degl’Innocenti Perini 153–54.
24. The theme of Medea’s ira as a result of her wounded love had already been developed by
Ovid: see, for example, Ars amatoria 2.373–86, Remedia amoris 55, and Tristia 2.387– 88: tingeret
ut ferrum natorum sanguine mater / concitus a laeso fecit amore dolor.
25. See Kullmann 158–59. Ovid’s version in Heroides 12, following the rules of elegy, only
hints in the last line at the crimes that will follow. On the possible literary implications of this line,
see Spoth 202–204, Barchiesi 343–45, Hinds 34–43, and Bessone 32–41.
26. After her dialogue with Creon, Medea herself will equate her past feelings and her present
hate, caused by her earlier love (Medea 397–99): Si quaeris odio, misera, quem statuas modum,
reassemble the shattered pieces of her identity, now that she has lost all that had
once been hers:
NVT. Abiere Colchi, coniugis nulla est des
nihilque superest opibus e tantis tibi.
ME. Medea superest: hic mare et terras vides
ferrumque et ignes et deos et fulmina.
Medea 164–67
Nurse. The Colchians are no longer on your side, your husband has
proved faithless, and there is nothing left of all your wealth. Medea.
Medea is left—in her you see sea and land, and sword and re and gods
and thunderbolts.
Nihil superest, Medea has lost everything: in this dialogue the nurse emphasizes
the material loss of Medea’s homeland as well as the end of her marriage, the
loss of her coniugis des. But Medea superest, Medea remains, and she declares
that she will take what is left and put the pieces of her life back together:
NVT. Profuge. ME. Paenituit fugae.
NVT. Medea— ME. Fiam. NVT. Mater es. ME. Cui sim vide.
NVT. Profugere dubitas? ME. Fugiam at ulciscar prius.
Medea 170–72
Nurse. Run away. Medea. I don’t want to. Nurse. Medea— Medea. I
will be. Nurse. You are a mother. Medea. You see for whom. Nurse. Do
you hesitate to run away? Medea. I’ll run away but rst I’ll be avenged.
Fiam: Medea is not lost, but she must “become” herself. Her identity as a
coniunx /mater no longer makes sense without Jason, who has rejected her (the
precise meaning of this cui is a point to which we will return). Medea must thus
avenge herself in a way that allows her past to regain the meaning which was
destroyed by the divorce. It is precisely the logic of this revenge that will allow
Medea to reacquire her identity.
MEDEA’S ‘‘DOWRY’’
Among the losses which Medea has lamented so far, we could list her pater,
patria, regnum,27 and also her coniugis des. The theme of loss is also emphasized
/ imitare amorem. Regias egone ut faces / inulta patiar? In her dialogue with Jason, Medea will
then try for the last time to use the power of amor (465–90).
27. Among Medea’s losses we can also include the nobility and the opes mentioned by the nurse
(Medea 164–65). Medea comes back to this point several times. During her dialogue with Creon, for
example, she complains about her former identity as a noble descendant of the Sun (209–10), the
daughter of a very powerful and rich king (211–16), a bride very much courted (218–19). Medea
says she has lost all of this in order to save the Argonauts, taking only Jason for herself (225–35).
in Medea’s dialogue with Jason, as Medea reminds him that she had been willing
to commit any sort of crime in order to follow him into exile:
Ex opibus illis [ . . . ]
nil exul tuli
nisi fratris artus: hos quoque impendi tibi;
tibi patria cessit, tibi pater frater pudor—
hac dote nupsi. Redde fugienti sua.
Medea 483–89
Of all that wealth [ . . . ] I brought away nothing in my exile but my
brother’s limbs. Those too I spent for you; for you my country has given
way, my father, my brother, my chastity—with this dowry I married you.
Give me back what is mine now that I am banished.
Medea now explicitly includes her brother and her former status as a virgo pudica
in the list of other losses which she has suVered (regnum, pater, patria),28 and she
links this nal, catastrophic reckoning of accounts to the Roman institution of the
dowry. Medea considers these losses to be the equivalent of a dowry paid to her
husband. Of course, this can only be a metaphorical dowry: Medea’s marriage was
completely unusual, without any of the normal guarantees required by a proper
matrimonial exchange. 29 The dowry was not paid by Aeetes as it should have
been, but by Medea herself, and at her own loss. Seneca’s rhetoric thus imposes a
kind of formal metaphorical order on an irregular and criminal union, treating that
union as if it followed all the rules of a regular marriage. Insofar as Jason and
Medea’s wedding is assumed to follow the rules of marriage, it is only logical
that their divorce should do the same, and in the case of a repudium the rejected
woman’s dowry must be returned to her family of origin. 30 Yet here the logic fails:
Jason cannot give anything back to a father-in-law who had not even agreed to the
marriage. Indeed, it would not be Medea’s father who requires compensation,
but Medea herself, since it was Medea who paid the price, so to speak, of her
wedding. Medea’s belief that a dowry was paid is already a paradox; so too is
this request for its return.
In Heroides 12, Ovid’s Medea also demands the restitution of her dowry, but
in a far less radical sense: 31
28. These are the same elements found in Ovid Heroides 12.109–14: proditus est genitor,
regnum patriamque reliqui, / munus in exilio quodlibet esse tuli; / virginitas facta est peregrini
praeda latronis; / optima cum cara matre relicta soror. / At non te fugiens sine me, germane, reliqui!
/ De cit hoc uno littera nostra loco.
29. See Guastella 2000: 152–57.
30. See Treggiari 325 and 446–82, especially 466: “The legal eVect of divorce was normally
considered to be the physical separation of the coniuges and the restoration of the dowry, apart from
whatever the husband retained on account of children, fault, expenses, gifts, or things taken away.”
31. It could be argued that Ovid might have developed this theme in his own Medea because
Ovid’s Medea in the Heroides brings her speech to an abrupt end exactly when she gives herself
over to wrath and to vengeful designs, pronouncing a threat in the last line of the letter. Similar
Dos ubi sit, quaeris? Campo numeravimus illo,

