The Male Characters of Euripides
By
Professor EM Blaiklock MA.
He prepared the stage with some care for both Medca's and Jason's first appearances. They are to appear, both of them, as human beings. How to do this with the foreign sorceress
24
THE MALE CHARACTERS OF EURIPIDES
was Euripides' first problem. How far he succeeded is revealed by a comparison with Seneca's rhetorical imitation. The Roman Medea is frankly a witch, designed to win the cheap applause of a highly sophisticated audience, deplorable in its dramatic tastes. She opens the play with fifty melodramatic lines meant to show forth the savagery of her spirit, and the description of her evil preparations for crime occupies two hundred verses in the heart of the drama. Corneille's imitation is as crude, which is surprising in view of the fact that his Medea appeared only a year before the Cid. Corneille's heroine is a magician. She frees Aegeus from his prison and bonds by supernatural means, and freezes Theudas to immobility with
'un coup de baguette.' Corneille does not seem to have read Euripides at all. Following Seneca in characterisation as well as rhetoric, he leaves us quite unmoved for all the five corpses which strew the last scene.S
Both the French and Latin plays reveal the difficulty inherent in the heroine. They both make the grave mistake of introducing the leading characters too soon. If Medea and Jason were to bear any relation to life and reality, it was necessary that the supernatural should not bulk too large. Some preparation of the stage was manifestly required, and Euripides made that preparation with considerable skill. By means of two minor characters in racy conversation he reveals the mistress from the angle of the servants' hall. There is no surer method of underlining the humanities. Both the Nurse and the cynical old Pedagogue who fill this rôle are singularly well drawn. It is not until 1. 96 that the sound of Medea's weeping from within breaks into their conversation. There is a fine touch of drama where the Nurse explains the sound of grief to the children. She hurries them off to safety with their Pedagogue, and strikes in so doing a note of foreboding which is very significant at this point in the action. The old woman may not understand her mistress, but her instinct was very sure. For another hundred lines the sound of Medea's invisible lamentation continues, interwoven with comments from the Nurse and the Corinthian dames who enter at l. I30. By the time Medea herself appears, at 1. 213, her case, from the human point of view, is stated, and the very necessary ground of sympathy for wronged womanhood is prepared. The only hint of the savage violence in her which forms the climax of the tragedy, comes, quite significantly, in the words of the Nurse, Medea's loving and devoted champion:
(İnTa Sw!v, ÖTav TIS……
Incorrect Greek letters & translation needed, which follows….)
But my queen on her thralls as a mad bull glareth
Or a lioness couched with her whelps, whoso dareth
With speech to draw near her.
(Med. 187-189. Way)
Medea's first speech must be read with attention. Its sententious opening is deliberately designed to disappoint those who had expected the flame and fire of an inhuman or superhuman heroine on her first appearance. She appears to have won control over her wild grief. There is strength in that.
There is strength too in the quiet, cold bitterness of her polite exordium, and in the contempt with which she describes a society where men are supreme and women their chattels.
'I am come out', she says, ° 'that you may have no cause to find fault with me, and say I am too proud to see you, for I am well aware that many are so regarded.
Some may keep out of sight, others may appear in public. The stranger in particular must do at Corinth as Corinth does.' The words, designed for heavy irony, are the echo of many a reproach of Jason, and introduce the famous passage of protest against male morality which makes the play important as a social document. There is no need in exegesis or analysis to disentangle Euripides' words, as it were, from Medea's. It is doubtless the poet speaking, ahead of his age as usual, and, like Socrates, helping Athens on to revolution, but the speech is quite in character and dramatically appropriate. One cannot help wondering, none the less, what women were saying in Athens just before the Peloponnesian War.
The scene follows between Medea and Creon. The shrewd old ruler has rightly divined the danger in which he stands, but he is no match for Medea's skilled deceit, false humility, and varied emotional appeal. He cannot, as Page says,
play the remorseless tyrant for long.’
His fear of Medea is no unmanly thing." He hardly understands it, but is uneasy for his child. He gives way at last against his better judgment.
'Oft,' he says, by showing mercy I have spoilt my fortune'
(1. 349):
And, woman, now I know I err herein,
Yet shalt thou win this boon. But I forewarn thee,
If thee the approaching sun-god's torch behold Within this country's confines with thy sons, Thou diest.
