ŠTEFAN BENČÍK, TRAGEDY ALISON HENNEGAN 2.

30PM THU 19 OCT

Beyond good and evil? Euripides’s construction of women

In June 2002 in New York, a peculiar adaptation of several Greek tragedies was
put on by Tina Shepherd at the Here Arts Center: two actors and twice that
many actresses exchanged the roles of directors and actors and in a sort of
metatheatrical parade acted out the major highlights and intersecting motives
of the roles of Clytemnestra, Medea, Phaedra, Agave, Deianeira, and Cas-
sandra in front of a chorus made up of young girls holding cell-phones. As
befits the list of heroins, the play was entitled Bad Women.1
This production illustrates that it seems to be the case that the aggressive
achievements of Medea’s and Clytamnestra’s kind are often the ones more
pronounced in the popular image of Greek tragedy as a genre. Yet, in one’s
attempt at understanding Greek tragedy’s construction of women, it may be
incautious to rely on the most controversial portrayals. Not that the feminist
triumphalism often accompanying modern productions, of let’s say Medea
would not be pleasurable, but there may be a sort of instructive horror to be
drawn from realising what it may have meant for a woman to be good in
ancient Athens.
After preliminary thoughts on what interpretative space there is, based on
our (lack of) knowledge of ancient audiences, to understand Euripides’s por-
trayal of women as indicative of the wider ideological construction of wo-
manhood, this essay seeks to compare and contrast the portrayal of an ar-
chetypally ‘bad’ woman, Medea, with ‘by much the very best of women,’2 of
1
H. Foley. ‘Bad Women: Gender Politics in Late Twentieth-Century Performance and Revi-
sion of Greek Tragedy’. In: Dionysus Since 69. Ed. by E. Hall, F. Macintosh and A. Wrigley.
Oxford University Press, 2004, pp. 77–112, p. 77–8.
2
v. 442, sung by the chorus, translations mine unless stated otherwise from A. M. Dale.
Euripides: Alcestis, edited with Introduction and Commentary by. 2. Oxford University
Press, 1961, (1954)

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ŠTEFAN BENČÍK, TRAGEDY ALISON HENNEGAN 2.30PM THU 19 OCT

Euripides’ Alcestis.
Lacking certainty as to the women’s presence in the audience of the Great
Dionysia,3 it is impossible to ascertain whether one should try to read these
plays as projecting different portrayals of women to a men-only, or a mixed
audience. Nevertheless, even if women were allowed to attend the plays, one
may suspect that dominant perspective would remain that of the male cit-
izens.4
This seems to be the case with Alcestis, and Medea too, even though in dif-
ferent guises and degrees. At first sight, both portray an eponymous heroine.
However, Alcestis, really, does very little on the stage, apart from dying, and
when she is being handed over to Admetos by Hercules in the end of the
play, she even remains silent throughout the whole scene. Taken solely on
this point, Medea might be thought to be more central to her play. Not only
we see almost the whole of the story through her perspective, as she domin-
ates the stage, enlisting even the help of the female chorus, but also, a large
part of the audience’s experience would be formed by the scene where it is
she who deliberates about the proposed murder and, then, her acting it out.
Nevertheless, and discounting the happy-ending of Alcestis for now, in both
plays it is the male hero who undergoes their tragic peripeteia. Admetos real-
ises that even though he was lucky in getting the option of sacrificing his
wife for him, he learned the lesson announced by the chorus already in the
second choral ode:5
3
For an argument that there were at least some, v.: J. J. Henderson. ‘Women and the
Athenian dramatic festivals’. In: TAPA 121 (1991), pp. 133–47, and A. J. Podlecki. ‘Could
women attend the theater in ancient Athens? A collection of testimonia’. In: AncWorld
21 (1990), pp. 27–43 but cf.: S. Goldhill. ‘Representing democracy: women at the Great
Dionysia’. In: Ritual, Finance, Politics, Festschr. D. M. Lewis. Ed. by R. Osborn and S. Horn-
blower. Oxford University Press, 1994, pp. 347–69, and Simon Goldhill. ‘The audience of
Athenian tragedy’. In: The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy. Ed. by P. E. Easter-
ling. Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. 54–68 for contrary evidence, and a sensible
refutation of any certainty from the question.
4
Goldhill, ‘The audience of Athenian tragedy’, p. 66.
5
Dale, Euripides: Alcestis, edited with Introduction and Commentary by, pp. vv. 241–3.

