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‘A Simple Girl’? Medea in Ovid Heroides 12
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 July 2014
Extract
For Homer's Circe the story of Argo's voyage was already well known. Although we cannot be sure that the Odyssey's first audience was aware of Medea's role in Jason's story, we do know that by the time that Ovid came to write Heroides, she had already appeared in numerous Greek and Latin texts, in epic and lyric poetry and on the tragic stage. Given her complex textual and dramatic history, it seems hardly likely that any Ovidian Medea could actually be ‘a simple girl'. And yet precisely this charge of ‘simplicity’ has been levelled against Heroides 12 and its Active author. I propose to argue that the Medea of Heroides 12 is complex, not simple, and that her complexity derives from the fact that Ovid has positioned his elegiac heroine between past and future, guilt and innocence, epic and tragedy.
Like all of Ovid's heroines, Medea writes at a critical juncture in her mythic life. But Medea's myth differs significantly from those of her fellow authors, for it requires her to play five distinct roles in four separate locations. Thus while Penelope, for example, plays only the part of Ulysses' loyal wife on Ithaca immediately before and during her husband's return, Medea plays the ‘simple girl’ in Colchis, the murderous wife in Iolcus, the abandoned mother in Corinth, the poisonous stepmother in Athens and the potential filicide back in Colchis. She is a heroine with a well-known and extensive history and so it is not surprising that the first line of Heroides 12 invokes the concept of memory: memini (‘I remember’).
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References
NOTES
1. For the text of Heroides 12 I have used Rosati (1989a). I employ, however, the orthography of the OLD. I do not follow Rosati's practice of capitalisation at the beginning of a line.
2. Horn. Od. 12.70.
3. E.g. epic poetry: Eumelus' Corinthiaca, Apollonius' Argonautica, Varro's Argonautae; lyric poetry: Pindar's fourth Pythian; tragic stage: Euripides' Peliades, Medea and Aegeus, Ennius' Medea Exul, Pacuvius’ Medus, Accius' Medea siue Argonautae. See further Boyle in the Introduction to this volume. Whether Ovid's own Medea predates or postdates Heroides 12 is not clear.
4. Jacobson (1974), 123. Jacobson complains of ‘a plainness and simplicity which plague hardly any other of the Heroides’, arguing that Medea is a ‘rather clear-headed villain not terribly concerned with questions of conscience’.
5. It may seem trivial to say that Medea is positioned between past and future. Most of Ovid's heroines, however, exist in a single story, living primarily in the present with little or no mythic past or future. Dido, for example, exists only as queen of Carthage and Aeneas' lover. Mutatis mutandis, the same is true of Penelope, Phyllis, Briseis, Phaedra etc. Hypsipyle is perhaps an exception to this generalisation for she is important in both the Argonautic myth (Apollonius of Rhodes, Valerius Flaccus) and the myth of the Argive expedition against Thebes (Euripides' Hypsipyle, Stasias' Thebaid).
6. It is worth noting that Ovid and his readers had access to tragedies presenting Medea in all five roles: Accius' Medea siue Argonautae (the Colchian girl); Euripides' Peliades (the killing of Pelias in Iolcus); Euripides' Medea and Ennius' Medea Exul (revenge in Corinth); Euripides' Aegeus (the near killing of Theseus in Athens); Pacuvius' Medus (the near killing of her son Medus in Colchis). For discussion of Medea in republican tragedy see Arcellaschi (1990), chs. 2-4; Cowan (2010), 39-52; Boyle in ‘Introduction’ (above).
7. The phrase was invented by Ross (1975), 78. For discussion see Hinds (1998), 1-5; Miller (1993), 153-64.
8. They also recall the opening lines of Ennius' Medea Exul. The surviving fragments, as well as Cicero's comments at Fin. 1.4, suggest that Ennius' play followed its Euripidean model closely. For discussion see Boyle (2006), 71-77; for discussion and commentary see Jocelyn (1967), 342-82.
9. Kennedy (1984).
10. By contrast, in Seneca's Medea the wedding takes place during the play's action, with the first choral ode constituting the wedding hymn.
