I found Euripides' "Medea" text relatively easy to read for an ancient Greek tragedy. I must say that the writing and the place of the women's choir help us.
When Jason landed to conquer the Golden Fleece, Medea left everything to follow him. She resorted to her betrayal's worst stratagems to allow the triumphant hero to overcome his trials. Jason took her as his wife and took her on his escape to thank her. They had two children. But the fairy tale quickly turns into a drama, which is what the play tells us.
Back in Corinth, Jason quickly preferred the daughter of King Creon. This king, who gave his daughter to Jason, would ban Medea.
Inspired by the Argonauts' legend, Euripides tells how this magician of royal and divine origin becomes an evil murderer and an infanticide mother who slaughters their two boys with her hands. The fruits of this betrayed love.
From then on, the ambitious Jason, desperate, will lose everything.
At first, ​​revenge did not appeal to me because it was not my temperament. But this woman's strength of character took me beyond my prior knowledge. This passionate love, to the point of madness, ended up overwhelming me.

As with the Herakles, we start with the basic recitation of mythological lore, as passed along in Apollodorus:

They went to Corinth, and lived there happily for ten years, till Creon, king of Corinth, betrothed his daughter Glauce to Jason, who married her and divorced Medea. But she invoked the gods by whom Jason had sworn, and after often upbraiding him with his ingratitude she sent the bride a robe steeped in poison, which when Glauce had put on, she was consumed with fierce fire along with her father, who went to her rescue. But Mermerus and Pheres, the children whom Medea had by Jason, she killed, and having got from the Sun a car drawn by winged dragons she fled on it to Athens. (Bibliotheka I.9.28 (Frazer, trans.))

Fairly straightforward. The euripidean version adheres fairly closely to this--or, perhaps, Euripides is the primary source for Apollodorus, who wrote centuries later.

Euripides retains Medea’s objection that Jason has broken an oath by taking up with Creon’s daughter (“Do you hear what she says, and how she cries / On Themis, the goddess of Promises, and on Zeus, / Whom we believe to be the Keeper of Oaths?” (ll.168-70)). He also presents a slick agon between them, wherein it is revealed that not only does Jason not deny the oathbreaking, but he defends it as economically and politically expedient:

What luckier chance could I have come across than this,
An exile to marry the daughter of a king?
It was not –the point that seems to upset you—that I
Grew tired of your bed and felt the need of a new bride;
Nor with any wish to outdo your number of children.
We have enough already. I am quite content.
But—this was the main reason—that we might live well. (ll. 553-59)

Jason apparently does not lack bravery, as he had prior to action in this text witnessed Medea’s capabilities on the voyage of the Argo, during which time she was the crew’s heavy artillery. Consider just one episode from Apollonius’ Argonautica, the confrontation with Talos:

Then, with incantations, she invoked the Spirits of Death, the swift hounds of Hades who feed on souls and haunt the lower air to pounce on living men. She sank to her knees and called upon them, three times in song, three times with spoken prayers. She steeled herself with their malignity and bewitched the eyes of Talos with the evil of her own. She flung at him the full force of her malevolence, and in an ecstasy of rage she piled him with images of death. (loc. cit. at IV. 1660 ff.)

Reckless beyond measure, therefore, to piss her off.

For his part, however, Jason may have understood that she thought that he has a “lack of manliness” (Euripides at l. 466) and is a “false man” (l. 519), and thus is not subject to the hounds of Hades who feed on ‘living men.’ She nevertheless is perfectly agambenian in her intention to “make dead bodies” (l. 373) of her enemies. She is perhaps irrational in this--not simply in wanting the deaths of several persons over a divorce, but also misconstruing her host’s fear of her art as “envy and ill will” (l. 297)—which is incidentally what Ayn Rand thought about her colleagues at school when they hated her for being an abrasive jerk.