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ŠTEFAN BENČÍK, TRAGEDY ALISON HENNEGAN 2.30PM THU 19 OCT

… whoever is bereft
of an excellent wife, shall live the rest
of his time without her,
time not worthy of living.

He admits himself when it seems so that he have learned a lesson: ‘As for me,
who has nothing to live for, I have disregarded my fate and I shall lead a grim
life. Now, I understand.’6
Equally, Jason, at first about to marry happily the princess of a new city ends
up being deprived of her, and cannot even give his children from the previous
marriage a proper burial. It is true, that Medea’s and Jason’s closing scene is
a far more dynamic agon, where Jason’s suffering cannot be uncoupled from
Medea’s ex machina triumph, but it is his chanted anapests which close-off
the play7 and therefore, frame its meaning. One has to also bear in mind,
that Medea’s agency, prominence on the stage, and the initially favourable
response she elicits from the female chorus do not necessarily sanctify the fe-
male perspective they bring in, as from the viewpoint of an Athenian citizen
they would be themselves markers of an inappropriate, and, indeed, danger-
ous, behaviour for a woman. (As one poignantly realises in contrast with
Alcestis’ absence, or at least silence throughout the majority of the play.)
Even though it is difficult to unequivocally assert that this is the only ef-
fect Medea’s presence has, without allowing for the sheer time the audience
spends with her to influence audience’s evaluation of the situation from a
female perspective, there is an additional sense in which her mythical, larger-
than-life stature, which contrasts with much more life-like Jason, can easily
be read as a frightful caricature, a projection of the man’s worst fears about
womanhood. Conversely, Alcestis can be viewed as an idealisation of the role
of woman, a perfect wife, who does not hesitate to exchange her life for that

6
Dale, Euripides: Alcestis, edited with Introduction and Commentary by, pp. vv. 939–40.
7
unless we take the closing choral verses as genuine, which, incidentally, are the same as
recorded for Alcestis

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ŠTEFAN BENČÍK, TRAGEDY ALISON HENNEGAN 2.30PM THU 19 OCT

of her husband, and in her fairy-tale-like heroism seems to be equally, if not

more, orbital to Admetos’s story.
After establishing this interpretative perspective, let me turn to key mo-
ments that seems to define woman’s role and image. As it stands, the defining
moments of each heroine’s story establish motherhood as the crucial feature
of a woman’s projected role in the society. I shall further argue the necessity
of recognising Medea’s and Alcestis’ different initial situations, and, given
the perspective assumed, defining the extent to which either of them can be
thought as acting from her own, individual, character, as opposed to acting
as a response to the situation into which they have been manoeuvred into by
men. Thus, it appears necessary to examine the marital contexts in which the
role of a woman as a mother is to be performed, as these, too, differ between
the heroines.
As for the crucial scene in Alcestis, it is the focus of her last words and
concerns on her children, that is the most striking, crowned with a touch
of pathos, which seems at the same time obligatory and genial, when she is
unable to give them her goodbye glance:

Ad: Lift up your face, so that you don’t deprive the children of
your last moments8 Al: Oh, but I cannot! Alas, farewell, my chil-
dren! Ad: Look at them, look at them! Al: I am no more. Ad:
What are you doing? Are you gone? Al: Good…9 Ad: I am done,
wretched me!

More importantly, the children, and their well-being, feature as a decisive

factor in her resolution to die for her husband,10 as the audience gets to know
at … , and, conveniently for the plotting of Admetos’ subsequent suffering,
motivate her pleas for him not to remarry, as not to bring a step-mother into
8
lit. just ‘of yourself’
9
a fascinatingly apt elision in the original
10
Though, curiously, this important argument is missing from Admetos’ defence of his let-
ting his wife die for him vis-à-vis his father in their agon later in the play.