qui tibi laturo vellus arandus erat.
Aureus ille aries villo spectabilis alto
dos mea, quam dicam si tibi ‘Redde’, neges.
Dos mea tu sospes, dos est mea Graia iuventus;
i nunc, Sisyphias, improbe, confer opes!
Quod vivis, quod habes nuptam socerumque potentes,
hoc ipsum, ingratus quod potes esse, meum est.
Quos equidem actutum—sed quid praedicere poenam
attinet? Ingentes parturit ira minas.32
Heroides 12.199–208
You ask where my dowry is? I counted it out on that eld which you
had to plow so that you could carry away the eece. That golden
ram, with his remarkably thick coat of wool, that is my dowry, the
dowry which you would deny me when I tell you to give it back. My
dowry is you, safe and sound, my dowry is those Greek youths—go
now, traitor, and compare your Sisyphian wealth. The fact that you
are alive, that you have a bride and a father-in-law who are power-
ful, the very fact that you can be ungrateful, that is all due to me.
And as for them, I am going to—but what does it matter if I say
what the punishment will be? Awesome are the perils being hatched
by my wrath.
Within the epistolary framework, the words of Ovid’s Medea become a mere
rhetorical device, an utterly impossible demand.33 Seneca’s Medea, on the other
hand, not only expects the return of her “dowry” 34 but constructs her revenge
in such a way that she can paradoxically claim that she has in fact received
compensation. Ovid’s Medea speaks about a dowry only in order to construct a
metaphor, but Seneca’s Medea takes that metaphor and pursues it according to
the cultural model on which it depends, thus de ning the rules that her revenge
will ultimately follow.
motifs can be found, although diVerently distributed, in the dialogues of Seneca’s Medea with both
Creon and Jason. The theme is also found in Hypsipyle’s letter to Jason (Heroides 6.137–38: quid
refert, scelerata piam si vincit et ipso / crimine dotata est emeruitque virum?).
32. Already according to Leo 168–69, Seneca was quoting these lines in Medea 486–89. For
more recent discussions about the signi cance of Seneca’s citation of these lines, see Bessone 266–86
and Heinze 206–19.
33. Ovid’s Medea seems willing to acknowledge that Jason not only would not give her back
this dowry, but that this would be impossible to do.
34. Medea asks for the restitution of her dowry using almost the same words she uses to ask
for the restitution of her coniunx (Medea 272–73: redde fugienti ratem / vel redde comitem). For
the juridical value of such words, see Perrenoud 495–97, who interprets the expression at line 272 in
terms of the notion of “reddere crimen” found in lines 244–46.
ME DEA NUNC SUM

