The Ancients - Medea: Maligned Sorceress or Heartless Murderer?

Episode Date: January 11, 2026

She helped Jason win the Golden Fleece, betrayed her own family, and became one of the most feared figures in Greek myth. Medea’s name has echoed through the ancient world for over two millennia, a byword for passion and revenge but was she really a villain?In this episode of The Ancients, Tristan Hughes is joined by acclaimed classicist and bestselling author Natalie Haynes to unravel the full story of Medea. From her origins in distant Colchis on the edge of the Greek imagination to her unforgettable portrayal in Euripides’ tragedy, they explore how the ancient Greeks understood Medea, why her vengeance shocked audiences, and whether she was ever truly the villain of her own story?MOREJason and the ArgonautsListen on AppleListen on SpotifyMedusaListen on AppleListen on SpotifyWatch this episode on our NEW YouTube channel: @TheAncientsPodcastPresented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Aidan Lonergan. The producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music courtesy of Epidemic SoundsThe Ancients is a History Hit podcast.Sign up to History Hit to watch Natalie Haynes new two-part documentary Divine Fury - Demeter and Persephone. Natalie unravels the story of Persephone’s abduction and Demeter’s fierce response. Filmed across Athens, Eleusis and beyond, the film traces how the myth was transformed into the Eleusinian mysteries, one of the most profound and secretive experiences of the ancient world.Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe. Medea. She is one of the most recognizable names from Greek mythology and tragedy, a princess of Colchis, a faraway kingdom at the eastern end of the Black Sea. It was Medea who helped the hero Jason in his quest for the golden fleece. She would abandon her family for Jason, sailing away with him aboard the Argo, later on becoming his wife and fathering his children. It's Medea's later story that is central to one of the most popular surviving tragedies from the ancient Greek world. Euripides is Medea, a story of betrayal and horrific vengeance.

So what is Medea's tragic story? What did ancient Greeks think of her? What do they think of Euripides' play? And was Medea, despite everything that happens, still quite a good match for Jason? This is the story of Medea, the archetypal femme fatal. Our guest is the acclaimed classicist and best-selling author Natalie Haynes, whose newest book, No Friend to This House, is all about Medea. Natalie, it is such a pleasure to have you back on the podcast today. Thank you. It's lovely to be back. And to talk about this extraordinary topic, the story of Medea.

I mean, she must have been one of the most famous figures. from antiquity in terms of mythology because of how many times they told her story again and again? Yeah, I mean, the story of the Argo, the story of the quest for the golden fleece, this dates back to our very earliest sources. So Homer is the first person to mention it. He Sealed is the first person to mention Medea by name in the Theogony. So, yeah, this is right back in the late 8th, early 7th century BCE. So, yeah, our earliest Greek literature, her story and the story of the Argo

are right down from the get-go. How long have you been wanting to tell Medea's story? Forever, for as long as I've known that that was an option, I think. So I read Euripides-Madere in the sixth form at school. My dad drove me down to London to see a production of it at the Almada Theatre with Diana Rig, which was shattering in the best possible way. And then I wrote my undergraduate dissertation on her, and specifically I wrote it on the heroics of gender-specific infanticide in the work of Euripides.

So I always like to clear the air and say I don't have children, nor did I used to have children. So nobody has to feel bad. I promise it's all fine. And then, you know, I spent a long, I mean, I go and see every production pretty well that I can get myself to. So I've probably seen about 30 Mideas over the years, I think. I've seen it in Dutch. I've seen it in Japanese. I've seen quite a few productions in English.

And the nice thing about knowing a play quite so well from the Greek is that you can put it in any language and I still know what's going on. which I'm going, yeah, no, I know this, but yeah, no, it's been a love affair for the last, well, 30 years or so, I guess. Well, just like in today's age, as you mentioned, like 30 different performances of Medea, was that the same in antiquity? Do we see many different retellings of her story down through the centuries? We certainly do. I mean, first of all, we see lots of re-performances of the same play. We see Euripides, Medea has performed all over Greece within a very short time. of it being first performed in 431 BCE.

But yeah, we also have multiple sources. So the first mention, as I say, Homer, the second, or perhaps the other way around. I know some people are very anxious to worry about which comes first out of Homer and Hesiod. So it mentions in Homer and Hesiod. And then our first narrative version, which actually tells the story rather than a little sort of mention,

is Pindar's fourth Pithio, that's from 4602, 461 BCE. So it's a victory ode. Pindar writes poems for victorious competitors in this instance, the Pithian Games, so like the Olympics, but held in Delphi. Because this is antiquity, he doesn't write the victory ode for the guy who won the horse race, the chariot race. He writes up for the guy who owns the horses. Follow the money. That's how you get paid. And so he writes a victory ode to Archesaleus of Cyrene, for that is who the winner is. And that begins with Medea in this instance.

a sort of a prophetess, I suppose. She is delivering an oracle that the foundation of Sirene will be connected to the Argo because a sacred board of earth, which I'm afraid I find intrinsically hilarious, is given to Euphemus, I think, who is a son of, I'm going to say Poseidon and hope that's right, one of the Argonauts anyway, and he has to take it and carry it and then, you know,

he confound Cyrene and his descendants or blah, blah, blah. But instead what happens is that he inexplicably loses track of his sacred clodova and it gets washed overboard, somebody clearly just goes, what is it, mud and throws it over. And that's my gloss on Pindar, I should say rather than what's actually in Pindar. And so the foundation of Sirene is delayed by several generations, but in the end, it all comes to pass. And so this is how Pindar gets the story of Medea straight in front and center. This is how he connects it. And then he sort of pauses to reassure us that the all gold fleece a fitting subject for the muses, i.e. for poetry. And then he tells us some of the story of the