Here, the host monarch reasonably fears her as a walking artillery piece who makes corpses (i.e., in order to ‘pay back’ (l. 268) her husband in a marriage gone sour, and thus “leave that account paid” (l. 790)). That said, her position is that it is no mere divorce, but is an abandonment during exile from her home, after having killed her brother and then killed the monarch of the first place of asylum. Jason knows all of this, as he was there and was a beneficiary of these killings—and yet he still uses these events against her:

A traitress to your father and your native land.
The gods hurled the avenging curse of yours on me.
For your brother you slew at your own hearthside,
And then came aboard that beautiful ship, the Argo.
[…]
A monster, not a woman, having a nature
Wilder than that of Scylla in the Tuscan Sea. (ii.1332-42)

Significant that he acts like an antisocial nihilist here--this may well be his hamartia, warranting is own tragic result in aristotelian terms--along with the nasty failure to consult her about his marry-rich/take-half plan (“If you were not a coward, you would not have married / Behind my back, but discussed it with me first” (l. 586-87), indicating a certain reasonable pragmatism in Medea). It is likewise important both that Jason says she is not a ‘woman,’ as this is not an indictment of women (that is more Euripides’ Hippolytus), and that she is rather distinguished as a ‘monster,’ which makes her more like Euripides’ Herakles, the fighter of monsters who becomes monstrous in the process (and also killed his own children). And, indeed, she is noted as furens several times (ll. 1014, 1079)—but also she has a “plan” (l. 772), marked by instrumental rationality, but manifestly lacking in objective reasonableness (to use Frankfurt Marxist terms), as there shall be no objectively reasonable set of facts wherein one savagely slaughters one’s own minor children to cause pain (e.g., l. 1399) to one's party opponent in a divorce case.

To her, however, it is ananke, a “necessary wrong” (l. 1243), arising out of all the hardship of double exile, abandonment, and, even, the original childbirths:

What they say of us is that we have a peaceful time
Living at home, while they do the fighting in war.
How wrong they are! I would very much rather stand
Three times in the front of battle than bear one child. (ll. 248-51)

A proto-feminist perspective, perhaps—but also we must recall that Medea is something of a cross between the Angel of Death and the Terminator; warfare for her would accordingly (and will, as it happens) be almost trifling in ease.

When Seneca gets a hold of this text (and we knew he would, as it has dead children, similar to the Hercules Furens, the Troades, the Thyestes, the Hippolytus), he keeps the general outline of the narrative, but makes several deft inversions for the Roman world. First, whereas Euripides has Jason as the primary topos of Medea’s rage, in Seneca the locus of anger is Corinth’s monarch: “The fault is Creon’s, all, who with unbridled sway dissolves marriages [coniugia solvet], tears mothers from their children, and breaks pledges bound by straightest oath; on him be my attack, let him alone pay the penalties” (ll. 143-47). In Euripides, Creon banishes her as a preemptive measure, which she therein regarded as arising out of Jason’s infidelity; here, she regards Creon as the principal offender—converting euripidean drama of the oikos into a matter of the polis here. We shall recall MacIntyre’s point that the function of the Oresteia is to transform certain sets of problems for the oikos into matters for the polis--so, mission accomplished. Creon decides that he needs to “purge my kingdom [purge regna]” (l. 269), which is the language used in the Hercules Furens to describe how monsters are exterminated (op. cit. at 1279).

Second, the voyage of the Argo, while traditionally the first of its kind within the legend, is not emphasized in Euripides as something special insofar as it is a voyage; but for Seneca, the Chorus of conservative Corinthians regards it as a moment when “The lands, well separated before by nature’s laws, the Thessalian ship made one” (ll. 335-36); previously, Trump voters might’ve rest assured that--

Unsullied the ages our fathers saw, with crime banished afar. Then every man inactive kept to his own shores and lived to old age on ancestral fields, rich but with little, knowing no wealth save what his home soil yielded. Not yet could any read the sky and use the stars [stellisque quibus pingitur aether / non erat usus]. (ll. 329-333)

--so, yeah, obviously Medea is just an alien criminal seeking to use anchor babies to do whatever it is alien criminals do in the febrile imaginations of right populist white nationalist scum--and it's all her fault for seducing the captain of the voyage.

