Euripides: ‘Medea’

 The history of drama contains more than one story about a critic panning a playwright. But the story of Euripides, one of the world’s great playwrights, begins with him taking a pounding from a critic named Aristotle.

Aristotle wrote the book — the first one, anyway — on what tragedy should be. In his view, a tragic hero must be like the rest of us, a blend of good and bad, strengths and weaknesses. Otherwise, how would we ordinary folks in the audience empathize with the hero or heroine’s struggles? How could be feel pity?

But Medea, the title character of Euripides’ great play, is not like us. 

When her husband, Jason, discarded her, Medea killed their children. Killing your kids is a hard thing to do, and Medea spoke eloquently about the difficulty. But her husband had left her to marry royalty — the daughter of King Creon of Corinth — and Medea had to hurt him. She said he left her no choice.

Professor H.D.F. Kitto, my guide to the Greek tragedies, gets to the crucial point about Aristotle’s criticism: Euripides didn’t write a bad play based on Aristotle’s standards. He didn’t use Aristotle’s standards at all.

Medea was not like one of Sophocles’ heroes. Her character was not a balance of strengths and weaknesses, with a single weakness that tragically overcame her great strengths.

Medea’s personality was passionate. In the clutch, her emotions always overrode her reasoning.

That was just who she was. When she first met Jason, her love for him was so passionate that she abandoned her family. When she felt he was threatened, she killed her brother and father in his defense. Her passion overrode any second thoughts.

As Kitto put it, she was “quite uncontrolled in love and hate.”

The tragedy is not that her great strengths are undone by a tragic flaw. The tragedy is that her passions are stronger than her reasoning. The tragedy is that such personalities exist at all.

Kitto said that Euripides did not want us to empathize with Medea, but understand her.

We are a long way from Sophocles, and a longer way still from Aeschylus. But I’d say the proposition that some temperaments are disastrous makes sense, perhaps because it’s an election year and one of the candidates has such an oversized personality it’s hard to miss its disastrous features.

There is much good poetry in Euripides. But in reading this play again, I was struck by the character of the children’s nurse, who is a subtle student of Medea’s psychology. She spoke these lines about Medea:

 

She’s a strange woman. I know it won’t be easy

To make and enemy of her and come off best.

 

• Sources: H.D.F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1954. The section on Medea is on pp. 197-210.

Medea, translated by Rex Warner, is in Euripides I in The Complete Greek Tragedies, edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore; Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1953, pp. 55-108. The quotations are on pp. 70 and 60.