{"id":25,"date":"2017-06-24T20:36:19","date_gmt":"2017-06-24T20:36:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/suny-geneseo-humanities1-1\/chapter\/the-medea-of-euripides-i\/"},"modified":"2017-07-05T21:39:48","modified_gmt":"2017-07-05T21:39:48","slug":"the-medea-of-euripides-i","status":"web-only","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/suny-geneseo-humanities1-1\/chapter\/the-medea-of-euripides-i\/","title":{"raw":"The Medea of Euripides I","rendered":"The Medea of Euripides I"},"content":{"raw":"
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INTRODUCTION<\/h1>\r\nThe<\/span> Medea<\/i>, in spite of its background of wonder and enchantment, is not a romantic play but a tragedy of character and situation. It deals, so to speak, not with the romance itself, but with the end of the romance, a thing which is so terribly often the reverse of romantic. For all but the very highest of romances are apt to have just one flaw somewhere, and in the story of Jason and Medea the flaw was of a fatal kind.\r\n\r\nThe wildness and beauty of the Argo legend run through all Greek literature, from the mass of Corinthian lays older than our present Iliad, which later writers vaguely associate with the name of Eum\u00ealus, to the Fourth Pythian Ode of Pindar and the beautiful Argonautica of Apollonius Rhodius. Our poet knows the wildness and the beauty; but it is not these qualities that he specially seeks. He takes them almost for granted, and pierces through them to the sheer tragedy that lies below.\r\n\r\nJason, son of Aeson, King of I\u00f4lcos, in Thessaly, began his life in exile. His uncle Pelias had seized his father's kingdom, and Jason was borne away to the mountains by night and given, wrapped in a purple robe, to Chiron, the Centaur. When he reached manhood he came down to I\u00f4lcos to demand, as Pindar tells us, his ancestral honour, and stood in the market-place, a world-famous figure, one-sandalled, with his pard-skin, his two spears and his long hair, gentle and wild and fearless, as the Wise Beast had reared him. Pelias, cowed but loath to yield, promised to give up the kingdom if Jason would make his way to the unknown land of Colchis and perform a double quest. First, if I read Pindar aright, he must fetch back the soul of his kinsman Phrixus, who had died there far from home; and, secondly, find the fleece of the Golden Ram which Phrixus had sacrificed. Jason undertook the quest: gathered the most daring heroes from all parts of Hellas; built the first ship, Argo, and set to sea. After all manner of desperate adventures he reached the land of Ai\u00eat\u00eas, king of the Colchians, and there hope failed him. By policy, by tact, by sheer courage he did all that man could do. But Ai\u00eat\u00eas was both hostile and treacherous. The Argonauts were surrounded, and their destruction seemed only a question of days when, suddenly, unasked, and by the mercy of Heaven, Ai\u00eat\u00eas' daughter, M\u00ead\u00eaa, an enchantress as well as a princess, fell in love with Jason. She helped him through all his trials; slew for him her own sleepless serpent, who guarded the fleece; deceived her father, and secured both the fleece and the soul of Phrixus. At the last moment it appeared that her brother, Absyrtus, was about to lay an ambush for Jason. She invited Absyrtus to her room, stabbed him dead, and fled with Jason over the seas. She had given up all, and expected in return a perfect love.\r\n\r\nAnd what of Jason? He could not possibly avoid taking Medea with him. He probably rather loved her. She formed at the least a brilliant addition to the glory of his enterprise. Not many heroes could\u00a0produce a barbarian princess ready to leave all and follow them in blind trust. For of course, as every one knew without the telling in fifth-century Athens, no legal marriage was possible between a Greek and a barbarian from Colchis.\r\n\r\nAll through the voyage home, a world-wide baffled voyage by the Ister and the Eridanus and the African Syrtes, Medea was still in her element, and proved a constant help and counsellor to the Argonauts. When they reached Jason's home, where Pelias was still king, things began to be different. An ordered and law-abiding Greek state was scarcely the place for the untamed Colchian. We only know the catastrophe. She saw with smothered rage how Pelias hated Jason and was bent on keeping the kingdom from him, and she determined to do her lover another act of splendid service. Making the most of her fame as an enchantress, she persuaded Pelias that he could, by a certain process, regain his youth. He eagerly caught at the hope. His daughters tried the process upon him, and Pelias died in agony. Surely Jason would be grateful now!\r\n\r\nThe real result was what it was sure to be in a civilised country. Medea and her lover had to fly for their lives, and Jason was debarred for ever from succeeding to the throne of I\u00f4lcos. Probably there was another result also in Jason's mind: the conclusion that at all costs he must somehow separate himself from this wild beast of a woman who was ruining his life. He directed their flight to Corinth, governed at the time by a ruler of some sort, whether \"tyrant\" or king, who was growing old and had an only daughter. Creon would naturally want a son-in-law to support and succeed him. And where in all Greece could he find one stronger or more famous than the chief of the Argonauts? If only Medea were not there! No doubt Jason owed her a great debt for her various services. Still, after all, he was not married to her. And a man must not be weak in such matters as these. Jason accepted the princess's hand, and when Medea became violent, found it difficult to be really angry with Creon for instantly condemning her to exile. At this point the tragedy begins.\r\n\r\nThe Medea<\/i> is one of the earliest of Euripides' works now preserved to us. And those of us who have in our time glowed at all with the religion of realism, will probably feel in it many of the qualities of youth. Not, of course, the more normal, sensuous, romantic youth, the youth of Romeo and Juliet<\/i>; but another kind\u2014crude, austere, passionate\u2014the youth of the poet who is also a sceptic and a devotee of truth, who so hates the conventionally and falsely beautiful that he is apt to be unduly ascetic towards beauty itself. When a writer really deficient in poetry walks in this path, the result is purely disagreeable. It produces its best results when the writer, like Euripides or Tolstoy, is so possessed by an inward flame of poetry that it breaks out at the great moments and consumes the cramping theory that would hold it in. One can feel in the Medea<\/i> that the natural and inevitable romance of the story is kept rigidly down. One word about Medea's ancient serpent, two or three references to the Clashing Rocks, one startling flash of light upon the real love of Jason's life, love for the ship Argo, these are almost all the concessions made to us by the merciless delineator of disaster into whose hands we are fallen. Jason is a middle-aged man, with much glory, indeed, and some illusions; but a man entirely set upon building up a great career, to whom love and all its works, though at times he has found them convenient, are for the most part only irrational and disturbing elements in a world which he can otherwise mould to his will. And yet, most cruel touch of all, one feels this man to be the real Jason. It is not that he has fallen from his heroic past. It is that he was really like this always. And so with Medea. It is not only that her beauty has begun to fade; not only that she is set in surroundings which vaguely belittle and weaken her, making her no more a bountiful princess, but only an ambiguous and much criticised foreigner. Her very devotion of love for Jason, now turned to hatred, shows itself to have been always of that somewhat rank and ugly sort to which such a change is natural.\r\n\r\nFor concentrated dramatic quality and sheer intensity of passion few plays ever written can vie with the Medea<\/i>. Yet it obtained only a third prize at its first production; and, in spite of its immense fame, there are not many scholars who would put it among their favourite tragedies. The comparative failure of the first production was perhaps due chiefly to the extreme originality of the play. The Athenians in 432 B.C.<\/span> had not yet learnt to understand or tolerate such work as this, though it is likely enough that they fortified their unfavourable opinion by the sort of criticisms which we still find attributed to Aristotle and Dic\u00e6archus.\r\n\r\nAt the present time it is certainly not the newness of the subject: I do not think it is Aegeus, nor yet the dragon chariot, much less Medea's involuntary burst of tears in the second scene with Jason, that really produces the feeling of dissatisfaction with which many people must rise from this great play. It is rather the general scheme on which the drama is built. It is a scheme which occurs again and again in Euripides, a study of oppression and revenge. Such a subject in the hands of a more ordinary writer would probably take the form of a triumph of oppressed virtue. But Euripides gives us nothing so sympathetic, nothing so cheap and unreal. If oppression usually made people virtuous, the problems of the world would be very different from what they are. Euripides seems at times to hate the revenge of the oppressed almost as much as the original cruelty of the oppressor; or, to put the same fact in a different light, he seems deliberately to dwell upon the twofold evil of cruelty, that it not only causes pain to the victim, but actually by means of the pain makes him a worse man, so that when his turn of triumph comes, it is no longer a triumph of justice or a thing to make men rejoice. This is a grim lesson; taught often enough by history, though seldom by the fables of the poets.\r\n\r\nSeventeen years later than the Medea<\/i> Euripides expressed this sentiment in a more positive way in the Trojan Women<\/i>, where a depth of wrong borne without revenge becomes, or seems for the moment to become, a thing beautiful and glorious. But more plays are constructed like the Medea<\/i>. The Hecuba<\/i> begins with a noble and injured Queen, and ends with her hideous vengeance on her enemy and his innocent sons. In the Orestes<\/i> all our hearts go out to the suffering and deserted prince, till we find at last that we have committed ourselves to the blood-thirst of a madman. In the Electra<\/i>, the workers of the vengeance themselves repent.\r\n\r\nThe dramatic effect of this kind of tragedy is curious. No one can call it undramatic or tame. Yet it is painfully unsatisfying. At the close of the Medea<\/i> I actually find myself longing for a deus ex machin\u00e2<\/i>, for some being like Artemis in the Hippolytus<\/i> or the good Dioscuri of the Electra<\/i>, to speak a word of explanation or forgiveness, or at least leave some sound of music in our ears to drown that dreadful and insistent clamour of hate. The truth is that in this play Medea herself is the dea ex machin\u00e2<\/i>. The woman whom Jason and Creon intended simply to crush has been transformed by her injuries from an individual human being into a sort of living Curse. She is inspired with superhuman force. Her wrongs and her hate fill all the sky. And the judgment pronounced on Jason comes not from any disinterested or peace-making God, but from his own victim transfigured into a devil.\r\n\r\nFrom any such judgment there is an instant appeal to sane human sympathy. Jason has suffered more than enough. But that also is the way of the world. And the last word upon these tragic things is most often something not to be expressed by the sentences of even the wisest articulate judge, but only by the unspoken lacrim\u00e6 rerum<\/i>.\r\n

