The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Euripides · a tragedy for performance · about 1,419 lines in the standard numbering, the text whole · Athens, City Dionysia, 431 BC · in Euripides’ Greek, read from knowledge with Kovacs’ Loeb for sense; Greek quoted only where its words are certain, in transliteration, with the desk’s own close English beneath
Mode
Tragedy of the household; the heroic code of revenge enacted by a wife and mother, ending on a god’s machine that judges nothing
Mythos
The debt of the Argo and the stolen fleece; the barbarian sorceress and the Greek hero; the broken oath; the avenging mother, granddaughter of the Sun
Phase
One day in Corinth, from the sentence of exile to the flight: the agon with Jason, the oath of Aegeus, the feigned reconciliation, the gifts, the monologue, the deaths and the chariot
Presentation
Drama for the City Dionysia, three actors and a chorus of Corinthian women; a prologue, a parodos, five episodes with choral odes between them, the murder sung, and an exodos; about 1,419 lines
Register
From servants gossiping at a door to the law court’s set speech, a king begging for sons, a mother’s back and forth over her children’s faces, a messenger’s exact horror and an epiphany without justice
Scale
One house, one day, one city on the stage, and Athens and the sky beyond it
Governing Proposition
A foreign wife abandoned in Corinth for a royal marriage, given one day before exile, wins a refuge, destroys her husband’s bride and the bride’s father with poisoned gifts, kills her own sons to strike him where he can be struck, and is carried off unpunished in the chariot of the Sun. The wager of the play is that the heroic code of honour, set in a household and in a woman who knows the wrong she does, becomes monstrous, and that she can be right about the man and wrong about the children at once.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
“eith’ ōphel’ Argous mē diaptasthai skaphos”
“would that the hull of the Argo had never flown through.” The Nurse speaks first, alone before the house, and her wish reaches back past the play to the voyage that began it: the ship, the stolen fleece, the Greek hero and the foreign woman who came home with him. Everything Medea will claim from Jason is in that first line, as a debt, and everything he will deny. The play opens not on its heroine but on a servant wishing the past undone.
The household speaks first. The Nurse and the Tutor talk by the door like servants anywhere, and the news they pass is plain: Jason has left his wife for a royal marriage in Corinth. Then Medea is heard, crying from within, before she is seen. The audience knows her first as a voice through a wall, in grief and in rage, and the chorus of Corinthian women comes in. The domestic opening and the cries are the ground the play stands on, and the sky it ends in is a long way above them.
The play was produced at the City Dionysia in 431 BC, the year the Peloponnesian War began, with Philoctetes, Dictys and the satyr play Theristai. It took third prize of three; Euphorion, son of Aeschylus, was first, and Sophocles second. It needs three actors: the Nurse, the Tutor, Medea, Creon, Jason, Aegeus and a Messenger, with the two sons silent on stage and heard only once, crying from inside the house. The text has come down whole, in about 1,419 lines.
Movement II
Medea comes out to the women and speaks to them as one of them. Of all creatures with breath and mind, she says, “gynaikes esmen athliōtaton phyton”
“we women are the most wretched growth.” A woman buys a husband with a dowry and takes a master with him; divorce is shameful for her and not for him; and the courage asked of her is greater than a soldier’s: “tris an par’ aspida stēnai theloim’ an mallon ē tekein hapax”
“I would rather stand three times beside a shield than give birth once.” The speech is an argument, and it holds.
She adds what is hers alone. The women of Corinth have a city and kin; she has neither, and nowhere to go. Then Creon comes with his sentence of exile, and grants her one day’s grace. That day is the play’s clock. Everything that follows must happen before it ends, and Creon, in granting it, has given her the time she needs.
The chorus sings what the world has come to: “anō potamōn hierōn chōrousi pagai”
“upward flow the streams of the holy rivers.” Nature runs backward, men’s faith is broken, and the name of women will be turned. It is a lyric height on a reversal, sung by Greek women for a barbarian wife, and it sets the order of the world itself among the things Jason has overturned.
Movement III
Jason comes, and the two meet in the formal contest of the stage, a set speech each. Medea counts what she did for him on the voyage of the Argo and after. Jason answers with reasons: she has gained Greece, law and fame; the marriage is prudence, for the children’s sake and for his own. The form is the law court’s, and the form exposes him. The play gives Jason his case in full so that his rhetoric can be seen as the instrument of the betrayal, and so that, later, his own reasoning can be turned against him.
