Week 15

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Euripides and MedeaThe Golden Fleece

• Week 15

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EURIPIDES

• 480-406 B.C.

Alice Y. Chang
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Euripides

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Alice Y. Chang
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The Works of Euripides

• Hecuba    Written 424 B.C.E  Helen    Written
  412 B.C.E    Translated by E. P. Coleridge The
  Heracleidae    Written ca. 429 B.C.E
     Translated by E. P. Coleridge

• Alcestis    Written 438 B.C.E   Andromache
     Written 428-24 B.C.E  The Bacchantes
     Written 410 B.C.E

Alice Y. Chang
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Works of Euripides

• Rhesus    Written 450 B.C.E The Suppliants
     Written 422 B.C.E    Translated by E. P.
  Coleridge The Trojan Women    Written 415
  B.C.E

• Iphigenia At Aulis    Written 410 B.C.E
  Iphigenia in Tauris    Written 414-412 B.C.E
     Translated by Robert Potter Medea
     Written 431 B.C.E    Translated by E. P.
  Coleridge

Alice Y. Chang
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Medea

• an ancient Greek tragedy written by Euripides,
  based upon the myth of Jason and Medea and first
  produced in 431 BC.
• The plot centers on the barbarian protagonist as
  she finds her position in the Greek world
  threatened, and the revenge she takes against her
  husband Jason who has betrayed her for another
  woman.

Alice Y. Chang
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The Golden Fleece
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sources

• This is the title of a long poem, very popular in
  classical days, by the third-century poet
  Apollonius of Rhodes.
• He tells the whole story of the Quest except the
  part about Jason and Pelias which I have taken
  from Pindar.
• It is the subject of one of his most famous odes,
  written in the first half of the fifth century.
• Apollonius ends his poem with the return of the
  heroes to Greece. I have added the account of
  what Jason and Medea did there, taking it from
  the fifth-century tragic poet Euripides, who made
  it the subject of one of his best plays.

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Journey by water

• The first hero in Europe who undertook a great
  journey was the leader of the Quest of the Golden
  Fleece.
• He was supposed to have lived a generation
  earlier than the most famous Greek traveler, the
  hero of the Odyssey. It was of course a journey
  by water.
• Ships did not sail by night, and any place where
  sailors put in might harbor a monster or a
  magician who could work more deadly harm than
  storm and shipwreck.
• High courage was necessary to travel, especially
  outside of Greece.

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the ship Argo

• No story proved this fact better than the account
  of what the heroes suffered who sailed in the
  ship Argo to find the Golden Fleece.
• It may be doubted, indeed, if there ever was a
  voyage on which sailors had to face so many and
  such varied dangers.
• However, they were all heroes of renown, some of
  them the greatest in Greece, and they were quite
  equal to their adventures.

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The Argonautic expedition
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Jason and Argonauts

• the Golden Fleece is the fleece of the
  gold-haired winged ram.
• It figures in the tale of Jason and his band of
  Argonauts, who set out on a quest for the fleece
  in order to place Jason rightfully on the throne
  of Iolcus in Thessaly.

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Lemnos

• The isle of Lemnos is situated off the Western
  coast of Asia Minor (modern day Turkey).
• The island was inhabited by a race of women who
  had killed their husbands. The women had
  neglected their worship of Aphrodite, and as a
  punishment the goddess made the women so foul in
  stench that their husbands couldn't bear to be
  near them.

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King Phineus the Harpies, Athenian red-figure
hydria C5th B.C., The J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu
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The Amazons
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The Amazons

• a nation of all-female warriors in Classical and
  Greek mythology
• Herodotus placed them in a region bordering
  Scythia in Sarmatia (modern territory of
  Ukraine).
• Other historiographers place them in Asia Minor
  or Libya or India.

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Mounted Amazon in Scythian costume
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Colchis

• ancient region at the eastern end of the Black
  Sea south of the Caucasus, in the western part of
  modern Georgia
• In Greek mythology Colchis was the home of Medea
  and the destination of the Argonauts, a land of
  fabulous wealth and the domain of sorcery.

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Medea avenges herself on Jason by slaying her own
children upon the altar, and destroying Kreon and
Glauke by fire in the palace (not shown).
Triptolemos arrives on the scene with a flying,
serpent-drawn chariot to assist Medea in her
escape.
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Medea
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Medea

• the daughter of King Aeëtes of Colchis, niece of
  Circe, granddaughter of the sun god Helios, and
  later wife to the hero Jason, with whom she had
  two children Mermeros and Pheres.
• In Euripides's play Medea, Jason leaves Medea
  when Creon, king of Corinth, offers him his
  daughter, Creusa or Glauce. The play tells of how
  Medea gets her revenge on her husband for this
  betrayal.

