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Medea (Masters of Latin Literature)

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This English translation is in superb verse. It gives to the poetical style of the play a power prose would have hidden. It is pure poetry which explains why there is so little action: the five acts exclusively center on Medea's discourse.

In the first act she shares the stage with no one at all. She introduces the situation, the past, the action and the future. She is like a Pythian oracle from Delphi ready to predict what fate has kept in store for us. In the second act she is seconded by the nurse and confronts Creon. She asks and obtains a delay for her banishment. In the third act still seconded by the nurse she confronts Jason who tries to argue that his marriage to Creusa was for him the only way to save his family, his children and even Medea from sure execution. He had no choice. He followed a purely political line full of compassion for his wife and children. In the fourth act she shares the stage with the nurse who gives a long presentation of Medea's magic powers and then Medea presents a long explanation of what she is doing, a long invocation of all gods and monsters in this world. Here Seneca shows how well he knows all these poisons and poisonous beings. He is trying to terrify the audience with these horrible beings and poisons. Most of them refer to places beyond the Roman Empire's borders. In the fifth act Medea confronts Jason in her final killing of the children when Jason comes to put her to death with Corinthians. The escape in the sky carried by dragons is only rapidly evoked.

Seneca thus purifies the drama of all acts, events and developments that would hide the pure form of it. He thus gets rid of all secondary characters and the children at the end are only passive props. This enables Seneca to use the Chorus in a new and more important role. The Chorus is not speaking and exchanging any discourse with any character. The Chorus only comments upon what is happening on the stage. It widens our vision with general reflections on various subjects like the conquest of oceans and the tragic consequences of it. The Chorus is only speaking to us, an important change from the Greeks. They don't get involved in the action.

Seneca reduces the drama to a simple choice: the vengeful objective of Medea on one side and the opportunistic political calculation of Jason on the other side, with in-between Creon's forceful authoritarian decision. In fact the play is reduced to that triad: Medea-Creon-Jason, in order of appearance on stage. Seneca then locks up the whole drama in a nutshell. That enables him to reduce maternal love to a vague hesitation in the fifth act, when she kills one son, hesitates and then kills the second when Jason arrives to kill her and appeals to her pity: "Spare your son. [...] So Kill me, and make me your sacrifice!" which is absurd in his logic since the Corinthians are here to kill Medea and such an act would give them one more reason to kill her and the second son.

The play is heavily dedicated to the triple goddess, Hecate, the "governor of heaven, hell and earth" though her triple identity is not entirely revealed in this English translation. The Romans have kept the reference to the Moon and the night as a third autonomous identity of Hecate. She is Trivia under another name, the three-way path. She is also referred to as Diana, but Selene is missing, though of course the invocation of the Moon, luna in Latin, is a direct evocation of Senele. I will regret the reducing of Ophiuchus to Hercules. Ophiuchus is the constellation that strangles the serpent. Her call is to the skies and not to a famous Argonaut. But that is a detail, though the serpent itself is thus divided into three parts, the head, the tail and Ophiucus in the middle strangling it, holding it.

The ternary drama of Medea is implemented in all possible ways: her three men (two sons and a husband), her three presents (a robe, a necklace and a headdress), her invocation of the triple goddess Hecate, and many other elements like the Chimaera. She has a triple vengeful objective: Creon, his daughter and Jason, but she will reach her aim by killing four people and this number is the number of her fulfillment, her satisfaction, her equilibrium. By killing these four, she gets her triple vengeance and she recaptures her brother and father who are avenged by the killing of her two sons, then her fatherland and virginity, four again. Killing her two sons makes her what she was before being raped as she says by Jason.

This balancing quaternary structure may explain why the Chorus only speaks four times. A fifth final one would be unbalancing, perverse in a way and it would impair the effect of the fourth crime, the killing of the second son and the non-debatable closing conclusion of Jason: "Wherever you may go, you'll prove the nonexistence of all gods" which is a lot more encompassing than the French version "Porte témoignage que, là où tu passes, il n'y a point de dieux." (Testify [by your sole presence] that anywhere you go, there are no gods whatsoever.), which seems to imply that she negates the existence of gods where she is, hence that her criminal spirit is not coming from the gods themselves, from fate imposed by the gods but from a human perversity that she embodies and symbolizes.

In other words Seneca has moved from a deep belief that everything happening in this world is the result of decisions from the gods, even the worst crimes imaginable, to a belief that some of these crimes are the result of human derangement.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

I first heard of Medea in our Latin II class when we covered Greek/Roman mythology. I was really intrigued by her then. This year, in Latin IV we translated a piece of Medea by the Roman author Seneca. I really enjoyed it. I bought Medea at the bookstore and loved it. There is a lot more psychological things going on than you get from the normal myth.

I reccomend this to anyone who likes classical mythology.