Medea and The Reformation of The Tragic Polis

Medea and The Reformation of the Tragic Polis
CHRISTOPHER VASILLOPULOS*
Eastern Connecticut State University
In the period between the Solonic and the Kleisthenic political reforms, tragedy
began to emerge, beginning with Thespis and finding full expression in
Aeschylus. As hoplite-democracy expressed the power of political legitimacy
in unmistakable military victories over the Persians and in the creation of the
Athenian Empire, Attic tragedy and its three greatest exponents flourished. No
ornament of a newly rich society, tragedy was a substantive part of the
development of Athens. Tragedy was the school of Athenian democracy,
training its citizens in emerging forms of the political in an era of unprecedented
change. Not only did tragedy help to legitimate new forms of decision-making
based on new political structures in the face of rapidly changing events, it altered
the Homeric warrior ethic to the needs of hoplite-democracy. More reliable and
cooperative heroes were needed and in ever greater numbers if Athens were to
win and hold its wealth and power to say nothing of its empire. Tragedy educated
Athenians to the requirements of reconciling the individual with the needs of
the society, the hero with the army, and the household with the state. Euripides,
who fully appreciated the possibilities which flowed from the resolution of age-
old human dilemmas, including the expansion of freedom, feared that Athens
would not continue to develop. He wished to alert Athenians to the need to
reform the polis by expanding the freedom of its citizens. It was time to bring
women into the political.
It is no accident that the sixth century B.C. saw the rise of the drama or that
its birthplace was the city-states of the Greeks. Like the formation of the city-
state itself, like the expanding commercialism which accompanied such a
formation, like democracy and free speech which resulted from it, the rise of
the theater was one symptom in a far reaching social changeover. It was part
of the passage from tribal culture to political life) Alan Little
*Direct all correspondence to: Christopher Vasillopulos, Political Science, Eastern Connecticut State
University, Willimantic, Connecticut 06226 Telephone (203) 465-4602.
The Social Science .Journal, Volume 31, Number 4, pages 435-461.
Copyright © 1994 by JAI Press Inc.
All rights of reproduction in any form reserved. ISSN: 0362-3319.
436 THE SOCIAL SCIENCEJOURNAL Vol. 3l/No. 4/1994
TRAGEDY AS THE SCHOOL OF ATHENS

