Medea (56 page)

'This is threadbare, my love,' he commented. 'Haven't you a better mantle?'

'There's one in the cupboard, I think, in the bundle we brought from Athens,' I answered from the depths of the towel with which I was drying my face and arms. I wrung out my hair on the hearth and rubbed it briskly. I was starting to get warm. A pot of dried-meat stew was simmering on the kitchen fire and the house smelled of cooking and slightly damp dogs, a very pleasant combination.

I heard Nauplios drop something which smashed and I went into the bed-chamber with the broom, ready to sweep up the shards.

He was standing as if amazed, staring at something in his hands. I came up to him, walking carefully through a mess of white fragments, and looked over his elbow.

'Herakles gave it to me, on the morning we ran away together,' Nauplios whispered, his brown eyes shining with tears.

'He told me, "when it opens, your lives will bloom". It has been forgotten in this cupboard all this time, more than a year without water or light. But it came true,' said my dear lord, and drew me close to his side.

In his brown hand, impossible, scarlet and scented, a rose was blooming.

No, we don't.

We know that Euripides the playwright came up with the definitive legend in a play so brilliant and effective that all subsequent writers have based their versions on his; from the savage play by the Roman, Seneca, (where Medea throws a blood-covered child at Jason), to the late-nineteenth-century Medea played by Sarah Bernhardt, where she sings lullabies to the babies while she cuts their throats.

Picture the scene. I am sitting in
Le Cafe Francais
having lunch with the most urbane and learned, retired Reader of Classics at Melbourne University, Dennis Pryor. I am nervous. I have been researching for weeks and I have come to an unbelievable conclusion.

I venture, 'Er, Dennis…I don't think Medea killed her children,' and he does not even put down his wine glass. 'Yes, m'dear?' he asks, waiting for the punch line.

This is so well known amongst classicists that I couldn't even make Dennis Pryor put down his wine glass (which he always does when I float some outrageous theory); and yet
everyone
knows Medea killed her children.

How do we know?

The same way we know that Richard III murdered his nephews. We know it because the best playwright of the age chose to tell us. Shakespeare got his plot from Holinshed, and followed the orthodox Tudor line about the House of York, which was almost certainly innocent of those murders. Euripides took his from Eumoleus and improved it, and according to various sources, was paid five talents to make the sorceress Medea into a child murderer.

Every commentator knew this. Professor Kerenyi of blessed memory knew it. Robert Graves knew it. Dennis Pryor knows it. And yet we still know Medea as the prototype 'bad mother'.

This seems to have been the story, according to such diverse authorities as the travel writer Pausanius, Apollodorus, Kreophylas, Parmeniskos and an anonymous but learned commentator on Pindar.

Medea, grand-daughter of Helios (the Sun) held Corinth in her own right. Jason was her consort. He decided to marry Glauke and Medea arranged her murder. Recklessly, she also managed to start a fire which killed Creon, king of Corinth and father of Sisyphos, and possibly a number of other people - but not Jason, regrettably. Medea fled with her children to the temple of Hera on the hill, and either the kin of Creon or the Corinthian women flocked to the temple and stoned her children to death - in the temple.

They either would not or could not touch Medea, and she left Corinth and went to stay with Herakles, thence to Delphi and after that to various other places before she went home to Colchis to put her father back on the throne.

This sacrilegious act - the murder of children in the temple of the Mother herself - brought down the wrath of the gods on Corinth; and there was a plague, which the Corinthians dealt with by sending fourteen of their children every year to that same temple to live in mourning for the crime of the Corinthians in murdering Medea's children. The dead children were honoured with divine rites and were called the
myxobarbaroi
- the half-barbarians.

The other group of stories available to Euripides, principally from Eumoleus, say that while carrying out some ritual intended to make them immortal, Medea unintentionally killed her children. Jason refused to forgive her for this.

Either way, none of the ancient writers say that Medea deliberately killed her children.