Argo. And right up to the bit where Jason has been told where the golden fleece is by Aetis, the father of Medea. And then Pindar just, I don't know if he was being paid by the word, but he's like, oh yeah, we haven't got time for that now. Anyway, Jason kills the snake. And off to the foundation of Cyrene. You're like, dude, no one cares about the foundation of Cyrene. He Tell me more about the fleece and the giant snake. But no, no dice. Pindar's not having it. And then 30 years later, the Euripides version,

which is such an extraordinary telling, that every version that comes later is in dialogue with it, up to and including the present day. Then a couple of hundred years after that, we have the version by Apollonius of Rhodes, the Argonautica, a four-book epic poem about the story of the Argo. Ovid, in the first century BC and to C, will take on the story of Medea a couple of times in his metamorphoses, I think he mentions her,

but also one of his heroides poems, which are like monologues from heroines of Greek myth to their absent menfolk in this instance, Jason. So, yeah, there are Seneca wrote a version in the first century of tragedy about Medea. So it is no exaggeration to say that just in antiquity, we have her story being told and retold for well over a thousand years. Her name never fades away, does it? And depending on the audience that they had in mind, do you see certain traits of Medea go to the forefront in certain versions?

Does she very much have different portrayals in different versions? She does. I mean, the essential conundrum of Medea, one which I've had to wrangle with, writing a novel, where, you know, the joy of Euripides is that it's the most perfect play ever written, I think. But all the action happens in a single day. So you don't have to show how she develops over time. because you just see her on a single crisis day.

But if you're trying to show her over a longer period, then your essential trickiness, and this is something Ovid struggles to reconcile and his different portrayals of her, I think. So it's a noble way to get caught up in her. It's a noble hedge to get caught in, as you try to sneak your way through, let's say. But she starts out when we meet her in E.G. Apollonius

as this very young, impressionable girl, she falls in love with this handsome adventurer, but she is simultaneously an incredibly powerful priestess and witch. She has drugs that can kill, she has drugs that can save lives, she is unbelievably powerful. The Argonauts have a sort of argument about whether or not it's okay or unmanly to get a young girl to help them with their quest. But they also know perfectly well that they need her or Jason will simply die in the attempt to win the golden fleece from Aetis. and we have that version of her, therefore, in Apollonius, a long-sized. So she's like super-powerful teenage, you know, falling in love really hard.

And that all sounds fine. But then when we meet her in Euripides, so she and Jason have children by this point, but they're, you know, they're old enough to talk, they have a tutor. So we can assume they've been married for 10 years, eight years, something like that. So, you know, she's often played by women in their 50s, and God knows there are so few parts for women full stop in the Western Canada. of theatre, that I'm all in favour of women doing whatever the hell they like on stage. But in fact, she's probably in her 20s or 30s.

It's like Heckerby is always played by somebody who is the sort of granddam of the British theatre, but you could be a grandmother in antiquity by sort of 32. I've only got distant memories of being grandmother aged by the standards of Greek myth. And so this version of her, abandoned by her husband and in the process of being banished, sent into exile from her adopted home of Corinth, is devoid of power. You know, she begins the play, we're told by the chorus when they're talking to the nurse in the Erippides' play, they say, you know, she's lying on the floor, she won't move her head, we've tried talking to her, and the nurse is like, yeah, you know, she just turns away if you try

and talk to her, she's just groaning, she doesn't even use words. And the first thing we hear her say from offstage is like, I want to die, it's the end of my life. And then when she comes on stage, she's completely calm and reserved. and she's got everything under control. And you're like, wait, who are you? You know, the devastation is real, but the control is real too. What was challenging in trying to sort of square some of these many different versions of Medea was how do you take somebody who's this incredibly powerful, if sort of naive teenager

and get her to a point where she's utterly powerless and can't seem to stop, you know, her straying husband from straying. And so it was the most interesting thing was looking at these different bits of her life, these different snapshots of her from different sources and trying to work out if I could reconcile them into a coherent, a psychologically coherent whole. Well, we'll explore some key themes from her story in these different accounts during this chat today. I'd like, first of all, Natalie, to explore a topic that I find really, really interesting,

which is her background. It's where she came from. So whereabouts in the ancient world does Medea come from? She's from Colchis. And Colchis is a place which may or may not be the name of the land or just the sort of specific kind of city that she lives in. Sometimes the land is called Aeia, but we know that better as the island that Searsie lives in Homer's Odyssey.

But Searsie is her aunt and her father is Aetis, so they are siblings and they are both children of Helios, the sun god. Colchis, we don't know exactly where ancient Colchis might have been if it's just a mythical place or if it was ever attached to any kind of real geography. It's situated on the banks of the River Fassus or not far from the River Fassus. But modern day, Georgia is where Colchis would have been. And the Georgians are rightly proud of Medea as their local, brilliant, incredibly clever, incredibly storied character of myths.

So there's a huge statue of Medea in Georgia. which always makes me really happy that they're rightly proud of her. And she's still claimed by other writers writing in and around the Caucasus. So Lidmila Ulitskaya wrote a novel called Medea and her children not too many years ago, which is set in the modern world and has a very different storyline from the ancient myth. So yes, ancient Caucasus is modern-day Georgia, so the side of the Caucasus Mountains. So things you might see as you went to visit her, if you were traveling by sea, would include the Titan Prometheus, chained to a rock, having his liver pecked out by an eagle.