The infanticide which makes it possible for Medea to punish her coniunx in
the very body of his children is conceived and carried out in haste, all within the
last “act” of Seneca’s tragedy. Yet this is in fact the core of Medea’s revenge, the
real focus of her eVorts. The murder of Creon and his daughter is of considerably
less importance in Seneca’s version of the story than in Euripides, and constitutes
only a small part of Medea’s overall project.35 There is absolutely no comparison
between the logical and rhetorical eVorts which Seneca devotes to the murder
of Medea’s children and the scant attention which he pays to the fates of Creon
and Creusa. Medea herself describes her revenge as unfolding in two stages, with
the rst stage serving as a mere prelude that is by itself incomplete:
Pars ultionis ista, qua gaudes, quota est?
Amas adhuc, furiosa, 36 si satis est tibi
caelebs Iason. Quaere poenarum genus
haut usitatum iamque sic temet para.
Medea 896–99
How much of your revenge is this, that you are so happy with it? You are
still in love, madwoman, if it is enough for you that Jason is unmarried.
Look for a kind of punishment no one has ever tried and prepare yourself
for this.
The real revenge, the more terrible punishment, has yet to begin, but the elaborate
rhetoric of Medea’s long monologue shows clearly that this is where the whole plot
has been leading. It is only now that the heroine starts to untangle the confusion
of her past life that has been created by Jason’s repudium. Here is where we
can discern the project that will unite all of these aspects of Medea’s life into
a meaningful whole, an aspiration that is as clear and articulate as it is utterly
insane:
35. Seneca seems to have wanted to quickly discharge his debt to the literary tradition, in which
the myth involved the murder of Creon and Creusa. In Seneca’s play, this murder does not have
the same importance as in Euripides’ version (see Guastella 2000). Before the sudden preparation of
this crime, the only allusions to the need to kill Creon and Creusa are found at lines 125–26 and
143–49. Even during the long scene of witchcraft, no reference is made to the reasons why Medea
needs to kill her rival, apart from a generic hint to the hated novi thalami (743). Seneca devotes only
12 lines to the messenger speech about Creon and Creusa’s death (879–90), compared to the more
than 90 lines in Euripides. Seneca has mostly used this crime in order to construct an impressive
scene of witchcraft, according to the literary taste of his own times. The atmosphere of this scene
(670–848) owes much to the character of Medea as presented by Ovid in the Metamorphoses (see
Newlands 186–92 on the subject of “Medea the witch”).
36. The correction furiose, which was proposed by Bentley and is now accepted by both Costa
and Zwierlein, is unnecessary. The correction is not needed for the meter, and I do not think that
it is so unlikely that Medea would brie y interrupt her apostrophe to the animus in order to address
herself. Indeed, it seems to me instead rather improbable that Medea would address her animus,
rather than herself, as “still in love.”
Prolusit dolor
per ista noster: quid manus poterant rudes
audere magnum, quid puellaris furor?
Medea nunc sum; crevit ingenium malis:
iuvat, iuvat rapuisse fraternum caput,
artus iuvat secuisse et arcano patrem
spoliasse sacro, iuvat in exitium senis
armasse natas. Quaere materiam, dolor:
ad omne facinus non rudem dextram aVeres.
Medea 907–15
In them my grief was but practicing; what great deed had my inexpe-
rienced hands the power to do? What, a girl’s rage? Now I am Medea;
my identity has grown through crime: glad am I, glad, that I tore oV my
brother’s head, glad that I carved his limbs, that I robbed my father of
his guarded treasure, glad that I armed daughters for an old man’s death.
Seek the right stuV, my grief: no untrained hand will you bring to any
crime.
Once again Medea makes an account of the wrongs committed in her earlier
criminal career, those deeds that Medea the virgo committed in a puellaris
furor. These crimes are now interpreted as the means to a new end, a prepa-
ration for redemption (iuvat, as Medea insists four times in three lines). At
last, by means of all her suVering, Medea can achieve a full realization of
her identity: Medea nunc sum.37 Medea’s identity thus emerges in three dif-
ferent phases: 38 beginning with the total disorder in which only the erce en-
ergy of the abandoned woman continued to function (Medea superest, 166),
followed by Medea’s intention to put her ruined life back together (Medea—
Fiam, 171) and nally the realization of the actual revenge. When she is n-
ished, Medea’s life will have regained a new meaning. We have now reached
the moment in which the virgo Medea will be integrated with the spurned
coniunx /mater so that Medea, at last, will be able to become “herself” once
and for all.
37. See Kullmann 161–64, who has correctly noted that this line is the culminating moment
of the progress of Medea’s ingenium over the course of the play.
38. See Liebermann 189, who provides a useful schema of the three phases of Medea’s character
development. About the extraordinary fortune of the theme “Medea am” in later versions of this
story, see Friedrich 227–37. For the Ovidian precedent, see Heroides 12.5, 12.25, and 12.182, with a
discussion in Bessone ad loc. In comparison to these lines of Ovid (along with Heroides 6.127–28
and 6.151), Seneca multiplies his variations about the name Medea throughout the play (see lines
8, 166, 171, 179, 362, 496, 517, 524, 567, 675, 867, 892, 910, 934). Both Traina and Segal 1982
discuss the repeated “naming” of Medea in the course of the play.
C ONIUN X VER SU S MATER