G. M.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n

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MEDEA<\/h2>\r\n\r\n
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CHARACTERS OF THE PLAY<\/h3>\r\n

Medea<\/span>, daughter of Ai\u00eat\u00eas, King of Colchis<\/i>.<\/p>\r\n

Jason<\/span>, chief of the Argonauts; nephew of Pelias, King of I\u00f4lcos in Thessaly<\/i>.<\/p>\r\n

Creon<\/span>, ruler of Corinth<\/i>.<\/p>\r\n

Aegeus<\/span>, King of Athens<\/i>.<\/p>\r\n

Nurse<\/span> of Medea<\/i>.<\/p>\r\n

Two Children<\/span> of Jason and Medea<\/i>.<\/p>\r\n

Attendant<\/span> on the children<\/i>.<\/p>\r\n

A Messenger.<\/span><\/p>\r\n

Chorus<\/span> of Corinthian Women, with their Leader<\/span>.\r\nSoldiers and Attendants.<\/p>\r\n

The scene is laid in Corinth. The play was first acted when Pythod\u00f4rus was Archon, Olympiad 87, year<\/i> 1 (B.C.<\/span> 431). Euphorion was first, Sophocles second, Euripides third, with Medea, Philoct\u00eates, Dictys, and the Harvesters, a Satyr-play.<\/i><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n

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MEDEA<\/h2>\r\n

The Scene represents the front of<\/i> Medea's<\/span> House in Corinth. A road to the right leads towards the royal castle, one on the left to the harbour. The<\/i> Nurse<\/span> is discovered alone<\/i>.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

Nurse<\/span><\/h3>\r\n
Would God no Argo e'er had winged the seas\r\nTo Colchis through the blue Sympl\u00eagades:\r\nNo shaft of riven pine in P\u00ealion's glen\r\nShaped that first oar-blade in the hands of men\r\nValiant, who won, to save King Pelias' vow,\r\nThe fleece All-golden! Never then, I trow,\r\nMine own princess, her spirit wounded sore\r\nWith love of Jason, to the encastled shore\r\nHad sailed of old I\u00f4lcos: never wrought\r\nThe daughters of King Pelias, knowing not,\r\nTo spill their father's life: nor fled in fear,\r\nHunted for that fierce sin, to Corinth here\r\nWith Jason and her babes. This folk at need\r\nStood friend to her, and she in word and deed\r\nServed alway Jason. Surely this doth bind,\r\nThrough all ill days, the hurts of humankind,\r\nWhen man and woman in one music move.\r\nBut now, the world is angry, and true love\r\nSick as with poison. Jason doth forsake\r\nMy mistress and his own two sons, to make\r\nHis couch in a king's chamber. He must wed:\r\nWed with this Creon's child, who now is head\r\nAnd chief of Corinth. Wherefore sore betrayed\r\nMedea calleth up the oath they made,\r\nThey two, and wakes the clasp\u00e8d hands again,\r\nThe troth surpassing speech, and cries amain\r\nOn God in heaven to mark the end, and how\r\nJason hath paid his debt.\r\nAll fasting now\r\nAnd cold, her body yielded up to pain,\r\nHer days a waste of weeping, she hath lain,\r\nSince first she knew that he was false. Her eyes\r\nAre lifted not; and all her visage lies\r\nIn the dust. If friends will speak, she hears no more\r\nThan some dead rock or wave that beats the shore:\r\nOnly the white throat in a sudden shame\r\nMay writhe, and all alone she moans the name\r\nOf father, and land, and home, forsook that day\r\nFor this man's sake, who casteth her away.\r\nNot to be quite shut out from home . . . alas,\r\nShe knoweth now how rare a thing that was!\r\nMethinks she hath a dread, not joy, to see\r\nHer children near. 'Tis this that maketh me\r\nMost tremble, lest she do I know not what.\r\nHer heart is no light thing, and useth not\r\nTo brook much wrong. I know that woman, aye,\r\nAnd dread her! Will she creep alone to die\r\nBleeding in that old room, where still is laid\r\nLord Jason's bed? She hath for that a blade\r\nMade keen. Or slay the bridegroom and the king,\r\nAnd win herself God knows what direr thing?\r\n'Tis a fell spirit. Few, I ween, shall stir\r\nHer hate unscathed, or lightly humble her.\r\nHa! 'Tis the children from their games again,\r\nRested and gay; and all their mother's pain\r\nForgotten! Young lives ever turn from gloom!<\/div>\r\n

