two more Tales of Terror

from Mr. Euripides & his PolyGods

Working on the Hippolytus piece I posted a month or two ago was so much fun I thought I’d share two of Mr. E’s other plays that have also been haunting me most of my life. (I expect I’ll also natter on a little more about how having multiple gods can be a handy technology for maintaining clarity and sanity, but mostly this time it’s just going to be the blood-drenched mythology.)

Medea

This first play is one I always included in a favorite class I created long ago for the University of Washington, a class in which I and the members (mostly older, committed upper-division undergraduates) read four plays over the course of the quarter. We would each first read each play at home, one act or set of scenes at a time, the students strictly forbidden to get ahead of the assignments and thus prematurely spoil the surprise of How It All Works Out. As each of us read on their own, we journaled our thoughts and reactions, our fears and hopes and guesses and questions and expectations. Then, in the classroom, we all read the assigned scenes again, aloud and on our feet and taking parts, with scripts and rehearsal props in hand and the classroom tables and chairs rearranged for our stage set, getting the drama just as hot (or as chilling) as we were able and pausing as we went along to address both their thoughts and questions and my own, or to call out for one another whatever it was we were only now noticing. The process was a dependably fascinating, edgy, often even exhilarating one. Of the learning methods I’ve ever tailored, that was one for which I’m still deeply grateful.¹

I should mention before we move on that the version of the Medea we read in that class was the brilliant one the great USAyan poet Robinson Jeffers created back in the mid-20th century for the extraordinary actress Judith Anderson, who toured the world twice in the original production. Mr. Jeffers takes a few small liberties with Mr. Euripides’ original, but the script he left us is a masterpiece in its own right and one I highly recommend to all readers-in-English. Last time I looked, there was at least one free PDF of the text available online, but do make sure wherever you read the play that Jeffers is your translator.² You may also be able to find his version at your public or university library, and there are usually reasonably priced used copies listed at AbeBooks and other online sellers. I’ll finish by particularly recommending a great inexpensive paperback edition titled Cawdor and Medea, in which Jeffers’ Medea version is paired with a terrific verse novella of his own — my personal favorite of his works in that longer form.

So, then:

Medea is the ‘barbarian’ (non-Greek) princess/priestess/sorceress whom the goddess Aphrodite caused to fall totally in love with Jason when he and his fellow Argonauts arrived in her country of Colchis at the far end of the Black Sea. Jason and his heroic-if-larcenous shipmates had come there to steal the famous Golden Fleece, and the love-maddened Medea duly betrayed her father the king and her home country on several occasions in the process of assisting Jason & Co. in their piratical enterprise.

To give you some notion just how strong Aphrodite’s love-spell was, I’ll mention that when Jason and Medea and their heroic accomplices were sailing away with their ill-gotten gains and the Colchian navy came swarming out to apprehend them, Medea foiled their pursuit by murdering her own young brother — whom she’d had the foresight to kidnap — and chopping his body into pieces, which pieces she then scattered in the wake of the Argo. Her father’s ships were thereby forced to slow down, in order to find and retrieve each bloody chunk of the late prince for proper burial.

From Colchis, the Argo sailed (presumably dropping off the other heroes along the way) to the Greek city-state of Iolcus — the city-state where Jason, though the rightful heir of the former king, had to date been denied the throne by his wicked enemy-uncle Pelias. The whole Golden-Fleece escapade would never have occurred had not Pelias (hoping that Jason would get killed in the process) promised his nephew that if he brought home the Fleece, Pelias would finally cede the throne to him.

Of course, when Jason and Medea arrived and presented Pelias with the booty, the wicked uncle refused to do what he’d promised, at which point Medea proceeded to remove him from the board in a grimly humorous way. Telling Pelias’s two daughters that she knew a spell for rendering an ageing man young and healthy again, she gave them a convincing demonstration: boiling magical herbs in a pot, she slaughtered an elderly goat and sectioned it up (the butchering of her brother comes insistently to mind), then simmered the pieces in the herbal infusion. Lo and behold, out sprang a healthy young goat! So then, convinced, the loving-but-far-too-credulous princesses killed and chopped up their ageing father, then enthusiastically seethed his remains in the magic broth.

