The The Golden Golden Fleece Fleece and and MedeaMedea

Greek Tragedy and Comedy

Greek TragedyAeschylusSophoclesEuripides

Greek ComedyAristophanes

Alice Y. Chang

EURIPIDES

480-406 B.C.

Euripides「舞台上的哲學家」的美稱悲劇內容大多以家庭生活為題材，討論戰爭、民主、貧富、宗教、婦女地位…等問題

討論雅典奴隸民主制衰弱時期的社會思想寫實現存十八部作品，是傳世作品最多的古希臘悲劇家

Alice Y. Chang

The Works of Euripides Alcestis

   Written 438 B.C.E   

Andromache    Written 428-24 B.C.E  

The Bacchantes    Written 410 B.C.E

Hecuba    Written 424 B.C.E  Helen    Written 412 B.C.E    Translated by E. P. Coleridge

The Heracleidae    Written ca. 429 B.C.E    Translated by E. P. Coleridge

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Works of Euripides Iphigenia At Aulis

   Written 410 B.C.E

Iphigenia in Tauris    Written 414-412 B.C.E    Translated by Robert Potter

Medea    Written 431 B.C.E    Translated by E. P. Coleridge

Rhesus    Written 450 B.C.E

The Suppliants    Written 422 B.C.E    Translated by E. P. Coleridge

The Trojan Women    Written 415 B.C.E

Alice Y. Chang

sources This is the title of a long poem, very popular in classical

days, by the third-century poet Apollonius of RhodesApollonius of Rhodes. He tells the whole story of the Quest except the part about

Jason and PeliasJason and Pelias which I have taken from Pindarfrom Pindar. It is the subject of one of his most famous odes, written in

the first half of the fifth century. Apollonius ends his poem with the return of the heroes to

Greece. I have added the account of what Jason and Medea did there, taking it from the fifth-century tragic poet EuripidesEuripides, who made it the subject of one of his best plays.

Journey by water The first hero in Europe who undertook a great journey was

the leader of the Quest of the Golden Fleece. He was supposed to have lived a generation earlier than the

most famous Greek traveler, the hero of the Odyssey. It was of course a journey by water.

Ships did not sail by night, and any place where sailors put in might harbor a monster or a magician who could work more deadly harm than storm and shipwreck.

High courage was necessary to travel, especially outside of Greece.

the ship Argo No story proved this fact better than the account of

what the heroes suffered who sailed in the ship Argo to find the Golden Fleece.

It may be doubted, indeed, if there ever was a voyage on which sailors had to face so many and such varied dangers.

However, they were all heroes of renown, some of them the greatest in Greece, and they were quite equal to their adventures.

The Argonautic expedition

Penteconter, 50-oared ship

as pentecontor or pentekontor (Greek: πεντηκόντορος, fifty-oared) was an ancient Greek galley in use since the archaic period.

Jason and Argonauts

the Golden Fleece is the fleece of the gold-haired winged ram.

It figures in the tale of Jason and his band of Argonauts, who set out on a quest for the fleece in order to place Jason rightfully on the throne of Iolcus in Thessaly.

Lemnos The isle of Lemnos is situated off the Western coast

of Asia Minor (modern day Turkey). The island was inhabited by a race of women who

had killed their husbands. The women had neglected their worship of Aphrodite, and as a punishment the goddess made the women so foul in stench that their husbands couldn't bear to be near them.

King Phineus & the Harpies, Athenian red-figure hydria C5th B.C., The J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu

The Amazons

The Amazonsa nation of all-female warriors in

Classical and Greek mythologyHerodotus placed them in a

region bordering Scythia in Sarmatia (modern territory of Ukraine).

Other historiographers place them in Asia Minor or Libya or India.

Mounted Amazon in Scythian costume,

Colchis

ancient region at the eastern end of the Black Sea south of the Caucasus, in the western part of modern Georgia

In Greek mythology Colchis was the home of Medea and the destination of the Argonauts, a land of fabulous wealth and the domain of sorcery.

And then. . .

When Jason and Medea returned to Iolcus, Pelias still refused to give up his throne. So Medea conspired to have Pelias' own daughters kill him. She told them she could turn an old ram into a young ram by cutting up the old ram and boiling it. During her demonstration, a live, young ram jumped out of the pot. Excited, the girls cut their father into pieces and threw him into a pot.

Having killed Pelias, Jason and Medea fled to Corinth. This is much like what she did with Aeson, Jason's father.

Medea avenges herself on Jason by slaying her own children upon the altar, and destroying Kreon and Glauke by fire in the palace (not shown). Triptolemos arrives on the scene with a flying, serpent-drawn chariot to assist Medea in her escape.

Medea

Medea

the daughter of King Aeëtes of Colchis, niece of Circe, granddaughter of the sun god Helios, and later wife to the hero Jason, with whom she had two children: Mermeros and Pheres.

In Euripides's play Medea, Jason leaves Medea when Creon, king of Corinth, offers him his daughter, Creusa or Glauce. The play tells of how Medea gets her revenge on her husband for this betrayal.