Then Aegeus, king of Athens, comes by. His arrival is unprepared chance, and Aristotle named it as irrational. But the scene does two things the play cannot do without. Aegeus offers refuge, bound by an oath, so that the revenge need not be suicide; and he is a king desperate for sons. In his want Medea sees where Jason can be struck. When he leaves, she sets out the plan.
The chorus sings in praise of Athens, the city that will take her in, and the ode is among Euripides’ best. The Corinthian women have sworn her their silence, and they keep it. They sympathise with her, they grow horrified, and they do nothing. They are the community that sees and permits, and their odes move from sympathy to horror in the order the play needs, while the one day runs on.
Movement IV
Medea sends for Jason again and makes her peace with him. She takes back what she said, yields to his reasons, and sends gifts to the bride. It is the agon reversed: the reasoning he used against her she now gives back to him, and he accepts it. The scene is plain, and its tension is suspense. The audience knows what is in the gifts, and Jason does not.
The Tutor returns: the gifts have been accepted. That news is the trigger, and Medea turns to the children. The monologue goes back and forth over their faces, resolve and relapse spoken in turn: she will do it; she cannot; she will. The text is not secure here, and passages in it are doubled, but the substance and the sequence are sure, and it is among the summits of the stage.
It ends on the knot the play has tied: “thymos de kreissōn tōn emōn bouleumatōn”
“my anger is stronger than my counsels.” She knows the wrong, and the passion overrules her knowledge. Nothing in the line excuses her and nothing makes her a stranger to the audience. The play has shown her right about the man, and now it shows her choosing what she knows is wrong.
Movement V
The Messenger comes. His speech is a model of its form, exact in the order of its horror: the crown catching fire on the princess’s head, the robe eating her flesh, her father clinging to her corpse and unable to rise from it. The gifts have done their work on the bride and on Creon both. A father’s love for his daughter is the last thing the house of Corinth shows.
Medea goes inside. The chorus stands outside the house and sings, and from within the children are heard crying. It is the only time they speak. The killing is not seen; the audience stands where the Corinthian women stand, at the door, hearing, doing nothing.
Jason comes to the doors too late. Medea appears above, in the chariot of the Sun, her grandfather, with the bodies of her sons. Where a god should descend to settle the action, the human agent rises out of reach on the god’s machine. Jason is below, denied even the bodies to bury. She is right about him and wrong about the children, and the play holds both to its last line, which settles nothing: no justice is done, and the form says so.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test mostly fails to find a removable part. The first line wishes the Argo had never sailed and sets the debt Jason will deny; Creon’s single day is the clock; the agon gives Jason his case so that the false reconciliation can turn his reasoning against him; the gifts need that scene, and the Tutor’s report that they were accepted sets off the monologue. Aristotle called the Aegeus scene irrational (Poetics 1461b), yet it is required twice: as the refuge without which the revenge is suicide, and as the sight of a king desperate for sons. What holds the axis below the others: Aegeus arrives by unprepared chance, the monologue as transmitted repeats itself, and the closing lines are generic.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The play states conditions that hold. In her first speech to the women Medea says of all creatures with breath and mind “gynaikes esmen athliōtaton phyton”
“we women are the most wretched growth”: bought with a dowry, owned by the man bought, divorce shameful for her and not for him; and “tris an par’ aspida stēnai theloim’ an mallon ē tekein hapax”
“I would rather stand three times beside a shield than give birth once” (first episode). It discloses the foreigner with no city and no kin; the man who calls betrayal prudence; and the divided self that knows the wrong and is overruled. Held a step from the top because what it shows of the wronged woman it partly retracts into the demonic at the end.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Height comes often in a short play, and in the dreadful register most. The cries from within before Medea is seen; the first stasimon’s reversal of nature, “anō potamōn hierōn chōrousi pagai”
“upward flow the streams of the holy rivers”; the monologue, its back and forth over the children’s faces among the summits of the stage; the Messenger on the crown’s fire, the robe eating the flesh, the father clinging to the corpse and unable to rise; the children’s cries from inside the house while the chorus stands outside; and the last image, Medea above with the bodies and Jason below unable to touch them. Held from the top because the middle, the Aegeus scene and the false reconciliation, is necessarily plain, its height suspense rather than elevation.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Myth built, and built so firmly that this play’s version became the myth. Whether the deliberate killing of the children was Euripides’ own invention is contested; it is this play’s design that made it the shape the figure carries. The archetypal structure bears weight throughout: the voyage of the Argo and the stolen fleece as the debt; the barbarian sorceress and the Greek hero; the oath and its gods, Themis and Zeus, as the law Jason breaks; the granddaughter of the Sun, whose descent is named early and then appears as the chariot that carries her off. She stays particular, a wife counting her wrongs and a mother who cannot bear her sons’ smile, while becoming the avenging mother. Held a step down because the chariot arrives as assertion more than built pattern.
