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Seneca's Medea and the tragic self

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Seneca's Medea and the tragic self

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Content SENECA’S MEDEA AND THE TRAGIC SELF
by
Lisl Walsh
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(CLASSICS)
May 2011
Copyright 2010 Lisl Walsh
Table of Contents
Introduction 1
Chapter I: Medea femina 17
Chapter II: Medea divina 80
Chapter III: Medea peregrina 132
Chapter IV: Medea as Habituated Self 173
Bibliography 213
ii
Introduction
I. Medea among the Scholars
There are five types of people who study tragic Medea. First, ancient philosophers
(Chrysippus, Epictetus, Galen, and others
1
) who use the Medea character (as written in
Euripides, and specifically Med. 1078-9) to argue for a unitary (Stoic) or dual (Platonist)
decision-making process in the self. Second, scholars who refer to Medea (usually Seneca’s
version, and the whole tragedy, not just the character) within a larger argument about
Stoicism in Seneca’s tragedies. Within this group I count mainly Rosenmeyer’s Senecan
Drama and Stoic Cosmology, in which he argues that Senecan tragedy can be read as
consistent with a Stoic framework; I also count Segal’s 1983 article in Seneca Tragicus, where
the beginning of the argument is built upon a “Stoic sympathy” between the action onstage
and the responses of the environment/universe (storms, solar eclipses, etc.). There are
other authors who refer to Seneca’s Stoicism while discussing his tragedies, and to Medea in
particular, but these works do not count Seneca’s philosophy as their only other focus.
Most scholars at least allow the possibility of Stoic influence on the tragedies if they do not
assume it to be the case; few scholars – at least of those scholars who believe that the author
of the tragedies is the same author of Seneca’s prose works
2
– reject a Stoic influence
outright (the closest, perhaps, is Schiesaro 2003: 7).
1
1
Chrysippus is cited in Galen Hipp. et Plat. 3.3.13-22, who then proceeds to offer his own commentary on
Euripides’ lines. Epictetus discusses Eur. Med. 1078-9 at Disc. 1.28.7 and Eur. Med. 790ff. at Disc. 2.17.19-22.
For analyses of ancient philosophy’s use of tragic Medea as a topos, see Dillon (1996) and Gill (1983).
2
For recent scholarship arguing for separate authorship, see Kohn (2003).
Third: scholars who use Medea (usually Seneca’s character and not the tragedy as a
whole) in the context of ancient selfhood, broadly understood to mean any work which has
as its basis questions about character formation, character development, or characters’ ‘self-
perception’. In this group I count Henry and Walker’s 1967 CP article, “Loss of Identity:
Medea superest?,” which argues that Seneca’s Medea loses her identity over the course of the
tragedy; Braden’s “The Rhetoric and Psychology of Power in the Dramas of Seneca” (1970),
which sees an “achievement psychology” (13) in Seneca’s tragic characters that makes them
want to fill the void created by the deafening silence of the Senecan universe (30ff); with
the resurgence of Senecan and “self” studies in the 1990s and 2000s, we have Guastella’s
analysis of Medea’s negotiation of competing social roles in “Virgo, Coniunx, Mater: The
Wrath of Seneca’s Medea” (2001); Fitch and McElduff’s essay in Mnemosyne (2002),
“Construction of the Self in Senecan Drama,” which examines the negative consequences
of Senecan characters’ desires to become their ideal self; Schiesaro’s The Passions in Play
(2003) and the related 2009 essay in Seneca and the Self, which explore the Medea
character’s relationship to her past and desire to recreate the past as her future; and
Littlewood’s 2004 Self-Representation and Illusion in Senecan Tragedy, which, in the context of
Medea, explores her self-fashioned role as dramaturge (as a comparison to Atreus), and
touches on her relationship to the past and her similarities to Phaethon, Nature, and the
Furies.
The scholars in the third category largely avoid in-depth discussions of
philosophical concepts (Stoic or otherwise), but scholars in the fourth category read
2
Seneca’s Medea through the intersection of the ancient self and philosophy; usually this
manifests as a focus on those aspects of ancient philosophy which address issues of self-
control, self-development, etc. In this group I count a few primarily philosophical scholars
(Gill 1983, Sedley 1993, Nussbaum 1993, Dillon 1996, and Berry 1996), who discuss
mostly ancient philosophers’ uses of Medea (see above, group one); there are also, however,
a few substantial works in this category: Gill (1997, 2006, and 2009), who reads Medea’s
emotional states as manifestations of Stoic passions and then argues for a particular
concept of the ancient self (“objective-participant,” 2009: 79) based on his finding of Stoic
patterns in Senecan tragedy; Nussbaum (1994), who sees the tragedy of Seneca’s Medea
character as an advocation of Stoic “extirpation” of the passions, an example of the failure
of Peripatetic philosophy to restrain the passions adequately; and Bartsch (2006) and Star
(2006), both of whom read Medea’s self-exhortation and self-fashioning as examples of
Seneca’s Stoic philosophy, an example which (for Bartsch) exposes the risks of promoting a
philosophy which allows a person to fashion themselves along the lines of what they
consider to be correct behavior, even against social approval.
The final group (and the largest group) of people who study Medea are, more or
less, strictly interested in a philological, social, or political analysis of the tragedy or the
character. Not to say that these scholars discount ancient selfhood or ancient philosophy;
they merely tend to stay away from long engagements with ancient philosophy, and they
tend not to focus exclusively on aspects of the Medea character’s self-fashioning, self-
awareness, or self-development. Since they study Medea within a few different contexts, I
3
have tried to organize them within their category. Analyses generally addressing Medea or
her tragedy are Lawall (1979); Fyfe (1983); and Ohlander (1989), who also compares
Euripides’ Medea with the Medea of Seneca. Those who address Medea or her tragedy as an
element of a larger study of Senecan tragedy are: Fantham (1975), who sees resonances of
Vergil’s Dido character in Seneca’s tragic heroines; Segal (1983a), who looks at the
Orpheus character in Senecan tragedy (including the Medea); Segal (1983b), where,
although elements of the article address Seneca’s Stoicism (see above), the ultimate study is
a psychoanalysis of Thyestes and Medea and their anxieties concerning bodily boundaries;
Davis (1993), who focuses on the presence, makeup, and functions of the Choruses in
Seneca’s tragedies; Robin (1993), who applies film theory to the role of the Chorus in
Senecan tragedy; Curley (1996), and Boyle (1997, 2006), who extrapolates various thematic
elements (authority, power, guilt, etc.) from Seneca’s tragedies. Scholars who have written
on specific aspects of Seneca’s Medea are: Biondi (1984), who looks at the depiction of the
Argonautic voyage found within the choral odes of the tragedy; Abrahamsen (1999) who
uses Roman marriage law as a lens for viewing Medea’s choices; Benton (2003), who
examines the issue of Medea’s foreignness in the tragedy as a parallel to Seneca’s
cosmopolitan Rome; McAuley (2008), who builds on the work of Abrahamsen and
Guastella, providing a close reading of Seneca’s Phaedra and Medea in their roles as
mothers and wives; and Walsh (2009), who examines the characterization of Orpheus in
Seneca’s Medea in the context of the Argonautic voyage.
4
This dissertation sits most comfortably in the third group: a fairly standard literary
methodology (intertextual analyses, philology, theoretical approaches) with an emphasis on
Medea’s selfhood. Due to the lack of space, I avoid major engagements on issues of
philosophy (Stoic or otherwise), though I do engage with those scholars whose work I have
placed in a “philosophical” category (the second and fourth categories) when I have an
issue with their particular interpretation of the text. Though I do not engage with them
directly, my work has been informed also by scholars of the ancient self whose work does
not address Medea or other Senecan tragedy: Taylor’s Sources of the Self (1992), Toohey’s
Melancholy, Love, and Time: Boundaries of the Self in Ancient Literature (2004), and Sorabji’s
Self: Ancient and Modern Insights about Individuality, Life, and Death (2006). My main
dissatisfaction with Taylor and Sorabji is that they rely too heavily, in my opinion, on
philosophical sources for their data. Although they are important, sources from the ancient
world which self-consciously address selfhood – attempting to define the self, its structure,
or its operations – cannot be read as an accurate reflection of selfhood in the ancient
world. I would argue that philosophical sources of selfhood need at least to be read
alongside non-philosophical sources, which, in my dissertation, I choose to define as
“constructions” of the self. Rather than arguing about what certain philosophical schools
believe about selfhood (in which case, one ends up simply getting caught up in
disagreements between ancient schools of philosophy all over again), I much prefer to look
at “selves in action,” personas which have been designed to convey a sense of realism, and,
5
in this realistic construction, perhaps reveal certain assumptions about what a realistic self
needed to contain or do in order to function comprehensibly to an audience.
With these goals in mind, Toohey’s methodology is most akin to my project.
Toohey examines the appearance and proliferation of certain emotional afflictions
(boredom, lovesickness, melancholy, and acedia) in characters of Greek and Roman
literature and in the lives of early monks. The scope of his analysis is much larger than
mine – he incorporates medical texts,
3
visual representations,
4
Sanskrit poetry,
5
and
modern comparisons, and studies Mediterranean work spanning from the Hellenistic
period to the sixth century C.E.; but his way of approaching the “self” in antiquity
resonates with my aims in the dissertation and, in retrospect, especially accords with what I
have found to be the “self” presented in Seneca’s Medea character:
The “self” that I want to look at in this book is a very simple thing. It is a personal
self and relates to our perception of ourselves as autonomous beings, as creatures
set apart from others and from the physical world. … One should not confuse this
form of self- awareness with the type of moral or philosophical self-knowledge urged
upon us by the precept “Know thyself” or by Greek admonitions concerning the
worth of the unexamined life. Nor should my use of the term self be confused with
that relating to the representation of the self—in the autobiographical mode by which
we represent ourselves and our apparent identity to the world (our race, gender,
sexuality; our personality or “voice” or character—the normally visible signs of who
we are) (see Mascuch 1997; Porter 1997). That “self” resembles our particular
personal “signature.” … The “self” with which I am concerned is far less specific. I
am using the term, rather, in the sense of “self-consciousness,” as a sense of oneself
as a sentient being, separate from those about. … It is built finally on a sense of
alienation from others and the world. …
6
3
The Hippocratic corpus, Soranus, and Galen, to name a few.
4
Including the Euripides painter, Exekias, a Pompeiian wall painting, photographs of Australian Aboriginals,
and paintings by Giorgio de Chirico.
5
The Subhasitaratnakosa anthology, collected around 1100 C.E. (pp. 97-100).
When such a a registering of self is apparent in literary texts, it is built upon
an opposition of “inside-outside,” a partitioning off of the self from the world
about. We could speculate that the sense of self evident in such texts may evince a
standing outside oneself, a concern almost to watch, to weigh up, and to react to
one’s emotional and physical state almost as if it were another. Such a
representation of self may involve the highlighting of an individual’s mental
processes. It may involve not just a partitioning between inner self and the outer
world but also a partitioning between the body (approximating the outer world) and
the self (approximating the inner world). It is as if the subject stands at a remove
from his or her emotional reactions. The subject watches his or her reactions and
may feel powerless in their face. There emerges a disjunction between the body and
a person’s consciousness of it.
(Toohey 6-7)
It is striking to me that, given his project, Toohey neglects to deal with Seneca’s Medea
beyond a few occasional references. In my examination of Seneca’s Medea, I have
encountered the conflict between “inside” and “outside,” both with respect to Medea’s
relationship with her society (see chs. III and IV) and with respect to her relationship with
her physical body (see chs. I, II, and IV). I have also encountered, though, what Toohey
defines as the “autobiographical” self – where Medea constructs a representation of herself
which she communicates to others (see chs. I, II, and IV). Her self-representation to others,
as one might suspect, does not exactly correlate to her “sense of herself” when she is alone
onstage. Finally, my analysis of Medea and her attempt to build a “robust” self over the
course of the tragedy seems to accord with Toohey’s own conclusions that the boundaries
of the self can be reconstituted as a result of having undergone mental trauma. In his study,
the mental traumas are forms of depression and/or mania – lovesickness, boredom,
melancholy, and acedia; but Medea’s own madness (if it can be called a madness) seems to
result in a renegotiation and reassertion of her self-definition (see ch. IV).
7
A caveat: Toohey seems to elide a basic question that must be addressed before
embarking upon a study of selves in ancient literature: can we read characters as depictions
of “selves”? Toohey gives no satisfying answer to the question, nor does he seem to consider
it to be a methodological problem. The issue is complicated, and precisely why I chose to
look at Senecan tragedy for a different perspective on ancient selfhood.
First, I assume that the characters of Seneca’s tragedies were written to be, at the
bare minimum, comprehensible to a Roman audience. In other words, I assume that a
Roman audience would have been able to view a character’s speech as reflective of a
psychology, i.e., a functional “mind” behind the speech. Reasons why I have this
assumption include the general interiority of Senecan characters, the way they address their
animus (and other parts of their body/psyche),
6
and the numerous asides and self-address.
7

Seneca’s characters are written such that they express a critical faculty – they express the
building of an argument, they express disagreements with other parts of their selves, and
they repeatedly express hesitation. By giving us an expression of interior thoughts, we are
encouraged to view the characters as if their interiors are just as present even when they are
unexpressed. The effect of this assumption is that I tend to analyze the Medea character
with an eye to the likes, dislikes, desires, and motivations behind her speech. I analyze the
character as if her speech gives us a window into the unspoken interior.
8
6
E.g., HF 1236, Phae. 1262, Tro. 113B (“manus”); Med. 41, 895, 937, 976, 988, Tro. 613, Phae. 112, 592, 599,
719, Oed. 933, 952, 1024, Ag. 108, 192, 228, 868, 915, Thy. 192, 270, 283, 324, 423 (“anime”); Med. 914, 944,
1019 (“dolor”).
7
E.g., Tro. 607-14 (Ulysses), 861ff. (Helen), Med. 549-550 (Medea).
Secondly, while it is perhaps not the traditional avenue by which one might pursue
data about the self in Antiquity, Senecan characters, because of their interiority and their
presumed comprehensibility to a Roman audience, make as good a body of data as
anything else. Certainly, looking for the ancient self in tragedy is just as valid an approach
as looking in Catullus (e.g., Wray’s 2001 monograph Catullus and the Poetics of Roman
Manhood) or even philosophy. Moreover, studies of the self which have focused on
philosophical texts fail, in my opinion, to find adequate answers. What they find are
philosophical perspectives on the self in the ancient world, which are not necessarily
accurate representations of the ancient self, and which (usually) are written “in line” with
the principles of one philosophical school or another. In studying Seneca’s Medea
character, I have looked at her speech (and the “interiority” behind the speech) as a system
of data which communicates a self which is oriented in its interpretability to a wider
Roman audience, as opposed to the members of a particular philosophical school.
8
II. The performance of Senecan tragedy
Critics have disagreed widely on the real historical performance context of Seneca’s
tragedies. Conjectures have ranged from ‘they were written to be read as texts’ (Fantham
1982) to ‘they (or excerpts) were written to be performed in small groups of upper-class
men as “recitation dramas”’ (Zwierlein 1966) to ‘they were written to be performed in large-
9
8
I am not claiming, however, that a study of literary characters can provide the answer to questions about
ancient selfhood, or can speak to the “average” Roman’s experience of themselves in the early Imperial
period. I am claiming that literary characters are another avenue worthy of pursuit, as valid a set of data as
philosophical texts.
scale, city-sanctioned productions’ (Boyle 1997, et al.). There is no ancient evidence in
support of any of these theories in relation to Seneca specifically, nor is there evidence
against these theories in relation to Seneca specifically. I am persuaded by Boyle’s
arguments that the tragedies “were and are performable: they have been and are
performed” (1997: 11). The Roman theatrical technology of the time (see Boyle 2006) was
by all means well-equipped enough to deal with the stage requirements of Seneca’s
tragedies. Harrison’s (2000) collection of essays gives a good history of the question of
Senecan performance in scholarship, and for a listing of recent Senecan performances, see
Stroh (2008).
Recent work has investigated the presence of pantomime in Senecan tragedy –
scenes where one character narrates an action which another character is performing on
the stage (e.g., the beginning of Medea’s magic scene, where the Nurse narrates Medea’s
actions and then quotes her speech, Med. 670-739). While others have used the presence of
such scenes to argue that Seneca’s tragedies were written to be recited and not to be
performed, Zimmermann’s recent article (2008) breaks down the pantomimic content of
Seneca’s tragedies and argues the opposite – that the presence of pantomimic scenes
supports a dramatic performance of the tragedy and not a recitation.
9
One must also address the issue of gender in the performance of ancient drama,
and whether the fact that male actors performed female roles is important in our
interpretation of tragic female characters especially. My opinion is that one need not
10
9
And see Zanobi’s article in the same volume for a similar (and extended) argument.
necessarily problematize their analysis of a female character with the fact of ‘cross-gender’
performance on the stage. From a modern perspective, we can easily contemplate how a
male actor might change the performance of a female character, but that is only because we
can contemplate a female actor playing the female character in the first place. In the
context of ancient tragedy, whether written for recitation or for the stage, the option for a
female actor to play a female character had never existed. Similarly, the Roman audience
would expect an all-male cast in any city-sanctioned performance. Female actors were
present only in mime, where their very presence perhaps indicated a bastardization of the
“high” stage. Certainly, the content of Roman mime was usually lascivious in nature, and
the actors and actresses of mime likely performed without masks – these two elements
perhaps necessitated the inclusion of females (Marshall 2006, 8ff.) Though there is
evidence for jokes about male actors playing female characters in Plautus and other comedy
(for which, see Richlin 2005 and Marshall 2006, 60ff.), such jocularity seems like it would
have little function in tragedy. Regardless, it is near impossible that Seneca wrote the
tragedies with female actors in mind, and it is similarly impossible that the audience would
have looked to the stage and thought it worth observing that a male actor was playing
Medea, or Phaedra, or Clytemnestra.
10
Female characters had always been abundant in
ancient tragedy, and had always been played by men. Thus I suggest that the sex of the
11
10
This is not to say that an ancient tragedian could not write gendered characters (indeed, I argue in my first
chapter that the gender of the Medea character is extremely important for a full understanding of the
tragedy). One need not envision a female actress playing the role in order to write a female character for the
stage.
actor was not an issue for ancient viewers of tragedy, and it need not be an issue for a
modern analysis of gender in ancient tragedy.
III. Text and Translations
All Latin and Greek texts are from the relevant volumes of the Oxford Classical
Texts series, except for Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Heroides 12, for which I use the Teubner
and LOEB editions, respectively. I have noted where I disagree with Zwierlein’s text of
Seneca’s Medea. All translations are my own, unless otherwise specified. In translating
Seneca’s text, I have focused my energy on conveying Seneca’s word order, even at the
expense of a smoother English reading; I have felt that Seneca’s placement of words is often
particular and laden with meaning. Obviously, only some of my observations of the
purposeful Latin word order have found space to be discussed below.
IV. Chapter Summaries
Chapter I explores Medea’s perception of her gender and the different gendered
performances she enacts around different characters in the play. The first section shows
how Medea constructs and performs a particularly feminine persona when she speaks with
Creon and Jason, attempting to persuade them that she is not a threatening presence in
Corinth, that she did not possess agency when her past crimes were committed (i.e., she
performed them at another’s behest), and that she should therefore be given compassion
instead of exile. The second section explores the (well-trodden) topic of Medea’s transition
12
from virgin to wife/mother. Building off the arguments of Nussbaum, Segal, Fitch &
McElduff, Fyfe, Guastella, and McAuley, I focus on the difference between Medea’s
biological experience and the social consequences of her biology, investigating the parallels
presented in the play between Medea’s loss of virginity/innocence and the raping of nature
perpetrated by the Argonauts in their quest for the Golden Fleece. I conclude that Medea’s
crisis revolves around the physical and emotional penetration caused by the Argoanuts’
voyage to Colchis, and, building on the work of Jonathan Walters, that her attempt to seal
off the boundaries of her self is intrinsically complicated by the fundamental permeability
of the female body in Roman thought. This leads to the third section of the chapter, which
shows that Medea constructs and attempts to perform a masculine persona. She does this
by using masculine language (the language of war, hunting, virtus, gladiators, etc.) and by
making reference to her character in the Heroides, which represents a more passive
counterpoint to Medea’s present state.
Chapter II addresses Medea’s concept of her divine heritage, which seems to shape
her sense of her own power and authority, and how this sense of power then leads Medea
to think of herself as outside the human community. The chapter first contrasts the
assured way in which Medea entreats her grandfather, Sol, with other acts of entreaty in
Senecan tragedy, where mortals are doubtful about the outcome of their prayers. Secondly,
the chapter surveys the similarities between Medea’s soliloquies and the opening soliloquy
of Juno in Seneca’s Hercules Furens, showing that Medea’s attitude of divinity is similar to
that of other divine characters in Senecan tragedy. Medea, like Juno, feels disrespected by
13
her husband and believes that she has the ability (and justification) to punish him by
inflicting tragedy upon others. In the case of Juno, Hercules goes mad at her bidding and
kills his family. Finally, the chapter investigates the specter of Prometheus as another divine
parallel to Medea: Prometheus (and his place of punishment, Caucasus) appears in the
tragedy directly, but is also associated with the larger themes of the tragedy – the loss of the
Golden Age and man’s covenants with larger forces (gods, nature). Using Hesiod’s Theogony
and Works and Days, as well as Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, Vergil’s Eclogue 4, Catullus 64,
and Horace’s Carmina I.30, I show that the myth of Prometheus – connected to the loss of
the Golden Age, the acquisition of technology, and the advent of human suffering
(including Pandora) – provides a strong undertone for the story of Medea and the
Argonautic voyage. Medea is likened to Pandora in Seneca’s second choral ode (a “pretium,”
meaning both “reward” and “punishment”, the malevolent gift), and she represents also a
manifestation of nature, a harbinger of the loss of human innocence – like Prometheus.
Chapter III explores the problem of cultural foreignness in the tragedy – both that
of Medea’s self-perception, and that of the Corinthian community. First, Seneca’s
manifestation of the Medea myth is contrasted with previous instances, especially those of
Euripides and Ennius. One of the biggest changes Seneca makes to the myth is that he
eliminates all contact between Medea and the chorus. By doing this, moreover, Seneca has
eliminated any opportunity for Medea to integrate with the Corinthians; Seneca’s Medea is
more aware of her outsider status because she is actively shunned by the community.
Secondly, using the work of Isaac and Farney, the chapter investigates the Corinthians’
14
cultural attitudes about their own group and shows that the Corinthians seem to see
themselves as an ethnicity distinct from other Greek tribes. They also seem to view the
opening of their borders (one of the consequences of the the loss of the Golden Age) in an
entirely negative light; the Corinthians see Medea as an unwelcome penetration into their
society. The chapter also looks at the sheer barrage of geographic vocabulary in Seneca’s
Medea, contrasting the world-view of this tragedy with the geographical references of the
other tragedies, and highlighting how Medea sees her isolation in cultural terms.
The final chapter looks at the pragmatics of Medea’s self-construction. I build on
the arguments of previous chapters – that Seneca gives his Medea certain character traits
and puts her in a particular situation (access to divine power, yet culturally isolated from
her environment and socially excluded, by lieu of her gender, from a legitimate position of
authority) - to show that Medea faces the predicament of having to construct an identity
which will be robust against a lack of social acknowledgement or feedback. She also
possesses a specific anxiety about being forgotten by those around her. Her solution, as this
chapter shows, is to preserve her own memory: she chooses select elements of her past
identity and constructs an ideal self based on her past deeds. Because the deeds she clings
to are her past crimes (the betrayal of her father, the murder of her brother, the murder of
Pelias and betrayal of his daughters), possessing a stable persona necessitates that her future
action also be criminal. The chapter next investigates the means by which Medea effects a
solidity of character – I propose that she implements a practice-based therapy, in which she
idealizes specific practices (i.e., her past crimes) as opposed to “values” or “traits.” Tracing
15
through her fluctuating levels of agency and passivity in her soliloquies, the chapter finds
that Medea gains the most agency and confidence from recalling the specifics of her past
deeds, which give her a sense of future purpose.
Finally, the chapter deals with Medea’s final monologue, where many critics have
focused the bulk of their analysis (Nussbaum, Star, Gill, Segal, et al.), assuming (as I hope
to have shown, wrongly) that the final monologue represents the apex of Medea’s character
development. I show that Medea in her final monologue exhibits, in fact, a failure to
achieve her goals: her assertions of agency presented earlier in the play do not lead to an
active, embodied murdering of her children (she attributes the murder to her hands and to
the ghost of her dead brother, and moments of agency in the final monologue bear strong
resemblance to her assertions at the beginning of the play), and she does not find satiety in
a robust persona without social recognition (she insists that the second murder must be
seen by Jason and the Corinthians in order for it to have occurred, and she insists on
having them recognize who she is in this performance).
16
Chapter I: Medea femina
The gendered aspect of Seneca’s Medea is curiously understudied.
1
For a play (and a
myth) whose female protagonist is wrapped up in a very gendered system of value (her
status as wife, witch, and mother, and the major preoccupations of the plot with issues of
marriage, motherhood, and nature), the seminal works on this play tend not to address the
gendered aspect of Medea’s character in any serious depth. This chapter seeks to rectify this
oversight. I feel, moreover, that a gendered reading of Medea’s character (and of the play in
general) offers a wealth of meaning for the work (as I shall present below), both in itself and
as a contribution to the Roman literary tradition.
One of the possible reasons for this lack of attention is that the Medea character,
on the surface, seems uninvested in her persona as gendered. Medea is very much unlike
other female Senecan characters (Phaedra and Clytemnestra especially), who take pains to
point out the role of gender in the functioning of their psychology or in the tragedy of their
situations.
2
Medea, for the most part, refrains from focusing on her femaleness as an aspect
of her character. However, I will argue that, despite this, her character is still far from
‘gender neutral’. We shall find that Medea, though she does not express it thus, is
ultimately concerned with the social consequences of her biological sex – the female’s
17
1
McAuley (2008): 92 also notices this phenomenon. See esp. p. 92, n. 11.
2
Take, for example, Phaedra 230, 559ff., and 824ff., Clytemnestra at Ag. 116, 959ff., and Andromache at Tro.
418ff., 642ff., and 792ff.
status as wife, mother, or paelex. Her dissatisfaction with her status is ultimately a critique
of the powerlessness of these social roles assigned to members of her sex.
3
Another aspect of Medea’s gendered character (and another reason why we tend to
read her as gender-neutral) is the fact that she uses masculine language to describe her
situation and aims in the tragedy. We are conditioned not to see masculine terms as
gendered terms, but I shall argue later in the chapter that Medea’s use of masculine
language is striking and purposeful. In this, Seneca’s reworking of the myth departs
drastically from Ovid’s two versions (in Metamorphoses 7 and Heroides 12), in which Medea’s
femininity figures intensely as an integral part of her psychology. Using Ovid as a ‘hyper-
feminine’ counterpoint, I shall explore Medea’s attitude toward gender more closely in this
play.
The second, and larger, impetus for this chapter is to address the lack of attention
that has been paid to gender and sexual difference in recent works about the ancient self.
Richard Sorabji’s book, Self: Ancient and Modern Insights about Individuality, Life, and Death
(2006), for example, does not address women as a distinct category at all; he speaks rather
of some male or gender neutral (read: male) person who is the subject and object of his
18
3
While most recent feminist thinkers have found fault with the so-called sex/gender divide (Delphy 2003,
Guillaumin 1982, Wittig 2003, West and Zimmerman 1987), I feel that I must maintain it, partly because I
am interested in how the biological experience of woman affects the formation of identity in the ancient
world (for a modern comparison, see Iris Marion Young, 2000), but also because I believe that Seneca’s
Medea herself expresses an anxiety about the conflict between the gender expectations tied to her biological
sex and her desired social identity. Thus I want clarify my uses of ‘female’ and ‘feminine’: the former refers to
one’s biological status, something that is inherent and fixed about a person’s identity (e.g., the presence of a
uterus). The latter refers to one’s gender performance – a collection of culturally gendered attributes that are
neither inherent nor unalterable within the individual (e.g., growing one’s hair long, or wearing ‘women’s’
clothing). For references to this paradigm of thinking, see: Oakley (1985), Parsons (1951), Mead (1963),
Goffman (1976).
philosophical discussion. Women, female, and feminine are absent from the whole
equation. Sorabji is not alone in this neglect of attention for the ‘second sex’. Most of the
other scholars in the study of ancient selfhood (e.g., Taylor, Toohey
4
) also speak of subjects
who are either explicitly male or are gender neutral, with no discussion of the self
specifically as female.
5
A possible reason for this oversight is that scholars of the ancient self
are writing within the paradigm of the Cartesian human, whose biological processes are
distinct and separable from consciousness. The conscious experience, moreover, is thought
to be more or less identical among individuals. When we examine selfhood, our instinct is
to look at conscious experience, and we (perhaps unknowingly) avoid including the sexed
body in our discussion.
One could also argue that this lack of attention to the body is the fault of our
sources for ancient selfhood. The issues of the self which interest most scholars are found
in philosophical writings (Plato, Aristotle, Epictetus, Plutarch, etc.), where the authors
themselves (at least in the ‘useful’ passages) make no mention of women as a separate
19
4
Toohey (2004) investigates several women as part of his exploration of ancient selfhood (including Phaedra,
Valerius Flaccus’ Medea, and Callirhoe) though he does not discuss a potential difference between female and
male experience (bodily or otherwise). He treats the male and female psychology practically interchangeably,
despite his use of ancient medical texts, some of which considered women to be substantially different from
men (and his recognition that “suicide” and “hanging” were perhaps more common among women: 336 n.
39; 337 n. 41 and 51). Taylor, however, does at least acknowledge that selves are shaped by their social
contexts – that in certain social and historical moments, persons of a “class, or race, or sex, or poverty will
never be allowed to develop themselves in the relevant ways” (1992: 46). He does seem to leave out discussion
of ancient women (which, granted, is not his focus) and the potential for the biological experience of
womanhood to have an effect on identity (outside of social constraints).
5
Nussbaum, notably, differs from this in her Therapy of Desire, where she explicitly chooses a female subject/
object of philosophical therapy. I think, however, that (perhaps due to Cartesian notions of self-as-
disembodied-consciousness) Nussbaum treats her female student as an un-gendered consciousness, without
addressing the potential differences between female and male bodily experience.
category. The ancient writers in these contexts, like the modern, tend to present a subject
who is either explicitly male, or is gender neutral. Modern scholars should know better
than to take an ancient premise of non-specified gender at its word. We know full well that
the default gender in almost all Greek and Roman texts is male. When speaking specifically
of women, ancient authors tend to make it explicit.
This is not to say that there are no models of female identity in ancient literature.
What I would argue is that we need to look outside the traditional sources of the self to
find these models, and we need to look outside the places where ancient authors write
explicitly about selfhood and identity. In tragedy, female characters abound; here, I believe,
we might also look for ancient models of selfhood. My intention in this chapter is use the
character Medea as a test case for theorizing a female self,
6
one who may exist and operate
differently from the male/ungendered standard of ancient philosophical texts.
Medea is aware of her sex as a factor in her social situation and in her identity. This
chapter will argue that Medea sees herself as a participant in a gendered conflict. For her
there are masculine and feminine options available in this conflict, which correspond,
respectively, to a male or female bodily experience.
7
She sees that there are no desirable
feminine options open for her to adopt in her situation, and she wants to reject her present
position as wife and as mother. We will see, first of all, how Medea is able to manipulate
20
6
See my Introduction above, which argues that Seneca’s characters are meant to be psychologically coherent
and comprehensible. Also see the Introduction for my opinion on the writing of female tragic characters in
the ancient world, where they will inevitably be played by male actors.
7
See, e.g., McAuley (2008): 92-112 on Medea’s conflict with the positions of wife and mother; Guastella
(2001) on the reflections of Roman marriage in this tragedy.
gender roles in her interactions with Creon and Jason to affect their interpretation of her
personality (both past, present, and potential). Secondly, we will examine the transition
Medea perceives between her existence prior to Jason’s arrival and her current state –
perhaps not a gendered conflict per se, but essentially a conflict peculiar to the social
restrictions of femaleness. One of her desires in the context of changing herself is to undo
the transition she experienced when she fell in love with Jason and attached herself to him.
Thirdly, one of the major strategies she uses to achieve her detachment from Jason, her
post-amor self, and her female identity is an adoption of masculine standpoints and
masculine paradigms. Finally, we will explore the larger themes of the tragedy – nature and
the Argonautic voyage – to show that Medea’s gendered experience parallels a gendered
experience of the natural world (manifested as the sea) at the hands of the Argonauts.
Medea’s problem with her situation arises, as she expresses it, not from the fact of
being female per se, but from the limited social roles to which, being female, she must be
assigned.
8
Medea’s conflict is not with her biological sex (i.e., she is not speaking in
biological terms), but with the social roles to which she is chained as a female at the apex of
her social development. One of the ways we see this is in the fact that Medea refrains from
labeling herself as femina – her words of choice are rather coniunx or mater. The word femina
only occurs three times in the Medea, spoken by the Chorus and Creon, never by Medea
herself. Compare this to forms of coniunx and mater, which occur in the Medea sixteen and
21
8
Of course, Medea’s situation in Corinth would not have been a problem had Jason not abandoned her to
marry Creusa. If Jason had stayed with Medea, she would have been able to maintain, through her marriage,
a legitimate status in society, and possibly also a position of wealth, royalty, and prestige. When Jason leaves
her, Medea is denied access to the society, the privilege, which would have been available to her if she had a
legitimate husband (with standing in the society).
fourteen times, respectively, and are freely used by Medea to describe herself.
9
We might
contrast the sense of Medea’s gendered conflict with the very biological male-female
conflict experienced by Hippolytus in Seneca’s Phaedra, where he uses the word femina or
femineus eight times. In the Phaedra, the conflict is largely over inherent biological natures
(male/female; animal/human; etc.).
10
Medea is conflicted about the social status of her
personhood that is a consequence of her sex, rather than the status of her sex itself.
11
It is significant that Seneca’s tragedy ends without any mention of Aegeus, who, in
Euripides’ version, is the ruler of Athens who will welcome Medea as his wife after she
leaves Corinth. In Euripides’ tragedy, Medea is successfully transferred from one man’s
circle of authority to another’s; she maintains her social position as ‘wife’,
12
even though
the husband is different. In Seneca’s tragedy, there is no legitimate next step for Medea.
The absence of Aegeus and her flying exit both hint that Medea effectively removes herself
from any social equation – she is no longer wife or mother. Her transition out of (beyond)
the role of wife/mother can only result in her escape – a death, or deification.
22
9
Indeed, some critics (Gill, Star, McAuley) have conjectured that Medea’s conflict is ‘between coniunx and
mater’ (as if wife and mother were two separate sub-selves), though I do not think that this is the case
throughout the tragedy.
10
Not to assert that there is no gender conflict occurring in the Phaedra – I only want to stress how Medea’s
biological sex is de-emphasized in this tragedy as compared to another, more sex-focused tragedy.
11
The word mater, however, presents an interesting problem; of course “mother” is both a biological and
social distinction – biologically, the mother is the one who carries and bears children (always female), and
socially, the “mother” is also associated with a raising of children, though the functional mother in a family
may not be the same as the biological mother of the children (e.g., Creusa would have functionally operated
as mother of Medea’s two children). I explore below in what ways Medea distinguishes between the biological
and social aspects of this word.
12
She also maintains her social distinction as mother with Aegeus, since (in addition to any children she
might bear for him), she becomes the functional mother of Theseus (c.f. Ovid’s Metamorphoses 7.402ff.,
Phaedra 697).
I. Fictions of a Past Self
There are many examples in the text that show Medea’s attitude about her own past
as a personal fall from some past ideal condition.
13
My focus here is on her ability to
manipulate, in her exchanges with other characters, a characterization of her past self in
terms of a gendered ideal. Medea caters her self-presentation to her interlocutors’
expectations of a proper gender performance. In her exchange with Creon, Medea focuses
immediately on the positive aspects of her past self (later on, she hints at the loss of these
positive attributes, but she avoids pointing this out directly). She begins with a description
loaded with overt reference to her family history.
quondam nobili fulsi patre
avoque clarum Sole deduxi genus. (Med. 209-10)
Once I shone with a noble father, and I drew my famous lineage down from my
grandfather Sol.
generosa, felix, decore regali potens
fulsi: petebant tunc meos thalamos proci,
qui nunc petuntur. (Med. 217-19)
High-born, blessed, powerful with royal grace I shone: then, they used to seek my
bed, suitors, who now are sought.
Medea’s past self was full of positive attributes: high-born, lucky, powerful. Her verb of
choice in both passages, fulsi, emphasizes her divine (paternal) ancestry from the sun.
14