[The<\/i> Children<\/span> and their<\/i> Attendant<\/span> come in<\/i>.]<\/p>\r\n\r\n

Attendant<\/span><\/h3>\r\n
Thou ancient treasure of my lady's room,\r\nWhat mak'st thou here before the gates alone,\r\nAnd alway turning on thy lips some moan\r\nOf old mischances? Will our mistress be\r\nContent, this long time to be left by thee?<\/div>\r\n

Nurse<\/span><\/h3>\r\n
Grey guard of Jason's children, a good thrall\r\nHath his own grief, if any hurt befall\r\nHis masters. Aye, it holds one's heart! . . .\r\nMeseems\r\nI have strayed out so deep in evil dreams,\r\nI longed to rest me here alone, and cry\r\nMedea's wrongs to this still Earth and Sky.<\/div>\r\n

Attendant<\/span><\/h3>\r\n
How? Are the tears yet running in her eyes?<\/div>\r\n

Nurse<\/span><\/h3>\r\n
'Twere good to be like thee! . . . Her sorrow lies\r\nScarce wakened yet, not half its perils wrought.<\/div>\r\n

Attendant<\/span><\/h3>\r\n

Mad spirit! . . . if a man may speak his thought\r\nOf masters mad.\u2014And nothing in her ears\r\nHath sounded yet of her last cause for tears!<\/p>\r\n

[He moves towards the house, but the<\/i> Nurse<\/span> checks him<\/i>.]<\/p>\r\n\r\n

Nurse<\/span><\/h3>\r\n
What cause, old man? . . . Nay, grudge me not one word.<\/div>\r\n

Attendant<\/span><\/h3>\r\n
'Tis nothing. Best forget what thou hast heard.<\/div>\r\n

Nurse<\/span><\/h3>\r\n
Nay, housemate, by thy beard! Hold it not hid\r\nFrom me. . . . I will keep silence if thou bid.<\/div>\r\n

Attendant<\/span><\/h3>\r\n
I heard an old man talking, where he sate\r\nAt draughts in the sun, beside the fountain gate,\r\nAnd never thought of me, there standing still\r\nBeside him. And he said, 'Twas Creon's will,\r\nBeing lord of all this land, that she be sent,\r\nAnd with her her two sons, to banishment.\r\nMaybe 'tis all false. For myself, I know\r\nNo further, and I would it were not so.<\/div>\r\n

Nurse<\/span><\/h3>\r\n
Jason will never bear it--his own sons\r\nBanished,\u2014however hot his anger runs\r\nAgainst their mother!<\/div>\r\n

Attendant<\/span><\/h3>\r\n
Old love burneth low\r\nWhen new love wakes, men say. He is not now\r\nHusband nor father here, nor any kin.<\/div>\r\n

Nurse<\/span><\/h3>\r\n
But this is ruin! New waves breaking in\r\nTo wreck us, ere we are righted from the old!<\/div>\r\n

Attendant<\/span><\/h3>\r\n
Well, hold thy peace. Our mistress will be told\r\nAll in good time. Speak thou no word hereof.<\/div>\r\n

Nurse<\/span><\/h3>\r\n
My babes! What think ye of your father's love?\r\nGod curse him not, he is my master still:\r\nBut, oh, to them that loved him, 'tis an ill\r\nFriend. . . .<\/div>\r\n

Attendant<\/span><\/h3>\r\n
And what man on earth is different? How?\r\nHast thou lived all these years, and learned but now\r\nThat every man more loveth his own head\r\nThan other men's? He dreameth of the bed\r\nOf this new bride, and thinks not of his sons.<\/div>\r\n

Nurse<\/span><\/h3>\r\n
Go: run into the house, my little ones:\r\nAll will end happily! . . . Keep them apart:\r\nLet not their mother meet them while her heart\r\nIs darkened. Yester night I saw a flame\r\nStand in her eye, as though she hated them,\r\nAnd would I know not what. For sure her wrath\r\nWill never turn nor slumber, till she hath . . .\r\nGo: and if some must suffer, may it be\r\nNot we who love her, but some enemy!<\/div>\r\n

Voice<\/span> (within<\/i>)<\/h3>\r\n
Oh shame and pain: O woe is me!\r\nWould I could die in my misery!<\/div>\r\n

[The<\/i> Children<\/span> and the<\/i> Attendant<\/span> go in<\/i>.]<\/p>\r\n\r\n

Nurse<\/span><\/h3>\r\n
\r\n\r\nAh, children, hark! She moves again\r\nHer frozen heart, her sleeping wrath.\r\nIn, quick! And never cross her path,\r\nNor rouse that dark eye in its pain;\r\n\r\nThat fell sea-spirit, and the dire\r\nSpring of a will untaught, unbowed.\r\nQuick, now!\u2014Methinks this weeping cloud\r\nHath in its heart some thunder-fire,\r\n\r\nSlow gathering, that must flash ere long.\r\nI know not how, for ill or well,\r\nIt turns, this uncontrollable\r\nTempestuous spirit, blind with wrong.\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

Voice<\/span> (within<\/i>)<\/h3>\r\n
Have I not suffered? Doth it call\r\nNo tears? . . . Ha, ye beside the wall\r\nUnfathered children, God hate you\r\nAs I am hated, and him, too,\r\nThat gat you, and this house and all!<\/div>\r\n

Nurse<\/span><\/h3>\r\n
\r\n\r\nFor pity! What have they to do,\r\nBabes, with their father's sin? Why call\r\nThy curse on these? . . . Ah, children, all\r\nThese days my bosom bleeds for you.\r\n\r\nRude are the wills of princes: yea,\r\nPrevailing alway, seldom crossed,\r\nOn fitful winds their moods are tossed:\r\n'Tis best men tread the equal way.\r\n\r\nAye, not with glory but with peace\r\nMay the long summers find me crowned:\r\nFor gentleness\u2014her very sound\r\nIs magic, and her usages.\r\n\r\nAll wholesome: but the fiercely great\r\nHath little music on his road,\r\nAnd falleth, when the hand of God\r\nShall move, most deep and desolate.\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

[During the last words the<\/i> Leader<\/span> of the Chorus has entered. Other women follow her.<\/i>]<\/p>\r\n\r\n

Leader<\/span><\/h3>\r\n
I heard a voice and a moan,\r\nA voice of the eastern seas:\r\nHath she found not yet her ease?\r\nSpeak, O ag\u00e8d one.\r\nFor I stood afar at the gate,\r\nAnd there came from within a cry,\r\nAnd wailing desolate.\r\nAh, no more joy have I,\r\nFor the griefs this house doth see,\r\nAnd the love it hath wrought in me.<\/div>\r\n

Nurse<\/span><\/h3>\r\n
There is no house! 'Tis gone. The lord\r\nSeeketh a prouder bed: and she\r\nWastes in her chamber, not one word\r\nWill hear of care or charity.<\/div>\r\n

Voice<\/span> (within<\/i>)<\/h3>\r\n
O Zeus, O Earth, O Light,\r\nWill the fire not stab my brain?\r\nWhat profiteth living? Oh,\r\nShall I not lift the slow\r\nYoke, and let Life go,\r\nAs a beast out in the night,\r\nTo lie, and be rid of pain?<\/div>\r\n

