Page 21 - GALIET INFINITE MEDEA: Euripides IV

Infinite Medea. Though Medea’s turn-and-toss eastern- ness, foreigness, and exilium pervade Graf’s mythic-historic timeline, her cultic and initiatrix roles pale in contrast to her dramatic personae, sorcery and divinity. The foreign and eastern has always threatened and placed the west on red-alert from Apollonian Greece (Dionysus, Medea) to Saturnine Rome (Carthage-Dido, Egypt-Cleopatra) to twenty-first century. The eastern has been presented as effeminate38, decadent, orgiastic and despotic amplifying fears of the dark, chthonic forces of the irrational, of the foreign. This is precisely the ‘distancing’ prejudice stressed in Sourvinou-Inwood’s tragic and iconographic expose. Medea is seen as bad woman because she wears oriental garb and carries poison-magic box. But Graf fails to see that Euripides’ Medea, more than any other mythic or historical version, has influenced later traditions and iconographic representations leaving a haunting 2400-24/7 impression on the western mind.
We are mind-struck, being-struck, magic-struck because Medea spills black milk with her desperation, her revenge, her passions, her bone-chilling infanticide, her magic robe-and- crown anarchic torch and her divine charioteering aura too far from Phaeton’s fall. Her cultic affinities, initriatix conjectures belong to Ariadne’s golden chord; afforded to few mortals. We remember eastern Medea because she is a thundering sorceress. (Think eastern Hecate, Thracian Orpheus). Medea, the too-
38Dionysus is the best effeminate example: he is disguised and raised as a girl. After Aeneas’ affair with Dido, Turnus and Iarbas treat him as effeminate. Turnus calls him a half-man. Iarbas calls him a “2nd Paris with eunuchs in attendance and hair dripping with perfume and Maeonian bonnet tied under chin” (Aen., IV-218).
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