When the playwright Euripides accepted the Corinthian commission - and playwrights have to live - to write about Medea, they paid him to relieve them of blood guilt by rewriting the story. And it is recorded that Euripides was much censured for changing history. So Medea the sorceress and poisoner was transformed into Medea the child murderess. There is no evidence that she was a bad mother, and the fact that seven of the children she bore in the twelve years she was married to Jason were alive to be murdered indidcates, in that time of high child mortality, that she (or someone) was devoted to their care.

The tale of Philomela, Procne and Tereus - much loved by the Middle Ages - contains the prototype child murderess (and Euripides would have known it). Procne's sister Philomela was carried off, imprisoned and raped by Tereus, Procne's husband. He cut out Philomela's tongue so that she could not tell her sister about this outrage. She wove a tapestry which revealed the story to Procne, who freed her sister by redirecting the Bacchic rout, then Philomela and Procne killed his son, serving him up to his father at dinner. (Shakespeare's
Titus Andronicus
, which adds the gratuitous agony of having Philomela's hands cut off as well, fails in a plot point - how do you weave without hands?) And if this sounds familiar it is also told of the exceptionally doomed House of Atreus, where it happens twice.

Tereus discovered what he was eating, chased the two women, and all three of them were turned into birds. Procne, not her sister Philomela in the earliest stories, becomes the nightingale which mourns her lost child forever.

This story has such strong mythical and magical overtones that it is clearly very old. Procne and Philomela were ensuring that Tereus committed the sin of the Titan Cronos (Saturn) - of eating his own children. It may have been a left-over from the religion which dominated Hellas before the gods came and defeated the Titans. Ritual cannibalism is only mentioned in the most doomed of circumstances; though the playwrights seem to attribute it readily to barbarian cultures.

I have found no modern parallel to the story of Procne. Though I have found several cases where a woman kills a man to avenge or protect another woman who is also in a sexual relationship with him, I have not found one where she kills a child.

The other story available to Euripedes, and actually mentioned in his play, is the story of Ino who, cursed by Hera to wander forever, leapt from a cliff with her children in her arms. Ino follows the pattern of child-murderesses in the modern world. She kills the child because she will not leave it behind - because no one will love it like she does, because she is worried about what will happen to the child without her.

Medea's 'murder' of her children so that Jason will not have them has echoes in the modern world too, but it is almost invariablly a non-custodial father who kills his children so that his wife shall not have them.

Euripides' Medea exhibits male characteristics and motivations - which may be why she is so unforgettable - so powerful, as a symbol, that even the all-male Achaean audience listening to that play who
knew
that Medea didn't kill her children, believed it instantly, as we do. Even the Corinthians who certainly
knew
that their children were sent every year to the temple of Hera in expiation for their crime believed it. One could almost wish that Euripides hadn't been such a great playwright.

In 1405 the writer Christine de Pisan, a most learned woman, must have read these different authors and decided to disbelieve everything to Medea's discredit. Medea appears in her
The Book Of The City Of Ladies
as a wise and stainless soul who was very learned in herbal medicine and who has been unfairly traduced. She wrote:

Medea, whom many historical works mention, was no less familiar with science and art than Manto (a diviner mentioned by Virgil). She was the daughter of Aetes, King of Colchis, and of Persia, and was very beautiful, with a noble and upright heart and a pleasant face. In learning, however, she surpassed and exceeded all women; she knew the powers of every herb and all the potions which can be concocted, and she was ignorant of no art that can be known. With her spells she could make the air become cloudy or dark, knew how to move winds from the grottoes and caverns of the earth, and how to provoke storms in the air, as well as how to stop the flow of rivers, confect poisons, create fire to burn effortlessly whatever object she chose, and similar arts. It was thanks to the art of her enchantments that Jason won the Golden Fleece…

Later she concludes the tale of Medea in the companion volume:

For this reason Medea, who would rather have destroyed herself than do anything of this kind [i.e., desert Jason for another lover] turned despondent, nor did her heart ever again feel goodness or joy.