Chorus<\/span><\/h3>\r\n

Some Women<\/h4>\r\n\"O Zeus, O Earth, O Light:\"\r\nThe cry of a bride forlorn\r\nHeard ye, and wailing born\r\nOf lost delight?\r\n\r\nWhy weariest thou this day,\r\nWild heart, for the bed abhorr\u00e8d,\r\nThe cold bed in the clay?\r\nDeath cometh though no man pray,\r\nUngarlanded, un-ador\u00e8d.\r\nCall him not thou.\r\n

If another's arms be now\r\nWhere thine have been,\r\nOn his head be the sin:\r\nRend not thy brow!<\/p>\r\n

All that thou sufferest,\r\nGod seeth: Oh, not so sore\r\nWaste nor weep for the breast\r\nThat was thine of yore.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

Voice<\/span> (within<\/i>)<\/h3>\r\n
Virgin of Righteousness,\r\nVirgin of hallowed Troth,\r\nYe marked me when with an oath\r\nI bound him; mark no less\r\nThat oath's end. Give me to see\r\nHim and his bride, who sought\r\nMy grief when I wronged her not,\r\nBroken in misery,\r\nAnd all her house. . . . O God,\r\nMy mother's home, and the dim\r\nShore that I left for him,\r\nAnd the voice of my brother's blood. . . .<\/div>\r\n

Nurse<\/span><\/h3>\r\n
Oh, wild words! Did ye hear her cry\r\nTo them that guard man's faith forsworn,\r\nThemis and Zeus? . . . This wrath new-born\r\nShall make mad workings ere it die.<\/div>\r\n

Chorus<\/span><\/h3>\r\n

Other Women<\/h4>\r\n

Would she but come to seek\r\nOur faces, that love her well,\r\nAnd take to her heart the spell\r\nOf words that speak?<\/p>\r\n

Alas for the heavy hate\r\nAnd anger that burneth ever!\r\nWould it but now abate,\r\nAh God, I love her yet.\r\nAnd surely my love's endeavour\r\nShall fail not here.<\/p>\r\n

Go: from that chamber drear\r\nForth to the day\r\nLead her, and say, Oh, say\r\nThat we love her dear.<\/p>\r\n

Go, lest her hand be hard\r\nOn the innocent: Ah, let be!\r\nFor her grief moves hitherward,\r\nLike an angry sea.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

Nurse<\/span><\/h3>\r\n
\r\n\r\nThat will I: though what words of mine\r\nOr love shall move her? Let them lie\r\nWith the old lost labours! . . . Yet her eye\u2014\r\nKnow ye the eyes of the wild kine,\r\n\r\nThe lion flash that guards their brood?\r\nSo looks she now if any thrall\r\nSpeak comfort, or draw near at all\r\nMy mistress in her evil mood.\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

[The<\/i> Nurse<\/span> goes into the house<\/i>.]<\/p>\r\n\r\n

Chorus<\/span><\/h3>\r\n

A Woman<\/h4>\r\n
\r\n\r\nAlas, the bold blithe bards of old\r\nThat all for joy their music made,\r\nFor feasts and dancing manifold,\r\nThat Life might listen and be glad.\r\n\r\nBut all the darkness and the wrong,\r\nQuick deaths and dim heart-aching things,\r\nWould no man ease them with a song\r\nOr music of a thousand strings?\r\n\r\nThen song had served us in our need.\r\nWhat profit, o'er the banquet's swell\r\nThat lingering cry that none may heed?\r\nThe feast hath filled them: all is well!\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

Others<\/h3>\r\n
I heard a song, but it comes no more.\r\nWhere the tears ran over:\r\nA keen cry but tired, tired:\r\nA woman's cry for her heart's desired,\r\nFor a traitor's kiss and a lost lover.\r\nBut a prayer, methinks, yet riseth sore\r\nTo God, to Faith, God's ancient daughter\u2014\r\nThe Faith that over sundering seas\r\nDrew her to Hellas, and the breeze\r\nOf midnight shivered, and the door\r\nClosed of the salt unsounded water.<\/div>\r\n

[During the last words<\/i> Medea<\/span> has come out from the house<\/i>.]<\/p>\r\n\r\n

Medea<\/span><\/h3>\r\n
Women of Corinth, I am come to show\r\nMy face, lest ye despise me. For I know\r\nSome heads stand high and fail not, even at night\r\nAlone\u2014far less like this, in all men's sight:\r\nAnd we, who study not our wayfarings\r\nBut feel and cry\u2014Oh we are drifting things,\r\nAnd evil! For what truth is in men's eyes,\r\nWhich search no heart, but in a flash despise\r\nA strange face, shuddering back from one that ne'er\r\nHath wronged them? . . . Sure, far-comers anywhere,\r\nI know, must bow them and be gentle. Nay,\r\nA Greek himself men praise not, who alway\r\nShould seek his own will recking not. . . . But I\u2014\r\nThis thing undreamed of, sudden from on high,\r\nHath sapped my soul: I dazzle where I stand,\r\nThe cup of all life shattered in my hand,\r\nLonging to die\u2014O friends! He, even he,\r\nWhom to know well was all the world to me,\r\nThe man I loved, hath proved most evil.\u2014Oh,\r\nOf all things upon earth that bleed and grow,\r\nA herb most bruised is woman. We must pay\r\nOur store of gold, hoarded for that one day,\r\nTo buy us some man's love; and lo, they bring\r\nA master of our flesh! There comes the sting\r\nOf the whole shame. And then the jeopardy,\r\nFor good or ill, what shall that master be;\r\nReject she cannot: and if he but stays\r\nHis suit, 'tis shame on all that woman's days.\r\nSo thrown amid new laws, new places, why,\r\n'Tis magic she must have, or prophecy\u2014\r\nHome never taught her that\u2014how best to guide\r\nToward peace this thing that sleepeth at her side.\r\nAnd she who, labouring long, shall find some way\r\nWhereby her lord may bear with her, nor fray\r\nHis yoke too fiercely, blessed is the breath\r\nThat woman draws! Else, let her pray for death.\r\nHer lord, if he be wearied of the face\r\nWithindoors, gets him forth; some merrier place\r\nWill ease his heart: but she waits on, her whole\r\nVision enchain\u00e8d on a single soul.\r\nAnd then, forsooth, 'tis they that face the call\r\nOf war, while we sit sheltered, hid from all\r\nPeril!\u2014False mocking! Sooner would I stand\r\nThree times to face their battles, shield in hand,\r\nThan bear one child.\r\nBut peace! There cannot be\r\nEver the same tale told of thee and me.\r\nThou hast this city, and thy father's home,\r\nAnd joy of friends, and hope in days to come:\r\nBut I, being citiless, am cast aside\r\nBy him that wedded me, a savage bride\r\nWon in far seas and left\u2014no mother near,\r\nNo brother, not one kinsman anywhere\r\nFor harbour in this storm. Therefore of thee\r\nI ask one thing. If chance yet ope to me\r\nSome path, if even now my hand can win\r\nStrength to requite this Jason for his sin,\r\nBetray me not! Oh, in all things but this,\r\nI know how full of fears a woman is,\r\nAnd faint at need, and shrinking from the light\r\nOf battle: but once spoil her of her right\r\nIn man's love, and there moves, I warn thee well,\r\nNo bloodier spirit between heaven and hell.<\/div>\r\n