The sudden emergence of tragedy was one of the many important changes which
swept the Attic peninsula during the period of Solonic and Kleisthenic reforms--
reforms which underlay the rise of Athens to preeminence. Tragedy was Athenian
in a sense far more profound than location and that its authors were Athenian.
Tragedy did not happen to occur in Attica. Tragedy was employed self-consciously
as a means of increasing the legitimacy of the new democratic order. Athenians
went to school at their theatre, learning political lessons. The importance of this
statement is often difficult to grasp. Few would suggest that without theatre
American or British democracy would be noticeably different, whatever the
importance of theatre is to the cultural elites of either society. Nor can television,
notwithstanding its power as a shaper of popular culture, convey the significance
of tragedy to the political life of Athenian democracy. This is not to say that
television does not have political influence. It clearly has changed the way
Americans have elections, but it has not had any structural impact on the polity.
Nor has it self-consciously worked to legitimate democratic forms, for all its
socializing force. For one thing western democracy was a well-formed tradition
by the time television became important to popular culture. In Athens tragedy and
democracy emerged together. More than this coincidence of stages was at work.
The separation of society and polity which marks modern life did not define Athens.
To the contrary few societies have ever integrated the political and the social as
thoroughly as Athenians. 2
Tragedy was part of the public sphere of a citizen's life. According to Beye, "The
public quality of ancient tragedy means that tragedy was part of the public process,
rather than something special. ''3 All the activities which surrounded tragic
performances, as well as, the content of the plays themselves were political to a
degree that moderns cannot without difficulty comprehend. Ehrenberg puts it this
way: "The theatre was an affair of the people, and everyone concerned with the
performance was serving the god Dionysus as well as the community. Although
tragedy by its contents and problems was not so immediate an expression of the
people's thought and feelings as was comedy, essentially it was the same, and in
truth 'the theatre was the polis'. ''4 Meagher does not put the case too strongly when
he says: "I would claim that Attic tragedy, an art form nearly native to Athens,
was a foundationally constitutive element of the democratic Athenian polis.'5
As an important element in the Athenian's immersion in the political, tragedy
was as important to him and to his polis as was holding office or serving on juries.
This is not to say that tragedies engaged in partisan politics. Here the distinction
between the political and politics must be stressed. 6 Tragedy schooled Athenians
in the political in a way that universities can only approximate in this country.
Tragedy was a stepping back from politics in order to view the political. In another,
perhaps opposite, sense tragedy was deeply political. It moved the people away
from ritual, superstition, and, above all, the passive acceptance of the universe, while
at the same time allowing them to accept responsibility for their actions. According
to Little: "But its very presence [ritual] indicates in the early period the existence
of social forces which have not yet been acclimatized within the new organization
Medea and The Reformation of the Tragic Polis 437
of the state... It is for this reason that one should insist on what state recognition
meant for tragedy... It meant a change from ritual forms to a new status. It meant
the beginning of secularization... It substituted for more primitive conceptions
founded in uncritical emotion and expressed in mythological terms a freer means
of giving vent to social criticism. Such a transition was, of course, only possible
after the political advance had been made from tribal organization and the
machinery set up for the actual verbalization of society's needs. It is this question
mark, this airing of both sides of the matter which differentiates drama, or action,
with its implication of the free agent, from the passive dromenon, or cult drama,
with its implication of predestined ritual. "7 The tragedians were thus the political
theorists of Athenian democracy. They were the true precursors of Plato and
Aristotle, notwithstanding the many profound differences between the dramatists
and the philosophers. 8 If tragedy and the polls were expressions of the same social
forces, then to understand the origins of one is to understand the origins of the
other.
It may be impossible to do a proper history of the development of tragedy. By
development I do not mean the movement from the prehistory of the Greeks down
through the classical period, but only the transformation of Solon's political verse
through the tragic vision of Thespis, blurred as it must remain to us, into the tragic
drama of Aeschylus, as his genius matured, itself a far from clear progression. We
simply do not have enough evidence of either author, to say nothing of their
predecessors and contemporaries, to suit the canons of literary history. What I
intend is to emphasize portions of Else's and Meier's fine studies, assuming that
they are in the main correct, in order to build a key premise to my argument
regarding Euripides' emendation of Aeschylus' project. The premise, briefly stated,
is that Aeschylus gave dramatic structure to the vision of Thespis in much the same
way that Kleisthenes provided political infrastructure for the reforms of Solon. A
corollary of this premise is that the purpose of integrating a conception of the
political into the tragic vision was twofold: (1) to legitimize the newly formed
Athenian democracy; and (2) to stabilize it by keeping the expectations of the people
in line with the economic and military realities of the fifth century.
There can be little question that the political synthesis which emerged in the wake
of the victories against the Persians was a remarkable success. Athens became the
preeminent Greek state--militarily, economically, culturally, and politically. Athens
resolved perennial and basic questions of political legitimacy, authority, and stability
by providing significant political power for all male citizens. Athens expected more
from its citizens because in the most profound sense Athens was its citizenry. No
amount of success, however, could have prevented cracks from emerging along the
fault lines of the synthesis. Its unprecedented success made it difficult for Athens
to either admit its limitations or to deal with changed circumstances, themselves often
consequences of its successful policies. When the Peloponnesian war broke out,
Athens became less able to deal with its problems. Much of Euripides' work
concerned both elements of the emerging political crisis: Athens' inability to recognize
the logic of its own success and its unwillingness to deal with the consequences of
it. Medea was his treatment of one of the fault lines of Athenian democracy, its
unwillingness to allow women to participate more fully in public life.
438 THE SOCIAL SCIENCEJOURNAL Vol. 31/No. 4/1994
By reading Medea for its political meaning, my object is political understanding,

not literary criticism. My task is to understand the relationship of tragedy to
Athenian democracy, as it was (at least insofar as contemporary scholarship can
bring it to us) and as it appeared in the light of Euripides' Medea. My belief is
that Athenian democracy and Medea's political meaning will be mutually
illuminated. For to understand the one is to understand the other. To misunderstand
the one is to misunderstand the other. This is not to suggest that no other theory
of tragedy, or interpretation of Medea, or of Athenian democracy is valid. My
approach assumes that joint treatment of tragedy and the Athenian polis will
provide insights which have eluded more traditional approaches.
The tragedies lose their distinction when they are rigidly categorized. There is
not tragedy, but rather tragedies, presented over a period of more than seventy-
five years, which are each idiosyncratic, a product of a certain mind speaking
to a certain moment in time. 9 Charles Rowan Beye
RATHER LATE BEGINNINGS: ELSE'S ORIGINS OF TRAGEDY

Greek tragedy is a misnomer. There was only Athenian tragedy. What came earlier
than Aeschylus was not tragedy proper; what came after Euripides, a corruption
and irrelevant to the concerns of this essay. While it is not controversial that
Periclean democracy and highest expression of tragedy were coterminous, to
identify tragedy with Aeschylus has been a matter of much debate. An important
scholarly tradition pushes the origins of tragedy into the dimness of the Dark Age
of Greece and traces a long evolution culminating in the greatness of Aeschylus,
Sophocles and Euripides. Without making an independent assessment of this
research--it comprises many of the great names in classic studies--my work finds
Else's treatment more congenial.
According to Else, the conditions had to be right but without the presence of
Thespis and Aeschylus, tragedy would have achieved neither its greatness nor its
political importance. For two reasons, therefore, it is necessary to elaborate Else's
theory. First, because the conditions of tragedy were the conditions of democracy.
And second, Attic democracy developed the way it did because Attic tragedy
developed the way it did. Just as one cannot conceive of Attic tragedy without
Thespis and Aeschylus, one cannot understand Athenian democracy without an
appreciation of tragedy. As an art form tragedy has come down to us with
undiminished power. As public instruction it has lost its meaning. To some extent
we must essay a retrieval, if we are to appreciate the centrality of tragedy to the
political life of Athens.
Else makes the following assumptions regarding the origins of tragedy:
Whatever may have happened elsewhere, in Polynesia of Peloponnese, it is