So that's among the local sites. I don't necessarily recommend it. I'm just telling you you can see that as you go. I think the archaeology from ancient Georgia is really, really interesting and the kind of interaction that they had, the eastern fringe of the Black Sea, with the Greek world. Does it mean, does it mean that the Greek audiences who would have been watching, let's say, Euripides' play or hearing about Medea's story from earlier sources,

would it have come across to them very early on that she is not a, she's not a Greek, that she is, I guess, a barbarian in their eyes. Yeah, they would have said barbarian. They do say barbarian to describe her. It's obviously a very colonial word that comes from the Greek belief. It will be handed over wholesale to the Romans, that people who are not from Greece, in the Romans case, Italy, don't make any comprehensible sounds.

So barbarian meant somebody who goes bar, bar, bar, bar, you can't understand what they're saying. So for the Greeks, yes, absolutely she's a barbarian. And one of the reasons that we centre on this so much, I think, is because it's crucial to Euripides' version of her, is that she is a character who comes from the fringes of the Greek experienced world. And she comes to the centre of Greece, to Corinth, to Athens, and she brings her non-Greek values with her. But as always with this sort of thing, you have to be very careful in trying to unpick

what might be Greek or not Greek. So a good parallel example, without spoiling my own novel, would be from the Trojan war myth, where Ephiginaia is spirited away from the moment when her father, Agamemnon, is about to sacrifice her. She's spirited away to Taoists, which is modern-day Crimea, so Ukraine, I guess, or near Ukraine. And in the poem, Ephiginia among the Taurians,

Ifaginia by Euripides again, she bemoans living in this awful place where human sacrifice takes place and it's so terrible and she wishes she was back home in Greece and it's like, sorry, remind me again what was happening to you the minute before you were spirited out of Greece. I feel like it was human sacrifice. So the Greek's construction of their own practices are much more oddly, sympathetic to themselves than their constructions of other people's barbarian practices. And that's sort of doubly trebly true for Medea. Greek tragedy often deals with a culture clash. It's one of the things that it's very good at, whether that's the Trojan War, where the Greeks turn up in Troy,

modern-day Turkey, or whether it is the story of Medea where a foreigner, barbarian, a colchian, comes to Greece. You do often get the, you know, the earliest play that we have, the Persians by Escalis, centres the story in Persian, with which Athens had very recently, all of Greece had very recently been at war. So the idea of imagining the foreign and as Edith also peerlessly described it, inventing the barbarian, is central to Greek tragedy, and Midea is a crucial part of that story. Shall we talk about her first meeting with Jason

when she is still in Colchis? Because it's quite the story, and one to look at it again and again when you actually looked at it from Midea's perspective. Yeah, absolutely. So we get a fantastic version of this scene in Apollonius of Rhodes and the Argonautica. And the first two books follow the Argonauts from Thessaly from Yolkos, where Jason begins his life and indeed his voyage.

And they own various adventures, which are a great deal to the Odyssey, or Odyssey 9 to 12 anyway, the sort of adventurey bit of the Odyssey rather than the slaughtering suitors on mass bit of the Odyssey or the largely pig-focused couple of books of the Odyssey. And so they have lots of adventures. They arrive in Colchis. And at the same time as the Argonauts are parking their ship, I have no idea. how you actually stop a ship because I'm from Birmingham where we don't have them. So yeah, whatever it is you that anchors something like that, then the gods and goddesses are getting involved. So Hera and Dathini approach Aphrodite and they say, could you get your son, that would be Eros, to go and shoot an arrow at Medea so she falls for Jason so she helps him out because

this is really important to our plan. And Hera's plan is get Jason and Medea back to Yolcos where Jason is from because she has an absolute death wish for Pellias, his uncle, king of Yolcos, and she feels like Medea is the kind of woman she could do business where. Jason has proved so far rubbish at killing his uncle. If anyone's going to be the man for the job, it probably will be Medea. So Herra's very keen for this to happen. And Aphrodite bribes Eros with a beautiful toy, a gold and sparkling blue ball,

which is probably meant to represent the earth. The blue stripe that goes around it is probably Oceanus, the river that the Greeks think encircle the earth. And so she gives her son a bribe. This used to be a toy of Zeus's when he was growing up on Crete, so it's a pretty good toy. And he goes and shoots an arrow at Medea. So she sees Jason and falls for him utterly. And in our other sources, so in Pindar, for example, a little bit earlier, a few centuries

earlier, the way she's sort of bamboozled into love is Aphrodite. intervenes directly, she gives Jason a yonks. This is sometimes used as the name of a bird, which is called a rye neck. I have no idea what a rye neck looks like, but again, Birmingham, I can't help it. And sometimes we accept it's the name of a sort of strange, circular device to which birds were perhaps attached, but a torture device, in essence, and it's a magical torture device. So the idea is it will stir up great passions if you spin it in Medea, not for Jason, interestingly, as Pindar tells it, but for Greece. So here's an early example of a slightly, as we would perceive it, colonial mindset

in which, you know, the Greeks can't imagine that you could be happy somewhere that wasn't Greece. So, yeah, she'll be tortured into longing for Greece, and then she will ditch her crappy little distant non-Greek homeland and come and live in Greece, which will, of course, treat her slightly abominably, although she will pay them back in kind. So, yeah, it's a very different scene. The crucial thing that echoes in both of them is that she has to be persuaded by desire,

either for Greece or for Jason, to override her natural love for her family, for her parents. And again, we have this sense of her as being this sort of, you know, willful teenage girl who falls for this handsome adventurer. But actually, you know, strong, erotic magic has to be used on her before she's prepared. to betray her family. So it would be a mistake to assume that she is just flighty, far from it.