Leader<\/span><\/h3>\r\n
I will betray thee not. It is but just,\r\nThou smite him.\u2014And that weeping in the dust\r\nAnd stormy tears, how should I blame them? . . .\r\nStay:\r\n'Tis Creon, lord of Corinth, makes his way\r\nHither, and bears, methinks, some word of weight.<\/div>\r\n
<\/div>\r\n
[Enter from the right<\/i> Creon<\/span>, the King, with armed Attendants<\/i>.]<\/div>","rendered":"
<\/div>\n

INTRODUCTION<\/h1>\n

The<\/span> Medea<\/i>, in spite of its background of wonder and enchantment, is not a romantic play but a tragedy of character and situation. It deals, so to speak, not with the romance itself, but with the end of the romance, a thing which is so terribly often the reverse of romantic. For all but the very highest of romances are apt to have just one flaw somewhere, and in the story of Jason and Medea the flaw was of a fatal kind.<\/p>\n

The wildness and beauty of the Argo legend run through all Greek literature, from the mass of Corinthian lays older than our present Iliad, which later writers vaguely associate with the name of Eum\u00ealus, to the Fourth Pythian Ode of Pindar and the beautiful Argonautica of Apollonius Rhodius. Our poet knows the wildness and the beauty; but it is not these qualities that he specially seeks. He takes them almost for granted, and pierces through them to the sheer tragedy that lies below.<\/p>\n

Jason, son of Aeson, King of I\u00f4lcos, in Thessaly, began his life in exile. His uncle Pelias had seized his father’s kingdom, and Jason was borne away to the mountains by night and given, wrapped in a purple robe, to Chiron, the Centaur. When he reached manhood he came down to I\u00f4lcos to demand, as Pindar tells us, his ancestral honour, and stood in the market-place, a world-famous figure, one-sandalled, with his pard-skin, his two spears and his long hair, gentle and wild and fearless, as the Wise Beast had reared him. Pelias, cowed but loath to yield, promised to give up the kingdom if Jason would make his way to the unknown land of Colchis and perform a double quest. First, if I read Pindar aright, he must fetch back the soul of his kinsman Phrixus, who had died there far from home; and, secondly, find the fleece of the Golden Ram which Phrixus had sacrificed. Jason undertook the quest: gathered the most daring heroes from all parts of Hellas; built the first ship, Argo, and set to sea. After all manner of desperate adventures he reached the land of Ai\u00eat\u00eas, king of the Colchians, and there hope failed him. By policy, by tact, by sheer courage he did all that man could do. But Ai\u00eat\u00eas was both hostile and treacherous. The Argonauts were surrounded, and their destruction seemed only a question of days when, suddenly, unasked, and by the mercy of Heaven, Ai\u00eat\u00eas’ daughter, M\u00ead\u00eaa, an enchantress as well as a princess, fell in love with Jason. She helped him through all his trials; slew for him her own sleepless serpent, who guarded the fleece; deceived her father, and secured both the fleece and the soul of Phrixus. At the last moment it appeared that her brother, Absyrtus, was about to lay an ambush for Jason. She invited Absyrtus to her room, stabbed him dead, and fled with Jason over the seas. She had given up all, and expected in return a perfect love.<\/p>\n

And what of Jason? He could not possibly avoid taking Medea with him. He probably rather loved her. She formed at the least a brilliant addition to the glory of his enterprise. Not many heroes could\u00a0produce a barbarian princess ready to leave all and follow them in blind trust. For of course, as every one knew without the telling in fifth-century Athens, no legal marriage was possible between a Greek and a barbarian from Colchis.<\/p>\n

All through the voyage home, a world-wide baffled voyage by the Ister and the Eridanus and the African Syrtes, Medea was still in her element, and proved a constant help and counsellor to the Argonauts. When they reached Jason’s home, where Pelias was still king, things began to be different. An ordered and law-abiding Greek state was scarcely the place for the untamed Colchian. We only know the catastrophe. She saw with smothered rage how Pelias hated Jason and was bent on keeping the kingdom from him, and she determined to do her lover another act of splendid service. Making the most of her fame as an enchantress, she persuaded Pelias that he could, by a certain process, regain his youth. He eagerly caught at the hope. His daughters tried the process upon him, and Pelias died in agony. Surely Jason would be grateful now!<\/p>\n

The real result was what it was sure to be in a civilised country. Medea and her lover had to fly for their lives, and Jason was debarred for ever from succeeding to the throne of I\u00f4lcos. Probably there was another result also in Jason’s mind: the conclusion that at all costs he must somehow separate himself from this wild beast of a woman who was ruining his life. He directed their flight to Corinth, governed at the time by a ruler of some sort, whether “tyrant” or king, who was growing old and had an only daughter. Creon would naturally want a son-in-law to support and succeed him. And where in all Greece could he find one stronger or more famous than the chief of the Argonauts? If only Medea were not there! No doubt Jason owed her a great debt for her various services. Still, after all, he was not married to her. And a man must not be weak in such matters as these. Jason accepted the princess’s hand, and when Medea became violent, found it difficult to be really angry with Creon for instantly condemning her to exile. At this point the tragedy begins.<\/p>\n

The Medea<\/i> is one of the earliest of Euripides’ works now preserved to us. And those of us who have in our time glowed at all with the religion of realism, will probably feel in it many of the qualities of youth. Not, of course, the more normal, sensuous, romantic youth, the youth of Romeo and Juliet<\/i>; but another kind\u2014crude, austere, passionate\u2014the youth of the poet who is also a sceptic and a devotee of truth, who so hates the conventionally and falsely beautiful that he is apt to be unduly ascetic towards beauty itself. When a writer really deficient in poetry walks in this path, the result is purely disagreeable. It produces its best results when the writer, like Euripides or Tolstoy, is so possessed by an inward flame of poetry that it breaks out at the great moments and consumes the cramping theory that would hold it in. One can feel in the Medea<\/i> that the natural and inevitable romance of the story is kept rigidly down. One word about Medea’s ancient serpent, two or three references to the Clashing Rocks, one startling flash of light upon the real love of Jason’s life, love for the ship Argo, these are almost all the concessions made to us by the merciless delineator of disaster into whose hands we are fallen. Jason is a middle-aged man, with much glory, indeed, and some illusions; but a man entirely set upon building up a great career, to whom love and all its works, though at times he has found them convenient, are for the most part only irrational and disturbing elements in a world which he can otherwise mould to his will. And yet, most cruel touch of all, one feels this man to be the real Jason. It is not that he has fallen from his heroic past. It is that he was really like this always. And so with Medea. It is not only that her beauty has begun to fade; not only that she is set in surroundings which vaguely belittle and weaken her, making her no more a bountiful princess, but only an ambiguous and much criticised foreigner. Her very devotion of love for Jason, now turned to hatred, shows itself to have been always of that somewhat rank and ugly sort to which such a change is natural.<\/p>\n

