Page 18 - GALIET INFINITE MEDEA: Euripides IV

Medea25 best evokes Euripides’ play while Greek-dressed Medea least evokes it.
In Sourvinou-Inwood’s view, shifting and zooming devices play on the audience’s misogyny or philogyny. Medea’s negative distancing from ‘normal-woman model’ is constantly reactivated in the play when she is portrayed instigating Pelias’ patricide (6-10), betraying her natal land and killing her brother for Jason’s sake (31-35), loathing and macabrely killing Princess Glauce and her sons (791-810), deceiving King Aegeus by plotting Theseus’ murder (749-51),26 fore-bearing the Medes (1377-1388) and escaping just punishment (1405- 14). Medea is furthest from the audience after Jason’s ‘non- Greek’ and ‘Scylla-like’ dart points and after her god power point of instituting a festival (1378-88). By contrast, scorned Medea is plus-plus-clapped and zoomed when portrayed as the obedient, loyal wife of Jason, the victim of a faithless and opportunistic husband (17-29) earning the chorus’ and Aegeus’ pity for Jason’s perfidy and infidelity (131 and 749-51), the favoured of the gods who flees despite Jason’s yearning for divine retribution (261, 1371 and 1414).
25The depictions in ca. 400 Lucanian hydria (i) and Lucanian Cleveland bell krater (ii) are closest to Euripides’ Medea. In both vases, according to S. Inwood, Medea is distanced due to her
supernatural aura and due to her wearing oriental tiara and stroke and lozenge patterned sleeves, respectively. By contrast, The Apulian amphora Naples Museum Nazionale 81954 (vi) least evokes Euripides’ Medea. Instead, it shows Medea wearing Greek dress, Helios’ chariot on the ground pursued by men on horseback and a demonic “rageful” figure along with Selene. Sourvinou-Inwood. 269-274.
26Sourvinou-Inwood argues that King Aegeus’ earlier oath not to expel Medea from Athens evokes, in the audience, Aegeus’ expelling of Medea from Athens after plotting Theseus’ death.
• 18•