I'm nowhere near an expert on the subject at all, but when thinking about the Jason and the Argonaut story, another key thing that pops up to me from stories that I've heard is almost how that clash of thoughts, you know, needing that strong magic to betray the family, to help Jason, how much later on where I think they're sailing down the Adriatic. And she has her brother chasing after them in another ship and her father or cutting up her brother during the way. And it just feels like that's gone to a different extreme. If there was this very difficult kind of attempt to wrestle her away from her loyalty to her family. And then later on, you've got that story where she's cutting up her own brother.

Yeah, it's an interesting one because in later versions, absurd of her brother is a small child, who's her younger sibling. And she basically kills and dismembers a toddler and then lobs the body parts into the sea so that her father will be delayed from chasing after her because I'd be busy collecting the bits. In Apollonius's version, which is, you know, by far the most detailed version, we have later versions like Valerius Flacus and the Orphic Argonautica, but Apollonius is Hellenistic. So this is being written in or around Alexandria in the time of bit after Alexander. And his version has Absertes as Medea's older brother, who was commanding the ships that are coming after her to try and bring her back. And there is no happy ending if she's taken home. She's not

taken home and then sent to bed without any tea. She's taken home and murdered for sure. And in Apollonius's version, it is Jason who kills Absertes and not Medea. And it is still a pretty cowardly act. He stabs him in the back, literally and metaphorically. And then very interestingly, at least I find it really interesting. Jason sometimes cuts off his extrematives, but he licks up the blood and then you spit it out. And this is one of the things you do. to try and make sure that the ghost of the person you just murdered doesn't pursue you. So I can't recommend it. And I'm obviously for hygiene reasons, for ethical reasons, I'm not recommending it.

I'm just saying this is what happens in Apollonius of Rhodes's Argonautica. But then they still have to go to Aeia and be purified by Searcy by Midea's aunt. And she is not delighted that they've been sent her way. You can't find Aea unless you're meant to. So she accepts that Zeus has sent them to be purified. And if, you know, do you since this sonnet, you sort of have to just suck up your scruples and say, yes, okay. Suck up your scruples as Jason does the blood of his slain enemy and continue, you know, about your day. So they managed to get themselves purified, but yeah, Absertes does have a pretty unhappy ending, whichever way you do it.

I find it's sort of more forgivable if he's older and more, you know, has more agency. It's pretty hard to get over the toddler version of the story. I've really conceived. I know. I did have to raise it just because it does come to the forefront of my own. my mind. But I do appreciate it does feel with Medea's story, like kind of the two geographic areas. It's either Polkis at the beginning or

Corinth for Euripides' play where it's centered on Corinth in just one day, isn't it? So those are the two geographic areas for it? Yeah, and then Athens later in her life. So we get a hint of that. But again, this is telling us a lot about how Greek tragedy works, because in the Euripides play,

at the beginning of the play, the tutor, the boys tutor, comes on stage and says to the nurse, oh, I'm sorry to hear Madeus, about losing Jason, but it's about to get way worse. Don't tell her she's about to be exiled. So are the kids. And so Madeira's at a crisis point on multiple fronts. She's lost her husband. She's about to lose her home. And one of the things she decides is that she can't enact a revenge plan until she has an escape route, which is very practical. She is very practical. And the escape route that she finds is Athens. Egeus, who is one of the mythical kings of Athens,

comes popping through. The downside to, you know, the upside of a play where everything happens on a single day is that the momentum is absolutely unbeniable and you're being kind of pulled along and punched in the face at the same time. The downside is occasionally you need some coincidences in order to make it fit together. So on this occasion, it just happens to be popping through and perhaps it would have been a different day, but for the purposes of theatricality, it's all in one day. And he's very impressed by Medea, they've met before. And she says, I'm in this disastrous position. And really interestingly, he says, you know, surely Jason isn't allowing his sons to be thrown into exile like this.

Surely Jason isn't agreeing to this. So he is shocked. You know, he, a patriarchal man like they are in the past, is appalled by what's being meted out to Medea. And when she says, oh, yeah, no, he knows and he doesn't care. It just is genuinely shocked. You know, this version of him, he is genuinely appalled on her behalf. And so he offers her safe haven. He says, you know, I can't scoot.

you up and take you out of Corinth, but if you can get to Athens, I will look after you in Athens. And so then Medea has, you know, one of her problems is resolved. She's still got to find a way out of Corinth, but she does have somewhere to get to. And Athens and Corinth are not far apart, of course. So it's certainly not too difficult a journey. But the reason that Athens is an important part of this myth is, I'm sure, because, you know, the story had grown up over time, et cetera, etc. And lots of different places are going to lay a little claim to it. So Yolkis is part of it and Thessaly and then, you know, obviously Colchis and then Corinth and now Athens. But it's also the fact that these plays were being written and performed in Athens, you know, that Euripides is writing

for an Athenian audience that this play was performed at the Dionysia, the Theatre Festival to Dionysus in Athens in 431 BCE. So of course you're going to have, you know, the city-state where your work is being performed, playing a starring role, or at least the crucial cameo role in the play, because, you know, that's your audience. Did they all, you know, this is a festival of Dionysus, so they've all been drinking wine all day, I assume. So did everyone cheer when Athens was mentioned? It doesn't seem a ridiculous idea, does it? Everybody were like, yeah, Athens, they'll see you right, wronged woman, come on. And then obviously she goes on to behave in a way, which they probably would find a little bit less sympathetic and perhaps they wouldn't want her in Athens, but too late now.

