Euripides' Medea has been well served by commentaries. In addition to D. Page's classic (1938) and A. Elliott's school text (1969), we have D. Mastronarde's excellent edition, published a decade before this one (2002). Though clearly in debt to these predecessors (particularly Mastronarde), M. has nevertheless produced an impressive commentary with a distinctive voice, and one which, combined with her prose translation, should prove helpful for students of this popular play.
The Aris and Phillips tragedy series no longer includes S. Barlow's ‘General Introduction’ or any updated version thereof. This is a pity, particularly since M.'s own introduction, though lengthy, gives little information about tragedy as a genre, its performance or Euripides' career. Nor does she provide any extended discussion of the tragic chorus, either in terms of the structure of Medea or regarding its dramatic and musical role in tragedy more generally. Such background is vital if, as C. Collard states in the preface, the intended readership includes students and even sixth-formers. There is, however, the welcome addition of a glossary of various technical and transliterated words.
The introduction covers an admirably wide range of topics: the different forms of the Medea myth; the date and setting of the play, as well as its relation to the other tragedies in the tetralogy (Philoctetes and Dictys); other intertexts, including the Nausicaa episode in the Odyssey; the ways in which the drama manipulates the audience's sympathy for Medea; some aspects of staging, costume and delivery; and the play's reception, particularly in antiquity (she focuses on Seneca's tragedy). M. is inclined to see Euripides' version as his own innovation: the mediocre quality of the extant fragments of Neophron's Medea for her indicate an inferior imitation of Euripides, and she even (contra Mastronarde) questions the existence of a fifth-century Neophron. She also suggests that the version in which the Corinthians killed the children, while clearly alluded to as a possibility in Euripides' play, need not have existed before its production in 431.
Throughout the introduction M. emphasises the ‘ordinariness’ of Medea, and even claims that the apolitical nature of the play underscores the possibility that it ‘could happen anywhere there are men and women’ (p. 12). She might have added that the universal aspect of Medea's character has contributed to the tragedy's popularity on the modern stage, as well as its reception in recent literature. But while Euripides plays down Medea's ethnicity and skills in magic for much of the tragedy, and while her emphasis on her status as a female encourages the chorus' sympathy even as she prepares to commit horrific acts, it is the mix of ordinary and other which makes Medea such an unsettling character (later M. highlights this disturbing mix when commenting on Medea's final appearance as a deus ex machina). M. closely associates Medea's ordinariness with her femininity, and throughout the introduction and the commentary she is at pains to deny her any masculine traits at all. Yet while she may be right to problematise the common tendency to see the obsession with oaths as exclusively male, I think M. goes too far in allowing no gender ambiguity whatsoever, particularly given her emphasis on Medea's ‘multivocal’ quality. I was also surprised to find no discussion of the gender implications of Medea's oratorical skill, nor of the contrast between this and her initial wild cries from within the house, which conform to the typical conceptualisation of female lamentation in Euripidean tragedy.
The text, as well as the hypotheseis and a full apparatus, is reprinted from Diggle's edition (1984). The facing translation is generally clear and straightforward, though the Greek could have occasionally be rendered more literally to avoid confusing a less experienced reader: instead of ‘but ask Creon how my children may be brought up by your hand and not be exiled from this land’ at 939–40, for example, I would suggest keeping the purpose clause in the English, as well as the force of the nominative παῖδες (‘but [as for] the children, so that they might be brought up by your hand, ask Creon that they not be exiled’). I noticed a couple of very minor inconsistencies and one omission: M. usually transliterates the cry of αἰαῖ, but at 1042 translates it, like ϕεῦ, as ‘alas’; in the exchange between Medea and Creon, the adjective σοϕός is translated alternately as ‘clever’ and ‘wise’, so that the significance of its repetition is obscured in the English text; the noun ὁμευνέτης at 952 is not translated. A more serious issue is her translation of 661 as ‘when he has opened the lock of their pure mind’, accompanied by her insistence in the commentary that this line refers to the friend's mind rather than one's own. I think it more probable that the point here is that Jason himself does not reveal his own true character to his friends – the counterfeit coinage metaphor at 516–17 makes such anxiety regarding a concealed interior particularly clear (cf. Theognis 117–24). Another unusual translation choice is at 905, where, like Page, she understands ὄψιν τέρειναν τήνδ’ as referring to the sight of the children rather than Medea's own appearance.
The commentary is very thorough and informative, with references to a wide array of scholarship. M. almost always accepts Diggle's edition of the text; when she does not, as in the case of 1056–80 (Diggle brackets all these lines as interpolated; Mossman defends the authenticity of 1064–77), she gives clear justification for her difference of opinion. Occasionally she provides explanations of grammatical points, but these can seem rather arbitrary. The commentary is divided primarily according to key moments in the play rather than its formal elements. Such a division makes it accessible to students but, combined with the lack of general introduction to tragedy as a genre, gives little sense of the overall structure. On metre M. tends to refer to Mastronarde's edition, though the glossary provides a useful synopsis of particular metrical structures. Occasionally greater explanation of metrical effects might have been helpful, particularly regarding the emotional difference between the anapaests of Medea and those of the Nurse at 96–130. The note here also confusingly states that the Nurse, unlike Medea, chants her lines ‘over music’, even though the presence of the aulos at this point in the play is not in fact clear.
M. provides particularly perceptive notes on the rhythm and stylistic structure of Medea's and Jason's speeches, and demonstrates with clear examples the frequent rhetorical shift between generalisation and individual application. Her lengthier discussions continue to focus on the issue of gender: she denies, for example, not only that Medea's famous statement at 250–1 that she would rather stand in battle three times than give birth once implies any degree of masculinity, but even that it would be shocking for an Athenian audience, since already in epic the pains of war and childbirth are equated (that Medea prefers one over the other is, however, surely significant). M. argues that the first and only time Medea is masculinised is at 1242, when she tells her heart to arm itself (ὁπλίζου). But if we accept (as most do) that a pointed gender contrast is meant in her earlier reference to hoplite warfare, we can more fully see how here she embraces both the male and female spheres, as she turns a theoretical preference into a chilling reality.
The commentary includes useful staging notes, which are for the most part uncontroversial. One exception is her judgement that Medea leaves the stage to poison the gifts at 823 and then reappears at the end of the third stasimon. Though a chorus can, as she notes, address a character who is not on stage during an ode (as in all three stasima of Euripides' Helen, for example), their desperate supplication to Medea here (πρὸς γονάτων σε πάνται / πάντως ἱκετεύομεν, 853–4) nevertheless suggests her presence, even if their attempt to dissuade her from carrying out her murderous plan is futile.
Occasionally I felt that the sheer quantity of information in this edition might overwhelm its more junior readers. But the extensiveness of the commentary is also one of its strengths, and overall this is a good and accessible additional resource for the study of Euripides' Medea.
