Medea Hero or HeroineAuthor(s) Carolyn A. DurhamSo.docx

Medea: Hero or Heroine?
Author(s): Carolyn A. Durham
Source: Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, Vol. 8, No. 1
(1984), pp. 54-59
Published by: University of Nebraska Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3346093
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Medea: Hero or Heroine?
Carolyn A. Durham
Two of the more common assumptions of feminist
literary criticism may be both logically consequential and
potentially contradictory. That most western literary
genres have been essentially male is hardly surprising in
a cultural tradition in which masculinity alone has generic
status. It follows, then, that women achieve the stature
of protagonists only at those times or in those world views
in which female experience becomes representative of the
human condition. Or does it follow? This argument's
implicit contradiction can be seen in Carolyn Heilbrun's
and Catharine Stimpson's provocative discussion of
theories of tragedy, which they characterize as "largely
masculinized. "1 Maintaining that the woman hero (note
the masculine) was born "from the author's realization
that women at that moment best symbolized the human
condition" (p. 65), Stimpson and Heilbrun go on to
distinguish the "tragic hero" from the "societal fact"; the
former's passion results from the limitations inherent in
being human and not from social evil that can be remedied
(p. 70). One might well argue that, precisely to the extent
that women remain women and therefore heroines, their
situation stems from rectifiable social conditions, that they
are therefore always "societal facts" and never "tragic
heroes." In this context, Medea provides a useful exam-
ple. Although she has the central role in three major plays,
each representative of a different, dominant western
culture, she never achieves the representative stature of the
tragic hero. The treatment of Medea in the plays of
Euripides, Seneca, and Corneille suggests that the limita-

tions associated with women somehow never seem to be
those inherent in being human.
The original audience of all three plays would have been
thoroughly familiar with the story of Medea. To succeed
in what Adrienne Rich calls the task of "re-vision-the
act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of enter-
ing an old text from a new critical direction,"2 feminist
criticism must examine the original sources of the legend
as well as the way in which each playwright effects its
transposition into dramatic form. (There is a certain
unavoidable circularity in this procedure, since Euripides
represents a key source for the legend itself.) This does
not, of course, imply that we can have access to an
ideologically neutral account, for to the extent that we
must depend upon standard guides to mythology, our
information arrives already encoded.3
It should come as no surprise, therefore, that Medea
enters into myth through the story of Jason and his heroic
quest for the golden fleece. To regain the throne of the
Greek state Iolcus, usurped by his uncle Pelias, Jason
eagerly agrees to recover the golden fleece from King
Aeetes of Colchis. In what has passed into collective
memory as the oldest story in Greek tradition and the first
important maritime adventure, Jason sets sail with the
Argonauts, the greatest heroes of Greece. In Colchis,
Aeetes agrees to give up the golden fleece if Jason
can triumph over the formidable forces that protect it.
Whether charmed by Jason, who promises marriage, or
by his divine protector Aphrodite, Aeetes' daughter Medea
falls in love with Jason and uses her magic powers to allow
him to steal the golden fleece. Medea and her younger
brother Absyrtus flee with the Argonauts; and in what

Thomas Bulfinch calls "another story of Medea almost
too revolting to record even of a sorceress, a class of per-
sons to whom both ancient and modern poets have been
accustomed to attribute every degree of atrocity,"4 Medea
assures the escape of the Greeks by killing her brother
and scattering his limbs across the water to slow her
father's pursuit.
Carolyn Durham teaches French, comparative literature, and
women's studies at the College of Wooster where she
currently chairs the Women's Studies Program. Durham is the
author of L'Art romanesque de Raymond Roussel and
has published on feminist issues in Jump Cut, Bucknell
Review, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation,
Twentieth Century Literature, and Tulsa Studies in Women's
Literature. She is presently working on a monograph of
Marie Cardinal.
FRONTIERS Vol. VIII, No. 1 @ 1984 FRONTIERS Editorial
Collective
2018 05:05:56 UTC
Durham 55
In Iolcus, where Pelias still refuses to surrender the
throne, Medea tricks his daughters into murdering him
in the belief that his death will lead to his rebirth and
rejuvenation. After Pelias' death, Jason and Medea are
forced to flee to Corinth with their two sons; there Jason
abandons Medea to marry Creusa, daughter of King

Creon. Though, in general, Bulfinch's hostile attitude
is common, there exist some sympathetic accounts of
Medea, and two important issues are clear in all the
sources: Medea acts not for herself but for Jason, and
Medea believes that Jason will honor her love and the
actions she performs in its name with the fidelity he has
sworn.
All three dramatic versions of the Medea legend are set
in Corinth-immediately after the day of Jason's wed-
ding to Creusa (Euripides), on the day of the wedding
(Seneca), and immediately before the day of the wedding
(Corneille). All three dramatists recount Medea's revenge:
to repay Jason for his faithlessness, Medea sends Creusa
a poisoned robe that destroys both the princess and her
father; Medea then kills her own sons and flees to Athens,
where King Aegeus has promised her protection. In the
basic focus of their interest and in the specific events they
choose to dramatize, the three plays are very similar. In-
deed, Seneca bases his play on Euripides' version, and
Corneille, in accordance with French neoclassical doctrine,
borrows from both the Greek and the Roman dramatists.
In all three dramatic versions, Creon's decision to
banish Medea determines her vengeance, which takes
place during the one-day reprieve Creon grants her. Each
includes at least one confrontation between Medea and
Jason in which she reminds him of all he owes her and
scorns his efforts at self-justification. The dramatis
personae of the plays include both partisans and enemies
of Medea, and dramatic tension builds through the con-
trasting failure of all attempts to prevent Medea's revenge
and the growing strength of her own determination. All
three plays end with Jason's despair as Medea trium-

phantly displays the bodies of their slain children.
Thematically, Euripides, Seneca, and Corneille all deal
to some degree with issues centering on love, jealousy, and
infidelity; all address the conflict within Medea between
her conjugal and maternal love and her desire for revenge;
all suggest on some level a political and cultural opposi-
tion between Medea and the Greek state or civilization.
Factual differences among the three plays tend to be minor
and to center entirely on secondary characters-for
example, the presence or absence on stage of the children,
of Aegeus, and of Creusa.
Since all three versions of Medea focus on the analysis
of the central character, important distinctions among
Euripides, Seneca, and Corneille result precisely from the
character the three dramatists ascribe to Medea and the
motives they attribute to her actions; these alone deter-
mine what her magical powers represent, how her legen-
dary past functions, how Jason is portrayed, how the
community reacts, and, ultimately, what our attitude
toward Medea will be. Differences among the three plays
can be and have been attributed to historical and cultural
factors. In the fourth century B.C., Euripides uses Medea
to illustrate by contrast the Greek ideal of moderation.
In Seneca, Medea functions as metaphor for the disorder
of first-century Rome. In seventeenth-century France, Cor-
neille's Medea illustrates the threat an independent, proud,
and sanguinary nobility poses to the authority of the state.
But despite changes in the conception of what constitutes
a human and social being, all three dramatists share a
definition that excludes women, however differently. It is
these differences and similarities in the dramatic depic-

tion of Medea as woman-treacherous daughter, betrayed
lover, destructive mother, and powerful sorceress-that
I now wish to examine.
Certainly the femaleness of the legendary Medea stands
unquestioned, as does the misogynist flavor of this male-
authored fable. Medea herself, of course, hates men
(curious absence in western languages of a convenient
adjective); she is, in fact, homocidal in the gender-
particular sense of the term. In an inversion of the com-
forting and comfortable myth of Isis as female gatherer
and weaver, as savior of the male Osiris, Medea
dismembers and scatters in the first place. Not only
defined as a killer of men, Medea also incarnates the
destruction of the private, domestic, traditionally female
world of the family.5 Herself guilty of fratricide and in-
fanticide, she arranges parricides through others: Pelias
is killed by his own daughters, and Creusa, although un-
wittingly, puts on a dress--delivered, moreover, by her
newly adopted children-that poisons her father as well
as herself. In accordance with the message of the legend,
the three dramatic treatments of Medea suggest that it
may be a contradiction in terms to speak of a tragic
heroine, that women characters who achieve heroic stature
in tragedy necessarily reject their femaleness or participate
in its devaluation. Medea becomes the central character
in each play to illustrate in turn the destructive plight of
women (in Euripides), the destructiveness of women (in
Seneca), and the destruction of women (in Corneille).
If the word could ever be taken without moral or emo-
tional connotations, the heroine of Euripides' The Medea
might qualify as the most "human" of the three dramatic
characters. She is carefully departicularized, stripped of

her legendary powers and aura, to become not simply an
ordinary woman but, in fact, Everywoman. Up to the
point of her crime, Euripides portrays Medea as the
stereotypically perfect female within the male power struc-
ture of his dramatic universe. In the opening scene of the
play, the Nurse characterizes her mistress as the good wife;
Medea is supportive, submissive, other-oriented:
She gave
Pleasure to the people of her land of exile
And she herself helped Jason in every way.
This is indeed the greatest salvation of all-
For the wife not to stand apart from the husband. (11-15)6
Now abandoned by Jason, "poor" Medea, to be "rightly"
female, must necessarily be depicted from both within and
without as victim. Euripides underplays Medea's poten-
tial for violent revenge in favor of an insistence upon her
passivity and helplessness. Much like Racine's Phedre,
though without the latter's sense of choice and will,
Medea has been reduced to a pitiful, suffering object who
desires death:
2018 05:05:56 UTC
56 FRONTIERS
She lies without food and gives herself up to suffering,
Wasting away every moment of the day in tears.
So it has gone since she knew herself slighted by him.
Not stirring an eye, not moving her face from the ground.