Well, we certainly get into what the audience would have thought of Medea when they watch the play as we go on. I have a couple more questions just to ask before that, Natalie. And it's actually in regards to the couple of Jason and Medea together. When you examine the key traits of these two figures, were they actually quite a good match? I think so. Yeah, I really think so. In a way that you can't ever think about, for example, Agamemnon and Clytemnestra. So if you are watching Eskolas's Agamemnon, what you see is the incredibly clever, terribly

angry, full of vengeance, Clytemnestra, toying with quite a stupid man who seems to have no idea what his wife is capable of. And then, you know, spoiler, she murders him. And you watch it thinking, you know, as they're talking to one another, you're like, have you ever met your wife? This is so weird. You don't seem to have any idea what she's capable of. You don't see to have any idea what she might think or feel on any subject. But when you watch a production of Euripides-Madea, what you see is these two characters who absolutely get each other. They're both clever. They're both good at rhetoric. And Euripides was a brilliant rhetorician. If he didn't make his money in the theatrical off-season writing legal speeches,

then there's no justice in the world because he's amazing at legal defences. You know, the one that Helen makes and Chauders is, oh, wow. And, you know, there's no. And, there's no, there's no, and, he's no, and here too. You know, when Medea makes her accusations at Jason for all the terrible things that he's done, he says, well, yeah, but I gave you life in Greece, so you're famous, and you can't imagine that being not in Greece is a valuable existence, of course. But their long speeches of recrimination become shorter and shorter until in the end, they're just exchanging single lines of dialogue. It's called stick amethia. And you would see that kind of dialogue in, for example, screwball comedies from the early 20th century or mid-20th century, where you've got two

very clever, very bright, very witty characters dropping lines at each other, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, like that. And it's so satisfying to watch and to listen to, you know, all those lovely stories, like it happened one night and things like that. And they're just full of joy or Philadelphia story. It's like when you've got Hepburn and Grant and they're both bringing everything to everyone's just bright and smart and witty and clever and fun. And so to have that in a tragedy is, you know, that's obviously the way that plays were written, but your release is particularly good at it. And what it gives you is this sense of incredible chemistry between them. So even while they're throwing insults at each other, you watch it thinking these two

had amazing sex. They had amazing sex. And when you see a really good production of it, you get that sense from the cast. You know, I think a lot of people saw the Helen McCory, Danny Sapani, Medea-Jason relationship, because the National Theatre made it available on National Theatre at home, I think, during lockdowns. So lots of people have seen it, even more than could see it in real life. And their chemistry was fantastic.

You were like, oh God, yeah, this couple were amazing when they were together. And the chemistry across the room with other people and would have crackled and everybody would have been like, they are so into each other. And you could see that that kind of really intense kind of chemical desire could very easily turn into something incredibly acrimonious.

So, yeah, when it's done well, and it is often done well, it is, oh, yeah, it's amazing. Very much a power couple, but as you say, the quality of writing of Euripides, does that make the tragedy itself even more, I have to say, fantastic? That's why the Midea story keeps coming back and back and back. part of it is that original relationship between Jason's into Madeira in the first place. Yeah, I really agree because there are later versions, the Seneca, for example, which make it shade off into melodrama. And sometimes people make mistakes with it, I think, in my opinion, with the Euripides now, where they're so dazzled by the beautiful Stichimithia and by the fact that you could play these short, sharp exchanges of lines for laughs, that they follow that path, but it is the wrong path because then what you end up with is melodrama attached to. a comedy. And so you kind of have to bear in mind at all times that there is everything at stake

for these two. It's not trivial. You know, the joy of comedy is that nothing very much is at stake. That's why we can enjoy it. And so the scale of things is relatively minor. But the scale of things in this is life and death. So it is a hugely potent, hugely difficult story. but because Euripides gives these two characters such articulate responses to their different lives and their choices, because Jason is able to defend himself in a way Agamemnon couldn't and never has to try, that when Jason receives these allegations from Madeira that she's ruined his life, he gives a response which is so plausible and yet toxic that the chorus of Corinthian women say, you know, your arguments are sound, but, you know, we don't agree with you. You know, you may, you

a really good case, but no, you're still wrong. And that's about as good as those speeches could possibly be. They know what's morally right and wrong. The chorus is often our moral arbiter in a tragedy, and they know what's right and wrong. But also, he argues so fluently, so plausibly, and this is a condition that Jason is always attached to. He's not like the manliest hero, but he's very, very good at speaking. From Pindar onwards, he's a very plausible man. And so that is his superpower. And there it is, you know, on show in the play. It's just not enough, not enough to persuade Madeira. Let me go back to the character of Medea in that play. I feel we need to talk about those two

monologues. Can you explain what they are, Natalie, and why they are such extraordinary pieces in the literature? Yeah, so the first big monologue that Medea gives in the play is really quite near the start. So what we've heard so far is that her husband has left her, he's marrying someone else. She and her children are banished. from Corrance and she doesn't really have anywhere to go. And by the time she comes out on stage, we've heard that she's in this desperate, powerless state that she's been lying on the floor. She's wretched, she can't do anything except weep.