Athens alone that counts. The origin of tragedy was not so much a gradual,
'organic' development as a sequence of two creative leaps, by Thespis and
Aeschylus, with certain conditioning factors precedent to each. Although the
two leaps were separated from each other by a considerable space of time, the
Medea and The Reformation of the Tragic Polls 439
second followed in direct line from the first. There is no room between them
for a reversal of the spirit of tragedy from gay to solemn. There is no solid
evidence for tragedy ever having been Dionysiac in any sense except that it was
originally and regularly presented at the City Dionysia in Athens. There is no
reason to believe that tragedy grew out of any kind of possession or ecstasy
(Ergriffenheit), Dionysiac or otherwise, u
Else's critique of the Dionysiac [goat-men/ecstasy] theory of tragic beginnings

concludes with: "The actual satyrs of Greek legend and drama were subhuman,
'good-for-nothing' creatures distinguished above all by braggadocio, cowardice, and
lechery. If the original tragic chorus was made up of them, tragedy must have
undergone a drastic change of tone and theme along the way.'12 There is no evidence
of such a change. Else begins the positive side of his argument with a discussion
of Solon and Pisistratus.
Solon was the great sixth century lawgiver, whose work broke the class deadlock
which threatened to destroy Athens. He was also a poet. His political ideas were
expressed first in elegiac couplets, "the accepted medium forparainesis, exhortation
or counsel" and later in "iambic and trochaic verses. ''u Although many dispute
the quality of Solon as a poet it is not controversial that "Solon is Athenian
literature, down to Aeschylus, except for the beginnings of tragedy itself. "~4 Solon
was an important source of tragedy not only because he was both a poet and a
political man of the first rank but because the mode of his expression anticipated
the union of tragedy and the political. ~5
Solon was a statesman who explained his actions poetically, as if he were before
a group of citizens and not in front of a god. It was they who after all created
political opportunity and demanded accounting. His poetry was a varying mixture
of political discourse and legal argument, as the situation required. That this
expression was as natural to him as it was to his audience indicates how integrated
poetry and the political were in early sixth century B.C. Its awkwardness for us
indicates how different we are. The gulf yawns the more when we realize that Solon's
poetry, despite its personal revelations, was more rational and measured than our
public discourse, even when concerned with the most prosaic matters.
Athenian tyrants also took notice of the relationship of poetry and political
legitimacy. Pisistratus could not conjure up the poetic muse, but he realized all
the more the power of poetry yoked to public purpose. 16 "Pisistratus' patronage
of literature, like his other enterprises, had one dominating purpose--aside from
the useful one of glorifying himself. It was dedicated, in sum, to the greatness and
prosperity of Athens and Attica as a whole, rather than to the benefit of any single
group or faction. This was certainly the purpose of the two great festivals which
he founded and developed, the Panathenaea and the Greater or City Dionysia. ''17
It was at Dionysia that tragedy was institutionalized and given a basis within the
body of Athenian political life. 18 It would be misleading to see the official position
of the theatre as a bureaucratic imposition, for it was accepted as a civic duty.
"After all," according to Meagher, "tragic poetry was supported by elaborate civic
patronage in Athens. No less than the construction and fitting out of a warship
for the Athenian fleet, the subsidizing of a tragic production constituted a
leitourgia, the discharging of a serious and economically onerous service to the

