Page 17 - GALIET INFINITE MEDEA: Euripides IV

priestess20 and daughter.21 Medea, Athenian and Corinthian cult-ritual initiatrix, is equally essential in Theseus’ and Jason’s heroic and manhood initiation quests. Cultic wise, Medea’s Athenian Delphinion monument celebrates Theseus’ survival from Medea’s assassination attempt. Medea’s cultic Corinthian affinity is stressed in the black-clad Seven Boys-Seven Girls short, annual confinement ritual in a sacred precinct. These ‘aitia’, Graf adds, suggest Artemis-like transition-initiation rituals.22 Just as Medea’s Thesean murder-plot facilitates Theseus’ recognition and princely initiation, her Jasonian help- plot initiates Jason to king and to marriage.
Distancing traces. By analyzing shifting distancing and zooming rhetorical devices in Medea’s tragic narrative and in several Attic and South Italian (“SI”) vase paintings, Sourvinou-Inwood attempts to reconstruct Medea’s complex impact on Athenians. She concludes that Medea, distanced in narrative and strongly distanced in iconography, ultimately explores woman as the barbarian, multifaceted ‘other’: bad woman;23 the antithesis of the female male-ideal defended in Attic epitaphs.24 She further concludes that eastern-dressed
20 In Apollonius’ version.
21 In Dionysius Scytobrachion’s version.
22The initiation rituals referred to are the Athenian Arrhephoroi, the Brauronian bears, or Locrian Maidens and Spartan youths. Graf. 40. This is postulated by Jeanmarie, Henri. Initiation motifs are also posited by Brelich and Segal (monosandalos) and by Propp (quest-tale). Graf, Fritz. “Medea, the Enchantress from Afar: Remarks on a Well-Known Myth”, Ch. 1 in J. Clauss and S.I. Johnston (eds.), Medea: Essays on Medea in Myth, Literature, Philosophy and Art, Princeton 1997: 39-40. 23Sourvinou-Inwood claims that the audience knows that Medea is bad woman in myth and that Euripides activates her distancing.
24In surviving epitaphs, Sourvinou-Inwood informs the male female-ideal to be goodness, self- control, dedication to husband and children, self-sacrifice, due diligence and thriftiness. Sourvinou- Inwood. 254.
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