23
13
See chs. II and III for further discussion about the prominence of the Golden Age as a theme in the
tragedy. Also, see ch. IV for more in-depth analysis of Medea’s attitude toward her past.
14
See ch. II for Medea’s emphasis on divinity in her own self-construction.
Note that she aligns herself with her father’s lineage and patriarchal authority; there is no
mention of her own mother. Her focus is on how she functioned as an emulator of her
father and grandfather – she is descended from royalty, from divinity, and she knows how
kings and gods are meant to behave. She implies a possession, as a result of her breeding, of
civilized honor, control of will, and responsible rulership.
She also confesses to participating in an appropriate form of courtship with
appropriately matched males; unlike Jason, whom she must pursue, other suitors in
Colchis used to pursue her. She presents herself as powerful, a person of social worth, but
not sexually threatening. The past Medea does not represent a threat against the patriarchal
order of society, regardless of her divine heritage or her social position of authority. The
past Medea deferred to her patrilineal heritage, and she would have become a proper
queen, with a suitable husband. As we shall see, her description is not “the truth;” this is
how Medea wants Creon to see her.
Within the framing of the above statements about her ancestry and her former role
in the family, Medea also gives Creon a description of her father’s territory, which, as she
explains later, she gives up to save the Greeks.
quodcumque placidis flexibus Phasis rigat
Pontusque quidquid Scythicus a tergo videt,
palustribus qua maria dulcescunt aquis,
armata peltis quidquid exterret cohors
inclusa ripis vidua Thermodontiis,
hoc omne noster genitor imperio regit. (Med. 211-16)
Whatever the Phasis moistens with placid turns, and whatever the Scythian Pontus
sees from behind, where the seas grow sweet with marshy waters, whatever that
24
group terrorizes, armed with shields, widowed and enclosed by the Thermodontian
shores, this entirety our begetter rules with imperium.
Here the geographic description of the Colchians’ territory belies a statement about
Medea’s level of cultivation and lack of barbarity, as well as her connection to the natural
world. The nature of the two rivers is decidedly gentle and non-threatening – the placid
turns of the Phasis (placidis flexibus), the Pontus looking back, the waters growing sweet
(dulcescunt). The geography of Medea’s past, the land under the control of Medea’s father, is
not barbaric, and nature is not a threatening force. Contrast a moment later in the play,
when Medea is onstage only with her Nurse, without Creon or Jason (or the chorus)
15
as
audience:
non rapidus amnis, non procellosum mare
pontusve coro saevus aut vis ignium
adiuta flatu possit inhibere impetum
irasque nostras…. (Med. 411-414)
Neither a swift stream, nor a tempestuous sea, or the Pontus raging with the North-
West wind, or the strength of fire (aided by the wind) could hinder the attack and
our anger….
Medea describes the Pontus as saevus, raging. She describes the Phasis similarly later in the
play: “violenta Phasis vertit in fontem vada” (762: “the violent Phasis turns its shallow waters
towards its source”), again while she is alone (or, at most, accompanied by the Nurse or
chorus in the background).
16
Clearly, Medea’s characterization of her native environment is
25
15
See ch. III for more explanation of the chorus’ whereabouts in this tragedy. There is no evidence, one way
or the other, for the chorus’ presence onstage when they are not singing or speaking.
16
The chorus at 102 also describe the Phasis as “horridi,” “bristling”/“frightening” – certainly an adjective
with negative force.
far from consistent. She is likely shaping her description of the East in such a way as to
improve Creon’s opinion of it, and, by extension, of her.
17
The peacefulness of the geography is broken, however, with the stark armata
beginning line 214. The inhabitants who live in the territory ruled by Medea’s father,
unlike the natural environment, are barbaric and threatening. The vidua cohors are the
Amazons, the ultimate mythological female threat against men and traditional patriarchal
structures of society. Medea, in mentioning the Amazons as part of the geographical
description of her homeland, subtly implies that she herself might represent a threat
against Creon. Medea aligns herself (through the fact of their same origin) with the vidua
cohors.
Her choice of vidua is significant; Medea distinguishes the Amazons primarily by
their lack of male association, as if their barbarity derives from the fact that they live ‘off the
grid’ of any male-run kingdom, or any male-run household. The word also specifically
signals the loss of something that was once present; she characterizes the Amazons as
women who used to have male companions but got rid of them, or were deprived of them.
Medea is potentially in a similar situation – about to be deprived of her male connection
with society, about to become a rogue female.
18
Her veiled threat to Creon is that, unless
he should give Jason back to her, Medea will become also vidua, a woman existing outside
the patriarchal realm of society (and therefore a threat to that same patriarchal system).
26
17
See ch. III for a discussion of the geographical themes in the tragedy.
18
Cf. Med. 581, where the chorus refer to Medea as “viduata.”
It is clear that Medea is shaping her self-presentation for Creon. Her description is
carefully crafted to convey both her former status and civilization/breeding, as well as the
threat she might represent to the Corinthians, should she be bereft of a husband and
become a rogue female. Medea is trying to show the ways in which her present self is
different from her past self: now she is the one who seeks marriage-beds, she is a powerful
female threat to society. Embedded within her description is a clear threat to the security of
Creon’s people: though she comes from a noble and moral family, the removal of a male
presence in Medea’s social existence will turn her into an Amazonian – violent, bellicose.
Later in the same speech, after discussing her importance for the saving of the
Argonauts, Medea also mentions the sacrifices she has made for their safety – namely, her
loss of power and wealth, but also her loss of pudor and her father. Within a contrary-to-fact
assertion about her former self, Medea implies that, had she behaved like a normal/proper
virgin, Jason would have died and the Argo would have perished:
… virgini placeat pudor
paterque placeat: tota cum ducibus ruet
Pelasga tellus, hic tuus primum gener
tauri ferocis ore flagranti occidet. (Med. 238-41)
If shame/chastity had been pleasing to me-as-virgin, and if my father had been
pleasing: the whole Pelasgian land would have self-destructed along with its leaders,
and to begin with, this guy – your son-in-law – would have perished from the
flaming mouth of the fierce bull.
Note that Medea avoids overtly representing herself as a threat to Creon. Medea does not
discuss the person into whom she has changed since leaving Colchis; rather, when she
makes what could be interpreted as a moral assessment about her present self, she focuses
27
on the positive attributes of her past self – her modesty, her good relationship with her
father. There is, however, an emphatic contrast between past and present; Medea did in fact
betray her father, and she did in fact bring the Argo back to Greece. Her pudor and her
respect for the father have vanished with that decision. Again, Medea presents a contoured
self-presentation for Creon, including an implied threat about the person she has become.
Medea consistently maintains an attitude of passivity with Creon; as much as
possible, Medea keeps the focus of Creon’s blame on Jason. In his response to Medea’s
monologue, Creon states that Jason is innocent (“innocuum,” “purus”), and that Medea is
the source of the havoc wreaked by the pair:
tu, tu malorum machinatrix facinorum,
cui feminae nequitia, ad audendum omnia
robur virile est, nulla famae memoria… (Med. 266-268)
You, you are the lady-engineer of wicked crimes, in whom there exists the badness
of woman, in whom there exists a manly hardness for daring everything,
19
and in
whom there exists no mindfulness of your reputation…
Creon’s clearly gendered response attempts to negate Medea’s previous self-presentation as
properly feminine, properly controlled. He assesses her as a bad woman because she shows
masculine qualities. Medea’s response, however, is intended to re-gender herself as
feminine; she was merely acting on her husband’s command.
cur sontes duos
distinguis? illi Pelia, non nobis iacet;
fugam, rapinas adice, desertum patrem
28
19
It could be argued here that Creon unwittingly aligns Medea with the Argonauts themselves: they are
fundamentally defined in this tragedy as “audax” (Med. 301, 318, 347), and the Argonauts are described as
“robur” at Cat. 64.4 and Hor. Carm. I.3.9 (see ch. II for a discussion of these texts).
lacerumque fratrem, quidquid etiamnunc novas
docet maritus coniuges, non est meum:
totiens nocens sum facta, sed numquam mihi. (Med. 275-280)
Why do you distinguish between two guilty people? For him Pelias lies dead, not for
me; flight, add robbery, a deserted father and a slaughtered brother, and whatever
even now a husband is teaching to new wives, it is not mine: so often I was made
guilty, but never for myself.
20
Medea denies Creon’s assertion that she is masculine (i.e., that she is acting on her own
behalf, under her own direction) by stating that Jason is really the one in control. Even
now, she warns, Jason could be teaching a new wife to cause destruction. According to
Medea, Jason instructed her
21
to commit crimes. Medea’s reassertion of her femininity
seems at least to force Creon off the topic of culpability (he changes the subject at line 281),
and perhaps also convinces him to be more lenient with her while she remains in Corinth.
Creon, though suspicious (“fraudibus tempus petis,” 290: “you seek time for deceits”), is
moved somehow by Medea’s words and grants her more than enough time to execute her
revenge.
In her exchange with Jason, Medea’s posturing is of a different sort; while
maintaining a strong veneer of passivity, she increases the emphasis on how she is different
from her past self, how she now represents a threat to Jason because of the changes she has
undergone. Jason himself begins their conversation with a lament about his own situation,
caught between several exterior forces.
29
20
McAuley (2008): 103 agrees that mihi is a dative of advantage.
21
The use of docet here is interesting – is Jason literally teaching her how to do things (if so, Medea could be
implying that even her magical powers were not as much a factor as Jason’s role in the killings)? Or is he just
showing her what needs to be done?
O dura fata semper et sortem asperam,
cum saevit et cum parcit ex aequo malam!
remedia quotiens invenit nobis deus
periculis peiora: si vellem fidem
praestare meritis coniugis, leto fuit
caput offerendum; si mori nollem, fide
misero carendum. non timor vicit fidem,
sed trepida pietas: quippe sequeretur necem
proles parentum. sancta si caelum incolis
Iustitia, numen invoco ac testor tuum:
nati patrem vicere. quin ipsam quoque,
etsi ferox est corde nec patiens iugi,…. (Med. 431-442)
O fates always burdensome and harsh chance, equally evil when it rages and when
it spares! So often the god finds for us remedies worse than the dangers: if I had
wanted to keep faith with my wife as she deserved, to death my head would have
had to be offered up; if I should not wish to die, I in my wretchedness had to be
faithless. It is not fear that has conquered trust, but fearful piety: certainly, the
offspring would have followed the death of the parents. If, holy Justice, you reside
in the sky, I call on and invoke your divinity: sons
22
have conquered the father.
Wherefore also she herself, even if she is wild in her heart and not suffering to be
yoked,….
Jason presents himself as a victim of exterior forces beyond his control. He presents himself
as having good intentions (piety), but no good escape from his predicament.
23
30
22
Of course (as A.J. Boyle points out to me), it is significant that Jason uses nati here and not liberi. Though
Medea uses both terms to refer to her children, Jason never uses liberi in the tragedy. Jason’s love for his
children is entirely (and unsurprisingly) predicated on their maleness; his piety demands that he preserve his
lineage. We can only speculate that Medea’s revenge may have been different if the children were daughters –
certainly, one could argue that Jason would have had less attachment to his female children, making them less
fit to be used as punishment against him. Medea’s use of (g)nati and liberi is further explored below.
23
While I agree with Lawall about the sense of Jason’s person as he presents himself in this scene, I disagree
with Lawall about the ‘honesty’ of Jason’s self-portrayal (423-425). Jason is just as liable as any other character
to present their situation subjectively, i.e., to present their version of the truth (with greater or lesser actual
grounding in truth). There is no reason why we should trust what Jason has to say about himself any more
than we would trust what Medea has to say about herself.
Medea’s response undercuts Jason’s argument that he is the passive recipient of the
fates and the people around him.
24
Her initial tone is also passive; Medea speaks to Jason
as if he has control over where she goes, and as if he is to blame for her condition.
pro te solebam fugere – discedo, exeo,
penatibus profugere quam cogis tuis.
ad quos remittis? Phasin et Colchos petam
patriumque regnum quaeque fraternus cruor
perfudit arva? quas peti terras iubes?
quae maria monstras?
…
quascumque aperui tibi vias, clausi mihi–
quo me remittis? exuli exilium imperas
nec das… (Med. 449-54; 458-60)
For you I was accustomed to flee – I depart, I exit, I whom you compel to flee from
your household. To what places do you send me? Should I seek Phasis and the
Colchians, my father’s kingdom, and the fields fraternal blood soaked? What lands
do you order be sought? What seas do you show?
…
Whatever paths I have opened for you, I have closed them for myself – so where do
you send me? You order exile to an exile, yet you do not give it.
The repeated “where do you send me” and second-person verb forms put the focus on
Jason’s agency; Medea speaks as if she has none of her own. This is a strong counter to
Jason’s initial monologue, in which he presents himself as a passive victim of many things –
31
24
Whether or not Medea is onstage to hear Jason’s monologue, and whether or not his soliloquy is meant to
be “out of time” are immaterial. The audience’s experience of the two monologues side by side makes it clear
that each character is building an argument that they are unable to control their actions. For a similar
moment elsewhere in this tragedy, see the chorus’ first ode, which responds to Medea’s opening monologue,
despite the fact that the chorus were not onstage to hear it. For opposing readings of the juxtaposition of
Medea’s opening monologue and the first choral ode, see Henry and Walker (1967: 173-4), Hine (1989), and
Littlewood (2004: 72, 203-4).
fate, the gods, Creon/Acastus, and Medea. Medea negates his statement by putting herself
in a more passive position than him and destroying his claim to victimhood.
In this same speech, Medea outlines the deeds she arranged in Colchis which
secured Jason’s successful completion of his mission and the safe return of the Argonauts.
In this description, however, she avoids taking overt responsibility for the execution of her
brother and Pelias:
revolvat animus igneos tauri halitus
interque saevos gentis indomitae metus
armifero in arvo flammeum Aeetae pecus,
hostisque subiti tela, cum iussu meo
terrigena miles mutua caede occidit;
adice expetita spolia Phrixei arietis
somnoque iussum lumina ignoto dare
insomne monstrum, traditum fratrem neci
et scelere in uno non semel factum scelus,
ausasque natas fraude deceptas mea
secare membra non revicturi senis. (Med. 466-476)
Let the mind return to the fiery breath of the bull and, among the raging fear of
that indomitable race, the fiery herd of Aeetes on the arms-bearing field, and the
weapons of the risen enemy, when, at my order, the earth-born soldier fell in
mutual slaughter; add the sought-out spoils of the Phrixeian ram and the sleepless
monster ordered to give his eyes to unknown sleep, a brother handed over to death,
and (a single crime committed many times) daughters, deceived by my trick, who
dared to cut the limbs of the old man who would not revive.
The events in Colchis – the bull, the chthonic army, the dragon – were completed
successfully by Jason, though he would not have succeeded had Medea not used her magic
to aid him. The third-person narration of events distances both of them (though Jason
more so than Medea) from involvement in the act. Medea could have easily used the first
32
person (e.g., ‘I helped defeat the bull, I helped defeat the army, I put the dragon to sleep’)
or the second person (e.g., ‘You defeated the bull, you defeated the army,’ etc.), but the
effect of her narration is to imply that there was no one person directly responsible – the
events merely happened.
25
At the conclusion of this speech, Medea further expresses her passive role, and
exculpates herself, by exploring her deeds in terms of the question ‘cui bono?’:
26
ex opibus illis, quas procul raptas Scythae
usque a perustis Indiae populis agunt,
quas quia referta vix domus gazas capit,
ornamus auro nemora, nil exul tuli
nisi fratris artus: hos quoque impendi tibi;
tibi patria cessit, tibi pater frater pudor—
hac dote nupsi. redde fugienti sua. (Med. 483-488)
Out of all this wealth, what the Scythians bring from afar, snatched all the way from
the burnt people of India, what treasures the house (because it was stuffed) scarcely
contained (we decorate the woods with gold), as an exile I brought nothing except
the limbs of my brother: these things also I spent on you; for you my fatherland fell
away, for you my father, my brother, my shame – with this dowry I wed. Return to
the one fleeing her own things.
33
25
The meaning of Medea’s phrasing is discussed in detail in ch. IV.
26
c.f. also later in the Medea/Jason scene:
I: Obicere crimen quod potes tandem mihi?
M: Quodcumque feci. I: Restat hoc unum insuper,
tuis ut etiam sceleribus fiam nocens.
M: Tua illa, tua sunt illa: cui prodest scelus,
is fecit – omnes coniugem infamem arguant,
solus tuere, solus insontem voca:
tibi innocens sit quisquis est pro te nocens. (Med. 497-503)
J: What crime can you charge me with, finally? M: Whatever I have done. J: This one thing still
remains – how I could also become guilty for your crimes. M: They are yours, they are yours:
whomever the crime profits, that person committed it – let everyone censure the notorious wife, but
you alone protect her, you alone call her innocent: let whoever is guilty on your behalf be innocent
in your sight.
Medea asserts both her selflessness in helping Jason with his trials and escape from Colchis
and what she has inevitably lost as a consequence of helping him: the wealth of her
homeland, her homeland itself, her father, her brother, her pudor. She makes herself seem
like a selfless and dependent person, who, thinking only of how she could help her
husband, has ruined every other option for personal success. Medea no longer has a father,
a brother, a sense of honor, or a home to which she can return.
In her response to Jason, the first interaction we see between the two, Medea gives
Jason complete responsibility for her current predicament, her former crimes, and her
nebulous future, attributing to him all agency necessary to alter her present and future. In
doing so, the juxtaposition of their speeches simultaneously undercuts Jason’s assertion
that he was acting out of piety; the interpretation conveyed to the audience is that he has in
fact failed to perform his duty, neglecting to care for a person whose life is fully in his
charge. Thus Medea’s speech, through the presentation of herself as agency-less, hyper-
feminine, points out Jason’s failure to be an adequate caretaker.
Much like her conversation with Creon, though, Medea’s conversation with Jason
also hints (perhaps more overtly) at the threat Medea poses should she not get Jason back.
While she initially seeks to present herself as hyper-feminine (entirely dependent and
passive, without her own agency), Medea later emphatically asserts her own power and
dangerousness. We see this especially when we compare Medea’s conversation with Jason to
her earlier scene with Creon.
34
We note first that Medea’s references to the geography and culture of Colchis have
changed tone. When Medea asks Jason where she should go, we see an emotive geography
very different from that which Medea showed to Creon.
ad quos remittis? Phasin et Colchos petam
patriumque regnum quaeque fraternus cruor
perfudit arva? (Med. 451-453)
To what places do you send me? Should I seek Phasis and the Colchians, my
father’s kingdom, and the fields fraternal blood soaked?
Instead of the pleasant and regal landscape presented to Creon, Medea describes her
homeland to Jason with emphasis on the crimes she committed there – we see that the
fields are bloody with the chthonic army’s death.
27
Medea communicates to Jason much
more overtly the threat she represents.
Medea also describes the monsters and obstacles faced by Jason in Colchis, an
image of the landscape which she notably chooses not to show Creon:
revolvat animus igneos tauri halitus
interque saevos gentis indomitae metus
armifero in arvo flammeum Aeetae pecus,
hostisque subiti tela, cum iussu meo
terrigena miles mutua caede occidit;
adice expetita spolia Phrixei arietis
somnoque iussum lumina ignoto dare
insomne monstrum,…. (Med. 466-473)
Let the mind return to the fiery breath of the bull and, among the raging fear of
that indomitable race, the fiery herd of Aeetes on the arms-bearing field, and the
weapons of the risen enemy, when, at my order, the earth-born soldier fell in
35
27
Arva must mean fields, and therefore the fraternus cruor must refer to the army of sown men (part of Jason’s
challenge set by Aeetes), since Medea’s brother (whom one would expect to be the referent here) was killed at
sea and not on land.
mutual slaughter; add the sought-out spoils of the Phrixeian ram and the sleepless
monster ordered to give his eyes to unknown sleep,….
Whereas the image shown to Creon evokes notions of royalty, prestige, honor, and
peacefulness, Medea’s reminder to Jason about where she comes from focuses on the
gruesome and hostile elements – the land itself bursting with her father’s own monsters.
Medea is attempting to frighten Jason by reminding him both of the threatening landscape
of Medea’s home and of the power Medea possesses, that she could mitigate the threat of
all these monsters for Jason’s benefit.
We also see Medea describe in detail to Jason, as she does not do with Creon, the
crimes that were committed by her both in Colchis and in Greece.
28
She also admits,
sometimes directly and sometimes in circumlocution, that she did in fact commit these
crimes.
traditum fratrem neci
et scelere in uno non semel factum scelus,
ausasque natas fraude deceptas mea
secare membra non revicturi senis
…
nil exul tuli
nisi fratris artus. (Med. 473-76; 486-87)
A brother handed over to death, and (a single crime committed many times)
daughters, deceived by my trick, who dared to cut the limbs of the old man who
would not revive…. As an exile I brought nothing except the limbs of my brother.
36
28
Creon, in his conversation with Medea, does point out to her that she was responsible for the death of
Pelias. Medea’s acknowledgment to Creon of her involvement in her crimes only goes so far as to implicate
Jason as the motivation and teacher (“docet”) behind them. She reasserts her passivity in the situation: “totiens
nocens sum facta, sed numquam mihi” (Med. 280), a sentiment repeated to Jason later.
Medea recounts in detail the death of her brother and the death of Pelias, events which she
avoids mentioning to Creon. She is not trying to convince Jason that she is benign. The
purpose, I suspect, is to remind Jason that she has the capability to cause destruction, and
that she has no compunction about killing even her own family if they are an obstacle to
her goals. She is warning Jason that he should not become that obstacle. This threat is
much more detailed and overt than Medea’s attempt to warn Creon about her potential, if
bereft of a husband, to become an Amazonian female.
Later in their exchange, we see Medea in a powerful position outright, taking a very
different (and strong) stance with Jason when he asks for her help.
I: quid facere possim, loquere. M: pro me vel scelus.
I: hinc rex et illinc– M: est et his maior metus
Medea. nos †conflige. certemus sine,
sit pretium Iason. I: cedo defessus malis.
et ipsa casus saepe iam expertos time.
M: fortuna semper omnis infra me stetit.
I: Acastus instat. M: propior est hostis Creo:
utrumque profuge. non ut in socerum manus
armes nec ut te caede cognata inquines
Medea cogit: innocens mecum fuge.
I: et quis resistet, gemina si bella ingruant,
Creo atque Acastus arma si iungat?
M: his adice Colchos, adice et Aeeten ducem,
Scythas Pelasgis iunge: demersos dabo. (Med. 515-528)
J: What I might be able to do, tell me. M: If you like, a crime on my behalf. J: On
this side a king, and on that side – M: There is even than these a greater fear:
Medea. Set us against each other.
29
Allow us to fight it out, let the prize be Jason. J:
I yield, tired from evil deeds. Even you should fear disasters already often
experienced. M: All Fortune always stood beneath me. J: Acastus stands over you.
37
29
To quote Costa: “a thorny problem” (117). At A.J. Boyle’s suggestion, I am reading the imperative “conflige.”
M: Nearer is that enemy Creon: flee from both. Neither to arm your hands against
your father-in-law, nor to befoul yourself in kindred murder does Medea compel
you: flee with me, innocent. J: Yet who will withstand, if twin wars should fall upon
us, if Creon and Acastus should join their forces? M: To these add the Colchians,
add even Aeetes as leader, join Scythia with the Pelasgians: I shall deliver them
buried.
Jason’s requests for help are reminiscent of their original interaction at Colchis, where he
needed Medea’s magic in order to survive the flame-breathing bull and the earth-sown
men. His life was in Medea’s hands, and she alone had the ability to prevent his death.
Jason is again facing a superhuman task, should he want to fight against the armies of
Acastus and Creon. By asking her for help, Jason gives Medea agency and authority (as she
had in Colchis) to present openly and utilize the full extent of her power – she could
escape with Jason and destroy any possible obstacle in their way, including the armies of
Corinth and Iolcos combined.
The Medea we see here is very similar to the character we see when Medea is alone
onstage (compare, e.g., Med. 147-149 and 411-414), and very different from the character
Medea has until now been presenting to Creon and Jason. This Medea is aware of her
power, confident in her ability, and not afraid to take on any mortal enemy. There is no
trace of her former passivity and dependence. When Jason asks for help and hands over to
Medea agency over his future, Medea is quick to take the reins and plot a concrete course
of escape.
Jason, however, is not persuaded by Medea’s powerful and confident persona, and
he refuses her offer of aid. They continue arguing until mention of the children is made, at
38
which point Medea realizes that the children can be a way to destroy Jason (her aside at
549-550). Having realized this, she switches back into her ‘passive’ mode of speech, asking
Jason to forgive her outburst:
suprema certe liceat abeuntem loqui
mandata, liceat ultimum amplexum dare.
gratum est. et illud voce iam extrema peto,
ne, si qua noster dubius effudit dolor,
maneant in animo verba: melioris tibi
memoria nostri sedeat; haec irae data
oblitterentur. (Med. 551-557)
Surely let it be permitted to say some final requests, while I am departing, let it be
permitted to give a last embrace. Thank you. And with my final words I ask that, if
in some way our wavering grief has poured out rashly, let the words not stay in your
mind: let a memory of our better self rest with you; let these things given forth in
anger be forgotten.
Medea moves to impersonal constructions, diminishing the presence of her “I” as much as
possible. Jason, who was not convinced by Medea’s powerful persona, seems to believe that
Medea is being truthful/forthright when she expresses this passive and humble demeanor.
He seems to accept Medea more easily in an appropriately feminine guise.
Finally, the important distinction that Medea makes to Jason (and Creon, at
238-241) between her present self and her past self implies that she is perhaps no longer as
proper a woman as she might pretend to be. She identifies her losses for Jason’s sake (her
fatherland, her father, her brother, and pudor) as her dowry – the price she paid in marrying
Jason.
tibi patria cessit, tibi pater frater pudor—
hac dote nupsi. (Med. 488-489)
39
For you my fatherland fell away, for you my father, my brother, my shame – with
this dowry I wed.
Of course, pudor is an important and complex feminine attribute. By pudor, Medea does not
simply refer to her sexual chastity, but also to her sense of honor, which, had she kept it,
would have required her not to kill her brother or leave her father and country. Her
decision to break free of the constraints of proper behavior is the decision to which Jason
owes his life. From another angle, it was the saving of Jason’s life that made Medea lose
those attributes that would have made her a virtuous woman. She makes here a clear
distinction between her past and present self – her past self had pudor (as well as male
relatives), but her present self has lost that or given it up.
We can compare the cases of Phaedra and Clytemnestra, where a sense of pudor is
similarly associated with appropriate (female) social behavior, and specifically the
appropriate behavior of wives and husbands towards each other. In the Phaedra, pudor is
one of the qualities which ought to have prevented Theseus from leaving his wife and being
unfaithful to her:
pergit furoris socius, haud illum timor
pudorve tenit: stupra et illicitos toros
Acheronte in imo quaerit Hippolyti pater. (Phae. 96-98)
The companion of madness proceeds, not at all do fear or shame stop him: the
father of Hippolytus seeks rapes and illicit beds in the depths of Acheron.
In an exchange with her Nurse, Phaedra states that pudor is a quality which prevents her
from declaring and acting on her love for Hippolytus; it is connected to her reputation
40
(fama), and the pudor in her mind urges her to commit suicide to protect herself from
crime:
non omnis animo cessit
30
ingenuo pudor…
virum sequamur, morte praevertam nefas. (Phae. 250, 254)
Not all shame has fallen from my noble mind…. Let me follow my husband, let me
prevent crime with death.
It is also pudor that fails her when she urges herself to act on her passion and to confront
Hippolytus with her love:
magna pars sceleris mei
olim peracta est; serus est nobis pudor:
amavimus nefanda. si coepta exequor,
forsan iugali crimen abscondam face… (Phae. 594-597)
A great part of my crime has long been finished; shame is too late for us: we have
loved unspeakable things. If I follow the things begun to their end, perhaps I might
hide the crime with the matrimonial torch.
For Phaedra, then, pudor seems to represent her fidelity to Theseus, and Theseus’ supposed
fidelity to her. At first, it prevents her from acting on her desire for Hippolytus; later, when
she does act on that desire, it is her pudor that has disappeared.
Similarly for Clytemnestra in the Agamemnon, pudor seems to represent one aspect
of the bond of fidelity between her and her husband. At the beginning of her first
appearance onstage, Clytemnestra assesses the degradation of her marriage thus:
licuit pudicos coniugis quondam toros
et sceptra casta vidua tutari fide;

