Authenticity of 1056–80

Long before anyone suggested that Medea 1056–80 were interpolated, that is, added by an actor/director other than Eur. in a performance later than 431 bce, there had been scholarly speculation about two recensions of the play by Eur. himself. This theory derived from Paolo Manuzio's observation of the absence in our text of a line of Ennius' Medea (fr. CV Jocelyn: qui ipse sibi sapiens prodesse non quit nequiquam sapit) that he wrongly identified as an exact version of Eur. fr. 905 (Cicero, ad Fam. 13.15.2: μισῶ σοϕιστὴν ὅστις οὐχ αὑτῶι σοϕός), and it received some support from remarks by Porson, Boeckh, and others, but by 1875 most of the passages referred to this Euripidean revision were satisfactorily explained in other ways. Already in the first edition of his school commentary Wecklein had developed the theory that Eur., some years earlier than 431, wrote a version of Medea fundamentally similar in conception to the play of 431, and that this earlier version inspired Neophron's imitation, produced before 431 as well (and thus in the festival records as earlier than Eur.'s play, misleading Aristotle and Dicaearchus: see Introd. 5). It was in the context of such theories that Bergk proposed that lines 1056–80 were to be regarded as a (Euripidean) doublet of 1040–55.

Medea is probably now the play of Euripides most widely known to the general public, from exposure to translations in classes in secondary schools and colleges and from performances either of translations of the Greek text or of looser adaptations of the plot. In the curriculum of programmes in ancient Greek, too, Medea is frequently an assigned text for study in the original language, and is sometimes the first Greek drama or first Greek poetry that a learner studies. In earlier generations, the play was equally studied but often frowned upon, for unAristotelian motivation and causation, for the extremity of Medea's action, and for the moral shock of its conclusion. In more recent times, the play has deservedly attained a better reputation, as critics and audiences have become more open to acknowledging the tensions and contradictions of classical Greek culture, to appreciating the chaotic as well as the harmonious and serene. Rather than seeing Medea as a realistic or psychological study, scholars now concentrate on issues like the problematics of the heroic code, the religious and ethical aspects of revenge, oath, and supplication, and the socio-political tensions reflected in the contest of genders and ethnicities evoked by the play.

The goal of this commentary is to make the play accessible in all its complication and sophistication to present-day students. It aims to provide, on the one hand, the linguistic and technical information that will support the task of translation and equip the student to appreciate the formal and artistic devices of Greek tragedy: hence, the sections Language and Style, and Prosody and Metre that follow the General Introduction.

Prologue

The opening scenes of the play (‘prologue’ in the wider sense defined in Poetics 12, 1452b19–20, as ‘the whole portion of the drama preceding the entrance-song of the chorus’: SE 2) offer some sparing hints of the past history, expose the distraught and emotional state of Medea under the pressure of Jason's betrayal, and introduce the new event (the decree of exile) that motivates the action (conceived, as usual for Greek tragedy, as events completed within a single day: Poetics 1449b12–13). The sequence may be divided into three parts by variations in form and by entrances and exits (SE 2): 1–48 nurse alone in iambic monologue, 49–95 (entrance during 45–9) iambic dialogue of nurse and tutor (with silent boys), 96–130 (gradual departure indoors during 89–105: 89n.) anapaests, chanted by nurse outdoors and sung by Medea indoors. This third part in fact flows almost seamlessly into the parodos (SE 2), since the chorus' lyric is interspersed with more anapaests from both the nurse and Medea, the chorus being alone only for 204–13.

Monologue of the nurse

Eur. routinely begins his plays with a single speaker addressing the audience more or less directly, a technique that permits the clear presentation of background details and that openly acknowledges the theatrical situation and the role of the audience as interpreters witnessing an enacted sequence of events (compare the remarks of Aristophanes' ‘Euripides’ in Frogs 946–7, 1122).

EURIPIDES: LIFE AND WORKS

For Greeks of the fifth century bce there is very little biographical information that can be relied upon. Much of the information about Euripides extant in later antiquity is based on plausible and (more often) implausible inferences from allusions in Old Comedy and from statements in the dramas themselves (according to the widespread, but false, assumption that various first-person statements may express the dramatist's own convictions). The doxographic tradition often constructed teacher-pupil relationships whenever a similarity was detected between two intellectuals. Anecdotes commonly transmitted stories based on traditional patterns of folktale and myth rather than on genuine biographical data.

