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INTRODUCTION
Euripides, His Life and Times
EURIPIDES, ATHENIAN
He grew old between the fires of Troy and the quarries of Sicily.
He liked caves on sandy beaches, and seascapes.
He saw the veins of men as the toils of the gods, in which they snared us like game.
He tried to rip holes in them.
He was dour. His friends were few.
When the time came, dogs tore him apart.
— GEORGE SEFERIS, 1955; TRANS. A.E. STALLINGS
It is nearly impossible to discern fact from legend in the biographies of ancient poets, but that doesn't stop us from searching for the bright sharp needles in the stacks of hay. Our fuller biographies of Euripides come centuries after his death, in the Byzantine encyclopedia the Suda (tenth century C.E.) and the work of grammarian Aulus Gellius (second century C.E.), with other scattered details coming from Plutarch (also second century C.E.) or the snarky remarks of contemporary Athenian comedians, who may not be excused from the motive of professional envy. As often with the lives of poets, there is a temptation to reconstruct Euripides' life through the words spoken by his characters, as well as through the plots of his plays.
Tradition has it that Euripides was born in 480 B.C.E. on Salamis on the very day of the famous Athenian naval victory over the Persians in the straits between Salamis and Piraeus. In an almost novelistic touch, his mother is said to have been heavily pregnant when she and a handful of other Athenians fled the city for the safety of the nearby island (only one nautical mile from the port of Piraeus, and elsewhere even closer to the mainland), where Euripides' family had property; she went into labor with the future poet on the spot. The Battle of Salamis marks a date in the life of all three of the major Athenian tragedians — Aeschylus fought in it, Sophocles was the handsome youth chosen to lead the victory chorus, and Euripides emerged into the world (presumably with a wail) on that day. This is a convenient shorthand for understanding both their contemporaneity and their relative ages, and as such is suspect; on the other hand, coincidences happen, and dates of major events in the ancient world (such as the Olympiads) were one firm way of nailing down a year. A pregnant woman fleeing war in a flimsy boat and going into labor from the stress is not an uncommon story in the news in recent years in the eastern Mediterranean. Stranger things have happened.
Another appealing story about Euripides and Salamis was that he used a cave there as a writer's retreat, rowing over from Piraeus, and writing his poetry there against the backdrop of the Saronic Gulf. Some have taken this to be a metaphor for Euripides' misanthropy, his desire to avoid people, or as an explanation for the extensive sea-imagery in his work. (Later biographical accounts also assert that Euripides was a painter, and had trained as a boxer.) Excavations of Salaminian caves in the late 1990s revealed that a cave in the south of the island was visited as a shrine to Euripides, at least in later times, with a potsherd there (possibly the offering of a fan in the second century B.C.E.) bearing the first six letters of his name. It is a scholar's job to hold all such stories suspect, and to consider even this archaeological tidbit as proof of nothing more than that there existed a sort of literary worship cum tourism; other poets such as Homer, Hesiod, Aeschylus, and Sophocles likewise had a (literal) cult following. As a poet, I will just say I do not know a writer who, if he or she had a cave on Salamis and lived in Athens, would not gladly row over a stretch of sea to their writer's retreat with a view, thinking metrically along with the oar strokes. It's certainly attractive to think of Euripides looking out at the water while writing, of Medea in her anguish, "She's like a wave beating against a sea-wall."
Euripides' father was a man named Mnesarchus, who may have owned a tavern or other shop. Athenian playwrights enjoyed relating that Euripides' mother, Cleito, was an herb woman or a sort of greengrocer. (Clearly he was not so highborn as Sophocles, but some of this gossip may again be a way of reading his plays, which feature people from all walks of life, and register something closer to common speech.) Ancient gossip tells us he married twice, having divorced his first wife for infidelity with a house slave, and had three sons. He died, perhaps in exile, away from Athens, in the kingdom of Macedonia. Legend has it that he was torn apart by King Archelaus's Molossian hounds (Greek mastiffs). There was a centotaph for him in Athens, which was said to have been struck by lightning.
Whatever the unknowable details, the real life of Euripides played out against a time of tensions between Athens and Sparta, and of the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War in 431 (the year in which Medea was first produced, and as it happens the year in which the video game Assassin's Creed Odyssey is set). It's worth noting that the city that is the setting of the play, Corinth, was a rival of Athens, and an ally of Sparta, at the time of the play's debut. It's also notable that Aspasia, the consort of Pericles, the lead statesman of Athens at the time, was a controversial and powerful woman of great mental acuity, as well as an immigrant from Asia Minor. (This might have added to the effect on an Athenian audience of a play about a brilliant and dangerous foreign woman wed to a Greek leader; indeed, imagine if, in defiance of Athenian norms for freeborn Athenian women, she were present at the performance.) Euripides died in 406, two years before the final defeat of Athens by Sparta, a defeat marking the end of Athenian hegemony, but perhaps the beginning of Athens' enduring cultural legacy, the afterlife of Athens' philosophers and poets.