41
30
Notice the similarity to Medea’s own statement “cessit...pudor” (Med. 488).
periere mores ius decus pietas fides
et qui redire cum perit nescit pudor. (Ag. 110-113)
It was permitted once to nurture the virtuous beds of a wife and widowed scepters
with a chaste fidelity; customs, law, honor, piety, pledges – they have all
perished, as well as that thing which does not know how to return when it has died
– shame.
Clytemnestra seems to think that the qualities which once made her a good wife have
vanished. The loss of pudor in particular is irreparable. Later in the play, she reiterates that
pudor is the force which could prevent her from killing her husband (138), and she seems to
disagree with her earlier declaration that all her shame had vanished and could not return.
In an argument with Aegisthus, Clytemnestra’s pudor seems to urge her to reconsider the
permanence of her extramarital affair:
surgit residuus pristinae mentis pudor;
quid obstrepis? quid voce blandiloqua mala
consilia dictas? scilicet nubam tibi,
regum relicto rege, generosa exuli? (Ag. 288-291)
Some shame left over from my earlier mind rises to the fore; why are you drowning
it out? Why do you keep giving me bad advice with a flattery-spouting tongue? As
if I would marry you, with the king of kings left behind, a noble-blooded woman
(wedded) to an exile?
Clytemnestra’s pudor seems to make her remember the disadvantages of leaving
Agamemnon for his socially unacceptable cousin. She credits her shame with urging her to
take a better course of action – saving her legitimate marriage.
For Clytemnestra and Phaedra, therefore, pudor maintains the marital pledge of
fidelity. It is also, however, easily lost with the advent of an unfaithful act (or, in the case of
42
Phaedra, even the intention to attempt an unfaithful act). For Medea, then, stating that she
gave up her pudor is the equivalent of stating that she is no longer qualified to be a proper
wife. Although her pudor at Med. 238 and 488 refers to her damaged sense of preventative
shame in her relationship with her father
31
(damaged because she decided to betray her
father, and by betraying him she broke a covenant of fidelity between the two of them),
Medea creates room to doubt her ability even to be a faithful wife to her husband Jason. A
logical consequence of her distinctions between a past, passive (appropriately feminine)
Medea and the present is that the present Medea, unlike the past Medea, is now a
potentially threatening presence in the community – a woman without male relatives and
without the sense of shame that would prevent her from committing crimes against society
and family.
We see in both interactions (i.e., between Medea and Creon, Medea and Jason) that
Medea shapes her self-presentation to each of her interlocutors. What is interesting,
moreover, is the way in which Medea uses an understanding of gendered attributes in these
self-presentations. For Creon, she paints herself as “good princess” who has the potential
either to be “good queen/wife” or “threatening Amazon.” Medea works with paradigms
that Creon would already understand and recognize, feminine attributes which are already
43
31
For a good discussion (and “taxonomy”) of Roman pudor, see Kaster (2005): 28ff. Of special use here is
Kaster’s pudor as improper “extension” of the self (Kaster’s 4th type, manifested, in the cases of Medea,
Phaedra, and Clytemnestra, as “being physically or verbally aggressive” or “pursuing self-interested ends at the
cost of social obligations” [44]) or as improper “lowering” of the self (Kaster’s 6th type, 47-48). Indeed, though
it lies outside the scope of this dissertation, one could use Kaster’s taxonomy of pudor to read Medea’s gender
presentation as a balancing act between improper “extension” of self (type 4) – in response to iniuria (type 2) –
lest she fall prey to an improper “retraction” of self (type 5). See Kaster’s discussion of the relationships
between different types of pudor in action (48ff., especially 52ff.).
socially available to her. There is no attempt to gender herself as anything other than
feminine. Similarly with Jason, the first part of her argument and her final words rest on a
presentation of herself as feminine: a dependence on her husband to tell her what to do,
an inability to act on her own, and a commitment towards working on her husband’s
behalf, even to her own detriment.
II. The paradox of virgo, coniunx, and mater
One of the major factors in Medea’s gendered self is her understanding of her
transition between various life stages – specifically, Medea focuses on her transition from
virgin to wife to mother. Throughout descriptions of her past life, moreover, Medea seems
to convey an implicit assumption that the self of the present is connected to the self of the
past; present Medea can remember and identify with the ‘Medea’ that existed prior to the
advent of the Argo and her departure from Colchis. She also, however, sees herself in the
present as fundamentally different from that former self, in that her attachment to Jason
(resulting in the adoption of the feminine roles of mother and wife) has changed the way
she acts and the way she connects with other people. She seems to believe, therefore, that
she possesses a coherent self over time that develops and can change quite drastically, but
does not lose or completely replace the former self. For Medea, there is a fluid timeline
between then and now; this double existence, however, is not without paradoxes.
First, I propose that Medea wishes to return to her virgin self. Medea wishes to
remedy her abandonment and the threat of exile by returning to a previous state – her life
44
prior to the arrival of the Argonauts at Colchis.
32
Medea attempts to effect this eradication
by seeking a reversal of Jason’s literal and figurative penetration of her self – i.e., by
destroying the marriage, eliminating the evidence of sexual union (the children), and
violently restoring/reasserting her own bodily boundaries.
The major textual example supporting this assertion occurs at the seeming
culmination of Medea’s project, after the murder of one of her sons:
iam iam recepi sceptra germanum patrem,
spoliumque Colchi pecudis auratae tenent;
rediere regna, rapta virginitas redit. (Med. 982-984)
Now, now I have regained the scepter, my brother, my father, and the Colchians
possess the spoil of the golden beast; the kingdom has returned, stolen virginity has
returned.
The completion of Medea’s revenge is the successful return of the past, and her maiden
status is aligned with the life of her brother, the possession of her father’s kingdom, and
the sanctity of the golden fleece in Colchis.
It is also clear through the rest of the tragedy, though, that Medea draws a sharp
distinction between her present self and her past self with the loss of her virgin status. To
Creon, Medea identifies her virginity as something which was lost when she decided to save
Jason and the Argonauts:
virgini placeat pudor
paterque placeat: tota cum ducibus ruet
45
32
Many other have noted this drive, though my analysis of the nature of this desire differs from those of
previous critics. For other discussions of this topic, see, e.g., Henry and Walker (1967): 177-179; Schiesaro
(2003): 208ff.; Lawall (1979): 425-426.
Pelasga tellus, hic tuus primum gener
tauri ferocis ore flagranti occidet. (Med. 238-241)
If shame/chastity had been pleasing to me-as-virgin, and if my father had been
pleasing: the whole Pelasgian land would have self-destructed along with its leaders,
and to begin with, this guy – your son-in-law – would have perished from the
flaming mouth of the fierce bull.
Medea seems to make the same distinction to herself at the beginning of the tragedy as
well:
haec virgo feci; gravior exurgat dolor…. (Med. 49)
I did these things while a virgin; let a heavier grief push me beyond.
So for Medea, returning to her prelapsarian state of safety means returning to a maiden
state, expunging the polluting presence of husband and children.
33
Second, although Medea looks back on her pre-Jason life as a Golden Age of sorts,
to which she wishes to return, she also sees her transition to motherhood as a graduation
from ‘virgin’ behavior to something worse – her motherhood necessitates a continued
escalation of her crimes.
34
She views her previous crimes as “practice” (“prolusit,” 906), as
“girly madness” (“puellaris furor,” 909). It is paradoxical because she can only return herself
to a past virgin state by working within the “escalated” paradigm of her present maternal/
married state.
46
33
Compare also Med. 1012-1013, where Medea basically promises to abort (“scrutabor ense”) any unknown
fetus left inside her as a reminder of her husband’s presence. This will be discussed in more detail below.
34
This is in addition to the veiled threats mentioned above of Medea’s loss of pudor when she agreed to help
Jason and the Argonauts escape back to Greece. Obviously, a lost pudor also indicates a women with potential
to inflict more damage.
Medea associates marriage and motherhood with an escalation of the degree to
which she must take revenge on others. Medea clearly draws the distinction between her
virgin self and her wife self at the beginning of the tragedy, and she states that motherhood
necessitates her to commit more severe crimes:
levia memoravi nimis:
haec virgo feci; gravior exurguat dolor:
maiora iam me scelera post partus decent. (Med. 49-50)
I recall trivial things too much: I did these things while a virgin; let a heavier grief
rise out: now greater crimes fit me post-partum.
Medea expresses a similar sentiment as she urges herself to perform the killing of her
children in her final monologue:
fas omne cedat, abeat expulsus pudor;
vindicta levis est quam ferunt purae manus.
…
quidquid admissum est adhuc,
pietas vocetur. hoc age! en faxo sciant
quam levia fuerint quamque vulgaris notae
quae commodavi scelera. prolusit dolor
per ista noster: quid manus poterant rudes
audere magnum, quid puellaris furor?
Medea nunc sum; crevit ingenium malis:
…
quaere materiam, dolor:
ad omne facinus non rudem dextram afferes. (Med. 900-915)
Let everything acceptable fall away, let shame fall away, driven out; it is a trivial
revenge which pure hands carry out. … Whatever was committed before now,
let it be called piety. Go on! Behold, I shall make it such that they know how paltry
and how common a quality were the crimes I committed. My grief was playing with
these incidents: what great thing were inexperienced hands able to dare, what great
thing girly madness? I am Medea now; my inborn talent has grown with evil
47
deeds…. Seek material, grief: you will not bring an inexperienced right hand to
every crime.
In her opening monologue, she associates the fact of her motherhood with the necessity to
complete her revenge. She contemplates what she should do to Jason:
vivat; per urbes erret ignotas egens
exul pavens invisus incerti laris,
iam notus hospes limen alienum expetat;
me coniugem optet, quoque non aliud queam
peius precari, liberos similes patri
similesque matri – parta iam, parta ultio est:
peperi. (Med. 20-26)
Let him live; let him wander through unknown cities bereft – an exile, shaking,
hated, of uncertain home – already an infamous houseguest let him seek out a
foreign threshold; let him wish for me as a wife, and I am not able to pray for
anything worse, (let him wish for) children similar to their father and similar to
their mother – it is born already, revenge is born: I have given birth.
Medea identifies her motherhood as an integral part of the necessary revenge for Jason’s
abandonment. Her children, who (presumably) resemble their father and their mother,
become part of Jason’s demise.
As she predicts at the beginning of the tragedy, motherhood does become the
means by which Medea can wreak the most damage on Jason’s emotions. During their
exchange, she discovers that Jason has a deep attachment to his children, and she decides
to punish him by manipulating that attachment.
M: contemnere animus regias, ut scis, opes
potest soletque; liberos tantum fugae
habere comites liceat, in quorum sinu
lacrimas profundam. te novi gnati manent.
I: parere precibus cupere me fateor tuis;
48
pietas vetat: namque istud ut possim pati,
non ipse memet cogat et rex et socer.
haec causa vitae est, hoc perusti pectoris
curis levamen.
35
spiritu citius queam
carere, membris, luce. M: sic natos amat?
bene est, tenetur, vulneri patuit locus. (Med. 540-550)
M: My mind, as you know, is able to scorn royal aid, and accustomed; only let it be
permitted that I have the children as companions in flight, on whose breasts I
might pour forth tears. For you, new sons await. J: To yield to your prayers – I
confess that I wish it; but piety forbids: for that I should be able to suffer this [i.e.,
losing the children], not even the king and father-in-law himself could compel me.
This is the reason for life, this is the solace for the cares of a charred heart. More
quickly would I be able to lack breath, limbs, or light. M: (aside) So he loves his
sons?
36
This is good, he is trapped, and a space has opened up for the wound.
She clearly displays a belief that her own change from the status of virgin to the status of
mother/wife makes appropriate a different status of crime against her enemies.
This element of Medea’s character has been thoroughly discussed by many critics;
indeed, Medea’s paradoxical stance towards her maternity/marriage is perhaps the most
intriguing puzzle of the tragedy. What the critics have not noticed is that Medea’s desire to
return to a virgin state has as much to do with her desire to undo specifically the
penetrative aspect of her wife-dom and motherhood as with her desire to remove the title of
wife, her status qualification. She wishes to undo the physical penetration of the husband/
49
35
Note the allusion to Heroides 12.77, where Jason had supposedly referred to Medea as his only “levamen”
when he needed her to save his life in Colchis. The use of the word signals Jason’s true vulnerability at this
point.
36
Medea connects Jason’s claim to pietas with his sons in particular; she refers to her children as liberi and
(g)nati throughout the tragedy, but she likely manipulates her use of (g)nati when she is speaking to Jason (as
at Med. 998, 1000, 1024 – and it is interesting that Medea only uses (g)nati in her first scene with Jason when
she speaks of Creusa’s hypothetical children, Med. 543 above) or to Creon (as at Med. 283 and 289).
Furthermore, one could argue that Medea uses the term sarcastically when she is speaking to herself (as in
this passage and Med. 575, 843, and 845). As I noted above, Jason never uses the term “liberi.”
outsider.
37
An exploration of the choral odes and the parallel experience of nature at the
hands of the Argo help to elucidate Medea’s anxieties about her own physical boundaries.
III. Nature and the Argo
What exists in the natural world (as characterized by the chorus) prior to the Argo
reminds us of the landscape of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter:
38
a sort of Golden Age,
characterized by innocence, chastity, honour, an absence of pain or inappropriateness.
39
As
regards her personal experience of this previous time, Medea not only possessed pudor and
a father, but it pleased her to do so (238-9), it was a natural part of her selfhood.
The assault against Medea parallels the assault against nature in the macrocosmic
sense of the Argonautic voyage and their breaking of the covenant with nature.
40
In
addition to the frequent linguistic echoes between the descriptions of nature and of Medea
in the play,
41
the choral odes present a particularly violent reading of the macrocosmic
parallel: the Argonauts were motivated by heroism and desire, they overstepped appropriate
50
37
Some critics have advanced a reading along these lines, though none have used the choral odes and macro-
plot of the tragedy as comparison. See Nussbaum (1996), who relies heavily on Segal (1983b). I have problems
with both interpretations, which I discuss in greater detail below.
38
I mention the Homeric Hymn to Demeter in particular because of Medea’s own self-comparison to Proserpina
(Med. 11-12). Obviously, themes of the Golden Age abound in ancient literature, and I explore more
comparative examples in ch. II.
39
Homeric Hymn to Demeter 3ff.
40
There is much written about the Golden Age in this play: see, e.g., Boyle (1997), (2006), Schiesaro,
Littlewood (2004), Henry and Walker, Lawall. See also ch. II for further exploration of the Golden Age
theme in this play.
41
See, e.g., Littlewood (2004): 151ff. et passim.
boundaries in sailing to Colchis, and the voyage was an act of penetration and domination
against the natural world.
In the first Argonautic ode, the chorus describe life prior to the advent of sailing
technology.
Candida nostri saecula patres
videre procul fraude remota.
sua quisque piger litora tangens
patrioque senex factus in arvo,
parvo dives nisi quas tulerat
natale solum non norat opes. (Med. 329-334)
White was the age our fathers saw, with trickery removed far away. Each man,
reluctant/slow, touching his own shores and having become elderly in his paternal
field, rich in little, he had not become acquainted with wealth except that which his
natal land bore.
Much like Medea’s recollections of her pre-Argonautic life, this life is peaceful, without
inappropriate ambition, without crime. In this description the chorus allude to the
progress represented by the Argo as a “fraus,”
42
a hurt/harm/imposition. This peaceful
accord between man and nature, the well-partitioned world (“bene dissaepti foedera mundi,”
335), is then disrupted by the “Thessalian pine,” which throws that well-partitioned world
into confusion.
The vocabulary used by the chorus to describe the Argonautic voyagers is
instructive. The chorus attest that the Argonauts were desirous of the heroic quest to steal
the Golden Fleece. The first Argonautic ode (which is usually read as eventually
51
42
See Ch. II for further discussion of the Argonautic voyage as fraus in the context of Vergil’s Eclogue 4.
sympathetic toward the Argonauts, or positive about progress in general)
43
begins by
describing the first sailor:
audax nimium qui freta primus
rate tam fragili perfida rupit…. (Med. 301-302)
Too bold the man who first broke the faithless waves with such a fragile
vessel….
This sentiment (i.e., that the Argonauts were too bold or greedy) flows through much of
the Argonautic odes. In the first, Tiphys and Orpheus are the only Argonauts named as
part of the expedition. Tiphys is called ausus (318), avidus nimium (326), and audax (346). In
the second Argonautic ode, the chorus implicate all of the Argonauts equally: quisquis
(“each one”) of the Argonauts in the audax ship broke the covenants of nature and merited
punishment (607ff.).
Also called ausus is Phaethon (599), to whom the Argonauts are compared, because
of his refusal to recognize and respect proper boundaries:
ausus aeternos agitare currus
immemor metae iuvenis paternae
quos polo sparsit furiosus ignes
ipse recepit.
constitit nulli via nota magno:
vade qua tutum populo priori,
rumpe nec sacro violente sancta
foedera mundi. (Med. 599-606)
Having dared to whip up the immortal chariot, the youth unmindful of his father’s
course, the flames which he, maddened, scattered in the heavens, he himself
52
43
See, e.g., Lawall: 422, Henry and Walker: 180.
received. The known path costs no man greatly: go where it was safe for earlier
people, and don’t break, violent man, the sacrosanct pacts of the world.
The Argonauts are likened to Phaethon, who destroys himself and sets the world aflame by
attempting to master his father’s chariot, a task beyond his means and beyond what is
appropriate. The Argonauts, too, break the accords between man and nature when they sail
across the sea; the result for them is similar – fear in the midst of the expedition and their
own eventual destruction.
The first Argonautic ode also gives us an image of the bounds which have been
broken by the Argonauts. After describing the former, pre-lapsarian age of man (“candida
saecula”), the chorus tell how that innocent age was destroyed:
bene dissaepti foedera mundi
traxit in unum Thessala pinus
iussitque pati verbera pontum…. (Med. 335-337)
The covenants of a well-partitioned world the Thessalian pine dragged into a
single thing, and it ordered the sea to suffer the lash.
The pacts between man and nature, which kept man in his appropriate place, were broken
by the Argonauts. Though some have argued that this ode ends with a positive, or at least
ambivalent, assessment of the voyage, the effects on the world are clearly unsettling:
nunc iam cessit pontus et omnes
patitur leges:
non Palladia compacta manu
regum referens inclita remos
quaeritur Argo —
quaelibet altum cumba pererrat.
terminus omnis motus et urbes
muros terra posuere nova,
53
nil qua fuerat sede reliquit
pervius orbis:
Indus gelidum potat Araxen,
Albin Persae Rhenumque bibunt—
venient annis saecula seris,
quibus Oceanus vincula rerum
laxet et ingens pateat tellus
Tethysque novos detegat orbes
nec sit terris ultima Thule. (Med. 329-379)
Now already the sea yields and suffers all laws: fit together by the hand of Athena
and bearing the oars of kings, the famous Argo is no longer sought — any flimsy
skiff wanders around on the deep. Every boundary is moved and cities have placed
their walls on new land, nothing in the place where it used to be has the accessible
world left behind: the Indian drinks the icy Araxes, the Persians drink the Elbe and
the Rhine – an age will come in later years, when Ocean looses the chains of things
and the huge earth lies available and Tethys reveals new worlds, nor will Thule be
the furthest in the lands.
The world is turned around; nothing is where it is supposed to be, no one lives where they
are supposed to live. The post-Argo world is signified by an inability to know where things
or people are, utter confusion of location and propriety. This in itself is usually a poetic
trope for showing that the society is in a state of disorder, or has been damaged.
44
Similar to this tale of a confused world is the chorus’ description of Orpheus on
the voyage. Specifically, the chorus narrate how Orpheus saved the Argonauts from the
Sirens:
quid cum Ausonium dirae pestes
voce canora mare mulcerent,
54
44
Hine sees a reference to Vergil’s Eclogue 1.59-63, where, in a list of adynata, “the Parthian will drink the
Araris or Germany the Tigris” (62). The post-Argonautic world is a world of impossibility, or even nightmare
– for everyone who swore their adynata by the separateness of geographic spaces, their vows are no longer
valid. Compare Medea’s own vow, based on the continuity of natural phenomena (which she has the power
to alter), at Med. 401-407.
cum Pieria resonans cithara
Thracius Orpheus
solitam cantu retinere rates
paene coegit Sirena sequi? (Med. 355-60)
What about when those harsh plagues sweetened the Ausonian sea with a
melodious voice, when, resounding with the Pierian cithara, Thracian Orpheus
nearly compelled the Siren (accustomed to holding ships back with her song) to
follow him?
The passage shows the switched roles of Orpheus and the Sirens: they
45
end up wanting to
follow him. The delayed sequi especially highlights the surprise of the reader/audience as
Orpheus not only competes successfully against, but even usurps, the Sirens. It is a
hyperbolic scenario which pits the singer-magician against the irresistible female temptresses
and allows him to defeat them utterly. This is a notable contrast from Apollonius’ version
of this episode in the Argonautika:
οἱ δ᾽ ἀπὸ νηός
ἤδη πείσματ᾽ ἔμελλον ἐπ᾽ ἠιόνεσσι βαλέσθαι,
εἰ μὴ ἄρ᾽ Οἰάγροιο πάις Θρηίκιος Ὀρφεύς,
Βιστονίην ἐνὶ χερσὶν ἑαῖς φόρμιγγα τανύσσας,
κραιπνὸν ἐυτροχάλοιο μέλος κανάχησεν ἀοιδῆς,
ὄφρ᾽ ἄμυδις κλονέοντος ἐπιβρομέωνται ἀκουαί
κρεγμῷ· παρθενίην δ᾽ ἐνοπὴν ἐβιήσατο φόρμιγξ,
νῆα δ᾽ ὁμοῦ ζέφυρός τε καὶ ἠχῆεν φέρε κῦμα
πρυμνόθεν ὀρνύμενον, ταὶ δ᾽ ἄκριτον ἵεσαν αὐδήν.
ἀλλὰ καὶ ὧς Τελέοντος ἐὺς πάις οἶος ἑταίρων
προφθάμενος ξεστοῖο κατὰ ζυγοῦ ἔνθορε πόντῳ
Βούτης, Σειρήνων λιγυρῇ ὀπὶ θυμὸν ἰανθείς,
νῆχε δὲ πορφυρέοιο δι᾽ οἴδματος, ὄφρ᾽ ἐπιβαίη,
σχέτλιος. Ap. Rh. 4.903-16
55
45
Or “she;” Hine (2000: ad loc.) states: “perhaps singular for plural, meaning all the Sirens, or else meaning
that one of the Sirens almost broke ranks and followed the Argo (compare how in Ap. Rh. 4.912-9 Butes
alone of the Argonauts swims off towards the Sirens).”
And they were already about to throw the ropes from the ship onto the shore, had
not Thracian Orpheus, the child of Oeagrius, having strung the Bistonian
phorminx in his own hands, rung out the hasty tune of a quick-moving sound, so
that, because he was driving everything into confusion together, the sounds roared
with the strumming: the phorminx forced itself upon the maidenly voice. And
together the west wind and the waves coming from the back drove the ship on: and
they uttered forth their disorderly voice. But even so the noble son of Teleon, alone
running ahead of his comrades, Boutes, leapt from the polished yard-arm into the
sea, taking delight in his heart in the sweet-toned voice of the Sirens: he swam
through the purple sea, intending to make landfall, unfortunate.
In Apollonius, Orpheus does not explicitly overpower the Sirens; Orpheus merely creates a
cacophony of sound when his music is mixed with their singing. Despite the confusion of
noise, Apollonius’ Orpheus still does not manage to save all the Argonauts from death;
Boutes jumps ship, still compelled by the Sirens. What Seneca chooses to change is
Orpheus’ degree of control over the Sirens; we see again in the chorus’ description of
Orpheus that the Argonauts on their quest foster a world of crossed boundaries and
confused positions.
While some might argue that the chorus present Orpheus’ defeat of the Sirens and
the present ‘openness’ of the world as a positive thing, a tribute to the success of the
voyage, the language of the chorus’ narration expresses instead a theme of violence on the
part of the Argonauts. Their entrance into the natural world was a penetration and a
domination.
In the passages we have already seen, there is evidence of this. In the first
Argonautic ode, the chorus describe the action of the Argo, “dragging the agreements of a
well-partitioned world into a single thing” (335-336). Though the chorus emphasize here
56
the unifying effect of the Argo (i.e., the confusing singularity of once-separated things), the
statement does not negate the idea that the Argo was a penetrating/disrupting force. The
chorus immediately add that the Argo also “ordered the sea to suffer the lash” (337).
Whatever unifying effect the Argo had, it was also an effect of domination equal to
enslavement.
46
The sea, a few lines later, is described as deprensum (“caught”).
47
When the chorus shift to a description of the present, confused state of the world,
we see the tax of natural conquest. Those new laws that Tiphys first gave (320) are now
endured by the sea as it yields and suffers these same laws. “Yielding and suffering” is not
the vocabulary of consent. As Oceanus looses his chains, the land pateat (“lies open”). The
verb patere is significant;
48
it is repeated at line 550, where Medea realizes Jason’s soft spot
for his children and decides that there is space available (patuit) for a wound. It is also used
by Medea to signal her escape at 1022: patuit in caelum via (“a way has become open into
the sky”). This verb is not one of happy submission, but of vulnerability, force, and
manipulation.
Orpheus’ interaction with the Sirens also could easily be seen as a domination of
the natural surroundings. We do not see Orpheus or the Argo slipping by the Sirens and
allowing them to continue exercising their song in their own habitat (as we do in
Apollonius’ version); rather, we see Orpheus stripping away their power and nearly
57
46
One is reminded of the Hellespont and Xerxes – another man who paid no heed to the proper boundaries
of nature (Herod. 7.33-36).
47
Perhaps an Ovidian word associated with rape victims. See, e.g., Fasti 2.799, 809; Aesacus and Hesperia
(Met. 11.772); Myrrha (Met. 10.390).
48
See ch. II for further ramifications of the verb patere in this tragedy.
displacing them from their accustomed place as they are “compelled to follow” the ship.
Even the parable of Phaethon reflects an assessment of the Argonauts’ quest as penetrative
and violent: the lesson, which the Argonauts have disobeyed, is not to “burst” or “break”
the sacred agreements between man and nature.
The verb used to summarize Phaethon’s transgression is also used at the beginning
of the first Argonautic ode, when the chorus describe the first sailor’s actions on the ocean:
audax nimium qui freta primus
rate tam fragili perfida rupit
terrasque suas posterga videns
animam levibus credidit auris,
dubioque secans aequora cursu…. (Med. 301-302)
Too bold the man who first broke the faithless waves with such a fragile vessel, and,
seeing his own lands behind his back, entrusted his spirit to light winds, cutting the
water with a hesitant course….
The verb rumpere, meaning to burst, break, violate, tear, etc., clearly shares a semantic range
with the concept of penetration. The first sailor also “cuts” the waters (“secans aequora”).
Similarly, secare’s main semantic range of cutting, dividing, and going through also shares
the idea of penetration.
The chorus move on to describe Tiphys (the helmsman of the Argo). The
vocabulary of this section is heavily tinged with themes of domination and manipulation.
Tiphys pandere (“spreads open”) the sails, writes novas leges (“new laws”) for the winds,
tendere (“stretches”) the sails, captare (“seizes”) the south-winds, ponere (“places”) and religare
(“ties back”) the yard-arms, and he optat (“selects”) the breezes (318-327). While some of this
vocabulary seems necessary for the narrative of sailing (e.g., tying cords, moving/placing
58
ship parts to optimize catching the winds), this description, where the sails themselves
eventually tremunt (“shake,” 328, a word familiar from Ovid’s rape scenes)
49
from all this
manipulation, clearly has resonances of inappropriate domination over the natural world.
Tiphys immediately exercises control over the wind and waves.
The second Argonautic ode presents much of the same; the Argonauts have
committed violent acts against nature:
rumpe nec sacro violente sancta
foedera mundi.
quisquis audacis tetigit carinae
nobiles remos nemorisque sacri
Pelion densa spoliavit umbra,
quisquis intravit scopulos vagantes
et tot emensus pelagi labores
barbara funem religavit ora
raptor externi rediturus auri,
exitu diro temerata ponti
iura piavit.
exigit poenas mare provocatum:
Tiphys, in primis, domitor profundi,…. (Med. 605-617)
Don’t break, violent man, the sacrosanct pacts of the world. Whoever
touched the famous oars of the bold ship and deprived Pelion of the dense shade of
its holy grove, whoever forced their way into the clashing rocks and, having passed
through so many labors of the deep, tied the ship’s cable to a foreign shore, a
plunderer of foreign gold intending to return, with a harsh death he appeased the
violated laws of the sea. The sea, challenged, exacted punishment: Tiphys, first of
all, the master of the deep,.…
The Argonauts are rapists of nature as much as they are plunderers of booty; they violate
nature’s laws and are punished for it. Victimhood lies with the Pelian grove, the clashing
59
49
See, e.g., Fasti 2.799; Philomela (Met. 6.527, 558); Dis and Proserpina (Met. 5.356)
rocks, the foreign shoreline, the golden fleece, and the sea. Their treatment of the clashing
rocks is especially rife with sexuality, as the Argo forcibly breaks through the pair and
permanently changes their geography.
50
The first Argonautic ode also addresses the clashing rocks, with similarly sexual
undertones:
dedit illa graves improba poenas
per tam longos ducta timores,
cum duo montes, claustra profundi,
hinc atque illinc subito impulsu
velut etherio gemerent sonitu,
spargeret astra nubesque ipsas
mare deprensum. (Med. 340-345·)
That perverse [Argo] gave harsh punishments, led through such vast fears, when
two mountains, barricade of the deep, from this side and that groaned with the
sudden strike like a noise from heaven, and the sea, trapped, sprinkled the stars and
clouds themselves.
The clashing rocks groan as their barricade is broken by the ship – an image of the loss of
virginity via sexual penetration. The sea, trapped by the act, also protests the Argo’s assault.
We cannot help but see the Argonauts as invaders and manipulators of natural space as
they break the covenants of the separated world.
The image of lost virginity presented in both odes recalls Medea’s own anguish over
the loss of her maiden status when Jason took her away from Colchis. Medea’s position
60
50
According to Apollonius, the clashing rocks were stopped from wandering and fixed into place after the
Argo pushed them apart (2.590ff). One thinks of rape, deflowering, or even childbirth.
parallels that of nature at the hands of the Argo.
51
A passage at the outset of the tragedy,
which alludes to an episode in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, solidifies the connection between the
assault of a woman and assault of the earth.
One of the first figures that Medea presents as a comparison to herself is
Proserpina, last in the initial list of gods to whom it is appropriate for Medea to pray. The
others are chaos, the lower realm, the “impios manes,” and Dis. While the others in this list
lack much description, Proserpina is described after Dis as “dominam fide/ meliore raptam:”
quosque iuravit mihi
deos Iason, quosque Medeae magis
fas est precari: noctis aeternae chaos,
aversa superis regna manesque impios
dominumque regni tristis et dominam fide
meliore raptam, voce non fausta precor. (Med. 7-12)
Those gods by whom Jason swore himself to me, and those gods to whom it is more
correct for Medea to pray: chaos of endless night, kingdoms turned away from the
gods and the impious shades, the lord of the sad kingdom and his lady, raped more
honorably, I pray to these with a voice of ill omen.
Mythologically, Proserpina is paradigmatic example of the consequences of marriage for
women in the ancient world (and, in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, Proserpina’s story is
used to explore the potential problems of marriage for young women); she embodies forced
61
51
Two things: first, Littlewood (2004) and Schiesaro (2003) have noted the similar language used to describe
nature (especially in punishing the Argonauts) and Medea’s emotions. Secondly, parallels between the
experience of a character and the experience of the surrounding world are common in Senecan tragedy. Segal
notes, “there is the involvement of the entire world in the hero’s suffering, a responsive sympathy between
individual and cosmos” (1983b: 173). In the case of Medea, however, I think that the hero is more intimately
connected with the events of the larger environment than, say, an Atreus or a Phaedra. The violation of
nature is precisely the sine qua non of Medea’s own violation. Segal might agree: “the violated interiority of her
body and the violation of nature’s limits in the Argo’s distant explorations and in the magic of Medea’s aerial
car are complementary aspects of the same theme, the pushing beyond limits, beyond civilized behavior, into
the barbarian and the monstrous” (178).
penetration, forced separation from home, and the isolating condition of the wife. Medea’s
specific recollection is interesting, since these are parallels of her own problems in her
marriage to Jason. She points to the forced nature of Proserpina’s position (“raptam”), but
the manner of the snatching/raping is a “meliore fide.” Better than what? Better than Jason’s
own fides with Medea, which he has broken. Unlike most other female rape victims in
mythology, Proserpina continues to cohabit with her husband for eternity. Medea compares
herself to someone who, though unwillingly forced to transition to a different life status,
manages to gain stability and recognition as part of this transition.
52
The lack of Medea’s
stability and recognition is highlighted especially.
The word “rapta” to describe Proserpina is reminiscent of Ovid’s description of her
rape in the Metamorphoses (Proserpina is called “rapta” at Met. 5.395, 416, 425, 471, 520). In
this episode, moreover, there is a clear connection between the rape of Proserpina and Dis’
malevolent treatment of the earth.
paene simul visa est dilectaque raptaque Diti:
53
usque adeo est properatus amor. dea territa maesto
et matrem et comites, sed matrem saepius, ore
clamat,… (Met. 5.395-398)
Nearly simultaneously Proserpina was seen, desired, and stolen by Dis: even still his
love was rushed. The frightened goddess shouts for her mother and companions,
but more often for her mother, with a sorrowful voice,….
raptor agit currus et nomine quemque vocando
exhortatur equos, quorum per colla iubasque
62
52
Homeric Hymn to Demeter 363ff.
53
M.P. Taylor points out to me that this is an intertext with Ovid’s Fasti 3.21, Mars’ rape of Rhea Silvia.
excutit obscura tinctas ferrugine habenas,
perque lacus altos et olentia sulphure fertur
stagna Palicorum rupta ferventia terra…. (Met. 5.402-406)
The ravager drives his chariot and urges his horses calling them each by name,
through whose necks and manes he flings the reins stained with dark redness, and
he is carried through deep lakes and the pools of the Palici which stink with
sulphur and burn with the broken earth….
gurgite quae medio summa tenus exstitit alvo
agnovitque deam. ‘nec longius ibitis!’ inquit,
‘non potes invitae Cereris gener esse: roganda,
non rapienda fuit. quodsi componere magnis
parva mihi fas est, et me dilexit Anapis,
exorata tamen, nec, ut haec, exterrita nupsi.’
dixit et in partes diversas bracchia tendens
obstitit. haud ultra tenuit Saturnius iram
terribilesque hortatus equos in gurgitis ima
contortum valido sceptrum regale lacerto
condidit. icta viam tellus in Tartara fecit
et pronos currus medio cratere recepit. (Met. 5.413-424)
And [Cyane] stood up out of the middle of the flood up to the top of her belly,
and she recognized the goddess. ‘You will go no further!’ she said. ‘You are not able
to be the son-in-law of an unwilling Ceres: it was necessary that she be asked, not
ravished. But, if it is appropriate for me to compare great things with small, Anapis
cherished me also, but I married having been obtained by entreaty, and not, like
her, having been obtained by terror.’ She spoke and, stretching her arms in opposite
directions, stood in the way. No longer did the Saturnian restrain his anger, but,
having urged his fearsome horses into the depths of the flood, he buried his royal
scepter, whirled about by his strong arm; where it was struck, the earth made a way
into Tartarus and received the chariot headlong in the middle of the crater.
When Dis steals Proserpina and takes her away, he also forces his way back through the
earth. The earth, much like Proserpina’s body, is penetrated unwillingly in the attack. The
text also hints at mistreatment of the horses, whose reins may be stained with blood from
63
Dis’ violent command. We see echoes of this passage in Seneca’s descriptions of nature and
the Argonauts: the “rupta terra” (in the repetition of rumpere, cf. Med. 302, 605), the
“raptor” (cf. Med. 613), and “facere viam” (cf. Med. 377, 1022, and ch. II).
In the Proserpina episode, Arethusa explains to Ceres that she has seen her
daughter, sitting as queen of the underworld. She asks Ceres not to be angry at the earth
(Ceres had been punishing flora and fauna for the loss of her daughter), for the earth is a
victim as well:
tum caput Eleis Alpheias extulit undis
rorantesque comas a fronte removit ad aures
atque ait: ‘o toto quaesitae virginis orbe
et frugum genetrix, inmensos siste labores,
neve tibi fidae violenta irascere terrae!
terra nihil meruit patuitque invita rapinae;...’ (Met. 5.487-492)
Then Alpheias raised her head out of the Elean waters, moved her dripping hair
back from her brow to her ears, and said, ‘O mother of a maiden sought over the
whole world and (mother) of the grain crops, stop your huge labors, and do not be
violent or grow angry with your faithful land! The land has earned nothing (of
punishment), and it opened for the rape unwillingly.’
Arethusa explains to Ceres how it was that she was able to go into the underworld to see
Proserpina. Note how differently the earth responds to Arethusa than it did to Dis:
mihi pervia tellus
54
praebet iter subterque imas ablata cavernas
hic caput attollo desuetaque sidera cerno.
ergo dum Stygio sub terris gurgite labor,
visa tua est oculis illic Proserpina nostris:…’ (Met. 5.501-505)
64
54
Cf. Med. 322: “pervius orbis.”
The porous earth showed me a path, and, having been carried off below within its
lowest caverns, I lifted up my head here and saw unaccustomed stars. Thus, while I
slid under the earth in the Stygian flood, in that place your Proserpina was seen by
my own eyes….’
Unlike Dis, who forces his way into the earth, Arethusa seems to receive the earth’s consent
when she travels through. For her, the earth “offers a way,” whereas Dis himself must “force
a way” through; by her description of consensual interaction with nature, it is more
apparent to us that Dis’ method was nonconsensual and forceful.
The comparison between earth and woman is not the only way in which
Proserpina’s story parallels that of Medea. After hearing Arethusa’s story, Ceres herself goes
to Jupiter and requests that Proserpina be returned to her. Jupiter explains to Ceres the
laws of living in the underworld, and reasons that a crime did not occur when Proserpina
was abducted; rather, it was amor.
ibi toto nubila vultu
ante Iovem passis stetit invidiosa capillis,
‘pro’ que ‘meo veni supplex tibi, Iuppiter,’ inquit
‘sanguine proque tuo. si nulla est gratia matris,
nata patrem moveat, neu sit tibi cura precamur
vilior illius, quod nostro est edita partu.
en quaesita diu tandem mihi nata reperta est,
si reperire vocas amittere certius, aut si
scire, ubi sit, reperire vocas. quod rapta, feremus,
dummodo reddat eam! neque enim praedone marito
filia digna tua est, si iam mea filia non est.’
Iuppiter excepit: ‘commune est pignus onusque
nata mihi tecum; sed si modo nomina rebus
addere vera placet, non hoc iniuria factum,
verum amor est, neque erit nobis gener ille pudori,
tu modo, diva, velis. ut desint cetera, quantum est
esse Iovis fratrem! quid quod non cetera desunt
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nec cedit nisi sorte mihi! sed tanta cupido
si tibi discidii est, repetet Proserpina caelum,
lege tamen certa, si nullos contigit illic
ore cibos; nam sic Parcarum foedere cautum est.’ (Met. 5.512-532)
There, with her whole face clouded, she stood resentfully in front of Jove with her
hair let loose and said, ‘I have come as a suppliant to you, Jupiter, for my blood and
yours; if there is no favor for a mother, let a daughter move her father, and, we pray,
let your care for her not be of less value because she was produced by our birthing.
Look, the daughter who has been sought for so long by me has at last been found, if
you call it finding to lose more certainly, or if you call it finding to know where she
is. That she was ravished, we shall bear, provided that he gives her back! For your
daughter is not deserving of a robber husband, if she is now not my daughter.’
Jupiter replied: ‘She is a common pledge and concern, born to me with you. But if
now it is pleasing to give true names to things, this deed is not an injustice, but it is
love; nor will that man be a son-in-law to us in disgrace, provided only, goddess, you
are willing. If the other things were lacking, how great a thing it is to be brother of
Jove! And what of the fact that the other things are not lacking, and that he does
not yield to me except in his portion! But if so great a desire for separation is in
you, Proserpina returns to heaven, but by a certain law: if she has touched no food
there with her mouth; for it was stipulated thus by the compact of the Fates.’
The Proserpina allusion serves to support the entanglement of Medea’s marital problems
with the larger problems of the Argonautic voyage: Proserpina’s own rape – or, the story of
her transition from maiden to (part-time) wife – is paralleled by Dis’ rape of the earth and
the environmental destruction caused by Ceres in response to her daughter’s forced
abduction. Moreover, when Seneca’s Medea compares herself to “rapta” Proserpina, we are
reminded of this episode, in which a law (lex, foedus), when broken, necessitates the
continued imprisonment of the victim: Medea, like Proserpina, must continue to suffer
because of the broken foedera between man and nature, between her and Jason. This act of
violence and domination also threatens to be hidden under a more positive mask: Jupiter
calls the rape amor, and Seneca’s chorus (perhaps cynically) refer to the Argonautic
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expedition as progress. Finally, Ceres seeks the impossible return of her lost daughter
(“reperta,” “reperire,” “reperire,” “reddat”), as Medea seeks the impossible return of her lost
maidenhood.
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In Seneca’s Medea, nature has been penetrated against the rule of sacred
agreements, and nature must punish the offenders. The second Argonautic ode recounts
the various fates of several Argonauts, explaining that each death is their punishment for
their assault against nature:
quisquis audacis tetigit carinae
nobiles remos
…
exitu diro temerata ponti
iura piavit.
exigit poenas mare provocatum…. (Med. 607-8; 614-16)
Whoever touched the famous oars of the bold ship ... with a harsh death he
appeased the violated laws of the sea. The sea, challenged, exacted punishment.
The effect of nature’s revenge – the death of the Argonauts – is to undo their crime by
eradicating their presence in the world. Perhaps if they no longer exist, the breach of
innocence itself will no longer exist.
Medea seeks a similar end: in addition to the revenge she desires to have on the
husband who abandoned her, ultimately she seeks an eradication of his presence, of the
presence of the children – a physical un-penetration and a reestablishment of her bodily
boundaries. We have seen already Medea’s desire for a restored virginity throughout the
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55
See, e.g., Med. 246, 272-3, 482, 489, 894, 982-984, 1024. For a detailed analysis of Medea’s relationship to
her past, see ch. IV.
tragedy, and her assertion in the final monologue that her virginity has in fact been
restored. What we have yet to explore are the bodily manifestations of this desire.
Beyond using the children as a means to get revenge on Jason, Medea seems, on
some level, to gain a sense of relief from their existential finality. At one point in her final
monologue, she expresses a desire to have had more children to kill:
utinam superbae turba Tantalidos meo
exisset utero bisque septenos parens
natos tulissem! sterilis in poenas fui—
fratri patrique quod sat est, peperi duos. (Med. 954-956)
Oh that the throng of the proud Tantalid had egressed from my womb, and I,
parent, had borne twice seven children! I was sterile in the realm of punishment —
for my brother and father it is enough, I bore two.
Medea wishes that she had had more children, only for the purpose of erasing them all.
There is something satisfying about killing the children, beyond repaying the debt she feels
to her kin and beyond punishing Jason for his abandonment. Later, she explains to Jason
why the punishment of one child is not enough:
si posset una caede satiari manus,
nullam petisset. ut duos perimam, tamen
nimium est dolori numerus angustus meo.
in matre si quod pignus etiamnunc latet,
scrutabor ense viscera et ferro extraham. (Med. 1009-1013)
If my hand were able to be sated with one death, it would have sought none.
Although I destroy two, yet the number is excessively small for my grief. If in the
mother there hides some pledge/child even now, I shall investigate my innards
thoroughly with a sword and drag it out with iron.
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“At the climax of her revenge, [Medea], like Oedipus, would reach into her vitals to
extirpate in her womb the traces of motherhood that tie her to Jason” (Segal 178). Medea
wishes to remove from her physical body the penetration of her marriage that symbolizes
the loss of her maidenhood and former self.
Segal (1983b): 178ff. and Nussbaum (1996): 453-457, while they acknowledge the
connection between Medea’s physical body and her psychic experience of amor, deal only
with the “root” desire of extirpating the psychic presence of the other, without questioning
the particularly gendered form of Medea’s urge to kill the children. Nussbaum states that
this violent digging out is an inevitable consequence of loving: “any person who loves is
opening in the walls of the self a hole through which the world may penetrate” (455). My
questions are: why are women the ones who usually experience this “agonizing
passivity” (454)? Men in Roman literature (with the possible exception of Seneca’s
Thyestes)
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do not experience this degree of “confusion of self and not-self” that seems
endemic to the abandoned women of Vergil, Ovid, and Seneca.
What Segal and Nussbaum ignore, and what Medea herself seems to realize, is that
the condition of womanhood necessitates the possibility of penetration. As Jonathan
Walters has argued, Roman masculinity was built upon the idea of impenetrable bodily
boundaries; free adult men are set in contrast to freeborn young men, slaves and women
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56
Segal’s exploration of Thyestes’ boundary-anxiety is interesting (1983b: 183ff.) primarily because Thyestes,
as a man, is precisely supposed to have a solid separation between himself and others; men’s bodies are never
host to other living beings. Also interesting is Littlewood’s (2008) analysis of the gender dynamics of the
Thyestes. Unfortunately, this project cannot fully explore the characteristics of the “abandoned woman” in
Roman literature, though I hope to have the opportunity to research it and write on it eventually.
precisely because young, slave and female bodies are always “potentially penetrable”.
57

Medea’s urge to seal her own body off from Jason’s presence reflects this anxiety over
bodily sanctity. Moreover, the condition of women in particular takes penetration as a
natural process of the life cycle: women must bear children. For Medea, the children, even
while they are inside her, serve as a reminder of the violability of her own body. What has
been read as her refusal to be ‘maternal’ is actually a refusal to have her own body be host
to the presence of another.
IV. Medea...femina?
Medea attempts to adjust her character from the outset of the tragedy. One of the
first statements she makes to herself is an exhortation to “banish womanly fear:”
pelle femineos metus (Med. 42)
Drive out womanly fear.
In her final monologue as well, Medea makes similar statements, urging herself to let go of
feminine things:
...abeat expulsus pudor;
vindicta levis est quam ferunt purae manus.
…
quid manus poterant rudes
audere magnum, quid puellaris furor?
Medea nunc sum; crevit ingenium malis…. (Med. 900-1; 908-10)
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57
Walters (1998): 41.
Let shame fall away, driven out; it is a trivial revenge which pure hands carry out. …
What great thing were inexperienced hands able to dare, what great thing girly
madness? I am Medea now; my inborn talent has grown with evil deeds….
Throughout her self-address (and occasionally with Jason), Medea uses masculine language
to describe her thoughts and actions. Medea’s use of masculine language is part of her
attempt to undo the feminization of her self that was the penetration of Jason (literally) and
the Argo (figuratively), a penetration that turned her into a subordinate, dependent,
socially anchored wife, with no legitimate social recourse to power and revenge against the
person who broke their contract with her, and no certain authority over the solidity of her
bodily boundaries. Medea associates her forceful reclaiming of power with masculinity, and
she makes that masculinity a part of her self.
She calls on the “avenging Furies” to aid her revenge: “ultrices deae” (Med. 13); the
notion of avenging herself (and the associated verb ulcisci) is crucial to Medea’s adopted
identity. She also uses this language at 172, during the exchange with her Nurse: “I shall
flee, but first I shall avenge myself” (fugiam, at ulciscar prius), later again to herself: “shall I
suffer royal torches unavenged?” (regias egone ut faces/ inulta patiar, 398-99) and “how small a
fraction of revenge is this, in which you rejoice?” (pars ultionis ista, qua gaudes, quota est, 896).
Medea also makes use of other masculine terms – images of battle, hunting, and
weaponry – when she talks specifically about her revenge:
accingere ira… (Med. 51)
Gird yourself with anger.
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bene est, tenetur, vulneri patuit locus.
58
(Med. 550)
This is good, he [Jason] is trapped, and a space has opened up for the wound.
iuvat, iuvat rapuisse fraternum caput,
artus iuvat secuisse et arcano patrem
spoliasse sacro, iuvat in exitium senis
armasse natas. (Med. 911-914)
It pleases, it pleases to have stolen my brother’s head, it pleases to have cut his limbs
and to have robbed a father of his secret trove, it pleases to have armed daughters
for the destruction of an old man.
quo te igitur, ira, mittis, aut quae perfido
intendis hosti tela? (Med. 916-917)

Where therefore, anger, do you send yourself, or what weapons do you hurl against
a faithless enemy?
ex paelice utinam liberos hostis meus
aliquos haberet…. (Med. 920-921)
Oh that from his mistress my enemy had some children….
hac qua recusas, qua doles, ferrum exigam.
…
in matre si quod pignus etiamnunc latet,
scrutabor ense viscera et ferro extraham. (Med. 1006; 1012-13)
In the place where you protest, where you grieve, I shall drive a sword through. … If
in the mother there hides some pledge/child even now, I shall investigate my
innards thoroughly with a sword and drag it out with iron.
As Fitch and McElduff state, “Medea’s language reveals how close her self-assertion
is to the heroic ethos, with its competitive drive for arete/virtus and its quest for the glory
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58
A.J. Boyle reminds me that this expression (the place being open for a wound) is reminiscent also of
gladiatorial combat.
of public approval...” (38). While they note the degree of self-fashioning in Medea’s
language, Fitch and McElduff avoid discussion of the gendered repercussions of this
particular self-fashioning. As we have seen, however, Medea’s use of heroic language (virtus,
160; vires et artes, 163; peracta vis est omnis, 843; pietas, 905; virtus, 977; vindicta, 987) is also
an aspect of her gender performance; she attempts to become masculine in order to secure
her bodily boundaries and free herself from the social weakness of womanhood.
Finally, one of the aspects of Medea’s masculinity is her relative ability to make
decisions for herself and affect the lives of others. In her final monologue, as stated above,
Medea asks “what great thing were inexperienced hands able to dare, what great thing girly
madness” (908-909). The verb choice, posse, is significant. Medea uses this verb also when
she is speaking with or about Jason, as they each try to determine which one of them has
less agency, which one of them has a life more dependent on the decisions of others:
M: hoc facere Iason potuit…? (Med. 118)
M: Was Jason able to do this...?
M: quid tamen Iason potuit…? (Med. 137)
M: Yet what was Jason able to do...?
I: quid facere possim, loquere. (Med. 515)
J: What I might be able to do, tell me.
I: … si quod ex soceri domo
potest fugam levare solamen, pete. (Med. 538-539)
J: If some compensation from my father-in-law’s house is able to lighten your exile,
ask it.
I: … namque istud ut possim pati,
non ipse memet cogat et rex et socer. (Med. 545-546)
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J: For that I be able to suffer this [i.e., losing the children], not even the king
and father-in-law himself could compel me.
M: hac aggredere, qua nemo potest
quicquam timere. perge, nunc aude, incipe
quidquid potest Medea, quidquid non potest. (Med. 565-567)
M: Begin here, where no one is able to fear anything. Go, now dare, begin whatever
Medea is able to do, whatever she is not able to do.
Although the usage may seem tangential to the issues of agency and self-determination, the
repetition of posse, especially in the conversation between Jason and Medea, alludes to one
of the play’s primary intertexts: Ovid’s Heroides 12, a letter from Medea to Jason, written
just after his marriage to Creusa (in Seneca’s tragedy, the beginning of Act II).
The Medea of the Heroides presents a passive counterpoint to Seneca’s self-
masculinizing protagonist. Ovid’s Medea fluctuates between states of agency and passivity:
with regard to the magic she performed for Jason in Colchis (defeating the bull, the sown
men, and the serpent), Medea claims full agency (163ff.; see also below), but with regard to
her relationship with Jason and the unequivocally evil crimes committed on his behalf,
Medea presents herself as if she has no control over her emotions, actions, or experience.
When she describes falling in love with Jason, she implies that her emotions were beyond
her control:
me mea fata trahebant (Her. 12.35)
My fates were dragging me.
sic cito sum verbis capta puella tuis (Her. 12.92)
So quickly was I, a girl, seized by your words.
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Medea decides to help Jason defeat the challenges (“lex”) set by her father not because she
herself has decided to do so, but because her sister requests that Jason be saved:
orat opem Minyis. alter petit, alter habebat;
Aesonio iuveni quod rogat illa, damus. (Her. 12.65-66)
She begs help for the Minyans. One seeks, another was in possession. What she
asks for the Aesonian youth, we grant.
Falling in love with Jason and giving him aid were not under Medea’s control.
As for the crimes committed against her father and the daughters of Pelias, Medea
never claims guilt or agency for them:
proditus est genitor (Her. 12.109)
The father was betrayed.
quid referam Peliae natas pietate nocentes
caesaque virginea membra paterna manu?
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ut culpent alii, tibi me laudare necesse est,
pro quo sum totiens esse coacta nocens.
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(Her. 12.129-132)
Why should I recount the daughters harmful in their piety for Pelias, and the
paternal limbs cut by maiden hand? Although others may blame, for you it is
necessary to praise me, you for whose sake I was compelled to be guilty so often.
The crime is impersonal; Medea does not leave room for the orchestrator of the crime to be
mentioned. The act seems to occur without agent and takes on a fated quality.
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59
Cf. Med. 475-476, which clearly refers to this couplet.
60
Cf. Med. 280 and 503, where Medea argues to Creon and Jason, respectively, that her harmfulness is not
“up to her” (perhaps appropriately thought of in terms of Stoic conceptions of culpability and agency – “e)f’
h(mi=n,” for which see Reesor 1978), but has been a response to Jason’s requests.
Even on the matter of her brother, where Medea comes closest to admitting guilt in
the commission of a crime, she nevertheless separates herself from her right hand, stating
that it, and not her, was the thing that committed the murder:
quod facere ausa mea est, non audet scribere dextra. (Her. 12.115)
What it dared to do, it dares not to write – my hand.
By attributing the murder of her brother to her hand (as Seneca’s Medea also does at
certain points in the tragedy), Medea refuses to claim complete agency over the death – it is
yet another event out of her control.
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Thus Ovid’s Medea attempts to remove agency from
herself in the matter of crime; when the deed was bad, Medea does not claim it as her own
doing.
The verb posse, which is scattered throughout the poem, is used consistently by
Medea as a way of expressing relative levels of agency over people and things. Jason uses it
when he asks Medea for help – when he puts the power over his life into Medea’s hands:
ius tibi et arbitrium nostrae fortuna salutis
tradidit, inque tua est vitaque morsque manu.
perdere posse sat est, siquem iuvet ipsa potestas;
sed tibi servatus gloria maior ero.
per mala nostra precor, quorum potes esse levamen,… (Her. 12.73-77)
To you has fortune handed over the right and judgement of our safety, and in your
hand is life and death. To have the power to destroy is enough, if power itself be
pleasing to anyone; but having been protected will I be a greater glory for you. I
beseech you by our troubles, for which you are able to be a cure,….
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Of course, this statement in the Heroides is hilarious – the delay of “dextra” until the end of the line, as if
the right hand itself, the killer of Medea’s brother, is independently loathe to admit its own guilt. Also, this
line forces us to question, if Medea’s right hand has agency, who is writing this letter – Medea or her hand?
When his life is in danger, and when Medea is his only hope for salvation, Jason is quick to
acknowledge and encourage Medea’s power, her ability to control the outcome of events
(and her ability to control the outcome of Jason’s life). Near the end of the poem, Medea
uses this same language, in turn, to describe the paradox of having magical abilities but
being now unable to control Jason or her own emotions towards him:
serpentis igitur potui taurosque furentes;
unum non potui perdomuisse virum…
quae me non possum, potui sopire draconem. (Her. 12.163-164; 171)
Thus I was able to conquer serpents and raging bulls; but not this one man… I, who
am not able (to quiet) myself, was able to quiet a dragon.
Medea also uses the verb posse to express Jason’s power to continue living his life without
her; despite all she has done for him, he nevertheless holds agency over his own life:
quod vivis, quod habes nuptam socerumque potentis,
hoc ipsum, ingratus quod potes esse, meum est. (Her. 12.205-206)
That you live, that you have a wife and a father-in-law of stature, and this itself –
that you have the power to be thankless – is my doing.
Thus one of the crucial themes of Heroides 12 is the extent of Medea’s agency and ability to
control those around her. With the exception of the last few lines of the poem (in which
she threatens to “do something” in revenge for Jason’s faithlessness),
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she seems to fix
herself in a passive position. She is helpless to stop Jason’s abandonment of her and
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62
“nescio quid certe mens mea maius agit!” (Her. 12.212) As many have pointed out, the last few lines of the
poem have echoes in Seneca’s tragedy. For discussion, see Boyd (unpublished essay), Hinds (1993).
helpless to stop his marriage to Creusa; Medea can only lament the present situation, the
sacrifices she has made, and the loss of her past identity.
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Seneca’s Medea, when she alludes to Heroides 12, cannot help but pull this element
of passivity into our picture of her. When she argues about Jason’s degree of self-
determination, or urges herself to exercise her own, Medea refers to her Ovidian
counterpart, highlighting for us the degree to which Seneca’s heroine has rejected the
passive position of her social womanhood and altered her gender performance so as to
increase her agency.
Seneca’s Medea is a critique of the status quo and the processes by which the past
has become the present. More specifically, the Medea character seems to present a
comprehension of the disparity between her desired self and the expected, appropriate,
adult female of her society. She plays to the expectations of her interlocutors, feigning
appropriate feminine passivity. She is a parallel image of nature, another victim of male
conquest and violence. She recognizes the inherent holes in her physical womanhood – the
space for a husband, which becomes the space for a child – and she realizes that a feminine
gender performance can only leave her vulnerable; it cannot ensure a hardened shell
(physical or psychic) between the self and the outside world. She creates and upholds this
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63
The many allusions to the Heroides in Seneca’s Medea are well documented in Costa (1978), Hine (2000)
and in Jakobi (1988). Of particular interest is the frequency of posse in the tragedy (118, 137, 140, 161, 163,
176, 291, 413, 416, 419, [nurse] 430, [Jason] 497, 515, 539, 545, 536, 541, 565, 567, 810, [chorus and nurse]
882, 884, 1009). As we have seen, this is a word which, if we are meant to see the Medea of the Heroides
alongside Seneca’s character, leads us to contemplate agency in Seneca’s tragedy as well. See also ch. IV for a
more thorough discussion of Medea and agency.
shell by abandoning the femininity that prevented its existence, and attempts to protect
herself (physically and psychically) with a masculine gender performance.
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Chapter II: Medea divina
This chapter will discuss two topics in the Medea which seem at first glance to be
separate, but upon examination prove to be inexorably entwined. The first part of this
chapter will address Medea and her assertion of what might be called a “divine” perspective
on the world. This divine perspective shows itself in the way Medea treats other characters,
in the way she removes herself from the moral or ethical implications of her actions, and in
the way she ignores her bodily experiences (which come back to haunt her) for the sake of
effecting revenge. Medea succeeds in getting vengeance, but only by letting go of other
(more human) pieces of her self.
The second half of this chapter addresses the notion of divine privilege and
morality generally, and the relationship between humans and gods in this and other
Senecan tragedies. Through allusions (mostly found in Medea’s speech) to Juno’s prologue
at the beginning of Seneca’s Hercules Furens and to Hesiod’s myth of Prometheus in the
Works and Days and Theogony, I believe that the Medea highlights the problematic morality
of divine figures and suggests a reading of the Argonautic story that emphasizes the voyage
as a transgression against divine authority.
I. Medea’s biological heritage and divine character construction
I would like to begin at the end: Medea’s exit from the play. Many critics have
recognized the implication of divinity, or even deification, in the final scene of the tragedy
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– Medea on the chariot, triumphant, flying off to some unknown location.
1
While these
critics seem to agree that the character is actually meant to ride off to be with her divine
family at the end, none seem to notice the extent to which Medea herself displays and
builds a divine persona over the course of the entire tragedy. To begin with, I hope to show
that Medea’s divine persona is apparent from the beginning of the play, and that her final
deification is entirely unremarkable when seen in the context of her displayed attitude
toward other humans.
Much more so than in Euripides’ version of the character, Seneca’s Medea
frequently stresses her divine heritage, both when she is speaking in soliloquy and when
she is performing for others.
2
She uses her divine ancestry to establish her position in a
hierarchy of people and gods and to support the justification for her revenge. The fact that
she is descended from the Sun gives her access to special powers to which other humans do
not have access. These special things, in turn, allow her almost absolute power to
manipulate the natural world to her fancy and to defeat any human enemy. Her ability to
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1
Seneca has left out any mention of Medea’s marriage to Aegeus and relocation to Athens, which features
prominently in Euripides’ version of the tragedy – as if Seneca wishes to remove any potential for continued
mortal existence for Medea. As for Medea’s similarity to other divine characters, Nussbaum (1996) argues that
Medea creates a “counterorder” of the world through her magical power and the image of the snake, and she
focuses on the simultaneously beautiful and horrible image of Medea’s chariot (461; generally, 458-464).
Henry and Walker (1967) state that Medea “seeks to transform herself into a demon of destruction” (171) and
that she becomes “a non-entity but still about to achieve divinity by a macabre parody of apotheosis” (178); yet
they assert that her apotheosis is a manifestation of a lack of stable identity. Schiesaro (2003) discusses Medea
as the orchestrator of her own play (16ff.) and a controller of time (208ff.). Littlewood (2004), finally, explores
Medea’s relationship to other divine figures: her “Fury” persona (148ff.), Medea as an agent of Nature
(151ff.), and Medea as a parallel Siren, Orpheus, and Phaethon (157ff.). Gill (1987) contrasts Seneca’s Medea
with the character of Euripides, whom he sees as “other-related” in her concerns. What I see as evidence of
Medea’s divine persona Gill seems to interpret as nearly “solipsistic” (1987: 25).
2
For Medea’s ability to alter her character performance in dialogue with other characters, see chs. I, III, and
IV.
defeat potential enemies then gives her a sense of disregard for normal social hierarchy –
she sits outside of and beyond the conventional power structures. The potential need to kill
another human does not frighten Medea, or strike her as morally problematic, especially if
it is done in the defense of Jason or her own goals. Unlike her Euripidean counterpart, this
Medea does not spend much time in dialogue with others;
3
Seneca makes the nurse
Medea’s main interlocutor, but the dialogues she and her nurse share prove to be entirely
formulaic.
4
Moreover, in Seneca’s version there exists no dialogue between Medea and the
chorus (who represent public opinion) about the morality of her plans – Seneca’s Medea is
by design cut off from any meaningful and preventative
5
criticism.
Medea also sets herself apart from other characters in Senecan tragedy in the way
she invokes Sol, her grandfather, to bear witness to her sufferings and to help her avenge
those crimes committed against her.
manibus excutiam faces
caeloque lucem – spectat hoc nostri sator
Sol generis, et spectatur, et curru insidens
per solita puri spatia decurrit poli?
non redit in ortus et remetitur diem?
da, da per auras curribus patriis vehi,
82
3
See, e.g., Medea’s scenes with Creon (261-356), with Jason (446-622, 866-975, 1317-1404) and with Aegeus
(663-758).
4
Leaving aside any thematic similarities (of which there are many), the use of imperatives from Nurse to
female protagonist is clearly part of the schema. Compare, e.g., Med. 174 with Phae. 165 (“compesce”); Med. 157
(“siste furialem impetum”) with Phae. 248, 263, and Ag. 203 (“siste furorem”/ “siste furibundum impetum”/ “siste
impetus”); Med. 381 with Ag. 224 (“comprime”); Med. 175 (“animosque minue”) with Phae. 256 (“animos corece”).
Contrast Atreus’ conversation with the Satelles, who, despite the length of their conversation, rarely uses the
imperative (Thy. 204-335).
5
That is, unlike in Euripides, there is no opportunity for the chorus to warn/counsel Medea against taking
certain actions, a phenomenon which is also noted by Fyfe (1983): 79-81. For a discussion of the chorus in
this tragedy and Medea’s relationship with them, see ch. III.
committe habenas, genitor, et flagrantibus
ignifera loris tribue moderari iuga….
hoc restat unum, pronubam thalamo feram
ut ipsa pinum postque sacrificas preces
caedam dicatis victimas altaribus. (Med. 27-39)
I shall shake out from their hands the torches and the light from the sky – does Sol,
the father of our line, see this? and is he seen? and sitting on his chariot does he
run down through the accustomed expanse of the clean sky? Does he not return to
his origin and retrace the day? Grant, grant that I be carried through the air on my
paternal chariot, entrust the reins, creator of my family, and allow me to direct the
fire-bearing pair with blazing bridles.... This one thing remains – that I myself carry
the marriage pine to the wedding chamber and (that), after the sacrificial prayers, I
slaughter the victims at the dedicated altars.
Her speech does not begin with direct address to her grandfather. Rather, Medea imagines
her grandfather seeing her situation from his sun-chariot and responding to it by reversing
the day, presumably in anger, disbelief, or outrage. Before she addresses him directly, she
apostrophizes his presence, setting him up as someone in support of her cause.
6
In her
speech, there is no doubt as to whether or not he actually supports her – Medea seems to
assume this to be true. The first half of this passage, before the imperatives “da, da,” is not
quite a prayer, not quite the language of someone who is unsure of divine support for their
actions.
We can contrast Medea’s prayer to Sol with entreaties to the gods found in other
Senecan drama. First, the second choral ode of the Oedipus:
lucidum caeli decus, huc ades
votis, quae tibi nobiles
83
6
As Habinek argues, one of the functions of apostrophe “serves to draw a distant figure closer, to make
familiar and apprehensible the sources of religious or ethical authority…” (2001: 146-7). Here Medea uses the
rhetorical figure to give the audience an image of her angered grandfather and persuade them that the gods
support her outrage.
Thebae, Bacche, tuae
palmis supplicibus ferunt.
huc adverte favens virgineum caput,
vultu sidereo discute nubila
et tristes Erebi minas
avidumque fatum. (Oed. 405-411)
Bright glory of the sky, be present for the prayers which the noble Thebans carry to
you, Bacchus, with suppliant palms. Turn here showing favor with your virginal
head, disperse with your starry visage the clouds, the grievous threats of Erebus, and
greedy fate.
Next, Amphytrion prays to Jove in Hercules Furens:
O magne Olympi rector et mundi arbiter,
iam statue tandem gravibus aerumnis modum
finemque cladi. (HF 205-207)
O great ruler of Olympus and judge of the world, now establish a limit to my heavy
burdens and an end of destruction.
and then to Hercules:
adsis sospes et remees tuis
tandemque venias victor ad victam domum. (HF 277-278)
May you be present as savior, may you return to your own people, and may you
come as a vanquisher to the conquered house.
Finally, Theseus asks Neptune to punish Hippolytus in Phaedra:
En perage donum triste, regnator freti!
non cernat ultra lucidum Hippolytus diem
adeatque manes iuvenis iratos patri.
fer abominandam nunc opem gnato, parens:
numquam supremum numinis munus tui
consumeremus, magna ni premerent mala;
inter profunda Tartara et Ditem horridum
et imminentes regis inferni minas,
voto peperci: redde nunc pactam fidem.
genitor, moraris? cur adhuc undae silent? (Phae. 945-953)
84
Lo grant this grievous gift, ruler of the sea! Let Hippolytus not see any longer the
light of day, and may the youth approach the shades angry with his father. Bring
now destructive aid to your son, parent: I would never use up the last gift of your
divine will if great evils were not pressing; even while I was in deep Tartarus and
frightening Dis, and while the threats of the underworld king were hanging over
me, I spared this wish: return now the promised pledge. Father, do you delay? Why
are the waves still silent?
Medea’s entreaty to Sol is different from these four prayers. First, unlike the chorus of the
Oedipus, who are in the midst of the Theban plague and seem unsure whether Bacchus will
bring them aid, or Theseus in Phaedra, who doubts the effectiveness of his prayer when
Neptune does not respond immediately, Medea is confident that her grandfather will see
that her revenge is justified, that she has been wronged, and that those who have wronged
her must be punished.
Secondly, unlike all the above examples, Medea does not request that Sol punish
Jason and Creon for their crimes, nor does she use jussive verb forms when referring to the
desired punishment. This is in stark contrast to what we have seen in the other examples,
where the gods are expected (or beseeched, in the jussive) to carry out the prayer: in
Oedipus, Bacchus ought to free Thebes from pestilence; in Hercules Furens, Jove ought to
prevent Lycus from taking over the city (or at least have a hand in sending Hercules on his
behalf), and in Phaedra, Neptune ought to punish Hippolytus. Medea’s request is different:
she takes the role of punisher on herself. With her grandfather’s help (or assent), she will
drive the chariot, she will carry the pine torch, she will perform the sacrifice (in fact, it is
arguable whether her grandfather’s approval would even be required for at least the last two
85
of those actions; excepting Sol’s chariot, Medea is perfectly capable of exacting the rest of
her revenge).
The language also plays with our expectations of what is normal prayer speech. The
verbs Medea uses when addressing Sol (“feram,” “caedam”) are present epexigetic
subjunctive (in explanation of “what remains,” restat). They differ from other prayers we
have seen, which make use either of the jussive subjunctive or the imperative (addressed to
the god himself). Medea uses the imperative to address her grandfather (Med. 32-33, cited
above), but she also uses the imperative with her animus directly following line 39 (where
the epexigetic subjunctive ends). In other words, she incorporates self-address where we
would expect her only to address the god to whom she is praying. The imperatives
addressed to herself, moreover, lie in accordance with other statements made by Medea
throughout the course of the tragedy, including the use of the future indicative where we
might expect the jussive subjunctive (e.g., “ibo,” 27; “cumulabo,” 147; “scrutabor,” 1013).
7