(24-27)
Accepting the cultural definition of her rejection as
"dishonor," Medea at first predictably cries to other men
for assistance: "She calls upon the gods" (22), "calling
out on her father's name" (31).
The use to which Euripides puts Medea's magic powers
reveals with particular clarity the price a woman pays for
an apparently sympathetic presentation as heroine.
Originally the source of her superiority, magic becomes
in Euripides' "humanized" view of Medea a metaphor
for intelligence in a world in which female intelligence is
little valued. Medea's response to Creon's admission that
he fears her because she is "a clever woman" (281-85) con-
firms that she is simply too bright and has failed to con-
ceal her sharpness of mind with proper female decorum:
This is not the first time, Creon. Often previously
Through being considered clever I have suffered much.
A person of sense ought never to have his children
Brought up to be more clever than the average.
For, apart from cleverness bringing them no profit,
It will make them objects of envy and ill-will.
If you put new ideas before the eyes of fools
They'll think you foolish and worthless into the bargain;
And if you are thought superior to those who have
Some reputation for learning, you will become hated.
I have some knowledge myself of how this happens;
For being clever, I find that some will envy me,
Others object to me. (292-304)
The male characters in the play express a hatred of
women so strong that Jason's insistence that his alliance
with Creon "was not because of a woman" (593) appears
absolutely convincing. Sadly but more significantly, the

female characters in Euripides' world have internalized
the negative image that men project upon them. One
potentially positive consequence lies in the female soli-
darity represented by the Chorus members' total sympathy
and support for Medea; their speeches generalize Medea's
experience into the female condition of slavery, oppres-
sion, and pain. But the Corinthian women of the Chorus
in fact covertly support female subservience. Euripides'
Medea, virtually free of her legendary violence against
Absyrtus and Pelias, becomes criminal only with the
murder of her children. The Chorus finds the infanticide
alone unacceptable-in fact, absolutely condemnable-
and logically so: it is the single act through which Medea
denies the female role as men have defined it and as
women have accepted it. Note Jason's opposition: "A
monster, not a woman" (1342). The play's plea for
moderation, constantly reiterated by the female Chorus,
discloses its real message: be moderate, be human, be nor-
mal; that is, be female-according to the rules laid down
by men. It matters greatly then that Euripides' heroine
is a woman, and it matters even more that she remain so,
but her female characteristics are not elevated as human
values but merely pitied as inevitable limitations on full
humanity.
Although in many ways the heroine of Seneca's The
Medea contrasts with that of Euripides, she is equally and
as necessarily female in a world in which femaleness
now openly equals subhumanity or even nonhumanity.
Carrying such standard gender traits as emotionalism,
irrationality, and capriciousness to their logical conclu-
sion, Seneca's Medea acts as an enraged, sadistic beast.
Typically, Creon retreats from her as from a wild animal:
"Threatening and fierce, she seeks to speak with us; /
Attendants, keep her off" (II.ii).7 She is a pure frenzy of

passion whose hesitations and abrupt changes of mood
bear witness to her almost total loss of self-control. She
is characterized throughout the play as "mad," "reckless,"
"wild," and it is in a fit of total madness, when she is
held in the power of the Furies, that she murders her sons
(V.ii). Moreover, Seneca's Medea also incarnates the prin-
ciple of cosmic destruction; she seeks to bring down the
entire universe with her, to destroy all around her without
regard for the guilt or innocence of her victims (III.i), and
her behavior is categorically condemned by the moral
universe of the Chorus. This conception of Medea deter-
mines that of the secondary characters; Seneca's Jason,
progressively ennobled as Medea is degraded, represents
self-control and reason in the face of Medea's blind
passion.
Despite her extension of stereotypically female
characteristics to logical extremes, despite the hatred and
fear she arouses, Seneca's Medea might, in her isolation
and in her very exaggeration, have been seen as more
individual than female. But, in fact, Seneca's very devalua-
tion of Medea's femaleness, her so-called "madness,"
leads to what I think must be a unique insight for a male
author and the period. Seneca's Medea is not only
rebellious as male-defined but also authentically revolu-
tionary. Seneca implicitly equates female innocence not
with freedom from crimes against men but with freedom
from men themselves. Medea's last crime repeats her first;
the killing of her son becomes an explicit act of expia-
tion for the murder of her brother, and, more remarkably,
the repetition produces literal erasure. Medea regains her
virginity and the lost paradise of her girlhood by the total
destruction of the wife and mother within her:

I have regained now my crown and throne,
My brother and my father; Colchians hold
The golden fleece; my kingdom is won back;
My lost virginity returns to me!
(V.iii)
This is an excellent example of virginity in Annis Pratt's
sense: "a form of negative emancipation in the freedom
to reject the forfeiture of the self to patriarchal demands-
by suicide, if necessary."8 Yet however perceptive this par-
ticular insight-or perhaps precisely because of it-
Seneca views Medea's female destructiveness as directly
responsible for the unhappiness of men and for the chaos
of the world. Indeed, in the final lines of the play, Jason
confirms that Medea has brought about the total dissolu-
tion of the patriarchal order: "Go through the skies
sublime, and in thy flight / Prove that where thou art
borne there are no gods" (V.iii).
I think few readers would argue for Medea's experience
2018 05:05:56 UTC
Durham 57
in Euripides or Seneca as metaphorical of the human con-
dition; rather, it represents a particular male view of a
specifically if not uniquely female situation. At first sight,
Corneille seems to have rejected such gender-specific
interpretations to raise his Medea to universal stature; it
is indeed, however, a question of ascension, for Corneille's

Medea will have to be superhuman to qualify for the
masculinity that alone can guarantee her humanity.
Even so, Medea's physical femaleness may have lessened
critical interest in Corneille's first tragedy. In spite of the
largely successful efforts of twentieth-century critics to
reconstitute Corneille's theater in its entirety, his Medea
has remained largely ignored. For example, Medea and
its companion piece, The Golden Fleece, are the only plays
omitted from Serge Doubrovsky's otherwise comprehen-
sive study of the Cornelian hero.9 This and other such
oversights stem from the common centering of critical
inquiry on the nature of the male protagonist. Yet Medea
stands clearly as the prototype of the Cornelian hero, the
first of a long line of central heroic figures, most of whom
will be men. 10
Medea already illustrates the primary values of Cor-
neille's heroic universe: unity of word and action; crea-
tion and cult of the self; surhumanity, defined against the
natural. Medea opposes efficacious action to the sterile
complaints of the other characters. She is able to keep
her word, to accomplish what she has announced. Medea
acts alone; she is self-sufficient in the fullest sense of the
term; and she preaches revolt in response to Jason's pleas
for submission. Her two accounts of the winning of the
golden fleece, echoing with "me" and "I alone" (II.ii;
III.iii),11 constitute an autocelebration. Medea's constancy
symbolizes faithfulness to the self; her continued love for
Jason results not from the self-alienation in the face of
irrational passion so common in Racine's heroines but
from a recognition of and insistence on her own identity.
Corneille's Medea first defines herself as hero(ine)
against the nonheroic world of the male characters who

surround her. In an inversion of sex roles, Jason represents
the "feminine" principle of passivity. In the face of
Medea's active energy, he preaches submission: "let us
yield to fortune" (III.iii.881). His willingness to adapt to
circumstances leads directly to his "feminine" fickleness,
his inconstancy. Jason's very thought processes-his am-
bivalence about his own motivations; the contradictions
in his multiple explanations of his actions, ranging from
Creusa's beauty to political necessity to paternal love; the
continual shifting and confusion of his argument-reflect
the constant metamorphoses of his sense of self. Male
sexuality has always been metaphorically allied with
masculine power, and Jason's is no exception. But Jason
pursues position and power through a goal that is tradi-
tionally the resort of women-marriage. All Medea's
sorcery does not permit her to act on Jason's heart and
will; ironically, the weak and cowardly Jason has precisely
this most "magic" and most female of powers: Jason "is
born only to charm princesses" (I.i.22); he is an "infamous
sorcerer who charms minds" (II.v.680).
Since Corneille's sympathies undeniably lie with Medea,
and since the traits that make up her strength-autonomy,
rebellion, efficacy, constancy-are clearly unexpected in
a woman, we might think that we have here the "reassess-
ment in woman's favor of the relative capacities of the
sexes" that Ian MacClean considers a workable defini-
tion of feminism for the seventeenth century.12 But,
in fact, Corneille has merely transposed masculine
characteristics onto female characters and feminine
characteristics onto male characters, while continuing to
value the former alone. As Medea and Creusa define

themselves through the individual identity and auton-
omous action normally associated with men, Jason and
Creon define themselves as women traditionally have,
through passivity and relationships with others. Medea's
qualifications as heroic and universal thus depend upon
her masculinization, dangerous in and of itself, and upon
her denial of a femaleness that is degraded and devalued
elsewhere in the play.
Given the rejection of nature as a central tenet of Cor-
neille's theory of the superhuman hero, woman's tradi-
tional identification with the world of the natural may
well have made her the logical choice to serve as the
original illustration of his doctrine. Medea's magic powers,
which "force nature" (IV.v.1246) and "hold nature
enslaved" (III.i.706), function initially as a metaphor of
this conception of heroism. But more importantly, Cor-
neille's reversal of sex roles also permits him to illustrate
conveniently the problematical character of heroism, the
potential destructiveness of the strong-willed individual,
without needing to condemn masculinity in the process.
Corneille focuses the necessarily unnatural and therefore
monstrous aspects of his conception of heroism on the
female realm of Medea's life: her roles as daughter, sister,
and mother. Medea herself stresses that her own unnatural
acts, her willingness to betray her father and to kill her
brother, and not her magic powers, were the essential fac-
tors in the successful quest for the golden fleece:
If I had then limited my desire to my duty,
If I had preserved my glory and my faithfulness,
If I had felt horror at so many outrageous crimes,
What would have become of Jason and all your
Argonauts?

