The Male Characters of Euripides by Professor
Edward M.Blaiklock M.A.
THE HERO THAT WAS
Continued on page 33
I cannot bear to do it. I renounce my plans
I had before. I'll take my children away from
This land. Why should I hurt their father with the pain
They feel, and suffer twice as much of pain myself?
No, no, I will not do it. I renounce my plans.
Ah, what is wrong with me? Do I want to let go My enemies unhurt and be laughed at for it?
I must face this thing. Oh, but what a weak woman
Even to admit to my mind these soft arguments.
Children, go into the house.
(Med. 1044-1053. Warner)
Unity of mood…. (17'Either follow tradition, or invent that which shall be self-consistent. In the former case let Achilles be impatient, irascible, ruthless, keen ... let Medea be untamed and unconquerable, Ino tearful, Ixion treacherous, lo ever roving, and Orestes in sorry plight. In the latter case, keep the character to the end of the play as it was at the beginning, and let it be consistent.' Horace, A.P. I19 sqq. Perhaps such rule of thumb helped young gentlemen in Maecenas' coterie to write their wooden tragedies.) Unity of mood has obviously no place in Euripides.
The story of Medea's crime needs no retelling. The messenger speech which describes the death of Creon and his daughter is a splendid piece of descriptive writing. Medea herself, it is to be noted, utters no word of exultation at its conclusion. The fearful narrative seems to steel her to the final act of ruthlessness, and to call for urgency. She faces the facts quite squarely. Life, when such a deed is compassed, will lose its joy. It shall, nevertheless be done. Like some female Samson, she is determined to drag down Jason's palace of security, though the ruins bury her.
For us the insistent question recurs. In this second loading of the dice against the fifth century male (ikîa прумат" cloáywv Translation from Greek require here) has Euripides a purpose? On a wider and more tragic stage we face again the problem of the depressed sex.
We have remarked in connection with the Alcestis that the age was sexually unbalanced. "The women', writes Toynbee, (18 ‘The study of history,’ III pp23@9-240 the most universal of modern historians goes further.
It is significant he writes that one of the promptest constructive reactions to the breakdown of the Hellenic Civilization in 431 B.C. was a movement to bring the women and the slaves back into social partnership with the free male citizens as recognized and active members of the commonwealth.
This movement declared itself in Athens, "the Education of Hellas",
while the Atheno-Peloponnesian
War, which was the beginning of the Hellenic "Time of Troubles" was still being fought—as witness the war-plays of Aristophanes.')
writes Toynbee ‘have been left behind, and almost all the slaves. The Homeric Odysseus has blossomed into the Attic Themistocles; but as for the Homeric Penelope and the Homeric Eumacus, where, in fifth century Athens are they? Euripides at least gave both depressed classes a voice.
If Greek drama sprang, as Thompson would have it, from the emotional stresses of a society in evolution, Medea could certainly well represent for the socially conscious of the Attic Time of Troubles, the outcast of a system taking awful vengeance upon the society which had wronged her. There is evidence enough to show that a deterioration in the status of Athenian womanhood had produced its crop of such socially destructive vices as prostitution and male
homosexuality. Thomson aptly quotes Lysias' speech On the Murder of Eratosthenes as a document on the situation. Woman, like Medea, was avenging herself on society. The problem indeed may have had more immediate importance than we know. Lysistrata's "policy speech, at any rate,
suggests that
before the war reached its close, the male prestige on which woman's helotry was built was gravely challenged by the depressed sex. Euripides was a man of mature mind even when he wrote the earliest of his surviving plays. The acuteness of his observation is a never-ending source of wonder for admirers of his work. He may easily have marked in 431 B.C. that spirit of rebellion which later inspired Aristophanes bitter comedy, and have shown in Jason the judged and punished Athenian male, whom he had painted with more tenderness in Admetus. Judged he was indeed. He appears, beside himself with grief and horror at the news of the murder of his princess bride, only to hear from the Chorus the tidings of greater tragedy.
Jason might have recognised Medea's barbarism long before, when she betrayed father and fatherland and murdered a brother once for love of him. In those days he had used her perfidy to effect the ends of his advantage. By a grim rEpuméTELa (Greek translation needed) it has compassed his destruction. Selfishness has been his guiding faculty. By an act of wickedness which had of old used her youthful treachery to secure the Fleece, Jason took into his life the agent of his own destruction, and the ruin of his fortunes.
That much he has already 'recognised'. One avayvpious (Greek Translation needed) is not enough. Let him face another, says the voice from the hanging chariot. He sought, ever selfish, to win security and children to bear his name. He has lost his security. He is a hated alien in a hostile state. He has destroyed, to boot, the children he had. It is not her hand, says Medea coldly, which has done the deed, åll "ßpIS Oï TE DOi VEOSUnTES yáuoL (Translation from Greek needed here).
She proceeds to prophesy.
"Thou, as is meet, an evil man, shalt die an evil
death, smitten on the skull by a fragment of the Argo.'
There is something horribly symbolic in the promised ending. The Argo has cursed Jason's life.
Nothing has failed like success.
Nothing does. In his great exploit lay all the seeds of ruin, like the germs of decadence in a golden age. In triumphs people have dropped down dead.' For Jason it might have been better so.
The Nemesis which came upon him, when all seemed most secure, was not the obscure visitation of gods or gods behind the gods, the shadow of old crime cast down the generations, пртархо ärn (Aeschylus, Agamemnon, 1192) exacting its due penalty, but the direct and prosaic result of his own faulty character and selfish calculation.
Nous voyons succéder, remarks Patin, "à l'antique fatalité du destin, la fatalité nouvelle de la passion.' The realist in Euripides, or, as some would have it, the sceptic, seeks the basis of catastrophe, not in heaven but on the good green earth. There were streets in Athens where men pursued their petty ends, misconceived their adversary, and suffered thus. Jason's story moved, to be sure, in exalted realms, where women had kings for fathers, and sailors sailed the Argo and not the Paralos, but that was what dramatic tradition required. It was the genius of Euripides to penetrate the cloth of gold and find the man. Here then is Jason the mighty Argonaut, Medea of Colchis and a tale of old sin or, if you will,
You, sir, and you, miss, You and all your cities.