For concentrated dramatic quality and sheer intensity of passion few plays ever written can vie with the Medea<\/i>. Yet it obtained only a third prize at its first production; and, in spite of its immense fame, there are not many scholars who would put it among their favourite tragedies. The comparative failure of the first production was perhaps due chiefly to the extreme originality of the play. The Athenians in 432 B.C.<\/span> had not yet learnt to understand or tolerate such work as this, though it is likely enough that they fortified their unfavourable opinion by the sort of criticisms which we still find attributed to Aristotle and Dic\u00e6archus.<\/p>\n

At the present time it is certainly not the newness of the subject: I do not think it is Aegeus, nor yet the dragon chariot, much less Medea’s involuntary burst of tears in the second scene with Jason, that really produces the feeling of dissatisfaction with which many people must rise from this great play. It is rather the general scheme on which the drama is built. It is a scheme which occurs again and again in Euripides, a study of oppression and revenge. Such a subject in the hands of a more ordinary writer would probably take the form of a triumph of oppressed virtue. But Euripides gives us nothing so sympathetic, nothing so cheap and unreal. If oppression usually made people virtuous, the problems of the world would be very different from what they are. Euripides seems at times to hate the revenge of the oppressed almost as much as the original cruelty of the oppressor; or, to put the same fact in a different light, he seems deliberately to dwell upon the twofold evil of cruelty, that it not only causes pain to the victim, but actually by means of the pain makes him a worse man, so that when his turn of triumph comes, it is no longer a triumph of justice or a thing to make men rejoice. This is a grim lesson; taught often enough by history, though seldom by the fables of the poets.<\/p>\n

Seventeen years later than the Medea<\/i> Euripides expressed this sentiment in a more positive way in the Trojan Women<\/i>, where a depth of wrong borne without revenge becomes, or seems for the moment to become, a thing beautiful and glorious. But more plays are constructed like the Medea<\/i>. The Hecuba<\/i> begins with a noble and injured Queen, and ends with her hideous vengeance on her enemy and his innocent sons. In the Orestes<\/i> all our hearts go out to the suffering and deserted prince, till we find at last that we have committed ourselves to the blood-thirst of a madman. In the Electra<\/i>, the workers of the vengeance themselves repent.<\/p>\n

The dramatic effect of this kind of tragedy is curious. No one can call it undramatic or tame. Yet it is painfully unsatisfying. At the close of the Medea<\/i> I actually find myself longing for a deus ex machin\u00e2<\/i>, for some being like Artemis in the Hippolytus<\/i> or the good Dioscuri of the Electra<\/i>, to speak a word of explanation or forgiveness, or at least leave some sound of music in our ears to drown that dreadful and insistent clamour of hate. The truth is that in this play Medea herself is the dea ex machin\u00e2<\/i>. The woman whom Jason and Creon intended simply to crush has been transformed by her injuries from an individual human being into a sort of living Curse. She is inspired with superhuman force. Her wrongs and her hate fill all the sky. And the judgment pronounced on Jason comes not from any disinterested or peace-making God, but from his own victim transfigured into a devil.<\/p>\n

From any such judgment there is an instant appeal to sane human sympathy. Jason has suffered more than enough. But that also is the way of the world. And the last word upon these tragic things is most often something not to be expressed by the sentences of even the wisest articulate judge, but only by the unspoken lacrim\u00e6 rerum<\/i>.<\/p>\n

G. M.<\/p>\n

\n

MEDEA<\/h2>\n
\n

CHARACTERS OF THE PLAY<\/h3>\n

Medea<\/span>, daughter of Ai\u00eat\u00eas, King of Colchis<\/i>.<\/p>\n

Jason<\/span>, chief of the Argonauts; nephew of Pelias, King of I\u00f4lcos in Thessaly<\/i>.<\/p>\n

Creon<\/span>, ruler of Corinth<\/i>.<\/p>\n

Aegeus<\/span>, King of Athens<\/i>.<\/p>\n

Nurse<\/span> of Medea<\/i>.<\/p>\n

Two Children<\/span> of Jason and Medea<\/i>.<\/p>\n

Attendant<\/span> on the children<\/i>.<\/p>\n

A Messenger.<\/span><\/p>\n

Chorus<\/span> of Corinthian Women, with their Leader<\/span>.
\nSoldiers and Attendants.<\/p>\n

The scene is laid in Corinth. The play was first acted when Pythod\u00f4rus was Archon, Olympiad 87, year<\/i> 1 (B.C.<\/span> 431). Euphorion was first, Sophocles second, Euripides third, with Medea, Philoct\u00eates, Dictys, and the Harvesters, a Satyr-play.<\/i><\/p>\n

\n

 <\/p>\n

MEDEA<\/h2>\n

The Scene represents the front of<\/i> Medea’s<\/span> House in Corinth. A road to the right leads towards the royal castle, one on the left to the harbour. The<\/i> Nurse<\/span> is discovered alone<\/i>.<\/p>\n

Nurse<\/span><\/h3>\n
Would God no Argo e’er had winged the seas
\nTo Colchis through the blue Sympl\u00eagades:
\nNo shaft of riven pine in P\u00ealion’s glen
\nShaped that first oar-blade in the hands of men
\nValiant, who won, to save King Pelias’ vow,
\nThe fleece All-golden! Never then, I trow,
\nMine own princess, her spirit wounded sore
\nWith love of Jason, to the encastled shore
\nHad sailed of old I\u00f4lcos: never wrought
\nThe daughters of King Pelias, knowing not,
\nTo spill their father’s life: nor fled in fear,
\nHunted for that fierce sin, to Corinth here
\nWith Jason and her babes. This folk at need
\nStood friend to her, and she in word and deed
\nServed alway Jason. Surely this doth bind,
\nThrough all ill days, the hurts of humankind,
\nWhen man and woman in one music move.
\nBut now, the world is angry, and true love
\nSick as with poison. Jason doth forsake
\nMy mistress and his own two sons, to make
\nHis couch in a king’s chamber. He must wed:
\nWed with this Creon’s child, who now is head
\nAnd chief of Corinth. Wherefore sore betrayed
\nMedea calleth up the oath they made,
\nThey two, and wakes the clasp\u00e8d hands again,
\nThe troth surpassing speech, and cries amain
\nOn God in heaven to mark the end, and how
\nJason hath paid his debt.
\nAll fasting now
\nAnd cold, her body yielded up to pain,
\nHer days a waste of weeping, she hath lain,
\nSince first she knew that he was false. Her eyes
\nAre lifted not; and all her visage lies
\nIn the dust. If friends will speak, she hears no more
\nThan some dead rock or wave that beats the shore:
\nOnly the white throat in a sudden shame
\nMay writhe, and all alone she moans the name
\nOf father, and land, and home, forsook that day
\nFor this man’s sake, who casteth her away.
\nNot to be quite shut out from home . . . alas,
\nShe knoweth now how rare a thing that was!
\nMethinks she hath a dread, not joy, to see
\nHer children near. ‘Tis this that maketh me
\nMost tremble, lest she do I know not what.
\nHer heart is no light thing, and useth not
\nTo brook much wrong. I know that woman, aye,
\nAnd dread her! Will she creep alone to die
\nBleeding in that old room, where still is laid
\nLord Jason’s bed? She hath for that a blade
\nMade keen. Or slay the bridegroom and the king,
\nAnd win herself God knows what direr thing?
\n‘Tis a fell spirit. Few, I ween, shall stir
\nHer hate unscathed, or lightly humble her.
\nHa! ‘Tis the children from their games again,
\nRested and gay; and all their mother’s pain
\nForgotten! Young lives ever turn from gloom!<\/div>\n