Regardless, Medea’s statement still marks her as an outlier among suppliants
because of her use of the first person. There are many instances in Senecan tragedy
(including the three above) where mortals ask gods to do things for them, but they rarely, if
ever, offer to do things themselves (e.g., the chorus at Med. 664-69 and 874-78, Hercules at
HF 1202-18, Oedipus at Oed. 868-81, etc.). Medea’s confidence in her own ability exceeds
86
7
In fact, there is an abundance of ambiguous 3rd conjugation first-person verbs used by Medea in this
tragedy. The ones I cite here are demonstrably future indicative (and perhaps then also any proximate verbs to
those above – e.g., “excutiam” at 27), but there are several, later in the tragedy, which are either future
indicative or present subjunctive. For more on this ambiguity, see section II of this chapter and ch. IV.
that of other mortals – she is able to carry out the punishment which, in every other case,
the immortals alone are expected to do.
Medea’s sense of divinity is also apparent in her scene with Jason. First, she displays
an attitude of divinity by having strong opinions about the worth of her family line. It is
clear, for example, that Medea thinks that her family is nobler than that of Creon, despite
the fact that he is in a ruling position in the society where she currently resides. In her
conversation with Jason, Medea contrasts her family line with Creon’s, in order to argue
that her sons should stay in her possession.
ne veniat umquam tam malus miseris dies,
qui prole foeda misceat prolem inclitam,
Phoebi nepotes Sisyphi nepotibus.
8
(Med. 510-12)
Let it never come, a day so horrible with miseries, which mixes noble offspring with
filthy offspring – the grandchildren of Phoebus with the grandchildren of Sisyphus.
Medea finds Creon’s heritage to be lacking in comparison with hers; not only does his
family not stem from a major divinity, they even descend from a notorious criminal.
9
For
Medea, lineage (divine or not) is a valid piece of evidence for assessing the degree of
prestige or authority in a person. The fact that Creon is the king of Corinth does not
change her opinion about his family line; Medea’s sons are still too well-bred to live in
Creon’s household.
87
8
Note the chiastic construction over Med. 511-12: the “filthy offspring,” the “grandchildren of Sisyphus,”
literally surround and entrap the more noble offspring of Phoebus.
9
It is noteworthy, perhaps, that Sisyphus is not necessarily the biological ancestor of Creon, but is referred to
as the progenitor of the Corinthians because of his status as the city’s founder: Boyle (2011) ad 279-82. In
which case, Medea seems to impute a stigma attached to all citizens of Corinth and not just the royal family.
See also her statement (interpolated, according to Zwierlein) at 746-747, where she calls for a harsh
punishment of Sisyphus because he is the ancestor of Creon.
Medea also seems to forget the political conditions in which Jason’s marriage is
taking place: Jason needs to seek refuge from Acastus.
10
Instead of relying on divine help
(i.e., the type of help Medea could provide for him), Jason resorts to a mortal solution –
finding protection in another city, marriage to a mortal princess, and the expunging of his
very powerful former wife, who has become the object of blame for all of Jason’s alleged
former crimes.
Medea’s strategy to ensure Jason’s safety lies outside the logic of mortal existence –
she offers to use her magic and destroy any army, any person who threatens them. Jason’s
solution to his situation – to stem the potential attack of Acastus by getting rid of Medea
and marrying Creusa – is very rational and practical for those who do not have access to
otherworldly powers and authorities. As Jason himself states, he thinks that he will face
death if he chooses to honor his marriage to Medea:
si vellem fidem
praestare meritis coniugis, leto fuit
caput offerendum…. (Med. 434-36)
If I had wanted to keep faith with my wife as she deserved, to death my head would
have had to be offered up.
Jason sees his marriage to Creusa as the only way to prevent his own death. In this practical
context, Medea seems so self–assured, single–minded, and perhaps delusional later in their
exchange, when she refuses to acknowledge that any human might have the power to
challenge her plan.
88
10
For more on the exigent circumstances of Jason’s marriage to Creusa (and Creon’s motivation for taking
Jason in), see Fyfe (1983): 81 and Lawall (1979): 420ff.
I.: hinc rex et illinc – M.: est et his maior metus
Medea. nos †conflige. certemus sine,
sit pretium Iason. I.: cedo defessus malis.
et ipsa casus saepe iam expertos time.
M.: fortuna semper omnis infra me stetit.
I.: Acastus instat. M.: propior est hostis Creo:
utrumque profuge. non ut in socerum manus
armes nec ut te caede cognata inquines
Medea cogit: innocens mecum fuge.
I.: et quis resistet, gemina si bella ingruant,
Creo atque Acastus arma si iungant sua?
M.: his adice Colchos, adice et Aeeten ducem,
Scythas Pelasgis iunge: demersos dabo.
I.: alta extimesco sceptra. (Med. 516-29)
J.: On this side a king, and on that side – M.: There is even than these a greater fear
– Medea. Set us against each other.
11
Allow us to fight it out, if the prize should be
Jason. J.: I yield, tired from evil deeds. Even you should fear disasters already often
experienced. M.: All Fortune always stood beneath me. J.: Acastus stands on you
[i.e., he comes near]. M.: Nearer is that enemy Creon: flee from both. Neither to
arm your hands against your father-in-law, nor to befoul yourself in kindred murder
does Medea compel you: flee with me, innocent. J.: Yet who will withstand, if twin
wars should fall upon us, if Creon and Acastus should join their arms? M.: To these
add the Colchians, add even the leader Aeetes, join Scythia with the Pelasgians: I
shall deliver them buried. J.: I dread especially the high scepters.
Jason’s fear is warranted. From Medea, though, there is a disregard for any human attempts
to block her own desired trajectory. Note that in two cases above she speaks of herself in
the third person (a marker of significance in Senecan tragedy)
12
and delays the revelation of
herself as the greater fear, the one who can protect Jason from all threats. The size of the
enemy army does not matter to her, nor does the number of human casualties.
89
11
See ch. I, n. 27.
12
See, e.g., Boyle (1994) comm. ad 614.
Nor is Medea intimidated by the social positions of those leading the battle (unlike
Jason, who fears the high ranks of his enemies). Even kings stand below her in terms of
absolute power over things; Creon and Acastus ought rather to be afraid of her. Medea,
separating herself from any interaction within the social structures, sees herself in a
different class from human beings, an exception or outlier to proper social position.
13

When Medea compares her powers to those of the natural world, she sees herself as
the stronger force. In response to the Nurse’s advice that she should calm herself, Medea
states that her anger, which goes beyond normal mortal bounds, is unstoppable by natural
forces:
non rapidus amnis, non procellosum mare
pontusve coro saevus aut vis ignium
adiuta flatu possit inhibere impetum
irasque nostras: sternam et evertam omnia. (Med. 411-14)
Neither a swift stream, nor a tempestuous sea, or the Pontus raging with the North-
West wind, or the strength of fire (aided by the wind) could hinder the attack and
our anger: I shall overthrow and destroy everything.
Medea thinks that her power and her emotion transcend nature, either because she has
control over it (i.e., she is directly able to manipulate it), or because natural forces are weak
in comparison to her.
Soon thereafter, her power over nature is linked to her threat against the gods
through the repeated use of the first person future verbs (as I argue below, Medea’s use of
90
13
Her foreignness might also contribute to this perspective; though the social structure is familiar to her
(having come from a land with a king and royal family), she is not socially or biologically a member of the
Greeks. For more on this topic, see ch. III and Fyfe (1983) more generally for Medea’s excluded position vis-à-
vis the Corinthians.
such verbs serve to reinforce her connection to the divine Juno). When she contemplates
the extent of her upcoming crime, Medea states that she will threaten (or join?) the gods
themselves:
non queror tempus breve:
multum patebit. faciet hic faciet dies
quod nullus umquam taceat – invadam deos
et cuncta quatiam. (Med. 422-5)
I do not lament the short time: much will be available. It will do, this day will do
the type of thing about which no one will ever be silent – I shall attack/usurp the
gods and shake up everything.
The vocabulary used in this passage is of particular importance for understanding Medea’s
perceived relationship to the gods. The verb invadere is singular here in the Medea and is
used in only three other instances in Seneca’s tragedies: Juno at HF 61 (“a shiver has
struck,” invasit tremor), Oedipus at Oed. 659 (invasit tremor), and Phaedra at Phae. 1160
(“attack me, me, fierce controller of the deep sea,” me me, profundi saeve dominator freti/
invade). Juno and Oedipus use the verb with “tremor” when fear strikes them (over Hercules’
strength and the fear/guilt of parricide, respectively); a “tremor” can be understood both as
something that attacks and takes over the body. Phaedra seems to use the verb to express a
desire that Neptune punish her (perhaps covered by the semantics of “attack”); she wishes
that Neptune would set the monster of the sea against her (Phae. 1159-61). Thus both
91
semantic ranges of the word, in my opinion, are crucial for a full interpretation of Medea’s
statement; she intends to attack the gods and take them over.
14

Medea’s invadere in the statement above could also be read as a response to Creon’s
orders (he tells her “vade” at 190 and 284), and it likely foreshadows the uses of “vade” at
604 and 1026, where, respectively, the chorus advise traversing only familiar territory and
Jason delivers the last couplet of the play as Medea flies off (signaling, perhaps, that
Creon’s request has on some level been fulfilled).
15
The latter uses seem in particular to
touch on the theme of boundaries. The chorus warn of the dangers of unknown lands, and
Medea flies towards a destination bereft of humans as well as gods (as Jason believes);
Medea’s invadam is here is likely also tinted with the hue of inappropriate crossings, i.e.,
Medea is threatening a space where she does not belong.
16
The usurpation of divinity by a mortal character is not unique to the Medea. A
similar example is also presented by Atreus,
17
who does believe his power to be equal to
that of the gods, in the Thyestes:
92
14
Costa seems to have a different definition of “invadam” in mind. His comment reads “by deeds of
witchcraft abhorrent to them” (111). The attitude of the gods towards Medea (or her witchcraft) does not,
however, seem to be an issue. There is nothing in this passage that indicates in what way the gods will receive
Medea’s attempt to join/attack/usurp them.
15
The related verb vadere (“to go”) is more prevalent in the Medea than in any other work of the Senecan
corpus (including Hercules Oetaeus, which is almost twice as long as the Medea). This may seem odd, especially
given the heightened focus on travel in the Troades (though I would argue that the poignant verb in the
Troades is movere, not vadere). For further discussion of the theme of travel in the play, see ch. III.
16
See section III of this chapter for more on boundaries.
17
Many scholars have also observed the similarities between Atreus and Medea, and there seems to be a
consensus that Atreus’ character is modeled to some extent on Medea’s (or at least shares many of the same
attributes, including a choice to see himself as a deity). See, e.g., Fitch & McElduff (2002): 36, Littlewood
(2003): 38, 47, 97, 148-153, 174; Segal (1983a): 237ff.
aequalis astris gradior et cunctos super
altum superbo vertice attingens polum.
nunc decora regni teneo, nunc solium patris.
18
dimitto superos…
utinam quidem tenere fugientes deos
possem, et coactos trahere, ut ultricem dapem
omnes viderent…. (Thy. 885-95)
I walk equal to the stars, and I remain above all others, touching the high axis with
my head. Now I hold the honors of the kingdom, now the throne of my father. I
dismiss the gods…. Oh indeed that I were able to restrain the fleeing gods, and drag
them together, that they all might see my vengeful feast.
Medea, like Atreus, believes that she is able to wield power equal to that of the gods.
Unlike Atreus, however, Medea displays no want or desire for power as such. Whereas
Atreus expresses a wish that he be able to drag the gods back and make them watch his
crime (implying that he actually cannot), Medea expresses no desire to have more power
than what she already possesses, nor does she seem to require or need the gods’ approval,
in general, for her crimes. Comparatively, Medea seems more confident (or at least
comfortable) in her abilities; there is no anxiety over what she can and cannot accomplish,
in part because she is not fighting against the gods, as Atreus is (see Thy. 891ff., where the
gods clearly disapprove of Atreus’ behavior). In this way, Medea’s character is more
93
18
This statement is highly reminiscent of Medea’s own revelation of success, “Medea nunc sum” at Med. 910,
but also “iam iam recepi sceptra germanum patrem,/ spoliumque Colchi pecudis auratae tenent;/ rediere regna, rapta
virginitas redit...” at Med. 982-984.
reflective of a Juno (i.e., an actual deity) than an Atreus (i.e., someone aspiring to be a
deity).
19
The final monologue is a pivotal moment where Medea’s divinity is challenged and
reasserted; the act of infanticide, as we shall see, enables her to break off all ties with her
mortal existence.
20
At the point of killing the first child, Medea believes so strongly in the
divine identity which she has built up over the course of the play that she seems surprised
at the hindrance of her body rebelling against her intentions:
liberi quondam mei,
vos pro paternis sceleribus poenas date.
cor pepulit horror, membra torpescunt gelu
pectusque tremuit. ira discessit loco
materque tota coniuge expulsa redit.
…
quid, anime, titubas? ora quid lacrimae rigant
variamque nunc huc ira, nunc illuc amor
diducit? anceps aestus incertam rapit;
ut saeva rapidi bella cum venti gerunt,
utrimque fluctus maria discordes agunt
dubiumque fervet pelagus, haut aliter meum
cor fluctuatur…. (Med. 924-28; 937-43)
Children once mine, you pay the penalty for paternal crimes. Horror has struck my
heart, my limbs grow stiff with cold, and my heart trembles. Anger has left the
place, and the mother returns, the whole wife having been expelled. … Why, mind,
do you falter? Why do tears wet my face, and why now does anger to here, now
94
19
Though it is perhaps outside the scope of this chapter, one must reckon with the magic scene (lines 670–
848), which comprises almost a fifth of the tragedy and is, perhaps, the clearest display of Medea’s actual
power. In the monologue itself (including the Nurse’s descriptions and reported speech), Medea prays to
Hecate to help her create the fire which, housed in the robe given to Creusa, will burn against the laws of
nature (see the Messenger’s report at Med. 888ff.) and destroy the city. In the course of observing Medea’s
magical ability, Medea professes a power over nature – defined broadly: flora (707-730), fauna (675-704),
landscape (752ff.), seasons (e.g., 759ff.), planetary bodies (768ff.), and a power over the underworld (740-751).
20
For a different interpretation of this part of the tragedy, see Fyfe (1983): 84-85.
love
21
to there lead me astray? A precarious seething snatches me uncertain; as
when rapid winds wage a savage war, and from each direction the sea leads
discordant waves, and the irresolute sea boils, in no other wise does my heart
waver….
As she prepares to kill her children, Medea experiences an unexpected bodily response to
her intentions: her heart and her limbs freeze up with horror and shiver, and tears come to
her eyes. Her narration of the response, especially the vivid perfect and progressive verb
forms, emphasizes her surprise and confusion at the body’s protest to her murder. Previous
critics tend to view this scene as a conflict between Medea’s ‘mother’ and ‘wife’ personas,
22

but I think, given the evidence for Medea’s consistent self-deification over the course of the
tragedy, one can read this episode as a revelation of the extent to which Medea’s divine
persona has eclipsed the presence of Medea’s human body. The re–realization of the
physical body is the irruption of the real (as Lacan might say), a shattering of Medea’s
divine veneer (for the audience, though not for Medea herself, since her divine persona
inevitably prevails). Medea’s conflict is not only between ‘wife’ and ‘mother’; it is also
between mortal and divine.
23
Through the reaction of Medea’s body to the prospect of
killing its offspring, we see the inevitable result of Medea’s denial of her own mortal bodily
95
21
I am surprised that most critics, on the nature of Medea’s love in this passage, tend to assume that Medea’s
love is love for Jason (thus she has conflicted feelings about him – anger and love). I think, however, that
Medea’s love here is directed at her children, since they are the most pressing cause of her body’s rebellion. It
makes more sense to see her conflicting emotions as 1) anger at Jason (the jilted wife who seeks revenge, on
which see below), and 2) love for her children (which would cause her to balk at murdering them).
Structurally, the thing which is amor and pitted against ira seems to become expressed as pietas at Med.
943-944.
22
See, e.g., Star (2006), Guastella (2001), Fitch and McElduff (2002).
23
T. Habinek suggests reading this monologue in Stoic terms, as a wavering between “non-sage” Medea and
“sage” Medea.
existence. I would like to posit that, by going through with the act of infanticide, Medea
cuts off the remaining ties to mortality.
24
She overrules her physical body’s aversion to
harming the children, and in doing so she performs her first perfect act of divinity. Her
mortal body no longer exists, and she has secured her divine exit.
At the end of the play, it seems as though Sol makes good on his granddaughter’s
request
25
– the chariot appears and Medea flies off.
bene est, peractum est. plura non habui, dolor,
quae tibi litarem. lumina huc tumida alleva,
ingrate Iason. coniugem agnoscis tuam?
sic fugere soleo. patuit in caelum via:
squamosa gemini colla serpentes iugo
summissa praebent. recipe iam gnatos, parens;
ego inter auras aliti curru vehar. (Med. 1019-25)
It is good, it is finished. Grief, I have nothing more which I might offer to you. Lift
your swollen eyes here, thankless Jason. Do you recognize your wife? This is how I
always flee. A way has been made open into the sky: the twin serpents offer their
scaly necks bent under the yoke.
26
Now, receive your sons, parent; I shall be carried
on winged chariot into the air.
Where she goes afterwards is a perennial and heated question – to the gods? To Athens (in
line with Euripides’ tragedy)? Or to some godless place (in line with Jason’s final
statement)? The chariot at any rate presents to the audience a fantastical deus ex machina,
27

96
24
Again, for a different reading of the act of infanticide, see Fyfe (1983): 84--85.
25
A.J. Boyle reminds me that the theme of fulfillment of prayers is very important in Senecan tragedy.
26
Perhaps reminiscent of the first choral ode: “primum sceptiferis colla Tonantibus/ taura celsa ferat tergore
candido;/ Lucinam nivei femina corporis/ intemptata iugo placet…” (Med. 59-62).
27
I have in mind here both the literal and figurative meanings of this idiom: the chariot represents the divine
aid (and approval) given to Medea, but it also appears (presumably) by means of the ‘mechane’ on stage – that
is, suspended in the uppermost field of the stage space. For details on this Roman staging, see Boyle (2006):
187–188, and especially n. 75, where he argues the use of the mechane in this scene.
but also, like the bull in Seneca’s Phaedra, a preternatural and unexplained ending that
brings to fruition many of the themes of the rest of the tragedy.
As Nussbaum seems to hint,
28
the image of Medea, daughter of Sol and driving his
chariot, seems a replica of Phaethon, another offspring of the Sun, who also attempts to
drive the Sun’s chariot. The story of Phaethon is not, however, sprung on the audience
only in the last image of the Medea. Phaethon is also invoked by the chorus when they seek
an analogue to the Argonauts’ journey and its consequences.
ausus aeternos agitare currus
immemor metae iuvenis paternae
quos polo sparsit furiosus ignes
ipse recepit.
constitit nulli via nota magno:
vade qua tutum populo priori,
rumpe nec sacro violente sancta
foedera mundi. (Med. 599-606)
Having dared to whip up the immortal chariot, the youth unmindful of his father’s
course, the flames which he, maddened, scattered in the heavens, he himself
received. The known path stands firm for no man at a high cost: go where it was
safe for earlier people, and don’t break, violent man, the sacrosanct pacts of the
world.
Like Medea (and like the Argonauts), Phaethon attempts to cross the boundary between
mortal and immortal, to prove that he has inherited paternal power and divinity.
29
Unlike
97
28
Nussbaum (1996): 463 mentions Phaethon in passing, alongside Icarus as proper warnings against
ambition. While she argues extensively about the connection between Medea and Plato’s Phaedrus, she does
not examine in detail the resonance of the Phaethon myth.
29
Also similar is Medea and Phaethon’s burning of the landscape: see Ovid’s detailed description of burned
lands at Met. 2.214-226, and burned peoples and rivers at 2.235-259.
Medea (but still like the Argonauts), Phaethon is arrogant and ignorant.
30
Ultimately, he
proves too weak to drive his father’s chariot. He cannot equal the divine driver, and his
death is the result.
Seneca refers to Ovid’s extensive narration of the Phaethon story in the
Metamorphoses (for detailed verbal allusions, see Jakobi 1988 ad Med. 32, 33, 33f., 37f.,
601f., 745, 758f.). After Phaethon makes the request to drive the chariot, his father explains
that he is not qualified to undertake the job:
magna petis, Phaethon, et quae nec viribus istis
munera conveniant nec tam puerilibus annis.
sors tua mortalis: non est mortale quod optas.
plus etiam, quam quod superis contingere possit,
nescius adfectas. (Met. 2.54-58)
Phaethon, you ask for great gifts, and those which are fitting neither to that
strength of yours, nor to your quite youthful years. Your lot is mortal: what you
wish for is not. Unknowing, you aspire to more than that which is able to touch
the gods.
Phoebus points out that Phaethon’s mortality makes him fundamentally unable to perform
the task; though his strength may improve, and his age will undoubtedly increase,
Phaethon could never change his status from mortal to immortal. Phaethon’s attempt to
‘perform immortality’ fails. In the Medea, Medea’s exit invokes the image of Phaethon but
highlights the fundamental difference between the two characters – where Phaethon fails to
exhibit divine ability, Medea succeeds in exhibiting hers.
It should also be noted that Medea is the only Senecan character who exits in this
fashion. The fact that Medea does become something else (perhaps something divine, and I
98
30
For the ‘daring’ of the Argonauts, see also ch. I. For the resonance of “immemor,” see ch. IV.
think that we are meant to see that the character certainly believes this to be the case), that
she can escape the human social context without being punished for her actions, is an
exercise of divine privilege in itself.
31
Only gods are able to commit such offenses against
humans and move on without fear of repercussion. From the Corinthians, or the other
Greeks at any rate, Medea fears no repercussion for her actions. She is beyond the scope of
social accountability.
While there is some scholarly consensus that Medea achieves some degree of
divinity (or quasi-divinity) as she exits from the play, critics have yet to explore the way in
which Medea, throughout the play, sees and fashions herself as a divine being, outside the
requirements set for normal mortals – negotiation, fear, social accountability. I hope to
have shown that Medea’s exit as a divinity ought not to come as a surprise, since, through
her belief in her divine heritage, her faith in her abilities, and her utter disregard for her
social surroundings, she has performed the role of a god from the outset.
99
31
I am puzzled by critics who see the ending of this tragedy as a ‘punishment’ for Medea: Gill (1987) and
McAuley (2008, as self-punishment), Segal (1983b): 175 n. 8 (where she is lumped together with
Clytemnestra, Atreus, and Hercules as “engulfed in his or her inner monstrosity”). Even when Medea kills
her children to expiate the death of her brother and alienation of her father (where the notion of ‘self-
punishment’ would make the most sense), nowhere does Medea indicate that she suffers as a result of the
infanticide (in fact, one could argue that her character sees the death of the children as to her benefit). The
only objection is Medea’s statement at 964-5: “frater est, poenas petit:/ dabimus, sed omnes,” “it is my brother, he
demands a penalty: we shall pay it – all of us;” though “omnes” is ambiguously nominative or accusative,
Medea indicates that she will at least share in the paying of the penalty. This line, however, is spoken before
the children are killed; after the children are killed, she seems to regret nothing about her actions, nor does
she project an attitude that she has been punished by the death of the children.
II. Medea and Juno
The dates of Seneca’s tragedies cannot be pinned down definitively; lacking any
more–convincing hypothesis, I shall stick to Fitch’s relative early, middle, and late groups of
tragedies. Fitch surmises Medea to have been written in the middle group of the tragedies,
along with Hercules Furens and Troades.
32
The intertextual similarities between Medea and
Juno, which we will now explore, cannot be shown to exist in a unidirectional sense, i.e.,
we cannot argue that one of the tragedies is an influence on the other (and not vice–versa).
We must allow for the possibility, then, that these two plays were constructed
contemporaneously (in line with Fitch’s argument). Even if this were not the case, we can at
least allow that the ideas presented in the plays, originating from a singular author,
coexisted in the authorial mind in dynamic interplay with each other. That is, the thematic
elements of Seneca’s drama existed outside the specific moment of construction of the
tragedies themselves.
33
I shall show that Medea’s character and tragedy contain elements
that remind the reader both of Seneca’s Juno character (arguably the only truly immortal
character in Seneca’s oeuvre)
34
in his Hercules Furens, and of the themes of boundary
violation and broken fides contained in that same tragedy. The dynamic interplay between
these two tragedies serves our analysis threefold: to reinforce our understanding of Medea
100
32
Fitch “Sense-Pauses and Relative Dating in Seneca, Sophocles, and Shakespeare” AJP 102 (1981): 289-307.
For further discussion of these issues, see my Introduction.
33
With respect to unknowable dating and intertextual arguments, Hinds’ Allusion and Intertext provides a
compelling methodology: “There is no discursive element in a Roman poem, no matter how unremarkable in
itself, and no matter how frequently repeated in the tradition, that cannot in some imaginable circumstance
mobilize a specific allusion” (26).
34
The possible exception to this is the Fury at the beginning of the Thyestes, who could also make an
interesting comparison to Medea.
as a divine figure; to remind us of the socially fragile position of women (by which even
Juno is affected); and to highlight the Argonautic voyage as an act of hubris, necessitating
an inevitable divine punishment.
35
On the level of plot, both Medea and Juno are struggling to deal with unfaithful
husbands. Medea has lost Jason to a new, socially sanctioned wife in Corinth, and Juno has
reached her limit of being able to cope with Jove’s countless mistresses. Juno opens the
Hercules Furens with a lament of Jove’s unfaithfulness:
soror tonantis (hoc enim solum mihi
nomen relictum est) semper alienum Iovem
ac templa summi vidua deserui aetheris
locumque caelo pulsa paelicibus dedi;
tellus colenda est, paelices caelum tenent…. (HF 1-5)
Sister of the thunderer (for this is the only name left to me), I have abandoned that
always-unfaithful Jove and the widowed temples of the highest ether, and, struck
from the sky, I have given the place to his mistresses; I must live on earth, and
mistresses hold the sky.
She proceeds to describe the various mortal mistresses and half-immortal offspring that
now share the heavens with the proper deities.
36
Like Juno, Medea sees herself displaced from the position of wife; she puts herself
in the role of Jason’s mistress. Medea says to him, “cruentis paelicem poenis premat/ regalis
ira” (“let royal anger oppress me, a mistress, with cruel punishments,” 462-3) and “paelicem
101
35
For the inevitability of the punishment of the Argonauts (and the inevitability of Medea’s ending), see Fyfe
(1983): 86ff.
36
An interesting comparison perhaps exists between Medea and Juno with regard to their lack of ‘motherly’
personas. As discussed in section I, in the passages where Medea sees her conflict as between wife and
mother, I read it also as a conflict between immortal and mortal. Medea’s motherly self, which exists in her
protesting body, is what she wishes to deny in performing her divine self. Perhaps Medea’s ‘wife’ persona is
also meant to emulate the standard exemplum of the jilted, vengeful wife – Juno.
invisam amoves” (“you remove a hated mistress,” 495). Like Juno, Medea seems stuck in a
status equal to that of a mistress, since the mistress (Creusa) has taken her place as wife.
Also like Juno, whose husband has countless affairs which corrupt the purity of the
heavens, Medea positions herself as one in a line of wives and mistresses who corrupt
themselves for Jason’s benefit. To Creon, she states:
illi Pelia, non nobis iacet;
fugam, rapinas adice, desertum patrem
lacerumque fratrem, quidquid etiamnunc novas
docet maritus coniuges, non est meum…. (Med. 276-279)
For him Pelias lies dead, not for us; flight, add robbery, a deserted father and a
slaughtered brother, whatever even now a husband is teaching to new wives, it is
not mine….
Medea, attempting to persuade Creon that she is not a threat, distances herself from the
agency of her crimes in part by imputing to Jason some heretofore unknown set of “wives”
who are right now being taught by him, being made to commit evil acts on his behalf.
Medea tells Creon that she could have been anyone, that she is merely one of many wife-
victims of Jason. The accusation that Jason has multiple mistresses also appears at the end
of the tragedy, when Medea tells him,
i nunc, superbe, virginum thalamos pete,
relinque matres. (Med. 1007-8)
go now, haughty one, seek the beds of virgins, leave mothers alone.
Aside from the implication that Jason might seek additional bedroom companions,
Medea must contend with the actual threat to her marriage, Jason’s ‘mistress’ Creusa.
37
In
102
37
Perhaps of note is the fact that Medea refers to Creusa most often as “coniunx:” Med. 17, 125, 279, and 999.
Medea’s final monologue, she seems to fuse herself with Creusa; they become
indistinguishable as mothers of Jason’s children:
ex paelice utinam liberos hostis meus
aliquos haberet – quidquid ex illo tuum est,
Creusa peperit. (Med. 920-22)
Oh that from his mistress my enemy had some children – whatever is yours by that
man, Creusa gave birth [to them].
Like Juno with Jupiter’s mistresses, Medea proposes the notion that she and Creusa might
be interchangeable, that Creusa has effectively ‘become’ her, usurping Medea’s former
position of authority.
38
Juno and Medea also share similar emotional reactions to the infidelity/loss of their
husbands. The primary responses of both characters are ira and dolor. Juno mentions her
dolor twice in her opening monologue (at HF 28 and 99, once with “noster,” a phrase used
by Medea more than once,
39
and a phrase that does not occur in Senecan tragedy outside
these two plays). Juno mentions her ira three times in her monologue (HF 28, 34, 75).
These are the same emotions predominant in Medea’s character. She presents these
emotions as an intrinsic part of her experience, and the frequencies of dolor (used by Medea
of herself at Med. 49, 139, 554, 907, 914, 944, 951, 1011, 1016, 1019) and ira (used by
103
38
M.P. Taylor points out to me that the punishment of Creusa and the death/deification of Hercules make
for interesting parallels: both die from a burning robe sent by a woman who fears that her position has been
usurped by someone else. See below for further discussion of Hercules.
39
Med. 554, 907-8, 1011 (“meo dolori”). Though it is outside the current scope of my project, T. Habinek
points me towards the likely intertext for an angry and mournful Juno: Vergil’s Aeneid (and especially the
opening: I.4, 9, 11, 25, 130, etc.). See also Lawall (1983), who argues that Hercules’ pietas and fortitudo foil
Juno’s plans to destroy his reputation as hero.
Medea of herself at 51, 203, 414, 556, 902, 916, 927, 938, 943, 944, 953, 989) are greater in
the Medea than in any of Seneca’s other tragedies (and ira significantly so).
40
Both Medea and Juno invoke the Furies as part of their plan for revenge, and their
invocations, while conventional, are quite similar. Interestingly, the only Fury specifically
mentioned by Medea and Juno is Megaera (who is also mentioned by Atreus in the Thyestes,
but is absent from the rest of Senecan tragedy). In her opening monologue, Juno states:
adsint ab imo Tartari fundo excitae
Eumenides, ignem flammeae spargant comae,
viperea saevae verbera incutiant manus. …
incipite, famulae Ditis, ardentem citae
concutite pinum et agmen horrendum anguibus
Megaera ducat atque luctifica manu
vastam rogo flagrante corripiat trabem.
hoc agite, poenas petit violatae Stygis;
concutite pectus, acrior mentem excoquat
quam qui caminis ignis Aetnaeis furit. (HF 86-8; 100-106)
Let them be present, roused forth from the lowest depth of Tartarus, the
Eumenides, let their fiery hair scatter flame, let their savage hands shake snaky
scourges. … Begin, servants of Dis, quick, shake the burning pine, and let Megaera
lead her band bristling with snakes, and with a grief-bringing hand let her snatch a
crude timber from the fiery pyre. Do this, seek punishment for the violated Styx;
shake his chest, let a flame more fierce than that which rages from the forges of
Aetna cook his mind to madness.
Medea mentions Megaera near the end of the play, when she sees the apparition of her
brother’s ghost accompanied by the Furies (958-966); in both tragedies, the Furies who are
requested at the beginning of the play duly show up by the end (assuming that the Furies
104
40
According to Denooz, of the 64 instances of dolor in Senecan tragedy, 14 occur in Medea (over 20%). Dolor
occurs in Tro., Phae., and Thy. 11, 10, and 10 times, respectively. Of the 70 instances of ira in Senecan tragedy,
22 occur in Medea (almost a third); Thy. has the next place with 13 occurrences.
are in part responsible for the onset of Hercules’ madness in HF). Medea’s Furies are
invoked, like Juno’s, in her opening monologue:
nunc, nunc adeste sceleris ultrices deae,
crinem solutis squalidae serpentibus,
atram cruentis manibus amplexae facem,
adeste, thalamis horridae quondam meis
quales stetistis: coniugi letum novae
letumque socero et regiae stirpi date. (Med. 13-18)
Now, now be present, goddess avengers of crime, scaly/unkempt in your hair with
loosed serpents, having embraced the black torch with bloody hands, be present,
such ones as you who once stood wild at my marriage chamber: give death to the
new wife and death to the father-in-law and death to the royal offspring.
Medea and Juno both identify the fiery and snaky elements of the Furies, though not in
exactly the same way: for Juno, their hair is fiery and they hold snakes in their hands,
whereas for Medea their hair is snaky and they embrace fire with their hands.
For both, however, fire is an intrinsic part of the proposed punishment: in the
Medea, fire represents one of the primary images of marriage and serves to connect Jason’s
punishment with his crime. Medea asks the Furies to carry a burning torch, as at her
wedding; for the reader, the use of the torch image at the outset of the play hints at the
marriage torch of Creusa’s wedding and the fiery destruction of Jason’s new marriage (both
of which the reader anticipates as a part of the myth). In the first choral ode, the chorus
refer to Creusa’s wedding torch twice: as “well-split” (multifidam pinum, Med. 111), which is a
reference to Medea’s rejuvenation of Aeson in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Met. 7.259; Ovid
coined the term) and thus an implied reference to Medea’s marriage to Jason, and as a
105
“sollemnem ignem” (Med. 112).
41
The Messenger reports the fire in the town at Med. 885ff:
“avidus per omnem regiae partem furit/ immissus ignis…” (“Greedy, the fire having been let
loose rages through every part of the palace”). “Avidus,” of course, is a reflection of the
Argonauts themselves (as if the fire were a tit–for–tat punishment of the Argonautic
voyage). “Furit” bespeaks a further overlap between Medea’s rage and that of Juno in
Hercules Furens; Juno asks the Furies for fire as well, turning her focus precisely to the word
furor and the related verb furio (HF 98-109) – to “cook” Hercules’ mind into a maddened
state. Both characters want the Furies to burn their enemies.
Medea seems to take on the persona of Fury, acting as the agent of her own
vengeance. In the opening monologue, Medea herself resembles Juno’s Megaera. When she
threatens to ruin Jason’s new marriage, she states: “manibus excutiam faces” (“I shall shake
out from their hands the torches,” 27), and “pronubam thalamo feram/ ut ipsa pinum” (“…
(that) I myself carry the marriage pine to the wedding chamber,” 37-8). The repetition of
forms of cutio (“incutiant,” HF 88; “concutite,” HF 101, 105; “excutiam,” Med. 27; and
“excute,” Med. 112 [in the 1st choral ode]) – and the shared context of the burning torches
and burning madness – signal an overlap between Medea’s character and the Fury to whom
Juno is praying.
42
106
41
And see also the ode’s description of the red sunrise, which seems fiery, at Med. 99–101.
42
I am not the first person to notice Medea’s similarity to a Fury (see, e.g., Littlewood 2004: 37, 103ff.), but I
think I may be the first to have highlighted this intertext with Hercules Furens, which on the one hand adds
evidence that Medea is acting like a Fury (and specifically Juno’s Fury, as if Medea is the embodiment of the
jilted wife’s revenge), but on the other hand stresses her central role in enacting her own revenge. Schiesaro
(2003): 183-4 notes the similarities between Juno in the prologue of Hercules Furens and the Fury in the
prologue of Thyestes.
Medea and Juno are also similar in that they both appear at the outset of their
respective tragedies and prove themselves to be the masterminds of the plays’ action.
43
They
use their opening monologues in part to reveal their orchestration of events to come,
though both initially describe their situation and emotional state. Medea states her
intention to punish Jason somehow for his infidelity, deliberating the most painful means
of assault (Med. 19ff.; 125ff.), and Juno moves from a general lament of her husband’s
infidelities to her specific anxiety over Hercules, and finally her plan for driving him mad
(HF 100ff.; 113ff.). They share similar language: compare, for example, Med. 48 with HF
63: “levia memoravi nimis;” “levia sed nimium queror.” More significantly, they both make use
of the 1st-person future indicative (or, in some cases, the present subjunctive: see above) to
make their threats and plan their revenge.
As I have argued in section I, Medea’s use of the first person illustrates the degree
to which she is willing to enact her own revenge against her enemies, a trait which
differentiates her from other Senecan characters asking for divine help. Juno, of course, has
the ability to enact her own revenge, so it is no surprise that she expresses her own agency
(at HF 91: “ostendam,” 92: “revocabo,” 95: “educam,” “extraham,” 118: “stabo,” 119: “librabo,”
and 121: “favebo”). Medea, as we have seen, is more of an outlier among humans, yet her
speech resembles that of Juno when she is talking about what she will do (at Med: 27: “ibo,”
“excutiam,” 37: “feram,” 39: “caedam,” 147: “cumulabo,” 172: “fugiam,” “ulciscar,” 173:
“inveniam,” 399: “patiar,” 414: “sternam,” “evertam,” 424: “invadam,” 425: “quatiam,” 528:
107
43
For Medea as dramaturge, see, e.g., Boyle (2006): 208-210, 215ff., Schiesaro (2003): 16ff. et passim,
Littlewood (2004): 45-51, 57ff.
“dabo,” 1006: “exigam,” 1010: “perimam,” 1013: “scrutabor,” “extraham,”
44
and 1025:
“vehar”).
45
Not only are Medea’s verb choices intimately related to her own sense of agency,
they serve as well to link Medea’s speech to that of the other major divine character of
Senecan tragedy: Juno in Hercules Furens. Medea’s sense of agency itself seems to be a divine
attribute.
It is also worthwhile to examine the similarity of the punishments inflicted by
Medea and Juno. They both choose to punish innocents as a means of revenge against their
actual enemies. Neither Hercules’ nor Medea’s children are in any way guilty for the crimes
of their respective fathers, and it is arguable whether they deserve to fall victim to vengeful
wrath. Juno and Medea share this trait, the unwarranted punishment of the innocent, with
nature herself, in the way she punishes the Argonauts for their transgression. In the third
choral ode of Medea, the chorus, listing the punishments of the Argonauts, also mention
those who received punishment for the voyage who were not directly involved (Med. 660ff:
Ajax and Alcestis). Nor are the punishments inflicted upon the Argonauts (or their loved
ones) really effective. The Argonauts (or descendants) are punished for their action, but
their punishment certainly does not undo the advancement of technology of humans
generally – people still sail to foreign places despite the fate suffered by the first seafarers.
Similarly, Juno’s punishment of Hercules does not undo the presence of demi-gods,
108
44
Note that this line has two first person future verbs, one of which is “extraham;” Juno also uses “extraham” as
the second verb of a two-verb sentence at HF 95.
45
For more on Medea’s use of the first person future and how it relates to her sense of agency, see ch. IV.
mistresses, and step-children in her heavenly space, nor does it necessarily prevent Hercules’
own deification (according to some versions of the myth).
When viewed in this comparative light, the death of Medea’s children seems
completely unwarranted and ineffective. Presumably, by the time of the children’s deaths,
Medea is aware that her magic has worked, that Creusa and Creon are dead, and that most
of the city is in flames.
46
There is at this point no obstacle between Medea and her
supposed goal of getting Jason back (or even her goal of not being exiled) – no mistress or
other wife, no threatening king/father-in-law to force her out of the kingdom or away from
her former husband. Why then, if the threat no longer exists, does Medea persist in killing
her children?
The answer I propose is that it is a trait of divinity in Seneca’s tragedies not to care
(i.e., not to feel guilt or remorse) about the relative guilt or innocence of actual victims. For
nature,
47
Juno, and Medea, revenge is the only crucial element, and recompense must be
sought for the affronts against their authority – whether that be by killing the perpetrators
of that affront, the children of the perpetrators, or even, in the case of Hercules and Jason,
by causing immense pain for the perpetrator by killing their loved ones. Thus Medea, by
killing her children in order to cause Jason the most pain, completes her divine
transformation with this act. It is only when she commits a purely vengeful act against a
109
46
The only other option is that Medea does not believe that her magic has worked and thinks that Creon will
still force her into exile. This option is illogical, both because of Medea’s confidence (and success) in her past
magical endeavors and because she is likely onstage when the Messenger delivers the news about the fire and
death in the city.
47
And cf. Phae. 352-3: “vindicat omnes/ natura sibi…” (“nature avenges all for herself”).
completely innocent victim and feels no remorse that she successfully performs divine
anger.
Perhaps the most significant overlap between Juno’s speech and the Medea deals
with the macrocosmic/metaphysical themes of the Medea, i.e., the crossing of natural
boundaries and the advancement of human technology. We have already touched on this
topic with the figure of Phaethon and Medea’s exit from the tragedy. As we shall see, the
threat of mortal encroachment on and usurpation of divine power also appears as one of
Juno’s foremost anxieties in her monologue.
The theme of boundary crossing embodied in the Medea’s conclusion is also
presented very clearly in its two central choral odes, which address the Argonautic
expedition, the repercussions of their journey in terms of human advancement, and the
departure from some idealistic, pre-lapsarian way of living. The chorus explain the full
transition effected by the Argonauts’ journey:
candida nostri saecula patres
videre procul fraude remota.
sua quisque piger litora tangens
patrioque senex factus in arvo,
parvo dives nisi quas tulerat
natale solum non norat opes.
bene dissaepti foedera mundi
traxit in unum Thessala pinus….
nunc iam cessit pontus et omnes
patitur leges…
terminus omnis motus et urbes
muros terra posuere nova,
nil qua fuerat sede reliquit
pervius orbis:
Indus gelidum potat Araxen,
110
Albin Persae Rhenumque bibunt—
venient annis saecula seris,
quibus Oceanus vincula rerum
laxet et ingens pateat tellus
Tethysque novos detegat orbes
nec sit terris ultima Thule. (Med. 329-379)
White was the age our fathers saw, with trickery removed far away. Each man,
reluctant/slow, touching his own shores and having become elderly in his paternal
field, rich in little, he had not become acquainted with wealth except that which his
natal land bore. The covenants of a well-partitioned world the Thessalian pine
dragged into a single thing.…. Now already the sea yields and suffers all laws… every
boundary has been moved and cities have placed their walls on new land, nothing
in the place where it used to be has the accessible world left behind: the Indian
drinks the icy Araxes, the Persians drink the Elbe and the Rhine – an age will come
in later years, when Ocean looses the chains of things, the huge earth lies available,
and Tethys reveals new worlds, nor will Thule be the furthest in the lands.
The former age is distinguished by a smaller circle of living – without sea travel, a man
knows only his own property and his own city, his own citizens.
48
Whether the change is a
penetration or not,
49
the transition between ‘golden’ age and post-‘golden’ age manifests as
displaced cities and people (even displaced landscapes), with the possibility of limitless
access to the rest of the world.
As a result of the expedition, according to the chorus, nature takes revenge on the
travelers, punishing them for their breach of the foedus that kept humans from entering the
sea.
quisquis audacis tetigit carinae
nobiles remos nemorisque sacri
Pelion densa spoliavit umbra,
111
48
See ch. III for the repercussions of the Argo on citizenship and ethnicity.
49
See ch. I for discussion of the Argonauts as penetrators of nature.
quisquis intravit scopulos vagantes
et tot emensus pelagi labores
barbara funem religavit ora
raptor externi rediturus auri,
exitu diro temerata ponti
iura piavit.
exigit poenas mare provocatum. (Med. 607-616)
Whoever touched the famous oars of the bold ship and deprived Pelion of the
dense shade of its sacred grove, whoever forced their way into the clashing rocks
and, having passed through so many labors of the deep, tied the ship’s cable to a
foreign shore, a plunderer of foreign gold intending to return, with a harsh death
he appeased the violated laws of the sea. The sea, challenged, exacted punishment.
The breach of the “foedera mundi” results in the punishment of the various Argonauts
(detailed in the third choral ode). It is clear that their voyage was against the law of nature.
It should also be noted that this passage directly follows the chorus’ Phaethon analogy (see
above). Phaethon’s (unsuccessful) attempt to cross a boundary between mortal and
immortal can likewise be characterized as a breach of a divinely sanctioned, divinely
decreed boundary.
Medea’s punishment of Jason is a parallel (more personal) manifestation of this
larger narrative; either acting as nature’s agent or entirely on a personal level, Medea
punishes Jason for his failure to honor his fides/foedus that he has with her as a spouse.
50