Meda--an enchantressMedea figures in the myth of Jason

and the ArgonautsMedea is known in most stories as an

enchantress and is often depicted as being a priestess of the goddess Hecate or a witch.

The myth of Jason and Medea is very old, originally written around the time Hesiod wrote the Theogony.

Medea kills her son, Campanian red-figure amphora, ca. 330 BC, Louvre (K 300)

Jason & the Dragon

Greek Tragedy, Euripides and Medea

Week 15

Alice Y. Chang

Alice Y. Chang

The fifth century BCE and intellectual revolution Most of these plays date from the last half of

the fifth century B.C.; they were written in and for an Athens that, since the days of Aeschylus, had undergone an intellectual revolution.

It was in a time of critical reevaluation of accepted standards and traditions that Sophocles produced his masterpiece, Oedipus the King, and the problems of the time are reflected in the play.

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Mysterious + contemporary The use of the familiar myth enabled the dramatist to

draw on all its wealth of unformulated meaning, but it did not prevent him from striking a contemporary note.

Oedipus, in Sophocles’ play, is at one and the same time the mysterious figure of the past who broke the most fundamental human taboos and a typical fifth-century Athenian.

His character contains all the virtues for which the Athenians were famous and the vices for which they were notorious.

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Pericles and OedipusThe Athenian devotion to the city, which

received the main emphasis in Pericles’ praise of Athens, is strong in Oedipus; his answer to the priest at the beginning of the play shows that he is a conscientious and patriotic ruler.

Medea an ancient Greek tragedy written by Euripides,

based upon the myth of Jason and Medea and first produced in 431 BC.

The plot centers on the barbarian protagonist as she finds her position in the Greek world threatened, and the revenge she takes against her husband Jason who has betrayed her for another woman.

Alice Y. Chang

Jason bringing Pelias the Golden Fleece

Alice Y. Chang

Alice Y. Chang

Medea

Euripides’ Medea, produced in 431 B.C., the year that brought the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, appeared earlier than Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, but it has a bitterness that is more in keeping with the spirit of a later age.

Alice Y. Chang

Alice Y. Chang

米蒂亞 Medea 米蒂亞是科奇斯島國的公主，也是女祭師，一生命運乖舛

，她愛上來自外地為了取得金羊毛與她父親作對的傑遜王子，不過，這段姻緣最後卻以悲劇收場。

米蒂亞是月亮女神的乾女兒，所以她懂得使用許多的黑魔法，她會調製靈藥、占卜、下毒。

不但法術高強也非常聰明與殘忍，他曾為了傑遜，親手殺了他自己的弟弟。後因為傑遜移情別戀，與鄰國的公主結婚，被情人拋棄的米蒂亞一怒之下，製作了一件沾滿毒藥的禮服，送給傑遜的未婚妻，將其殺害。甚至還親手殺了自己為傑遜生下的兩名稚子，最後騎著馬離開傷心地。

Alice Y. Chang

golden coronet, covered in poison

In Corinth, Jason abandoned Medea for the king's daughter, Glauce.

Medea took her revenge by sending Glauce a dress and golden coronet, covered in poison.

This resulted in the deaths of both the princess and the king, Creon, when he went to save her.

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The golden chariot According to the tragic poet Euripides, Medea

continued her revenge, murdering her two children by Jason. Afterward, she left Corinth and flew to Athens in a golden chariot driven by dragons sent by her grandfather Helios, god of the sun.

Alice Y. Chang

Medea (about to murder her children) by Eugène Ferdinand Victor Delacroix (1862).

Alice Y. Chang

Alice Y. Chang

Ironic expression

If Oedipus is, in one sense, a warning to a generation that has embarked on an intellectual revolution, Medea is the ironic expression of the disillusion that comes after the shipwreck.

In this play we are conscious for the first time of an attitude characteristic of modern literature, the artist’s feeling of separation from the audience, the isolation of the poet.

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rejected by his contemporaries The common background of audience and poet is

disappearing, the old certainties are being undermined, the city divided.

Euripides is the first Greek poet to suffer the fate of so many of the great modern writers: rejected by most of his contemporaries (he rarely won first prize and was the favorite target for the scurrilous humor of the comic poets), he was universally admired and revered by the Greeks of the centuries that followed his death.

Euripides’ Medea

His Medea is typical of his iconoclastic approach; his choice of subject and central characters is in itself a challenge to established canons.

He still dramatizes myth, but the myth he chooses is exotic and disturbing, and the protagonist is not a man but a woman.

Alice Y. Chang

Alice Y. Chang

The citizen rights?

Medea is both woman and foreigner—that is, in terms of the audience’s prejudice and practice she is a representative of the two free-born groups in Athenian society that had almost no rights at all (though the male foreign resident had more rights than the native woman).