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ŠTEFAN BENČÍK, TRAGEDY ALISON HENNEGAN 2.30PM THU 19 OCT

his house, with all the potential troubles this might mean for their common
children.
Children, and their murder, are, of course, the most memorable motive in
Medea as well. It is telling, though, that it is not, for example, the murder of
Jason, which Medea has chosen for her revenge, and it reflects the importance
of lineage and offspring for the definition of both men and women in ancient
Greece. One may even dare to suggest that it is precisely through chosing the
children as the target of her fury that Medea perverts her role as a woman
in the eyes of the Athenians, and many moderns too, especially given the
importance of mother’s care for children as a defining trait of the best of the
women in Alcestis.
However, can one disentangle a character, even if it were to be merely a
caricature of a particular societal role, without any difficulty from the situ-
ation that compels them to act in a certain way? For Medea, one has to take
into account Jason’s betrayal of the oath he gave her back in Colchis, and her
position, after Creon’s demands, as basically a foreign refugee single mother
of two. This is the basic line the men have reduced her to, compared to Al-
cestis, who is from the beginning a wife to a man, whose piety is so strong
that Apollo himself choose him for his ordained servitude to a mortal. With
her man destined to die, her choices were still a couple of steps ahead from
those of Medea, as she was able to further the prospects of her children by
exchanging herself for her husband (thus saving them from fatherlessness,
arguably a direr fate in ancient Greece, compared to motherlessness), whilst
able to count on their father’s piety when asking him not to take another
wife.
Of course, this analysis of initial situations does not make it necessary that
either woman acted in the way they did, and for Medea, it does not diminish
the horror of her act, but it does suggest that, at least partially, their actions
are a function of the quality of the legal and personal relationships with their
(former) husbands, and ultimately conditioned by the men’s ability to control
and order their households. Furthemore, despite the overarching male per-

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ŠTEFAN BENČÍK, TRAGEDY ALISON HENNEGAN 2.30PM THU 19 OCT

spective, one may even easily read into the structure of the plot a sympath-
etic insight (even if far from a truly formulated critical stance) about women’s
dependancy on men, and consequent vulnerability.
Nevertheless, there are other factors contributing to the nature and de-
cisions of the two characters. Firstly, legend is a great source of inspiration.
Even though it is a famous moot point whether Medea’s murder of her chil-
dren was an Euripidean invention, her record from her past (betraying her
father, and killing her brother in order to help Jason) predestines her not to
become the sort of woman Alcestis is, but remain proud and violent, as well
as vice-versa. A sort of rough psychology is also present in Medea’s address
to her thumos, in the scene of her deliberation: on one hand, thumos is the
seat of emotions, and often translated as ‘heart,’ but it is also suggestive of
the Homeric epithet megathumoi, which has more to do with one’s inflated
self-image than anger and/or compassion. Curiously, though, the presence
of a more substantial picture of a woman’s psychology may be thought of
as premised on her un-womanly prominence and agency – in stark contrast
with Alcestis whose inner life, even if assumed, is kept secret to the audience,
as must have been considered a mark of proper womanhood.
One may, then, consider the process by which Athenian Tragedy was gen-
erated as a sort of reformulation of the tales of the folk-lore to the wishes and
the anxieties of the Athenian male citizen class, by which process a character
from myth would be put into a more clearly defined social situation in a way
in which they would fit there. Thus, there is still space to consider Medea an
‘evil’ woman from the Athenian perspective, defined through her attitude to-
wards her children, but it is at the same time asserting that the responsibility
for the tragedy is shared with Jason as any of her ‘inner character’ can reveal
itself only after Jason’s betrayal. Similarly, it would have not been possible
for ‘Alcestis’ to become the paragon of womanhood had the virtue of her hus-
band been not the case, but at the same time, it is through her already being
Alcestis, that she can, given the situation, become the fairy-tale heroine she
is destined to be.

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ŠTEFAN BENČÍK, TRAGEDY ALISON HENNEGAN 2.30PM THU 19 OCT

Wolfson College ŠTEFAN BENČÍK

sb2033@cam.ac.uk

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ŠTEFAN BENČÍK, TRAGEDY ALISON HENNEGAN 2.30PM THU 19 OCT

References

Dale, A. M. Euripides: Alcestis, edited with Introduction and Commentary by. 2.

Oxford University Press, 1961, (1954).
Foley, H. ‘Bad Women: Gender Politics in Late Twentieth-Century Perform-
ance and Revision of Greek Tragedy’. In: Dionysus Since 69. Ed. by E. Hall,
F. Macintosh and A. Wrigley. Oxford University Press, 2004, pp. 77–112.
Goldhill, S. ‘Representing democracy: women at the Great Dionysia’. In:
Ritual, Finance, Politics, Festschr. D. M. Lewis. Ed. by R. Osborn and S. Horn-
blower. Oxford University Press, 1994, pp. 347–69.
Goldhill, Simon. ‘The audience of Athenian tragedy’. In: The Cambridge Com-
panion to Greek Tragedy. Ed. by P. E. Easterling. Cambridge University Press,
1997, pp. 54–68.
Henderson, J. J. ‘Women and the Athenian dramatic festivals’. In: TAPA 121
(1991), pp. 133–47.
Podlecki, A. J. ‘Could women attend the theater in ancient Athens? A collec-
tion of testimonia’. In: AncWorld 21 (1990), pp. 27–43.