(II.ii.431-34)
Medea's ultimate act of heroism results in the murder of
her children.13 Thus, Corneille manages to have it both
ways: when Medea is masculine, she is good, but when
she is bad, even though this results only from carrying
male characteristics to an extreme, she becomes female
again.
The legendary Medea is, of course, remembered first
as a mother. Even though Corneille underplays his
heroine's direct involvement with her children far more
than do Euripides and Seneca, his play may still in fact
be the one most directly concerned with Medea as mother.
Her motherhood is first of all literal. For Medea to be
authentically heroic-and authentically monstrous-she
must love the children she sacrifices. Without a clear and
deep bond of affection to overcome, no heroic test and
no act against nature would occur. In Seneca, where
Medea carries out the murders in a fit of madness, they
lose all heroic and moral meaning.14 Corneille takes two
innovative steps in his Medea to insure our interpretation
2018 05:05:56 UTC
58 FRONTIERS
of the murders as an heroic act. In both Euripides' and

Seneca's versions, Medea herself requests the right to leave
her children in Corinth. In Corneille's version, the children
are taken away by Medea's enemies, an act she sees as a
mutilation of her own self:
Barbarous humanity, that tears me from myself,
And feigns gentleness to take from me what I love!
If Jason and Creusa have so ordered it,
Let them return the blood I gave my children.
(II.ii.497-500)
Corneille's greatest originality is to make Jason plan to
kill the children. Because this intention is based on his
identification of Medea's only vulnerable spot-"Let the
sorceress begin to suffer in you / Let her first torment
be to see you die" (V.v.1535-36)-it focuses our attention
on her maternal love at the very moment when she is
murdering her sons.
But Medea's motherhood is also metaphorical. Sandra
Gilbert and Susan Gubar argue in The Madwoman in the
Attic for a literary interconnection between maternity,
monstrosity, and creativity. Medea's fearful powers
originate in her "grotto," the witch's cave whose womb
shape makes it the central seat of female power. For
Gilbert and Gubar, maternal creativity represents the
"sexual/artistic strength that is the female equivalent of
the male potential for literary paternity."15 Medea is a
storyteller, and the tale she recalls of her role in the con-
quest of the golden fleece deals essentially with the female
power to generate male success. The speech itself contains
a curious abundance of generative vocabulary--"to sow,"
"sterility," "fertile," "brought forth," "sown," "gave
birth" (II.ii.409-50)-and it ends with Medea's willingness

to accept her past crimes in the clear role of mother: "In
short, all your heroes owe life to me" (II.ii.441). More
importantly, it would seem at first that Medea's mater-
nal creativity is not merely the equivalent but, for once,
the metaphor of literary creativity. Theatrical producer,
director, and playwright, Medea views her revenge as a
spectacle staged for her own pleasure: "I must create a
masterpiece" (I.iv.253). This is the principal reason why,
at the risk of offending classical doctrine and taste, Creon,
Creusa, and Jason must all die on stage: "I am not"
avenged, if I do not see the result; / I owe my anger the
joy of so sweet a spectacle" (IV.v.1276-77).
But female power is viewed as destructive. Medea uses
for her own purposes that most maternal power of life
and death over men. Moreover, while Medea originally
seems to possess the essential literary power of naming,
symbolized by her magic-"Fire obeys me, and I control
the waters; / Hell trembles, and the heavens, as soon as
I name them" (III.iii.908-09)-this most male of rights
will prove as always to be denied to women.16 Medea is
asked to be quiet and to forget what Jason owes her, to
exhibit in fact "aphasia and amnesia-two illnesses which
symbolically represent (and parody) the sort of intellec-
tual incapacity patriarchal culture has traditionally re-
quired of women."17 Medea understands clearly the link
between silence and submission:
Nerine, after that you wish me to keep quiet!
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38 I AUTOMATING INEQ!!AUTY
during times of economic crisis. Poor and working-c
lass people
resist restrictions of their rights, dismantle discriminatory in
sti-
tutions, and join together for survival and mutual aid. But ti
me
and again they face middle-class backlash. Social assistan
ce is re-
cast as charity, mutual aid is reconstructed as dependency,
and
new techniques to turn back the progress of the poor prolifera
te .

A well-funded, widely supported, and wildly successful
counter-
movement to deny basic human rights to poor and working-clas
s
people has grown steadily since the 1970s. The movement man
u-
factures and circulates misleading stories about the poor: t
hat
they are an undeserving, fraudulent, dependent, and immo
ral
minority. Conservative critics of the welfare state continue to ru
n -
a very effective propaganda campaign to convince Americans t
hat __
-
the working class and the poor must battle each other in a z
ero-_
sum game over limited resources. More quietly, program
ministrators and data scientists push high-tech tools
promise to help more people, more humanely, while un_,,,.,_,.,,
efficiency, identifying fraud, and containing costs. The
poorhouse is framed as a way to rationalize and streamline

fits, but the real goal is what it has always been: to profile,
vuJ«�
--,- -
and punish the poor.
2
AUTOMATING HIGIBIUTY IN
THE HEARTLAND
A little white donkey is chewing on a fencepost where we turn
coward the Stipes house on a narrow utility road paralleling
the train tracks in Tipton, Indiana. Michael "Dan" Skinner,
65-year-old ex-newspaper man and my guide to central Indiana,
heaves his mom's 19-year-old sedan across the tracks and imo
the Stipes family's driveway a mile or so later. Their big white
house is marooned in a sea of cornfields, but on this sunny day
.-. in March 2015, the stalks are cut back low and softened by
snow
•-•· melting to mud. Kim and Kevin Stipes joke that they've had
to
grow tall children: come July, the smaller ones disappear into
the
corn. I'm here to talk to Kim and Kevin about their daughter
So-
/phie, who lost her Medicaid benefits during Indiana's
experiment
with welfare eligibility automation.
In 2012, I delivered a lecture at Indiana University Blooming-
••••- ton about how new data-based technologies were impacting
pub-
lie services. When I was finished, a well-dressed man raised

his hand
and asked the question that would launch this book. "You
know,"
he asked, "what's going on here in Indiana, right?" I looked at
40 I AUTOMAUN_G INE~ALITY
him blankly and shook my head, He gave me a quick synopsis:
a $L3 billion contract to privatize and automate the state's
welfare eligibility processes, thousands losing benefits, a high-
profile breach-of-contract case for the Indiana Supreme Court,
He handed me his card, In gold letters it identified him as Matt
Pierce, Democratic member of the Indiana House of Represen-
tatives.
Two and a half years later, the welfare automation story brought
me to the home of Sophie Stipes, a lively, sunny, stubborn girl
with dark brown hair, wide chocolate eyes, and the deep brow
characteristic of people with cerebral palsy, Shortly after she
was
born in 2002, she was diagnosed with failure to thrive, global
de-
velopmental delays, and periventricular leukomalacia, a white-
matter brain injury that affects newborns and fernses, She was

also diagnosed with lp36 deletion syndrome, which is believed
to
affect between l in 5,000 and 1 in 10,000 newborns, She has
sig-
nificant hearing loss in both ears, Kim and Kevin were told that
she might never sit up, walk, or speak, For her first two years,
all
she did was lie on her back She barely moved,
Her parents contacted representatives of First Steps, a pro-
gram of the Indiana Division of Disability and Rehabilitative
Services that helps young children with developmental delays,
Through the program, Sophie received therapy and nutrition ser-
vices, and her family received counseling and support, Most
important: she had a gastronomy tube implanted to deliver
nutri-
tion directly to her stomach; for the first two years of her life,
she
had not been eating very much at alL Shortly afi:er they started
feeding her directly through the G-tube, Sophie began to sit up,
At the time of my 2015 visit, Sophie is 13, She gets around on
her own and goes to schooL She knows all the letters of the al-

phabec Though doctors originally told Kim that it wouldn't
do any good to sign to her, Sophie understands 300 or 400
words
in the family's pidgin sign language and communicates with her
AUTOMATING ELIGIEIUTY IN TH.E HEARTLAND I 41
parents and friends, Sophie has been at school all day, so she is
relaxing in her room watching Elmo's World, wearing orange-
and-pink-striped pajamas, Kim Stipes introduces us, and we
wave
hello at each other,
I ask Kim to tell Sophie that I like her pink TV, and she laughs,
signing the message, "Kudos to Sophie," says her mom, a blond
with faded blue eyes, a gold thumb ring, and the slide-on Croes
worn by folks who spend a lot of time on their feet, "If other
kids worked half as hard, they'd all be geniuses making
millions,
That's how hard Sophie has worked,"
The Stipeses aren't strangers to hard work In a greenhouse
made of metal tubes and plastic sheeting, Kevin cultivates heir-
loom tomatoes, broccoli, lettuce, peppers, green beans, squash,

and
even peaches, They can and freeze produce to use throughout
the
winter, But 2008 was a rough year, Kevin lost his job, and with
it,
the family's health insurance, He and Kim were trying to
support
seven kids on what they could make selling auto parts on rhe
inter-
net, Their son Max had recently been diagnosed with type I
diabe-
tes, And Sophie had been very sick, throwing up all the time,
Without Medicaid Sophie's care would have been financially
overwhelming, Her formula was incredibly expensive, She
needed
specialized diapers for older children with developmental
delays,
It cost $1,700 every time Sophie had a G-tube implanted, The
cost of her care exceeded $6,000 a month,
Trouble really started in late 2007, when Kim applied for the
Healthy Indiana Plan, which provides catastrophic health insur-
ance for low-income adults, Though five of their children were

covered by Medicaid, she and Kevin had no health insurance,
Im-
mediately afi:er Kim started the application process, four
members
of the household became ill, Kim knew that she would not be
able
to fill out all the required paperwork while caring for them,
So she went to her local Family and Social Services Adminis-
tration (FSSA) office in Tipton, spoke to a caseworker, and
asked
42 AUTOMATING INEQ.::!ALITY
to have the application put on hold. The Tipton caseworker
told her that, because of recent changes at FSSA, application
decisions were no longer made at the local level. She would
have
to speak with a call center operator in Marion, 40 miles away.
Kim called the Marion office and was told that her application
"would be taken care of." Neither the Tipton caseworker nor the
Marion call center operator told Kim that she had to sign pa-

perwork declaring that she was stopping the application pro-
cess. Nor did they tell her that her failed attempt to get health
insurance for herself and her husband might impact her
children's
coverage.
Then, rhe family received a letter from the FSSA. It was ad-
dressed to six-year-old Sophie, and it informed her that she
would
be kicked off Medicaid in less than a month because she had
"failed to cooperate" in establishing her eligibility for the pro-
gram. The notice somehow managed to be both terrifyingly brief
and densely bureaucratic. Ir read:
Mailing Date: 3/26/08
Dear SOPHIE STIPES 1
MA D 01 (MI]
Your MEDICAID beilefits will be discontinued
effective APRIL 30, 2008 due to the following
reason(s}:
-FAILURE TO COOPERATE IN ESTABLISHING ELIGI-
BILITY
-FAILURE TO COOPERATE IN VERIFYING INCOME

SUPPORTING LAW(S) OR REGULATION(S) :
470IAC2,l-l-2
Iffiportant : If you believe you may be eligi-
ble for Medicaid benefits under another cat-
egory and have more information about your
AUTOlvIATING ELIGIBILITY IN THE HEARTLAND I 43
case, please contact us at the number listed
at the top of this notice within ten days (13
days if this notice is received by mail) of
the date of this notice.
. The nouce arrived on April 5, 2008. It had been ten days since
it was mailed. The family had three days lefi: to contact FSSA
and correct the mistake.
Kim sprang into action, composing a lengthy letter that
explained her situation and faxing it to the Marion office on
Sun-
day, April 6. In it, she stressed that Medicaid kept Sophie alive,
that she had no other insurance, and that her medical supplies

alone cost thousands of dollars a month. Sophie's medicines
were
due to run out in five days. Kim phoned the call center in
Marion
and was told that Sophie was being cut off because Kim had
failed
to sign the paperwork declaring that she was stopping her
earlier
applications for the Healthy Indiana Plan. Kim protested that no
one had ever told her about the paperwork.
But it was too late.
According to the state oflndiana, the Stipes family had failed
to cooperate with the eligibility determination process and,
under
state law, the punishment was total denial of medical benefits.
The sanction would impact both Kim and Kevin, who were try-
mg to get health insurance for themselves, and Sophie would be
demed the Medicaid she was already receiving. When Kim
asked
why their other children were not being cut off, she was
informed
that they were. She should expect four more letters.