Similarly, Juno has her own microcosmic concern – her anger over Jove’s unfaithfulness.
This is her personal investment in punishing the larger boundary transgressions of
Hercules.
112
50
For more on Medea’s relationship with Jason and Medea as an agent of nature, see ch. I. See also Guastella
(2001) and McAuley (2008) on fides and Roman marriage in this tragedy.
While the theme of boundary violation in the Hercules Furens parallels that in the
Medea, the conflict in the former tragedy is not between man and nature, but between
mortal and immortal. Yet it is the resonance of and reference to the theme of (im)mortality
that highlight the divine themes at work in the Medea; in addition to marital
unfaithfulness, Medea shares in common with Juno an investment in the privileges
normally associated with divine status.
We have seen above that one of Juno’s initial complaints is the upturning of her
normal abode; she feels that she has been ejected from her normal position and forced to
dwell somewhere abnormal (on the earth), while those who should be on the earth have
been granted place in the sky (HF 1-5). There is a reversal of the normal (and proper)
position of individuals relative to their status. Note how this is similar to the out-of-place,
post-Argonautic world of the Medea, where peoples drink the water of faraway rivers, cities
are displaced from their normal locations, and boundaries have been moved (Med.
369-379). The state of Juno’s heaven seems strikingly similar to the post-lapsarian state of
the Medea’s world.
After lamenting her displacement from a position of power relative to the
illegitimate offspring of her brother/husband (HF 6-18), Juno focuses specifically on
Hercules, whom, at the beginning of the tragedy, she has been tormenting for some time by
giving him impossible tasks to complete (HF 30-36; 40ff.). Juno’s anxiety about Hercules is
that he is not constrained by the typical boundaries of mortals; he has access to spaces that
have been previously inaccessible (i.e., Hades, HF 46ff.), he possesses powers beyond those
113
of other humans (or immortals, for that matter – Juno surmises that the only person who
could conquer Hercules would be Hercules himself, HF 84-85). Her language describing
Hercules’ position will seem familiar to a reader of the Medea.
Among Hercules’ various tasks, Juno focuses particularly on his recent trip to
Hades and his stint as Atlas’ substitute.
nec satis terrae patent:
effregit ecce limen inferni Jovis,
et opima victi regis ad superos refert. (HF 46-48)
Nor is it enough that the lands lie open: behold, he smashes the threshold of the
Jove of the underworld, and he brings back to the gods the spoils of the conquered
king.
patefacta ab imis manibus retro via est
et sacra dirae mortis in aperto iacent. (HF 55-56)
A way back from the lowest shades has been made open, and the sacred matters of
harsh death lie in the open.
Anyone who has read the Medea will recognize the loaded verb patere (also patefacere) – used
by the chorus also to describe the openness of the land after the Argonautic voyage (377:
“ingens pateat tellus”), used by Medea to describe her discovery of Jason’s emotional
vulnerability (i.e., his children; 550: “vulneri patuit locus”), addressing Creon’s granted time
(423: “multum patebit”), seeing her brother’s ghost and accompanying Furies (966: “pectus en
Furiis patet”), and finally as Medea sees her escape route in the sky (1022: “patuit in caelum
via”). What is an expression of Hercules’ threat to divine power in the Hercules Furens is
found in the Medea to be a word marking sinister vulnerabilities and the crossing of
inappropriate boundaries.
114
Juno’s next statement, “foedus umbrarum perit” (HF 49), again resonates with the
Medea in its attention to the macrocosmic boundaries between human and immortal and
between the different areas of the world. “The pact of the shades has ended,” – i.e.,
Hercules, in his crossing into Hades and back, has broken the foedus between the human
world and the underworld. He has broken the law of death. In the Medea, the chorus state
that the Argonauts disobey the “bene dissaepti foedera mundi” (Med. 335, quoted at length
above). As in the case of Hercules, the world prior to their offense was “well-partitioned.”
Juno concludes that Hercules, having conquered Hades, will now try to conquer
Olympus as well: “quaerit ad superos viam” (‘he seeks a path to the gods’, HF 74).
51
Her
response to this idea, as she states, is fear. Juno’s fear of Hercules is a fear of his ability to
break the boundaries that keep normal humans in their place. Hercules has managed to
travel to Hades and return alive – Juno assumes that he will therefore travel to Olympus
and threaten the authority and power of the gods there.
52
In the Medea also there is an anxiety about the breaking of boundaries, an anxiety
about the appropriate realm and power of mortal men. The Medea, by alluding to Juno’s
monologue (in character and thematic similarities), invokes the idea of broken boundaries,
115
51
It is also probable that via is a loaded term in both tragedies, related to the sinister vulnerability of patere; in
the Medea, it is Medea’s exit path away from repercussion and towards divinity (1022), a means for
punishment (40), and the potential escape routes open to Jason and closed to her (458). In HF, via is
Hercules’ path to and from Hades (55, 276, 280, 675, 770), as well as his path to heaven (74, 568).
52
Of interest, and, for now, outside the scope of this chapter, is the fact that Hercules’ mythology shows up in
most of the ingredients which go into Creusa’s poisoned robe: the blood of Nessus (Med. 776, which is also
responsible for Hercules’ own death), the Harpy’s feathers (Med. 782, the Harpies were driven off by the
Argonauts, of which Hercules was a member), the Stymphalian birds and the Hydra (Med. 783-4, both labors
of Hercules). Medea, like Juno, takes advantage of Hercules’ labors and uses them for ill ends. She also turns
Hercules’ destruction of monsters into a creative enterprise, adding to the dissolution of creation and
destruction in the tragedy.
appropriate mortal/immortal relationships and spaces, and the threat represented by
people who break these boundaries.

III. Prometheus and the descent of Man
It should be clear by now that Medea sees herself as belonging to a class above
human, divine (if not an actual deity). She has used her heredity and her power over nature
to support the belief that she can commit crime without repercussion from the human
community. Her language, moreover, echoes (or is echoed by) that of Juno in the Hercules
Furens, who also, with the boundary between human and divine threatened, manipulates
human experience for destructive aims without fearing any human interruption or
punishment. The similarities to Juno presented in Medea’s language and in the tragedy’s
themes aid in our understanding of the divine aspect of Medea’s character. Now, to what
ends is Medea’s divinity brought to the fore in this particular tragedy?
The answer to this question, I think, has to do with Juno’s problem in Hercules
Furens – the authority of humans and the extent of their power – as well as the larger
narrative of human progress that is invoked by the choral odes of Medea. The problem
centers on the consequences of human technology: the relative powers of human and
divine when humans make technological progress. We move on, then, to the resonance in
this play of the Prometheus myth. We shall find that part of Medea’s divine character is
meant to help us examine the moral ambiguity of technological progress and the
appropriate relationship between man and god.
116
The Medea is unique among Seneca’s tragedies for its frequency of references to
Prometheus and his location of punishment – a mountain in the Caucasus region. Aside
from an adjectival usage in the Hercules Furens,
53
Prometheus is mentioned by name only in
the Medea, and Caucasus receives mention twice.
54
The reference is introduced within the
first 50 lines of the play. In a much-critiqued line in her opening monologue, Medea urges
herself to “drive out womanly fear.” What is less well examined, however, is her
replacement for this womanly fear. She instructs herself:
pelle femineos metus
et inhospitalem Caucasum mente indue. (Med. 42-43)
Drive out womanly fear, and clothe your mind with unfriendly Caucasus.
55
Caucasus is, of course, the famous mountain range on which Prometheus was chained,
punished by Zeus for giving fire to humans (“inhospitalis Caucasus” in the Thyestes). The verb
induere is used again by Medea later in the play and a few times in the Phaedra and
Agamemnon to signal changes or metamorphoses (used of clothing in Agamemnon and of
disguise in Phaedra).
56
So a plausible way of reading this comment is to say that Medea,
117
53
1207, as an adjective, where Hercules, realizing his crime, asks Jove for Prometheus’ punishment.
54
“Caucasus” also occurs at Phd. 1135, HF 1209, and Thy. 1048.
55
Costa, in his commentary, does not seem to make a connection between Medea’s reference to Caucasus
and Prometheus. He states, rather, that “by ‘clothing her mind with the inhospitable Caucasus’ M. means
reverting to her wild native character” (68). Seneca could have used other words to imply that Medea was
referring to her native land, though, and I think the particular choice of Caucasus, when seen in the context
of other allusions and similarities, is meant to invoke more than just Medea’s barbaric origin.
56
At Phae. 299 and 574, the chorus and Nurse speak of the various guises of Jove and Amor when they have
pursued lovers. At Ag. 881ff., Cassandra narrates the interior scene of Agamemnon’s death; she uses the verb
to talk about a cloak which Clytemnestra puts on Agamemnon. Also compare Med. 750-751: “nunc meis vocata
sacris, noctium sidus, veni/ pessimos induta vultus, fronte non una minax.”
consciously or unconsciously, alludes to the punished Prometheus when she is in the initial
process of re-constructing her persona for the upcoming events, either instructing herself to
become Promethean or to emulate Prometheus’ punishment in her designs of revenge
against Jason.
The Nurse presents the next mention of Caucasus, as she describes Medea’s magic
performance.
postquam evocavit omne serpentum genus,
congerit in unum frugis infaustae mala:
quaecumque generat invius saxis Eryx,
quae fert opertis hieme perpetua iugis
sparsus cruore Caucasus Promethei, …. (Med. 705-709)
After she called out every race of serpents, she piled into one heap the following
evil elements of disastrous plant life: whatever Eryx bore, that place impassable for
all the rocks, and whatever Caucasus, spattered with the blood of Prometheus,
carries on its crests covered over in neverending winter, ….
Caucasus and Prometheus become a part of Medea’s magical purview. Finally, Medea
herself mentions Prometheus, when she describes the flame that will imbue the robe she
gives to Creusa:
tu nunc vestes tinge Creusae,
quas cum primum sumpserit, imas
urat serpens flamma medullas.
ignis fulvo clusus in auro
latet obscurus, quem mihi caeli
qui furta luit viscere feto
dedit et docuit condere vires
arte, Prometheus;…. (Med. 817-824)
Now you, wet Creusa’s robe, which when she first has put it on, may a winding
blaze burn her deepest marrow. The obscure fire hides, enclosed in tawny gold,
118
(that fire) which he who paid for his theft with an ever-growing liver gave to me
from the sky, and taught (me) to store up/hide strength with skill, Prometheus;….
Medea identifies Prometheus as the source of the fire which will destroy Creusa, Creon,
and Corinth, the flame which she places in the robe. Medea’s means of destruction,
however, is also associated with the flame Prometheus gives to humans; in this passage,
Medea highlights Prometheus as the one who steals fire from Jove and gives it to mankind
– an affront to Jove’s authority as well as the harbinger of a more difficult age for men.
Medea, like Prometheus, gives hidden fire to the human community, participates in a
conflict over authority (attempting to save Jason from the unfair Creon/Acastus), and sees
herself being punished for helping others (i.e., saving the Argonauts). Yet, beyond the
singular character of Medea, by looking for the significance of these allusions in the text,
one realizes that the story of Prometheus and the story of the Argonauts share many of the
same themes: a ‘golden’ age, transgression, technology, and punishment.
Prometheus appears in Hesiod’s Works and Days and Theogony, each of which
emphasizes different aspects of his myth. The Works and Days focuses on the punishment
man earns for possessing fire: the construction of Pandora and the release of her jar’s
contents, which are the causes of misery for mankind.
57
The Theogony presents a more
expanded explanation of why Zeus took fire away from humans in the first place –
Prometheus tricked Zeus into choosing the worse portion of meat (i.e., the bones) by
119
57
W & D 65ff. See Vernant (1988): 193ff. for a discussion of the many meanings of the Prometheus/Pandora
tale in Hesiod, and especially 200f. (where he addresses “hope” specifically).
wrapping them in fat.
58
Zeus’ response to Prometheus’ trick was to keep the technology of
fire away from humans, but Prometheus stole it and gave it back. Zeus punishes both
humans and Prometheus, the latter by chaining him to a rock, and the former by giving
them Pandora, who, in the Theogony, is the ancestor of all women.
59
In both of Hesiod’s versions, the story of Prometheus is a story about the
repercussions of the transgression of authority, and the idea that the technological
advancement of humanity is both a cause and result of life getting worse and harder for
people, further away from the ideal “golden” age.
Zeus got his spleen up, and went and hid
how to make a living, all because shifty Prometheus
tricked him. That’s why Zeus made life hard for humans.
He hid fire. But that fine son of Iapetos stole it
right back out from under Zeus’ nose, hiding
the flame in a fennel stalk. And thundering Zeus
who rides herd on the clouds got angry and said:
“Iapetos’ boy, if you’re not the smartest of them all!
I bet you’re glad you stole fire and outfoxed me.
But things will go hard for you and humans after this.
I’m going to give them Evil in exchange for fire,
their very own Evil to love and embrace.” (W&D 65-76)
(trans. Lombardo)
Pandora is presented in Hesiod as the consequence of mankind’s re-acquisition of fire
technology from Prometheus. Medea makes for an interesting comparative figure here.
Similar to Pandora, the chorus of the Medea describe Medea as the result of sea travel –
120
58
Theog. 537ff. It could be argued that Medea performs a similar trick with Pelias’ daughters – persuading
them to cut up and boil their father in an attempt to restore his youth. Cf. Ovid Met. 7.297ff.
59
Theog. 594ff.
along with the golden fleece, she is described as one of the ‘pretia’ of the Argonautic
voyage:
quod fuit huius pretium cursus?
aurea pellis
maiusque mari Medea malum,
merces prima digna carina. (Med. 361-4)
What was the price/reward for this journey? A golden fleece, and a greater evil than
the sea – Medea, a recompense worthy of the first ship.
The excessive alliteration of 363 and the stark break between the dense alliteration and the
preceding material of the sentence (i.e., the golden fleece) draw attention to the description
of Medea, included as another spoil, another consequence, of the Argo’s journey. The
bitter enjambment of “merces” (another word with ambiguous meaning: both
“cost”/“punishment” and “pay”/“income”) signals their ultimately selfish and greedy
enterprise. Medea resembles Pandora because she is an ambiguous gift awarded to the
Argonauts.
It should be noted that one of the possible etymologies of Pandora’s name (and the
one cited by Hesiod
60
) is pan–dora, “all gift” in Greek. As Lombardo notes (and as ancient
critics understood), however, “the name itself is ambiguous ... and capable of having either
one of two senses: ‘giver-of-all’ or ‘receiver-of-all’…” (comm. ad loc.). Pandora is
simultaneously the one who has received gifts from each of the gods (her form from
Hephaistos, her mind from Hermes, etc.) and the one who gives her ‘gifts’ (which are the
121
60
W&D 100ff.: “… and he named that woman Pandora, because all the Olympians donated something, and
she was a real pain for human beings” (trans. Lombardo).
evils of her jar
61
) to all mankind. Labeling Medea specifically as a pretium likens her to
Pandora by emphasizing her dual function in the Argonautic voyage. As Pandora is all-giver
and all-receiver, so Medea is simultaneously a reward and a punishment.
The theme of punishment for transgression, intrinsic to the Prometheus myth, is
also coextensive with the macro- and micro-plot of the Medea. Prometheus’ punishment is
described in Hesiod’s Theogony (and dramatized in Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound).
62
As for
humans, the punishment for their increased technological ability is Pandora (or the whole
race of women, according to the Theogony) and the ills released from her jar. In Seneca’s
tragedy, the Argonauts are also punished for their transgressions against the authority of
nature’s laws. The chorus relate:
quisquis audacis tetigit carinae
nobiles remos nemorisque sacri
Pelion densa spoliavit umbra,
quisquis intravit scopulos vagantes
et tot emensus pelagi labores
barbara funem religavit ora
raptor externi rediturus auri,
exitu diro temerata ponti
iura piavit.
exigit poenas mare provocatum. (Med. 607-616)
Whoever touched the famous oars of the bold ship and deprived Pelion of the
dense shade of its sacred grove, whoever forced their way into the clashing rocks
and, having passed through so many labors of the deep, tied the ship’s cable to a
foreign shore, a plunderer of foreign gold intending to return, with a harsh death
he appeased the violated laws of the sea. The sea, challenged, exacted punishment.
122
61
Of course, even the contents of Pandora’s jar seem to have a double meaning. In the Works and Days, “all
the miseries that spell sorrow for men” are spilled out of the jar except “hope” (116–117); ought hope then to
be understood as a misery? And if so, are we meant to believe that there is now no hope among mankind?
62
Theog. 523ff.; Aesch. PB 1-127; 1016-1029; 1080-1093
Just as humanity and Prometheus are punished for disobeying the authority of Zeus and
the borders between man and god, so the Argonauts are punished for transgressing the
“foedera mundi” (606).
Hesiod also implies that, prior to the appearance of Pandora and her jar of ills, and
prior to Prometheus’ gift of fire, life was easier for men:
Because before that the human race
had lived off the land without any trouble, no hard work,
no sickness or pain that the Fates give to men
(and when men are in misery they show their age quickly).
But the woman took the lid off the big jar with her hands
and scattered all the miseries that spell sorrow for men. (W&D 110-116)
(trans. Lombardo)
The story of Prometheus and Pandora in the Works and Days segues into the story of the
five ages of man, the steady decline of quality in the succeeding iterations of the human
race.
If you want, I can sum up another tale for you,
neat as you please. The main point to remember
is that gods and humans go back a long way together.
Golden was the first race of articulate folk…. (W&D 126-129)
(trans. Lombardo)
Thus, the tale of Prometheus is intimately connected to Hesiod’s tale of human digression
from cherished, just individuals to the present day – unjust people whose lives are fraught
with toil.
The digression of humanity from some past ideal is also a concern of the chorus in
the Medea. They describe life prior to the Argo:
123
candida nostri saecula patres
videre procul fraude remota.
sua quisque piger litora tangens
patrioque senex factus in arvo,
parvo dives nisi quas tulerat
natale solum non norat opes. (Med. 329-334)
White was the age our fathers saw, with trickery removed far away. Each man,
reluctant/slow, touching his own shores and having become elderly in his paternal
field, rich in little, he had not become acquainted with wealth except that which his
natal land bore.
Both in Hesiod’s telling of the Prometheus myth and in Seneca’s telling of the Argonautic
voyage, a ‘golden age’ of innocence is lost with the accession of technological progress.
Hesiod’s Works and Days and Theogony are, however, far from unique in using the
Prometheus myth as a metaphor for the devolution of mankind from some ideal state of
existence. Nor is Seneca the only Roman author to connect the Argonautic story to the
imagined pivotal moment of mankind’s collapse. Other literary links of importance are
Catullus’ epyllion (64), Vergil’s Eclogue 4, and Horace’s Carmina I.3, which make use of the
Prometheus story, the Argonautic voyage, and the Trojan War as moments of transition
between pristine humanity and the present (worse) condition. It is interesting to note that
none of the above texts use Medea to express man’s descent; Seneca seems to be the first to
focus on Medea as a connective locus for the stories of the Argo and Prometheus. What we
find, ultimately, is that Medea and her play allude to these poems, reinforcing our
understanding of Seneca’s Medea as a tragedy of human progress, where the initial moment
124
of technological advancement sends the world careening into an unstoppable and
inevitable cascade of increasing destruction and debasement.
Catullus 64 is a tour de force of imagery and narrative. For our purposes, the
content of the poem is poignantly framed within the boundary episodes of the Argonautic
voyage and the Trojan War, each of which represents a stage in man’s descent away from
their close companionship with the gods. Leaving aside the coverlet ekphrasis, the poem
follows the two heroic generations which bring about the end of divine presence on earth:
Peliaco quondam prognatae vertice pinus
dicuntur liquidas Neptuni nasse per undas
Phasidos ad fluctus et fines Aeeteos,
cum lecti iuvenes, Argivae robora pubis,
auratam optantes Colchis avertere pellem
ausi sunt vada salsa cita decurrere puppi,
caerula verrentes abiegnis aequora palmis. (Cat. 64.1-10)
Once upon a time, pine-trees grown on the peak of Mount Pelion are said to have
swam through the liquid waves of Neptune to the streams of Phasis and the
territory of Aeetes, when chosen young men, the strength of the Argive youth,
wishing to take back the golden fleece from Colchis, dared to run through the salty
waters in a swift ship, sweeping the sky-blue waters with palms of fir-wood.

sed postquam tellus scelere est imbuta nefando,
iustitiamque omnes cupida de mente fugarunt,
perfudere manus fraterno sanguine fratres,
destitit exstinctos natus lugere parentes,
optavit genitor primaevi funera nati
liber ut innuptae poteretur flore novercae,
ignaro mater substernens se impia nato
impia non verita est divos scelerare penates.
omnia fanda nefanda malo permixta furore
iustificam nobis mentem avertere deorum.
quare nec talis dignantur visere coetus
nec se contingi patiuntur lumine claro. (Cat. 64.397-408)
125
But after the earth was soaked with evil crime and everyone scattered justice from
their desiring mind, brothers soaked their hands with fraternal blood, the son
ceased to grieve his deceased parents, the father wished for the death of his first-
born son so that he, unhindered, might acquire the flower of a new young wife, the
impious mother laying herself underneath her unwitting son, impious, she is not
afraid to commit crime against the divine household gods. Everything both
speakable and unspeakable, mingled together in evil madness, has turned the right-
acting mind of the gods away from us. Wherefore our gatherings are not deemed
worthy of visiting by such (gods), nor do they permit themselves to be touched by
the clear light of day.
Thus Catullus inculpates the Argonautic voyage (as in Seneca, identified as man’s first sea
journey) as setting off a cascade of events which lead inevitably to the Trojan War, to civil
strife, to debauchery, and to the abandonment of mankind by the gods.
Vergil’s 4th Eclogue also describes man’s fall from perfection, though the poem
focuses on the unending repetition of that cycle, looking forward to the next “golden”
age.
63
The poem describes the next golden age as one in which man and gods will again
mingle (a response, perhaps, to Catullus’ pessimistic focus on the permanent divine
desertion of mankind).
iam redit et Virgo, redeunt Saturnia regna;
iam nova progenies caelo demittitur alto.
Tu modo nascenti puero, quo ferrea primum
desinet ac toto surget gens aurea mundo,
casta fave Lucina: tuus iam regnat Apollo.
Teque adeo decus hoc aevi te consule inibit,
Pollio, et incipient magni procedere menses.
te duce, si qua manent sceleris vestigia nostri,
inrita perpetua solvent formidine terras.
ille deum vitam accipiet, divisque videbit
126
63
In Eclogue 6, Silenus tells the story of creation, and although Prometheus and the Argonauts are cited one
after the other (41-44), there is no direct link between the episodes and a ‘descent’ of mankind away from
some former state of perfection.
permixtos heroas, et ipse videbitur illis,
pacatumque reget patriis virtutibus orbem. (Ecl. 4.6-17)
Now even Virgo returns, the Saturnian kingdom returns; now a new lineage is sent
down from high heaven. But you, for the boy being born, in whom first the iron
race will fall and the golden race rise in the whole world, show favor, chaste Lucina:
now your Apollo reigns. And precisely with you as consul, Pollio, will this glory of
an age begin, and great months will begin to march. With you as leader, if some
remnants remain of our old wickedness, made ineffective they will free the earth
from perpetual fear. That man will receive the life of the gods and see heroes mixed
together with gods, he himself will be seen by them, and he will reign with his
father's virtues over a world made peaceful.
The young child-savior will see gods and heroes intermingled again, as if the Trojan War or
the Argonautic voyage had never forced their separation. Indeed, the new perfection is
characterized by a return to the past, seen in the repetition of ‘re–’ verbs at line 6. This is
not unlike Medea’s own aims in Seneca’s tragedy, and she makes heavy use of backward-
looking verbs (e.g., “redde” at 246, 272, 273; “remittis” at 451, 459; “revexi” at 235, 455).
Moreover, in her final monologue, after she has killed the first child and attracted the
attention of Jason and the town, Medea gives a startlingly clear echo of Ecl. 4.6 at Med. 984:
“rediere regna, rapta virginitas redit” (“The kingdom has returned, my stolen virginity
returns”), and the first line of this particular speech begins with “iam iam,” perhaps another
reference to Ecl. 4.6-7. By alluding to Vergil’s poem, we see that Medea envisions herself as
having brought to fruition her own golden age.
The progress of man is not yet finished, however, and another cycle of ages will
occur; Eclogue 4 cites the Argo and the Trojan War as events which will again precipitate
man’s downfall (as they have already before).
127
Pauca tamen suberunt priscae vestigia fraudis,
quae temptare Thetim ratibus, quae cingere muris
oppida, quae iubeant telluri infindere sulcos:
alter erit tum Tiphys, et altera quae vehat Argo
delectos Heroas; erunt etiam altera bella,
atque iterum ad Troiam magnus mittetur Achilles.
Hinc, ubi iam firmata virum te fecerit aetas,
cedet et ipse mari vector, nec nautica pinus
mutabit merces: omnis feret omnia tellus…. (Ecl. 4.31-39)
Yet a few traces of ancient wrong
64
will lurk there, which urge (us) to attempt Thetis
with ships, to gird towns with walls, to fix furrows in the earth. Then there will be
another Tiphys, and another Argo which will carry chosen heroes; there will even
be other wars, and again great Achilles will be sent to Troy. From this, when now
strengthened age will have made you a man, the sailor himself will yield the sea, nor
will the nautical pine alter goods: the whole earth shall bear all things….
In addition to the echoes of content, one will note the obvious connection between this
poem and Catullus 64. Vergil uses “Thetis” metonymically for the sea, recalling the
wedding of Peleus and Thetis, a wedding which could not have occurred without the
Argonautic voyage, and the main subject of the Catullus poem. Also like Catullus 64, the
episodes of the Argo and the Trojan War are linked to each other and intrinsic to the
downfall of man, as if the first attempt at sailing will automatically put into place a series of
cascading disastrous consequences.
There are also echoes of this poem in Seneca’s tragedy. The fault in mankind is
called “priscae fraudis” (Ecl. 4.31); Seneca’s chorus refer to their own golden age as ‘lacking
deceit’ (“fraude remota,” Med. 330). Vergil highlights the walls around cities (Ecl. 4.32-33);
Seneca’s chorus also observe that “cities have placed walls on new land” (“...urbes/ muros
128
64
Boyle (1986: 20) states that the fraus referred to in this passage is Prometheus’ theft, mentioned in Vergil’s
Eclogue 6.41-42.
terra posuere nova…,” Med. 369-70). Other possible allusions include the Medea’s repeated
use of vehere (including Medea’s last word at Med. 1025; cf. Ecl. 4.34) and the chorus’
description of Medea as “merces” (Med. 363; cf. Ecl. 4.39).
Horace’s Carmina I.3, a prayer for Vergil’s safe travel, places the Argo alongside
Prometheus as the reason why man must face dangers in a post-lapsarian world. The
language of Horace’s ode is perhaps more identifiable to a reader/viewer of Seneca’s Medea,
and it is likely that Seneca refers to this ode in particular when the chorus present their
description of the Argonautic voyage.
illi robur
65
et aes triplex
circa pectus erat, qui fragilem truci
conmisit pelago ratem
primus,
...
nequiquam deus abscidit
prudens Oceano dissociabili
terras, si tamen impiae
non tangenda rates transiliunt vada.
audax omnia perpeti
gens humana ruit per vetitum nefas.
audax Iapeti genus
ignem fraude mala gentibus intulit.
post ignem aetheria domo
subductum macies et nova febrium
terris incubuit cohors,
semotique prius tarda necessitas
leti corripuit gradum. (Hor. Carm. I.3.9-33)
For that man there was oak and triple bronze around his breast, he who first
committed a fragile ship to the troubled sea: ... In vain the prudent god cut off the
lands from the people-dividing Ocean, if nevertheless impious ships leap across
waters which must not be touched. Bold to permit all things, the human race
129
65
Horace is likely in conversation with Catullus 64: cf. “robora” (Cat. 64.4), “ausi sunt” (Cat. 64.6).
rushes through forbidden sin. The bold offspring of Iapetus brought down fire by
an evil deceit to the peoples of the earth. After (the theft of) fire led down from its
heavenly home, a disease and a new cohort of fevers fell upon the lands, and the
slow necessity of death, once remote, sped up its step.
It is clear that Seneca’s language is rife with allusion to this poem in particular. Most
obvious, perhaps, is the reference to the first sailor at 9ff.; Seneca repeats the “primus” and
the relative clause (as well as “fragilem ratem”) to describe the first ship:
audax nimium qui freta primus
rate tam fragili perfida rupit…. (Med. 301-302)
Too bold the man who first broke the faithless waves with such a fragile vessel….
Also obvious, but more interesting for our purposes, is Horace’s double use of “audax” to
link the Argonauts to Prometheus; one of the characteristic words used by Seneca to
describe the Argonauts is “audax” and the related verb audere.
66
The chorus thus
intertextually liken the Argonauts to Prometheus; they are just as culpable for bringing
about disease and destruction to mankind. Finally, Horace’s description of the gods’
delineation of land with water seems to be echoed in Seneca’s second choral ode:
bene dissaepti foedera mundi
traxit in unum Thessala pinus…. (Med. 335-336)
The covenants of a well-partitioned world the Thessalian pine dragged into a
single thing….
In both texts, the land is divinely separated, and the gods are disobeyed when the first
sailors cross water into other lands. Although Seneca does not mention Prometheus or
disobedience to the gods directly in this passage, the allusion to the Horace ode puts the
130
66
See ch. I for more on “audax”/ “audere” in the Medea.
Argonauts’ act into a larger and inevitable cascade of events which will prove to be
destructive for mankind. Their offense is far more serious than Seneca’s chorus realize.
Like Horace, Seneca seems to leave out the Trojan War from his discussion of the
fall of mankind;
67
yet he includes Medea, who has heretofore been left out of the narrative
of man’s descent. Why this shift of viewpoint? I would like to posit that, unlike Catullus,
Vergil, and Horace, who focus on the inevitable cascade of events, Seneca chooses to focus
on the initial, pivotal moment of this process. The Medea’s focus is the first disobedience of
divine law, the commission of man’s first act of hubris, the point when the boundaries
between human and divine become crystal clear even as they fracture. Putting Medea at the
forefront is a brilliant stroke; she is simultaneously Pandora and Prometheus; she is a
product of broken contracts and mortal transgression, yet she herself crosses the boundary
between man and god.
131
67
Though see Fyfe (1983): 90, who sees the Trojan War as an undercurrent of the Medea.
Chapter III: Medea peregrina
This chapter has two focuses. First, I shall address what I see as two main strategies
employed by Seneca to emphasize the cultural elements of the Medea myth: a manipulation
of the literary tradition to increase Medea’s isolation from society within the action of the
tragedy, and the systematic use of geographical reference to signify cultural difference.
Secondly, I wish to explore how this change to the mythical tradition – increased isolation
and awareness of cultural difference – might affect the responses of the Corinthians,
Creon, and Medea to this dramatized episode of cultural interaction. Specifically, I am
interested in the consequences of Medea’s arrival on the cultural stability of the
Corinthians, including questions about the Corinthians’ impressions of their own ethnic
identity, and how they respond to Medea’s intrusion of their society as an instance of
cultural contact. I shall attempt to interface Seneca’s text with recent post-colonial theory
and recent work on ethnicity in the ancient world. This chapter is also intended, in part, to
rectify the absence of criticism addressing the degree to which Seneca’s representation of
Medea’s foreignness shapes the way she is made to view herself in the context of
Corinthian society and the Greek world. Certainly, I shall make the case that her
foreignness is one of the foremost aspects of Medea’s experience. Being cognizant of her
position as cultural outsider, Medea responds in a way that is perhaps startlingly
comparable to a modern experience of the self in similar circumstances.
132
I. Changing the Literary Tradition
We observe that one of the major differences between Seneca’s version of the
tragedy and that of Euripides is the degree of interaction between Medea and the other
characters in the play, and especially the chorus (which, in Euripides’ version, is composed
of Corinthian women, as Medea states at Med. 214).
1
Euripides’ chorus, in a more typically
Greek way,
2
function as a character in the plot of the tragedy – they have many exchanges
with all of the characters, and though they do not participate in the plot directly, they
certainly pass judgment on others’ decisions. The chorus speak specifically with Medea
many times, and Medea addresses them as “fílai” more than once; they, along with
Medea’s nurse, are a constant sounding board for Medea’s thoughts and plans. In the
Euripidean passage (cited in Costa’s commentary),
3
the chorus leader responds to Medea’s
entreaty that they be silent about her plans for revenge against Jason, Creon, and the new
wife:
δράσω τάδ’· ἐνδίκως γὰρ ἐκτείσῃ πόσιν,
Μήδεια. πενθεῖν δ’ οὔ σε θαυµάζω τύχας.