Eur. was probably born some time in the decade of the 480s, and no later than about 475. The first reliably recorded date in his life (from the Marmor Parium) is that of his first production of plays at the Great Dionysia in 455, when he was presumably at least 20 years old and may have been as old as 31 or 32. Different ancient traditions place his birth in 480/79 (in some sources, more precisely, on the very day of the Battle of Salamis) or in 485/4 (a coincidence with the first victory of Aeschylus) or one of the two previous years.

His father's name was Mnesarchides (or Mnesarchos) of the deme Phlya (Kekropid tribe), and anecdotes and later cult connect him with Salamis (for his birth, and for the cave in which he is supposed to have isolated himself to compose).

Lyric vs dialogue and the registers of tragic utterance

The alternation of song and speech was basic to the genre of tragedy from its inception. The contrast between sung lyric metres and spoken metres (iambic trimeter, or occasionally trochaic tetrameter) parallels to a large extent the contrast between chorus and actor(s), but crossover does occur. The head-man of the chorus (koryphaios) speaks iambic trimeters, sometimes in a short dialogue with an actor (as Med. 811–19) and sometimes (esp. in couplets) as a pause or articulation after a long speech by an actor (as Med. 520–1, 576–8, 906–7, 1231–2). On a few occasions, other individual members of the chorus speak iambic lines to indicate indecision (as in Aesch. Ag. 1346–71, Eur. Hipp. 782–5). Actors sometimes sing either short exclamatory lyrics (as Medea in 96–167) or an extended aria (as Hippolytus in Hipp. 1347–88). A lyric exchange or lyric dialogue (amoibaion) may involve two actors or the actor(s) and chorus. Both participants in such an exchange may be lyric voices (esp. in a kommos, a quasi-ritual lament, as at the end of Aesch. Pers.), or one voice may be confined to iambic trimeter to provide a calmer counterpoint to the emotion expressed in the other voice's lyrics (as Soph. Ant. 1261–1346; Eur. IT 827–99, Helen 625–97). Sometimes the relative emotional levels of the two voices vary during the scene, as Aesch. Ag. 1072–1177 (where Cassandra's emotion infects the chorus), 1406–1576 (where Clytemnestra first responds in trimeters, then joins in the lyrics).

The Attic tragedians wrote in an artistic literary language which deliberately set itself apart in many ways from colloquial Attic and formal Attic prose, although the language used in the dialogue portions of tragedy is relatively closer to ordinary Attic than that of the lyric portions. When considering the language and style of Euripides, one must be aware of three main levels of differentiation from ‘normal’ (non-poetic) speech. First, in many respects the tragedians are continuing the traditions of high-style poetry and thus they inherit or share forms and constructions found in epic, choral lyric, and other archaic genres. Tragedy's debt to various lyric genres is especially heavy in the choral odes, while messenger speeches tend to feature more prominently certain epicisms. Second, there are distinctive elements of tragic style that seem to be common to all its practitioners, features that one might find in Aeschylus or Sophocles or other tragedians of the fifth century (or even later). Finally, there are the features and mannerisms specific to Euripides himself, some of which represent simply extensions or greater frequency of stylistic features already found in the tradition (such as various forms of verbal repetition), and some of which are more clearly innovative or idiosyncratic (such as the admission of more colloquialisms and the extension of tragic vocabulary through the allowance of additional word-shapes within the iambic trimeter and through greater openness to contemporary intellectual and technical vocabulary).

FRANÇOIS DE CALLIÈres (1645–1717), ambassador and spy during the reign of Louis XIV. His On the Manner of Negotiating with Princes (1716) was written for Philip, duke of Orleans, regent during the minority of Louis XV. Neither the first nor the last of innumerable handbooks of good diplomacy, it ably records the diplomatic ideals of a period in which imperial arrogance had been temporarily replaced by a concern for the principled conduct of foreign affairs.

From On the Manner of Negotiating with Princes

The usefulness of negotiation

To understand the permanent use of diplomacy and the necessity for continual negotiations, we must think of the states of which Europe is composed as being joined together by all kinds of necessary commerce, in such a way that they may be regarded as members of one Republic and that no considerable change can take place in any one of them without affecting the condition, or disturbing the peace, of all the others. The blunder of the smallest of sovereigns may indeed cast an apple of discord among all the greatest Powers, because there is no state so great which does not find it useful to have relations with the lesser states and to seek friends among the different parties of which even the smallest state is composed. History teems with the results of these conflicts which often have their beginnings in small events, easy to control or suppress at their birth, but which when grown in magnitude became the causes of long and bloody wars which have ravaged the principal states of Christendom.