. The Stipes family contacted Dan Skinner, who was spending
his retirement as a volunteer with United Senior Action,
working
on behalf of elderly Hoosiers. In early 2007, United Senior Ac-
tion started getting calls from individuals and organizations all
over central Indiana: the shelves at food pantries were empty
and
1,,
I
I
44 I AUTOMATING INE~LITY
the United Way was overrun by requem for emergency medical
help. Skinner began an independent investigation in Howard
County, visiting the mayor's office, the area agency on aging,
Catholic social services, the senior center, and Mental Health
America. He found that people were losing their benefits for
"failure to cooperate" in alarming numbers.
Sophie's case stood out to him as particularly appalling. "She
was six years old, and she was recovering. She learned how to
sign.

She was starting to walk!" Skinner said. "She was starting to be
able to eat a little bit, and they said when she could rake 3,000
calories, they would take the feeding tube out. She was right at
that stage, and her Medicaid was cut off for failure to
cooperate."
By the time the Stipes family reached him, Skinner
remembered,
they were in a desperate situation and needed immediate action.
Dan called John Cardwell, founder and director of The Gen-
erations Project, an organization dedicared to addressing long-
term health-care issues in the state oflndiana. The two gathered
their colleagues from the AARP and the Alliance for Retired
Americans, lobbied their contacts, worked the media, and called
an emergency press conference. Dan took Sophie and her
parents
to the Indianapolis State House in a van. "She had a little dress
on," Kim Stipes remembers. "She was not a happy camper then.
Her little life was rough." They walked into the governor's
office
with Sophie in her wheelchair and "TV cameras in tow," said

Skinner. "They didn't expect that."
At one point, Governor Mitch Daniels walked right by the
group. "He did have an opportunity, quite frankly, to walk right
over to us," Skinner recalled. "He just walked by. Mitch Roob
[Secretary of the FSSA] was with him. They just stared at us
and
kept on going." Kevin Stipes yelled across the room to Daniels,
inviting him to come talk with his family. But the governor and
FSSA secretary failed to acknowledge them. "They get to that
AUTOMATING ELIGIBILITY 1N TH.E HEARTLAND I 45
position they don't want to deal with chat stuff They want lay-
ers," Kevin theorized later, "They want people in between." The
group asked for Lawren Mills, Governor Daniels' policy direc-
tor for human services, who agreed to meet with them. The next
day at four o'clock in the afternoon, Sophie had her Medicaid
back.
Sophie's family was not alone. In 2006, Republican governor
Mitch Daniels instituted a welfare reform program that relied on
multinational corporations to streamline benefits applications,

privatize casework, and identify fraud. Daniels had long been a
foe
of public assistance. In 1987, while serving as President Ronald
Reagan's assistant for Political and Intergovernmental Affairs,
he
had been a high-profile supporter of a failed attempt to
eliminate
AFDC. Nearly 20 years later, he tried to eliminate TANF in
Indi-
ana. But this time he did it through high-tech tools, not policy-
making.
Governor Daniels famously applied a Yellow Pages test to
government services. If a product or service is listed in the
Yellow
Pages, he insisted, the government shouldn't provide it. So it
was
not surprising when, shortly after his election in 2004, Daniels
began an aggressive campaign to privatize many of the state's
public services, including the Indiana Toll Road, the Bureau of
Motor Vehicles, and the state's public assistance programs.
Daniels appointed Mitch Roob as FSSA secretary. In The
Indianapolis Stat, Daniels praised Raab, then a vice president at
Affiliated Computer Services (ACS), as being" deeply

committed
to_ the interests of the least fortunate among us and equally
com-
mitted to getting the most service from every tax dollar." As
their
first order of business, Roob and his boss commissioned an
audit
of what Daniels called in a 2007 South Bend Tribune editorial
"the monstrous bureaucracy known as the Family and Social
46 I AUTOMATING INEQYALITY
Service Administration." As agency's audit report was released
in June 2005, two FSSA employees were arrested and charged
with theft, welfare fraud, and a panoply of other offenses. One
of
the employees was accused of collaborating with church leaders
of the Greater Faith Missionary Baptist Church in Indianapolis
to collect $62,497 in food stamps and other welfare benefits
by creating dummy accounts for herself and fellow church
parishioners. Between them, the two caseworkers had 45 years
of

experience at the FSSA.
Daniels seized the political moment, In public speeches, press
releases, and reports, the governor repeatedly characterized
Indi-
ana's welfare system as "irretrievably broken," wasteful, fraudu-
lent, and "America's worst welfare system." Citing the system's
high error rate and poor customer service, Mitch Roob criss-
crossed the state arguing that the system was broken beyond
the ability of state employees to fix. In early 2006, the Daniels
administration released a request for proposal (RFP) to out-
source and automate eligibility processes for T ANF, food
stamps, and Medicaid. In the request, the state set very clear
goals: reduce fraud, curtail spending, and move clients off the
welfare rolls.
"The State is aware that poor policy and operations have con-
tributed to a culture of welfare dependency among some of its
cli-
ents," the RFP read. "Respondent will help address this issue by
agreeing to use welfare eligibility and other programs to help
cli-
ents reduce dependency on welfare assistance and transition
into a

paid work setting." While the state provided no incentives or
sup-
port for matching applicants to available jobs, the RFP
suggested
that the FSSA would be willing to provide extra financial incen-
tives for finding and denying ineligible cases. The state offered
to
"pay the Respondent for superior performance," for example, if
the company can "reduce ineligible cases" by identifying "client
misrepresentations."
AUTOMATING ELIGIBILITY .iiN THE HEARTLAND I 47
At the time, the Indiana FSSA was helping about a million
people access health care, social services, mental health
counsel-
ing, and other forms of support. The 2006 agency was sizable: it
had a budget of $6.55 billion and a staff of approximately
6,500.
But it was much smaller than it had been 15 years earlier. In
1991,
the Indiana General Assembly consolidated the departments of
Mental Health, Public Welfare, and Human Services, and out-

sourced many of its functions. By the time of the automation,
the
FSSA had halved its public workforce and was spending 92
percent
of its budget buying setvices from outside vendors.
Everyone-advocares, applicants, administrators, and legisla-
tors alike-agreed that the existing system faced serious chal-
lenges, FSSA offices were using an extremely out-of-date
system
called the Indiana Client Eligibility System (ICES) for daily ad-
minisrrative functions such as calculating eligibiliry and verify-
ing income. Customer service was uneven at best. A 2005
survey
found that applicants faced a slow intake process, a telephone
sys-
tem that rarely worked, and caseworkers who were difficult to
reach. A US. Department of Agriculture (USDA) smdy found
that food stamp applicants made up to four visits to county of
fices before receiving program benefits. Overstretched staff
couldn't handle demand or keep up with towering piles of paper
case files. 1

The Daniels administration insisted that moving away from
face-to-face casework and toward electronic communication
would make offices more organized and more efficient. Even
bet-
ter, they argued, moving paper shuflling and data collection to a
private contractor would free remaining state caseworkers to
work more closely with clients. Daniels and Roob built a
compel-
lmg case. And people listened.
However, many ofDaniels's other assertions about the failures
of FSSA have been contested, His claim that Indiana's welfare
system was the worst in the country, for example, was based
only
48 AUTOMATING INEQ!:!AUTY
on the state's record for moving Hoosiers off welfare. It is true
that Indiana reduced the number of people on public assistance
more slowly than other states in the decade after the 1996
welfare
reforms. But Indiana had seen a significant drop in the welfare
rolls years earlier. In the three years between the installation of
ICES and the implementation of federal welfare reform, Indi-

ana's caseload fell 23 percent. As Daniels began his term, only a
tiny proportion of poor Hoosiers-38 percent-were receiving
benefits from TANF, and only 74 percent of qualified individu-
als were receiving food stamps. Despite the administration's
insis-
tence that eligibility errors were spiraling out of control, the
FSSA
reported food stamp error rates consistent with national
averages.
The positive error rate-which measures those who receive bene-
fits for which they are not actually eligible-was 4.4 percent. The
negative error rate-which describes those who apply for benefits
and are incorrectly denied them-was 1.5 percent.
Only two bids were submitted for the contract, one from
Accenture LLC and the other from a coalition of companies
called the Hoosier Coalition for Self-Sufficiency. The coalition
was led by IBM and ACS, Roob's former employer. Accenture
dropped out of the bidding process. On December 27, 2006,
after holding a single public hearing on the topic, the governor
signed a ten-year, $1.16 billion contract with the IBM/ACS
coalition.