Seneca’s chorus accommodates to the Real of the Roman world, however: “Now, in our time, the deep has ceased resistance and submits utterly to law” (l. 364) and “All bounds have been removed, cities have set their walls in new lands, and the world, now passable throughout, has left nothing where it once had place” (ll. 369-372). And then it prophesies: “There will come an age in the far-off years when Ocean shall unloose the bonds of things, when the whole broad earth shall be revealed, when Tethys shall disclose new worlds and Thule not be the limit of the lands” (375-79)—and thank the Argo for this, the modern world, approximately two thousand years prior to Marx & Engels when they stated that “The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe” (Communist Manifesto, I).

Ovid, for his part, will make the similar equation of the Argo with the Empire and the world proto-market in his note that “And Jason won the famous Golden Fleece / And proudly with his prize, and with her too, / His second prize, who gave him mastery, / Sailed home victorious to his fatherland” (Metamorphosis, VII.55-58): foreign goods and foreign persons to be imported via successful maritime adventure. And of course it's all consistent with Virgil's ideological project of "Roman, remember your strength to rule / Earth's peoples [sic]--for your arts are to be these: / To pacify, to impose the rule of law, / To spare the conquered, battle down the proud" (Aeneid VI, 1151-54) (emphasis added). This is definitely not Euripides' project, by contrast.

Otherwise, same crisis, same denouement, same dreadful violence—but with Seneca’s normal emphasis on visceral horror. And Medea is still a nuke:

Nurse: The Colchians are no longer on thy side, thy husband’s vows have failed, and there is nothing left of all thy wealth [nihilique superest opibus e tantis tibi].

Medea: Medea is left [superest]—in her thou beholdest sea and land [mare et terras vide], and sword and fire and gods and thunder [ferrumque et ignes et deos et fulmina]. (ll. 164-67)

That’s genuinely badass. After the catastrophe, in both versions she hops on her magical flying dragon chariot and zips away, giving the survivors the middle finger. Afterward, Apollodorus (Bibliotheka I.9.28) reports that she ends up in Athens for a bit, had a thing with the monarch, fell out with Theseus, escaped to Persia and took over some towns there, and then returned to Colchis to set things upright. Her ultimate result is given in Apollonius, as part of the incentive to Thetis to help the Argo: “And there is something else that I must tell you, a prophecy concerning your son Achilles, who is now with Cheiron the centaur and is fed by water-nymphs though he should be at your breast. When he comes to the Elysian Fields, it has been arranged that he shall marry Medea the daughter of Aeetes; so you, as her future mother-in-law, should be ready to help her now” (loc. cit. IV 791-97).

“Who profits by a sin has done the sin” (Seneca, l. 500)—who profits by a reading has done the reading, so go read.

پیش از این می‌خواستم بعد از خوندن مده‌آ بیام و از پیشرو بودن اوریپید نسبت به جامعه‌ی خودش صحبت کنم و این که چگونه 2500 سال پیش وجوهی از حقوق زنان رو مطرح می‌کنه که الآن هم زن‌ها دنبالشن اما میانه‌ی راه به این فکر کردم که آیا واقعاً انسان‌ها در طول تاریخ رشد کردند و ما نسبت به گذشتگانمون از آگاهی‌های بیشتری برخورداریم؟ یا تاریخ فقط یک تسلسل بی‌پایانه که خواسته‌های اون‌ها رو شبیه به خواسته‌های ما می‌کنه؟ و آیا 2500 سال دیگه اگه کسی آثار دوران ما رو بخونه از حق‌خواهی نسلمون خنده‌ش می‌گیره و یا آیندگانمون هم به دنبال پیدا کردن همون حقوقی هستند که امروز ما دنبالشیم؟