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Anti-social

The tragic hero is no longer a king, “one who is highly renowned and prosperous such as Oedipus,” but a woman who, because she finds no redress for her wrongs in society, is driven by her passion to violate that society’s most sacred laws in a rebellion against its typical representative, Jason, her husband.

http://smarthistory.khanacademy.org/medea-sarcophagus.html (4’57”)

Medea sarcophagus 

The relief shows four scenes from the Medea myth, following the homnymous tragedy by the Athenian poet Euripides. Topics from Greek mythology were a popular motif in Rome for sarcophagus reliefs, especially when they depicted, as in the case here, wedding and death and sorrow of life.

Made and found in Rome, Porta San Lorenzo, 140-150 AD.

Altes Museum, Berlin 2011

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The Magic Chariot

These emphatic appeals clearly raise the question of the attitude of the gods, and the answer to the question is a shock.

We are not told what Earth does, but Sun sends the magic chariot on which Medea makes her escape.

rejected by most of his contemporaries

Euripides is the first Greek poet to suffer the fate of so many of the great modern writers: rejected rejected by most of his contemporariesby most of his contemporaries (he rarely won first prize and was the favorite target for the scurrilous humor scurrilous humor of the comic poets), he was universally admired and revered by the Greeks of the centuries that followed his death.

Alice Y. Chang

Iconoclastic His Medea is typical of his iconoclastic approachhis iconoclastic approach;

his choice of subject and central characters is in itself a challenge to established canons.

He still dramatizes myth, but the myth he chooses is exotic and disturbing, and the protagonist is not a man but a woman.

Medea is both woman and foreignerboth woman and foreigner, that is, in terms of the audience’s prejudice and practice she is a representative of the two free-born groups in Athenian society that had almost no rights at all (though the male foreign resident had more rights than the native woman).

Alice Y. Chang

Finds no redress

The tragic hero is no longer a king, “one who is highly renowned and prosperous such as Oedipus,” but a woman who, because she finds she finds no redress for her wrongs in societyno redress for her wrongs in society, is driven by her passion to violate that society’s most sacred laws in a rebellion against its typical representative, Jason, her husband.

Alice Y. Chang

Cinema and television In the 1963 film Jason and the Argonauts,

Medea was portrayed by Nancy Kovack. In the 2000 Hallmark presentation Jason

and the Argonauts, Medea was portrayed by Jolene Blalock.

In 1970, the Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini directed a film adaptation of Medea featuring the opera singer Maria Callas in the title role.

Alice Y. Chang

電影版劇情簡介： (1970) http://www.imdb.cn/title/tt0066065美狄亞，或譯米蒂亞，是古往今來最著名的復仇女性，也是所有受背叛、嫉妒所苦的女性的守護神。爲了愛上一個外邦人傑森，她抛卻公主地位、竊走國寶金羊毛、殺死弟弟，甘願隨夫遠走他鄉、漂泊失所。然而她的勇敢愛情和偉大犧牲最終卻變

成一則笑話：丈夫決定另娶柯林斯公主，換取穩定名位。美狄亞走投無路之下，展開恐怖報復：先是獻毒衣焚殺丈夫的新歡，繼而手刃兩個小孩，乘太陽神的華車遠颺，留下一無所有的負心丈夫。  

Alice Y. Chang

導演：皮耶‧保羅‧帕索里尼 Pier Paolo Pasolini

從希臘悲劇到現代戲劇，這個故事被翻寫過無數回。 Pasolini的版本抛開三一律 ( 注 ) 古典包袱，以一位來自遠古的情欲象徵──半人半馬怪爲敘事者，把來龍去脈從頭說起。他到土耳其和敘利亞取鏡，將場景拉回故事發生的高加索蠻荒世界，開場恍如人類學影片：一場驚心動魄、交糅恐怖與狂喜的原始儀式，美狄亞正是祭司，殺人獻祭的過程呼應了後來的血腥報復手腕。兩性戰爭被轉化爲美狄亞的史前泛靈世界與傑森的現代務實世界的對比。美狄亞嫁給傑森後，在理性世界中彷佛淪落得法力盡失。

Alice Y. Chang

ending

最後，在希臘悲劇中揚長而去的美狄亞，電影卻讓她消失在熊熊烈焰中──太陽神的華輦也被現實化了，直接關涉到美狄亞的熾烈性情。就像《定理》中的性瓦解了中産價值，《美狄亞》中的巫術神話力量也反撲了現代文明。  

http://video.mail.ru/mail/karelina-natalia/4815/28316.html

Alice Y. Chang

The exodus of MedeaJason shakes the doors of the

house, which remain closed. Medea appears in a winged

chariot, rising above the house. The bodies of the two children are visible in the chariot.

Alice Y. Chang

MedeaWhy are you rattling the doors like that,

trying to unbar them so you can findtheir bodies and me, the one who killed them? Stop trying. If you want something from me,      then say so, if you want to. But you'll never      have me in your grasp, not in this chariot,      a gift to me from my grandfather Helios,      to protect me from all hostile hands.

Alice Y. Chang

CHORUS [Exit Chorus]       Zeus on Olympus,

      dispenses many things.            Gods often contradict      our fondest expectations.      What we anticipate      does not come to pass.      What we don't expect      some god finds a way          

to make it happen.      So with this story.

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Helios, the titan god

Alice Y. Chang