Score: 9.3 / 10
The inheritance is Aeschylean tragedy and the epic and lyric story of the Argonauts. The turn: a heroine given the code tragedy gave Ajax or Achilles, not to be laughed at by enemies, to harm enemies and help friends, and applying it as a woman in a household, which makes the code monstrous; a hero reduced to a reasoner about marriage and status; a chorus of Greek women that sympathises with a barbarian’s revenge and does nothing; the killer of her children carried off unpunished in a divine car where the god of the ending should have stood. The stake was paid: the play took third prize. The ancient summary reports a claim that Euripides took it from Neophron; the order of the two plays is contested, and the score rests on the balance of evidence.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Change the form and the play loses what it knows. The agon of two set speeches gives Jason his reasons as public argument, and the form exposes them: rhetoric is the instrument of the betrayal. The chorus, Greek women bound to silence by Medea’s oath, is the community that sees and permits, and its odes move from sympathy to horror in the order the play needs. The monologue’s oscillation is a form of thought, resolve and relapse spoken in turn. The ending inverts the machine: instead of a god descending to settle the action, the human agent rises out of reach on the god’s machine, and the form announces that no justice will be done. Held at 9.0 because the form is inherited and used with exceptional point, not invented for this knowledge.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The evidence is twenty-four centuries of return without exhaustion. The monologue’s knot, the knowledge of the wrong and the passion that overrules it, passed into the philosophers’ accounts of passion, and Ovid tied it again for his own Medea: “video meliora proboque, / deteriora sequor”
“I see the better and approve it; I follow the worse” (Metamorphoses 7.20 to 21). Modern reading has found in the play a text of women’s condition, of the foreigner and the colonised, of the heroic code transposed, of passion and will, and a philological problem in the monologue’s own lines. Each reading holds and none closes the others, and the stage keeps finding new pressure in it. Held a step from the top because its central question is one question, posed with total depth.
Score: 9.3 / 10
The field is Attic tragedy and the Greek poetry of the fifth century. The intrinsic force is high: tragedy turned on the household and on a woman’s interior, with the gods withdrawn to an ending that judges nothing, a real reorganisation of what the form could hold, though part of a larger turn that other plays of Euripides carry too. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: at Rome, Ennius’ Medea, Ovid’s lost Medea and Heroides 12, and Seneca’s Medea, through which the figure reached the Renaissance stage; then Corneille’s Médée (1635), Cherubini’s opera (1797), Grillparzer’s trilogy, Anouilh, Jeffers, Pasolini’s film (1969) and Christa Wolf’s novel (1996). Held below the top because much of the reach runs through Seneca and the myth rather than this play’s form.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the text survives whole, about 1,419 lines, carried among the select plays of the Byzantine manuscripts with scholia, with no scene lost. The charges are interpolation: doubled passages in the monologue, actors’ additions, and closing lines shared with other plays, all of which an editor can isolate and which take little from the work. Presence: adapted continuously in antiquity, read in the Greek East through Byzantium, printed in the first edition of Euripides at Florence in the 1490s, and staged and taught without break in modern times. The Latin West read the figure through Seneca rather than the Greek for most of the Middle Ages, the one charge on presence. Millennia, a whole text, and no break: 9.5, the foot of the band.