(
The Treasure of the City of Ladies,
Christine de Pisan II 56 I)

The 'fact' that Medea killed her children is so well known that the writer of the introduction to Christine de Pisan's work says:

… It is a trifle peculiar to find [Medea's] story told without a mention of the demented dimension of her despair, the murder of her children, overlooked. Christine actually describes the great prototype of the wronged first wife turning merely 'despondent' after Jason leaves her.
¹

It is quite possible that Christine de Pisan was actually aware of the weight of the evidence in favour of Medea and just didn't mention this slander.

 

The ships of the time, as I have seen for myself, carried at the absolute most about forty men, and their usual complement was twenty-five. However, what with having to include everyone who was sure that his ancestor was on
Argo
and putting together all sources, there was a cast of thousands on one small ship by the time that Apollonius of Rhodes was writing the compilation album,
Argonautica.
Like the fourteenth-century
Geste of Robin Hood
, it's a collection of all available stories and is quite often inconsistent - there just wasn't room on board for all those well-connected people.

So I have left out the sons of gods; for instance, the sons of Boreas, who could fly; which is going to be tricky for a modern reader to swallow. I omitted people who are archetypes or who already had a representative on board, like Orpheus, who has the Orphic bard Philammon, and Mopsus who has his brother seer, Idmon.

I kept Herakles and Hylas, though they leave the voyage fairly early on, because I have always been fascinated with Herakles. Most of the Argonauts were your basic Ancient Greek hoon - one only has to look at how they behaved. I retained Alabande, in whose persona my dear friend, Susan Tonkin, proudly rowed when she and I were Argonauts on ABC radio. I have also retained Atalante the Hunter, the only woman on board.

 

Giving support to the Irish statement that they are actually descended from the Danaans - that is, the Greeks - the only other mention of the cauldron is in Irish and Welsh stories; notably
Kilwych and Olwen
from
the Mabinogion
.

I have found it easier to come to the worship of Hekate, the Dark Mother, through Celtic sources than Greek ones (this may be because I have a Welsh background). See entry on Hekate.

 

After a lot of research and attempts to decide between various Scyths - there are the Royal Scyths, who are nomads, and the ordinary Scyths, who stay in one place, and there are the Scyths whose women were originally Amazons and…

Seconds before I lost what remained of my reason I found that Herodotus clearly states that Colchis was an Egyptian colony. This was a relief to an author who thought she was going to have to re-invent the Scyths, about whom very little is known and not a lot to their credit; though they beat up the Persian army and had a tradition of very tough female rulers indeed. Anyone who doubts this should look up Tomyris and her argument with the king of Persia.

Egyptian colonies were not uncommon; as were colonies of other people in Egypt. The People of the Sea seem to have been Achaeans living on the Nile Delta. But such a colony, isolated on the Black Sea, would tend to become ingrown and traditional, to preserve their autonomy amongst the numberless Scythians. Therefore Medea's Colchis is a lot narrower and more circumscribed than life would have been in Thebes at the same time.

 

The father of Pelias - 'the usurper king' of Iolkos - was the god Poseidon and his mother was Tyro. Aison - Pelias' half-brother and Jason's father - was definitely the offspring of King Kreutheus and Tyro.

This is similar to the argument about the accession of the Persian Xerxes to the throne. He said that when his brother was conceived, their father was only a prince; but when Xerxes was conceived his father was already king, therefore Xerxes should be king. This argument apparently convinced the Persians.

Jason was brought up on Mt Pelion by Cheiron the centaur (which is why he has no tact), and came one-sandalled to demand his kingdom from Pelias. He was one-sandalled because he lost the other helping an old woman (Hera) across a river.
²
He thus fulfilled the prophecy, made to Pelias, that he would be deposed by a one-sandalled man.