Now that she must persuade herself to kill her own children, Medea relies
on a series of expressions which dramatize the incompatibility of her identity as a
mother with the reality of her divorce. Separated from her children, Medea tries to
make herself believe that her children in fact belong to Creusa, the stepmother
under whose jurisdiction the children now live.39 But despite the monumental
rhetorical eVort, Medea’s decision remains unthinkable, and she must undergo
the internal questioning traditionally associated with the heroines of myth who
murder their own children:
Ira discessit loco
materque tota coniuge expulsa redit.
Egone ut meorum liberum ac prolis meae
fundam cruorem? Melius, a, demens furor!
Incognitum istum facinus ac dirum nefas
a me quoque absit; quod scelus miseri luent?
Scelus est Iason genitor et maius scelus
Medea mater—occidant, non sunt mei;
pereant, mei sunt. Crimine et culpa carent,
sunt innocentes, fateor: et frater fuit.40
Medea 927–36
Wrath has given way; the mother has all come back, the wife is banished.
Can I shed the blood of my children, of my own oVspring? Ah, mad rage,
say not so! Let not that unheard-of deed, that accursed guilt attend even
me! What sin will the poor boys atone? Their sin is that Jason is their
father, and, greater sin, that Medea is their mother. Let them die, they are
not mine; let them be lost—they are my own. They are without crime and
guilt, yes, they are innocent. I acknowledge it; so, too, was my brother.
Medea nds herself having to overcome the gap between her maternal identity
(mater tota, 928; Medea mater, 934) and her marital identity (coniunx, 928).
At the moment of her divorce, these two aspects of Medea’s identity became
39. Medea 921–22: Quidquid ex illo tuum est, / Creusa peperit . See also 924: liberi quondam
mei. For a discussion, see Guastella 2000: 157–62.
40. Nussbaum 227 has proposed a quite interesting punctuation for this line: Pereant. Mei
sunt, crimine et culpa carent, / sunt innocentes— fateor: et frater fuit. In this reading, the children
belonging to Medea would be, for this same reason, innocent, so that they would turn out to be
innocent victims in exactly the same way as Absyrtus had been. However, I am afraid this would
represent a banalization of the text. Apart from the improbable undoing of the strong syntactical
parallelism (which is typically Senecan, as well as Ovidian), such a solution also cancels an important
thematic element. Medea has said (933–34) that her children share the scelus that comes from being
born as a result of a criminal union. Medea is here proposing a twofold reason for the infanticide:
the children are to die because they are at this time both Creusa’s and Medea’s sons and because
they must share the same destiny as Absyrtus (only this second aspect would remain in the text as
punctuated by Nussbaum).
incompatible. For whom, cui, is Medea now a mother? The problem is stated
quite clearly in the dialogue between Medea and the nurse which was cited earlier
(Medea 171): “NVT. Mater es. ME. Cui sim vide.” Medea is saying that a “mother”
(a Roman mother, we might add) is not a mother in some absolute sense, but is
a mother only with respect to someone else’s bene t (cui).
It is here that we nd the central element in the logic of the infanticide, as we
can see by comparing Medea’s words to analogous expressions found in similar
myths, such as Ovid’s account of Procne in the Metamorphoses . Procne is also
suVering a crisis of identity, vacillating between her role as a “sister” who wants
to avenge the rape of Philomela and her role as “mother” who does not dare to
murder her son Itys:
quam vocat hic matrem, cur non vocat illa sororem?
Cui sis nupta, vide, Pandione nata, marito.
Degeneras! Scelus est pietas in coniuge Tereo.
Metamorphoses 6.633–35
When he calls me mother, why does she not call me sister? See whom
you have married, you, Pandion’s daughter! Will you betray your birth?
With such a husband as Tereus, aVection due to kin is a crime.
Cui sis nupta, vide: Procne’s words are a terrible sophism, but at the same
time they reveal a great deal about the Roman notion of marriage. To be the
mother of Itys and to be the wife of a despicable man like Tereus are two sides
of the same coin, a situation which manages to somehow justify a crime (the
elimination of their common oVspring) which would otherwise be unthinkable.
Sarah Iles Johnston has recently observed that the fascination which is still
exerted today by Medea and her story “owes much to the fact that a mother’s
deliberate slaughter of her children undermines one of the basic assumptions
upon which society—indeed humanity—is constructed: mothers nurture their
children.” 41 In ecting this argument according to the cultural paradigms of ancient
society, we would need to add that this nurturing function of the mother does
not take place in isolation, but to someone else’s advantage, as Medea herself
observes. 42 To be a wife and to be a mother were functions both linked to the
bene t of one and the same man. As a result, the sacri ce of the children is
the culmination of the divorce, a visible manifestation of the need to make this
separation into a loss not only for the woman who has been abandoned, but above
all for the man who had previously bene ted from the union, and who would
otherwise continue to pro t from its fruits, keeping the sons for himself. Thus
many ancient stories of infanticide involve not so much the complete negation
41. Johnston 44.