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Meda--an enchantress

• Medea figures in the myth of Jason and the
  Argonauts
• Medea is known in most stories as an enchantress
  and is often depicted as being a priestess of the
  goddess Hecate or a witch.
• The myth of Jason and Medea is very old,
  originally written around the time Hesiod wrote
  the Theogony.

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Medea kills her son, Campanian red-figure
amphora, ca. 330 BC, Louvre (K 300)
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Jason the Dragon
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Chimaera

• noun, plural -ras. 1.(often initial capital
  letter ) a mythological, fire-breathing monster,
  commonly represented with a lion's head, a goat's
  body, and a serpent's tail.
• 2.any similarly grotesque monster having
  disparate parts, esp. as depicted in decorative
  art.3.a horrible or unreal creature of the
  imagination a vain or idle fancy He is far
  different from the chimera your fears have made
  of him.
• 4.Genetics. an organism composed of two or more
  genetically distinct tissues, as an organism that
  is partly male and partly female, or an
  artificially produced individual having tissues
  of several species.

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Centaur

• centaurs were notorious for being overly
  indulgent drinkers and carousers, given to
  violence when intoxicated, and generally
  uncultured delinquents, each Centaur was also
  wild and lusty.

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A Great Teacher in Greek Mythology

• Chiron

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Chirona great teacher!

• In Greek mythology, Chiron or Cheiron or Kheiron
  ("hand") was held as the superlative centaur
  among his brethren.
• Chiron, by contrast, was intelligent, civilized
  and kind.
• He was known for his knowledge and skill with
  medicine.

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An Excellent teacher

• A great healer, astrologer, and respected oracle,
  Chiron was said to be the last centaur and highly
  revered as a teacher and tutor. Among his pupils
  were many culture heroes Asclepius, Theseus,
  Achilles, Jason, Peleus, Telamon, Heracles,
  Phoenix

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Chiron and Achilles in a fresco from Herculaneum
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Greek Tragedy, Euripides and Medea

• Week 15

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The fifth century BCE and intellectual revolution

• Most of these plays date from the last half of
  the fifth century B.C. they were written in and
  for an Athens that, since the days of Aeschylus,
  had undergone an intellectual revolution.
• It was in a time of critical reevaluation of
  accepted standards and traditions that Sophocles
  produced his masterpiece, Oedipus the King, and
  the problems of the time are reflected in the
  play.

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Mysterious contemporary

• The use of the familiar myth enabled the
  dramatist to draw on all its wealth of
  unformulated meaning, but it did not prevent him
  from striking a contemporary note.
• Oedipus, in Sophocles play, is at one and the
  same time the mysterious figure of the past who
  broke the most fundamental human taboos and a
  typical fifth-century Athenian.
• His character contains all the virtues for which
  the Athenians were famous and the vices for which
  they were notorious.

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Pericles and Oedipus

• The Athenian devotion to the city, which received
  the main emphasis in Pericles praise of Athens,
  is strong in Oedipus his answer to the priest at
  the beginning of the play shows that he is a
  conscientious and patriotic ruler.

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Jason bringing Pelias the Golden Fleece
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Medea

• Euripides Medea, produced in 431 B.C., the year
  that brought the beginning of the Peloponnesian
  War, appeared earlier than Sophocles Oedipus the
  King, but it has a bitterness that is more in
  keeping with the spirit of a later age.

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Prologue of Medea

• NURSE
• Oh how I wish that ship the Argo      had never
  sailed off to the land of Colchis,      past the
  Symplegades, those dark dancing rocks     which
  smash boats sailing through the Hellespont.     
  I wish they'd never chopped the pine trees
  down      in those mountain forests up on
  Pelion,      to make oars for the hands of those
  great men      who set off, on Pelias'
  orders,      to fetch the golden fleece.

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Nurse

• Then my
  mistress,      Medea, never would've sailed
  away       to the towers in the land of
  Iolcus,      her heart passionately in love with
  Jason.      She'd never have convinced those
  women,      Pelias' daughters, to kill their
  father.      She'd not have come to live in
  Corinth here,         with her husband and her
  childrenwell loved      in exile by those whose
  land she'd moved to.      She gave all sorts of
  help to Jason.

