In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • The Polis in Medea:Urban Attitudes and Euripides' Characterization in Medea 214–224
  • Charles Lloyd

Few entrances in Greek drama are more culturally charged than Medea's first exit from the . In her first speech, Medea tries to evoke sympathy from the chorus of Corinthian women, solicitous of her well-being, and Euripides intends the speech to have a similar effect on his Greek audience with its strong male constituency. In the multiple registers of speech and dramatic action exhibited in her appearance before her Corinthian friends, Euripides allows us to see how thoroughly he has infused Medea's language with the ideas that define the polis. Though Medea is a foreigner, her first few lines (214–224) present us, nevertheless, with an arresting flexibility and adaptability to the Greeks and to their unique social and political creation, the polis. Similarly, her language reveals the kind of adroitness that is characteristic of the sophistication born out of the town life of the fifth-century Greek aristocrat. In its dramatic context, Medea's malleability appears stunning if not demonic, for only moments before, the audience has heard her disconsolate wails, so alarming that they arouse both the chorus' sympathy and fear. These outcries rightly belong only to the restricted private world of the within the . Accordingly, when Medea steps outside shortly afterwards, she presents a cool and calculated affect, and in her speech she, as a woman, discloses a remarkably astute assessment of the essentially male attitudes that make the Greek polis. As Euripides intends, the familiarity of this complex male discourse to both internal and external audiences does, in fact, achieve an initial, necessary, but perhaps fleeting, compassion in them for Medea,1 for through the first lines of this entrance speech, Euripides uncovers political and social ideas that underlie polis life in Athens in the last third of the fifth century, the subject of this study: (I) the centripetal force of the city that pulls the individual often uncomfortably into itself, and two sets of polarities that are in some ways manifestations of this force: (II) and , and (III) rusticity and polis sophistication. [End Page 115]

Euripides' overdetermination of Medea's first, simple dramatic movement underscores that it signifies an important transition, at once disruptive and subversive: Medea walks out of the into the orchestra and then says, "Women of Corinth, I've come out of the house" (, 214).2 Medea moves from the private sphere of the into the public sphere of the polis. As S. C. Humphreys points out,3 the last half of the fifth century marks a growing awareness and widening separation of the public and private domains in Athenian life, and this partition is unmistakably observable in tragedy.4 Margaret Williamson5 clearly distinguishes between Medea's frenzied, angry, and unhappy words offstage in the and her "controlled, abstract, intellectualizing" language outside the , a form of speaking which ancient audiences and today's readers have difficulty separating from the speech of the Greek males in the play. Even the space out of which she steps has been problematized, for it is not the central space of Creon's palace which is closely identified with the center of the polis itself (such identifications of palace with polis almost form tragic topoi), but is "off-center": her is not only feminine and inner and therefore unknowable, but also, because she is , it is at the same time paradoxically "outer and alien."6

Because of her marginalized position as a woman in the Greek polis of Corinth, her first words are necessarily guarded and subtle, and yet they acknowledge social distinctions that the female audience of the chorus and the intended audience of both genders in the theater understand because they are citizens of a polis. Her speech also offers her, as a foreigner, an important first opportunity to speak from the perspective of the insider who she cannot be:

[End Page 116]

7

I've come out of the house, for fear that you would criticize me. I do understand that many are superior, haughty ()8 either privately (out of others' sight) or publicly. Still others because of their quiet ways () get for themselves a reputation...

pdf

Share