Yeesh, talk about a tragedy. This is about as dark as it gets, plot-wise.

tbf tho jason was a dick

تجربه خیلی جالبی بود خواندن مده‌آ. چون طی یک هم‌خوانی خواندمش و از هم‌خوانان باسوادم خیلی آموختم. مثل بقیه نمایش‌نامه‌های کلاسیک یونانی چاپ شده توسط بیدگل از موخره و مقاله پیوست آن هم یاد گرفتم. قسمت درخشان این نمایشنامه که احتمالا هیچ‌گاه از یاد نخواهم برد؛ برای من، دیالوگِ مناجات‌گونه همسرایان با آفرودیت الهه عشق بود:
n  
_ عشق فوران می‌کند و رسوایی و ننگ به بار می‌آورد. اما اگر الهه عشق به اندازه بیاید، هیچ موهبتی جای آن را نمی‌گیرد. باشد که تو هرگز، ای بانوی قبرس (منظور آفرودیت است) تیرهای زهرآگین کمان زرینت را به سوی من نشانه نروی، تیر‌هایی که هیچ‌کس را از آن گریزی نیست.
باشد که خویشتن‌داری،‌ این دلنشین‌ترین پیشکش آسمان، مرا خشنود سازد. باشد که آفرودیت هرگز دلم را از تب عشق دیگری نلرزاند و مرا گرفتار خشم و بدنامی‌های بی‌پایان نسازد. باشد که این الهه پیوندهای سازگار را ارج نهد و آمیزش‌های زنان را از سر دانایی سازمان دهد. آه خانه و سرزمین پدری، من به خدایان نماز می‌برم، باشد که هرگز، هرگز، بی‌سرزمین نباشم. بی‌آن، زندگی دردناک، اندوهبار و سراسر نومیدی‌ست که آدمی تاب آن ندارد. اگر این باشد، بگذار بمیرم و این زندگی را به پایان رسانم. هیچ مصیبتی بدتر از بی‌وطنی نیست.
این را از زبان دیگران نمی‌گویم، خود آن را به چشم دیده‌ام. تو نه شهری داری، نه یاری که در این مصائب جانکاه غم تو خورد. در بدنامی و ننگ هلاک شود آن مردی که به دوستارانش بدی می‌کند و سفره دلش را نزد آن یاران شریف نمی‌گیرند! چنین مردی هرگز یار من نخواهد بود.
n

I wish Shakespeare had written a play where the Macbeths got divorced. You'd love to see what Lady Macbeth would have to say about it, right? The thing with marrying an asshole is, divorcing them isn't going to be pretty.

Here's the ugliest breakup in history, the most famous play by the nastiest Greek playwright, the sly and vicious Euripides. The plot is, Jason of the Argonauts, this guy:



has married an asshole. It was a good idea at the time: Medea slew an actual dragon for him, and who doesn't get turned on by a good dragon slaying. But now that the adventures are over, Jason wants to leave her for a more politically advantageous wife. The thing with dragon slayers is you get back to your kingdom and they're sortof traipsing around looking scary and you're like well, I feel like you're not going to be amazing at throwing feasts. Jason tries to break it to her easy: he's like listen, I'm going to marry this princess lady but here's the good news, your sons will be princes now! No seriously, that's what he says. He's such an asshole, and that's one of the fun things about Euripides, he'll take a hero like Jason and be like "But what if he was a douche?" Here's Jason in a more honest moment:

"To me, fame is the important thing.
I'd give up all I owned for it.
What good is a voice like Orpheus
If no one knows it belongs to you?"

So what happens next is that Medea is miffed.


"Men win their battles
On the field but women are ruthless when the bed
Becomes the battlefield. We've lain
In our own blood before...and have survived."

Medea shocked everyone when it was first performed in 431 BCE; it came in last in the competition that year. It's like when Hardy wrote Jude the Obscure and everyone got so mad about it that he never wrote another novel. There's a level of darkness that people just can't handle, and when you go there they blame you for it. This play is a dark place.