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Jason and Medea fled to Corinth.

• When Jason and Medea returned to Iolcus, Pelias
  still refused to give up his throne. Medea
  conspired to have Pelias' own daughters kill him.
  
• She told them she could turn an old ram into a
  young ram by cutting up the old ram and boiling
  it (alternatively, she did this with Aeson,
  Jason's father).
• During the demonstration, a live, young ram
  jumped out of the pot. Excited, the girls cut
  their father into pieces and threw him into a
  pot.
• Having killed Pelias, Jason and Medea fled to
  Corinth.

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??? Medea

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golden coronet, covered in poison

• In Corinth, Jason abandoned Medea for the king's
  daughter, Glauce.
• Medea took her revenge by sending Glauce a dress
  and golden coronet, covered in poison.
• This resulted in the deaths of both the princess
  and the king, Creon, when he went to save her.

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Luigi Cherubini Medea http//www.amazon.com/Luig
i-Cherubini-Medea/dp/B001JFKW8A/refsr_1_6?smusic
ieUTF8qid1293028145sr1-6
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The golden chariot

• According to the tragic poet Euripides, Medea
  continued her revenge, murdering her two children
  by Jason. Afterward, she left Corinth and flew to
  Athens in a golden chariot driven by dragons sent
  by her grandfather Helios, god of the sun.

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Medea (about to murder her children) by Eugène
Ferdinand Victor Delacroix (1862).
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Ironic expression

• If Oedipus is, in one sense, a warning to a
  generation that has embarked on an intellectual
  revolution, Medea is the ironic expression of the
  disillusion that comes after the shipwreck.
• In this play we are conscious for the first time
  of an attitude characteristic of modern
  literature, the artists feeling of separation
  from the audience, the isolation of the poet.

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rejected by his contemporaries

• The common background of audience and poet is
  disappearing, the old certainties are being
  undermined, the city divided.
• Euripides is the first Greek poet to suffer the
  fate of so many of the great modern writers
  rejected by most of his contemporaries (he rarely
  won first prize and was the favorite target for
  the scurrilous humor of the comic poets), he was
  universally admired and revered by the Greeks of
  the centuries that followed his death.

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Private and intellectual life

• It is significant that what little biographical
  information we have for Euripides makes no
  mention of military service or political office
  unlike Aeschylus, who fought in the ranks at
  Marathon, and Sophocles, who took an active part
  in public affairs from youth to advanced old age,
  Euripides seems to have lived a private, an
  intellectual life.

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Questioning the received ideas

• Younger than Sophocles ( though they died in the
  same year), he was more receptive to the critical
  theories and the rhetorical techniques offered by
  the Sophist teachers
• his plays often subject received ideas to
  fundamental questioning, expressed in vivid
  dramatic debate.

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Euripides Medea

• His Medea is typical of his iconoclastic
  approach his choice of subject and central
  characters is in itself a challenge to
  established canons.
• He still dramatizes myth, but the myth he chooses
  is exotic and disturbing, and the protagonist is
  not a man but a woman.

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The citizen rights?

• Medea is both woman and foreignerthat is, in
  terms of the audiences prejudice and practice
  she is a representative of the two free-born
  groups in Athenian society that had almost no
  rights at all (though the male foreign resident
  had more rights than the native woman).

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Anti-social

• The tragic hero is no longer a king, one who is
  highly renowned and prosperous such as Oedipus,
  but a woman who, because she finds no redress for
  her wrongs in society, is driven by her passion
  to violate that societys most sacred laws in a
  rebellion against its typical representative,
  Jason, her husband.

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Earth and Sun

• All through Medea the human beings involved call
  on the gods two especially are singled out for
  attention Earth and Sun.
• It is by these two gods that Medea makes Aegeus
  swear to give her refuge in Athens, the chorus
  invokes them to prevent Medeas violence against
  her sons, and Jason wonders how Medea can look on
  Earth and Sun after she has killed her own
  children.

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The Magic Chariot

• These emphatic appeals clearly raise the question
  of the attitude of the gods, and the answer to
  the question is a shock.
• We are not told what Earth does, but Sun sends
  the magic chariot on which Medea makes her
  escape.