In fact, it's hard to think of an ancient playwright with a more popular afterlife. While he lived, Euripides' plays were not as successful as his rivals', at least if we go by prizes at the Dionysia festival (and Athenian playwriting existed strictly in the context of such competitions); out of his ninety odd plays — most now lost to us, or existing only in fragments — only five won prizes, and of those, there were only three firsts; two won seconds, and Medea placed a disappointing third. But if not an immediate critical hit when it debuted, Medea went on to have a huge influence on art — Greek vases depicting Medea almost invariably depict scenes from Euripides' stage — and on later Greek and Roman (and English) literature.
Despite Euripides' paucity of ancient Greek Oscars, two stories, one from during the playwright's lifetime, and one from not long after, tell us much about the esteem in which Euripides' poetry was held by the ancient Hellenic world. And both are stage-worthy (or cinema-worthy) in their own right. Thucydides, in his history of the Peloponnesian War, relates that as a result of the disastrous Sicilian expedition (in 415 B.C.E.), 7,000 Athenian prisoners were kept corralled in the Sicilian quarries for months, with no shelter from the elements; given only a pint of barley meal and a half pint of water a day, many died from hunger, thirst, or exposure before the rest were eventually sold into slavery. What evidently had kept many of the prisoners of war alive was their knowledge of Euripides:
For the Sicilians, it would seem, more than any other Hellenes outside the home land, had a yearning fondness for his poetry. They were forever learning by heart the little specimens and morsels of it which visitors brought them from time to time, and imparting them to one another with fond delight. In the present case, at any rate, they say that many Athenians who reached home in safety greeted Euripides with affectionate hearts, and recounted to him, some that they had been set free from slavery for rehearsing what they remembered of his works; and some that when they were roaming about after the final battle they had received food and drink for singing some of his choral hymns. (Plutarch, Life of Nicias 29.2–3)
Also (according to Plutarch), Euripides posthumously saved Athens itself with his poetry. When the Spartan admiral Lysander, exasperated that the defeated Athenians had not observed the conditions of their surrender, was considering proposals to not only tear down the long walls of the city, but to raze Athens and enslave its inhabitants, a singer came in to entertain the assembly, and began with a chorus from Euripides' Electra. Deeply moved, those in the audience broke down: all "felt it to be a cruel deed to abolish and destroy a city which was so famous and produced such poets" (Plutarch, Life of Lysander 15.3). That the singer should have begun with a chorus from Euripides is not surprising if we consider that Plutarch gives the date for this debate as the "sixteenth of the month Munychion," which is to say, the playwright's traditional birthday: the anniversary of the Battle of Salamis.
— A.E. Stallings
THE PLAY
Medea's story has always been impossible to disentangle from the adventures of Jason and the golden fleece, a mission that takes the hero all the way to the coast of the Black Sea, where Medea is a princess, but not one in distress. It is Jason who needs saving. Medea, having fallen head over heels in love with him (herself bewitched, perhaps, by the goddess of love), uses her sorceress knowledge of potions and magic to help him overcome lethal and seemingly impossible fairy-tale tasks, such as harnessing fire-breathing robot bulls to plow a field, killing an army of warriors sprung out of the sown furrows, and snatching the golden fleece out from under the jaws of a watchful dragon. Set in the generation before the Trojan War, this story seems to be known to the earliest Greek poets, though we tend to read it through the Hellenistic Argonautica by Apollonius of Rhodes. In some earlier Greek poets, such as Hesiod and Pindar, Medea is a witch (granddaughter of the Sun and niece to Circe), but not necessarily a bad witch — a tyrannicide (of the bad king Pelias), but no murderess. Her name derives from the Greek medomai — "to pay attention, think, calculate, prepare, plan, plot, concoct, devise." To be Medea is to premeditate. Her witchiness seems to be part and parcel of her intelligence.
Yet the play does not open with the jilted princess Medea. Most Greek tragedies begin with a supernatural being, or royalty, or even the Chorus itself. This play, though, has no gods; it opens in the voice of the mortal of absolute lowest status in Greek society — not only a woman, but a slave; not only a slave, but a foreigner; indeed a female foreign slave whose mistress is herself a refugee. Throughout the play, the emphasis is on those without power or protection, and their limited choices when faced with injustice.