[The<\/i> Children<\/span> and their<\/i> Attendant<\/span> come in<\/i>.]<\/p>\n

Attendant<\/span><\/h3>\n
Thou ancient treasure of my lady’s room,
\nWhat mak’st thou here before the gates alone,
\nAnd alway turning on thy lips some moan
\nOf old mischances? Will our mistress be
\nContent, this long time to be left by thee?<\/div>\n

Nurse<\/span><\/h3>\n
Grey guard of Jason’s children, a good thrall
\nHath his own grief, if any hurt befall
\nHis masters. Aye, it holds one’s heart! . . .
\nMeseems
\nI have strayed out so deep in evil dreams,
\nI longed to rest me here alone, and cry
\nMedea’s wrongs to this still Earth and Sky.<\/div>\n

Attendant<\/span><\/h3>\n
How? Are the tears yet running in her eyes?<\/div>\n

Nurse<\/span><\/h3>\n
‘Twere good to be like thee! . . . Her sorrow lies
\nScarce wakened yet, not half its perils wrought.<\/div>\n

Attendant<\/span><\/h3>\n

Mad spirit! . . . if a man may speak his thought
\nOf masters mad.\u2014And nothing in her ears
\nHath sounded yet of her last cause for tears!<\/p>\n

[He moves towards the house, but the<\/i> Nurse<\/span> checks him<\/i>.]<\/p>\n

Nurse<\/span><\/h3>\n
What cause, old man? . . . Nay, grudge me not one word.<\/div>\n

Attendant<\/span><\/h3>\n
‘Tis nothing. Best forget what thou hast heard.<\/div>\n

Nurse<\/span><\/h3>\n
Nay, housemate, by thy beard! Hold it not hid
\nFrom me. . . . I will keep silence if thou bid.<\/div>\n

Attendant<\/span><\/h3>\n
I heard an old man talking, where he sate
\nAt draughts in the sun, beside the fountain gate,
\nAnd never thought of me, there standing still
\nBeside him. And he said, ‘Twas Creon’s will,
\nBeing lord of all this land, that she be sent,
\nAnd with her her two sons, to banishment.
\nMaybe ’tis all false. For myself, I know
\nNo further, and I would it were not so.<\/div>\n

Nurse<\/span><\/h3>\n
Jason will never bear it–his own sons
\nBanished,\u2014however hot his anger runs
\nAgainst their mother!<\/div>\n

Attendant<\/span><\/h3>\n
Old love burneth low
\nWhen new love wakes, men say. He is not now
\nHusband nor father here, nor any kin.<\/div>\n

Nurse<\/span><\/h3>\n
But this is ruin! New waves breaking in
\nTo wreck us, ere we are righted from the old!<\/div>\n

Attendant<\/span><\/h3>\n
Well, hold thy peace. Our mistress will be told
\nAll in good time. Speak thou no word hereof.<\/div>\n

Nurse<\/span><\/h3>\n
My babes! What think ye of your father’s love?
\nGod curse him not, he is my master still:
\nBut, oh, to them that loved him, ’tis an ill
\nFriend. . . .<\/div>\n

Attendant<\/span><\/h3>\n
And what man on earth is different? How?
\nHast thou lived all these years, and learned but now
\nThat every man more loveth his own head
\nThan other men’s? He dreameth of the bed
\nOf this new bride, and thinks not of his sons.<\/div>\n

Nurse<\/span><\/h3>\n
Go: run into the house, my little ones:
\nAll will end happily! . . . Keep them apart:
\nLet not their mother meet them while her heart
\nIs darkened. Yester night I saw a flame
\nStand in her eye, as though she hated them,
\nAnd would I know not what. For sure her wrath
\nWill never turn nor slumber, till she hath . . .
\nGo: and if some must suffer, may it be
\nNot we who love her, but some enemy!<\/div>\n

Voice<\/span> (within<\/i>)<\/h3>\n
Oh shame and pain: O woe is me!
\nWould I could die in my misery!<\/div>\n

[The<\/i> Children<\/span> and the<\/i> Attendant<\/span> go in<\/i>.]<\/p>\n

Nurse<\/span><\/h3>\n
\n

Ah, children, hark! She moves again
\nHer frozen heart, her sleeping wrath.
\nIn, quick! And never cross her path,
\nNor rouse that dark eye in its pain;<\/p>\n

That fell sea-spirit, and the dire
\nSpring of a will untaught, unbowed.
\nQuick, now!\u2014Methinks this weeping cloud
\nHath in its heart some thunder-fire,<\/p>\n

Slow gathering, that must flash ere long.
\nI know not how, for ill or well,
\nIt turns, this uncontrollable
\nTempestuous spirit, blind with wrong.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Voice<\/span> (within<\/i>)<\/h3>\n
Have I not suffered? Doth it call
\nNo tears? . . . Ha, ye beside the wall
\nUnfathered children, God hate you
\nAs I am hated, and him, too,
\nThat gat you, and this house and all!<\/div>\n

Nurse<\/span><\/h3>\n
\n

For pity! What have they to do,
\nBabes, with their father’s sin? Why call
\nThy curse on these? . . . Ah, children, all
\nThese days my bosom bleeds for you.<\/p>\n

Rude are the wills of princes: yea,
\nPrevailing alway, seldom crossed,
\nOn fitful winds their moods are tossed:
\n‘Tis best men tread the equal way.<\/p>\n

Aye, not with glory but with peace
\nMay the long summers find me crowned:
\nFor gentleness\u2014her very sound
\nIs magic, and her usages.<\/p>\n

All wholesome: but the fiercely great
\nHath little music on his road,
\nAnd falleth, when the hand of God
\nShall move, most deep and desolate.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

[During the last words the<\/i> Leader<\/span> of the Chorus has entered. Other women follow her.<\/i>]<\/p>\n

Leader<\/span><\/h3>\n
I heard a voice and a moan,
\nA voice of the eastern seas:
\nHath she found not yet her ease?
\nSpeak, O ag\u00e8d one.
\nFor I stood afar at the gate,
\nAnd there came from within a cry,
\nAnd wailing desolate.
\nAh, no more joy have I,
\nFor the griefs this house doth see,
\nAnd the love it hath wrought in me.<\/div>\n

Nurse<\/span><\/h3>\n
There is no house! ‘Tis gone. The lord
\nSeeketh a prouder bed: and she
\nWastes in her chamber, not one word
\nWill hear of care or charity.<\/div>\n

Voice<\/span> (within<\/i>)<\/h3>\n
O Zeus, O Earth, O Light,
\nWill the fire not stab my brain?
\nWhat profiteth living? Oh,
\nShall I not lift the slow
\nYoke, and let Life go,
\nAs a beast out in the night,
\nTo lie, and be rid of pain?<\/div>\n

Chorus<\/span><\/h3>\n

Some Women<\/h4>\n

“O Zeus, O Earth, O Light:”
\nThe cry of a bride forlorn
\nHeard ye, and wailing born
\nOf lost delight?<\/p>\n

Why weariest thou this day,
\nWild heart, for the bed abhorr\u00e8d,
\nThe cold bed in the clay?
\nDeath cometh though no man pray,
\nUngarlanded, un-ador\u00e8d.
\nCall him not thou.<\/p>\n

If another’s arms be now
\nWhere thine have been,
\nOn his head be the sin:
\nRend not thy brow!<\/p>\n

All that thou sufferest,
\nGod seeth: Oh, not so sore
\nWaste nor weep for the breast
\nThat was thine of yore.<\/p>\n

Voice<\/span> (within<\/i>)<\/h3>\n
Virgin of Righteousness,
\nVirgin of hallowed Troth,
\nYe marked me when with an oath
\nI bound him; mark no less
\nThat oath’s end. Give me to see
\nHim and his bride, who sought
\nMy grief when I wronged her not,
\nBroken in misery,
\nAnd all her house. . . . O God,
\nMy mother’s home, and the dim
\nShore that I left for him,
\nAnd the voice of my brother’s blood. . . .<\/div>\n

Nurse<\/span><\/h3>\n
Oh, wild words! Did ye hear her cry
\nTo them that guard man’s faith forsworn,
\nThemis and Zeus? . . . This wrath new-born
\nShall make mad workings ere it die.<\/div>\n

Chorus<\/span><\/h3>\n

Other Women<\/h4>\n

Would she but come to seek
\nOur faces, that love her well,
\nAnd take to her heart the spell
\nOf words that speak?<\/p>\n

Alas for the heavy hate
\nAnd anger that burneth ever!
\nWould it but now abate,
\nAh God, I love her yet.
\nAnd surely my love’s endeavour
\nShall fail not here.<\/p>\n

Go: from that chamber drear
\nForth to the day
\nLead her, and say, Oh, say
\nThat we love her dear.<\/p>\n

Go, lest her hand be hard
\nOn the innocent: Ah, let be!
\nFor her grief moves hitherward,
\nLike an angry sea.<\/p>\n

Nurse<\/span><\/h3>\n
\n

That will I: though what words of mine
\nOr love shall move her? Let them lie
\nWith the old lost labours! . . . Yet her eye\u2014
\nKnow ye the eyes of the wild kine,<\/p>\n

The lion flash that guards their brood?
\nSo looks she now if any thrall
\nSpeak comfort, or draw near at all
\nMy mistress in her evil mood.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

[The<\/i> Nurse<\/span> goes into the house<\/i>.]<\/p>\n

Chorus<\/span><\/h3>\n

A Woman<\/h4>\n
\n

Alas, the bold blithe bards of old
\nThat all for joy their music made,
\nFor feasts and dancing manifold,
\nThat Life might listen and be glad.<\/p>\n

But all the darkness and the wrong,
\nQuick deaths and dim heart-aching things,
\nWould no man ease them with a song
\nOr music of a thousand strings?<\/p>\n

Then song had served us in our need.
\nWhat profit, o’er the banquet’s swell
\nThat lingering cry that none may heed?
\nThe feast hath filled them: all is well!<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Others<\/h3>\n
I heard a song, but it comes no more.
\nWhere the tears ran over:
\nA keen cry but tired, tired:
\nA woman’s cry for her heart’s desired,
\nFor a traitor’s kiss and a lost lover.
\nBut a prayer, methinks, yet riseth sore
\nTo God, to Faith, God’s ancient daughter\u2014
\nThe Faith that over sundering seas
\nDrew her to Hellas, and the breeze
\nOf midnight shivered, and the door
\nClosed of the salt unsounded water.<\/div>\n

[During the last words<\/i> Medea<\/span> has come out from the house<\/i>.]<\/p>\n

Medea<\/span><\/h3>\n
Women of Corinth, I am come to show
\nMy face, lest ye despise me. For I know
\nSome heads stand high and fail not, even at night
\nAlone\u2014far less like this, in all men’s sight:
\nAnd we, who study not our wayfarings
\nBut feel and cry\u2014Oh we are drifting things,
\nAnd evil! For what truth is in men’s eyes,
\nWhich search no heart, but in a flash despise
\nA strange face, shuddering back from one that ne’er
\nHath wronged them? . . . Sure, far-comers anywhere,
\nI know, must bow them and be gentle. Nay,
\nA Greek himself men praise not, who alway
\nShould seek his own will recking not. . . . But I\u2014
\nThis thing undreamed of, sudden from on high,
\nHath sapped my soul: I dazzle where I stand,
\nThe cup of all life shattered in my hand,
\nLonging to die\u2014O friends! He, even he,
\nWhom to know well was all the world to me,
\nThe man I loved, hath proved most evil.\u2014Oh,
\nOf all things upon earth that bleed and grow,
\nA herb most bruised is woman. We must pay
\nOur store of gold, hoarded for that one day,
\nTo buy us some man’s love; and lo, they bring
\nA master of our flesh! There comes the sting
\nOf the whole shame. And then the jeopardy,
\nFor good or ill, what shall that master be;
\nReject she cannot: and if he but stays
\nHis suit, ’tis shame on all that woman’s days.
\nSo thrown amid new laws, new places, why,
\n‘Tis magic she must have, or prophecy\u2014
\nHome never taught her that\u2014how best to guide
\nToward peace this thing that sleepeth at her side.
\nAnd she who, labouring long, shall find some way
\nWhereby her lord may bear with her, nor fray
\nHis yoke too fiercely, blessed is the breath
\nThat woman draws! Else, let her pray for death.
\nHer lord, if he be wearied of the face
\nWithindoors, gets him forth; some merrier place
\nWill ease his heart: but she waits on, her whole
\nVision enchain\u00e8d on a single soul.
\nAnd then, forsooth, ’tis they that face the call
\nOf war, while we sit sheltered, hid from all
\nPeril!\u2014False mocking! Sooner would I stand
\nThree times to face their battles, shield in hand,
\nThan bear one child.
\nBut peace! There cannot be
\nEver the same tale told of thee and me.
\nThou hast this city, and thy father’s home,
\nAnd joy of friends, and hope in days to come:
\nBut I, being citiless, am cast aside
\nBy him that wedded me, a savage bride
\nWon in far seas and left\u2014no mother near,
\nNo brother, not one kinsman anywhere
\nFor harbour in this storm. Therefore of thee
\nI ask one thing. If chance yet ope to me
\nSome path, if even now my hand can win
\nStrength to requite this Jason for his sin,
\nBetray me not! Oh, in all things but this,
\nI know how full of fears a woman is,
\nAnd faint at need, and shrinking from the light
\nOf battle: but once spoil her of her right
\nIn man’s love, and there moves, I warn thee well,
\nNo bloodier spirit between heaven and hell.<\/div>\n

Leader<\/span><\/h3>\n
I will betray thee not. It is but just,
\nThou smite him.\u2014And that weeping in the dust
\nAnd stormy tears, how should I blame them? . . .
\nStay:
\n‘Tis Creon, lord of Corinth, makes his way
\nHither, and bears, methinks, some word of weight.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
[Enter from the right<\/i> Creon<\/span>, the King, with armed Attendants<\/i>.]<\/div>\n\n\t\t\t
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Candela Citations<\/h3>\n\t\t\t\t\t
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Public domain content<\/div>