Combat Trauma and Psychological Injury in Euripides’ Medea

Introduction

In his groundbreaking work, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character, Jonathan Shay provides an interpretive framework that illuminates the utility of ancient Greek poetry for understanding battle trauma and PTSD. Shay, who served for two decades as a staff psychiatrist in the Boston Department of Veterans Affairs Outpatient Clinic, argues that combat trauma in both the Iliad and the Vietnam War can be explained with similar etiologies.¹ Shay assesses the “tragedy” of the undoing of Achilles’ character and of markedly similar psychological injuries among his Vietnam-era patients, and lays the groundwork for using Greek epic and tragedy as a narrative means of promoting soldiers’ revisitation and examination of their own traumatic experience.²

In this paper I extend Shay’s reading of the Iliad to Euripides’ Medea, performed on the eve of the Peloponnesian War in 431 BCE. Although Euripides does not cast a male soldier as its protagonist, the play depicts Medea as suffering from the background trauma, betrayal, isolation, and consequent symptoms that Shay has attributed to combat veterans with lasting psychological injuries. Since Euripides’ Medea is a complex figure that involves frequent conflations of antithetical characteristics (martial and maternal, masculine and feminine, Greek and barbarian), I will necessarily focus upon some important attributes to the relative neglect of others.³ However, this examination is not intended to dismiss or replace other productive readings of the drama, nor is this model proposed as the final word on Medea’s martial-heroic aspect. In approaching the tension between Medea’s martial and maternal aspects with a model of combat trauma, I instead hope to open familiar scholarly controversies and discussions of the play to a novel and illuminating interpretive framework that takes account of Medea as a devoted warrior who suffers traumatic hardships in her experiences with and betrayal by Jason.

In my discussion of the play, I look first to the fundamental ways in which Medea’s character and self-conception reflect those of an epic warrior and exist in conflict with her maternal aspect and with typical Greek notions of femininity; this permits us a close comparison of Medea to a martial combatant. Next, I apply Shay’s etiology of lasting psychological injury to Medea, with particular emphasis on traumatic experience in Medea’s background, the betrayal of ‘what’s right’ (θέμις), loss of a special comrade-in-arms, and the identifiable symptoms of the ‘berserk’ state. I then discuss Medea’s ‘divided self’ and her disturbing filicide in terms of the growing turmoil between her martial and maternal aspects—a conflict that can be explained by the emergence of persistent combat mobilization and hypervigilance that characterize PTSD and lasting psychological injury. I conclude with a tentative proposal of the play’s invitation to revisit and evaluate traumatic experience in a civic and socially inclusive context. Before we undertake an analysis of combat trauma in Medea, let us take a brief look at the composition of the City Dionysia’s audience in the late fifth century BCE, as this will help illustrate the applicability of this model in Medea’s social and cultural context.

Citizen-Soldiers in the Audience

A substantial proportion of Medea’s audience in 431 BCE would have been comprised of adult male citizens of Athens, likely organized in the Theater of Dionysus into thirteen kerkides or ‘wedges,’ ten of which were occupied by the ten traditional tribes of Attica; the middle wedge was allotted to members of the year’s boulê and ephebes, while the outer two were occupied by noncitizens.⁴ The City Dionysia’s audience served as an immediate and primary target group for which the tragedians composed their dramas.⁵ Experience in battle made up a crucial aspect of the lives of the festival’s male Athenian spectators, and this study will deal largely with Medea’s appeal to the sizable portion of the audience composed of these combat veterans. Additionally, David Roselli (2011) has cogently argued for the importance of noncitizen audience members in understanding theater dynamics at the City Dionysia, and resident aliens’ probable contribution to Athens’ military...