Look, Greek plays are sortof spoiler proof. There's only one thing that happens in each of them, really. Their characters spend the whole play deciding whether to do the thing, and then they always do the thing, and then the chorus is like holy shit, they did the thing, that was nuts, and then that's the end of it. (Which is one of the nice things about them: they take like an hour and a glass of wine to read. Maybe two.) You shouldn't even read Medea if you don't know how it ends. But here it is: in order to get back at Jason, she murders his new fiancee. Which actually that part sounds almost reasonable, right? It's pretty gory: the fiancee's dad (not that Creon!) comes and embraces her corpse but she poisoned the corpse, wow, so he gets
"Stitched
To it like ivy to laurel,
Felt his flesh ripping from his bones."

But we're not at the bad part yet. The bad part is that she murders her and Jason's children, too. Murders her own two kids. Euripides doesn't make you watch it - you never watch murders in Greek tragedies, it's always just howling off stage, and here you get to listen to her kids yelling, "Look! A knife!" and then screaming. It's awful.

The chorus, always weird and ambiguous participants in Euripides' plays, tries half-heartedly to talk her out of it:
Chorus: Suffering so great you’ll kill your sons?
Medea: Yes, anything to make Jason’s suffering worse then mine
Chorus: And turn your grief into wretchedness and misery?
Medea: Who can say? The time for talk has ended.

It's an Iagoesque villainy: she's uninterested in thinking this through.

Medea is one of the starkest and cleanest of the Greek tragedies. Euripides in particular tends to have slightly messier plots, but not here: this is one cold dagger stroke to the heart. It's troubling and unforgettable. Its reputation has blossomed since its inauspicious beginning; it was the most-performed Greek tragedy of the 20th century, with a reputation for winning Tonies for its Medeas. And here's the chorus again:

"Stronger than lovers love is lovers hate
Incurable, in each, the wounds they make."

So just keep that in mind, next time someone slays a dragon for you. That was nice of them, but what happens when you run out of dragons?

در درون تمامی زنان مده‌آیی نهفته است...

Medea'nın mitostaki intikamını baştan sunuyor oyun, konu kapalı tutuluyor..
Euripides felaketlerin yüzeyselliğini bi' güzel eşeliyor, düşünce ödevine dönüştürüyor okurken..

Sonrasında Medea resimlerine de göz atmak istersiniz belki ^.^

https://painting-mythology.blogspot.c...

مده‌آ از اوریپید، درامی ست درباره قدرت ویرانگر احساسات انسانی و گسست غیرقابل اجتناب اخلاق و شور. این نمایشنامه چیزی فراتر از یه انتقام‌جویی شخصی رو روایت می‌کنه؛ مده‌آ، زنی که به‌خاطر عشقی پرشور همه‌چیزش رو از دست داده، در برابر خیانت جیسون، به تجسم خشم غیرقابل مهار بدل می‌شه.
اوریپید با تصویرگری روح متلاطم مده‌آ، تضادی تراژیک خلق می‌کنه که در اون عشق به نفرت، و مادرانگی به ابزاری برای انتقام تبدیل می‌شه. مده‌آ نه قربانیه، نه هیولا؛ اون نمادی از زنانیه که در حاشیه قدرت و جامعه، تنها ابزارشون انتقامیه که همه‌چیز رو قربانی ‌میکنه.
این اثر با به چالش کشیدن مفاهیم مرسوم اخلاق، عدالت، و نقش جنسیت، مرزی باریک میان انسانیت و هیولاوارگی ترسیم می‌کنه. اوریپید با مده‌آ، ما رو در برابر پرسشی اساسی قرار می‌ده: آیا در جهانی سرشار از بی‌عدالتی، انتقام توجیه‌پذیره؟ و آیا تخریب تمام‌عیار، می‌تونه شکلی از رستگاری باشه؟

2023 Review
the scene off-stage, with Medea murdering her young sons is heartbreaking. It’s made harder because she had to put her plan in action after their lives are in danger as she got even with Jason for hurting her. It’s a very, very tragic moment .