And then she comes out, she's completely composed and she's basically giving a performance to the chorus, to the women of Corinth, who are there because they are friends of hers. And she's, you know, obviously earned her place in their trust over the year that they've been there. And she says, it's just the worst thing being a woman if your marriage isn't happy. And the thing is that you can't tell in advance what it is you're getting because you have to buy a husband at a huge price.

She's talking about dowries. And there's no mark. Like there is with gold, you get a mark to show you that it's proper gold rather than some painted bit of lead. But you don't get a mark on a man, so you can't tell if he's a good guy or a bad one. You just have to find out. And then if things go wrong, it's not so bad for him because he can just go out and find fun else worth. We can't. We have to stay at home. And she says, it's all right for you, women of Corinth, because, you know, you've got your fathers and your brothers to sort of defend your honour,

but I don't have those. I'm not in my homeland. I'm a long way away from it. And I don't have a father or a brother because, you know, I don't have anyone to look after me. And it's such an extraordinary kind of litany of what is wrong with women's lives in an extreme patriarchy, which fifth century Athens certainly was, that it was still been. being read this speech written by a man, performed by a man, and to an audience very probably of just men, it was still being read at suffrage meetings 110 years ago. I mean, it is just an extraordinary piece of writing. And what's the most incredible thing about it, I think, is that Medea isn't talking about herself, because in the Bronze Age, which is when the player

sets of 13th century, it's the generation before the Trojan War, she didn't need a dowry to get, She didn't marry the man her father chose for her. She helped a traveling adventurer to steal something from her dad and then did a runner. So who is she talking about? She's talking about the wives of the men who are watching the play is what she's doing. She's talking about fifth century Athenian women's lives where these women are cloistered. And so if you're living an Athenian woman's life in the fifth, Athenian wife's life in the fifth century, you wouldn't see it.

You might see your dad and you would see your husband. you'd see sons and you'd maybe see a brother, but you would see no other men at all. If you were upper class, you'd have a completely cloistered existence. So it would be, if your husband was straying, it would be disastrous. You would be completely powerless.

You'd have no capacity to divorce this man, but he could just repudiate you and that'd be you out on your ear. And I can never quite get past it. This incredible monologue, written by a male playwright, performed by a man, because obviously masked drama in the fifth century, so all parts were played by men.

And we don't know for a fact that the audience at the Dionysia, the City's Theatre Festival, was only male, but women have almost no role at all in civic life in ancient Athens. So it's pretty unlikely, I think, that they were in the original audience, the first audiences for the play. They may have seen it when it started to tour, but not at the beginning. And so how did that audience respond? They were watching this role of Medea,

telling them basically your wife's life is absolutely appalling, so try and be nice to her. Hey. And they just sit there going, oh, hang on, that is a bit like my wife. Or did they just think, you know, nothing more about it? I just don't know. I find it an incredible, it is just the most extraordinary piece of writing. It's not the only extraordinary piece of writing Euripides does when you're like, how did you know? How did you know women's lives were like this? You know, he must have had a very unusual relationship with his own wife, I guess. Yes, although this is all supposition, but we're told in Xenophon's Economicus, I think, where Socrates is in conversation with a man named. I'm just say Iscomicus and hope I'm right? And he says, is there anyone you have less conversation with day-to-day than your wife? And Isichomacus goes, no, I don't think so. And they carry on.

This is a completely unremarkable response. She is decades younger than him, as becomes clear through the dialogue, and she is supposed to look after his household. But they don't seem to have any kind of conversation. That cannot have been true of Euripides. He must have had not just a brilliant male actor who could play female roles, as Edithal has argued unbeatably in my view. He must have had an extraordinary actor so he could write these incredible female roles, knowing that they would be performed with this extraordinary pathos.

But also, he had an absolutely astonishing understanding of the lives of women around him. And that's not, let's be honest, that's not always true of modern writers, let alone of writers in a society as heavily devised. as ancient Athens. So I'm constantly dazzled by Euripides and not least in this. I remember talking recently, effectively, as you've said, the 5th century Athens is arguably one of the worst times and places for a woman ever to have been living because of what you've just described there. And one of my later questions would have been, like,

what do you think people would have thought about the play Medea in 5th century Athens? But it sounds like maybe, you know, most women may not have even been able to watch the play. or they have got had to go elsewhere. Yeah, they may well never have seen it. They might have had to wait, or maybe the women of Athens never saw it. Maybe women elsewhere saw it, but the women of Athens might never have seen it.

We don't know a huge amount about the other two plays that were shown, well, the other three plays, technically, two other tragedies and a satire play alongside Medea, because in the Dionysia, each playwright would produce three tragedies and a satir play, a sort of raucous, bawdy comedy with a chorus of satir. And the plays would be shown in sets,

of four. And sometimes there's a very obvious thematic link, like in the Oristea, East Gliss is orosteia. And sometimes the link might have been more tangential. The plays might not have seemed to be a set. But of the three playwrights who competed in 431, Euripides' set of four plays came third out of three. So you have to assume it was greeted with, I mean, I don't think whatever one that year is likely to have been as good as the Medea, but maybe the other two plays. Maybe you put all his energy into that one and the others weren't up to it. I don't know. But within a fairly short time, the play was being performed all over Greece. So it was incredibly popular. But perhaps it was its first performance just too shocking? Because, you know,

he certainly would have made changes to the story that people felt they knew. Maybe that's it. Or maybe, as I say, the other plays in the trilogy just weren't up to scratch. Who knows? But, yeah, very quickly, it becomes an incredibly popular play. Aristophanes will tease Euripides for years and years afterwards for the fact that women all hate him because he's always making them be terrible in his plays and do awful things. So it's obviously a fun joke for him that Euripides is renowned for making women be awful. But of course, he gives women amazing things to do on the stage.