In a press release celebrating the plan, Daniels announced,
"Today, we act to clean up welfare waste, and to provide
Indiana's
neediest people a better chance to escape welfare for the world
of
work and dignity. We will make America's worst welfare system
better for the people it serves, a much fairer deal for taxpayers,
and for its own employees."2 According to the Daniels adminis-
tration, the modernization project would improve access to
services for needy, elderly, and disabled people while saving
taxc
AUTOMATING .EHGrn1uTY IN THE HEARTLAND I 49
payers' money. It would do this by automating welfare
eligibility
processes: substituting online applications for face-to-face
inter-
actions, building centralized call centers throughout the state,
and "transitioning" 1,500 state employees to private telephone
call centers run by ACS.
Daniels lauded his privatization plan and the automated
system in the 2007 South Bend Tribune editorial. "Today's wel-
fare system ... is totally indefensible," he wrote. "For Hoosier

taxpayers, reform means enormous savings: a half billion
dollars
over the next 10 years, and that's only on the administrative
side.
When today's high rates of errors and fraud are brought down,
savings will probably exceed $1 billion."3 By March, 70 percent
of
the FSSA workforce had moved to positions with private con-
tractors. In October the Indiana automation project rolled om
to 12 pilot counties in north central Indiana.
In the first nine weeks of the pilot, 143,899 people called the
toll-
free number and 2,858 applied online. System failures were
immediate. "The telephone appointment system was a disaster,"
remembered_Jamie Andree of Indiana Legal Services, an organ-
1zat10n providing legal assistance to low-income Hoosiers. "An
interview would be scheduled from 10 to 12 in the morning.
People would have to find a phone, sit by it, and wait to be
called.
Then the call wouldn't come, or they'd call at II:45 saying [the
mterv1ew] 1s being rescheduled for tomorrow."

Applicants who had taken time off work were often unable to
wait by the phone the next day for a new appointment. Others
received notices that required them to participate in phone inter-
views scheduled for dares that had already passed. According to
a
2010 USDA report, a food stamp (called the Supplemental
Nutri-
tion Assistance Program, or SNAP, after 2008) recipient added
the
call center number to her cell phone plan's "friends and family"
i:J
so I AUTOMATING INEQ.gALITY
because she spent so much time on phone with them. Ap-
plicants who failed to successfully complete their phone
intervkw
were terminated for failing to cooperate in eligibility determma-
tion. Says Andree, "It was a terrible, terrible, terrible system."
Private call center workers were not adequately trained to deal
with the severity of challenges faced by callers, nor were they

pro-
vided with sufficient information about applicable regulations.
Advocates report call center operators bursting into tears on
the phone. "The first person I called under modernization, I re-
member it vividly," reported Terry West, a patient advocate
with
15 years' experience in central Indiana. "She was young, and· · ,
did not have any experience whatsoever. ... There was a
problem,
a denial of a case. I talked to this young lady for about an hour.
I
kept citing [ the appropriate regulations]. After about a half an
hour, she just started crying. She said, 'I don't know what I'm
doing.' That's exactly what she told me. I said, 'Look, it's okay.
I
was a caseworker. I'm reading right out of your policy manual
what has to be done.' She just cried."
Millions of copies of drivers' licenses, social security cards,
and other supporting documents were faxed to a centralized
document processing center in Grant County; so many of them
disappeared that advocates started calling it "the black hole in

Marion." Each month the number of verification documents that
vanished-were not attached properly ro digital case files in a
pro-
cess called "indexing" -rose exponentially. According to court
documents, in December 2007 just over 11,000 documents were
unindexed. By February 2009, nearly 283,000 documents had
disappeared, an increase of 2,473 percent. The rise in technical
errors far outpaced increased system use. The consequences are
staggering if you consider chat any single missing document
could
cause an applicant robe denied benefits.
Performance metrics designed to speed eligibility determina-
tions created perverse incentives for call center workers to close
AUTOMATING ELIGIBILITY IN nm HEARTLAND I 51
cases prematurely. Timeliness could be improved by denying
ap-
plications and then advising applicants ro reapply, which
required
that they wait an additional 30 or 60 days for a new
determination.
Some administrative snafus were simple mistakes, integration

problems, and technical glitches. But many errors were the
result
of inflexible rules that interpreted any deviation from the newly
rigid application process, no matter how inconsequential or
inad-
vertent, as an active refusal to cooperate.
The automation's impacts were devastating for poor and
working-class Hoosiers. Between 2006 and 2008, the state ofln-
diana denied more than a million applications for food stamps,
Medicaid, and cash benefits, a 54 percent increase compared to
the three years prior to automation.
Michelle "Shelli" Birden, a soft-spoken and serious young
woman
from Kokomo, lost her benefits during the automation experi-
ment. Shelli was diagnosed with epilepsy at six months of age;
by the time she reached adulthood, she was suffering as many as
five grand ma! seizures a day. Despite having surgery to
implant a
vagus nerve stimulator-something like a pacemaker for the
brain-she was still, in her own words, "violently ill" when the
modernization hit. In late April 2008 she received a recertifica-

tion notice from the FSSA. She faxed her response, a pile of
forms,
and other documentation eight days later. On June 25, Shelli re-
ceived a letter dated June 12 informing her that her Medicaid
benefits would be discontinued in five days for "failure to
cooper-
ate m establishing eligibility."
The failure to cooperate notice had originally been sent to an
outdated address, which delayed its delivery. Now Shelli, in a
panic, phoned the call center. An ACS worker told her to try to
correct her application online. When that failed, she and her
boyfriend Jeff Stewart phoned the call center several more
times,
trying to identify the problem. "I started reading her letters to
52 I AUTOMATING INEQ:g.ALITY
figure our what to do, and where to go, and who to call," Jeff
re-
membered, "but you couldn't get anywhere on the phone. It was
like you were talking to a computer instead of a person:" .
On July 11, call center operators connected Shelli with one

of the few remaining state caseworkers in Marion, who told her
that she had neglected to sign a required form but did not tell
her which one. By this point, she was starting to run out of
her anticonvulsant medications. She would have to find a free
source for her drugs, which cost close to $800 a month, or risk
violent seizures, panic attacks, dizziness, insomnia, blurred vi-
sion, and an increased risk of death from going off them cold
turkey. .
Shelli contacted the United Way, which ptovided her with a
few days of emergency medication. The staff also advised her to
immediately file an appeal of the "failure to cooperate" determi-
nation. She reached out to the Marion office again, on July 14,
and asked to lodge an appeal. But she was informed that the 30-
day deadline to contest the June 12 decision had passed. It was
too late to appeal the FSSA'.s decision. She'd have to reapply.
A new determination would take 45 days. She had three days
of medication left.
The governor and the FSSA promised that an autom~ted
eligibil-
ity system would offer increased client control, a fairer applica-

tion process, and more timely decisions. The problem with the
existing caseworker-centered system, as they saw it, was
twofold.
First, caseworkers spent more time manually processing papers
and collecting data than "using their social work expertise to
help
clients." Second, rhe outdated data system allowed caseworkers
to
collude with outside co-conspirators to illegally obtain benefits
and defraud taxpayers. The old system involved caseworkers_
de-
veloping one-on-one relationships with individuals and families
and following cases through to completion. The new system was
AUTOMATING ELIGIBILITY rn THE HEARTLAND I 53
"self-serve," technology-focused, and presented call center
ers with a list of tasks to complete rather than a docker of
families
to serve. No one worker had oversight of a case from beginning
to
end; when clients called the 1-800 number, they always spoke to
a
new worker. Because the Daniels administration saw relation-

ships …
Audience Uncertainty and Euripides' Medea
Author(s): Stuart Lawrence
Source: Hermes, 125. Bd., H. 1 (1997), pp. 49-55
Published by: Franz Steiner Verlag
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4477177
Accessed: 08-03-2018 05:07 UTC
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Franz Steiner Verlag is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize,
preserve and extend access to
Hermes
2018 05:07:30 UTC

AUDIENCE UNCERTAINTY AND EURIPIDES' MEDEA
In the words of Charles SEGAL writing on the 'Bacchae',
Euripides' "' feeling
for the tragic antinomies of life"...finds its clearest expression
in doubling, the
pairing of opposites, and the sliding of opposites into one
another'.' Ambiguity
and unresolved contradiction are typical of this tragedian. In
the 'Bacchae' for
example the god Dionysus embodies various polarities: male
and female, Greek
and foreign, rational and non-rational, agent and victim, god
and beast, god and
human being. In some sense, literal or figurative, all of these
oppositions apply
also to 'Medea', and the play is disturbing because the
protagonist arouses
conflicting responses2. Indeed, Euripides fosters ambivalence
and ambiguity part-
ly through the play's tadvotx and partly at the emotional level
by eliciting at
different times sympathy or alienation. The spectators (and
especially the men)
are compelled thereby to view, however reluctantly, Medea's
psychology as
relevant to their own, although after the infanticide they may
feel the impulse to
dismiss her as totally alien, as a highly emotional and irrational
barbarian sorcer-

ess who could have nothing in common with a sensible and
decent Greek male.
Ambivalence and ambiguity are at once to the fore in the
prologos where, if the
audience entered the theatre expecting to see Medea the exotic
criminal, they
received essentially (though not entirely) the opposite
impression3. The nurse, the
tutor and the chorus of Corinthian women are all well-disposed
towards Medea
and severely critical of Jason4. We are informed of her services
to him at
1 C. SEGAL, Dionysiac Poetics and Euripides' 'Bacchae',
Princeton 1982, 25. SEGAL here
quotes F. WASSERMANN, Man and God in 'Bacchae' and
'Oedipus at Colonus', in: Studies
presented to David M. Robinson, ed. C. Mylonas and D.
Raymond 2, St Louis 1953, 563.
2 'The 'Medea's' harsh effect on the audience is further
intensified by the fact that the
reactions demanded from them at various points are so
turbulently contradictory. Euripides did
not simply show his audience complexities; he made them feel
them in the confused tumble of
their emotional responses to the characters and their actions'
(E. A. McDERMOTI, Euripides'
Medea. The Incarnation of Disorder, Penn State UP 1989, her
emphasis 78). G. H. GELLIE, The