city. ''19
Tragedy, however, was more than the politicization of selected Homeric verses
dramatically staged, just as it was more than Solonic verses publicly recited. The
more, according to Else, was supplied by Thespis. 2° Thespis created Attic tragedy,
by bringing "together three different things which had never been joined before:
the epic hero, impersonation, and iambic verse. The hero is the subject; he presents
himself directly, in his own character, instead of through quasi-impersonation by
the rhapsode. ''2~ To this heroic combination Thespis added a decidedly non-heroic
chorus which was "made up of ordinary mortals like us, and through their emotional
participation in the hero's fall we too are drawn into the ambit of his pathos [i.e.,
his concern with death, mortality, and suffering]. ''22 Choruses tended to be of two
kinds, one a group traditionally dependent upon the hero; the other a group of
citizens, who embody the "root manifestation of the political element in Greek
tragedy, an element which distinguishes it clearly from epic.'~3 Else draws a powerful
inference from Thespian tragedy: it helped create a "spiritual unification of Attica":
"Tragedy for the first time brought the faraway directly into the present and the
great man into contact with the little man... Here all Athenians, noble and
commoner alike, could meet on common ground, in a common surge of emotional
identification with the heroic spirit. ''z4
It takes no great effort to see the political implications for such unity, as
Pisistratus undoubtedly did. Bonding Athenians in the name of Homeric virtues,
while at the same time eliminating many of the divisive properties of the class system,
had to have positive implications for Athenian success, economic, military, and
political. Assuming Thespis presented tragedies in the middle of the sixth century
B.C., the fifty or so years before the Kleisthenic reforms can be seen as a period
which provided sufficient emotional unity in the face of unprecedented social and
economic change for the reforms to take hold. The political properties of tragedy
already had supplied Athens with an advantage over other Greek states. The creative
efforts of another tragic genius provided others.
If Thespis invented tragedy, Aeschylus created tragic drama. The portion of his
achievement that is central to the concerns of this essay was Aeschylus' inability
to accept without understanding. "Aeschylus accepted the pathos as something
coordinate with the hero's greatness. But he was not the kind of man who could
accept it, in the long run, unless it made sense: that is, unless it could be understood
as flowing from certain events or conditions issuing in others. ''25 Notwithstanding
a profound religious motivation pervading his work, Aeschylus' aim was to
understand, not merely accept, man's relationship to God and this not to worship
but to form "an increasingly bold and complex intuition of the meaning of life. "26
In other words, he had as much a philosophical approach to religious questions
as a religious approach to philosophy. If the most awesome confrontations of man's
existence could be approached with reason, then no political dilemma could simply
be accepted. Not only was there a Homeric duty to face the dilemma bravely, but
a human obligation to face it armed with reason. "The Aeschylean trilogy is the
ultimate and only adequate realization of Solon's insight in art: a distinctively
Athenian achievement, and what is more, achieved in Solon's way, by hard,
individual meditation on the problem. "27 Tragic drama enabled not only the hero
to cope with the indeterminacy of existence but enabled the chorus of citizens to
act heroically. "The three hundred Spartans at Thermopylae were a special breed
of men. Valor had been bred and drilled into them; it was their way of life. The
triumphs of Athens were of a different order. Here, for the first and perhaps only
time in Greek history, a whole people rose to the height of a great argument and
lived and died like heroes. "28 Martial glory was the Homeric virtue with the most
primary relationship to the survival of the state, its spread throughout the citizenry
of inestimable value. This extension of Homeric expectations to the male citizens
of Athens had profound political implications, culminating not only in great
victories but in hoplite democracy.29 There were, however, other political lessons
embedded in Attic tragic drama. To these we now turn.
Whence did the Athenians draw this greatness of spirit? Much, of course, has
to be attributed to men like Militades, Aristides, and especially Themistocles.
Much has to be ascribed to Solon and Pisistratus and Cleisthenes, the founders.
But I would suggest that the way to Athens' unique achievement was also
prepared by her unique institution, tragedy.3° Gerald Else
THE TRAGIC POLLS: ME|ER'S AESCHYLUS

By tragic polis I do not mean to suggest that Athens, either literally or
metaphorically, as a tragic character or its history as a tragic drama. I risk
misleading the reader for a simple reason. The emergence of Athens as a polis in
the fullest sense of the term, after Kleisthenic reforms, coincided with the Aeschylean
reformation of Thespis' tragic presentations. Athens as a political community,
inventing itself, admiring its successes, spreading its influence, increasing its prestige
throughout the Greek world--all this took place as Aeschylus was inventing tragic
drama. This was no happenstance. No more did Aeschylus happen to be a general
than did he happen to be a playwright who created tragedy. No more did Athens
happen to politicize and democratize itself to an unprecedented degree with
unprecedented speed than Athens happened to dramatize itself in a form of theatre
unique to it. Athens was the tragic polis, because tragedy was as essential to its
political development as was the success of its hoplite troops. Athens was the tragic
polis not because of the fate which befell it, but because of its self-conscious capacity
to shape its own destiny; not because it was so thoroughly politicized, but because
it politicized itself in accordance with the political conceptions embedded in tragedy.
How thoroughly political Athens was is difficult to grasp. Christian Meier has
devoted a book largely to an exploration of this idea. A significant portion of his
effort deals with Aeschylus' Eumenides, relying heavily upon Meier's interpretation.
In many senses it is an elaboration of Else's thesis that tragedy and Athenian political
development were coterminous and interdependent. "Behind the immediate
complications [in the wake of the removal of the power of the Areopagus] there
must have been a disturbing awareness that the polls itself and its order had been
called into question. For the first time in Greek history--and world history--the
civic order as a whole was placed at the disposal of the citizens: it had become
a matter of controversy, hence a political issue... It was no longer simply a question

of whether or not there should be some kind of public order or of whom should
have the right to govern (either a monarch or an aristocracy); it was now [458 B.C.]
a question of how government should be conducted or what its precise structure
should be... Should the government be in the hands of the nobles or the people?
Should the governed be entitled to a decisive share in the governance of the polis?
The distinction between the rulers and the ruled thus became a matter of political
choice... This development may be understood as the 'politicizing' of the civic order,
or--to put it more precisely--the completion of the process of politicization; it may
also be understood as the stage at which the people suddenly became aware of the
process. This is true above all in the modern sense of the word political: the civic
order became entirely subject to politics. This is the central insight of the
Eumenides. ''31 Although I disagree with Meier in many important details, this essay
can assume the general correctness of Meier's thesis.
Meier begins with discussion of the Athenian fascination with politics and the
political: "Greek civilization is thus the one political civilization in the whole of
world history...Politics became the dominant element in the life of the community
(rather than an element of domination and potentially total disposition). "32 The
Greek immersion in the political does not mean that no other sphere of life was
important. The private life of the household was unquestionably significant and
of primary political concern. Athens was political in the sense that the public life,
that is, all activities outside the oikos, and the political life of its male citizens were
nearly identical. "What is decisively important for world history is the fact that
for the first time ever, the community became a living entity in which, if only among
the ranks of its citizens, men 'lived in consideration of the greater number'--of the
governed, regardless of rank, possessions, and education. ''33
This entity took a great deal of time and energy, and the Greeks were already
an active people. "Athens offered many sources of personal fulfillment--successes;
booty; ownership of land; public esteem (even for the common man); wide
experience; pride in greatness, beauty, and fame of the city; the excitement of being
at the center of political and commercial activity; and all the prestige that one
enjoyed among the Athenians (and as an Athenian among other Greeks) of being
an official, a member of the Council or the Assembly or the People's court. ''34
Although it is impossible to be certain why Athenians were so committed to polis,
a portion of the explanation surely lies in their belief that their identity was largely
synonymous with the polls. "For many citizens their commitment to politics...must
have proved so compelling--and fulfilling--that politics became a way of life. They
discovered their identity in politics and found self-realization in political action.'35
Political activity was a way to achieve meaning, a way to accept the inevitability
of death without giving in to it, a way open to nearly all free men. "The broad
mass of the Athenians thus did not have to be particularly 'educated' or
'intellectually inclined'...in order to develop extreme interest and considerable
understanding."36
Although, formal education was not necessary to carry out the role of citizen,
there was political education. Athenians educated themselves in accordance to what
we might call the grammar of tragedy. I do not mean, of course, the drama of
politics or man's attempts to accommodate himself to change in general or to locate

himself in the cosmos, although such efforts, collective and individual, can be
dramatic and upon occasion tragic. I mean that as Athenian citizens took more
and more of their affairs under direct political control, they did so in accord with
a conception of the political that was imbedded in Attic tragedy. Having no
precursors, Athenians had to teach themselves how to be democratic citizens or
simply lurch from one public desire to the next as a mob. Quite naturally they
turned to the theatre. "The specific term for pla~cwright or dramatic poet in classical
Greek is didascalos, teacher or instructor. In a literal sense the tragic theatre
was their school. The great tragedians were their first political philosophers. 38
According to Ehrenberg a poet was listened to and therefore could serve the
political effectively, because "He neither wrote for sophisticated connoisseurs nor
even for an educated upper class. He was a man speaking to his own people, thinking
and believing and feeling very much as they did, though as it were on a higher
level... The Attic tragedian's art was not only, as all art is, an offspring of the union
between the poet's own genius and the spirit of his age--and therefore in many
ways strange and alien to our taste and understanding; it was also an event of public
life in which the trends of the people's minds were reflected, discussed and displayed,
often in their ultimate consequences. ''39 It is important to emphasize that the
political influence of the tragedians was on the political not on politics. "Tragedy
could hardly be a medium for partisan pronouncements on matters of day-to-day
politics. Its political function lay at a deeper level. "4°
One basis of this deeper level was the Homeric world, altered to meet the needs
of the polis. Without reverting to pre-political tribal forms, tragedy kept alive many
of the values of the Homeric era and its basileus-based society. However real the
world of heroes remained to Periclean Greeks, however competitive and combative
they remained, however much they were tempted by private interests and selfishness
in general, "the public spirit of the citizens," according to Ehrenberg, "which really
held the Polis together, rested on their identity with the state--that is to say, on
the basic fact of 'Politea'...,.41
The revitalization of Homeric virtues in the Athenian polls had a deeper purpose
than finding ancestors worthy of current developments or keeping the old flames
flickering in the new polls. While undeniably conservative, Attic tragedy was
anything but antiquarian or nostalgic. Having little to with reverence for the past,
in spite of the centrality of Homeric content, tragedy expressed the political because
it tried to bring the expectations of the new democratic polis closer to the realities
of its time and place. Meier states it thus: "On the whole there was almost a complete
identity between experience and expectation. In the archaic period there had been
a certain excess of expectation over experience--or rather an excess of demands--
and even after the middle of the fifth century men seem to have entertained
expectations of improvement by extrapolation from the experience of various
successes. Yet these expectations were not pitched very far beyond existing
conditions."42
Whatever a given play suggested about a particular character, event, situation,
conflict, or value, tragedy in general circumscribed the efficacy of political action.
Man may have been the measure of all things, but not their creator. Man may
have achieved unprecedented success in nearly every field of endeavor, but certain
necessities retained their power, confronting man with blank, inarticulate defiance
of man's attempts to deny them. Beyond the realm of necessity lay indeterminacy.
The very confidence political action presumed was premised on causal relations
which were rarely in evidence and often mispremised. Hence the substantive value
of Homeric ideals. A hero dealt courageously with his fate, meeting his
responsibilities, if only to his self-image. A citizenry of heroes could do no less.
And it had the advantage of dealing with dangerous enemies and the unknown
as a body of men, not as solitary strangers. This was the great lesson of hoplite
democracy, a lesson Athenians learned early and with great effect, and in no small
way from their tragic teachers.
The tragedians found their audience receptive to the political thought which
pervaded their plays because of the special place of the theatre in public life and
the absence of other effective ways to reach the citizens at large. "There was as
yet hardly any distinction between poetry and thought. Tragedy reached the widest
sections of the public, making it possible for the long tradition of political thought
to continue into the age of Athenian democracy... It may be that certain norms
were perceived behind some of the realities [all the great changes that had just
occurred], and that individual demands were anticipated, but men had no general
awareness of the full implications of their practical aims--until democracy was
suddenly upon them. And even then the implications of democracy for the whole
new order that came into being with it were not immediately self-evident. In
consequence, men were all the more aware of the enormity of what was happening.
What Aeschylus attempted to do was to evolve new concepts by means of which
the whole of this new experience could be articulated and brought into
equilibrium.'43
In the Eumenides Aeschylus demonstrated how. Meier believes that Aeschylus
tried to demonstrate the following:
The overcoming of self-perpetuating feud (or, more generally, the menacing

political conflicts) by means of a new legal (and civic) order. The whole of this
civic order is at issue and 'placed in the midst of the citizens'. The result is: The
emergence of a fundamental antagonism of a highly partisan character that
extends virtually to the entire political order. This leads to: The new problems
of decision-making concerning central questions that were previously subject
to the criterion of truth. This also means: The establishment of new civic
authority over the houses. The united polis gains ascendancy over all
particularist forces. It also involves: The shifting of the friend-foe dichotomy
from within the city to outside it. And not least: The need for reconciliation
and peaceful compromise among all the existing forces within an all-embracing
order .... 44
More generally, what occurred was the legitimation of conflict resolution by

purely human institutions employing human rationality. Every issue was now
appropriate for discussion and decision by the political community, which
increasingly meant by male citizens in the Assembly or in court. This implied that
Medea and The Reformation of the Tragic Polls 445
Athenians understood that the integrity of the processes of conflict resolution was
more important than any given outcome, no matter how committed some citizens
might have been to the substantive justice of a desired verdict or decision. If the
Erinyes could be refashioned to new duties within the polis, how could less
implacable human adversaries have refused to accept the decisions of the polis?
The application of a given law external to the polis was no longer acceptable, merely
because it was external. In other words, the Truth of tribal society gave way to
the truths of politically legitimate outcomes. "There was no longer one legitimate
order, inherited from the past and sanctioned by the gods, to which the constitution
of this or that city might approximate to a greater or lesser degree... The civic
communities were now free to choose among different constitutions. An individual
might go on believing that this or that constitution was the only true one; he might
postulate a new ideal of order...Yet what really mattered was the fact that the civic
order as a whole was at the disposal of the citizens--and hence subject to
controversy."45
The polis needed a way to resolve controversy which conformed to the other
political requirements of fifth century Athens. The Solonic and Kleisthenic reforms
had provided the economic and political infrastructure for the democracy which
developed in the Periclean period. Tragedies like the Eumenides provided the
emotional and rational infrastructure necessary for the acceptance of the
extraordinary changes Athens had undergone in a matter of two or three
generations and was continuing to undergo through the last half of the fifth century.
Tragedy was at once a celebration of man's remove from an inchoate, irrational
past, filled with whimsical and malevolent forces and a caution which appreciated
the reality of the forces within man which could have the same effects. Man, by
political activity, could liberate himself from their tyranny but not from their
presence. Tragedy thus made four cardinal points. One was that the sources of the
troubles of the pre-political, tribal past were still at large and retained their power
to limit man's efforts to create a life free of their malevolence and cruelty. Another
was that only through political activity could these forces be kept in check. A third
was that even in the most advanced polis these efforts would themselves be subject
to limits imposed by the necessitous nature of existence, the overreaching of men,
the indeterminacy of existence, and the inevitability of change. The fourth point
was that a lack of appreciation of the first three points would lead to catastrophe.
Euripides took it upon himself to warn his fellow citizens of the dangers they courted
if they failed to heed instruction in the tragic realities.
Singularly sighted in those darkened areas wherein Pericles and his city appear
to have been all but blind, Euripides teaches us about all that shone and about
all that stank in a city, which for the sheer scale of accomplishments, good and
evil, has few rivals.46 Robert Meagher
EURIPIDES AND THE REFORMATION OF THE TRAGIC POLLS

Aeschylus feared for Athenian democracy in two important ways. First, he was
not sure that majorities would be able to hold together under the law in the face
of traditional pressures. He worried that democracy would be too fragile to sustain

itself in the face of age-old adversaries, including the people's respect for their non-
democratic traditions, their desire to do to aristocrats what aristocrats had done
to them, and their doubts regarding their political ability. To meet the needs of
the Athenian demos Aeschylus fashioned a mixture of Homeric virtues, suitably
democratized for Athenians, and a majoritarian political process, suitably
subordinated to the idea of law. He hoped to provide the people with sufficient
confidence to be able to make decisions in the face of the perilous imponderables
of the age. Moreover, he hoped they would make these decisions according to their
own procedures and laws, believing that how decisions were made was as important
to the success of the democracy as what decisions were made. Survival was often
at stake. For Aeschylus this entailed survival as a democracy.
Secondly, Aeschylus feared that the people would misuse their political power
by attempting to gratify desire without an appreciation of the limits of political
and human life, an effort that could only result in catastrophe. As Kagan points
out, this fear has proved perennial. "The paradox inherent in democracy is that
it must create and depend on citizens who are free, autonomous, and self-reliant.
Yet its success--its survival even--requires extraordinary leadership. It grants equal
rights of participation to citizens of unequal training, knowledge and wisdom, and
it gives full power to the majority, which is certainly inferior in those qualities to
an elite. It gives free reign to a multiplicity of parties and factions, thereby
encouraging division and vacillation rather than unity and steadiness. "47 In other
words, the people would not doubt their wisdom enough. So certain would they
be that their desires were the equivalent of justice and political competence, that
the people's will was infallible, they would tear the polis apart, weakening it
internally, making it prey to hostile neighbors.
A sense of limits was important not only to prevent the cycle of revenge and
retribution from reasserting itself but to keep Athenians from rash and foolish acts
by tethering them to reality. The line between confidence, often heroically expressed
by hoplite citizens, and hubris, with its inevitable catastrophe, was narrow. For
Aeschylus a reverence for equilibrium was essential to the survival of Athens. The
divine harmony of the cosmos had to be approximated in the human order of the
life of the polis. Thus the aim of the political was, if not directly religious, imbued
with religious properties. The purpose of political action was to contain the
tendencies to disorder which were inherent in heroic man without eliminating the
heroic qualities which were essential to the survival of the polis.
By the time Euripides wrote Medea in 431, it was clear that Aeschylus did not
need to worry further about Athenian confidence in their democracy. Nor was there
need to be concerned about the Athenians' willingness to subject the pursuit of
their majority will to their laws and procedures. Aeschylus' second worry that
majorities would suffer from an excess of expectations must also have seemed to
him and many other thoughtful Athenians not to be an immediate concern. Pericles
seemed the incarnation of the democratic leader: prudent, restrained, politically
astute. Only an inability to deal with the perils of empire seemed a threat. Despite
strife with Sparta, Athens seemed secure and stable.
Euripides, however, had misgivings. Those which sprang from the problems of
empire were not central to Medea and therefore cannot occupy us, except as the
empire was a sign of Athenian disregard of non-Athenians, In Medea Euripides
was concerned with the disregard Athenian males had for Athenian wives and
women in general. This concern reflected the purposes of the Aeschylean projects,
albeit with a typically Euripidean twist. Euripides realized the need for pervasive
Homeric virtues but preferred the Hectorian expression to the Heraklean: " H e c t o r
affirms himself as a warrior by recognizing the bond that he has with his family
and with his city as a whole, and he claims that his activity as a warrior is on behalf
of them all. ''48 So far this conformed to Aeschylean purposes, but I believe Euripides
went further: "In the 'new' code which Hector articulates, and which reflects the
organization of society around small, nuclear families, the position of the wife is
upgraded and the concubine fades or disappears. Socially relevant transactions were
still the province of the males of the community, but these men were increasingly
defined as heads of families, not as members of a class apart from the rest of society.
The new heroic code therefore embodies a new type of humanism, in which man
is defined as a total being, and not on the basis of one special function, and in
which his rights as a member of society proceed from an acknowledgement of that
which he had in c o m m o n with the rest of society, rather than from his particular
and special abilities. "49 Jason thus must be seen as much worse than a cad; he was
antithetical to Hector. Medea seized upon Jason's anti-heroism:
O coward in every way--that is what I call you,