FRIEDRICH LIST (1789–1846), German political economist. A liberal nationalist, List was forced to flee Germany in the 1820s and during his exile in the United States he became acquainted with American ideas on political economy and the protection of “infant industries.” Returning to Germany, he became an advocate of a customs union of the various German states, with a high external tariff. In the following extract from his masterwork, The National System of Political Economy (1841), he explains how free trade is a policy of the strong which works to the advantage of the more advanced economy, using arguments which have been repeated frequently in the last century and a half by opponents of liberal economic theory.

From The National System of Political Economy

Political and cosmopolitical economy

Before Quesnay and the French economists there existed only a practice of political economy which was exercised by the State officials, administrators, and authors who wrote about matters of administration, occupied themselves exclusively with the agriculture, manufactures, commerce, and navigation of those countries to which they belonged, without analysing the causes of wealth, or taking at all into consideration the interests of the whole human race.

Quesnay (from whom the idea of universal free trade originated) was the first who extended his investigations to the whole human race, without taking into consideration the idea of the nation.

ALEXANDER HAMILTON (1757–1804), American statesman and first secretary of the treasury in the federal government established by the constitution of 1789. With James Madison and John Jay, Hamilton authored the series of articles, collectively known as The Federalist (1787–8), exploring and defending the republican principles underlying this constitution. When war broke out between Britain and France after the revolution in France in 1789, Hamilton argued that the new American nation should remain neutral. In Letters of Pacificus (1793), he disputes the popular view that the United States should side with France, arguing that the national interest must come before sympathy with the French as fellow revolutionaries against monarchical rule.

From Letters of Pacificus

France, at the time of issuing the proclamation, was engaged in war with a considerable part of Europe, and likely to be embroiled with almost all the rest, without a single ally in that quarter of the globe.

In such a situation, it is evident, that however she may be able to defend herself at home, of which her factions and internal agitations furnish the only serious doubt, she cannot make external efforts in any degree proportioned to those which can be made against her.

This state of things alone discharges the United States from an obligation to embark in her quarrel.

It is known, that we are wholly destitute of naval force. France, with all the great maritime powers united against her, is unable to supply this deficiency.

DESIDERIUS ERASMUS (1466–1536), Dutch humanist, theologian, and religious reformer. Like other Christian humanists, Erasmus aspired to recapture the spirit of early Christianity by placing the teachings of scripture and of the early church fathers above those of Aquinas and the medieval scholastic tradition. Unlike Luther, however, Erasmus sought to preserve the unity of Christianity by reconciling Protestant ideas with those of the Roman church. His essay on the adage dulce bellum inexpertis, “war is sweet to those who have not tried it,” may be read as a defense of pacifism against the Thomistic doctrine of just war.

From “Dulce Bellum Inexpertis”

Among the choicest proverbs, and widely used in literature, is the adage ‘war is sweet to those who have not tried it.’ Vegetius uses it thus, in his book on the Art of War, III, chapter XIV, ‘Do not be too confident, if a new recruit hankers after war, for it is to the inexperienced that fighting is sweet.’ There is a quotation from Pindar: ‘War is sweet to those who have not tried it, but anyone who knows what it is is horrified beyond measure if he should meet it.’

There are some things in the affairs of men, fraught with dangers and evils of which one can have no idea until one has put them to the test.

JOHN of Paris (c. 1250–1306), an independent-minded theologian, philosopher, and priest in the Dominican order. John's promising career as a teacher of philosophy at the University of Paris was derailed when he was denounced to the authorities for defending the then unorthodox views of Thomas Aquinas. Restored to his position in 1300, he was again embroiled in controversy when he defended the claims the French crown in its conflict with the papacy over the king's right to regulate the church in France. Arguing that royal authority is not derived from that of the church, John concluded that the king was superior to the pope in temporal matters within the realm. His arguments for monarchical authority against the claims of the church strengthened the position of all monarchs against both pope and emperor.

From On Royal and Papal Power

What royal government is and whence it had its origins

In the first place, it is to be understood that a kingdom can be defined thus: a kingdom is the perfected government of a multitude by one person for the sake of the common good.

In connection with this definition, ‘government’ is taken to be the genus, while ‘multitude’ is added in order to differentiate it from government in which each person governs himself, whether by natural instinct (in the manner of brute animals) or by one's own reason (in the case of those who lead a solitary life).