(Med. 267-8)
I shall do these things; for you exact repayment/punishment from your husband
rightly, Medea. I do not admire that you suffer misfortunes.
133
1
I am not the first scholar to note the increased isolation given to Medea’s character in Seneca’s tragedy. See
also: Fyfe (1983), Davis (1993), Benton (2003): 274.
2
Seneca’s break from Greek tragedy in his use of the choral body is well-documented (see, e.g., Davis 1993
Shifting Song: The Chorus in Senecan Tragedy, Boyle 2006 Roman Tragedy for general changes from the Greek
tradition). While Senecan choruses generally lack the level of participation present in Greek tragic choruses,
the particular absence of choral interaction with characters in the Medea is striking.
3
Ad 56-115: “note that the chorus throughout is hostile to M. and friendly to Jason (102ff., 362, 596); in Eur.
the chorus is friendly to M. (e.g. 267-8).”
Here, it is clear that the chorus sympathize with Medea’s marital situation, and seem to
defend her justification for seeking revenge.
Euripides’ chorus also castigate Jason directly for his behavior towards Medea:
Ἰᾶσον, εὖ µὲν τούσδ’ ἐκόσµησας λόγους·
ὅµως δ’ ἔµοιγε, κεἰ παρὰ γνώµην ἐρῶ,
δοκεῖς προδοὺς σὴν ἄλοχον οὐ δίκαια δρᾶν.

(Med. 576-8)
Jason, you have arranged these words well; yet as far as I’m concerned (even if I
speak against common sense), in betraying your spouse you seem not to have done
the right thing.
With Medea present on stage, the chorus clearly state that they do not approve of Jason’s
action and are in support of Medea’s side of the argument. In Euripides’ version of the
play, the chorus not only have a high level of interaction with Medea on stage, they even
empathize with Medea’s marital situation. Moreover, Medea is constantly reminded of the
presence of the community, as well as the great degree of support they offer her. In Seneca’s
version, we find quite the opposite; the chorus have no interaction with the Medea
character (and very little interaction with any of the other characters),
4
and they maintain
an antipathy towards Medea and her presence in the community.
Another link in the literary tradition deserving of exploration is perhaps an
intermediary step between the isolation found in Seneca and the strong community
interaction found in Euripides: namely, Ennius’ version of the tragedy. As Boyle argues in
Roman Tragedy, one of the themes of Ennius’ Medea Exul is Medea’s cultural isolation,
134
4
One might contrast the choral activities in Seneca’s Oedipus, Troades, and Hercules Furens, where the choruses
converse with several characters and represent clearly defined communities of citizens. I suggest that the
chorus of the Medea is also clearly defined (as Corinthian citizens, made apparent in the first choral ode)
despite their general distance from conversation.
which, in its socio-historical context, “would have hit home to every member of Ennius’
audience, slave-owner and slave, whether a political, economic, or intellectual immigrant
(like Ennius) or a member of Rome’s established elite” (71). Specifically, Boyle’s fragments
2 and 5 emphasize Medea’s foreign identity, first in a possible conversation between the
Tutor and Nurse (where Ennius, according to Boyle, highlights Medea’s “vulnerable
isolation in Corinth,” 73), and then in a statement by Medea to the chorus of Corinthian
women, where she couches her emigration in positive terms of masculine exploration and
state duty:
quae Corinthum arcem altam habetis, matronae opulentae optumates,
ne mihi vitio vos vortatis [exul a patria quod absum].
multi suam rem bene gessere et publicam patria procul;
multi qui domi aetatem agerent propterea sunt improbati. (Med. Ex. fr. 5)

Wealthy, well-born ladies, who possess the soaring city of Corinth,
Find no fault with me [because I am an exile away from my fatherland].
Many have performed private and state business well, far from the fatherland;
Many who passed their days at home have been despised for this.
(trans. Boyle)
Ennius keeps the direct interaction between Medea and the chorus, in line with Euripides,
but he emphasizes the cultural divide between them. The Corinthian women do not travel,
and Medea considers them to be categorically different from her – and possibly inferior to
her – for this fact. Medea “implicitly signals [her] exilic status, which is then (possibly)
overtly stated and (certainly) brilliantly transformed through association with the
praiseworthy category of service to the respublica abroad” (Boyle 75). Boyle highlights the
problematic stance of Romans toward travel away from home (75), implying that time spent
135
abroad, while “being demanded more frequently of Rome’s elite,” was also looked down
upon in that same social environment.
5
Ennius, by putting these words in the mouth of
Medea, brings out her similarities to Roman elite men of the time (traveling abroad for the
service of their families or their country), masculinizing her and giving her a façade of
agency in deciding to leave home. At the same time, however, the unsettling difference
between service to the state and what Medea is about to do (and has done already) reminds
us of the evil outcome of this story; despite the implication of good intentions in her
speech, we know that her departures from Colchis and Iolchos were grounded in murder
and betrayal, and we fear similar consequences for her stay in Corinth. Medea wants us to
read her as morally superior because of her émigré status, but we know that death and
destruction have been the primary consequences for the cities where Medea has gone. It
may have been better if she had stayed at home.
Forsaking the duty of travel and staying at home, which Ennius’ Medea claims can
be a disgraceful behavior (“improbati”), is precisely the element of pre-Argonautic existence
which Seneca chooses to stress. We can see that Seneca is perhaps responding to this theme
in Ennius’ tragedy when his chorus describe their ‘golden’ age as one in which people pass
their lives at home:
candida nostri saecula patres
videre procul fraude remota.
sua quisque piger litora tangens
patrioque senex factus in arvo,
136
5
Though an investigation is outside the scope of my topic, I suspect that this attitude has something to do
with a cultural privileging of “old money” (i.e., landed wealth) over “new money” – here, the mercantile class,
which earned their living, necessarily, by traveling abroad.
parvo dives nisi quas tulerat
natale solum non norat opes. (Med. 329-334)
White was the age our fathers saw, with trickery removed far away. Each man,
reluctant/slow, touching his own shores and having become elderly in his paternal
field, rich in little, he had not become acquainted with wealth except that which his
natal land bore.
It is possible that Seneca refers to Ennius’ Medea Exul here to highlight the fact that the
opposition of travel and isolation marks the transition between the pre- and post-lapsarian
society of the Corinthians.
In Seneca’s tragedy, the Corinthians remain comparatively isolated from Medea’s
presence, and he has eliminated any potential for dialogue between Medea and the chorus;
they are, arguably, never onstage at the same time.
6
Compared to Euripides’ play, Seneca
has also reduced the roles of the nurse, Jason, and the messenger. Aegeus and the tutor are
omitted entirely. The outcome is that our vision of Medea is rarely interrupted by the
outside world. This is a significant alteration precisely because Seneca sets up a social
vacuum in which Medea must make decisions.
7
Her Euripidean counterpart has the
constant opportunity to discuss her situation and her plans with the community.
8
Seneca,
however, sets Medea in her own world, isolated from the community, where there is no
moral check on her thoughts, and her process of decision-making is necessarily altered.
137
6
See Davis (1993): 37, who believes that “the chorus is absent from the stage in every act of Medea except
during Act 5, scene 1 (879-90) when they are required as recipients for the messenger’s news.”
7
Others have also observed Medea’s isolation: see, e.g., Davis (1993): “the constant absence of the chorus
contrasts with Medea’s constant presence … and serves to emphasize Medea’s social and cultural isolation”;
Fyfe (1983), and Benton (2003): 272-277, who, like me, includes Medea’s gender as a factor in her isolated
state.
8
For specific citations of Medea’s dialogue in Euripides, see ch. II.
Though he exclusively addresses their respective final monologues, Christopher Gill’s
assessment of the difference between Euripides’ and Seneca’s Medeas might fit well also as
a description of their characters throughout:
9
In the Euripidean version, I hope to bring out the connection between the
character of Medea’s speech as dialogue (that is, as speech addressed to others) and
the other-related character of the concerns from which her inner conflict derives. In
the Senecan version, by contrast, I aim to bring out the link between the
soliloquizing character of Medea’s speech and the self-related (even solipsistic)
character of her inner conflict. (1987: 25)
The Medea of Euripides is a fundamentally social being, interacting with others, rarely on
her own. Seneca’s Medea, on the other hand, is fundamentally solitary, dramaturgically
bereft of social interaction.
We can see that Seneca manipulates the tradition of the myth with the intent of
further isolating Medea from the foreign society of the Corinthians and thus emphasizing
how much she does not belong and how much the society thinks that she does not belong.
While Seneca’s Medea does not consider herself to be already in/an exile, she sees it as a
probable and near future, one about which Creon and the chorus have no conflicted
feelings. The Corinthians are united against her, and she is isolated from their
interlocution, their empathy. We shall explore below how the society and Medea respond
within Seneca’s changed environment.
138
9
Showing again that the final monologue of Seneca’s play is not the sine qua non of meaning, as some critics
tend to treat it, though Gill himself does admit that the difference between these two Medeas probably
reflects “larger differences between Euripidean and Senecan dramaturgy and psychology” (25).
II. Geography and Ethnic Difference
10
In the introduction to The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity, Isaac accepts
some of Lord Fraser’s definitive qualifications of an ‘ethnic group’ for the context of the
ancient Mediterranean.
For a group to constitute an ethnic group it is essential that it should have ‘(1) a
long shared history, of which the group is conscious as distinguishing it from other
groups, and the memory of which it keeps alive; (2) a cultural tradition of its own,
including family and social customs and manners, often but not necessarily
associated with religious observance’. (35)
In some ways, ‘ethnic group’ is a broader term than ‘race’ (that is, ethnic groups need not
transmit innate inherited characteristics or appearance to their offspring, who are thereby
marked as members), and it is unsurprising to understand ancient societies as
distinguishing themselves along ‘ethnic’ lines. However, it should be understood that (at
least according to Isaac) the ancient world was also rife with ‘ethnic prejudice.’
Both racist attitudes and ethnic prejudice treat a whole nation or other group as a
single individual with a single personality. The varied individuality of the members
of such groups is ignored in both cases, but ethnic prejudice, as distinct from
racism, maintains some flexibility towards the individual. (24-5)
139
10
It is perhaps important to address the applicability of such terms as ‘ethnicity’ and ‘cultural identity’ to the
context of this play – written in imperial Rome, by a Spanish Roman, about Greek cities in the mythical past.
Does Seneca’s foreignness or his Roman perspective on the East play a role in the cultural or ethnic
depictions of this tragedy? While Seneca’s Roman perspective and his own foreign ancestry could be dealt
with, there is some clarification of these issues to be found in recent research on ancient ethnicity, as well as
evidence within the Medea itself. For further discussion of this issue, see my Introduction.
Ethnic difference, therefore, was not nothing, and the identification of an individual or a
group as belonging to an ethnic category may have carried with it a series of prejudicial
judgments and behaviors.
11

For example, it is plausible that the Corinthian chorus does in fact seem to
understand themselves as having a distinct “ethnic” identity (as defined by Isaac: they share
a “cultural tradition” and a “history, of which the group is conscious as distinguishing it
from other groups,” 35) – specifically distinct from other Greek cities, and certainly distinct
from Colchis. The evidence for this claim is found in the first choral ode, where they praise
Creusa (the bride-to-be) for her beauty.
vincit virgineus decor
longe Cecropias nurus,
et quas Taygeti iugis
exercet iuvenum modo
muris quod caret oppidum,
et quas Aonius latex
Alpheosque sacer lavat. (Med. 75-81)
Her virgin beauty conquers by far the Cecropian maids, and those whom the city
which lacks walls trains on the ridges of Taygetus in the manner of young men, and
those whom the Aonian water and the sacred Alpheus wash.
The Corinthians specifically contrast Creusa’s beauty with that of the Athenian, Spartan,
Olympian, and Theban women. Note that these non-Corinthian women are characterized
en masse, sharing traits within their culture and discernibly different from each other. With
the exception of the Athenians, they seem identified primarily by the geographical
140
11
Perhaps an illustrative example of what I intend to convey is the treatment of Irish-Americans in the late
19
th
and early 20
th
centuries. An ‘Irish’ surname, while not tied to a ‘race’, marks a person as distinctly
different from the non-Irish, and may invite a particular set of assumptions about the person’s work ethic,
alcohol consumption, love for potatoes, etc.
landmarks of their people – the Taygetus, Aonius, Alpheos; the women are located in space
and tied to particular topographies. They are culturally distinct as well, however: the
Athenian women are identified with an allusion to the founder of their city, Cecrops,
implying their bond to the city as one of generational descent. The Athenian women are
distinct from others in their descent from and relation to their founder. The Spartan
women are additionally identified by the masculine behavior that marks them culturally as
different from other Greek women. Spartan women exercise “in the manner of young
men,” a behavior which may very well (if we are to believe ancient writers)
12
leave markers
on their bodies; Spartan women can be distinguished from other Greek women by their
strong, athletic frames and lack of more feminine physical characteristics.
The idea that separate city–states could constitute separate ethnic identities would
not have been strange, even in the context of imperial Rome. Farney argues in his Ethnic
Identity and Aristocratic Competition in Republican Rome that as late as the time of Augustus,
Roman aristocrats distinguished themselves by tracing their family names (gentes) back to
some specific ethnic group. What is significant for our discussion is the fact that these
different ‘ethnic’ groups could have been as proximate to Rome as Sabinum or Etruria.
As late as the time of Augustus, Romans were still claiming to be Sabine and Latin
in origin as part of Cicero’s ‘two homelands’ identity. I think that most scholars
would also agree that, at one point in history, Sabines and Latins were distinct
cultural groups. (30)
That different ethnicities would have been understood from a presentation of different city
origin seems to show that Seneca’s social context perhaps had a very different
141
12
Plato Laws 806a; Plutarch Life of Lycurgus 14.2; Xenophon Constitution 1.4; Aristophanes Lysitrata 78-82.
understanding of ‘ethnic’ difference than what we understand as ethnic difference today.
13

This is precisely what we see in the first choral ode, where Athenians and Spartans are
described as having shared characteristics, distinct from each other, and distinct from the
Corinthians themselves.
Moreover, the Corinthians do not offer a Corinthian counterpoint to their cultural
characterizations of Athenian and Spartan women. In and of itself, this phenomenon
could be seen as a prime example of ethnic prejudice: the essentializing of “other” groups
as sharing a particular trait combined with a lack of a similarly generalized character of the
“center” group. The Corinthians do not provide a positive definition of their own culture;
they are the center, the norm, all the things which are not the qualities of the other.
14
Thus
the chorus seem to indicate that the Corinthians see themselves as a distinct (and
dominant) ethnic/cultural group.
Geography is the only positive medium through which the Corinthians understand
themselves to be a distinct ethnic group, i.e., they define themselves as different from other
peoples because of their geographic location. Unlike Seneca’s other plays, moreover
142
13
Farney (167-169) also analyses the case of Maecenas, whose effeminacy Seneca (and Augustus before him)
attributed, at least in part, to his Etruscan heritage. Whether this would be considered by Isaac to be an
instance of ‘racial’ attribution as opposed to ‘ethnic’ attribution is worth exploring, but outside the scope of
this work.
14
What I am arguing here, that the Corinthians show an ethnocentricity in their essentialization of the
Athenians and Spartans (and the corresponding lack of self-essentialization) has its roots in race theory, where
“whiteness” is not racialized because it is the norm. As Richard Dyer summarizes: “as long as race is
something only applied to non-white peoples, as long as white people are not racially seen and named, they/
we function as a human norm. Other people are raced, we are just people” (1). In Tim Wise’s book, White
Like Me, he explains the consequences of contemporary racism in terms of white ignorance: “for every ounce
of racial wisdom contained in the mind of a black child barely ten years old, or even seven for that matter,
there is a corresponding void in the mind of a similar white child, the latter having never had to contemplate
her racial position or identity in most cases, and thus remaining gleefully ignorant of the role of race in the
warp and woof of her society” (23).
(perhaps excepting the Troades), the Medea uses contemporary Roman geography as a
primary means of discussing the diversity of things and people in the known world.
Geographical references are scattered and frequent in this tragedy (also unlike Seneca’s
other plays, where geographical references seem to exist in the choral odes, in short, dense
bursts of ‘geographical tourism’).
15
Within the first 800 or so lines of the Medea, there are
over a hundred geographical or ethnic references (equating to roughly one ethno-
geographical term per 8 lines). The most common of these references are to the Phasis river
(five references), Colchis/Colchians (nine references), the Pelasgus/Pelasgians (six
references), Thessaly/Thessalians (five references), and the Black Sea (at least five
references).
16
There are also a significant number of geographical places and ethnicities
referred to in the Medea that are not attested elsewhere in Senecan tragedy: Aonius (80),
Malea (149), Achivus (as an adjective, 227), Albis (374), Persa (374), Thule (379), Nysa
(384), Rhodanus (587), Sidonii (697), Sueba (713), Hyrcanii (as an adjective, 713),
17
Athos
(720), Hydaspes (725), Baetis (726), and Pirenidus (745). Many other terms are used only in
the Medea and one other tragedy. Through the fairly constant mention of other places and
143
15
e.g. Phaedra and Hercules Furens, where geography plays a significant role only later in the tragedy.
“Geographical tourism” is H. Cameron’s term. I am indebted to Cameron for sparking interest in the
geographical references present in this tragedy as a thing worth examining. Obviously, his suggestion has
proved extremely fruitful, and my discussions with him on this topic have also informed my argument.
16
Obviously, pontus is also the generic word for a lake or sea body. I have relied on Zwierlein’s capitalization
and the attested examples in Denooz for my data.
17
While this place name is present in all the manuscripts, it is not geographically accurate; Costa ad loc.
states: “if Hyrcaniis is right Sen. has muddled his geography…. Sen. probably confused the name with the
Hercynia silva, the extensive mountain range running across Germany from the Rhine to the Carpathians. But
we may vindicate him by supposing with Avantius that he wrote Hercyniis: manuscripts are notoriously
unreliable with proper names.”
peoples, the reader maintains a consistent awareness of the large scope of the known world
(both of the world that exists after the Argonautic voyage, and, extra-dramatically, of the
world of Seneca’s Roman empire) and the diversity of landmarks and peoples within it.
The frequency of rare locations (rare for Seneca, anyway) further highlights the importance
of geography and ethnicity as important factors in the meaning of the tragedy. Thus it
would behoove us to pay attention to the significance of geographical references, as they
may be signaling moments of thematic importance as well, and specifically moments of
highlighted cultural difference.
III. The Corinthian Perspective
Segal sees Senecan emotion as consisting of “two complementary types of
physiological sensations of emotional disturbance: entrapment, enclosure, engorgement, or
implosion on the one hand and dismemberment, invasion, penetration, or mutilation on
the other” (1983b: 181). These two physiological expressions of emotion are rooted in what,
according to Segal, are “those anxieties, present in all of us, that have to do with what
psychologists call primary-boundary anxiety, the concern with the autonomy of our physical
being, our corporeal integrity in its most fundamental sense” (181). I think Segal is right
about this anxiety being present in Senecan tragedy. This primary-boundary anxiety, Segal
argues, is what causes the disassociation of the self from the body, characters feeling as if
they exist in a “prison” of a body, or characters expressing a “confusion of personal
boundaries” (183). Much of Segal’s analysis regarding the primary-boundary anxiety focuses
144
on Seneca’s Oedipus and Thyestes, and on the individual experience of this pathology.
Though he does not address Medea directly in the context of primary-boundary anxiety, his
arguments specifically about the character’s boundaries of self are thought-provoking for
the Medea. I want to explore, however, the notion of this anxiety in a larger context than
that of the individual – namely, in the context of the city and the ethnic group. I want to
explore the idea that Medea herself – as a product of technology (i.e., as a direct result of
the Argonautic voyage) – is an invasion, a penetration (and therefore mutilation) of
Corinthian society.
18

The reaction of the chorus to Medea will be a large part of this argument. Much has
been written about the choruses of Senecan tragedy, and how they function vis-à-vis the
“moral” messages of the tragedies.
19
But what group of people, or what type of opinion, do
the chorus of Medea represent? I take issue with much of the scholarship on the chorus of
the Medea in particular, mostly for scholars’ lack of attention to the chorus as a subjective
community entity, with significant, if flawed, opinions about the events surrounding and
within the play. Diana Robin, for example, in her article “Film Theory and the Gendered
Voice in Seneca,” argues that the choruses of Senecan tragedy (which, she believes, are
almost always all-male) function in a way akin to the modern “voice-over” in film – an
outside narrator, guiding the viewer of the audience toward the correct interpretation of
145
18
I have already partly explored the notion of boundary anxiety in chapter II, where I identify an anxiety
about the boundary between mortal and divine at work in the play, and in chapter I, where I critique the
applicability of Segal’s theory to a female-sexed body, whose boundaries are always perceived as penetrable,
and naturally so.
19
See, e.g., Lawall (1979), Davis (1993), Biondi (1984)
the events and the characters.
20
While I do not agree that the chorus in Seneca’s Medea is
meant to be seen as an impartial body, I do think it safe to say that they must present the
‘Corinthian’ response both to the phenomenon of sea travel and exploration and to the
presence of Medea herself. They are our only access to community opinion and must be
examined as such.
If the chorus are the community, how do their odes relate to the action of the
tragedy? With very different aims from those of Robin’s article, Gilbert Lawall presents a
detailed analysis of the choral odes of the Medea in his article “Seneca’s Medea: The Elusive
triumph of Civilization.” Unfortunately, Lawall does not attempt to draw any conclusions
from the choral odes regarding the chorus’ alliance with any particular viewpoint on the
problem of new technologies. I agree with Lawall firstly that the two “Argonautic” odes
respond to the microcosm of Medea’s conflict in Corinth with a macrocosmic parallel of
the voyage of the Argo, the death of the “Golden Age,” and the successes (and eventual
downfalls) of the Argonauts. Secondly, I agree with Lawall in general that one of the
functions of the chorus in this tragedy is to respond to the situations of the main characters
(423, 425). Unlike Lawall, however, I do not believe that the chorus lack their own
character and goals;
21
in representing the general opinion of the community about Medea’s
presence, we must perform a similar study of the chorus, qua community, and see where
they stand on the presence of Medea.
146
20
Robin (1993): 115-117
21
Lawall (1979): 421, 424 seems to view the choral odes purely as macrocosmic responses to the scenes
between Medea and Creon and Medea and Jason, respectively. Lawall does not examine the chorus as a
community perspective.
One way to read the choral odes throughout the play is to deduce that the chorus
disapprove of the Argonautic voyage and interpret nature’s revenge against the Argonauts
as a justified punishment of transgressors.
22
One could even argue that the most pro-
technology statement of the chorus (found at the end of the second ode) is actually a
statement against the post-lapsarian world.
23
The chorus express the consequences of the
Argo as a displacement of disparate peoples and places, a chaos–inducing
24
crossing of
boundaries.
Terminus omnis motus et urbes
muros terra posuere nova,
nil qua fuerat sede reliquit
pervius orbis:
Indus gelidum potat Araxen,
Albin Persae Rhenumque bibunt—
venient annis saecula seris,
quibus Oceanus vincula rerum
laxet et ingens pateat tellus
Tethysque novos detegat orbes
nec sit terris ultima Thule. (Med. 369-79)
Every boundary has been moved and cities have placed their walls on new land,
nothing in the place where it used to be has the accessible world left behind: the
Indian drinks the icy Araxes, the Persians drink the Elbe and the Rhine – an age
147
22
In this light, we could conclude, logically, that the chorus ought to approve of Medea’s anger and revenge –
they align Medea with nature, and she is also seeking to punish an Argonaut transgressor. See Walsh (2009)
for this argument.
23
Lawall makes the case (p. 421-2) that the second choral ode ends on a positive note (contrasting it with
Horace I.3), but c.f. Nussbaum’s Therapy of Desire (1996) p. 465ff., and especially p. 466, n. 34, for a different
reading of this ode and a summary of some of the disparate interpretations. Nussbaum argues that Lawall
misses the “more pessimistic” “surface argument” of the ode in favor of the chorus’ “attachment to audacia
and the erotic life” (466, n. 34).
24
Contra Nussbaum (1996): 466, n. 35, where she asserts that the “audax self” (i.e., the self that desired to
look for new technologies and create the Corinthians’ new world) is in no way “committed to chaos. Instead,
it pursues orderly projects, discovers new spheres for human practical reason.” I think the disordered state of
the world, as described by the chorus, reflects more chaos than ‘new order.’
will come in later years, when Ocean looses the chains of things, and the huge earth
lies available, and Tethys reveals new worlds, nor will Thule be the furthest in the
lands.
The chorus see the differences from the old world and specifically the failure of the new
world to look like the old one – nothing is the same. Things, people are out of place. The
future is chaotic in its non-specificity: the objects of the verbs are either absent or vague
(“things,” “worlds,” “lands”). The disorder of people and place is compounded by an
agoraphobic vastness of future possibility.
It is certainly arguable that the ode ends ambiguously (i.e., it conveys both a positive
and a negative assessment of their new technological world), though Seneca could have
written it differently if it had been intended to be strictly positive (c.f., for example, the first
choral ode of the Medea, where the chorus are unambiguously positive about Jason’s
marriage to Creusa). In this, I completely disagree with Lawall, who reads this passage as an
“optimistic” assessment of the world’s openness: “nothing could be further from Horace’s
pessimistic moralizing...” (423).
25
As I have showed in Chapter II, the verb patere has
potentially negative connotations in this play. Also, the frequency of negatives and the
focus on differences (e.g., motus, nova, nil qua fuerat reliquit, nec) implies disapproval on the
part of the speakers. If this is the most positive assessment of the Argo spoken by the
chorus, then I do not think that their assessment as a whole is all too positive. Moreover,
this disapproval of the current state of the world is precisely the anxiety over boundaries
alluded to by Segal, but on a community level. The Corinthians see the breakdown of
148
25
For my thoughts on Horace I.3, see ch. II.
boundaries between peoples and places as a discontinuation of their preferred way of life
(i.e., the candida saecula). They desire the return of the old world, a de-penetration of
foreign civilizations and foreign knowledge. In this, the chorus’ desires are remarkably
similar to those of Medea, who also wishes to undo the penetration of the Argonautic
voyage and return to a past time;
26
the chorus and Medea actually have much in common.
The chorus consider Medea to be a crucial element of that penetration, and it is
clearly the case that the chorus never in any way nor at any time openly approve of Medea’s
actions or presence in their society.
27
The chorus only want to shut Medea out, deny her
existence in their community, and even erase her from history. The chorus want to turn
back time and undo the penetration into their world that is Medea.
In their second ode, the chorus make it clear that they see Medea as one of the
products of the Argonautic voyage. After describing the victories of the Argonauts over
various natural hazards encountered on the sea, the chorus state the result:
quod fuit huius pretium cursus?
aurea pellis
maiusque mari Medea malum,
merces prima digna carina. (Med. 361-363)
What was the price/reward for this journey? A golden fleece, and a greater evil than
the sea – Medea, a recompense worthy of the first ship.
149
26
For more on this, see chs. I and IV.
27
Lawall would seem to agree with this point: with “Medea removed from Corinth, a new age of security not
unlike the Golden Age could begin” (422).
Medea, just as much as the golden fleece, is one of the consequences of the Argonautic
voyage.
28
The chorus associate Medea with the loss of their candida saecula, with the advent
of technology, the changing of boundaries, and the introduction of foreignness into their
experience of the world. In their longing to return to that pre-lapsarian time, they express a
desire to remove Medea from their lands, as if her absence would undo the change that has
been brought to their society.
The desire to be rid of Medea is consistently emphasized by the chorus. In their first
ode (which ostensibly only needs to address their celebration of Jason’s wedding to Creusa),
they include a statement about Jason’s former relationship with a manipulative Medea; the
chorus make it very clear that they do not approve of Medea, that Jason should rid himself
of her, and that she should go into exile:
ereptus thalamis Phasidis horridi,
effrenae solitus pectora coniugis
invita trepidus prendere dextera,
… tacitis eat illa tenebris,
si qua peregrino nubit fugitiva marito.
29
(Med. 102-104; 114-15)
[Jason was] torn out from the marriage chambers of the bristling Phasis, accustomed
to the breast of his untamed wife, shaking to take hold of her with an unwilling
hand, … [but] let that one go to the silent shades, if some runaway marries a foreign
husband.
The fact that the chorus feel the need to comment on Medea at all in the midst of Creusa’s
marriage ceremony is testament to their feelings of fear and antipathy towards her (and fear
150
28
For similarities between Medea and Pandora in this regard, see ch. II.
29
Zwierlein’s OCT prints “furtiva,” but there seems to me to be no reason to eschew the manuscript’s
“fugitiva.”
seems to become their main focus in the final choral ode, as I explore below). What we also
learn from this passage is how negatively the chorus view Medea as compared to Jason. Part
of their justification for her exile is their opinion that Medea is fundamentally
manipulative and controlling: Jason was “unwillingly” (“invita”) married to Medea,
30
who is
characterized as “untamed” (“effrenae”), literally “out of her reins.” The chorus see Medea as
a runaway horse,
31
and they project their own fear of her onto Jason, who has married her
supposedly in a state of trepidation (“trepidus”).
Later in the play, even before the messenger announces the death of Creusa (i.e.,
before the chorus know that Medea has killed Creusa and Creon and set the palace on
fire), the chorus express their wish to be rid of Medea:
quando efferet Pelasgis
nefanda Colchis arvis
gressum metuque solvet
regnum simulque reges? (Med. 870-3)
When will the unholy Colchian carry her feet out of the Pelasgian fields and free
the kingdom (and at the same time the kings) from fear?
The chorus want Greece to be free of her polluting presence and the fear that this presence
creates; much like the Indian drinking the Araxes river (373), Medea, the Colchian, is
151
30
See L. Abrahamsen (1999) “Roman Marriage Law and the Conflict of Seneca’s Medea,” p. 110 for the
legality of a ‘nonconsensual’ marriage as described by the chorus here.
31
Not only does this word play into the chorus’ characterization of Medea in natural terms (on which, see
below), but also perhaps resonates with the mythical tales involving riders of runaway horses, e.g., Phaethon
or Hippolytus. Extra support for this can be found at 593ff., where the chorus state that Medea “does not
suffer reins” (“nec...patiturve frenos”); this passage occurs just before the chorus make their Phaethon
comparison (599ff.). Of course, if this image is meant to resonate, the chorus (probably without their
knowing) puts Jason in the position of the rider, but we all know that Hippolytus and Phaethon were not
innocent victims; rather, they were both punished for acts of hubris. The chorus here perhaps (and
unknowingly) level a similar accusation against Jason. For more on the resonance of Phaethon in this play, see
ch. II.
identified as a member of her ethnic group, and she is in a place where she does not
belong. Note the use of geographical language to signal the foreignness and distance
between the Corinthian speakers and Medea – with the Phasis river (a river in Colchis) in
the first passage, and with Colchis and the Pelasgian (Greek) fields in the second. We see
here Seneca’s use of geography to mark the ethnic distinction between Medea and the
Corinthians, in much the same way as that by which the Corinthians contrasted themselves
(through Creusa) with the separate ethnic groups of Athens, Sparta, Thebes, and Olympia,
identifying them primarily by their geographic origin,
32
in the first choral ode (see above).
The chorus alternately praise and castigate the advent of new technology
(specifically seafaring), and in their castigation is the implicit acknowledgement that the
Argonauts did commit an offense against nature.
33
They remain, however, entirely
unsympathetic to the plight of Medea, who, according to the chorus’ own parallel
reasoning in their odes, represents that nature which was assaulted by the Argonauts. The
chorus frequently use natural imagery to describe Medea, likening her especially to the sea,
as if she were a manifestation of the very nature responsible for the (justified) punishment
of the Argonauts: they liken her to rushing rivers (Med. 584-590), and they metonymically
call her marriage bed the “bristling Phasis” (Med. 102).
34
Aligning Medea with nature,
which the chorus view as victim, should, structurally, remove blame from Medea herself.
152
32
Again, with the exception of Athens, which is identified genealogically as “Cecropian” (Med. 76).
33
For this argument, see chs. I and II.
34
For a full analysis of Medea as an agent of nature (including choral descriptions of her), see Littlewood
(2004): 151ff.
But the chorus are not so logical. Rather, the chorus (at least initially) seem to expect
Medea to obey Creon, let go of Jason and their children, and leave. They resolutely do not
accept this new and strange “pretium” in their city.
In addition to the perspective of the chorus, Creon also represents a Corinthian
perspective. Not surprisingly, he feels the same way about Medea as the chorus does.
Although he had been persuaded by Jason not to kill Medea (his original intent), he still
lets her know that she is unwelcome in the city:
Medea, Colchi noxium Aeetae genus,
nondum meis exportat e regnis pedem? (Med. 179-80)
Is Medea, the harmful race of Colchian Aeetes, not yet bearing her feet out of my
realm?
concessa vita est, liberet fines metu
abeatque tuta….
vade veloci via
monstrumque saevum horribile iamdudum avehe. (Med. 185-6; 190-1)
Her life was allowed – let her free my land from fear and let her go away secure….
Begone with a swift exit and carry off already the dreadful fierce monster.
Clearly, Medea (to whom the last one and a half lines quoted are addressed) must know
that she is fundamentally unwelcome, fundamentally on the verge of complete isolation.
35

Creon’s initial reference to Medea is also important (and not only because initial
statements in Senecan tragedy are always significant). He refers to her by her foreign
“genus” (whether or not genus can mean something akin to ‘race’ is perhaps a problem here,
153
35
Note also the foreshadowing here of the last lines of the play: “M: patuit in caelum via:… ego inter auras aliti
curru vehar./ I: Per alta vade spatial sublime aetheris,/ testare nullos, qua veheris, deos” (1022-27). Medea echoes
Creon’s “via” and “veho,” Jason Creon’s “vade” and “veho.” In the end, Medea ironically does obey Creon’s
order. For more on the verb vehere, see ch. II.
but I think the evidence quoted at the outset of section II – i.e., Farney’s argument – would
support a race-ish reading of genus here). For Creon, the essence of Medea’s lack of
belonging is her foreign identity, the fact that she is not one of the Greeks, but from a
different stock of people in Colchis.
IV. Medea in Corinth
What happens to the self when cultural boundaries are crossed? In this play, what
happens to Medea (that is, how does her character seem to reflect or convey a perception of
the situation) when she is located in a foreign cultural context? Critics on this topic seem to
operate under a false assumption; what one must understand is that there are two separate
oppositions at work: “foreign” vs. “native”/“local” and “barbaric” vs. “civilized.” It is not
necessarily the case that the foreigner is barbaric, or that the native (or the “center”) is
civilized. Confusing or conflating the geographical/cultural opposition with the moral/
ethical opposition has led, in my opinion, to some very problematic conclusions. I explore
a couple of these below, and then I launch into my own analysis of the above issues in the
character of Medea.
The crossing of boundaries is already a well-documented theme of this tragedy (see
chapters I and II above). Segal, in his article on the topic (1983b: see above, and ch. II),
explores the theme of broken boundaries in Senecan drama, using the psychoanalytical
theory of “primary boundary anxiety” and the Senecan tendency to have the natural world
154
act as mirror and complement to the action of characters’ interiors.
36
Segal’s conclusions
about Medea’s personal experience of boundaries are somewhat misleading. He states:
the violated interiority of [Medea’s] body and the violation of nature’s limits in the
Argo’s distant explorations and in the magic of Medea’s aerial car are
complementary aspects of the same theme, the pushing beyond limits, beyond
civilized behavior, into the barbarian and the monstrous. (178)
While I agree that Medea and nature are meant to parallel each other, is it really the case
that Medea becomes a barbaric character over the course of the play? Could one show, on
the other hand, that Medea is ‘barbaric’ from the outset (bringing her barbarity with her
into foreign lands)? Could one argue that she is not barbaric at all? Or, to what extent does
the cultural transition and resulting cultural experience induce ‘barbaric’ behavior or
identification?
Benton (2003), like Segal, seems to assume that Medea exhibits barbarism in the
tragedy; Benton goes a step further and suggests that Medea’s barbarism is not something
she brought with her, but something she adopts over the course of the play as she responds
to the Corinthians’ portrayal of herself as “barbaric”:
It is only after Medea realizes the essential difference between the ways she and
Jason are viewed, and after she recognizes that her attempts at assimilation are
futile, that she decides to embrace the identity thrust on her as a barbaric foreigner.
… She sees herself through the gaze of the Corinthians at this point and decides to
recreate herself in that very image…. She understands the way that others relate to
her and knows that their image of Medea is terrifying to them. Thus she will exploit
the Otherness imposed on her and use this difference as a means of gaining power.
(277)
155
36
Segal roots this nature-mirroring-self action in Seneca’s Stoic philosophical beliefs: “This interaction
between the enclosed depths of the soul and the expansive frame of nature obviously has its philosophical
roots in the Stoic correspondence of macrocosm and microcosm and the ideal of living in harmony with the
universe” (1983b: 179).
While it is a tempting hypothesis, Benton’s argument has several problems. First, she
points out that Creon and the chorus see Jason as innocent (Med. 263-5 and 102-6,
respectively), and she reads the relative guilt or innocence of Jason and Medea in the eyes
of Creon and the Corinthians as the turning point which causes Medea to “embrace” her
barbarity:
It is only after Medea realizes the essential difference between the ways she
and Jason are viewed, and after she recognizes that her attempts at assimilation are
futile, that she decides to embrace the identity thrust on her as a barbaric foreigner.
(277)
Nowhere does Benton show that the Medea character is aware of the ethnic/cultural
prejudice the Corinthians and Creon hold against her. Under Benton’s presentation, as far
as Medea is concerned, her “guilt” is not necessarily connected to her foreignness.
37