42. Both Seneca’s Medea and Ovid’s Procne use the dative cui, which is normal in Procne’s
case, but less so in Medea’s, since Medea is not discussing “whose mother she is” (as Procne is
discussing “whose wife she is”) but “for whom she is a mother.”
of all the rules, but rather involve a method—an extreme method, but with a
clearly de ned aim—which can be used either to dissolve erroneous marriages
or to punish the (male) parents who engage in sexual relations with prohibited
partners. 43
Thus, in order to propose a correct anthropological account of the dichotomy
between Medea coniunx and Medea mater as depicted here by Seneca, we must
begin with the following question: for whom, cui, is Medea now a mother? The
answer is that she is a mother for a coniunx who has rejected her. As a result,
her sons remain linked to her by blood since she is still their mater, but at the same
time they are alienated from her insofar as she is alienated from the father, the man
for whom, cui, she had assumed the role of mother. This rejected coniunx, carried
away by ira, can imagine the possibility of killing those children, even though the
mater, still moved by amor and pietas, is horri ed by this idea.44 In this moment
of con ict, the children’s innocence will not be enough to avert Medea’s fatal
blows, even though she is their mother, just as once upon a time the innocence
of Absyrtus had not been able to restrain the fatal blows struck by his sister (et
frater fuit, 936).
MEDEA AND THE ACT OF INFANTIC IDE
There is thus a fundamental con ict here between relations of blood kinship
(Medea as mater) and relations with kin acquired by means of marriage (Medea
as coniunx). To better understand the signi cance of this con ict in a story like
Medea’s, we can compare Medea’s situation to that of two analogous characters,
Procne (again) and Althea,45 although I will only be able to brie y outline the
comparison here. In Ovid’s version of Procne’s story (Metamorphoses 6.627–35)
43. The valuable ancient and modern evidence collected twenty years ago by Easterling needs to
be reexamined in this light. I suspect that the cultural reasons underlying these crimes changes over
time. For instance, in our culture the psychological attitude seems to be the same for both parents
who might commit infanticide: the man and the woman aim at harming their partner in more or less
the same way by killing their children. In ancient myth, however, this seems to be a crime intended to
injure fathers, not mothers (see also Segal 1996: 16, who cites the case of Procne and also that of
Hecuba, who kills the sons of Polymestor in Euripides’ Hecuba). Even in stories where infanticide
seems to be directed against a mother (as in the story of Ino and Athamas), the woman is usually
not punished by the father of the child, but by some other character (in Ino’s case, by Hera). As
Segal observes (1996: 16): “Her [sc. Medea’s] behavior here departs from modern patterns of child
murder, for modern society does not place so much emphasis on the father’s need for children to
continue the male line.”
44. Medea 943–44: ira pietatem fugat / iramque pietas—cede pietati, dolor. Compare the
description of Medea’s crime in Ovid Metamorphoses 7.396–97 (after the killing of the nova
nupta): sanguine natorum perfunditur inpius ensis / ultaque se male mater Iasonis effugit arma.
Liebermann 190–91 rightly points out that the last part of this tragedy is centered upon the oppositions
pietas / dolor, amor /ira, mater /coniunx .
45. Althaea’s story is explicitly evoked by the chorus (Medea 779–80). For the similarities
between these two stories, see Friedrich 202–203.
and also in his account of Althea (Metamorphoses 8.462–84), 46 there is a similar