Euripides was notorious for piling on exposition at the opening of his plays, but the Nurse's opening monologue is not the famous backstory, but an unraveling of it, a contrary-to-fact wish that none of it had ever happened — not only that Medea had never left their home in Colchis, but that Jason had never come on his adventures, and that the magic ship the Argo herself had never been built.
Interestingly, those who have been interviewing migrants today who have come over the seas seeking asylum in Greece come across such negative wishes again and again. "If I had known about how I would be treated along this journey, I might have never left my country. Better to die under the bombs in my home than to be treated like this in Europe," says one Syrian man; a woman from Yemen says, "Sometimes I think it would have been better to have died in the sea rather than be in this place." Similar laments, spontaneous and yet an ancient genre unto themselves, are a chorus to be heard in all the refugee camps of Greece.
The children's Tutor is also a slave; likewise his fortunes are caught up with the household and the fate of his young charges. The Nurse knows what goes on inside the house; the Tutor knows the word on the street, eavesdropping, as he does, at the sacred spring, a sort of town square where the men hang out playing tavli and talking politics (as today, in modern Greece, one might catch conversation against the clatter of backgammon under a plane tree). Medea may be churning with anger and hurt, dangerous to herself and others, but she is about to receive information — about the looming "deportation," in Charles Martin's contemporary language, of herself and her children, a future of exile, that will compel her to act. Gossip and rumor were personified divine forces in ancient Greece (Rumor in Hesiod "is a kind of god"), and we see how the thoughts and actions of the highest in society are "leaked" by the lowest, unnoticed members, flowing freely in and out of doors. Perhaps Fame — the ultimate goal of Greek heroes, to be immortalized in song — may be thought of as publicity, a controlled glorification of one's story, while Rumor is what escapes control, is even decried as fake news, damaging reputations, particularly the reputations of women. Consider Pericles' funeral oration, delivered in 430 B.C.E. (a year after the play's debut), on the fame of women: "The greatest glory of a woman is to be least talked about by men, whether they are praising you or criticising you." It seems plausible that Pericles had seen Euripides' play.
Medea's first utterance, her aria (Greek drama being closer to opera than to our idea of a play), from inside the house, is pure voice, pure vowel — the Greek io! would have been intoned, sung. For us, this might sound more like a howl, but io was the Greek expression both of triumph and of grief, as if we had one word that meant both "alas!" and "hallelujah!" And indeed in the course of the play, Medea will make a triumph of her grief, and a grief of her triumph. The utterance resists translation, but Martin's solution is a good and bold one, to begin on an incantatory trochaic tetrameter (a meter we might also associate with witches and their spells, as in "Double, double, toil and trouble"), with a vowel music ranging from the long o's of "sorrow" to high e's. Medea is voice before she is visible, and her eerie vocal entrance should raise hairs on the back of the neck.
Medea's cries trigger the entrance of the Chorus of native-born Corinthian women (the Chorus will remain onstage till the end of the play):
I have heard the voice, I have heard the cry Of the anguished woman of Colchis:
Is she not calm yet?
The Corinthian women prove a sympathetic sisterhood to the foreign woman in their midst, and Medea, having gathered herself, knows how to approach and persuade them. With caution and self-control, she admits the need for assimilation:
A foreigner who lives in a strange city Must ever be compliant to its customs,
while also calling on civility from the native-born. Medea carefully draws comparisons between her situation and theirs, on the universal difficulties of being a woman. Marriage itself, declares Medea, is a kind of exile:
When a young bride goes to her husband's home With all of its new customs and arrangements Untaught to her beforehand, she must become A prophet or a mind-reader to cope With this complete unknown who's now her mate.
(Remember that Medea is also a prophetess.) And she argues that motherhood is its own kind of heroism, in her rousing comparison of childbirth to being on the front line of battle: I'd rather fight three battles, shield to shield, In the first line of men, than once give birth!
One can imagine a sort of "amen" from the Chorus here, nodding and gesturing in approval. The audience too would have been struck by this comparison — all Athenian freeborn men were on active-duty status in the military, and had either seen combat, or were about to do so. It was an audience of veterans.
The Chorus, too, continues the play's concern with the contrary-to-fact, with wishing things hadn't happened, or had happened otherwise — if only women, not men, had written the stories and songs that gave glory to male heroes while casting women in the shade:
Verses made by men of old Sang of our inconstancy;
Their songs will now be put on hold.
Had Phoebus given us the lyre,
I could well have made reply To lies about female desire.
(As Jane Austen might chime in, "Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story.") The choral ode then proceeds to invert expectations and to reweave the story from Medea's point of view.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Medea: Euripides"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Charles Martin.
Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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