Second, though Benton wants to argue that Medea shows a clear progression from one
character state to another (i.e., ‘trying to fit in’ to ‘adopting the label of “Other”’), her
argument does not follow the chronology of the tragedy. Benton’s evidence that Medea
“begins to adopt this [barbaric] persona” occurs in Medea’s opening monologue (Med.
51-53), well before Medea has had her conversation with Creon wherein she is labeled as
foreigner and barbaric (and before the first choral ode, if one would like to believe that
Medea hears the particulars of the chorus’ speech about her). According to the passages
156
37
This is especially disheartening because the evidence, perhaps, exists: in Creon’s statement to Medea at
Med. 179-180 (which Medea may or may not have heard, where Creon refers to her as “the harmful race of
Colchian Aeetes”), at 191, where Creon calls her a “monstrum.” My response to Benton leaves aside the fact
that Medea may or may not have actually heard the choral odes, where the bulk of Medea-xenophobia is
presented. Benton assumes that Medea’s character shift is at least in part a response to the first and fourth
choral odes (276).
cited by Benton, both the “civilized” and the “barbaric” Medeas exist simultaneously
throughout the tragedy, so it is difficult to prove that Medea becomes barbaric as a
response to the way she is treated by the Corinthians during the tragedy. Perhaps Benton’s
trouble lies in the semantic slippage between “barbaric = foreign” and “barbaric = criminal/
evil-hearted.” One would do better to argue that Medea, labeled as “evil,” decides to
embrace “evil” behavior. But this does not necessarily have anything to do with her ethnic
identity.
Though it is very clear that Medea’s experience is paralleled and complemented by
the experience of nature, both during the expedition of the Argo and afterward, I would
like to question whether there is a clear distinction between barbaric and civilized in this
particular tragedy. I also wonder whether this opposition is really the point. The
Argonauts, Medea, Creon, and nature can all be accused of being cruel, uncivilized, yet
their behavior can also be defended.
38
Ultimately, what I am interested in pursuing here
are answers about how Medea perceives her cultural isolation and foreignness. These
questions might end up having little to do with Segal’s or Benton’s elided dichotomies.
Segal, in his article about Orpheus in Senecan tragedy, hints that Medea’s barbarity
is connected to the pre-social primitive of the golden age itself, that Medea is meant to
157
38
The Argonauts breach natural boundaries, but they set out under orders from Pelias; Medea seeks a
justified revenge against Jason, defends his interests out of love/commitment, but she designs her own
punishments and carries them out herself (i.e., not under orders); Creon is cruel to reject Medea so
completely, yet he is protecting his citizens and trying to secure an heir; nature, like Medea, seeks a justified
revenge, though the punishments are occasionally meted out against innocents (as described in the second
Argonautic ode) – in this, Medea and nature are also aligned (though see ch. II for the punishment of
innocents as a trait of divinity).
represent the savage. His goal is to set her in opposition to the “civilizing” figure of
Orpheus:
[Medea] harbors an inner violence that, like an elemental force of nature, is less
amenable to rational control than the optimistic assumptions of progress in human
history would suggest. Jason has brought back from remote and barbarous Colchis
something that remains untamed and untamable, something that remains in touch
with its latent monstrosity. (1983a: 237-238)
I think, however, it is made clear in the tragedy that barbarity in other forms already exists
when the golden age comes to an end. I have argued that the Argonauts perform a violent,
penetrative act on nature;
39
it is not a great semantic leap to see their act, the harbinger of
the golden age’s destruction, as an act of barbarity (by which I mean evilness) against nature
or against the gods. The chorus, moreover, identify their “candida saecula” with a lack of
deceit: “procul fraude remota” (Med. 330). If anything, barbarity/evilness seems to come into
existence only as the golden age comes to a close (as “civilization” comes into being).
As for Medea herself, there is no evidence that she is “barbaric” prior to Jason’s
arrival at Colchis; on the contrary, Medea characterizes her past self as loyal to her father
and proper in every way (Med. 209-210; 217-218; 238-241; see also ch. I). According to her,
Medea only becomes barbaric after the covenant of natural separation has been broken,
i.e., after the golden age is already over. One cannot therefore identify Medea with a
primordial, pre-social barbarity. One could even argue that this ‘pre-social’ barbarity is
invented precisely by the structured social gathering of the Argonauts and by their
158
39
See ch. I.
expedition. Medea herself then is merely the result of the already committed offense
against nature and the end of the golden age.
Medea understands and expresses eloquently from the outset of the play her own
cultural isolation. In her introductory monologue, she expresses her desire for Jason to
undergo what she is undergoing – to be bereft of his family and friends, to be sent into
exile.
vivat; per urbes erret ignotas egens
exul pavens invisus incerti laris,
iam notus hospes limen alienum expetat. (Med. 20-23a/22b)
Let him live; let him wander through unknown cities bereft – an exile, shaking,
hated, of uncertain home – already an infamous houseguest let him seek out a
foreign threshold.
In this statement, she describes exactly what she has experienced and what she is about to
experience, should Jason go through with his marriage – exile, perpetual wandering, fear,
the hatred of the community, unrecognized by anyone, with no secure future. Even at the
outset of the tragedy, Medea sees herself isolated and floating, with no support from any
community, much less that of the Corinthians. It is also significant, I think, that she uses
“limen” to express foreign territory; she is aware of the borders between lands, between
peoples, and she is aware that she has crossed them in coming to Corinth.
She expresses similar awareness of her isolation after the first choral ode, this time
with a focus on the difference between the agencies/abilities of Jason and herself. Jason is
characterized as able, while Medea sees herself as relatively powerless.
159
hoc facere Iason potuit, erepto patre
patria atque regno sedibus solam exteris
deserere durus? (Med. 118-20)
Was Jason able to do this, with my father, country, and kingdom stolen, and was he
able, cruel, to desert me, abandoned in foreign places?
quid tamen Iason potuit, alieni arbitri
iurisque factus? (Med. 137-8)
Yet what was Jason able to do, having been made subject to foreign arbiter and
(foreign) law?
Medea communicates her anxiety about agency here for the first time in the play, when she
is cognizant that Jason’s marriage has taken place. At this point, Jason’s life has moved
forward to a next stage; he has exercised his agency and accomplished the first piece of
actual plot movement in the play. Medea responds to this agency by focusing at first on her
own lack of power – a lack of power that is caused in no small part by her cultural
exclusion.
40
This initial expression of powerlessness is significant because there is no
audience; Medea is not posturing or feigning a lack of agency (as she is, arguably, with
Creon and Jason later in the play – cf. 207-8 and 458, ch. I), and it is more likely that she
truly believes what she is saying here.
41
Medea expresses a similar sentiment to Creon, characterizing herself as powerless,
though deserving of a better fate than an unwanted exile, since she has come from a
previous position of power.
160
40
For a comparison of this passage to Ovid’s Heroides 12 and a general discussion of Medea’s agency and
gender, see chs. I and IV.
41
For more on the mechanics of agency in this particular passage (and other similar ones), see ch. IV.
quamvis enim sim clade miseranda obruta,
expulsa supplex sola deserta, undique
afflicta, quondam nobili fulsi patre
avoque clarum Sole deduxi genus. (Med. 207-10)
For although I was overpowered in deplorable defeat, driven out, a suppliant, alone,
deserted, ruined from all sides, once I shone with a noble father, and I drew my
famous lineage down from my grandfather Sol.
It is interesting to note Medea’s particular mode of expression with Creon (as opposed to
the language she uses with herself in soliloquy). She describes herself – expulsa, supplex, sola,
deserta, undique/ afflicta. Whereas in her first monologue (cited above) she sees her own
position only by vicariously transferring it onto Jason – someone who is hated, wandering,
shaking, and she emphasizes the journey of the exile and community’s experience of the
homeless individual, here she focuses on the personal experience. The perfect passive
participles show both her lack of agency in an exiled situation (as opposed to, say, pavens or
errans in her first speech) and the distance between her present, soon-to-be exiled state, and
these isolating acts that were done to her. That is, she sees herself already in a state of
having-been-abandoned. Part of her posture for Creon is playing the helpless female, but it
is also possible that her perspective has changed since the beginning of the tragedy – what
was a process, a series of actions, is now a finished state, a personal experience.
The language with which Medea communicates to Creon that she is a potential
threat to his kingdom
42
is a language of ethnicity – she compares herself to the Amazon
women who, according to Medea, live in the same territory as her father’s kingdom (Med.
214-216). Costa points out that the Amazonian territory is “rather far from Colchis” (comm.
161
42
For an explanation of the Amazonian allusion as a threat, see ch. I.
ad loc.); I conjecture that Medea, while cognizant of this fact, takes advantage of Creon’s
inexperience in lands outside his own. He would not know that the Amazonians were far
away from Colchis, but he probably would know that they were a distant and wildly
different ethnicity, specifically threatening to men and male-centered authority, and
threatening in their foreignness.
We see that Medea, at least in her scene with Creon, speaks of the Greeks as a
distinct people, separate from her and her own.
43
solum hoc Colchico regno extuli,
decus illud ingens Graeciae et florem inclitum,
praesidia Achivae gentis et prolem deum
servasse memet. (Med. 225-8)
I carried off this alone from the Colchian realm, that I myself saved the great glory
and famous flower of Greece, the guards of the Achaean race and offspring of the
gods.
This statement by Medea is especially useful for determining how she sees her own cultural
status vis-à-vis the Greeks. Here, she identifies the men she saved as belonging to the
Achaean bloodline. According to Farney (speaking on the subject of candidates for
elections, and citing Feeney [1986] p. 5), the word “gens” is used by Romans to indicate
distinct ethnic groups – as if each aristocratic family had its own ethnic identity.
Recognition of family identity may have been one of the only ways that voters could
distinguish the candidates. Cicero’s comment that the populus had elected “a Piso…
not this Piso” suggests as much: he claims the people’s vote was swayed by Piso’s
family identity. … a voter could expect or assume that a man’s clan or background
indicated certain character traits. (21)
162
43
Cf. also her aversion to blending her family line with that of Creon (or the Corinthians) at Med. 510-12,
where she states: “let it never come, a day so horrible with miseries, which mixes noble offspring with filthy
offspring – the grandchildren of Phoebus with the grandchildren of Sisyphus.” See ch. II, n. 9.
The notion of separate ethnic groups is also supported here by Medea’s use of “prolem,” a
word that could signify what Jonathan Hall would read as a marker of shared ethnic
identity: “a myth of common descent, a sense of shared history, and a connection with a
specific territory” (Farney 28). Certainly “prolem” indicates a shared descent, as if the heroes
of the Argo are all family relations.
44
Thus it seems here that Medea sees the Achaeans as
an ethnic group (as their own family with their own heritage and culture) and sees herself
as a member of another, non-Achaean ethnic group.
In her exchange with Jason, Medea asks (perhaps rhetorically) where she should go,
if she is no longer welcome alongside him in Corinth.
ad quos remittis? Phasin et Colchos petam
patriumque regnum quaeque fraternus cruor
perfudit arva? quas peti terras iubes?
quae maria monstras? Pontici fauces freti
per quas revexi nobilem regum manum
adulterum secuta per Symplegadas?
parvamne Iolcon, Thessala an Tempe petam?
quascumque aperui tibi vias, clausi mihi.
quo me remittis? exuli exilium imperas
nec das. (Med. 451-60)
To what places do you send me? Shall I seek Phasis and Colchis and my fatherly
kingdom and what fields fraternal blood soaked? What lands do you order to be
sought? What seas do you show? The jaws of the Pontic sea though which I carried
back the well-bred band of kings, having followed an adulterer through the
Symplegades? Shall I seek tiny Iolcos, Thessalian Tempe? Whatever paths I have
opened for you, I have closed them for myself. Where do you send me? You order
exile to an exile, yet you do not give it.
163
44
If they are in fact descendants of gods, then, according to Hesiod’s Theogony, they would all be related
(albeit distantly). Also, it is clear from the plural “deum” that Medea is not referring to a single individual, but
to a group of progeny.
In this passage, Medea identifies her present self as an exile, fundamentally powerless
because she lacks the resources or support a homeland might offer. Her sense of agency is
dependent upon her being rooted in a physical location which (as we have seen above with
the Corinthians, Spartans, and Athenians) could lead to an ethnic sense of identification.
Part of Medea’s powerlessness stems from her lack of community identity.
But Medea is not completely free from blame for her current lack of options. Firstly,
her list of alternate places is a veritable replay of her own travel narrative: from Colchis,
through the Pontic Sea, through the Symplegades, to Iolchos, to Thessaly. Medea only
reminds Jason of her past travels, the places which, because of their crimes, are inaccessible
to her.
45
Secondly, Medea also admits her active role in Jason’s peregrine expansion (“aperui
tibi”), but she observes that the aid she gave to Jason – successful access to foreign locations
– has ultimately limited her own options when she needs a place to inhabit (“clausi mihi”).
The new world is a world having-been-conquered, but Medea’s role in the conquering has
left her unable to relocate when Jason is no longer at her side.
Another topic we must explore is what Medea perceives are the characteristics or
attributes of her homeland. And which, if any, of these traits does she claim to have
brought with her? Generally, Medea makes very few statements about the character of her
former home; the most detailed description we get is in her scene with Creon. For Creon
164
45
This makes me want to read the passage as rhetorical: its purpose is perhaps to remind Jason of her history
with him and not a sincere request. Also, we know that Medea is familiar with other lands from her magic
monologue, where she cites the many places she has traveled to gather various herbs and plants. For more on
the mnemonic aspect of this passage, see ch. IV.
Medea develops an image of Colchis which resembles Creon’s own kingdom (or at least
aristocratic Greek society):
quodcumque placidis flexibus Phasis rigat
…
hoc omne noster genitor imperio regit.
generosa, felix, decore regali potens
fulsi: petebant tunc meos thalamos procri… (Med. 211-218)
Whatever the Phasis moistens with placid turns, ... this entirety our begetter rules
with imperium. High-born, blessed, powerful with royal grace I shone: then, they
used to seek my bed, suitors….
As I have shown above,
46
however, her characterizations of the physical landscape are not
consistent, and she may be attempting to liken herself to Greek aristocracy in an effort to
make herself seem familiar to Creon, and therefore less deserving of his harsh
punishment.
47

There are two other passages in the rest of the tragedy in which Medea does seem to
refer to her homeland; in both these passages, Medea seems to be looking to her past
(manifested here as her past physical location) for the motivation and material for her
eventual revenge.
quodcumque vidit Pontus aut Phasis nefas,
videbit Isthmos. (Med. 44-5)
Whatever crime the Pontus or the Phasis saw, the Isthmus will see.
165
46
See ch. I.
47
Though (for the moment) outside the scope of this dissertation, the brief discussion of kings between
Medea and Creon may reveal some of Medea’s assumptions about social structure and power relations.
si quod Pelasgae, si quod urbes barbarae
novere facinus quod tuae ignorant manus,
nunc est parandum. (Med. 127-29)
[addressing herself] If there is some crime which the Pelasgian or barbaric cities
know, of which your hands are ignorant, now (that crime) must be prepared.
Now, these passages occur in Medea’s first two monologues, where her plans for revenge
are not yet completely formed. The physical spaces of the Pontus and the Phasis river may
be meant to stand in as a temporal location (i.e., place and time are metonymically linked),
and she may merely be recalling the memory of crimes committed while she was in Colchis
and not making a statement about the character of her home community. The second
passage, moreover, seems to count Greek
48
cities right alongside the foreign ones, as if the
Greek cities are just as well-versed in crimes as the foreign cities, and as if Medea has just as
much to learn about criminality from both regions. Therefore, it cannot be said that Medea
considers herself to have brought specifically “Colchian” qua “barbaric” characteristics (that
is, Medea’s “Colchis” is a foreign, but not a “barbaric”/“evil” place) along with her from
her homeland. Medea seems not to see herself as expressing a specifically “barbaric
Colchian” identity.
However, this is not problematic for our argument. While Medea may not see
herself as a “barbarian” (i.e., particularly uncivilized) we have shown that she is aware of her
166
48
Depending on the definition of “Pelasgae,” which, according to Chambers-Murray, refers to “the oldest of
the Greek inhabitants, who were spread also over a part of Asia Minor and other countries.” In the worst
case, it refers to Greek Asia Minor, though Medea could have used “Ionian” or “Aeolian” if she meant to refer
to Greeks in Asia Minor specifically. At Med. 240, Medea refers to the “Pelasgian” land which would have
been destroyed if she had not helped the Argonauts, and at Med. 178, she refers to Creon as possessing
“Pelasgo… imperio.” At Med. 870-1, the chorus ask when Medea (referred to as “Colchis”) will remove herself
from the Pelasgian fields: “Pelasgis/ ...arvis.” In this tragedy, then, “Pelasgian” seems to refer to mainland
Greece, if not Corinth itself.
cultural foreignness among the Greeks. In fact, Medea’s ethical self-evaluation seems to
view her actions simply in terms of her own historical narrative; even though she sees
herself as a foreigner, an outsider, she does not see herself embodying a definable ethical
cultural identity as such (i.e., she does not see her decisions as based on some idea of her
culture’s behavioral expectations). Medea, while aware of her foreignness, does not align
her geographical origin with any negative ethical implications about her character or her
behavior.
49
Finally, I think it can be argued that Medea’s feelings of cultural isolation and exile
are major motivations for her actions at the end of the tragedy. In her final moments of
indecision regarding the death of her children, just when Medea seems to be yielding to her
maternal urge to spare them, it is the thought of further exile that reinforces her decision
to kill:
huc, cara proles, unicum afflictae domus
solamen, huc vos ferte et infusos mihi
coniungite artus, habeat incolumes pater,
dum et mater habeat – urguet exilium ac fuga:
iam iam meo rapientur avulsi e sinu,
flentes, gementes – osculis pereant patris,
periere matris. (Med. 945-51)
Here, dear child, sole relief of an afflicted house, carry yourselves here and join
embracing arms to me, may your father have you safe and sound, provided that
your mother also has you – but exile and flight press upon me: now, now they will
be taken, torn away from my breast, weeping, groaning – may they perish to the
kisses of their father, they are dead to the kisses of their mother.
167
49
This is also supported by the fact that Medea never in Seneca’s tragedy refers to her aunt Circe (who was
known for her questionable morals, and from whose line she likely received her magical abilities).
After this final change of heart, Medea is resolved to her task and no longer questions
whether her children should be killed.
50
The realization of her exile and separation from
her children, should she let them live, is enough to convince her that they need to die.
51

Medea’s accumulated isolation from society, which has denied her the opportunity to
negotiate her plans with others, encourages her to imagine herself in an exiled position
already – beyond any hope for rescue or redemption – and allows her to kill her children
because she believes them to be already (“iam iam”) taken from her.
The encounter with the alien is an important theme of the tragedy, as I hope to
have shown. Seneca makes changes to the mythical tradition to maximize Medea’s isolation
from the community; we are made painfully aware of how isolated she feels and to what
extent the Corinthians are uniformly turned against her. We are also aware of the sheer
expanse of the new, post-Argonautic world, and Medea’s isolation seems all the more
pathetic by contrast. For the Corinthians, Medea represents a force of nature, a foreign
threat (threatening, in the most part, because she is foreign). From Medea’s perspective,
however, we see no ethnic prejudice, either against her own people or against the
Corinthians/Greeks. Medea does not seem to believe the community’s eth(n)ic assessment
168
50
She only questions how they should be killed, hesitating to kill the second child because she wants the
death to be a public spectacle. For more on this, see ch. IV.
51
Medea conflates her exile with the loss of her children, and rightly so, since Jason has refused to let her
take the chilren with her. Medea’s motivation then, it seems to me, is the thought of her forced separation
from her children (i.e., her exile).
of her.
52
Finally, by seeing the death of the children as caused in no small part by this
isolation, we are made aware that Creon and the Corinthian community could have made
different choices in their treatment of Medea and avoided their destruction.
V. Modern Perspectives
In the context of this tragedy, it is interesting to explore some contemporary
theories about cultural isolation’s effects on one’s sense of self. James Dowd, in his article
“The Theatrical Self: Aporias of the Self”, explores some of the ramifications of the
postmodern self, which he sees as highly constructed and performative, to the extent that
some individuals feel a lack of authenticity in their interior – they are all the time acting,
with no substance to their performance. While obviously it is anachronistic to look at the
ancient self as if it were the same as the postmodern self,
53
I think that there are some
useful implications for Senecan studies from this body of work. The idea of the self as
hyper-performative resonates very well with our understanding of Roman education in the
1st century C.E., which emphasized the taking on and performance of roles as a means of
169
52
Here, I am wary of Benton’s (2003) conclusions; she argues that Medea not only understands the
community’s fear of her foreignness (I can agree with this, especially in light of Medea’s use of the Amazons
as a fear-inducing comparison to herself), but also “exploits” it to her own advantage. Benton argues that
Medea’s decision to kill her children is a decision to embody the “outsider” persona put upon her by the
Corinthians. See also above.
53
For problems with this approach and common pitfalls of thinking about the ancient self, see, e.g., Gill
(2006), and the recent collection of essays Seneca and the Self, edited by Bartsch and Wray.
rhetorical practice.
54
The social existence of Roman citizen men, moreover, depended
heavily on correct performance; one’s value (and perhaps even one’s sense of self) was
determined by social opinion – that is, the self was socially (not subjectively) constructed
and reaffirmed on a daily basis.
55
I would like to suggest that the examination of
contemporary theories of the self, which highlight the agency (or lack of agency) a person
has in constructing their own ‘self’, might be useful to think about the post-Hellenistic self
– especially the self in Roman society, and especially the self as created (and dramatized) by
an elite Roman male.
56
Thus, I shall present some of Dowd’s observations in the context of
Medea’s cultural status and her isolation from the Corinthian society.
Dowd cites Taylor (1989) on the necessity of having familiar social frameworks in
which to situate oneself vis-à-vis the rest of society. Without social affirmation of the self,
Taylor states, “they would be at sea, as it were; they wouldn’t know anymore, for an
important range of questions, what the significance of things was for them.’” (Taylor 27,
cited in Dowd 260). As part of my investigation, I would like to consider how cultural
isolation might have changed Medea’s character and explore the possibility of viewing
170
54
As Gunderson (2000) states: “… the [Roman] orator has presented to him an elaborate hermeneutics of the
self; he. more than any other member of the society, is commanded to participate in a regime of intense
inspection and introspection. … He is endowed with a subjectivity that is anxious about he very questions of
the subject. He is endowed with a subjectivity that must be always regrounding itself and looking closer and
deeper into itself in the hopes that further self-mastery will win further security” (110). See also Boyle (1997):
21ff.
55
This seems to be the crux of Gill’s heated denial (2006, et al.) of a post-Cartesian selfhood’s existence in
the ancient world.
56
See my Introduction for further thoughts on this topic, but in general, I believe that Seneca is attempting
to create a realistic psychological/selfhood model in his characters.
Medea as the seminal émigré, ‘at sea’, the first foreigner unable to determine the
significance of things.
Dowd also discusses minority groups generally (of which Medea most certainly is a
member while she is in Corinth), and the ‘minority’ aspects of their selves, which are
highlighted in the larger society: “for minority group members in a strictly segregated
society, one’s status qua minority group member is continually brought into consciousness
and made problematic” (261). Dowd clarifies with examples:
A woman amidst men or an old person in a college classroom with young adults is
likely to have a heightened sense of the degree to which their self is constituted by
their gender or age. So too, depending upon the presence of physical traits that may
be unusual or stigmatizing, one’s understanding of oneself as bald, short, or light-
skinned, for example, may never recede completely from conscious awareness…. I
only wish to note that, even given the constraints on the self imposed by such
ascribed characteristics as ethnicity and gender, there remains a dimension of the
self that must be selected, produced, and reproduced by the individual.
I will argue in Chapter IV that Medea is, in fact, made to be hyper-aware of her difference
from the rest of the society, and that she does select, produce, and reproduce aspects of her
former self in order to regain a centeredness.
Part of Medea’s cultural crisis of self involves (as I will also argue in chapter IV)
having to rediscover her self and re-inscribe her identity into her practice. Dowd, talking
about the problem of finding a sense of ‘authentic’ selfhood in the postmodern world,
discusses two social “out-groups,” one of which is those people
for whom the self is newly discovered or rediscovered… those whose newly
established sense of self is primarily a social or group-anchored identity. I would
include AIDS sufferers, actively-engaged feminists and others committed to
particular social movements, either progressive or reactionary, and those whose
171
ethnicity places them on one or another side in a regional hostility, such as, for
example, the gang warfare…. In each of these cases, an understanding of one’s
identity, one’s self, becomes crystallized and paramount. (262)
When in the minority (or in a social out-group), that aspect of the self which is different
from the norm becomes the center of selfhood, the root of authenticity. One defines, and
perhaps even equates, oneself as a representative of a group. This is also perhaps an elided
assumption of Benton’s argument – that Medea’s foreignness will be paramount to her
identity because it is the one thing that differentiates her from her environment. Certainly,
I think it can be argued that because Medea’s foreign status makes it difficult for her to
bond with the members of Corinthian society, and thus difficult to accept or empathize
with their ethical standards, she is forced into a position of self-definition. It makes it easier
for Medea to develop her own isolated standard of morality,
57
in which Jason’s
abandonment of her (and the corresponding insult to her authority) leads her to a new
narrative of her ‘fitting’ self, one which is modeled on her past crimes.
172
57
This theory of Medea having a separate, isolated morality is discussed in part by Bartsch (2006), though not
explored as it regards Medea’s cultural foreignness, and not treated in the context of Seneca’s manipulation of
the literary tradition – both elements, I think, are crucial to an understanding of the issue.
Chapter IV: Medea as Habituated Self
Senecan characters display a unique interest in and discussion of their own
characteristics and traits. The reader/viewer of Senecan tragedy witnesses the development
of character, the description (often physical) of various states of mind, and the thought
processes that happen beyond the verbalized conversation.
1
What I would like to examine
in this chapter is Medea’s self-exposition, her attempts to change her character, and the
methods by which she effects this change. I posit that Medea fabricates an ideal self, whose
core identity is shaped around a series of Medea’s own past actions, and that she treats this
ideal as an exemplum to follow. Her goal throughout the tragedy is to become the exemplum
she has created. Furthermore, I believe that Medea enacts a self-therapy based on a theory
of practice; by constructing an ideal for herself and adjusting her practice to fit that ideal,
she means to resolve her identity crisis.
I. Remembering “Medea”
It is incontestable that Medea experiences a crisis of identity in this tragedy: due to
a lack of socially acceptable positions available to her (as the ex-wife of Jason, who remarries
at the beginning of the play), her divine ancestry and access to magical power, and an
unambiguous commitment by the Corinthians to shun her and expel her from their
society, Medea finds herself an outlier of social and gender paradigms. Having lost many
173
1
Specifically, the many asides of Senecan tragedy: Ulysses as he questions Andromache (Tr. 607-618); Phaedra
in her exchange with Hippolytus (Phae. 592-599, 635); Medea in her exchange with Jason (Med. 549-550); etc.
previous determinants of her identity (e.g., wife of Jason, daughter of Aeetes, mother of two
sons, princess of Colchis), Medea is bereft of the social recognition which could solidify
one for her.
2
Neither the Corinthians nor Jason wish to remember her existence or her
contributions toward the success of the Argonautic voyage, the return of the Greeks who
were on the ship,
3
or Jason’s personal safety. Medea therefore chooses to secure an identity
for herself, relying primarily on her past deeds for models. While references to her past self
(whether as dramatis persona or the deeds she committed before arriving at Corinth) have
been noticed by critics before (Star, Schiesaro, Boyle, McAuley, Guastella, etc.), no one has
looked at Medea’s identity crisis as a crisis of memory per se,
4
i.e., an anxiety that she will be
forgotten. I think Medea’s primary motivation from the beginning of the play is the
preservation and/or re-creation of her self in the absence of social affirmation. Moreover,
174
2
This assertion is not necessarily in conflict with Gill’s objectivist-constructionist self, where the makeup of
the self is socially determined, though for the sake of this chapter I view the socially acknowledged self as
merely one means of securing an identity.
3
This issue is a bit complicated, since, as the chorus argue, several of the Greek heroes who returned from
the Argonautic voyage ended up dying as a result of their offense. Thus, Medea’s success in this regard is
hampered, if not entirely negated. What is important, however, is that Medea does not consider her success
or effort to have been negated by the deaths of the other Argonauts. For the argument that her success is
negated by the deaths of the Argonauts (as told in the second Argonautic ode), see Henry and Walker (1967):
174-5.
4
Guastella (2001) comes closest to this thesis; he explores the play as a disjunction between ‘past’ and
‘present’ Medea, and her struggle for identity reformation is a task of undoing/avenging the crimes of her
past, of reconciling her new self with the old. Schiesaro (2003) also presents a very similar thesis, where he
argues that Medea wants to make the past conquer the present and future. (Despite the fact that his
discussion of Medea occurs within a larger comparison of Medea to Atreus, Medea is strikingly different from
Atreus in this regard; Atreus is motivated by a familial pattern of cannibalistic revenge, and perhaps an even
biologically inherited imperative to seek power and gain. Medea is not repeating an historical pattern set by
previous generations). What Guastella and Schiesaro both miss is Medea’s anxiety over being forgotten,
which, I think, directly drives her desire to turn backwards.
as part II of this chapter will show, Medea relies primarily on the memory of her past self as
the material for the creation of her idealized self, the “Medea” she wishes to become.
5
We begin where Medea first hears that the marriage between Jason and Creusa has
taken place. At this point, the threat of her own obsolescence is realized, and Medea
identifies Jason’s misstep as a failure to remember her.
merita contempsit mea
qui scelere flammas viderat vinci et mare? (Med. 120-121)
Does he think light of my services, he who saw flame and sea conquered by my
crime?
Medea is angry at Jason because she interprets his remarriage as a refusal on his part to
honor the sacrifices she made in bringing the two of them safely on their journey from
Colchis to Corinth. Medea’s uses the past to make a statement about the present: she used
her special abilities (which distinguish her from other mortals), and she committed crimes
for the benefit of her husband. Those past deeds help to signal her present worth, and the
failure to be mindful of that present worth is Jason’s presumed offense.
6
175
5
I realize that I am flirting with the idea of a basic opposition between socially constructed self and
individually constructed self. Bartsch’s Mirror of the Self posits a similar hypothesis about Seneca’s philosophy,
though my conclusions regarding the Medea differ from hers: “One is tempted to suggest that Seneca’s project
… is to reestablish the sense of some authentic core of non-socially determined selfhood in the turbulent
culture of the first century C.E.” (216). I also think this analysis is a far too simple reduction of the issue of
socio-historical context; surely, there were elements beyond the ‘turbulent’ first century which motivated the
need to refine (or even construct) a model of self-determined selfhood.
6
I choose the phrase “be mindful of,” as opposed to “remember,” because I think the particular quality
Medea wants Jason to have is not a “remembering” per se, which could consist of a single event (e.g., “I
remembered where I left my keys this morning”). Medea wants more than a single event of remembering to
take place; instead, she wants Jason to have her continually in mind, to be in a state of constant mindfulness of
Medea’s presence and worth.
Within the same speech, Medea considers whether she should kill Jason as
punishment. She decides to let him live and shifts her concern toward securing Jason’s
memory of her and her deeds:
vivat tamen
memorque nostri muneri parcat meo. (Med. 141-142)

Yet let him live, and mindful of us let him make good use of my gift.
7
What is essential to Medea is not that Jason should die, but that she herself should not be
forgotten; she will allow her enemy to live, as long as she can stay with him – here, as a
memory which he must always carry. Medea sees the potential power of memory over the
makeup of Jason’s future self, and she uses the potential remembering of her (and, on
Costa’s reading, her role in his continued existence) to affect her presence in Jason’s mind
in the future. And, at the very least, she needs Jason to take to heart the idea that he is only
alive because Medea chooses to spare his life.
8
At the beginning of her exchange with Jason, Medea laboriously recounts all the
deeds she performed so that he could succeed in his heroic efforts, as if she believes that
Jason needs reminding of what she has done and what she has given up for him.
Immediately after Jason’s departure from the scene, Medea apostrophizes him:
176
7
Costa suggests that Medea’s “muneri” is meant to be Jason’s life (p. 85, ad loc.).
8
Also important is how Medea wants to be remembered by Jason – i.e., as a powerful killer. It is one thing to
construct an identity to/for herself and perform it in isolation, but it is another thing then to perform this
identity for other people. This helps explain the necessity of a public murder at the end of the play – Medea
needs Jason to see her this way and remember her appropriately, and she is also invested in constructing a
public image (see Schiesaro (2003) and his discussion of Medea-as-playwright). As I show below, her
investment in a public persona implies that Medea has made no progress in the search for an identity in
isolation, i.e., that she, despite her self-coaching, is still reliant on society for the confirmation of her identity.
vadis oblitus mei
et tot meorum facinorum? (Med. 560-61)
Do you go having forgotten me and my countless deeds?
Medea’s primary anxiety here is that Jason has forgotten her, or, more precisely, has failed
to keep her in his mind (“vadis” having a diachronic connotation: Jason has continually not
remembered Medea and her crimes).
9
The diachronic aspect of Medea’s anxiety is
interesting; it is as if Medea refuses to be remembered at singular moments, to be the
occasional centre of Jason’s attention, or to be out of his attention most of the time. She
seems to insist that she ought to be a continual presence in his conscious awareness, an
immovable reality in his thought, like the immovable reality of his own self (the senses of
physicality, one’s bodily limitations, and the continuity of thought which aid in the
existence of a diachronic self).
As I argued in chapter III, Medea’s social exclusion creates a particularly precarious
space, in which Medea must assert her identity or disappear altogether. If Jason is her only
viable source of social recognition, Medea must try to make sure that Jason at least
remembers her. As much as Medea attempts to secure herself in Jason’s thoughts, however,
she does realize that Jason’s marriage to Creusa has fundamentally destroyed their
relationship. In the absence of Jason as a husband, Medea also embarks on a project of self-
creation, which begins at the outset of the tragedy and, presumably, reaches its completion
177
9
Also, the second person form of vadis is interesting: Jason has clearly left the stage (discessit), so Medea is
speaking to a version of him that is present in her mind.
at the end: “coniugem agnoscis tuam?” (1021: “Do you recognize your wife?”).
10
The use of
“coniunx” is biting, of course, because she is no longer Jason’s wife and has herself professed
to an undoing of their marital relationship: “the kingdom has returned, my stolen virginity
returns” (984: “rediere regna, rapta virginitas redit”). The alliteration and repeated “re-”
syllables
11
in Med. 984 stress the backwards movement of Medea’s self-identification, the
erasure of her marriage, the erasure of all her crimes (the first crime, remember, is the one
she commits against her father by betraying him). It places Medea back into her desired
state of pre-lapsarian innocence.
12
The returned kingdom is also the last thing she
accomplishes: the end of the tragedy, where the chariot of the Sun rescues her from the
Corinthians (“vehar,” Medea’s last word),
13
assures that Medea has regained the favor of her
paternal grandfather.
Aside from Medea’s anxieties, though, we have reason to suspect that Jason’s
character has forgotten (or is likely to forget) Medea: the thematic resonances and verbal
echoes of Catullus 64 and Heroides 12 in Seneca’s Medea create an analogy between Jason
and Theseus, and between Medea and Ariadne. As I showed in chapter II, Seneca’s Medea,
constructed as part of the Roman literary critique of the ‘golden age’, refers to Catullus 64
178
10
Section IV of this chapter investigates more fully the end result of Medea’s attempted self-therapy with a
close analysis of the final monologue as it relates to our concerns. For more on Medea’s “wife” self, see
Abrahamsen (1999), Guastella (2001), and McAuley (2008).
11
See also below for discussions of “re-” vocabulary in the rest of the play.
12
For resonance of Eclogue 4 in this line, see ch. II.
13
The passive voice of Medea’s last word is intriguing: see ch. I above and section III below for more on
Medea’s use of active and passive verb constructions and their connection to Medea’s sense of agency.
in its capacity as a ‘golden age’ poem.
14
Beyond its applicability to the ‘golden age’ motif in
Roman literature, though, Catullus 64 also resonates in this tragedy on additional
structural and thematic levels. Both Catullus 64 and Seneca’s Medea address the interaction
between the larger narrative of man’s sea exploration and the more intimate narrative of a
love story gone awry (an element missing from the other ‘golden age’ works mentioned in
chapter II – Horace’s Ode I.3 and Vergil’s Eclogue 4). In the Medea – as I have shown in
chapters I and II – the Argonautic narrative parallels Medea and Jason’s own relationship;
in Catullus 64, the Argonautic narrative provides the opportunity (and cause?) for the
marriage of Peleus and Thetis, which, in turn, encompasses the true “love story” of the
poem: that of Theseus and Ariadne.
15
The similarities between Seneca’s Medea and
Catullus 64 with regard to the macro- and micro-cosmic structures and the similarities
between Medea and Ariadne are meant, I believe, to highlight for the reader/viewer the
similarities between Jason’s and Theseus’ character flaws. Specifically, a reading of Seneca’s
179
14
On the problematic terminology of ‘golden age’ for Roman literature about pre-lapsarian innocence and
the fall of man, see ch. II.
15
Gaisser (1995): 592 remarks that the narrator of Catullus 64 introduces the coverlet as a tale of Theseus’
defeat of the Minotaur. The narrator’s story, however, focuses on the love relationship between Theseus and
Ariadne: “the coverlet promises virtutes; we are shown amores instead.”
Medea with Catullus 64 in mind encourages us to see Jason, like Theseus, as a character
whose primary problem is a lack of memory.
16
Medea and Ariadne have similar plotlines: both fall in love with a foreigner, who
must fight a bull in order to complete their mission. Both betray their fathers, both
contribute to the murder of their brothers, and both are essential for their lover-heroes to
return home safely. Both are abandoned by their lover-heroes as soon as they are no longer
useful for the completion of the mission. Gaisser has argued that an “undertext” of the
Medea and Jason story (of Apollonius, Euripides, and Ennius) exists within the entirety,
though especially the beginning, of Catullus 64 already. She remarks that, in the first seven
lines of the poem, “we seem to be in a poem about Argonauts, and one, moreover, with
Medea as its protagonist, for the allusive signposts at the entrance cite both Euripides’
Medea and the Medea Exul of Ennius.”
17
Concerning the Ariadne story, Gaisser seems
convinced that the coverlet “shows a second story not visible on the first; for the story of
Medea — first in love, then betrayed, and finally destructive — runs through the narrative
episodes as a disturbing counterpoint to that of Ariadne” (607).
180
16
For the word “immemor” in Latin literature (used once in Seneca’s Medea, one of only three instances in
Seneca’s legitimate tragedies – Tr. 320 and Phd. 369 are the others), compare Propertius I.19, where
Protesilaus’ mindfulness (“non immemor”) of his wife is held up as a model of true love (oblitus is also in this
passage); Ovid Heroides 15.106 (Sappho to lover); 21.64 (Cydippe to Acontius), also as examples of good/bad
lovers, respectively. There is also a very interesting example in Val. Flac. 7.498-506, where Jason states that, if
he is ever “immemor” of Medea’s work, then Medea is welcome to burn the house down (hilarious).
A.J. Boyle reminds me also of its use in Aeneid 6 (“immemores Romani”), which likely strengthens a
connection between Jason, Theseus, and Aeneas as similar heroes. For now, this line of argument lies outside
the scope of this dissertation.
17
Gaisser (1995): 580-581. See also her excellent observations about the convoluted chronologies of Medea
and Ariadne, which cement their two stories together: “Jason told the young Medea in Apollonius that by
helping him she could be as happy as Ariadne” (602), but Theseus’ quest cannot have already happened
because Theseus does not discover that Aegeus is his father until Medea is already in Athens (605).
In addition to the fact that Medea’s myth shares many narrative elements with that
of Ariadne, Catullus 64 as a whole hinges on the power and importance of memory, the
drive for narrative connection, and the inevitability of the progression of events.
18
To focus
on the coverlet ekphrasis: Theseus is a fundamentally forgetful character. When he requires
Ariadne’s help to find his way back out of the labyrinth, it is because he is unable to
remember the path without her thread to remind him (granted, as anyone would, given the
labyrinth’s necessarily maze-like nature):
inde pedem sospes multa cum laude reflexit
errabunda regens tenui vestigia filo,
ne labyrintheis e flexibus egredientem
tecti frustraretur inobservabilis error. (Cat. 64.112-115)
Safe, he turned his step back from there with much praise, ordering the wandering
traces with a slender thread, lest an unnoticed deviation of the house baffle him
walking out of the twisting turns.
After Theseus successfully departs from Crete, with Ariadne in tow, he seems to “forget”
her on the island Dia, where they spent the night:
...aut ut eam devinctam lumina somno
liquerit immemori discedens pectore coniunx? (Cat. 64.122-123)
… or (why should I call to mind) how the spouse, departing with a forgetful heart,
left that girl bound in her eyes with sleep?
The “immemori pectore” here signifies a lack of recognition; Theseus, in leaving Ariadne,
fails to keep her needs and desires in mind. Theseus’ “immemori” is a cognate of the
181
18
While it is outside my current focus, I think that the themes of memory and causality link together the
seemingly disparate vignettes of the epyllion – the Argo, the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, the story of
Theseus and Ariadne, and the song of the Parcae.
“commemorem” used by the narrator to describe his own relationship to the tale.
19
Even the
narrator highlights Theseus’ forgetfulness in this passage when he contrasts his own ability
to remember what happened to Ariadne and Theseus after they left Crete:
sed quid ego a primo digressus carmine plura
commemorem … (Cat. 64.116-117)
But why should I, having digressed from the outset of the poem, call still more to
mind…?
The delayed “commemorem” emphasizes the narrator’s role as the one who recalls and retells
the events – specifically, Ariadne’s decision to choose (“praeoptarit”) Theseus over her own
family members, a fact which Theseus is unable to keep in mind when he decides to
abandon her. The interjecting “ego” calls attention to Theseus’ irresponsibility by
contrasting Theseus’ “forgetful heart” with the narrator’s own ability to remember and
retell Ariadne and her experience of the relationship.
Ariadne, when she discovers her abandonment, similarly curses Theseus as a
forgetful and faithless partner:
sicine me patriis avectam, perfide, ab aris,
perfide, deserto liquisti in litore, Theseu?
sicine discedens neglecto numine divum,
immemor a! (Cat. 64.132-135)
Is this the way, faithless one, you, faithless one, left me, carried away from my
paternal altars, on a deserted shore, Theseus? Is this the way you, leaving with the
will of the gods neglected – O forgetful one!
182
19
Gaisser (1995) does not address this proximate set of cognates in her discussion of Theseus’ forgetfulness
(602-606).
Ariadne’s frustration is clear from the language: the repetition of “perfide” and the way it
breaks up her thoughts, as well as the complete inability to “use her words” in the second
couplet, which explodes into a primal shout. What she does manage to get across is that
Theseus has betrayed the gods in betraying her, and that she identifies his forgetfulness as a
cause for his departure.
The language of the above passage – Ariadne’s primal anger at Theseus – resonates
throughout Seneca’s Medea.
20
Medea calls Jason “perfido hosti” at 916, and Jason’s lack/
betrayal of fides is one of Medea’s primary complaints (Med. 11, 145) and Jason’s primary
admitted fault (Med. 434, 436, 437, 1003). Jason’s breach of fides, moreover, is paralleled by
the Argonautic voyage and their rupture of the sacred “foedera” between man and the gods
(for which, see chapters I and II). The Argonauts are compared to Phaethon, whom the
chorus directly identify as “immemor” when he desires to drive his father’s chariot. Though
the connection between forgetting and faithlessness seems tenuous in Seneca’s Medea when
viewed in isolation, the analogous relationship between Ariadne and Theseus, where
memory is closely tied to fidelity, helps us see that Medea is justified to believe that the end
of her marriage also foretells her obsolescence.
Theseus is identified as forgetful once more in Catullus 64, with disastrous
consequences. As he sails home to Athens, he forgets his promise to his father, which was
to raise a white sail if he were returning to Athens alive (64.233ff.). When Aegeus sees the
“infecti veli” (64.243), he kills himself by jumping off the cliff. The narrator once again calls
183
20
Perhaps more so with the addition of Heroides 12, for which see below.
Theseus forgetful, implying that Theseus’ lack of attention is to blame for his father’s
death.
sic funesta domus ingressus tecta paterna
morte ferox Theseus, qualem Minoidi luctum
obtulerat mente immemori, talem ipse recepit. (Cat. 64.246-248)
Thus brutish Theseus, having entered the roofs of the house, funereal with paternal
death, the sort of grief which he had given to the daughter of Minos with his
forgetful heart, this very sort he himself received.