Character of Medea, Bull.Inst. Class.Stud. 35, 1988, 19, sees
Medea as 'a conglomerate of
qualities shaped by various influences into a creature who can
fill a stage or a story but was never
seen walking down a street.'
3 D. L. PAGE, Euripides. Medea, Oxford 1938, xviii-xxi,
thought that Euripides' audience
would respond to Medea the foreigner in terms of certain
stereotypes. The view has found little
favour, but the poet may have counted on the existence of such
prejudices and then set about
overturning them. E. HALL, Inventing the Barbarian, Oxford
1989, 17, 35 n. 110, suggests that it
may have been Euripides who transformed Medea into a
barbarian.
4 E.g. 49ff., 82-88, 173ff.
2018 05:07:30 UTC
50 STUART LAWRENCE
considerable cost to herself, of her subsequent loyal
submissiveness as his wife, of

her acceptance by the Corinthians and of Creon's intention to
banish her from
Corinth. We hear too her heartbroken cries from within the
house5. In counter-
point to all of this, however, we are reminded that in helping
Jason Medea was
prepared to go to barbarous lengths, that she is a dangerous and
formidable
adversary, that she hates her own children, that she may strike
down friends
indiscriminately with foes and that she is impervious to advice
or influence6.
These antithetical ideas and feelings merge or alternate. The
Pelias affair is cited
as a service to Jason, but it is also an instance of Medea's
ruthless criminality.
Medea's sufferings move us to pity but also alienate us by their
almost inhuman
excess (she is likened to inanimate nature at 28-29) - and there
is the threat to the
children7.
The technique of Medea's great address to the chorus (214ff.) is
similar. The
audience would sympathise with Medea the victim of an

extreme situation to the
point perhaps of wanting revenge for her sake, but the
retaliation intimated is
clearly a murder (iaucpovoycpa, 266) of which the audience
could not have
morally approved. It will not do here to appeal to the dictum
'harm your enemies'
because, firstly, the audience's sympathy is too equivocal to
count as identifica-
tion with Medea, and, secondly, what is in prospect is the
killing of a husband and
that for a crime considerably less than Agamemnon's in
Aeschylus where the
chorus, despite their condemnation of the sacrifice of
Iphigenia, are utterly
appalled by his wife's deed8.
Medea's argument in this speech creates a further unease. In
describing the
social disabilities of women so readily recognisable to an
audience she provides
S E.g. 9-15, 31-35, 70-72, 96-98, 143-47. B. GREDLEY, The
Place and Time of Victory:
Euripides' 'Medea', Bull.Inst.Class.Stud. 34, 1987, 27-29,
remarks on the importance of the

crvij, or the area behind it, as the locus of Medea's alienation,
from which her emotions spill
out on the stage.
6 E.g. 9, 28f., 36-45.
7 'Medea herself is presented in all the alarming violence of her
passion, but framed by the
sympathy of the Nurse and chorus, and therefore to be seen by
the audience as a victim, even if
also as a potential criminal'. P. E. EASTERLING, The
Infanticide in Euripides' 'Medea', Yale
Class.Stud. 25, 1977, 181. D. J. CONACHER, Euripidean
Drama, Toronto 1967, 187, observes: 'The
series of emotions traversed - sympathy, apprehension, horror -
anticipates in a few rapid strokes
the responses which, in the same sequence, the coming action
will evoke'.
Euripides' use of the mythic sources and the question of the
originality of the deliberate
infanticide is discussed by PAGE (n. 3) xxiff. The question of
the priority of Neophron's play is the
subject of a study by A. N. MICHELINI, Neophron and
Euripides, Medea 1065-80, T.A.Ph.A. 119
(1989), 115-35. W. STEIDLE, Studien zum antiken Drama,

Munich 1968, 154 n. 16, finds the
references to Medea's hatred of the children fully intelligible to
an audience only if they were
aware of a prior tradition of deliberate infanticide, whereas T.
V. BUTTREY, Accident and Design
in Euripides' 'Medea', AJ.Ph. 79 (1958), 12-14 discusses
possible audience reactions to refe-
rences to the children precisely on the opposite assumption.
8 Ag. 1399ff.
2018 05:07:30 UTC
Audience Uncertainty and Euripides' Medea 51
one context at any rate for explaining her later deeds, at least
when she appends
the exacerbating factor of her status as an exile. There is no
attempt here to define
her situation by ethnicity or individual temperament, i.e. that
she is a barbarian
and naturally passionate,and therefore more likely to kill. If an
audience goes with
Medea on this, they may well have to think that a Greek woman

in this extreme
situation might have been capable of similar bloody deeds9.
There is no invitation
to dismiss Medea as alien to the spectator's psychology or
culture.
If an audience experiences a blend of amoral admiration and
moral unease at
Medea's Odyssean manipulation of Creon and exploitation of
his sensitivity to a
supplication10, a higher intensity of emotional ambivalence
and conceptual uncer-
tainty arises out of Medea's reactions after that scene. In this
monologue, which
falls into two parts, Medea begins by relishing the fulfilment of
her vindictive
schemes now spelt out fully for the first time (364-85), at
which point it is at least
doubtful that the audience are actively supporting Medea rather
than standing in
awe of her singleminded audacity. If they are responding
morally at all they will
condemn a revenge that cuts down the innocent with the guilty.
In any event
Medea is not here explicable as the representative Greek or

Athenian woman, and
the reference to her skill in drugs (384-85) recalls the tradition
of Medea the
sorceress11. On the other hand, her determination to silence the
laughter of her
enemies puts her in the company of the male heroes of Greek
legend and morally
on the same ground in principle as such decent men as Plato's
Polemarchus12.
9 Euripides makes his audience aware that 'pressures analogous
to those working upon
Medea exist in their own comfortable homes'. K. J.
RECKFORD, Medea's First Exit, T.A.Ph.A. 99
(1968), 339. 'Medea is a barbarian with incalculable power; she
is also an archetypal Married
Wife, and as such an isolated foreigner. This second aspect of
Medea, together with the
relentlessly recognizable portrait of her as a woman wronged,
is designed to prevent every man in
the audience from comfortably dissociating her from his own
Greek spouse'. M. VISSER, Medea:
Daughter, Sister, Wife and Mother, in: Greek Tragedy and its
Legacy (ed. CROPP. et al.), Calgary
1986, 152. H. ROHDICH, Die Euripideische Tragodie,

Heidelberg 1968, 47f., sees Medea as a
'normal' woman different from the chorus only in the extremity
of her circumstances.
10 R. G. A. BUXrON, Persuasion in Greek Tragedy, Cambridge
1982, 35, commends
Creon's sense of ai&& here. For a dissenting view see D.
KoVACS, Zeus in Euripides' 'Medea',
A.J.Ph. 114 (1993) 56.
11 B. M. W. KNox, The 'Medea' of Euripides, Yale Class.Stud.
25 (1977) 211-16, denies
that Medea is any more a sorceress than Creusa or Deianeira
who have recourse to drugs with
supernatural associations or ingredients. But Medea is a
professional: S. P. MILLS, The Sorrows of
Medea, Cl.Phil. 75 (1980) 291-93, cites 'the magical aid Medea
gave Jason in his Colchian
adventures... (476-82)', the murder of Pelias, 'alluded to
frequently (9-10, 486-87, 504-5, 734),
...Medea's origin as not merely a foreigner but as someone who
entered Greece from outside the
whole known world... (1-2,.. .210-12, 431-33, 1262-64)', and
Medea's offer to cure Aegeus'
childlessness. See also CONACHER (n. 7) 186, M. P.
CUNNINGHAM, Medea &no' gqXcavfj;, CI.Phil.
49 (1954) 153.
12 Republic 332b. When 'Euripides gives the barbarian witch
the ideals of a traditional

2018 05:07:30 UTC
52 STUART LAWRENCE
In the second part of the monologue (386-409) Medea the
victim briefly
reappears (386-89), but before sympathy has developed any
momentum Medea
the sorceress re-emerges with Medea the desperate and
determined 'Sophoclean'
hero13 (391ff.), the woman who forms her self-view on the
basis of her highly
distinguished ancestry (406). So by the time the speech ends
with a sarcastic
reference to a stereotype about evil, scheming women that seem
to offer an escape
hatch to those who would dissociate themselves from Medea
(407-9), it is at least
clear that nothing is as clear as such stereotypes would suggest.
In a short ode (410-45) the chorus claim that Jason's treatment
of Medea has
discredited the traditional prejudice about female deceitfulness,
making the barba-

rian woman the positive pole of an antithesis that has Greek
males at its other end
(410-30, 439-40). But the audience can reflect that Medea
herself has just shown
herself to be the arch-deceiver. The play will offer no evidence
at all for (or indeed
against) the cultural superiority of non-Greeks. None of
Medea's behaviour up to
this point has been explained as the product of an alien
society14. The nurse
attributed her excesses to her royal upbringing (1 19-21)15, and
even Creon, while
expressing fear of her ao(pia in drugs, made no mention of any
suspect foreign
vOgoI (282-91).
The first two scenes with Jason explore in a problematical way
the relation of
reason to emotion. In his criticism of what he clearly considers
Medea's stupid
emotionalism (446-58) Jason casts himself in the role of a cool,
sensible man who
plans intelligently for the future (459-63, 547-73). But the
spectator cannot
accept this implied antithesis. Medea is certainly emotional,
and her threats were

stupid, but she is now concealing her feelings in the interests
of a carefully plotted
revenge. People sometimes assume, as Jason does here, that
strong emotions are
antithetical to and incompatible with rational planning. But the
spectator knows
from what he has seen of Medea how simplistic this is. The
scene of false
reconciliation will confirm it and the Great Monologue show
just how reason and
emotion are tragically related in Medea. Jason, who to his own
misfortune does
not realise it, himself appears immune to strong feelings, the
good as well as the
bad. But not only is Jason unemotional; he is unheroic. We see
this when Medea
reinterprets his exploits as her own (476-87). Again we are
debarred from taking
refuge in stereotypes. It is worth noting too that Jason's male
Greek fame is based
on the achievements of a barbarian female16.
Greek hero he is surely suggesting that there is no safe dividing
line; civilized life is always most
precariously poised, continually threatened from within' -
EASTERLING (n. 7) 191.