Except that this time, the herbs Medea supplied were not the requisite magical ones but something more along the lines of dandelions and crabgrass, and all the girls wound up with was a sort of horrid Daddy Soup.

Once again Jason and Medea had to flee for their lives; and then, for perhaps a decade or so (during which their own two sons were born), they lived however they could, when possible as guests in other noble or royal houses. (The leader of the Golden Fleece’s heroic crew would as a matter of course have had a number of friends in high places).

That’s the backstory, which we glean from dialogue over the course of the play. The actual action onstage is roughly continuous and occurs in the present single day.

When the curtain rises (or the lights come up, or whatever), we discover that Jason and Medea and their boys have only recently arrived in Corinth, a powerful city-state on the Greek mainland not so very far west of Athens, and are now living in an upscale house there. The chorus for the play is composed of their upper-class Corinthian neighbor-women.

These ladies are understandably a little leery of Medea (she is, after all, not only a foreigner but a non-Greek barbarian one, as well as a woman who comes trailing rumors of treacheries and sorceries and untimely deaths); but they’re nonetheless prepared to offer her their sympathy, because Medea’s life is taking yet another wrenching turn: her husband Jason — for whom Medea has turned her whole life upside down, and who has led her into exile from her homeland and involved her in at least two infamous royal murders, one of them a fratricide — is now planning to divorce her for the purpose of marrying the beautiful young daughter of the King here in Corinth.

Doing so, Jason will become the heir of that King (who has no child apart from his daughter) and thus effectively the crown prince of this wealthy city-state. It’s a tremendous step up from the footloose, catch-as-catch-can life the little family have been living, and there are practical souls who would say that Medea should just accept it all quietly, even perhaps to some degree gratefully. After all, it’s not as though she or her boys won’t benefit by the change: they’ll be understood to be closely connected to the local royal family, and Jason will make sure that they are well taken care of and honored for their relationship with him. In time, if things go well, he’ll be the King here, and thus able to continue making their lives very comfortable indeed. Still, the women of the chorus understand that for a proud person who was once a king’s daughter herself, accepting the effectual demotion from Jason’s wife to merely the honored mother of his sons might be a difficult pill to get down.

Before the play is done, these comparatively ordinary women will be our fellow-witnesses to Medea’s terrifying revenges — upon Jason, upon his royal fiancée, and upon his would-be father-in-law the king.

This play has a crucial common factor with the Hippolytus (the play featured in that earlier essay), and that factor is the goddess Aphrodite. In the Hippolytus, as you may recall, there were two goddesses driving the action, the chaste Artemis inspiring the young prince to remain a virgin, the libidinous Aphrodite forcing the prince’s stepmother into a deadly romantic obsession with him. In that play, each of the goddesses makes a personal appearance onstage.

Here in the Medea, only Aphrodite is explicitly active, and even she is not represented by an actor (except insofar as Medea herself is a sort of pathological incarnation). The irony grows more and more insistent as the action evolves: without Medea’s obsessive Aphroditic addiction to Jason, the crimes and horrors that occurred years ago in Colchis and Iolcus would never have come about, and neither would the crimes and horrors that are about to break out today here in Corinth. Medea is a deadly weapon — for many years serving Jason’s interests, but pivoting today to obliterate his happiness. Before night has fully fallen, the Corinthian King and his daughter will be

Eyeless, disfaced, untouchable;
middens of smoking flesh laced with molten gold ...

Still more dreadfully, Medea will hunt down her own children in this house and kill them with a sword. When Jason, outraged, demands to know how she could have brought herself to do such a thing, she will calmly inform him that her revenge would otherwise have been incomplete. Earlier, in perhaps a more deeply telling moment, when she’s about to take the boys into the house for the last time:

[Medea looks up from staring at the children. Her face has changed;
the love has gone out of it. She speaks in a colorless tired voice.]

I have a sword in the house.
I can defend you.

[She stands up stiffly and takes the children by their shoulders;
holds the elder one in front of her, toward the chorus;
speaks with cold intensity.]

Would you say that this child
Has Jason’s eyes?

[The women are silent, in terror gazing at her.]

... They are his cubs. They have his blood.
As long as they live I shall be mixed with him.

If you’re expecting that she’ll finish by murdering her faithless spouse, you haven’t yet plumbed the full depth of her instinct for cruelty. She carefully leaves Jason alive, correctly predicting his own pathetic remainder-of-life and eventual, utterly unheroic death.

Have I mentioned that Medea is a granddaughter of the sun-god, Helios? In the end she flies away to safety in Athens — in a dragon-drawn chariot sent by her divine grandfather.

Having many gods means I need to demonstrate at least minimally adequate respect to each — and even then, there are almost certainly going to be times when two different gods will present me simultaneously with two mutually exclusive imperatives. (Hegel’s theory of Tragedy centers on precisely that sort of impossible situation. The classic example is Antigone, trapped between obeying her uncle the king and honoring her beloved dead brother.) Of course each of us is going to be focused on some gods more than others, but too much negligence in relation to any of the central ones is likely to put you at grave hazard. Jason’s egotism, failure in gratitude, and obsession with power and wealth combine to wreck his life; meanwhile Medea’s own extravagant pride and addiction to Jason’s ‘love’ leave a trail of ghastly murders, now including those of her own children, behind her.

Religion as a balancing act makes good sense to me. The various aspects of living that strike me as sacred are not by any means always neatly harmonized with one another, and polytheism plays fair by refusing to pretend that they are. There’s a lot of negotiating to be done in the course of any life with the many distinct and often divergent sets of meanings and values amid which we always live.

But now let’s move on to today’s second Tale:

The Bacchae

The recently-born god Dionysus, son of the king-god Zeus and a mortal princess of Thebes (the Greek city, not the Egyptian one) has begun his career as a new god in countries to the east, but has recently been hearing offensive rumors that there are humans back in Thebes who are spreading doubts about His own divine paternity and consequent godhood. The offended young god arrives in Thebes in time to address the play’s Prologue to those of us seated here in the great outdoor theatre, informing us that he’s already maddened the ordinarily restrained and proper Theban ladies into a toxic and violent frenzy, a sort of lunatic hyperversion of what his true followers properly experience during worship. These newly-lunatic Theban women have left the city and are now roving the surrounding meadows and mountains, drunk on the god’s wine and the god’s madness and killing every warm-blooded creature they can catch.

I have stung them with frenzy, hounded them from home
up to the mountains where they wander, crazed of mind,
and compelled to wear my orgies' livery.

Like it or not, this city must learn its lesson.

The onstage choral group in this play are a troupe of foreign women, the new god’s mortal followers who have traveled here with him — the god-infused-but-not-delusional Bacchants who give the play its title.

The god’s adversary in the action is the new king of Thebes, an officious and controlling young fellow named Pentheus, who happens to be a nephew of the god’s mother, the mortal princess Semele who was impregnated by Zeus. (Semele no longer lives, at least not among mortals, having committed the fatal error of touching one of the King-God’s lightning-bolts during her divine pregnancy and been, in consequence, instantly rendered into ash.)

(And yes, you caught that right: the offending young king and the new god are first cousins.)

Pentheus has added his own voice to the many already chattering in the city (including those of most of the rest of the ruling family), claiming that his late aunt was not impregnated by a god at all but rather, and scandalously, by a mere mortal man (and not even a royal one at that). This participation in the slander makes the new king a central target of his newly-arrived god-cousin’s retribution, alongside Pentheus’ own mother, Agave (Semele’s sister and fellow-princess) — Agave, who has been spreading the same defamatory gossip about her deceased sister and has now by Dionysus’s power been transformed into the lunaticked leader of the god-madded ‘decent’ Theban women currently hunting and dancing and slaughtering and carousing out in the wild meadows and the mountains.

In the staging of his elaborate revenge, the god poses as one of his own followers, a beautiful if not very generically masculine human youth acting as spokesperson for the foreign Bacchae, and allows himself to be captured along with them by Pentheus’s guards. The most riveting encounters in the play (for my money, anyhow) are the ones between these two cousins, one an entirely-mortal man, the other a half-human-but-thoroughly-immortal god now impersonating a mortal captive.

We watch, spell-bound, as the god works the relationship.

At first, Pentheus clearly despises this foreign, presumptuous, trouble-making, and insufficiently macho youth; but before Dionysus is done with him, the young king, adeptly flattered and charmed and generally practiced upon, will be eating out of the hand of the strange foreigner. By the end of their confrontation, the pride-blinded human will allow himself to be convinced that the best plan is for him to go up into the hills and spy upon the crazed women his mother is leading.

At the peak of his besottedness, in order to pass for one of the those crazed women, Pentheus permits his humanly-disguised god-cousin to lead him into the palace and there clothe him in the sort of garb the god’s own maenad followers wear — to dress him up as a woman, daubed with womanly cosmetics, draped in a fawnskin and a girly dress and finished off with a long curly-blonde wig, carrying a stout staff of the type the Bacchae themselves carry and often employ as weapons.

By the time Dionysus has completed his transformation, Pentheus would be a highly comic spectacle if only he weren’t such a deeply alarming one. He’s completely enchanted now, giggling with titillation in apprehension of covertly witnessing what all those crazy women are doing out there. We, for our part, know that Dionysus is set upon wreaking vengeance and teaching terrible lessons, and we more and more dread the full discovery of what the vengeance will be.

And it is indeed horrific — but what always interests me most in the meanwhile is the way Euripides wrangles our feelings concerning this doomed mortal.

Pentheus first enters as a controlling bully, an insecure and insulting tyrant who intends to impose his will not only upon his own people but also on these trouble-making foreigners and their vaunted new ‘god’. As a result, in the beginning we’re prepared to side with the new deity against his cousin — and we don’t even have the principal reason that the original audience had for doing so, the reason of believing that the mortal playing Dionysus on the stage stands for a very real and very powerful god, whom the Athenians certainly worshiped themselves and to whom all mortals were best advised to give an active and abiding fealty.

Anyway: as Pentheus begins to fall under the god’s spell, never guessing that this is no merely human youth but rather his own fatal nemesis, I always start by being amused (because it’s always gratifying to see a controlling bully getting his due) but then rapidly begin to suffer a growing anxiety as well. There’s something vicious about this beautiful young foreigner’s precise, confident manipulation of his prey. And when this seeming-youth-who-is-actually-a-god continues to lead Pentheus into ever deeper displays of credulity, grandiosity, misplaced trust, and in the end downright fatuity, I begin to feel not only dread of whatever’s coming (which of course I’ve known since half a century ago, when I first read the play) but also an increasing revulsion from the god himself, who I can’t help feeling is indecently savoring his heartless fun. There’s a dreadful iciness in this Dionysus, an elegant, glinting, ironical and gloating and entirely composed superiority. There’s the clear impression that he’s quietly, inwardly laughing at his opponent-cum-victim. (To be very contemporary, it’s all a bit too Hannibal Lecter — and just as with Lecter, whose sardonic revenges can amuse me even as they chill my blood, so too with this divinely incognito cousin of the doomed king.)

When at last the climactic messenger-speech comes, we hear and imagine the whole dreadful event:

Pentheus has headed up into the hills, still giggling with prurient anticipation at the notion of spying upon these crazed women his crazed mother is leading; but in the event the crazed women detect him almost immediately and, in an extended scene of cruelly violent horror — a scene during which I always find myself being taught yet again that imagining  a horrible thing can in fact freeze the blood even more thoroughly than actually seeing it  — Pentheus’s mother and aunts and the horde of women following them drag the disguised young man down from his hiding place in the upper limbs of a tall tree, in the process tearing him limb from limb.

When his mother finally arrives onstage in the final scene — laughing and boasting and triumphant, still fully under the god’s deluding spell — she proudly bears what she believes to be the gory head of a mountain lion that she and her princess-sisters and their attendant ladies have hunted down and killed. It’s only now, here before us, that the god suddenly withdraws the spell that has been distorting her vision — and leaves her holding, seeing it clearly only now, the broken and bloodied head of the son in whose murder she has unwittingly collaborated.

For me, the ensuing wrap-up is anything but satisfying — which (it seems clear to me) was precisely Euripides’ intent. A dogged critic and interrogator of the traditional religion, he leaves us confronted with all this horror — with a world in which the immortal gods are just as petty, vengeful, and violent as any of their mortal creatures. What can we think but “If this is how reality works, if this is how the gods are — well, who can bear that, much less approve of it?” The wrecked humans stand around, overwhelmed and bewildered and undone, the highest-born of them now doomed to lifelong exile for their offenses against the new god; and meanwhile that god, who’s just wrecked them, reappears calmly up on the theatre’s ‘god walk’, dressed now in proper Divine finery, His mortal disguise laid calmly aside, rationally (if perhaps a little pedantically) justifying His own actions throughout, clearly free of any flicker of remorse.

I suppose what grips me about this play and never fully lets me go is that both of the realities are true and important, however disturbing that realization may be, particularly to one brought up (as I was) in a congregation where the god was presented as loving and forgiving and universally so.³ In going blindly to war against his divine cousin, Pentheus has gone blindly to war against an authentic aspect of the sacred — one that he, as a proudly rational controller, was simply incapable of correctly perceiving and honoring — and has been accordingly destroyed.

To put that a little differently: Pentheus in the action is behaving as a sort of proto-monotheist, sorting the intrinsic aspects of Being into those that are more sacred and those that are less (or not sacred at all); while the foreign chorus, who are not mad precisely because they give the new god his due, are sanely aware that every intrinsic aspect of being is sacred, and must be remembered and respected accordingly.

A thought that just now came to mind, and with which perhaps it would be appropriate to close:

I don’t generally like patently topical ‘conceptual’ productions of classic plays — a Julius Caesar where the Caesar is clearly costumed and made up to resemble the current Russian or USAyan president, or a Lysistrata where the chorus waves Women’s Lib signs, or whatever — but if I had to do that with The Bacchae, the foreign chorus of true believers could certainly be framed as members of the LGBTQIA+ community and Pentheus as whoever’s most prominent for the intended audience among current anti-Queer public figures.

¹ I think this sort of mindful reading-and-journaling could be profoundly useful not only for plays, but for creative and exploratory literature of any kind — and not only works of fiction. It seems to me that it would make sense for assigned texts in History or Psychology or Philosophy, to give only a few examples. Among other benefits, it gets the students clearly noticing what they’re thinking and feeling about whatever they’re reading, and it does this before there’s any way for them to know the teacher’s own takes. It’s a fundamentalism of mine that one essential foundation of education is strengthening and sharpening both the student’s curiosity and their capacity to notice and explore their own reactions to whatever is before them. In that process, they build their self-knowledge in tandem with their knowledge about life and the world.

² Here’s a link to one online PDF for the Jeffers version of the Medea:
^{https://ia800609.us.archive.org/2/items/MedeaEuripedesJeffers/Medea%20Euripedes-Jeffers_text.pdf}

³ Medea is also a granddaughter of the sun god Helios, who takes an important part in the drama without ever personally appearing in it — he provides the flying chariot, drawn by winged dragons, in which Medea makes her final escape to Athens — but there are only so many hyphenations I can expect y’all to parse. =:o)