Theseus’ forgetfulness, which encouraged him to leave Ariadne behind, gives him her same
grief when it is responsible for Aegeus’ suicide. Forgetfulness causes Theseus to break the
pact with his father. In the ekphrasis of Catullus 64, we see that the themes of fidelity,
piety, and memory are intertwined; Theseus’ inability to remember results in the breaking
of oaths sworn to Ariadne and to his father.
21
Reading Jason’s character in light of these
themes, we are more easily convinced that Jason’s lack of fidelity is bound up with a similar
inability to remember.
In Ovid’s Heroides 12, we see echoes of the Catullus 64 ekphrasis in the accusations
leveled against Jason by Medea. Ovid’s Medea, through allusion, uses the experience of
Ariadne at the hands of Theseus as an analogy for her own abandonment by Jason. The
first line of the poem begins with Medea remembering Jason’s arrival at Colchis:
At tibi Colchorum, memini, regina vacavi... (Her. 12.1)
Yet for you, I remember, as queen of the Colchians I made time.
184
21
One must be careful, however, not to conflate Catullan intertext in Seneca with Ennian, Apollonian, and
Euripidean intertext in Seneca: Catullus himself alludes to these three previous versions of Medea in 64: see
Gaisser (1995).
The abrupt beginning, as if Medea’s letter is a spontaneous response to Jason (“at”), focuses
our attention on Medea’s memory as she claims narrative authority over past events.
22
This
version of the story was lived by the author herself; there is truth in her account. In the
opening line of Heroides 12, we are reminded of the theme of memory in Catullus 64 and
its connection to fidelity; Medea, by aligning herself on the side of memory, implicitly
states that she is respectful of her marriage bond to Jason. Specifically, Medea’s opening
line recalls the narrator of Catullus 64, who interjects his own voice to recall
(“commemorem”) the abandonment of Ariadne by forgetful Theseus.
Later, when she names Jason (and the only time Jason is addressed by name),
Medea calls him “immemor Aesonides” (Her. 12.16); she identifies him as forgetful and as the
son of Aeson. The juxtaposition of the patronymic with “immemor” recalls the final episode
of Theseus’ story in Catullus 64, where his father dies because of his lack of memory. The
Medea of Ovid’s Heroides also explicitly focuses on Jason’s lack of respect for their marriage
bond. She identifies him with perfidia, or as perfidus or infidus several times throughout the
poem, and asks for the return of their marital fides (Her. 12.19, 37, 72, 194, 210). Medea
thus sets up a contrast between herself and Jason – she is the one who remembers and
preserves her marital pact, the keeper of an accurate version of the past, and Jason is the
one who forgets and is therefore unfaithful.
Seneca’s Medea and Ariadne are similarly intertwined. In the overlapping of the
story of the Argo and Medea’s personal narrative, the micro- and macro-cosmic breaches of
185
22
Later, Medea also accuses Jason of having forgotten her: “noscis? an exciderunt mecum loca?” (71: “Do you
recognize [the place]? Or have places fallen out of your mind along with me?”).
fidelity, and Medea’s obsession with her own memory, Seneca points us to Catullus 64 and
the experience of Ariadne’s abandonment by Theseus. Seneca’s Medea taps into the story
of Ariadne, an abandoned female character who feels specifically “forgotten” by her
companion, not just by means of the references in Ovid’s Heroides, but also by means of the
similarities between Medea’s and Ariadne’s stories and the forgetfulness and faithlessness
shared by Jason and Theseus. Thus in Seneca’s tragedy, Medea’s anxiety over the
disappearance of her memory carries with it the weight of unmindful heroes (and the
consequences of their unmindfulness) of previous literature.
23
II. Creating “Medea”: the fabrication of an ideal based on the past
I posit that Medea’s transition of ‘becoming’ is the necessary result of Jason’s
abandonment and a lack of social recognition from the Corinthians. Medea’s solution to
the threat of being forgotten is to do the work of remembering herself, who she is, what she
represents.
24
Specifically, Medea creates an ideal self to imitate by calling to mind certain
events from her past, and she then adopts the practices and attitudes that she feels
186
23
Though it is outside the scope of this chapter, it would be interesting to compare Medea and Ariadne’s
perception of memory and fidelity with the situation presented in Vergil’s Aeneid IV. In the Aeneid, Dido also
accuses Aeneas of being faithless (“perfide” at IV.305, 366, 421), but Aeneas cites memory as the reason why
he has to leave (i.e., he must leave to preserve the memory of his father and Troy, IV.335-336). Dido kills
herself in part to forget her love for Aeneas (IV.520-521). Here, it seems that memory and love are also
connected – perhaps Aeneas’ call to memory subverts any accusation of forgetfulness Dido could make
against him?
24
Schiesaro argues Medea’s “desire to push her life backwards, to deny the future any real possibility of
unfolding and deviating from the past” (208). He also highlights the fact that Seneca invents this desire:
“Euripides’ heroine makes no attempt to win back the object of her passion” (209). See generally 208ff.
correspond to the character comprised of these events.
25
It is important to state that
Medea’s choice of past exempla to follow is significant in and of itself. That is, Medea could
have chosen different events from her past, ones which did not involve murder, betrayal, or
crime, but the focus is instead on three specific evil acts: the betrayal of her father, the
murder of Absyrtus, and the murder of Pelias. By building a “Medea” to become based on
the events of her choosing, Medea creates a murderous character for herself, and acts in the
way that her fabricated “Medea” would act – in a criminal way.
26
Medea often strengthens herself by calling up memories that seem to center her in
her purpose. The subject of these memories is her past evil deeds (specifically, the betrayal
of her father, the killing of her brother, and the killing of Pelias), all of which she
performed for Jason’s benefit. For example, at the beginning of the play, Medea, having
called upon the various deities to help her, decides that her plan of action should emulate
(and outdo) her previous deeds:
mens intus agitat: vulnera et caedem et vagum
funus per artus – levia memoravi nimis:
haec virgo feci; gravior exurgat dolor:
maiora iam me scelera post partus decent. (Med. 47-50)
187
25
Several critics observe that Medea openly models herself on her past: Guastella (2001): 202ff., Schiesaro
(2003), Star (2006), Gill (1987): 31ff., Boyle (1997): 58-59, etc. The following analysis aims to unpack Medea’s
reliance on the past as a means of self-creation.
26
Here I agree with Fitch and McElduff’s argument that the unfortunate result of Medea’s self-assertion is
that she “misidentifies” her self with one set of characteristics; she “associat[es herself] too completely with a
particular role” (30). Fitch and McElduff, however, fail to problematize the mechanism of Medea’s self-
fashioning, and address only the outward consequences. I also find their opposition between Medea-as-wife
and Medea-as-mother to be a too simplistic reading of her character. Benton argues (also too simplistically, in
my opinion) that Medea chooses to become the character of the “Other,” a xenophobic stereotype which the
Corinthians have created for her. For my response to Benton’s argument, see ch. III.
The mind within stirs up: wounds and death and murder wandering over the
limbs – I recount too much light things: I did these things while a virgin; let a
heavier grief push me beyond: now greater crimes fit me post-partum.

She remembers the crimes of her past self and models her present self by following and
outdoing that persona.
27
Not an hundred lines later, she reminds herself again: “scelera te
hortentur tua/ et cuncta redeant” (Med. 129-130: “let your crimes compel you, and let them all
return”). She then details her departure from Colchis, the murder of her brother, and the
deception of Pelias’ daughters, which leads to Pelias’ death.
28
It is significant for our analysis that these moments of self-exhortation occur while
Medea is the only character onstage; she is speaking to herself, and the other characters
cannot hear her.
29
She is only performing for herself and not catering her speech for the
benefit of someone else
30
(assuming that the fourth wall remains intact, i.e., Medea is not
aware of her theatrical audience, and assuming that the Nurse is not onstage with her).
This lends credence to the idea that, in the passages above, Medea is in fact using her past
deeds to motivate her to punish Jason and the Corinthians, as well as a basis for
establishing an identity in the absence of social recognition. However, even in her
conversations with other characters, we can see Medea’s reliance on (and obsession with)
the past for the purpose of self-definition.
188
27
Much has been said about the paradoxical connection between Medea’s motherhood and the necessary
severity of her crimes. See, e.g., Guastella (2001), Nussbaum (1996), McAuley (2008) for a range of better
interpretations (though none of the above, in my opinion, interprets the problem to a satisfying end).
28
See section III below for a more detailed assessment of this passage.
29
For the presence and absence of the chorus in Seneca’s tragedies, see Davis (1993).
30
For Medea adjusting her speech to fit the expectations of others, see ch. I.
While she caters her self–presentation to assuage Creon’s anxieties about her,
Medea nevertheless belies her ultimate endeavor to return to a past self. When Medea and
Creon talk about her exile from Corinth and potential return to Colchis, the contrast in
their speech is striking. Medea stresses a turning back and a backwards motion, whereas
Creon looks solely to the future, a unidirectional temporal stance.
Let us look at Creon’s language:
nondum meis exportat e regnis pedem? (Med. 180)
Has she not yet carried her step out of my kingdom?
i, querere Colchis. Go, complain to the Colchians. (Med. 197)
egredere, purga regna, letales simul
tecum aufer herbas, libera cives metu,
alia sedens tellure sollicita deos. (Med. 269-271)
Leave, purge the kingdom, and at the same time carry away those lethal herbs with
you, free the citizens from fear, and agitate the gods while dwelling in another land.
iam exisse decuit. (Med. 281)
Already was it fitting for you to have left.
vade. Leave. (Med. 284)
Now compare Medea’s language:
redeo: qui avexit, ferat. (Med. 197)
I go back: but the one who drew me away, let him carry me.
sed redde crimen. But return the crime. (Med. 246)
profugere cogis? redde fugienti ratem
vel redde comitem. (Med. 272-273)
189
You compel me to flee? Return the ship to the one fleeing, or return the
companion.
We see here that Medea interprets Creon’s order as an order to go backwards in time, to
retrace her steps back to Colchis.
31
In fact, this retracing is crucial to her argument that
Creon should return Jason to her when she leaves Corinth: in order for her to return
home, Medea must get Jason back as well. The contrast between Medea’s and Creon’s
temporal attitudes reveals to the reader/viewer the extent of Medea’s focus on the past as a
looming potentiality. For Medea, exile from Corinth will cause future and past to be
synonymous.
Similarly with Jason, Medea brings the past with her into the present to argue that
Jason is beholden to her (see especially 466ff.). She views the present as a logical
progression/repetition of past events: “fugimus, Iason, fugimus – hoc non est novum” (Med.
447: “we fled, Jason, we flee now – this is not new”). When she asks Jason where she
should go, she lists her options as the past locations of their journey from Colchis,
mentioning the crimes she performed for him in the process:
Phasin et Colchos petam
patriumque regnum quaeque fraternus cruor
perfudit arva?...
Pontici fauces freti
190
31
Though not connected directly with her return home, Medea uses “re-” words also to describe the return of
the Argonauts to Greece (235, 238), and in other contexts (“recedens,” 282; “recidas,” 296). The “re-”
vocabulary also appears in the Nurse’s address to Medea at 380ff. (381, 383, 385, 389, 425). Perhaps of
interest is Medea’s language in Ovid’s Heroides 12, where she tells Jason “redde” and “refer.”
per quas revexi
32
nobilem regum manum
adulterum secuta per Symplegades?
parvamne Iolcon, Thessala, an Tempe petam? (Med. 451-3; 454-7)
Should I seek the Phasis and the Colchians, and my father’s kingdom and what
fields fraternal blood soaked?... The jaws of the Pontic sea, through which I carried
back the noble band of kings, having followed an adulterer through the
Symplegades? Should I seek tiny Iolcos, Thessaly, or Tempe?
Medea suggests only the places where she has already been. Other locations – e.g., the
West, where she may have already traveled,
33
or, notably, Athens, where she goes in
Euripides’ and Ovid’s versions of this myth – are omitted. In her exchange with Jason,
Medea presents herself as a woman who can only exist in the places she has already been
(and accompanied by the people – namely Jason – whom she already knows). Part of her
posturing for Jason, therefore, puts a focus on the past as inextricably entwined with the
present and with the future: Medea can only become the person who she has been. Thus
Medea, even when she is not the sole occupant of the stage, constructs a potential future
self who is completely based in her past.
34
In the recreation of an ideal “Medea,” we must not overlook the final monologue.
35

Though not the crux of Medea’s character formation (as I hope to have shown), it has been
191
32
The verb “veho” and its compounds are an important theme in this tragedy – its force rests on the
attribution of agency (i.e., Medea brought back the Argonauts, Jason drew Medea away from Colchis, and
Medea is drawn away by her grandfather’s chariot at the end), who is responsible for whose actions. See also
ch. I.
33
See, e.g., Med. 727.
34
In this, Medea is similar to Ariadne (who envisions herself going back home at Cat. 64.177ff.), but she is
unlike Vergil’s Dido, who imagines herself traveling onwards with Aeneas to Italy, or waging war against the
Trojans (Aen. IV.537ff.).
35
See section IV below for a more thorough analysis of the final monologue.
the misguided centre of attention for critics of the play, and deserves to be addressed.
Fairly early on in the monologue, Medea states “Medea nunc sum” (Med. 910: “now I am
Medea”) – one of many crescendoes of resolve found in the speech. This climax begins with
Medea exhorting her “animus”
36
to outdo its previous deeds:
teque languentem excita
penitusque veteres pectore ex imo impetus
violentus hauri. quidquid admissum est adhuc,
pietas vocetur. (Med. 902-905)
Rouse yourself languishing, and, violent, draw up from deep within the heart the
old attacks. Whatever was committed before now, let it be called piety.
As Star (2006) also concludes, the force of this final monologue is Medea exhorting herself
to maintain a consistent character in her performance, much like Cato in the performance
of his suicide in Seneca’s de Providentia. What Star misses, however, is the extent to which
Medea’s memories are intrinsically connected with this project. The process of becoming
“Medea” involves following the example of past Medea and modeling herself based on the
horrible things she did before she came to Corinth. Her agency is not completely free,
because her past self dictates the options that are actually open to her. Becoming Medea
means having to reconcile the present with the past, and her self-exhortation, unlike
Cato’s,
37
uses past-Medea as a model, and not some abstract set of principles.
192
36
It is tempting to take the A branch reading of “violentius” at 904 and reject Bentley’s emendation of “furiose”
at 897 (meaning that Medea addresses her “animus” at 895-6, and herself from 897 onwards – until 914,
where she addresses her “dolor”). Both Costa and Hine, however, take “violentus” and, to make the E reading
more logical, Bentley’s emendation.
37
In de Providentia 2.10ff., which is Star’s primary comparison (2006: 218ff.).
As soon as she states, “now I am Medea,” immediately the memories of her past –
her brother murdered, her father bereft, and the daughters of Pelias tricked – come
flooding back to her, and each one of them is a boon; “iuvat,” she repeats as she recounts
each one:
iuvat, iuvat rapuisse fraternum caput,
artus iuvat secuisse et arcano patrem
spoliasse sacro, iuvat in exitium senis
armasse natas. (Med. 911-914)
It pleases, it pleases to have stolen my brother’s head, it pleases to have cut his
limbs and to have robbed a father of his secret trove, it pleases to have armed
daughters for the destruction of an old man.
These memories, moreover, seem to come back to her consciousness involuntarily (judging
by the rapidity of her recollection, the short space given to each memory, and the repeated
“iuvat”). Much like an earlier recounting of her crimes, though, Medea seems to be
reiterating precisely the definition of her identity. This is usually the point in the
monologue where critics identify Medea as having been overcome by madness or passion
(or, as Gill might argue, an “akratic self-succumbing to passion”).
38
What is missing in the
analysis is the fact that Medea, as she wants herself to be, is intrinsically bound to those
memories. Most importantly, by looking at her past evil actions as things that have
prepared her for her present ones, she creates a teleological narrative of her life, leading to
her grand exit at the end of the play, all by following her own lead.
39
Her past evils are what
193
38
See Gill (1987): 25-26, Costa, Hine ad loc.
39
This is a bit paradoxical – a teleology that is also a turning backwards, but Medea’s own speech is
paradoxical: for example, she calls herself “coniunx” (1021) and “mater” (1012) after she has decided that both
children must die, and after she has declared that her virginity has been restored (984). Her own logic is not
internally consistent.
she chooses as her self, and by mimicking these, adopting these practices, these memories
guide her, and she is able to find her identity again, even among an entire society choosing
not to remember her.
III. Becoming “Medea:” Action, practice
As I have argued, Medea responds to the threat of obsolescence with the creation of
an ideal self based on her past actions. The transformation into this ideal self, i.e., Medea’s
progression into her final character, is the next subject of my focus. I shall examine in
detail Medea’s first two monologues, which she delivers alone onstage, reading them as
reflections of her mental process.
40
I would like to suggest that, from the beginning of the
tragedy, Medea presents for the reader/viewer a model of practice-based self-therapy. In the
process of ‘becoming’ her fabricated ideal, and specifically in the moments where she is the
only one present on stage, Medea focuses not on mimicking particular character traits (e.g.,
striving to be ‘good’ or ‘bad’) but on using action itself as a means of changing her
character into the ideal “Medea.” In her first monologue, we see evidence of this: Medea
laments that words are not sufficient for her task:
querelas verbaque in cassum sero? (Med. 26)
Do I compose laments and words in vain?
194
40
Though I have treated the character in this fashion throughout, it is worth reiterating that I assume at the
outset that Seneca writes the Medea character in such a way as to provide a convincing exposition of a stream
of conscious thought. In the frequency of Medea’s self-exposition, we are encouraged to examine and
question her motives and psychological makeup. For more on my interpretation of Senecan characters, see my
Introduction.
The sentiment, a commonplace opposition between words and deeds, enables Medea to
transition from the hypothetical to the real: a stark shift from her previous subjunctive
prayers (20-25: precer, vivat, erret, expetat, optet,
41
queam) to the future indicative:
non ibo in hostes? manibus excutiam faces
caeloque lucem….
hoc restat unum, pronubam thalamo feram
ut ipsa pinum postque sacrificas preces
caedam dicatis victimas altaribus. (Med. 27-28; 37-39)
Shall I not go against my enemies? I shall shake out from their hands the torches
and the light from the sky…. This one thing remains – that I myself carry the
marriage pine to the wedding chamber and (that), after the sacrificial prayers, I
slaughter the victims at the dedicated altars.
By recognizing the potential created by contemplating actions instead of speech, Medea no
longer prays for possible outcomes; the modal shift in her language signals a commitment
to the proposed destruction of others.
42
She then presents a series of specific actions which
she will perform – carrying the marriage fire, slaughtering the sacrificial animals; there is
nothing vague about her plans.
Medea then addresses her “animus” directly, exhorting it to adopt and let go of
particular characteristics: if its “old vigor remains” (41-42), it should get rid of “femineos
metus” and replace it with “inhospitalem Caucasum” (42-43). While these instructions seem
trait-oriented (vigor, womanly fear, and the inhospitable Caucasus – though it is unclear
195
41
I reject Axelson’s unnecessary emendation included in Zweirlein’s OCT (“opto”) in favor of the universal
manuscript reading.
42
Though “feram” and “caedam” are not future indicative, they are operating within an indicative protasis
(“hoc restat unum”) – thus still distinct from the jussive subjunctives cited above. For similarities between these
passages and Juno’s speech in Hercules Furens, see ch. II.
what type of trait that image is meant to invoke
43
), Medea soon follows with something
more specific:
quodcumque vidit Phasis aut Pontus nefas,
videbit Isthmos. effera ignota horrida,
tremenda caelo pariter ac terris mala
mens intus agitat: vulnera et caedem et vagum
funus per artus – levia memoravi nimis… (Med. 44-48)
Whatever crime the Phasis or the Pontus saw, the Isthmus will see. Savage, obscure,
rugged, trembled-at by sky and earth alike are the evils my mind stirs up within:
wounds and death and murder wandering over the limbs – but I recount too trivial
things…
Medea creates a set of deeds (whatever crime happened in the East), declares that the
Isthmus shall see it (note the future indicative instead of the jussive), and comes up with
three specific events: wounds, slaughter, and a death wandering all over the limbs. At first,
she delays admitting her own role in past crimes – she is describing the desired outcome of
her conflict with Jason first, and then she states that the desired events come from her own
past experience (memoravi; feci). She also refrains from addressing her state of mind when
these events took place (e.g., she was angry, or spiteful, or evil). Rather, the events stand on
their own, specific in their description (i.e., a specific plan of action), but divorced of the
agents performing them. More importantly, Medea implores herself to perform the actions
as a means, in and of itself, of achieving her desired selfhood.
196
43
See chapter II for my interpretation of the Caucasus reference.
The process of becoming Medea, then, rests on the performance of action.
44
In this
first monologue, Medea even adjusts her definition of “fitting” actions to suit her changed
physical reality:
haec virgo feci; gravior exurgat dolor:
maiora iam me scelera post partus decent. (Med. 49-50)
I did these things while a virgin; let a heavier grief push me beyond: now greater
crimes fit me post-partum.
She states that the physical change from virgin to wife creates a different set of appropriate
actions, i.e., her changed physical body has changed what fits her.
After the first choral ode, Medea again goes through a progression of thought
similar to that of her introductory monologue: a lament for her abandonment, a plan for
revenge, and a rehashing of the crimes she has already committed. Medea again recounts
her past deeds in order to empower and motivate herself to punish Jason. The use of
different modes of address highlight Medea’s progression from helpless to empowered.
45

She begins in a disempowered state:
Occidimus: aures pepulit hymenaeus meas.
vix ipsa tantum, vix adhuc credo malum.
hoc facere Iason potuit...?
merita contempsit mea...?
incerta vecors mente non sana feror
partes in omnes; unde me ulcisci queam? (Med. 116-124)
197
44
Contra Star (2006), who reads Medea’s self-exhortation mostly in terms of desired traits, i.e., Medea wills
herself to become her ideal by focusing on the mental condition and letting the physical action follow from
that. I argue that the physical action is given primacy (at least by Medea) as a means for becoming her ideal,
and that the appropriate mental state is meant to follow from the commission of actions.
45
For intertext with Ovid’s Heroides 12 in this passage, and the relationship between Medea’s sense of agency
and her gender, see ch. I.
We are ruined: the wedding song has struck my ears. Scarcely, scarcely still do I
myself believe such great ill. Was Jason able to do this?… Has he belittled my
services? Uncertain, senseless, and of unsound mind I am carried into all parts:
whence shall I be able to avenge myself?
This speech indicates the degree to which Medea considers herself without agency: the
hymns strike her ears (she does not actively hear them, 116); she is scarcely able to believe
what has happened (117), what Jason has done (118), and how he has disrespected her
(120); she is carried around uncertain in her mind (she cannot control where she’s going,
123-4); and she can only hypothesize an ability to avenge herself (124).
46
Medea does not
possess agency here; she is not thinking of herself as able to make decisions about her
actions. She requires a reminder that she does possess this agency, and she finds this
reminder in the recounting of certain past events.
Medea then moves to address herself:
si quod Pelasgae, si quod urbes barbarae
novere facinus quod tuae ignorent manus,
nunc est parandum. scelera te hortentur tua
et cuncta redeant… (Med. 127-130)
If the Pelasgian cities, if the barbarian cities know some crime of which your hands
are ignorant, now it must be prepared. Let crimes urge you – your crimes, and let
everything come back….
By addressing herself in the second person, Medea takes an active control over the
direction of her thought (as opposed to the “incerta...feror” above). Though she has not yet
198
46
Compare the statements of Phaedra, who sees herself in a similarly passive role in Act II – she cannot
control her own emotions (Phaedra blames Crete, her mother, amor, and furor for her thoughts and desires).
Hine (ad loc.) notices the intertext with Ovid’s Medeas – both from the Heroides and his lost tragedy. Medea in
Ovid’s Heroides is especially passive, and the references to the Heroides Medea in particular might aim to
highlight the passivity present in Medea’s character here. For more on Medea in the Heroides, see ch. I.
taken the subject position, she nevertheless begins to guide her thought towards her past
crimes, intimating that they, not she, are urging her on.
As Medea recounts the deeds, we notice the distinct lack of first-person speech
(though she calls them her crimes – “tua scelera,” Medea avoids taking first-person
ownership of them until after they have been reiterated). The events, therefore, take on a
‘fated’ quality; they seem to take place without anyone’s active control over them:
inclitum regni decus
raptum et nefandae virginis parvus comes
divisus ense, funus ingestum patri
sparsumque ponto corpus et Peliae senis
decocta aeno membra. funestum impie
quam saepe fudi sanguinem – et nullum scelus
irata feci: saevit infelix amor. (Med. 130-136)
The famous honor of a kingdom snatched, and the small companion of a cursed
maiden divided by a sword, and death heaped upon a father, and a body scattered
on the sea, and the limbs of old Pelias cooked in bronze. Deadly, impiously, how
often I poured blood – and no crime did I do angered: unhappy love raged.
When she describes the crimes themselves, Medea does not remember them at first in the
first-person; the repeated passive constructions leave the actions without an agent – they
simply ‘happened’. The narration of the events, however, leads Medea into a perspective of
greater agency: in the shift to first-person “fudi” and “feci,” she remembers them finally as
her own. Motivated by the description of the crimes, Medea comes into possession of them
and claims them as outcomes of her own active choosing.
47
For our purposes, it is also
199
47
This is interesting because we are never told in this tragedy who actually killed Absyrtus – in some versions
of the myth, it is Jason and not Medea; in which case, Medea here is taking on the responsibility even for
crimes over which she may have had only partial control. In general, the responsibility for the murders is a
central point of contention in this tragedy (see 258-265, 275-280, 486-489, 497-503), and wherever it is
discussed, at stake is the fluctuating power dynamic between Jason and Medea.
interesting to note that the actions take prominence before the acknowledgement of agency.
Medea can only become the agent capable of plotting revenge against Jason after she has
described, in a disembodied way, the details of her past crimes. She must see the practices
of her model self before she can embody it.

IV: Observations on the final monologue
The final monologue itself has drawn the attention of many critics for its seemingly
illogical and violent changes of emotion and personas. I think the final monologue has
received, if anything, too much attention from critics looking for the locus in which Medea
presents her clearest vocalization of her selfhood and her conflicts.
48
It is, however, the last
scene of the tragedy, where any resolution to the tragedy’s conflicts ought normally to be
presented (and Seneca’s endings tend to be especially poignant), so it deserves its own
examination.
We began this chapter with Medea’s anxiety about being forgotten – primarily by
Jason, but also by the larger society (further explored in ch. III). A “perfect storm” descends
upon Medea: her femaleness means that she is especially vulnerable to social prejudice,
dependent on men for social status, and especially unfit for the task of self-definition; her
divinity and magical ability elevate her to a different playing field than that of other mortals
and, by giving her agency to manipulate people and the natural world, hinders her
200
48
While I think Star’s (2006) reading of self-exhortation and constantia is correct for the context of the final
monologue (in exclusion of the rest of the tragedy), I think another version of her conflicted self, one of
forgetting and memory, can be supported by the rest of the play.
potential to form lasting social bonds; lastly, her foreignness further alienates her from the
Corinthians especially, who, in Seneca’s tragedy, universally reject her presence among
them. Seneca leaves Medea isolated from society and bereft of a socially–conferred identity.
As we have seen, Medea manages over the course of the tragedy to create, using her past, an
identity that might stand robust against a husband and a society slow (or refusing) to accept
it. But how successful is Medea in this project? That is, how well, finally, does she manage
to maintain her chosen identity, and can she maintain it in her social vacuum?
Her final monologue, if we can view it as some sort of culmination of Medea’s
experience throughout the tragedy, reveals the unsustainability of Medea’s goal to have a
stable self without the aid of social recognition of that self. We see, in Medea’s final
moments of decision-making, that she is far from stable in the realization of her
convictions and still reliant on social recognition for the verification of her selfhood.
Certainly, one of the hallmarks of Medea’s final monologue is the degree to which
her resolve seems to waver and the degree to which her behavior hesitates to conform to
her stated goals.
49
I would like to focus precisely on the disparity between intention and
action (manifested, in part, as a disagreement between mind and body) and argue that the
final monologue shows the failure of Medea’s attempt to become a character who possesses
201
49
As a smattering of the available interpretations, see: Star (2006) who, in my opinion, has the best line-by-
line rundown of the monologue; Gill (1987); Bartsch (2006). Several critics use select bits of the final
monologue to support various arguments about the whole tragedy (a prime example being “Medea nunc
sum” [910]), while failing to deal with other, often contradictory, elements (e.g., the fact that Medea’s thoughts
still seem wildly unstable even after her assertion at 910, though Star explores this well).
uniform purpose, who commits crimes without guilt or hesitation, and who divorces
herself from the norms and expectations of her social environment.
50
While Medea occasionally addresses parts of herself earlier in the tragedy (e.g., her
animus at 41), in the final monologue there is a high concentration of questions addressed to
parts of herself which highlight her hesitation.
51
quid, anime, cessas? sequere felicem impetum. (Med. 895)
Why, mind, do you hesitate? Follow the successful attack.
She immediately follows her hesitation here with a direct command, urging herself on in
her task. But something has been lost between the first line of the final monologue, “egone
ut recedam?” (893: “Should I withdraw?”), and her first moment of hesitation: she begins
with a strong first-person embodiment, and loses that unification when she moves to a
second-person address of her animus, treating it as if it were a part, or all, of her ability to
perform action. When she addresses herself in these instances, even in direct command,
she is not fully engaged in embodied action; she is in a state of indecision or hesitation.
There is no singular “I,” but the thing which she addresses –
her animus:
quid, anime, titubas? Why, mind, do you falter? (Med. 937)
nunc hoc age, anime: non in occulto tibi est
perdenda virtus. (Med. 976-977)
202
50
For Medea’s conflict with her body at 926ff., see chs. I and II.
51
Medea questions herself, or parts of herself, at 895, 896, 916, 929, 932, 937-939, 958-964, and 988-990,
some of which are cited below. These questions mostly show hesitation, and are different from the series of
questions she puts to Jason (Med. 451ff.) when she asks where he sends her, or the questions put to herself in
Acts I and II, where she is deciding on a plan of revenge.
Now do it, mind: virtue must not be wasted by you in secret.
quid nunc moraris, anime? quid dubitas? (Med. 988)
Why now do you delay, mind? Why do you hesitate?
her ira:
quo te igitur, ira, mittis, aut quae perfido
intendis hosti tela? (Med. 916-917)
Where therefore, anger, do you send yourself, or what weapons do you hurl against
a faithless enemy?
ira, qua ducis, sequor. (Med. 953)
Anger, where you lead, I follow.
demens furor:
melius, a, demens furor! (Med. 930)
Better, ah!, insane madness!
her dolor:
quaere materiam, dolor. (Med. 914)
Seek material, grief.
cede pietate, dolor. (Med. 944)
Yield to piety, grief.
and her frater:
frater est, poenas petit. (Med. 964)
It is my brother, he demands a penalty.
203
mihi me relinque et utere hac, frater, manu
quae strinxit ensem. (Med. 969-970)
Leave me to myself and use this hand, brother, which drew the sword.
52

In addressing parts of herself, Medea differentiates the decision-making/action-performing
element and whoever is speaking – presumably another part of Medea’s decisive apparatus.
Leaving her indecision aside for the moment, Medea’s self-exhortation at the
beginning of her final monologue closely resembles the speech which opened the tragedy:
quaere poenarum genus
haut usitatum iamque sic temet para:
fas omne cedat, abeat expulsus pudor….
incumbe in iras teque languentem excita… (Med. 898-900; 902)
Seek a mode of punishment not at all customary and now prepare yourself thus: let
everything acceptable fall away, let shame fall away, driven out …. turn your
attention toward anger and rouse yourself languishing….
Compare her first monologue:
per viscera ipsa quaere supplicio viam
si vivis, anime, si quid antiqui tibi
remanet vigoris; pelle femineos metus…
accingere ira teque in exitium para
furore toto. (Med. 40-42; 51-52)
Through the viscera themselves seek a way for punishment, if you live, spirit, if
something of your old strength remains; drive out womanly fear… gird yourself with
anger and prepare yourself for destruction with total rage.
204
52
Most critics consider the appearance of Absyrtus’ ghost, as well as the Furies, to be Medea’s delusion (see,
e.g., Star 2006: 237, where he calls her experience “hallucinatory madness”). For my purposes, if it is meant
to be a delusion, Medea fabricates it and imbues it with agency over her own body’s actions. Interestingly,
Medea never states that she sees either the Furies or her brother (contrast the Troades, where both Talthybius
and Andromache profess to see the ghosts of Achilles and Hector, at Tro. 170 and 685, respectively).
Notice the verbal similarities: “quaere” (40 and 898) is in same metrical position; “femineos
metus” and “pudor,” both (by definition) female characteristics,
53
are urged by Medea to be
put off (“pelle” and “expulsus,” which are related verbs); lines 51 and 899 contain “te...para”
and “temet para;” and 51 and 902 contain the expressions “accingere ira” and “incumbe in
iras:” these have same number of syllables (and sound more similar than they look because
of elision), both start their respective lines, and “accingere” and “incumbe” both have the
hard “c” followed by a liquid/plosive combination. The start of Medea’s final monologue,
then, is a clear repetition of her first attempt to create a cohesive and purposed self, as if
she has progressed not at all in this endeavor.
Soon after the above passage, Medea makes the famous statement “now I am
Medea” (910). As I have stated above, most critics tend to view this moment as evidence
that Medea has come into her full character. Her statement, however (as Star rightly
observes)
54
does not end her indecisiveness. Whatever resolve her memories have given her
for the moment seems to fade when Medea is faced with the actuality of killing the first
child:
cor pepulit horror, membra torpescunt gelu
pectusque tremuit. ira discessit loco
materque tota coniuge expulsa redit.
egone ut meorum liberum ac prolis meae
fundam cruorem? melius, a, demens furor! (Med. 926-930)
205
53
For a discussion of Medea and pudor, see ch. I.
54
Star (2006): 237: “It is not enough simply to declare ‘now I am Medea.’ In fact, as we have seen, it remains
unclear even to Medea what exactly it means to ‘be herself.’ She must continually work to achieve
psychological constantia, a unity of her psychology, her desires, and her actions.”
Horror has struck my heart, my limbs grow stiff with cold, and my heart trembles.
Anger has left the place, and the mother returns, the whole wife having been
expelled. Shall I pour out the blood of my children and my progeny? Better, ah!,
insane madness!
The “egone ut” at 929 emphasizes Medea’s incredulity at the impending action; compare the
similar constructions at 398 and 893. Regardless of the reason for her wavering resolve (for
my analysis, see chs. I and II), it is clear that Medea does not “finish” her development at
line 910.
Due to the general chiastic structure of the tragedy, critics like to see line 910 as a
response to Medea’s earlier statement to her Nurse at 171: “Medea – fiam” (“Medea – I shall
become”).
55
But even this statement is suspect in the text, both because of the formulaic
quality of the exchange with the Nurse (i.e., because the exchange is formulaic, one could
justifiably be suspicious that Medea is again merely posturing – cf. her exchange with
Creon and see ch. I for discussion), and because of textual disagreement (manuscript
branch A reads “fugiam”) – for which Costa, Zwierlein, and Hine seem to justify the E
reading “fiam” because of the later “Medea nunc sum.” Using the chiastic structure as a
justification for Medea’s finished character development at 910 then seems tenuous.
Examining the events which occur after 910 further supports the idea that Medea’s
attempt at transformation ultimately fails. When Medea kills her first child, she separates
herself from the act, and she does not claim it as her own doing. Rather, she attributes
agency to the Furies (Megaera, Med. 963) and her brother, whom she claims to be present
with her and in control of her body:
206
55
See, e.g., Star (2006): 236.
discedere a me, frater, ultrices deas
manesque ad imos ire securas iube:
mihi me relinque et utere hac, frater, manu
quae strinxit ensem – victima manes tuos
placamus ista. (Med. 967-971)
Order them to depart from me, brother, and order the avenging goddesses and
shades without care to go back to the depths: leave me to myself and use, brother,
this hand which has unsheathed the sword – we placate your shades with such a
victim.
She invites her brother to take control over the death of her first son, making him the doer
of the action. When she speaks to Jason (1009-1010), Medea similarly neglects to say that
she, in the first person, killed their son – she externalizes her hand
56
and states that it was
the thing that demanded satiety:
si posset una caede satiari manus,
nullam petisset. (Med. 1009-10)
If the hand were able to be sated with one death, it would have sought none.
What she then says,
in matre si quod pignus etiamnunc latet,
scrutabor ense viscera et ferro extraham (Med. 1012-13)
if in the mother some pledge/child hides even now, I shall investigate my innards
thoroughly with a sword and drag it out with iron,
she does claim as her own, using the first person future. But is this progress? This looks
exactly like what she has said at the beginning of the tragedy: “non ibo in hostes? manibus
excutiam faces/ caeloque lucem” (Med. 27-28: “Shall I not go against my enemies? I shall shake
207
56
cf. Hercules at HF 1192ff., who also separates himself from his hands and blames them for the killing of his
family, and Medea in Heroides 12.113-115 (discussed in ch. I).
out from their hands the torches and the light from the sky”), “alto cinere cumulabo
domum” (Med. 147: “I shall overload the house with deep ash”), “sternam et evertam
omnia” (Med. 414: “I shall overthrow and destroy everything”), and “multum patebit. faciet hic
faciet dies/ quod nullus umquam taceat – invadam deos/ et cuncta quatiam” (Med. 423-425:
“much will be available. It will do, this day will do the type of thing about which no one
day will ever be silent – I shall attack/usurp the gods and shake up everything”). Medea has
consistently used the first person future indicative to express her intent to destroy things,
and in the final monologue her mode of expression is no different. When crimes are
actually committed, however, she cannot admit them as her own doing. She is good at
making future plans with herself as agent, but apparently bad at performing tasks in the
present without distancing herself from their actuality.
The death of the second child is expressed in a way similar to how we have seen
Medea describe her previous crimes, excluding herself (or anyone) from the agent position.
After she kills the second child, she states merely:
bene est, peractum est. (Med. 1019)
It is good, it is finished.
Compare the description of her past deeds at Med. 130-134 (see above, p. 190), where there
is a similar passive construction by which Medea aims to divorce herself from
responsibility.
57
Medea therefore never manages to perform a unified, embodied action in
208
57
After the fact, Medea obliquely admits to killing the child: “plura non habui, dolor,/ quae tibi litarem” (“I did
not know of anything more, grief, which I might sacrifice to you,” Med. 1019-1020). She still neglects to own
the deed as she commits it – she only does so afterwards (as we have seen earlier in the play) and, here, only
in periphrasis.
the present; acts in the past are alternately agent-less (see above) or claimed by Medea as
hers, and acts in the future are very strongly in her possession, but Medea never owns her
crimes as they occur in the present.
Finally, we see that another aim of Medea’s desired ‘transformation’ – to be secure
in a selfhood without receiving social acknowledgement of that selfhood – also fails in the
final monologue. Ultimately, Medea is still reliant on social recognition to achieve her
desired self. In other words, we find that her desired self cannot adequately exist without
an audience. One example of this is that her well-known statement about her restored
virginity and kingdom occurs before she is technically finished with her crimes: one child is
still alive, and she has stated earlier (957) that two needed to die: “fratri patrique quod sat est,
peperi duos” (“what is enough for brother and father, I bore two”):
iam iam recepi sceptra germanum patrem,
spoliumque Colchi pecudis auratae tenent;
rediere regna, rapta virginitas redit. (Med. 982-984)
Now, now I have regained the scepter, my brother, my father, and the Colchians
possess the spoil of the golden beast; the kingdom has returned, stolen virginity has
returned.
This statement occurs, in fact, directly after Jason calls for the townspeople to storm the
house; it is likely that Medea heard him addressing the Corinthians who have accompanied
209
him.
58
I would suggest that Medea is also responding to the potential acquisition of an
audience, and not solely to the death of her first child.
59
Her primary goal is that she be
recognized as her desired self by Jason and the Corinthians; this is precisely what solidifies
and confirms her selfhood. She admits as much soon thereafter, when she contemplates
how she should kill the second child:
derat hoc unum mihi,
spectator iste. nil adhuc facti reor:
quidquid sine isto fecimus sceleris perit. (Med. 992-994)
This one thing is lacking for me, that observer. I think nothing of the deed up to
this point: whatever we made of crime without that (observer) has perished.
The fact that Medea requires a spectator to validate her actions means that she is not in a
position to validate her own actions. It is not enough that she knows who she is and what
she has done; she needs the community (and especially Jason) to know it as well, to
“recognize” who she is and reflect that selfhood back to her.
Medea begins the tragedy with the anxiety that the end of her marriage with Jason
foretells that she herself will be forgotten. She works to preserve her own past, building a
model of a future persona based on a set of actions she performed before she arrived in
Corinth: the betrayal of her father, the murder of her brother, and the murder of Pelias.
210
58
It is likely that Medea first sees Jason at 992: “et ecce crescit” (“and behold! [my pleasure] grows”), but it is
probable that she hears him when he speaks (presumably shouts, even) to the Corinthians at 978-981 (while
Medea is moving up to the roof). It is obvious that her move to the roof is motivated by the sound of the
townspeople (Med. 971-2 and 976-7). If I were blocking the scene, Medea would be responding to Jason’s line
from 982-986, she would notice the still living child at 987, hesitate to kill it at 988, pace across the roof from
“paenitet facti” (989), decide again to kill the child at “voluptas magna” (991) and see Jason over the edge of the
roof at 992. She then realizes that she is already in a position where she can have everyone see the death of
the second child.
59
As many critics have presumed: see, e.g., Nussbaum (1996): 456-457 (though I do agree with her that the
returned virginity in particular is a response to the death of the child: see ch. I), Schiesaro (2003).
Moreover, she relies on the verbal repetition of these actions to give her a sense of center
and purpose. Medea creates this ideal self also as a response to her lack of social
acknowledgement: when Jason, Creon, and the Corinthians all wish her silenced and
exiled, Medea seeks to assert a persona without any outside support. In addition to
preserving her memory, she strives from the beginning of the tragedy to secure for herself a
robust and embodied self. For all her self-exhortation and future predictions, however,
Medea ultimately fails to take ownership of her actions in the present and to maintain self-
assertion without the legitimating audience of Jason and the Corinthians. Her actions
“happen” or are done “to her,” but they are not done “by her,” and she is not satisfied with
the solo performance of her deeds; rather, she counts them as worthless until they (and
she) can be observed by others.
V. Epilogue
Medea’s focus on spectacle – both the spectacle of her child’s death and the
spectacle of her destruction of Corinth – highlights her metatheatric role. Like the
Messenger in Seneca’s Troades, Medea has a sense of theatric space (moving to the roof),
timing, eloquence, and irony (“coniugem agnoscis tuam?” 1021). She is aware of the distance
between her ‘real’ self and the self she performs for others. The theatrical genre is especially
apropos for contemplating the potential disjunction between interior thought and external
behavior. The actor is clearly not the character (covered by mask and costume), and the
conceit (or performance) of the character’s speech and actions is always at the forefront of
211
our attention. Throughout the entire play, moreover, Medea has feigned personalities to
manipulate her audience and, even when alone, exhorted herself with a performance of the
character she wants herself to be. She aims not to “will” her ideal self into reality, but to
“perform” it into reality. What comes to the fore, then, is the difficulty with which the
physical body adopts mimetic desire and the difficulty with which Medea’s psyche, in the
moment, can be her ideal. While inevitably Medea commits all the actions she sets out to
do, in accordance with what she wants herself to perform, there is hesitation and doubt at
the moment of her greatest test: specifically, if she will be able to kill her children. I
propose that Medea’s insistent adoption of a set of practices which she wants to be her self
inevitably fails in light of such a great crime as child-murder. The causes for this failure are
up for discussion: is it because of the physical body’s innate bond with the children? Is it
ultimately a failure of the will not to embody the punishment as it happens? To look at the
bigger picture, if Medea’s project is a practice-based therapy of self-transformation, we
might conjecture that Seneca argues that there are pieces of ‘innate’ material inside the self
which cannot be altered through practice and habituation. Indeed, we might conjecture
that Seneca is pointing out precisely the limitations of performance-as-self.
212
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Abstract (if available)

Abstract The dissertation addresses four aspects of Seneca's Medea character: her gender performance, her divinity, her foreignness, and her relationship to the past. From an analysis of these four facets of her identity, the dissertation argues that Seneca's Medea character is forced to define her identity in isolation, without the sounding board of social interaction. Through a close reading of the final monologue, the dissertation concludes that Medea fails in her attempt to construct a robust self which can take ownership of its actions in the present and maintain itself without social recognition. The epilogue postulates that Medea's character ultimately displays the limitations both of identity in isolation and of a performance-based self.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Walsh, Lisl (author)

Core Title Seneca's Medea and the tragic self

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Classics

Publication Date 04/08/2011

Defense Date 02/16/2011

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Body,Ethnicity,gender,Medea,memory,OAI-PMH Harvest,self,Seneca,tragedy

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Boyle, Anthony (committee chair), Habinek, Thomas N. (committee member), Schor, Hilary (committee member)

Creator Email lisl.walsh@gmail.com,lislwals@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m3725

Unique identifier UC1168634

Identifier etd-Walsh-4372 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-450083 (legacy record id),usctheses-m3725 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Walsh-4372.pdf

Dmrecord 450083

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Walsh, Lisl

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu