Recognition

As a means of evaluating Medea's character, this paper also explores the close relationship that Seneca envisages between performance, identity and recognition. I have chosen to concentrate on recognition scenes because these moments provide crucial insight into how Seneca's characters construct their own and others' sense of self. Recognition in dramatic texts is an event that draws attention to issues of characterisation, motivation, psychology and typology; it is a moment when questions of identity are brought to the fore.

Moreover, this connection between anagnōrisis and character is part of recognition's status as ‘a peculiarly dramatic device’.Footnote ⁵ Recognition belongs to drama more than to any other literary genre, the reason being that it implicates a character's identity in precisely the same way that theatrical performance implicates an actor's. When performers assume a role, they not only destabilise their own identity – at least in the eyes of others – but they also raise the far more troubling possibility that all human selfhood is precariously fluid. This possibility arises from the actor's skill in editing, rehearsing and developing behaviour so that it appears seamless and convincing.Footnote ⁶ Such self-fashioning belies to some extent the idea of naturally unified identity, and when skilled theatrical performers portray an image of unified selfhood, they paradoxically reveal that selfhood to be a construct and its image to be an illusion. The issue, therefore, is not merely that actors engage in contrived conduct, but that their professional activity blends the categories of ‘natural’ and ‘contrived’, and prevents any simple distinction between ‘reality’ and ‘fiction’, ‘person’ and ‘character’.

It follows that the anxiety attendant upon anagnōrisis in ancient drama reflects the ontological anxiety surrounding actors themselves. Recognition in dramatic performance typically attempts to dispel the threat of problematic selfhood by generating a sense of resolution and declaring the newly revealed or more fully apprehended identity to be true and correct. Ion is restored to himself when Creusa recognises his birth tokens; Oedipus is likewise restored to himself, albeit unhappily, when he uncovers the truth about Laius' killer; Sophocles' Orestes reveals himself to Electra at the conclusion of an elaborate performance in which he has earlier gone so far as to announce his own death.Footnote ⁷ In every case, the formerly deceptive or mistaken identity is pronounced a momentary aberration rejected in favour of a more fundamental, and presumably natural, kind of selfhood. Against the actor's protean qualities, recognition scenes champion the claims of birth, family ties and inherent characteristics. Even when they occur in the middle of a play's action, such scenes constitute moments of resolution and stability, so much so that they feature increasingly as a denouement in ancient drama; it is no coincidence that all of Seneca's recognition scenes take place at the ends of his plays.Footnote ⁸

Thus, the traditional recognition scene in Greek and Roman drama is a moment that pivots upon revelation, as characters either uncover a previously misapprehended identity, or realise more fully the capacities of an individual they have hitherto underestimated. As Aristotle defines it, the central principle of recognition scenes is change (μεταβολή, Poetics 11 1452a31), whether that change applies to largely external circumstances, like social status and family relationships, or internal ones, such as a character's ethos and sense of self. The act of anagnōrisis is, typically, a turning point that resolves uncertainties, reveals secrets and clarifies misunderstandings.Footnote ⁹ Seneca, however, handles the recognition scene of his Medea in a unique way, treating it as a moment in which identity, far from being altered or rediscovered, is instead amplified and thereby validated. Genuine and constructed selfhood are not incompatible in Seneca's view, with the result that his characters engage in performance as a means of self-realisation. They approach recognition as the final stage in a steady and inherently theatrical process of moral and psychological development, which they pursue over the course of an entire play. In the words of Brian Hook, ‘Senecan self-presentation does not operate as self-revelation as much as self-confirmation.’Footnote ¹⁰

Consequent to its focus on identity, anagnōrisis may be said to delineate character in two main ways: as an implied human personality and as a textual construct.Footnote ¹¹ The duality is confirmed by the act of recognition itself, which on the one hand draws attention to a character's selfhood, and to the confluence of actor and character (as we have seen), and, on the other hand, emphasises a character's status as a fabricated dramatic entity. While the mimetic or representational aspect of recognition deals with a character's ethos – and, behind it, a performer's ethos – the semiotics of recognition treat that ethos as an assemblage of textual information. In semiotic terms, the act of recognising means interpreting correctly the signs that indicate a given character's identity – the marks on Oedipus' body, the tokens kept in Ion's box. Terence Cave notes that scenes of recognition become ‘a focus for reflection on the way fictions as such are constituted’.Footnote ¹² They can resemble processes of reading and writing, as characters and audience alike are called upon to analyse the symbols displayed before them and to organise those symbols into some kind of coherent whole. Such ‘textual recognition’ (as I shall call it) often occurs at the expense of ‘ethical recognition’ and vice versa, since highlighting one requires us to dismiss or minimise the other. We may read a character either as a quasi-human or as a literary entity; the two rarely coincide. But Seneca's recognition scenes do present one example of this rare coincidence: the figures involved in them construct their identities in terms that are simultaneously meta-poetic and moral, literary and personal.

Medea's meta-theatre

The final exchange between Jason and Medea begins with Medea standing on the roof of her house, accompanied by one child and carrying the body of the other in her arms. In defiance of Jason's pleas, she kills the second son, climbs into an airborne chariot and throws the children's bodies down to their father, declaring: ‘Do you recognise your wife? | This is how I usually escape’ (coniugem agnoscis tuam? | sic fugere soleo, Med. 1021–2).Footnote ¹³ At first glance, the question seems meta-theatrical, and this is how it has most often been interpreted.Footnote ¹⁴ By asking Jason whether he recognises her, Seneca's Medea highlights her status as a dramatic character that has performed the same story in Euripides' and Ennius' dramas, and probably in Ovid's lost tragedy as well.Footnote ¹⁵ Seneca's use of agnoscere supports this meta-theatrical interpretation, not only because of its self-reflexive presence in a recognition scene, but also because, as Stephen Hinds has shown, Latin poets often used the verb to signify their allusions to earlier writers.Footnote ¹⁶ Agnoscere denotes an open practice of poetic appropriation, as in Seneca the Elder's remark that Ovid lifted phrases from Vergil non subripiendi causa, sed palam mutuandi, hoc animo ut uellet agnosci (‘not for the sake of stealing, but of borrowing openly, with the intent that it be recognised’, Suas. 3.7).Footnote ¹⁷ If we grant that Seneca too employs the verb in this way, then Medea's question to Jason doubles as the playwright's question to his audience members, prompting them to recall other literary versions of Medea and to judge how the current one compares. With the phrase sic fugere soleo, Seneca's Medea may also be referring to her departure from the scene in an airborne chariot, an act that likewise occurs at the end of Euripides.Footnote ¹⁸ Like agnoscis, soleo can function as an ‘Alexandrian footnote’, signalling the literary tradition that informs Medea's current behaviour.Footnote ¹⁹ The overall effect of Medea's question, on this reading, is to widen as much as possible the gap between intra- and extra-dramatic levels of recognition: the audience comprehends who Medea is because the audience has read Euripides, Ennius and Ovid, while Jason, presumably, has not.

It is also tempting to infer from Medea's combination of soleo and agnoscis a reference to the visual dimension of theatre, whereby any given scene may reproduce aspects of other, preceding, performances. This argument must remain speculative, given the lack of evidence for Seneca's plays ever being staged during his lifetime. Yet, even if Seneca's Medea was not performed in front of a first-century AD Roman audience, the visual qualities of its final scene – Medea above in a chariot, Jason below on the ground – could still be understood as replicating the visual qualities of Euripides' version. And, in the unknowable event that Seneca's tragedy was actually performed during his lifetime, Medea's agnoscis would surely encourage the audience to recognise this visual parallel.Footnote ²⁰ Such ‘optical allusion’ – as Robert Cowan has dubbed the technique – is not uncommon in ancient drama, a famous example being Aristophanes' use of the mechanē in the Peace (80–179) to parody Euripides' Bellerophon (frr. 306–8).Footnote ²¹ It would, of course, be even more meta-theatrical to evoke such visual recollection in the context of an actual recognition scene.Footnote ²²

Performance and recognition in Seneca's Stoicism

Seneca's Medea emerges from the preceding interpretation as a self-consciously theatrical construct, a literary entity assembled from earlier texts and a dramatic role embodied by earlier performers. Yet her status as a dramatis persona does not preclude her from occupying equal status as an implied human personality. In fact, her ‘textual’ and ‘ethical’ identity overlap in this scene because, by drawing attention to previous dramatic versions of herself, Medea invites the audience to see in her current behaviour the degree of self-coherence necessary for creating a stable, recognisable ethos.Footnote ²³ Medea is who she is because she behaves in keeping with the requirements of her role and thereby enables others to perceive a link between her deeds and her nature.Footnote ²⁴ Seneca discusses precisely this idea at the end of Epistle 120; he does so, moreover, in terms that cannot fail to evoke the dramatic tradition of recognition scenes:

The central idea in this passage concerns self-coherence: Seneca advises Lucilius that he must behave in a consistent manner if he wishes to render himself recognisable to others.Footnote ²⁵ Coming at the end of Seneca's extended theatrical analogy, the word adgnosci suggests the concluding function of many recognition scenes. Yet, contrary to most dramatic practice, Lucilius' true identity is established not through revelation, but through steady confirmation. The recognition that Seneca envisages in Epistle 120 involves no unveiling of a previously unsuspected identity; rather, Lucilius is understood and acknowledged as the person he has always, consistently been. Likewise, when Seneca declares at the beginning of Epistle 31, ‘I recognise my Lucilius’ (agnosco Lucilium meum), he means that Lucilius is now fulfilling the promise he had previously displayed (incipit, quem promiserat, exhibere, Ep. 31.1). Lucilius has not suddenly altered his character, but has simply come closer to perfecting a disposition to which he aspires.Footnote ²⁶ The same may be said of Seneca's Medea, who seeks recognition for an identity she has been developing, steadily and cold-bloodedly, over the entire course of her play. Medea has not changed her personality in the tragedy's final few lines, nor has she revealed a new aspect of herself; she has merely amplified and perfected a role she has long desired to play.

Medea's self-fashioning is most apparent in the way she cites her own name at critical points in the tragedy. Although her illeism has already attracted considerable scholarly attention, it is worth reviewing briefly here, in order to show how Medea uses it to ensure her self-coherence.Footnote ²⁷ Compared to Euripides' heroine, who utters her own name on only one occasion (Eur. Med. 402), Seneca's does so seven times: ‘Medea remains’ (Medea superest, 166); ‘Medea is a greater fear than these things’ (est et his maior metus | Medea, 516–17); ‘Medea does not compel you’ (nec … te … | Medea cogit, 523–4); ‘undertake whatever Medea can do’ (incipe | quidquid Medea potest, 566–7); ‘now I am Medea’ (Medea nunc sum, 910). She even begins the play by invoking deities ‘whom it is more right for Medea to call upon’ (quosque Medeae magis | fas est precari, 8–9); later, she rationalises that her children's crime is having Medea for a mother (et maius scelus | Medea mater, 933–4); when the Nurse uses Medea's name to command her attention, the heroine famously replies, ‘I shall become’ (Nut. Medea— Med. Fiam, 171). The cumulative effect of all this self-naming is that Medea's conduct becomes a process of self-construction in which the protagonist knows her role and strives to live up to it.Footnote ²⁸ Like Lucilius in Epistle 120, Seneca's Medea tries as much as possible to remain ‘in character’. She performs herself both in the literal sense of acting a dramatic part and in the figurative sense of developing a stable, recognisable identity. Her behaviour throughout the play is simultaneously meta-theatrical and quasi-Stoic; her self-citation alludes to her previous appearances in drama, and in literature more generally, at the same time as it emphasises continuity between her past, present and future actions.

Medea's fiam at line 171 is a particularly telling example of this overlap between meta-theatrical and Stoic versions of her identity. On the one hand, the word conveys Medea's awareness of her own literary past and presents her behaviour as a model derived from earlier poetry. In fact, it confirms Medea's already paradigmatic status via allusion to Hypsipyle's remark in Heroides 6.151, Medeae Medea forem (‘I would have been a Medea to Medea’).Footnote ²⁹ On the other hand, fiam evokes not just textual identity, but a slow and deliberate process of ethical self-construction. Medea will ‘become’ Medea because she will ‘be made’ into Medea: the verb's passive force connotes a quintessentially Senecan Stoic project of self-reform, one that splits the individual into moral agent and malleable object. Seneca uses the verb in a similar manner at De ira 2.10.6, when he declares, ‘no one is born a wise man but is made such’ (neminem nasci sapientem sed fieri). Interpreted alongside such evidence, Medea's promise to work upon and thereby achieve an ideal version of herself begins to sound like a distinctly Stoic goal. Her ethical identity is no less consciously constructed, and no less paradigmatic, than her textual one.

Medea's self-citation is also quasi-Stoic in the way it leads her to resemble an actor. Just as a theatrical performer adopts a part and endeavours subsequently to maintain it, so does Medea strive to bridge the gap between her current self and her ideal role. In this regard, too, her behaviour relates to Seneca's advice in Epistle 120, where the main point of the theatrical analogy is to associate people with stage performers.Footnote ³⁰ According to Seneca, most individuals change their masks frequently (mutamus subinde personam), but the wise man plays just a single role, that of himself (unum hominem agere). Thus, far from claiming that all acting is inherently deceptive, Seneca allows the possibility that consistent performance will in fact establish and enhance genuine selfhood. His idea most likely rests on Stoic persona-theory, in which people are understood to perform roles that merge with and thereby display normative aspects of their identity.Footnote ³¹ The main proponents of this theory, Panaetius and Cicero,Footnote ³² hold that human selfhood comprises four distinct facets or personae, each of which must be observed according to what befits it.Footnote ³³ Tailoring one's conduct to one's persona is the ethical equivalent of achieving a seamless performance: both activities require an outwardly directed display of self-coherence intended to guarantee recognisable identity; actor and character are assumed ultimately to coalesce. Further, the theatrical metaphor of Stoic persona-theory shares with actual dramatic performance an interest in the conscious construction of identity, emphasising choice and deliberate self-fashioning over any notion of unalterably in-born character. In all of these respects Stoic persona-theory maps neatly onto the behaviour of Seneca's Medea: she understands in advance the crucial aspects of her character and develops her conduct accordingly; she aims at self-coherence; she presents herself simultaneously as dramatis persona and actor; and she fashions her identity at a pitch of self-consciousness unsurpassed by any other Senecan protagonist. The persona resulting from Medea's actions may not be the slightest bit Stoic, but the means used to create it are.

Self-coherence

One does not have to look far in Seneca's tragedy to find evidence of Medea's consummate ability to ‘play one person’ (unum hominem agere). So unvarying are the traits she exhibits throughout the play that many of her final deeds are alluded to as early as her opening monologue. To some extent, this is a standard Senecan technique, whereby the tragedies' initial scenes hint obliquely and ironically at events the audience knows will occur by the plays' end.Footnote ³⁴ Yet the parallels between Medea's first speech and final actions are so close that they suggest a greater than usual effort on Seneca's part to link the two scenes. For instance, Medea proclaims darkly that she has ‘given birth to her revenge’ (parta iam, parta ultio est: | peperi, 25–6), and resumes the metaphor when she remarks, ‘a home born through crime must be abandoned through crime’ (quae scelere parta est, scelere linquenda est domus, 55). Further hints of infanticide lurk in Medea's exhortation to ‘seek a path to revenge through the vitals themselves' (per uiscera ipsa quaere supplicio uiam, 40), referring in this instance to the entrails of a sacrificial animal, but also anticipating the murder of her offspring, and perhaps even evoking her later claim to search out with a sword any child still hiding in her uiscera (in matre si quo pignus etiamnunc latet | scrutabor ense uiscera et ferro extraham, 1112–13).Footnote ³⁵ The Medea of the opening monologue even asserts that greater crimes befit her after becoming a mother (maiora iam me scelera post partus decent, 50), a remark that foreshadows both her infanticide and the source of her perfected identity. Thus, the character Medea envisages for herself at the tragedy's outset is the same one that she exhibits at its end. If recognition of her capacities comes as no surprise that is not just because the audience already knows her story, but also because she has pursued the kind of coherent self-presentation designed to ensure other people's acknowledgement of her identity. Medea, like the Stoic sage, does not change her mask.

Just as Medea's eventual infanticide is apparent from her opening monologue, so too is her flight from the stage in an airborne chariot, since as part of her initial complaint, Medea appeals to her ancestor, the Sun, to ‘entrust [her] with the reins, and allow [her] to guide the fiery steeds with blazing straps’ (committe habenas, genitor, et flagrantibus | ignifera loris tribue moderari iuga, 33–4). It is a standard feature of recognition scenes that they connect the past with the present, usually by recalling events that happened offstage in a time prior to the drama's beginning: Aeschylus' Electra recognises the cloth she wove for baby Orestes; Oedipus discovers himself by tracing his origins back to the moment his parents exposed him.Footnote ³⁶ In Seneca's Medea, however, the past recalled most strongly in the recognition scene is the protagonist's initial monologue; this opening speech glances forward to the drama's end where it is fully reified. The result, again, is that Medea's assertion of selfhood involves no act of revelation: past and present have been joined seamlessly, with no intervening period in which Medea's character has deviated – or been seen to deviate – from its true form.

Medea's relentless pursuit of a behavioural ideal also emerges from her use of the word decent in line 50 (maiora iam me scelera post partus decent, quoted above). Deliberately or not, this verb evokes the Stoic concept of decorum, which describes the beauty and harmony resulting from appropriate, self-coherent conduct.Footnote ³⁷ Significantly, decorum is closely related to notions of self-performance, as the following passage from Cicero's De officiis demonstrates:

Cicero's advice has much in common with the end of Seneca's Epistle 120: both texts compare people to actors; both stress the need for individuals to remain consistent within their chosen roles. Where Seneca warns against changing masks, Cicero cautions people not to exchange their characteristics for others' that may not suit them (nec uelle experiri quam se aliena deceant; id enim maxime quemque decet quod est cuiusque maxime). On this analysis, achieving decorum is the equivalent of ‘playing one person’. Although Medea's actions are far from being examples of Stoic morality, it could hardly be said of her that she does not know her own nature and does not cleave to what befits her. In a phrase that resembles Cicero's injunction for each man to know his own natural disposition (suum quisque noscat ingenium), Seneca's Medea declares, ‘now I am Medea; my disposition has grown through evils' (Medea nunc sum; creuit ingenium malis, 910).Footnote ³⁸ Too limited to signal a direct allusion, the parallel points instead to the fact that these two texts articulate similar sets of ideas. By citing the same concept as Cicero, Medea illustrates the extent of her self-knowledge and consciously monitored conduct: her decorum may be deeply disturbing, but it is decorum all the same.

Furthermore, Medea's decorum is textual as well as ethical, because the term denotes not just appropriate behaviour, but also literary appropriateness.Footnote ³⁹ Horace in the Ars poetica, for instance, uses decet to describe the fit between style and genre (singula quaeque locum teneant sortita decentem, ‘let each individual thing, allotted, keep to its appropriate place’, Ars P. 92), or the way a character's words harmonise with his or her emotions (tristia maestum | uoltum uerba decent, iratum plena minarum; ‘sad words suit a sorrowful face, threating words an angry one’, Ars P. 105–6). Viewed against this background, Medea's aspiration to commit suitable crimes becomes a meta-literary and, more narrowly, meta-theatrical statement that draws attention to her conduct as a fabricated dramatic character. The link between textual and ethical identity is closer still, because meta-theatricality helps the audience comprehend Medea's self-consistency: only if we know Medea's story in advance can we truly appreciate the uniformity of her conduct.Footnote ⁴⁰ The semantic range of decet is yet another indication of how Medea's quasi-Stoic identity blends into her literary one and vice versa.

Medea and the sapiens

It may seem odd, at first, to attribute quasi-Stoic behaviour to Seneca's Medea, a woman in the grip of passion and plotting a terrible revenge. It can and has been argued that Medea's identity actually disintegrates over the course of the play.Footnote ⁴¹ If one takes the Stoic position, broadly stated, that nature equals virtue, then Seneca's Medea can hardly be said to live in accordance with her own nature, let alone Nature with a capital ‘N’. If, as Seneca asserts, nobody except the sapiens can succeed in ‘playing the role of one man’, does Medea's submission to ira and furor mean that she fluctuates and must, by definition, be inconsistent?

There is no easy answer to this question. Recent work by Shadi Bartsch and Christopher Star has demonstrated how deeply Stoic notions of selfhood permeate Seneca's tragedies, to the extent that Seneca's dramatis personae employ Stoic methods of self-construction to vastly un-Stoic ends.Footnote ⁴² In a related vein, Roy Gibson has shown how Ovid spots and playfully slips through loopholes in Cicero's theory of appropriate behaviour.Footnote ⁴³ The conduct of Seneca's Medea could likewise be regarded as illustrating potential contradictions at the heart of Cicero's and Seneca's ethical theory, since emphasis on self-consistency leaves open the slim possibility of people persevering in wickedness, and emphasis laid upon fitting behaviour – quid decet – can surely lead to individuals perpetrating further crimes on the basis that such action suits their moral make-up.Footnote ⁴⁴ In addition, the theatrical metaphor of Stoic persona-theory leaves little if any room between the role and the person: if you are your persona, what happens when the most appropriate persona for you is Medea, or Atreus?Footnote ⁴⁵ An approach to selfhood that relies so much on dramatic analogies inevitably runs into problems when placed in actual drama. Seneca's Medea does exhibit the irrational, passionate behaviour that brands her the antithesis of the sapiens, yet she also displays a remarkable ability to monitor and fashion her conduct along Stoic lines.

Such an impasse need not imply that Seneca intended to criticise in his tragedies principles he had preached elsewhere;Footnote ⁴⁶ the cause is subtler than that, and may well lie not (or not only) in the potential conflicts of philosophy, but in Seneca's vocabulary. Because Seneca conceives of identity and morality in Stoic terms, he uses his arsenal of distinctly Stoic language to describe people and their morals, regardless of whether those people are real or fictive. In the case of his Medea, acts of self-exhortation, her desire to achieve a goal and, consequently, to arrive at a version of herself, must all be conveyed in broadly Stoic vocabulary because this, for Seneca, is the definitive way of portraying identity, judgement and action. The uniformity of Seneca's style across his philosophical and dramatic oeuvre leads to friction between artistry and ethics, but that friction may not be entirely intentional on Seneca's part.

A clear example of this stylistic overlap is Seneca's Cato who, in the De providentia, behaves in almost exactly the same manner as Seneca's Medea.Footnote ⁴⁷ The Cato portrayed in this text cites his own name as a means of ensuring that his impending suicide fits the reputation he has so far assumed: ‘Cato has a way out’ (Cato qua exeat habet, Prov. 2.10); ‘this sword will grant Cato the freedom it was not able to grant the fatherland’ (ferrum istud … libertatem, quam patriae non potuit, Catoni dabit, 2.10); ‘for Cato, seeking death at another's hands is as disgraceful as seeking life’ (tam turpe est Catoni mortem ab ullo petere quam uitam, 2.10). Like Medea, Cato envisages his self as a role from which he should not deviate; he treats his past identity as a paradigm for future conduct. He even refers explicitly to the concept of decorum when he defines death by another's hand as ‘a compact with fate that does not suit [his] greatness’ (fati conuentio … quae non deceat magnitudinem nostram, Prov. 2.10).Footnote ⁴⁸ The evident parallels between Cato and Medea generate difficulties for Seneca's ethical theory: while Cato puts his precepts to a relatively innocuous purpose and ends up being applauded for his constantia, Medea adopts the same attitudes as a means of accomplishing her revenge. The outcome depends upon which character one chooses to maintain.

Another crucial point to emerge from Medea and Cato's resemblance is that invoking one's own name does not have to be meta-theatrical. Although Cato's death is certainly dramatic, and although Seneca frames the episode as a ‘spectacle worthy for a god to gaze upon’ (spectaculum dignum ad quod respiciat … deus, Prov. 2.9), Cato is performing himself as an ethical rather than intrinsically theatrical role, as a person rather than as a character.Footnote ⁴⁹ It stands to reason that Seneca's Medea can be doing precisely the same thing.

Recognition without revelation

Seneca's heroine fashions herself so consciously and consistently that the audience ends up recognising a figure it has known all along. Jason, we may assume, also recognises his wife's ethical identity, since it is difficult to imagine his responding to her question with anything other than ‘yes’.Footnote ⁵⁰ Of course, Jason's knowledge is not quite the same as the audience's, because his recognition of Medea involves painful realisation of his own errors, a mild form of Aristotle's peripeteia. What Jason experiences in the tragedy's final scene is a moment of re-appraising and re-knowing (hence: ana-gnōrisis) a person he knew before, but whom he had seriously underestimated.Footnote ⁵¹ Forcing Jason to this new level of comprehension is certainly one of Medea's aims, but it is a less important one than having Jason contribute to her own self-construction. Above all, Medea wants Jason to validate her achievement: when he arrives to witness her final act of murder, Medea calls him a spectator (993) and declares that she has wasted any crimes committed outside his presence (quidquid sine isto fecimus sceleris perit, 994).Footnote ⁵² Besides being meta-theatrical and deeply sadistic, this desire for an audience is a symptom of Medea's careful self-fashioning, since, as Seneca and Cicero both imply, consistent conduct must be seen in order to be recognised.Footnote ⁵³ If people are equated with actors, it follows that their deeds are supposed to be on display. Thus, Medea expects acknowledgement from Jason; her final exchange with him hinges on the authorising rather than revelatory function of recognition. Anagnōrisis in this instance does not involve unmasking or disclosure, but continuity and, thus, corroboration.

Likewise, when Medea declares, ‘this is how I usually escape’ (sic fugere soleo, 1022), she pushes Jason to acknowledge continuity between her past and present conduct. We have seen already how the statement may refer specifically to Medea's leaving the stage in a serpent-drawn chariot, but it can just as easily signify her habit of committing murders before she flees.Footnote ⁵⁴ Slaughter and escape are two events that recur, paired, throughout Medea's story: she dismembers her brother, Absyrtus, as she sails from Colchis; she destroys Pelias before departing Thessaly; she leaves behind in Corinth the bodies of Creon, Creusa and her own two children. Seneca stresses throughout the play this repetition inherent in Medea's story, and he draws particular attention to the killing of Absyrtus because the act provides a precedent for Medea's impending infanticide. Just as Medea will kill the second child in Jason's presence, so she recalls Absyrtus' death being ‘thrust in his father's face’ (funus ingestum patri, 132); similarly, she treats the slaughter of her own children as a warped form of payment for her brother's murder (956–7, 969–71, 982). Imagery of dismemberment is also used to connect the two events: when Medea in her final monologue urges her own children to embrace her – ‘and join with me your limbs poured over mine’ (et infusos mihi | coniungite artus, 946–7) – her stilted and sinister language evokes the several references she has already made to Absyrtus' limbs (47–8, 912), while infusos recalls the blood she has shed elsewhere (funestum impie | quam saepe fudi sanguinem, 134–5; quaeque fraternus cruor | perfudit arua, 452–3).Footnote ⁵⁵ Pelias' death, too, involves dismemberment and thus forms part of this nexus (133–4, 475–6). The overall effect of these associations is to demonstrate that Medea has always performed the kinds of actions she will perform again by the end of this play. Not just the external audience, but Jason too, as Medea's internal audience, is called upon to recognise the uniformity of her behaviour.

Medea alludes to that uniformity even in Jason's presence; the first words she speaks to him in the entire play are, ‘I have fled, Jason, I am fleeing. Changing abodes is nothing new, but the reason for flight is new: I used to flee on your behalf’ (fugimus, Iason, fugimus. hoc non est nouum, | mutare sedes; causa fugiendi noua est: | pro te solebam fugere , 447–9).Footnote ⁵⁶ Her language here is almost identical to her statement in the recognition scene – sic fugere soleo – which, notably, comprises her final speech to Jason. Close correspondence between the two passages hints at an equivalent correspondence between Medea's past and present action. Once again, Medea prompts Jason to acknowledge the behavioural patterns that have long since defined her character. Such is Medea's desire to stress continuity and self-coherence that she does not ask Jason ‘Do you recognise me?’, but instead phrases her question so that it invites Jason to acknowledge in her precisely the woman he once married: coniugem agnoscis tuam? (‘Do you recognise your wife?’, 1021). Medea has not, will never, change.Footnote ⁵⁷

Recognition without reunion

The self-construction that Medea pursues so relentlessly in this play comes at the expense of everything else. Whereas conventional recognition scenes tend to involve a renewal of family relationships, Seneca's Medea achieves the opposite, namely, she seeks acknowledgement for her ability to destroy interpersonal ties.Footnote ⁵⁸ Her request that Jason recognise her as his wife plays ironically on the ideas of reunion and legitimacy germane to anagnōrisis in both tragic and comic plotlines. As Simon Goldhill remarks, recognitions typically reassert and also authorise relationships between people: Electra regains her brother; Ion reclaims his status as Creusa's child; Oedipus learns simultaneously his true parentage and the socio-sexual boundaries he has unwittingly crossed.Footnote ⁵⁹ The results are even more pronounced in New Comedy and comoedia palliata, where long-lost children are recovered and status issues resolved so that long-term lovers are finally able to unite; anagnōrisis brings with it the prospect of restoring order to previously incomplete, incorrect or unbalanced collectivities.Footnote ⁶⁰ Seneca's Medea, however, longs to cut all social ties, and the profusion of family terms used by Seneca throughout the tragedy only serves to emphasise his heroine's ruinous pursuit of isolation and autonomy.

One example is Medea's obsessive desire to be acknowledged as Jason's wife.Footnote ⁶¹ She begins her tragedy by invoking the ‘gods of marriage and you, Lucina, guardian of the marriage-bed’ (di coniugales tuque genialis tori, | Lucina, custos, 1–2), and refers to herself as coniunx far more frequently than other characters in the play do.Footnote ⁶² Like the Medea of Ovid's Heroides, she focuses on her dowry and on the impossible process of restitution she feels that Jason ought to perform as a consequence of their ‘divorce’: ‘My fatherland fell to you, my brother, father, modesty. I married you with this dowry; give the fugitive back what is hers' (tibi patria cessit, tibi pater frater pudor | hac dote nupsi; redde fugienti sua, 487–8).Footnote ⁶³ Her opening speech even includes the bitter wish that Jason's future sufferings will make his marriage to her seem a blessing in retrospect: ‘Let him long for me as his wife’ (me coniugem optet, 22).Footnote ⁶⁴ In fact, the wish verges on paradox, because having Jason long for her as his wife is precisely what Medea wants at this early point in the drama. Yet she also wants to achieve her identity by destroying family ties so that Jason no longer has any wife at all.

The same paradoxical tension underlies her final request for Jason's recognition: Medea wants Jason to claim her and no other in the role of his wife, but she also wants to confirm that she has abolished all of that role's actual, social requirements. The verb agnoscere itself articulates this conflict because it can refer specifically to legitimisation and family reunion, as is often the case in descriptions of parents legally recognising their offspring: quem ille natum non agnouerat, eundem moriens suum esse dixerat (‘He had not acknowledged him as a son, but declared him so on his deathbed’, Nep. Ag. 1.4); expositum qui agnouerit, solutis alimentis recipiat (‘A father who recognises a son exposed in infancy should take him back only after having paid for his upbringing’, Quint. Inst. 7.1.14). Placed alongside these examples, Medea's request for recognition evokes familial restoration and the resumption of social duties: Jason is called upon to recognise Medea's spousal status in a legal as well as emotional sense, even while Medea's vengeful acts have precluded the possibility of reunion.Footnote ⁶⁵ Thus, Seneca's recognition scene hints at, only to deny, the renewal that anagnōrisis typically brings. Confirmation of Medea's identity prevents rather than generates social reintegration.

Such allusions to reunification haunt the final exchange between Jason and Medea as if to remind the audience of other, happier versions of dramatic recognition. For example, when Jason arrives on stage, Medea describes the culmination of her revenge as a moment that reverses time and reinstates her as a virginal Colchian princess:Footnote ⁶⁶

Medea's assertion is a hyperbolic reflection of the customary events of recognition scenes, in which brothers really are united with sisters, and fathers with children. Even Medea's perversely gleeful reminder that this is Jason's wedding day (o nuptialem!) conjures, obliquely, the love matches that tend to conclude New Comic and comoedia palliata plots.Footnote ⁶⁷ Moreover, with Creusa now dead by Medea's hand, the heroine's exultant o nuptialem articulates her own, sole claim to be Jason's wife; it hints, bitterly, at the resumption of social relationships so often dependent on acts of anagnōrisis.

In like manner, Jason's acceptance of his sons' bodies seems to build upon, almost to parody, the convention of parent–child recognition that pervades earlier drama. The event is facilitated by Medea herself, who differs from Euripides' heroine in her lack of concern for her children's burial (cf. Eur. Med. 1378–83).Footnote ⁶⁸ Rather than carrying the corpses with her, Seneca's Medea leaves them for Jason, declaring sarcastically, ‘Now take back your sons, as their parent’ (recipe iam natos parens, 1024). Comparable language of restitution and recovery is used to describe family reunions in comoedia palliata, as in Plautus' Captiui, when Hegio thanks the gods for ‘giving back and restoring’ his son (quom te redducem tuo patri reddiderunt, 923),Footnote ⁶⁹ or in Terence's Hecyra, when the courtesan Bacchis reveals Myrrina's background story and, as a direct consequence, restores to Pamphilus both his son and his spouse (gnatum ei restituo …, | uxorem … reddo; ‘I return his son to him … I give back his wife’, 818–19). The parallels in vocabulary suggest a further, structural, similarity: like the fathers of Roman comedy, Jason takes part in a recognition scene in which he is granted the opportunity to acknowledge and reclaim his children. The verb recipere may even suggest the legitimising function of anagnōrisis since it, along with agnoscere, features in the legal maxim reported by Quintilian (Inst. 7.1.14 recipiat, quoted above). Thus, Medea's language in this final exchange pushes Jason, however ironically, to assume an authorising, paternal role in relation to the family he has disrupted. Seneca's handling of the scene draws attention to the reintegration and social harmony so often consequent upon acts of recognition, making their absence from his tragedy all the more acute. The paradox for Seneca's Medea is that self-coherence and consequent recognisability entail the kind of crimes that will destroy any chance of a family reunion. Acting in the role of Jason's wife leads Medea, ultimately, to be a wife in name only. Likewise, she leaves Jason in the purely nominal position of parens.