I reread the translation by Robin Robertson published by Vintage, this was after reading a translation that was written roughly 100 years earlier by  Medea of Euripides (translator, Theodore Alois Buckley)

Just like when I read this in 2019, I noticed a contrast between the action that unfolds and the sympathy the play draws towards Medea. Back in 2019 I could not make sense of this contradiction but reading these translations back-to-back makes it clear that it’s Jason who is the guilty one for breaking his promise.

This is a hard one to get my head around, breaking a solemn promise today works differently to these stories, so it’s taken a lot of other reading for me to make sense of this.

In both translations the poetry is gorgeously rendered, Robin Robertson’s contemporary style in places is not an easy read as he paints a clear picture that shows what drove Medea’s anger. Theodore Alois Buckley’s style is a touch old worldly with a lot of thee and thy but tells the story just as well, Theodore Alois Buckley’s translation is also available in the public domain on Gutenberg.

Both translations were good to read to see Medea through the eyes of Euripides and his contemporaries.




2019 Review
Medea is Circe’s niece, a loose connection to Homer’s Odyssey.

The play by today’s standards is shocking but I wanted to revisit it to read it better.

The edition I read is translated by Robin Robertson published by Vintage. It starts with a short introduction that talks about Medea beyond her dark traits, Robinson points out how her behaviour is of a woman betrayed. With this in mind I read the play again, and closely.

I found the poetry in this translation full of warmth in contrast to the scenes that unfold, and by the end, as shocking as Medea’s actions are, I also felt sympathy. I am not sure if this is down to the translation or I’m reading this differently; as I now have a better understanding of the ideas of how oaths, heroes and gods fitted into that culture back then. It may also be down to reading Emily Wilson’s translation of Medea Seneca’s (included in Six Tragedies) which helped me to read this differently this time; it was down to this where I’ve meaning to read this play again. In Wilson’s translation of Seneca’s version showed a Medea I had never seen before, I always sensed there had to be more but until now, this Euripides’s version only gave me a vague sense of Medea’s vulnerabilities, as I previously did not have the understanding of this ancient world.

So, previously one of the things I had missed was how much Medea loved her children. I realise now it’s too simple to say her actions are about spite and jealousy when it’s a cultural ideology she is relying on to support her. The women around her, the chorus and the nurse, along with the tutor do not approve. Previously, these are the voices that I noted but it overshadowed that she was a victim here but these are my words as Medea is not willing to be made a fool by anyone no matter the cost, where her actions become more callous for keeping her emotions in check, but what I had previously missed was the gods approved.

A Basic Medea
Review of the Dover Thrift Editions paperback (2022) of the Dover Publications original (1993) of the John Lane: The Bodley Head hardcover The Medea of Euripides (1944) translated by Rex Warner from the Ancient Greek language original Μήδεια (431 BC).

I read this 1944 translation in parallel with reading Liz Lochhead's adaptation Medea (2023) for the National Theatre of Scotland. (You can read my review of the latter at A Fierce Modern Medea (with a Scots Inflection).) I wanted to have a basic comparison in order to see how far Lochhead differed from the original. The Dover Thrift edition was ideal for that purpose, but it provided no background information and only a very few brief footnotes to explain some references in the text.

I'm also planning on reading a more recent translation in a more scholarly edition. The Oxford University Press's Medea (2006) with a translation by Michael Collier and Georgia Ann Machemer looks like an ideal candidate for that.


The cover of the Dover Thrift Edition (2022) which differs slightly from the orig. Dover Publication (1993).

Trivia and Links
Some of the earlier English language translations of Medea are in the Public Domain. You can read several of the 19th century translations online at Wikisource.