11. For the same wish in the prologue see also 144-47.
12. For the reading of this line and its meaning see Rosati (1989b), 181-85; Bessone (1997), 169-71.
13. Knox (1986) 209. For refutation of Knox's case see Hinds (1993).
14. See OLD s.v. 2, 3,4.
15. Heinze (1997), 190, points out that the phrase compositis…comis (157) refers to Creusa's hair and not Medea's as the Loeb edition suggests. While it is true that the ‘ordered hair’ could belong to Medea or even members of the bridal procession, reference to the garland (serta) suggests that Ovid has the bride in mind because, as Treggiari (1991), 163, notes, the bride's ‘coiffure was fastened with woollen fillets, crowned with a garland and then a flame-coloured veil’. She cites Cornelia's recollection of her wedding day at Prop. 4.11.34. Rosati's (1989a) translation ‘strappar via le ghirlande da quei capelli acconciati’ suggests that he too understands the ‘ordered hair’ to be Creusa's.
16. Apollonius regularly refers to Medea as ‘the girl’ (ϰούϱη, 3.286 and passim).
17. Bessone (1997), 63.
18. Cf. Virg. Aen. 6.209: sic leni crepitabat brattea uento (‘so the foil crackled in the gentle breeze’); and Austin (1997), 101, ad loc.: ‘The line is wonderfully onomatopoeic: its ingenious alliteration makes a fine climax to a markedly alliterative passage.’
19. Hunter (1989), 230, observes: ‘In following Medea's advice, Jason dresses himself in an advertisement of his tendency to leave women behind.’ See also his discussion (207f.) of the interconnections between Hypsipyle-Jason, Medea-Jason, Ariadne-Theseus and Ariadne-Dionysus.
20. For this see Hinds (1993), esp. 27-34.
21. Treggiari (1991), 17f.
22. Verducci (1985), 61, notes that ‘neither in the Argonautica nor anywhere else in the known literature of antiquity does Jason promise marriage to her’.
23. Jacobson (1974), 103.
24. Thus Rosati (1988), 305, notes that ‘l’eroina di Lemno finisce per assumere ella stessa, talora, i tratti caratterizzanti di Medea, fino a diventare “figura” profetica della maga colchica'; Hinds (1993), 30, points out that ‘at this moment, Her. 6 and 12 converge: the programmatic invitation to read one as a palimpsest of the other could hardly be clearer’. See also Verducci (1985), 64f.; Fulkerson(2005), 51.
25. Palmer (1898), 395.
26. Jacobson (1974), 113; Verducci (1985), 71; Knox (1986), 211 n.13.
27. This is noted by Verducci (1985), 70, and Lindheim (2003), 129.
28. See also Hor. C. 1.5.9; Prop. 2.25.21f.; Tib. 1.9.38; Sen. Phaed. 634.
29. Palmer, Jacobson, Verducci and Knox all mistakenly assume that to plead credulity is to assert innocence.
30. In the single Heroides only Phaedra speaks of her own guilt (4.28), but that guilt is prospective and is to be shared equally with Hippolytus.
31. For this reading see Heinze (1997), 89. Bessone follows Palmer in treating poena as metaphorical.
32. The point is made even more forcefully by Seneca's Medea when she insists that her crimes were also Jason's (Sen. Med. 496-501).
33. Sirius 3.957; Ariadne 3.998, 1003, 1097, 1107; Hypsipyle's robe 3.1206, 4.423, 426.
34. See Am. 3.3.24, 3.14.30; Pont. 2.4.32.
35. ‘He invented this genre unknown to others.’ For discussion of this passage see Spoth (1992), 22-28; Gibson (2003), 239.
36. For discussion of the collection's generic affinities see, for example, Knox (1995), 14-18.
37. Spoth (1992), 200: ‘Die Hexenmacht ist elegischer Schwäche gevvichen.’
38. Accius' Medea siue Argonautae concerns events drawn from Book 4 of Apollonius' Argonautica, particularly the killing of Absyrtus.
39. At least two fragments of Varro's Argonautae can be assigned to Book 3 (equivalent to Apollonius' third book). See Hollis (2007), frr. 128,129 and possibly 130.
40. Hollis (2007), 198, citing Ars 3.335f. (dictaque Varroni fuluis insignia uillis/uellera, germanae, Phrixe, querenda tuae, ‘the fleece famous for its tawny hairs that Varro spoke of, a source of complaint for your sister, Phrixus’) among his testimonia for Varro's poem and noting that when discussing other poets Ovid regularly echoes their words, points out the similarity between the references to Varro in Ars and Her. 12.201. Cf. Ap. Rhod. 4.176f.
41. See, for example, Currie (1981), 2717; Hinds (1993), 39; Knox (1986), 213f.; Spentzou (2003), 186-90.
42. Spoth (1992), 203; Barchiesi (1993), 344.
43. For ago in this sense see OLD s.v. 25.