13 KNox (n. 11) 196-206.
14 'If Medea is to be seen as a distinctively oriental type.. why
does Euripides make her
talk like a Greek, argue like a Greek, and to all appearances
feel like a Greek? - EASTERLING (n. 7)
180, her emphasis. See also KNox (n. 11) 217.
15 For Medea as virtually a tyrannus see PAGE (n. 3) ad 119-
30 and K. VON FRIrz, Antike
und moderne Tragodie, Berlin 1962, 357.
16 On Medea's contribution and Jason's status as a flawed hero
see VON FRITZ (n. 15) 33 If.,
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In the brief ode that follows the scene of spurious
reconciliation (976-1001)
the chorus divide their sympathy among all the parties, and all
are viewed as
victims. Medea herself is now two people: Medea the agent and
Medea the victim
of Medea the agent. Now that she has effectively removed all

her opposition, only
Medea can oppose her own resolve17. If, with KoVACS18, we
accept that the entire
Great Monologue is genuine (apart from 1056-64), we
encounter in the final
couplet a Medea who dissociates herself emotionally from her
irresistible ihjgo6;
(as the source of her terrible sufferings)19. Those of us who
consider the lines
authentic can look upon Medea at this point as the woman and
mother disowning
an alien entity. (Otherwise she is to be identified with the
ftugo6;, and the maternal
feelings will be secondary20.) Medea, once all focussed
t3Rugo6, is at this point also
a mother and a detached critical awareness. Yet this awareness
knows that its
rationality will soon be harnessed to the terrifying irrationality
of the itg6o;21.
The ugly murders of Creon and the princess and the
perpetrator's response to
them (1133-35) could hardly fail to revolt the Greek audience,
as they do the
messenger, for Medea is not torn on this issue as she was about
the infanticide, to
which she now turns, resigned to its necessity (whether as the
perfect revenge or to

forestall the children's murder by the Corinthians: 1236-41).
She is not dehuma-
nised yet but aware of the lasting sorrow their loss will bring
(1247-50), and even
ex machina she admits that she suffers, although at this point
she claims that it is
worthwhile. (Contrast 1362 with 1046f.)
The resolution ex machina has aroused endless controversy,
largely because it
seems to belong to a different level of the dramatic illusion,
with supernatural
elements negating the earlier realism. But there is no absolute
break between the
scene and what precedes it, for Medea needs transport from
Corinth (Aegeus
356; S. A. BARLOW, Stereotype and Reversal in Euripides'
'Medea', Greece and Rome 36 (1989)
162; A. P. BURNETr, Medea and the Tragedy of Revenge,
CI.Phil. 68 (1973) 16; D. BOEDEKER,
Euripides' 'Medea' and the Vanity of logoi, Cl.Phil. 86 (1991)
104-6.
17 KNox (n. 11) 200f., CONACHER (n. 7) 195.
18 D. KoVACS, On Medea's Great Monologue, Cl.Qu. 36
(1986) 343-52. For references to
recent debate see GREDLEY (n. 5) 36, n. 4.

19 G. R. STANTON, The End of Medea's Monologue:
Euripides' 'Medea' 1078-80, Rh.M.
130 (1987) 97-106.
20 See E. SCHLESINGER, On Euripides' 'Medea', in:
Euripides, ed. E. SEGAL, New Jersey
1986, 72.
21 H. D. F. Kirro, Greek Tragedy, London 1961, 195, finds
Medea's struggle with her
maternal feelings 'theatrical' rather than 'psychologically
convincing' in line with his view of her
as a monolithic embodiment of i5it6;. EASTERLING (n. 7),
188, is more judicious: 'The detail of
the speech suggests that despite a certain rhetorical formalism
of manner Euripides keeps close to
observed patterns of human behaviour.' Medea's disdain for and
manipulation of feminine
stereotypes fail in the case of the maternal instinct which is
more than a stereotype (BARLOW [n.
16] 164f.); 'the Medea who expressed earlier such contempt for
the traditional views of women
cannot after all escape her nature as one'.
2018 05:07:30 UTC

54 STUART LAWRENCE
offered only sanctuary at 725-30), and the logic of a fully
triumphant revenge
requires a further confrontation with Jason during which she
must remain inviola-
ble22. Doubtless these requirements could have been met
without recourse to a
supernatural device23, but the dragon chariot has obvious
theatrical and figurative
advantages. With respect to theatrical considerations, Euripides
has kept his
audience guessing about Medea's mode of escape; he now
satisfies their curiosity
in spectacular fashion24. On the figurative plane Medea can
appear an implacable
deity, an embodiment of her own vengeful i5Thg6. This is
manifest in so far as she
is revealed as a Euripidean deus25. But that the break between
the Medea of the
epilogue and the earlier woman is not absolute is evident from
her words: she
gloats before Jason (which is what the earlier Medea always

wanted), while she
admits that she suffers (1362), as she admitted earlier (1247-
50). So while some
of her pronouncements are appropriate to a deus but not to a
mortal (her prophecy
at 1386-88 in particular), others are equally characteristic both
of a Euripidean
deus and of Medea the woman26. In this respect this pseudo-
deus contrasts with,
for example, the epilogue of the 'Orestes' which in its reversion
to myth is
completely dissonant with the realistic drama that precedes it.
Here the realistic
Medea spills over into the epilogue, and the relevance is
preserved (and indeed
enhanced) by the figurative dimension of the scene.
Critics who have been impressed only by the gulf between the
epilogue and the
earlier scenes have tended to claim that the real Medea, the
woman, is now dead or
dehumanised, sometimes without clarifying whether this
dehumanisation is literal
or merely figurative27. CUNNNINGHAM, however, rightly
insists that the apotheosis

is merely figurative, for Medea is en route to Athens and
Aegeus, rather than to
Olympus28. Indeed she is invested with characteristically
Euripidean ambiva-
lence: she remains a woman but she is also a sort of &Xdat&p.
The &XiJLov is
perhaps only within29. So in this sense a mortal may
incorporate an immortal. But
22 SCHLESINGER (n. 20) 75-77, EASTERLING (n. 7) 190, W.
SALE, Existentialism and Euripi-
des, Melbourne 1977, 32.
23 SALE (n. 22) 32, suggests 'a pre-arranged escort from
Aegeus'.
24 See N. E. COLLINGE, Medea ex machina, Cl.Phil. 57
(1962) 170-72. For this reason, if for
no other, Medea must betray (or simply possess) no
foreknowledge of the chariot.
25 See especially KNox (n. 11) 206-10, and CUNNINGHAM
(n. 11) passim.
26 On Medea's humanity ex machina see BUXTON (n. 10) 169;
C. E. COWHERD, The Ending
of the 'Medea', Cl.World. 76 (1983) 135; EASTERLING (n. 7)
191; STEIDLE (n. 7) 168.
27 E. g. BURNErT (n. 16) 22, KNox (n. 11) 206-9, E. B.
BONGIE, Heroic Elements in the
'Medea' of Euripides, T.A.Ph.A. 107 (1977) 55, RECKFORD
(n. 9) 333f., 359; LUCAS, The Greek

Tragic Poets, 3rd ed., London 1959, A. LESKY, Greek
Tragedy, tr. FRANKFORT, London 1965, 197;
PAGE (n. 3) xiv; MILLS (n. 11) 296; BARLOW (n. 16) 167.
28 CUNNINGHAM (n. 11) 159.
29 As Hecuba tells Helen at 'Troades' 988, 'Your mind was
turned into Cypris'.
2018 05:07:30 UTC
there is also traditionally a gulf between mortals and gods
which it is i,S"pt; to
attempt to bridge. Euripides here undermines that holiest of
polarised distinctions
by actually reifying in a visual metaphor the idea that a mortal
may be 'demon-
ic'30.
Medea is also a monstrous beast, for (one might wish to
believe) only a beast
could kill her own children (1342f., 1358f.), and yet the gods
condone by their
silence or actually assist - as Helios does in his inscrutable
way3l. This is implied
in the chorus' appeal to prevent the infanticide (1251-60) and
in Jason's disbelief

that Medea could do the deed while looking at the sun (1327f.).
Why should a
polluted Helios signal his gratitude with the gift of a winged
chariot? Morally, is
there anything to choose between the superhuman and the
subhuman? If Medea is
a beast or a god, it is because of her iv,io ;, and though this
15vgo6; is excessive, it
is still in principle human, and not aberrantly human but
dressed in respectability
by the heroic code which converts its non-rational impulses
into a hallowed
vogo;, a principle of justice. It follows that the audience cannot
dismiss Medea as
uncivilised or inhuman or un-Greek, insofar as her motivation
is legitimised by
the code. Jason claims that no Greek woman would have done
it (1339f.), but the
play does not show the infanticide to be the product of
Colchian customs,
whatever they might have been.
There remains Medea's sorcery. That she habitually employs
drugs with
Hecate's help is undeniable. But a witch is still a woman, and
the supernatural
dimension applies only to the means by which she dispatches
her victims. It does
not contaminate her motives which originate in the 15vRO6. It
does, however,

affect the success of her revenge, guaranteeing her
invulnerability against Jason.
In conclusion, Euripides invites questioning of rigid
categorisations, stereoty-
pes and antitheses. During the course of the play the spectator
will have come to
sympathise with and understand a foreign witch by seeing that
she is not entirely
unlike Athenian wives, and even in some degree resembles
Athenian men in her
moral outlook32. But he will also have experienced an uneasy
sense of alienation
from Medea and therefore from his own human nature and
Greek culture and he
will have come to see that his vaunted rationality, far from
being an effective
weapon against this evil, may turn out, perfidiously, to be its
formidable accom-
plice.
Massey University, New Zealand Stuart Lawrence
30 Aeschylus' Clytemnestra claims to be an iaBoato(op,
denying her identity as
Agamemnon's human wife, but the chorus insist on the dual
operation of the woman and the
assisting avenger (Ag. 1498-1508). The visual metaphor of
Medea in the chariot, playing the role
of deus, suggests that she is herself the avenging spirit.