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rejected by most of his contemporaries

• Euripides is the first Greek poet to suffer the
  fate of so many of the great modern writers
  rejected by most of his contemporaries (he rarely
  won first prize and was the favorite target for
  the scurrilous humor of the comic poets), he was
  universally admired and revered by the Greeks of
  the centuries that followed his death.

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Iconoclastic

• His Medea is typical of his iconoclastic
  approach his choice of subject and central
  characters is in itself a challenge to
  established canons.
• He still dramatizes myth, but the myth he chooses
  is exotic and disturbing, and the protagonist is
  not a man but a woman.
• Medea is both woman and foreigner, that is, in
  terms of the audiences prejudice and practice
  she is a representative of the two free-born
  groups in Athenian society that had almost no
  rights at all (though the male foreign resident
  had more rights than the native woman).

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great intellectual power

• She is not just a woman and a foreigner, she is
  also a person of great intellectual power.
• Compared with her the credulous king and her
  complacent husband are children, and once her
  mind is made up, she moves them like pawns to
  their proper places in her barbaric game.
• The myth is used for new purposes, to shock the
  members of the audience, attack their deepest
  prejudices, and shake them out of their
  complacent pride in the superiority of Greek
  masculinity.

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Finds no redress

• The tragic hero is no longer a king, one who is
  highly renowned and prosperous such as Oedipus,
  but a woman who, because she finds no redress for
  her wrongs in society, is driven by her passion
  to violate that societys most sacred laws in a
  rebellion against its typical representative,
  Jason, her husband.

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Earth and Sun

• All through Medea the human beings involved call
  on the gods two especially are singled out for
  attention Earth and Sun.
• It is by these two gods that Medea makes Aegeus
  swear to give her refuge in Athens, the chorus
  invokes them to prevent Medeas violence against
  her sons, and Jason wonders how Medea can look on
  Earth and Sun after she has killed her own
  children.
• These emphatic appeals clearly raise the question
  of the attitude of the gods, and the answer to
  the question is a shock. We are not told what
  Earth does, but Sun sends the magic chariot on
  which Medea makes her escape.

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Cinema and television

• In the 1963 film Jason and the Argonauts, Medea
  was portrayed by Nancy Kovack.
• In the 2000 Hallmark presentation Jason and the
  Argonauts, Medea was portrayed by Jolene Blalock.
• In 1970, the Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini
  directed a film adaptation of Medea featuring the
  opera singer Maria Callas in the title role.

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Latest films

• In 2007, director Tonino De Bernardi filmed a
  modern version of the myth, set in Paris and
  starring Isabelle Huppert as Medea, called Médée
  Miracle. The character of Medea lives in Paris
  with Jason, who leaves her.
• In 2009,"Medea" was shot by director Natalia
  Kuznetsova. Film was created by the tragedy of
  Seneca in a new for cinema genre of Rhythmodrama,
  in which the main basis of acting and atmosphere
  is music written before shooting. -?
  http//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/22Medea22

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??????? (1970) http//www.imdb.cn/title/tt0066065

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  ??????,????????????????????,??????????????????????
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???????????? Pier Paolo Pasolini

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  ?????????--?????????,?????????????????????,???????
  ??????????,????????????????????????????,???????,?
  ??????????????????????????????????????????????????
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ending

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• http//video.mail.ru/mail/karelina-natalia/4815/28
  316.html

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Jason

• shouting into the house, as he shakes the
  doors                                         
  You slaves in there, remove the bar from this
  door at once,  withdraw the bolts, so I may see
  two things my dead sons and their murderer,
  that woman      on whom I shall exact
  revenge.      

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The exodus of Medea

• Jason shakes the doors of the house, which remain
  closed.
• Medea appears in a winged chariot, rising above
  the house. The bodies of the two children are
  visible in the chariot

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Medea

• Why are you rattling the doors like that, trying
  to unbar them so you can findtheir bodies and
  me, the one who killed them? Stop trying. If you
  want something from me,      then say so, if you
  want to. But you'll never      have me in your
  grasp, not in this chariot,      a gift to me
  from my grandfather Helios,      to protect me
  from all hostile hands.

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CHORUS Exit Chorus

•       Zeus on Olympus,      dispenses many
  things.            Gods often contradict     
  our fondest expectations.      What we
  anticipate      does not come to pass.     
  What we don't expect      some god finds a
  way          
• to make it happen.      So with this story.

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Translation

• https//records.viu.ca/johnstoi/euripides/medea.h
  tm

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The Life and Death of Jason
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