(Med. 350-354. Way)
Creon is a homely portrait, and well sketched, for all the lightness of the strokes. As a ruler he can bend to pity, and his harshness is that of a father protecting his child. He is to die in that act. The moment he is gone, without reserve, without pity, with a sibilance in her speech, the Colchian plots aloud.
Utterly forgetful of a benefit received, and plotting the benefactor's misery, without a thought of shame or pity, Medea is a shocking picture. It is worth remembering that it is in such a context that Euripides makes one of his famous remarks against women:
(про бі каі пефикамє
yuvaîkes, eis uèv É0ON' aunawútaral Translation needed from Med. 407-409)
(Med. 407-409)
The ode which follows (avw noTauv xupoûo nayai Translation needed) might,
in the terminology of Hebrew literature, be termed prophetic'—not in the sense that it foretells, but that it tells forth an eternal truth. Oppression, it says, has its inevitable end.….
Continuing overleaf
Addendum: Contrast his comic terror in Seneca, faithfully echoed by Corneille:
Arcete, famuli, tactu et accessu procul.
Gardes, empêchez-la de s' approcher de moi.)
That of old is changed into confusion. It seems certain, in view of the revolutionary times in which he lived, that Euripides wrote the words with this wider meaning. There is no fixed and stable order. Hávra peî. There is change, which is not decay. The women of Corinth are made to glimpse this truth, of which Jason, unimaginative and dull, has no inkling.
He enters at l. 445. In a dozen lines we have the cruel truth about him. Often has Jason remarked what an unmanageable pest a harsh temper is. A little self-control and calm endurance of the will of her 'betters', and Medea might have lived comfortably in civilisation. The great Argonaut has become a thing of flesh. He has forgotten how in two wild scenes of murder he enjoyed the benefits of Barbary. With some subtlety Euripides makes the Hellene imply that the Colchian cared more than he for moral issues. He is quite above such things.
Let them remain Medea's simple preoccupation:
Me they vex not-cease never, an thou wilt, Clamouring, 'Jason is of men most base.'
(Med. 451, 452. Way)
With repulsive condescension towards the woman to whom he owes his life and reputation, he tells how he has helped, nay, will magnanimously help her. Indeed, he holds her in some esteem:
Though thou hatest me
Never can I bear malice against thee.
(Med. 463, 464. Way)
Medea's reply is one of the most passionate pieces of Greek Euripides ever wrote. The sibilants are no accident as she hisses the truth at him:
(TaUTOv OUVELÉßnaN Apyçor aKádos.
(Med. 476, 477 Translations needed.)
She has saved him, indeed, at the cost of home and kindred, facing for his sake the very (epnuía Translation needed) of which the coward takes cynical advantage, saved him, forsooth )pólunos uâllov i Translation needed)
O Zeus, ah wherefore hast thou given to men Plain signs for gold which is but counterfeit, But no assay-mark nature-graven shows
On man's form, to discern the base withal?
(Med. 526-529. Way)
Jason's answer more than fulfils Medea's prophecy that his words will make him appear yet more base. She has reminded him of the days of old adventuring, and more than hinted that the great quest would have had a sorry ending but for the intervention of her selfless folly to aid it. The Argo and the days of Black Sea storm and foreign voyaging have been present again in Jason's mind. They breed no shame, no tenderness. The memory suggests no contrast. There is no reproach in the past. Thus far has Jason fallen. The memory of the old sailor days does nothing more than suggest a metaphor! He must shorten sail, and like a clever helmsman brave the tornado of her words:
As for me it seems I must be no bad speaker.
But like a man who has a good grip of the tiller, Reef up his sail, and so run away from under This mouthing tempest, woman, of your bitter tongue.
(Med. 522-525. Warner)
Such callousness is base enough. He sinks lower. Perhaps Medea's stinging words reminded him of a Jason who once was, standing in full panoply on the Argo's poop. He sees no contrast with another, nearer Jason. The memory suggests a thought. Medea could not help herself!
Since you insist on building up your kindness to me,
My view is that Cypris was alone responsible Of men and gods for the preserving of my life.
You are clever enough, —but really I need not enter
Into the story of how it was love's inescapable Power that compelled you to keep my person safe.
(Med. 526-531. Warner)