31 See Krrro (n. 21) 201, KNox (n. 11) 204-5.
32 Contrast BARLOW (n. 16) 158, who believes that the fact
that Medea is a foreigner and a
sorceress are 'the author's get-outs - loop-holes in case the
action turns out to be too controversial
for the audience to stomach'.
2018 05:07:30 UTC
Contents[49]505152535455Issue Table of ContentsHermes, Vol.
125, No. 1 (1997), pp. 1-132Volume InformationXenophanes'
Physics, Parmenides' Doxa and Empedocles' Theory of
Cosmogonical Mixture [pp. 1-16]Wissen und Skepsis bei
Xenophanes [pp. 17-33]Pindarica [pp. 34-48]Audience
Uncertainty and Euripides' Medea [pp. 49-55]P. Clodius
Pulcher: Eine Politische Ausnahme-Erscheinung der Späten
Republik? [pp. 56-74]The Similes in Catullus 64 [pp. 75-84]Die
Chronische Unpässlichkeit des Messalla Corvinus: Rudolfo
Kassel septuagenario [pp. 85-91]Servius ad Aen. I 592 [pp. 92-
99]Zum Theoderich-Panegyricus des Ennodius. Textkritische
Überlegungen im Rahmen Einer Neuedition und Übersetzung
[pp. 100-117]MiszellenEratostene Sulle Muse e il re [pp. 118-
123]Einige Bemerkungen Über Zwei Handschriften des Rhetors
Menandros [pp. 123-129]Back Matter [pp. 130-132]
Medea
by Euripides
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Scene One:
Nurse enters from skenē.
Nurse
If only the hull of the Argo had not flown through
the dark Clashing Rocks to the land of Kolchis.
If the pine in Mt. Pelion’s forests

had never been cut and supplied oars
for Pelias. Then my mistress Medea
would not have sailed to the towers of Iolkos,
her heart dazed with love for Jason,
nor persuaded the daughters of Pelias to kill
their father. Then she would
here in Korinth with her husband and children.
Pleasing the people in her land of exile,
she helped Jason himself in every way.
When a woman does not oppose her man,
Now hate infects all the closest bonds of love.
Betraying his own sons and my mistress,
Jason beds down in a royal marriage,
having wed the daughter of Kreon, the king.
cries out his oaths to her, their joined right hands,

the greatest pledge of all. She invokes the gods
to witness exactly how Jason repays her.
She lies there without eating, surrendering to pain,
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knowing her husband has wronged her.
Without raising her eyes or lifting her face
from the ground, she listens like a rock
or sea wave to her friends’ advice.
to mourn for her own dear father, her country
and family, since she betrayed all of them

to follow a husband who has dishonored her.
That woman, so miserable, knows through misfortune
Filled with hate, she finds no joy in the sight of her sons.
I’m afraid she’s planning something:
Her hard mind won’t stand for mistreatment.
I know her. I fear she may silently
and stab her heart with a sharp sword,
or kill the king and the bridegroom,
provoking a greater disaster.
She is a strange one. No one battling her
Enter Tutor and two boys from City Path.
Ah, here come the boys, done with their games.
They’re not thinking of their mother’s troubles.
Young hearts are not fond of sorrow.
Tutor

Old household slave of my mistress,
Crying to yourself about your troubles?
Does Medea wish to be left alone?
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Nurse
Ancient companion of Jason’s children,
when the dice of our masters’ fortune roll badly,
I felt such an overwhelming grief
that I longed to come out here and tell
Earth and Sky about my mistress’s bad luck.

Tutor
Isn’t that poor wretch done moaning yet?
Nurse
Tutor
The fool – if one may call masters that.
She knows nothing of the latest troubles.
Nurse
What is it, old man? Don’t hold back.
Tutor
Nothing. I regret what I’ve already said.
Nurse
I’ll keep quiet about it, if I must.
Tutor
I heard some talk, while pretending not to listen,
by the gaming tables where the old men
sit near the holy spring of Pirene.

intends to banish these boys
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with their mother. I do not know
whether this tale is true. I hope not.
Nurse
Even if Jason has a quarrel with their mother,
Tutor
Old marriage ties are abandoned for new
and he is no friend of this house.
Nurse

We’re sunk if new troubles wash over
before we bail out the old!
Tutor
for your mistress to learn this. Keep the news secret.
Nurse
Oh children, do you hear what a father you have?
May he be cursed – no, he is my master –
but he is caught in cruelty to his family.
Tutor
that everyone loves himself best of all?
Because of his new bedmate,
their father does not love these boys.
Nurse
Go inside the house, children; it will be all right.
To Tutor:
You must keep them out of the way as much as possible –

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do not let them near their ill-tempered mother.
I have seen her eye them like a bull,
as if she has something in mind. Her rage
won’t end, I know well, until it blasts someone.
Medea wails from offstage inside skenē.
Medea
Oh! Misery, I’m miserable in my troubles.
Oimoi! I wish I were dead.
Nurse
Here she goes. Dear boys, your mother

stirs her heart, stirs her rage.
Don’t let her see you;
stay away from her.
To Tutor:
Guard against her fierce temper and
the hateful nature of her willful mind.
Tutor and children exit skenē as Nurse continues.
Clearly that cloud of woe,
rising from its source, will soon flash
with still greater passion. What
will her enraged and untamed spirit
Medea
Oh! I’ve suffered miserably, misery
worthy of great woe. O cursèd sons

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of a hateful mother, may you die
with your father! May his entire line vanish.
Nurse
do your sons have in their father’s crime?
Why hate them? Dear children,
I’m worried, afraid that you might suffer.
The tempers of tyrants are strange.
that their moods change violently.
To face life on equal terms is better.
For me at least, may I grow old

without greatness, secure.
To sp
then to act on it, is best for men
by far. There’s no right time for excess
in human life, but when a god
becomes angry with a household,
Entrance Song: Chorus enters from City Path.
Chorus (sings)
We hear her voice,
we hear the cry
of the unhappy woman of Kolchis.
Is she not yet calm? Old woman, tell us.
Woman, since we are her friends,
we do not rejoice
at the grief of this house.

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Nurse
What house? It’s already gone.
while my mistress wastes her life away
in her room. No words from friends
or family comfort her in any way.
Medea
May lightning from heaven strike my head.
Oh, in death may I take my rest,
abandoning this hateful life.
Chorus (sings)

Zeus, Earth, and light,
do you hear the miserable bride
Foolish woman, why do you
desire that cold, cruel rest?
Why hurry death’s end?
Don’t pray for this.
worships at a new bed,
do not be sharp with him.
Zeus will take your case. Do not waste away
weeping too much for your bed partner.
Medea
do you see what I suffer, despite binding
my accurséd husband with sacred oaths?
May I gaze upon him and his bride

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gouged out, scraped away, house and all.
O father! Homeland I abandoned,
shamefully killing my brother!
Nurse
You hear what she says? She shouts
an invocation to Themis and to Zeus,
The rage of my mistress will not
end with some trivial deed.
Chorus (sings)
We wish she would let us see her, come out

and hear our voice,
dismiss her mind’s temper
and angry passion.
Let our willing support
not abandon our friends.
and tell her we, too, are friends.
Hurry in before she harms someone.
This sorrow rushes on and grows.
Nurse
I’ll do it. But I fear
I’ll do you this favor of my labor –
although she glares like a bull,
like a lioness with newborn cubs,
whenever a slave approaches to have a word.

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and not at all wise, you would not be wrong.
They invented songs for festivals, banquets
and dinner parties, merry music for life.
Yet none has discovered poetry
to end such bitter human suffering
that unleashes death and terrible
misfortune, wrecking homes.
The lives of human beings
During abundant feasts,

why strain the voice in vain?
The plenty of the feast at hand
holds delight in itself for humans.
Nurse exits skenē.
Chorus (sings)
she calls out shrilly, wailing in distress
about her bed betrayer, her wicked husband.
Having suffered injustice, she invokes
Zeus’ Themis, goddess of oaths,
across the strait through the brine
by night toward the Bosporos
barrier of the treacherous Black Sea.
Scene Two:
Medea enters from skenē.
Medea
Women of Korinth, I’ve come out of the house

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prove themselves arrogant either behind closed doors
or in public. Others win a bad reputation
for indifference just by living quietly.
It isn’t right for people to hate at a glance
even though wronged not a whit.
A foreigner certainly must conform to the state.
Even for a citizen, I don’t approve if he carelessly
pleases himself while offending his fellows.

has destroyed my life. I am lost, my friends,
and casting away life’s joy, want to be dead.
I know well, the one who was everything to me
has turned out to be the worst of men, my husband.
we women are the most miserable species:
We must buy a husband with abundant goods
and, an evil even more hurtful than the initial purchase,
take him as master of our body. That
or a decent one. Divorce ruins a woman’s reputation,
nor is it possible to refuse a husband.
Without instruction at home, you must be a prophet
to understand new habits and customs,
If we do a good job with that and a husband
lives with us without protesting the marriage yoke,
then our life is enviable. If not, better to die.

When those at home annoy a man,
by turning to a friend or companion,
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while we women must look to one soul alone.
They say that we live a life in the house
without danger, while they fight with spears.
in the line of battle three times than give birth once.
My story, though, is not the same as yours.
You have this city and your father’s homes
and advantage in life and company of friends.

who stole me from a foreign land.
I have no mother, no brother, no kin
to shelter with away from this disaster.
That’s why I want you to go along with one thing:
to pay back my husband for these wrongs,
(and his bride and the father who gave her to wed),
keep silent. In other matters, a woman is full of fear
and weak in weapons and strength.
But when she finds herself wronged in the marriage-
no one wields a mind more murderous.
Chorus Leader
Medea, we will keep silent while you justly pay back
your husband. I am not surprised that you grieve at your fate.
Here I see Kreon, Lord of Korinth,
Kreon with silent attendants enters from City Path.

Kreon
You there, scowling and angry with your husband.
Medea, I command you to leave this land,
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banished with your two children without delay.
As the enforcer of this order myself,
until I cast you beyond my borders.
Medea
No! Misery, utter destruction!
My enemies unfurl all their sails against me
and I can find no safe harbor from ruin.

Kreon, why do you banish me?
Kreon
I fear you – no need at all to cloak my words –
afraid you may incurably harm my daughter.
The evidence points that way: You are clever
And you grieve, deprived of your man’s marriage-bed.
I hear, as the report goes, that you threaten the groom,
the bride, and me, who gave her in marriage.
So I will be on guard before anyone suffers.
than for me to be soft now and later groan in regret.
Medea
Puh! Not now for the first time, Kreon, but often,
has my reputation hindered and injured me.
No sensible man should ever educate

Aside from seeming lazy, they earn
envy and resentment from their neighbors.
If you bring a new idea to fools
you will seem useless, not clever.
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to the experts, they will be offended.
I, too, share in this lot:
The experts envy me for being clever,
while fools consider me a bother.
Yet you fear me. What unpleasantness could you suffer?

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