Decades before Madeline Miller rehabilitated the witch Circe in her current bestseller, Miranda Seymour took on an origin story for the murderous Medea in her 1981 novel. Something I really admired about this retelling is that Seymour did not attempt to engender sympathy for Medea by justifying her actions, but tried to put her antiheroine into context by fleshing out the deadly intrigue at the royal court of Colchis and the death-devoted cult of the goddess Hecate. Seymour's Medea is no tragically misunderstood victim. She is a woman who survived by becoming the most dangerous person in a dangerous world. There are no heroes or villains in this story, just winners and losers.
Similarly, Herodotus does not paint his Persian Wars as a conflict between good and evil. He is more interested in the flow of events and the intricate dance of nations as they encircle each other in never-ending power plays. After his description of Io's abduction, which he admits is based on the Persian account, alluding to an alternative Greek version which may or may not resemble the myths I discussed in the previous post, he turns his attention to not one but two instances of Greek retaliation, the abductions of Europa and Medea. Just as his Princess Io is abducted by non-supernatural Phoenician pirates rather than transformed into a heifer, his Princess Europa is not taken by Zeus in the form of a bull, but rather snatched away from the Phoenician city of Tyre by Cretan pirates. Herodotus does not mention Jason or the Argonauts by name when he describes the Greeks who sailed to Colchis for an unnamed errand, presumably the quest for the golden fleece, and carry off Medea. He does not identify Medea as a witch.
Medea's legacy in drama is so expansive, from the opera of Luigi Cherubini to the films of Pier Paolo Pasolini and Lars Von Trier, that I don't have room to discuss all the adaptations of her story in this post. I will limit my scope to my own personal experiences. My freshman year of high school, I was cast as Jason, who seduced Medea away from Colchis in mythology if not in Herodotus, in a production of Euripides's Medea. Although we never put on the play due to a failure of logistics, I did learn the part and the rehearsals enabled me to experience the sudden turn from my character's arrogance as he abandons Medea for the younger Princess Glauce to his abject suffering when the witch takes revenge by killing not only her rival, but also her own two young sons by Jason.
My senior year, a friend of mine did direct Medea. I was only an audience member, since I was caught up during that time with rehearsals for my own production of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, another bloody tragedy of betrayal and revenge. My friend cast Jason and Medea as a Caucasian man and an Indian woman, which highlighted Euripides's theme of Medea as a foreigner in Greece. All three versions of this play that I have attended have focused on this aspect of the title character. The performance I saw at Lindenwood University in 2018 cast as their Medea a Latina actress with a very pronounced accent. As you can see in the program pictured above, the director included a disclaimer about “disturbing” subject matter. The Witch of Colchis still holds a transgressive power thousands of years later. Luis Alfaro's Mojada: A Medea in Los Angeles, one of the last live plays I saw at the Repertory Theatre of Saint Louis before the pandemic, reimagined Medea as an undocumented Mexican woman who had followed her husband during a perilous border crossing into the United States only to be abandoned by him for a more "Americanized" Latina. This Medea only had one son to kill at the end, but the moment still elicited shocked silence from the audience in the theater.
Herodotus, of course, does not get into any of this. His main concern is that Medea's father sent a herald to Greece demanding her return. The Greeks refused, citing the lack of reparations for the previous abduction of Io. If things with Medea turned out like they did in Euripides, maybe the Greeks regretted not giving her back while they had the chance!
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