con ict in kinship loyalties. Both women decide to kill their children in order
to avenge the victimization of their siblings by their enemies: Procne avenges
her sister’s rape by her husband and Althea avenges her brothers’ murder by her
son. In both cases, the women must choose between loyalty to their acquired
family and loyalty to their family of origin. In other words, they must decide
whether to be a good mother or to be a good sister. Of course, Medea’s situation
is somewhat diVerent, since it was in fact Medea herself who committed the
crime against her family of origin, killing her own brother. Yet even though
Medea does not face a con ict between her role as a mother and as a sister
“synchronically” (that is, Medea is not choosing now between being a good
mother and the alternative of being a good sister, as Procne and Althea do), she
does face this dilemma “diachronically.” That is, Medea’s renunciation of her
role as a mother reproduces her earlier refusal of her sisterly identity in an act
of revenge that is meant to expiate the original crime by means of another, entirely
analogous infanticide. By killing her children, Medea does aYrm her role as a
sister, but in a delayed and perverted way, avenging the death of her brother at
her own hands by later killing her own children. Ultimately, Medea’s murder
of her children is imagined as a sacri ce oVered to the Erinyes of her brother,
those same Furies evoked in the opening lines of the play. In the end, Medea
gives herself over completely to dolor and is surrounded by the Furies urging
her to carry out her crime,47 until the actual ghost of her dismembered brother
appears before her, turning her hand (perhaps even literally) to the murder of her
rst child. 48
Seneca’s Medea, therefore, does not punish Jason simply because he has
betrayed her, as is the case in Euripides. Instead, in this version of the story
Medea’s wrath unleashes a much wider-reaching strategy. Medea does not intend
only to deprive Jason of his progeny, but also to obtain compensation for the
46. Ovid Metamorphoses 8.475– 77: Incipit esse tamen melior germana parente / et, consan-
guineas ut sanguine leniat umbras / inpietate pia est. Compare Medea 779–80: piae sororis, impiae
matris (about Althaea). For a discussion of these passages, see Jakobi 59, who comments also on the
stylistic similarities between Medea 939–44 and Ovid Metamorphoses 8.470–77, providing a list
of parallel passages.
47. Medea might have seen the Furies on stage, if the tragedies had theatrical performances.
The theme of Medea urged by the Furies was traditional, as in Neophron’s tragedy (frag. 2.10–12:
see Dingel 1074). In Euripides (Medea 1333–35), Jason remarks that he is the victim of divine
vengeance being exacted for Medea’s fratricide. Ovid (Heroides 12.160) also has Medea say, albeit
in a diVerent context, that the divorce was celebrating the inferiae of her brother’s umbra (inferias
umbrae fratris habete mei).
48. Medea 963–71: Cuius umbra dispersis venit / incerta membris? Frater est, poenas petit:
/ dabimus, sed omnes. Fige luminibus faces, / lania, perure, pectus en Furiis patet. / Discedere a me,
frater, ultrices deas / manesque ad imos ire securas iube: / mihi me relinque et utere hac, frater,
manu / quae strinxit ensem—victima manes tuos / placamus ista. Hosidius Geta actually made the
umbra Absyrti a speaking character in his cento (390–91). Friedrich 211–12 discusses the subsequent
versions in which this same detail can be found.
losses that she suVered in order to marry Jason in the rst place.49 The two
disconnected “halves” of Medea’s identity thus nally seem to achieve a sort of
unity. Originally, Jason was the “bene ciary” of a crime which had Medea as
its “subject,” and which injured Medea’s father by means of Absyrtus’ murder.
Now the situation is reversed: (Aeetes by means of) the ghost of Absyrtus is
the “receiver” of a crime, whose “subject” is once again Medea, who injures the
father Jason by means of his children. 50 With the parallelism that is typical of
ultio, revenge, the original iniuria suVered by the house of Medea is compensated
for by an analogous iniuria suVered by the house of Jason.
In Ovid, too, this motif emerges in the words that Hypsipyle addresses to
Jason in the Heroides, in the form of a series of curses against Medea, who has
stolen Jason from her in a way that parallels the way in which Creusa in turn will
deprive Medea of her coniunx. Hypsipyle’s nal wish is that the barbarian woman
will suVer all the same things which Hypsipyle herself has had to suVer, and that
Medea will commit precisely those crimes which her literary destiny condemns
her to carry out:
quam fratri germana fuit miseroque parenti
lia, tam natis, tam sit acerba viro.
Heroides 6.159–60
A bitter sister to her brother, a bitter daughter to her wretched father, may
she be as bitter to her children, and as bitter to her husband.
Here in Ovid we see the same method that Seneca will use to juxtapose the crimes
of Medea’s past with the crimes she commits after her divorce, based on values
that have a strongly marked cultural content. Yet what was a purely verbal exercise
in Ovid emerges in the action of Seneca’s play in a more radical form, exploiting
this approach for all of its narrative and dramatic potential.
Medea thus emerges as the inversion of the ideal bride: instead of eVecting an
alliance between two houses, Medea instead brings disaster on both her family
of origin and on the family that she acquires by marriage. More precisely, the
logic of Medea’s revenge demands that a parallel injury be in icted on her family
by marriage as compensation for the injury this marriage in icted on her family
of origin. 51 The plan to avenge the crimes committed against Medea’s family
49. Revenge is also inserted into the larger context of the nefas committed by the Argonauts.
They were haunted by a series of divine punishments, recalled in the third choral ode (Medea 579–
669); for a discussion, see Lawall 426. There is also a folkloric prohibition against having a murderer
on board a ship. Both Apollonius of Rhodes (Argonautica 4.557–91) and Ovid (Heroides 12.117–18)
feature this motif; for a discussion, see Heinze 166, who provides a list of parallel passages.
50. See Morse 51. The perfect parallelism in Medea’s strategy of revenge has been highlighted
very well by Hass, who also emphasizes the damage which the loss of the children in icts on the
father.
51. On these aspects of Medea’s myth see Visser 153–59, who clearly shows that the mythical
gure of Medea radically reverses the unifying role of the wife by destroying both of the families
(her own and Jason’s) which she would be expected to unite.
of origin is completely absent from Euripides’ play but in Seneca’s version this
aspect of Medea’s revenge is what actually motivates the infanticide. When Medea
welcomes Jason’s arrival on the stage, she gives a shout of victory, announcing
that she has now requited those earlier injuries:
Iam iam recepi sceptra germanum patrem,
spoliumque Colchi pecudis auratae tenent;
rediere regna, rapta virginitas redit.
O placida tandem numina, o festum diem,
o nuptialem! Vade, perfectum est scelus—
vindicta nondum: perage, dum faciunt manus.
Medea 982–87
Now, now have I regained my regal state, my brother, my father; and
the Colchians have once more the spoil of the golden eece; restored
is my kingdom, my ravished virginity is restored. Oh, divinities, at
last propitious, oh, festal day, oh, nuptial day! Come, the crime is
accomplished; but vengeance is not yet complete; nish it while there
is still work for your hands.
Similarly, in Seneca’s Thyestes, when Atreus sees that he has achieved his goal,
he also shouts that his revenge has restored to him what he had thought he had lost
because of the iniuria he suVered at his brother’s hands (Thyestes 1096–99):
Nunc meas laudo manus,
nunc parta vera est palma. Perdideram scelus,
nisi sic doleres. Liberos nasci mihi
nunc credo, castis nunc dem reddi toris.
Thyestes 1096–99
Now I praise my hands, now is the true palm won. I had wasted my crime
if you did not suVer like this. Now do I believe my children are my own,
now may I trust once more that my marriage-bed is pure.
With this rhetorical formulation Atreus nourishes the illusion that he has erased
the eVects of Thyestes’ adultery with his wife Aerope, thereby restoring his
con dence in the legitimacy of their oVspring.52 Likewise, Medea declares that
she has succeeded in picking up the broken thread of her life, having recovered
everything that she had given up “for Jason’s sake”: her royal status, her brother,
her father, the golden eece, and even her own original identity as a virgo, the
whole list of losses which Medea has been lamenting throughout the rst half of
the tragedy, the so-called “dowry” which Medea had paid in order to get married
to Jason. 53 If only in the logic of a paradoxical metaphor, Medea has recouped
52. See Guastella 1994: 145–47.

