Euripides' Medea: The Stranger in the House

Abstract

In his 1978 film A Dream of Passion, the director Jules Dessin revisits the tragedy of Medea. The film juxtaposes and contrasts theater and cinema, ancient and modern, Greek and American, in its exploration of an extended encounter between the characters played by Melina Mercouri a Greek actress performing Euripides' Medea in Athens and Ellen Burstyn an American corporate wife and fundamentalist Christian, imprisoned for having murdered her children, because her husband was having an affair with a Greek woman.1 What remains constant, in the confrontation of the ancient and the contemporary narratives, is the horror of and fascination with a woman who would murder her own children.2 And, further, who would do so out of marital jealousy. This unspeakable crime seems to a modern audience whether of the Dessin film or of the well-received 1982 performance of Robinson Jeffers' translation by Zoe Caldwell and Dame Judith Anderson to be the very essence of Medea's myth, the heart of the legend. It would not have seemed so to Euripides' audience. For the killing of the children appears to have been a Euripidean innovation, explicitly counter to existing versions of Medea's tale. This paper will consider variant versions and aspects of Medea's legend which Euripides does not incorporate into his play; the ways in which that material, nevertheless, is reflected in Euripides' shaping of the myth both narratively and rhetorically; and the ways in which the fifth-century Athenian cultural context may have influenced that shape quite specifically.