Medea's Flight: The Fourth Book of the Argonautica

Abstract

If Medea has attracted more readers to the Argonautica than any other character – thereby also determining which parts of the poem have become generally familiar – she has also provided critics of the poem with their major (sometimes their sole) topic for discussion. The main charge, particularly among critics writing in English, is that the various aspects of Medea – awakening love, deadly magic, fratricide – form neither a consistent nor a credible whole. One quotation, from an article which explicitly aims to summarise recent criticism, may stand as representative: ‘[Medea′s passion] produced an inconsistency [Apollonius] either ignored deliberately in the confidence of his Medea in love, or, just possibly, may not have noticed. The same emotionally immature and helpless Medea is the competent, unfrightened servant of Hecate, the cool instructress of Jason in taming the bulls, the calm soother of the dragon…the behaviour of Medea later in the [fourth] Book is, against all reason, quite untouched by what we would think of as a shattering experience, at the very least destructive of any real trust between her and Jason….It is as if Apollonius has thrown in [Apsyrtus′ murder] without care or realisation of its consequence for the consistency of her character’. Behind criticism of this kind lies both an understandable desire to relate the characters of ancient literature, if not to our own experience, at least to what instinct tells us is possible, and the whole tradition of criticism which descends from the Poetics of Aristotle. In recent years other approaches have gained currency, but in this paper I shall explore the presentation of Medea as a whole (Part I) and particularly of her flight from Colchis (Part II) within a traditional framework in an attempt to clarify what seem to me to be critical misunderstandings.