53. See Medea 209–20 and 483–89.
her losses; her revenge creates the illusion that “everything has come back,”
rediere / redit (984).54
CONCLUSIONS
By the time the play reaches its close, the seduced virgo and the abandoned
mater have both been avenged; Medea can nally show herself to Jason in the
terms he had refused to accept: no longer as the rival of Creusa, but as his old
coniunx, the companion of his exile. Medea then ies oV into the cloudless sky,
her identity as a “mother” discarded and the events of her past annulled. At the
end of the tragedy, Jason has not put Medea aside, but instead it is Medea who
puts Jason aside, having requited the crimes, scelera, she had once committed
on Jason’s behalf with crimes now committed against him. Medea had become a
mother to Jason’s pro t, but now she has ceased to be a mother, and has done
so at a loss to him. In this way Medea has succeeded in doing just what she
promised at the end of the play’s prologue (Medea 55): quae scelere parta est,
scelere linquenda est domus.
University of Siena
guastella@unisi.it
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figures 1–2 joyce
Fig. 1: Punishment
of Dirce with Amphion
and Zethos apprehending
Lykos. Sicilian Calyx
Crater. Staatliche Museen
zu Berlin, Antiken
Sammlung, F 3296.
Photo by Isolde Luckert.
bpk, Berlin.
Fig. 2: Dirce under an

