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When someone says they are afflicted with something painful, something that burns them, that makes them want to commit suicide and to kill all the other people around them, the listener may not think immediately of love - but nothing seemed to cause Medea more pain. In Euripides' play as well as in Apollonius' story, Medea was constantly in agony, and always because of love or actions that were performed for love's sake. This fact, however, appears to be one of the only similar themes between the two works. The Argonautica is a heroic epic designed to tell a story, and let the reader know about other stories along the way, but Euripides' Medea has a more complicated purpose to which it is difficult to do justice. Rather than merely to entertain or inform, the Medea is a tragic play that tries to explain, or at least sympathize with, why a mother would kill her children - something considered terrible by its audience. Though the two works have the same characters, the reasons for the stories were dramatically different, and this is reflected in the style of the writing and the portrayal of the characters. The Argonautica was not intended to bring its reader to a totally new perspective on the story of Jason and the Argonauts. Rather, it is stylistically reminiscent of Pausanias' works in its attention to other myths. Apollonius' interest in apparently unimportant details reminds the reader that this is not a work designed to draw one deeply into the story, but more like a historical documentation so that it won't be forgotten. One notices a similar phenomenon in the perspective of the narrative, third person omniscient: it is seen through Aietes' eyes, as well as though Jason's and the Argonauts and Medea's. It leaves the reader with what appears to be a very balanced view, but is still colored by Apollonius' reasons for writing it. In the end, a heroic tale has been told, with nothing too deviant from social norms. Euripides' Medea is almost the complete opposite. The play was written with a clear purpose: to bring its audience the well-known horror story told in a new way, to see it as a tragedy with Medea as the perfect Sophoclean tragic hero. Medea was not the only mother in mythology to kill her children, but all the others (Lamia and Agave, for example) were depicted as monsters or insane or both. Medea, on the other hand, is portrayed in the same way as other tragic heroes: driven by fate, against their own happiness, in perfect cognizance of their actions, towards their own tragic ending. Unlike Apollonius' story, the Medea is seen only through Medea's eyes (all the soliloquies are hers), and thus brings the audience into her mind. Seeing the story through Medea's eyes was probably not any easier for the play's first audience than it is today. Trying to understand what would drive a woman to kill her children is as distasteful as it is disturbing, but both the Argonautica and the Medea strive to keep Medea as human and understandable as possible. In the Argonautica, Medea is seen first as a perfectly traditional maiden, that is to say, passive to an extreme. When her power is spoken of, the reader is always quickly reminded that it was bestowed by "the daughter of Perses," keeping Medea from seeming like a threat in her own right. She is, in fact, so unable to handle the world around her that she repeatedly considers suicide as the best option, and it is only that "Hera caused her to change her mind" that kept her alive. Her decisions to help Jason are not made out of impetuous love, but out of the Gods meddling - the love, too, is the fault of the Gods, and even that cannot get her to become active. It is not until she has completed her marriage ceremony and left her father's house that she begins to come into her own. By the time the heroes face Talos she has "the grim power of the mistress of drugs," no longer ascribed to Hekate. The story continues (after skipping a little) in Euripides' play, where Medea takes on the role of the woman scorned. Here, like a tragic hero, she is not worried about survival, but totally motivated by vengeance. As in the Argonautica, love is entirely a thing of pain, although now more because of love's consequences than of the actual emotion. But to completely understand how Medea has become the woman she is in the Medea, it is helpful to understand the man she gave her life away for. Jason is the hero of the Argonautica; he is human, and frequently in need of assistance, but no more than one of his companions would have received from his birth. What he does have is fair-mindedness and leadership abilities, and he listens well to the advice given him and makes the right decisions at the right times. He also has the Gods, for purposes of their own, on his side. But this is not the case in the Medea. The Gods have no place here, and have abandoned them to the consequences that their actions have determined. Here, Jason is no longer a young man looking to fulfill a heroic journey, but a relatively stupid husband who, far from being the fair adventurer whose understanding of the desires of those around him gave him his success, does not begin to understand what his wife thinks or feels and no apparent desire to try. The names of the characters remain the same, but the hero and perspective all change in accordance with the story and its purpose. The one, a hero's adventure full of Gods and monsters, the other, a disturbing tragedy that brings you to a new understanding of a mother's infanticide.
Read some more of Ailia's essays
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Contact me at ailiathena@yahoo.com Written May 9, 2003 at Oberlin College Last Updated May 18, 2002
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