So they may only do villainous things, but it is tragedy. So they're going to be quite a lot. Statistically, there are more villainous things going on than in everyday life, I would say. and at least he's letting them have these incredible parts. There you are quite right. Well, shall we also mention that second monologue that we do have of Medea in the play? This is the big one, isn't it? The other one's extraordinary, but it's the big one.

Yeah, I mean, yeah, that's the thing. They're both huge in their own ways in completely different categories, because the deliberative nature of the big monologue, as I would think of it, where Medea tries to decide if she can or cannot bring herself to kill her children is absolutely incredible. And this is one of the features that Aristotle really prizes in a tragedy.

Dianoya is one of the most important things in him. It's thought or deliberation, the way that you convey your thinking process. And of course, you know, this is millennia before there are novels. So if you want to get a character's inner thinking, inner working onto an audience,

you can't portray it in prose. You have to find a way for that character to say it on the stage in a monologue or in dialogue. And Euripides writes this extraordinary. I think she changes her mind. I did count once. I think it was seven times.

Yeah, she was like, I'm going to have to kill my children. I cannot bring myself to do it. I'm going to have to do it. I cannot do it. And these two halves of her self are at war. You know, there is a part of Medea, which is a very, she was like a Greek hero in the Trojan War. She was like a male hero in the Trojan War.

So she is an extremist, a moral extremist, and moral absolutist, if you like. And the thing that she cannot bear, much like Ajax and Sophocles is Ajax, is the idea that anyone will be able to laugh at her. That the idea is so, I mean, Anathema doesn't really come close to describing it. She is so determined that no one will be able to say, I put one over on Moday and she just had to take it, ha, ha, ha, that she will commit the most extraordinary acts of harm and indeed self-harm in order to prevent that from ever happening. And if you look at that with our mindset, I would hope it would seem irrational. It would seem extreme and horrific. But from her perspective, it's a price worth paying.

You know, you often see in a contemporary production they'll make Medea mad at the end of the play. Because the alternative is that we accept that she has done something beyond horrific and she doesn't regret it. She's desperately upset by it, but she doesn't regret it. And so almost always, not 100% of the time, but a lot. And directors tend to square that circle by saying, oh, yeah, so she's crazy now. She imagines that she's in this sort of happier place. It's like, okay, that's not what you're a pretty said, but sure. And isn't the ending, which is, you know, kind of following that act of kidding the children, isn't it?

Her inner chariot going up to the heavens as well? She's in a chariot. She comes on. So in Greek theatre, if you have been to somewhere like Epidavros, you'll have seen, But in ancient Greek theatre, the action happens, obviously, in this lovely sort of space in front of the audience, which is a big semi-circle. But if gods come on stage, they come on stage upper level. So they are, in the case of Medea, she's in a chariot that belongs to Helios, the sun god, her grandfather. But we have other places.

This is where the phrase, Deo-Sex Machina comes from a God in a Machine, is that a God in a Machine does literally come on stage. and, you know, pronounces, in the case of, say, Euripides Hippolytus, Artemis comes on stage and she basically goes, this is all awful, exhabrodite's fault. Oh, well, anyway, that's the end of the play. And you go, oh, okay, fine, the resolution has been achieved. And at the end of Medea, we might be expecting, I don't know, the goddess Heera to come on stage and say,

well, I cherish the lives of small children, and you two didn't deserve to have them, you appalling pair. or similarly, although God knows, Hera's not above killing children, you have half a chance. And in some versions of the Medea story, Hera is responsible for the death of their children. And Medea is not.

In earlier versions prior to Euripides, it seems pretty likely that Hera is the guilty party some of the time. But for Medea to come on at the end of the play, in this role, essentially she's undergone an apotheosis by killing her children in Euripides' version of the play, she has become an equivalent to a goddess. And so there's a moment at the end of the play

where Jason says, you know, the gods know who did this terrible thing. And she says, they know that you broke all your oath. And we might, as modern people, think, well, surely, you know, killing children is way worse than breaking your word. But within the confines of the play, she's not wrong. You know, the gods have seen what happened.

And they've rewarded her with a chariot to get her out of town and not him. He is left, you know, kind of broken on the ground. She serenely flies out of town. So you have to assume that the gods, in this matter, however difficult it may seem for us to understand, the gods don't particularly disagree with her course of action. I mean, human life is cheaper, perhaps, in antiquity. So maybe that's why it seems so cold to us, but perhaps not to its original audience.

It is also fascinating learning about this. But you did mention earlier, of course, there's so many different versions. and Medea's story and that does ultimately come down to the Romans and you mentioned Ovid earlier so that first

or is it first century BC BCD we're talking about? Yeah turn of the first. Yeah, turn of the first. So he's writing at the end of the first century BC and into the first century CE

and he takes on Midea's story for example in his heroidas which is an incredible again they seem like they're somehow travelled through time because Ovid

this first century they're probably early it's always a bit difficult to date Ovid's work relative to other bits of work but probably they are early poems. And essentially they are letters written from the abandoned women of Greek myth

to the men who abandoned them. So we have, you know, the first one is a letter from Penelope to Ulysses rather than Odysseus, because obviously, Ovid's using Roman names. And it's incredibly affecting, you know, she talks about the fact that he's just been gone for so long, you know, that when he left, she was a young girl, and now, you know, it's 20 years later.