Ithyphallic Bull. Augustan
Carneol. Staaliche Museen
zu Berlin, Antiken
Sammlung, FG 6897.
bpk, Berlin.

Guastella. Virgo, Coniunx, Mater. The Wrath of Seneca's Medea

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Virgo, Coniunx, Mater: The Wrath of Seneca's Medea

Author(s): Gianni Guastella

T HE PR EMISES OF THE R EVENGE

nunc, nunc adeste sceleris ultrices deae,

The “ill-omened wedding” was a popular element in Roman literature, at least

Medea’s revenge is thus based on a logic of awesome precision, meticulously

CR EDITS AND DEBITS

As Medea herself describes the development of her revenge,16 she begins by

MY THS OF INF ANTIC IDE: THYE ST ES AND PHI LOME LA

and Philomela in the Metamorphoses; taken together, these passages constitute

of Absyrtus—funus ingestum patri—point both towards the murder of Thyestes’

FROM AMOR TO IRA

Dos ubi sit, quaeris? Campo numeravimus illo,

ME DEA NUNC SUM

C ONIUN X VER SU S MATER

41. Johnston 44.

MEDEA AND THE ACT OF INFANTIC IDE

and also in his account of Althea (Metamorphoses 8.462–84), 46 there is a similar

52. See Guastella 1994: 145–47.

Fig. 2: Dirce under an

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