"Good" Medea

      Let’s not beat around the bush: I talk a lot of smack about Jason. I’ve read the major classical texts that talk about him, I’ve come to the conclusion that he’s an irredeemable jerk, and I don’t care who knows it. Now, many of the classical texts that talk about Jason are set up as a conflict (yeah, an India-Pakistan level conflict) between Jason and Medea. Naturally you might assume that I’m on Medea’s side in these conflicts. Well, the truth is that Medea, while much smarter and more competent than Jason and less likely to engage in casually dickish behavior, is a pretty terrible person also--particularly in Euripides’ play, which is the most popular version in America today. She kills her children, first of all, and it’s hard to convey the blackhearted ruthlessness required to kill a small, feeble person who trusts you. And she doesn’t kill them because of any grievance she has against them, any actions they’ve undertaken or words they’ve spoken. She does it because their deaths will make Jason sad, and she feels fully justified in cutting off their lives in service of her revenge. Also, she kills her brother (who might be still a child or might be a full-grown  adult, depending on whose version you’re reading), tears up his body, and scatters the pieces in the Black Sea to make it more difficult for her father to perform a burial. When she meets a man who caused problems for Jason in the past (this is when she still likes Jason), she tricks his loving daughters into dismembering him and boiling up the pieces in a stewpot. And, on a smaller scale, she lies when it suits her, she forces people to make promises that they won’t want to keep, she attempts to kill some people without managing to pull it off, she cheats on her taxes, she likes Coldplay, you get the idea. I admire her strength of character and her ability to get things done, but it’s not like I want her working in my office. Or marrying my brother.

      The funny thing about Euripides, though, is that, while he is the earliest literary source we have on Medea, you can find traces of stories about Medea that predate Euripides. And if you look into those, it becomes obvious that Euripides really bent over backwards to make Medea into the most unsympathetic character possible (anyone else reminded of "Wicked"? ("Who can say if I've been changed for the better?")) while in the earlier sources, she looks more misunderstood than evil. For starters, if you know Euripides’ version, you probably know all about what happens when Jason and Medea arrive in Corinth: Jason is honored as a world-traveled hero and master of the seas, while Medea is despised as a filthy foreigner. The local king offers Jason the chance to marry his daughter and become the next king, pointedly ignoring the fact that Jason already had a wife. But in another version, the story plays out differently: when Medea arrives in Corinth, the locals recognize her as the rightful heir to the throne--in fact, she came to town specifically because they invited her. (There’s a complicated explanation for why this is the case, but you’ll have to look it up separately--I’m not going to draw out all the minutia here.) So Medea herself is the princess Jason married to become king of Corinth. Moreover, she didn’t kill the children--she was trying to make them immortal (something like the story of dipping Achilles in the river Styx) by hiding them in Hera’s temple. This doesn’t work, unfortunately, but before Medea can bring the children home, Jason gets tired of his children disappearing and returns to his hometown. Rather than stay on as queen in her own right, unfettered by her worthless husband, Medea abandons the city--which doesn’t speak well of her commitment to her ancestral privilege. You’ll notice that no one has killed the children yet. But there is a further alternative version that, after Medea is rejected by Jason, she’s driven out of the city. Her children stay in Hera’s temple, where they think they’ll be safe. The Corinthians, still irate at Medea, discover the children and stone them to death--again, not for any crime they’ve committed, but to punish someone else indirectly.

      In other words, if you ignore Euripides and his followers, there is a notable alternative tradition in which Medea is honored as a genuine Greek princess, who is not a shameful burden on Jason but rather the key to his power. Moreover, her intentions toward her children are entirely benevolent, and her failures toward them are refusing to recognize the limits of her magic, and allowing them to fall victim to the violence of other people. Euripides, as you may know, lived in classical Athens, a society notoriously full of diehard misogynists, so it’s little surprise that Medea should be revised into a cautionary tale about the dangers of powerful and intelligent women to their opportunistic and ineffective husbands. I’d encourage everyone to go read (or re-read) Euripides’ play and pay attention to Medea’s aggressive feminism--understanding how this aggression was intended to terrify the audience with the prospect of active women, and how a well-intentioned magician who wanted to make her children immortal has been deliberately twisted into a bogeyman for this purpose.