Score: 9.5 / 10
Command of the medium as the tragic stage of 431 knew it: iambic speech, lyric odes, stichomythia, the set speech, the messenger narrative, the cry from within. Euripides’ iambic diction is plainer and more argumentative than Aeschylus’, and here the plainness bears weight: Medea’s speech to the women and Jason’s reply are rhetoric of the law court, and the play needs them to be. The Messenger’s speech is a model of its form, exact in its sequence of horror. The lyric is strong, the first stasimon and the ode in praise of Athens among Euripides’ best. What holds it at 9.0: Aegeus’ entrance is mechanically weak, and the staging of the end, the chariot and the bodies above, rests on a device. The music is lost and neither credited nor charged.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the domestic realism of the opening, a household’s servants talking by the door, and the Sun’s chariot in the sky at the close. They mostly obey one law, Medea’s honour, which governs her from her first cries to her last word to Jason; and her divine descent is named in the play before it is shown. The chorus’s horror and the play’s sympathy are reconciled by the one thing both see: she is right about Jason and wrong about the children, and the play holds both to the end. Charged: Aegeus’ chance arrival obeys a convenience the rest of the play does not, and the chariot asserts an order, the Sun protecting a killer of children, that the play leaves unexamined, either its deepest irony or a seam.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Judged on what one play of fourteen hundred lines holds, and it holds much in one structure. Consciousness, in the monologue. The family: marriage as contract, divorce, children as the bond and the weapon, a father’s love for his daughter at her corpse. The state: a royal marriage as policy, exile, the standing of a foreign woman, Athens as refuge. The sacred: oaths, Zeus and Themis, the Sun. Gender as an order of the world; the foreigner and Greece, which is the argument of Jason’s defence; the natural order in the reversed rivers; history as the Argo’s voyage behind the action. Each is a term in the one quarrel. What holds it lowest of the twelve: labour, the wider city, war and the long course of time lie outside a single action on a single day before a single house.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
9.0 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier V · Epochal
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.5, with The Archetypal Deep and The Bottomless Well at 9.3 and The Unconcealment at 9.2. A text whole and read without break for twenty-four centuries; a version of the myth so firmly built that it became the myth; a play returned to by philosophers, poets and the stage without exhaustion; and a disclosure of women’s condition, the foreigner’s position and the divided self that can be stated and holds.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 8.0, held by the vessel: a single action on a single day before a single house, outside which lie labour, the wider city, war and the long course of time. Among the others, The Inevitable at 8.7, for Aegeus’ unprepared arrival, the doubled lines of the monologue and the generic close; and The Inner Law at 8.9, for that arrival and for the Sun’s chariot, which the play leaves unexamined.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.7 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.0, The Inner Law at 8.9, The Made at 9.0, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Imperishable at 9.5, The Archetypal Deep at 9.3, The Unconcealment at 9.2, The Swerve at 9.1 and Pressure on Tradition at 9.1 clear the bar of 8.5. The Universal Minimum is met (the lowest of the eleven axes it covers is The Inevitable at 8.7, against 7.5), and The Encompassed clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.0. Every summit condition is met.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Euripides’ Mēdeia in the Greek, scored as the surviving text for performance: about 1,419 lines in the standard numbering of Diggle’s Oxford text, whole as transmitted. The editorial deletions are weighed where they bear on an axis, chiefly the doubled passages in the monologue and the closing lines that recur at the end of other plays of Euripides; they are charged under The Inevitable and The Imperishable and not cut from the unit. No text was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Every axis is judged on Euripides’ Greek. David Kovacs’ Loeb (1994), a close prose version facing the Greek, was read for sense, and Rex Warner’s verse translation (1944) for the play in English. No published translation is quoted, and none is charged or credited to the play: Greek is quoted only where its words are certain, transliterated, with the desk’s own close rendering beneath, and Ovid’s Latin likewise. Events are paraphrased, and citations are by part of the play (prologue, episode, stasimon, exodos) rather than by line. The facts of the production (the festival, the year, the other plays of the group and the order of the prizes) come from the ancient summary prefixed to the play, which also reports the claim that Euripides took the play from Neophron; the order of the two plays is contested. The music and dance of the odes are lost to every reader, and the metre is judged only in outline; neither is charged to the work. Facts that could not be verified, among them the earlier versions of the children’s death, the surviving papyri, the play’s early presence in vase painting, its sixteenth-century Latin translation and the ancient philosophers’ citation of the monologue by name, are not given.