She says, now she's an old woman. You know, life is obviously compressed in antiquity. And so she is abandoned in one way, for example. Medea is abandoned in a very different way by Jason. And she is not, you know, waiting for him to come home. That ship has sailed to use the appropriate metaphor, I think, by the time we get to the point in her story that Ovid chooses. But, you know, it's an incredible act of kind of literary ventriloquism

that Ovid can imagine himself. I find it incredible that this sort of most... in some ways, most masculine kind of man about towny poet, who's always trying to impress on us that he's basically just obsessed with sex in every context and with Greek myth, you know, at all times. And there he is thinking, oh, I wonder what it's like from a woman's perspective. And you're like, what? How are you doing that of it? It's just absolutely extraordinary. So his versions are fascinating too. European isn't going to inch it for me, but I do love it.

Yes, but do you think then, I know it's such an overarching question, and I'm sure many opinions differed, But do you think, generally speaking, that Roman men and women had a different perspective on Medea's story compared to, let's say, the men of 5th century in Athens? Yeah, I think they almost certainly did, because women just have a much more present role in Rome than they do. In Athens, they're allowed to own property for a start. So we know that women own businesses, you get things like bricks with the name of a woman who owns the factory stamped into the brick. So we know that women can own property. We know that women can have quite an influential role in imperial politics once the republic has been crushed by Caesar, Octavian and the rest. Once we get into the imperial system, then we're always getting told that, you know, the emperor's wife or the emperor's mother is interfering, certainly in Tacitus and in Suetonia. So whether it's Libya in the life of Augustus or Agrippina in the life of her son, Nero, we always get this sense that there are women who are, in positions of power they shouldn't really be in if, you know, if it was being a bit more Roman and old-fashioned about it, but somehow this new imperial system has come in and these

women are all over the place with their fingers in assorted power pies where they shouldn't be. But you have women and men dining together, you have, you know, at least of Suetonius is to be believed, constant affairs happening all over the shop. And certainly from the laws that are enacted from Augustus onwards to try and improve public morality, it implies that the that you weren't perhaps quite as boistered in Rome as you might have been elsewhere. And of course, you know, that's just the city of Rome further away in places like, you know, greater part of Italy, like the south, like the Bay of Naples, as we would think of it now, and indeed other parts of the empire altogether.

You have to assume that there was, of anything, more freedom for women. There are, there's still a suspicion of foreigners undeniably, you know, when Titus comes to power, he has been having a relationship with Bernice in Judea, and that is seen as a very sort of difficult thing. A foreign woman with power over an emperor, albeit one who lasts as long as tightas, just reminds everybody of Cleopatra, who had far too much influence over Mark Antony,

so we're all very worried about that. So, yeah, the Romans continue to, and their stories talk about foreign interfering women, Dido, Cleopatra. So Medea is another of those that they can, managed to find stories to tap. Well, Natalie, in classic Natalie Haynes-style, you've beautifully retold Midea's story in your new book.

No friend to this house. I mean, quite an interesting title there, I must say, as well. It's from Euripides. Yeah, so when I came to start writing this book, even though I've read the play before lots of times and seen the play a guerrillion times, I didn't know how to start the book. And I thought, you know what I'm going to do?

I'm going to sit down, I'm going to write my translation longhand in a notebook. And when I've finished it, I will know how to start the book. And I did do exactly that, but I didn't have to get very far to find the title because that's about, like, I should have learned this really before I started talking to people about it. It's about line 76, I think, when the tutor arrives to tell the nurse that Medea and the children are banished. The nurse says, oh, Jason can't have agreed to this, surely. You know, and the tutor says, well, yeah, he has, because new love banishes old love, he says, and that man is no friend to this house. So I think everyone will assume that the title refers to Medea because of her notoriously,

happy house behaviour, but actually it's Jason. Nancy, do you hope that this book will let people see a new side to Medea's story or understand how complex a story is? I hope the second one particularly. I think they probably will see a different side to her because I don't think you can find a sort of psychological completeness to a character from the sources that we have that survive to us from an understanding. antiquity. So trying to kind of create a character that you can see from every angle and on different

days and from different perspectives is just a that's a novelist's job and novels aren't written in antiquity. So, you know, at least not in Greek literature until a bit later. And so, yeah, I hope that they will get a sense of her as this extremely complex and very nuanced person. But, you know, she is, she's my Medea as much as anyone's as anyone's, I suppose. So, yeah, I don't know. They'll have to see what they think. Well, Natalie, congratulations on the book. Thank you. It just goes to me to say, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast.

Thank you for having you. Well, there you go. There was the one and only Natalie Haynes talking all things Medea. I hope you enjoyed the episode. Now, this is where I must also bring your attention to Natalie's most recent documentary with us on history hit. It's a two-parter all about Demeter and Persephone, that extraordinary mother-daughter Greek goddess power team. Natalie delves into their powerful myth,

exploring its enduring significance within ancient Greek culture and its continued relevance today. She unravels the story of Persephone's abduction and Amita's fierce response. Along the way, she meets leading historians and archaeologists to uncover what this myth reveals about ancient Greek society, from marriage customs and agricultural cycles, to religious rituals and the mysteries of death.

Filmed across Athens, Elusis and beyond, the film traces how the myth was transformed into the Elysinian Mysteries, one of the most profound, popular, and secretive ritual experiences of the ancient world. So if that documentary intrigues you if that tickles your fancy, well, you can watch it today on History Hit.

Both episodes are coming out this January. Sign up at historyhit.com. subscribe. That's all from me. I'll see you in the next episode.