With bitterest reproach for you lack of manliness,
You have come, you, my worst enemy, have come to me!
It is not an example of overconfidence
Or of boldness thus to look your friends in the face,
Friends you have injured--no, it is worst of all
Human diseases, shamelessness (465-472, Warner translation unless otherwise
indicated). 5°
Medea was not complaining of an excess of maleness but of an insufficiency of

it, an insufficiency of a particular kind, a sense of shame, the kind of shame Hector
would have felt had he let his city or family down.
Part of Medea's reproach centered on Jason's ingratitude for her heroic deeds
which made Jason into a hero.
Medea to Jason:
I saved your life, and every Greek knows I saved it,
Who was a shipmate of yours aboard the Argo,
When you were sent to control the bulls that breathed fire
And yoke them, and when you would sow that deadly field.
Also that snake, who encircled with his many folds
The Golden Fleece and guarded it and never slept,
I killed, and so gave you the safety of the light.
And I myself betrayed my father and my home,
And came to you to Pelias' land of Iolcus.
And then, showing more willingnessto help than wisdom,

I killed him, Pelias, with a most dreadful death (476-486).
Perhaps lost in this murderous catalogue--at which few in a warrior society would
have blanched, save for its female perpetrator, who after all was helping her
beloved--was a more routine kind heroism expected of every respectable women:
the leave kith and kin upon marriage. Marriage removed a woman from the
protection of her father and placed her under the protection of her husband. She
was subject to her lord (kyrios) and absolutely dependent upon him for her and
her children's survival. Medea's barbarian origins emphasized her vulnerability
which was compounded by her deeds against her family and native land. Later
in the same speech Medea says, now that she has been supplanted by a new woman:
Where am I to go? To my father's?

Him I betrayed and his land when I came with you.
To Pelias' wretched daughters? What a fine welcome
They would prepare for me who murdered their father!
For this is my position--hated by my friends
At home, I have, in kindness to you, made enemies
Of others whom there was no need to have injured (502-508).
Her children (and his) were in no better position, as Medea well understood:
For his children to wander as beggars and she who saved him (515)
Later Medea [930-940] pleaded with Jason not to have her children exiled, even
though this meant her separation from them. He responded:
I doubt if I'll succeed, but 111 still attempt it (941).
It would be too much to suggest that Euripides here argued for some sort of
safety net for children who lost their patronage. It is not too much, however, to
claim that Euripides expected men to fulfill their obligations which emphatically
entailed the protection of the household (oikos), including its dependents. The
unquestioned prerogatives of the kyrios, implied for Euripides, manly behavior.
Here the Hectorian model comes to the fore, brought into the boldest relief by
the inability of Medea's many powers, human and supernatural, to lessen her
vulnerability. Jason was made into a hero by Medea. She was unable to make him
into Hector, the kind of male the polis needed, if its children, to say nothing of
discarded wives, were to receive the protection they deserved and the polis required.
The irony could not have been more compelling. The hero-warrior of deeds could
be made by a woman like Medea. The hero-kyrios of the household could not,
yet every Athenian wife needed a heroic protector, if she and her children were
not to live in daily, unrelenting insecurity, an insecurity the more terrorizing for
being added to existence in an already dangerous world. One could live without
the Golden Fleece. Living without the expectation that minimal protections would
be afforded by those charged with their provision was another matter. Medea's
response was extreme, as befits an extraordinary, semi-divine heroine; her anxiety
for her children, to say nothing of her humiliation, was all too normal.
The closest one came to fulfilling the model of Hector was significantly Aegeus,
the king of Athens, a traveller to Corinth. The contrived appearance of Aegeus
is just the sort of dramatic gratuity that has for centuries infuriated literary critics
of Euripides. Aegeus' role in the play indeed has little to do with drama, but much
to do with the political. An old man, impotent and largely ineffectual, he appeared
as a supplicant to Medea's powers over the reproductive process. Medea promised:
I will end your childlessness, and I will make you able

To beget children. The drugs I know can do this (717-718).
Her price is safe haven for herself and her children.

Aegeus' reply resounded with the compromises of today's headlines:
For many reasons, woman, I am anxious to do

This favor for you. First, for the sake of the gods,
And then for the birth of the children which you promise,
For in that respect I am entirely at my wits' end.
But this is my position: if you reach my land,
I, being in my rights, will try to defend you.
But this much I must warn you of beforehand:
I shall not agree to take you out of this country;
But if you by yourself can reach my house, then you
Shall stay there safely. To none will I give you up
But from this land you must make your escape yourself,
For I do not wish to incur blame from my friends (719-730).
It would be tempting to condemn Aegeus for this over-refined (in the

circumstances) prudence. Neither Euripides nor Medea did so. Aegeus was accepted
for what he was, a well-intentioned ruler with problems, personal and political,
of his own. He would do what he could for Medea and her children, as she would
do what she could for him. Again, the interdependency and the complementarity
of sexual powers was emphasized. And, again, the disproportionate (if one could
see protection as an ordinary and expected benefit) benefits Medea was expected
to bestow, over which she made no complaint. Furthermore, there is the suggestion
by Aegeus' role that some extra-familial and therefore political protection of
vulnerable mothers and children was not beyond the moral and civic ken of
Euripides' audience. Hector was required; in his absence, Aegeus would have to
do. And for countless women, he and other well-meaning male protectors did. But
not for Medea.
She, after all, had bent every effort, including the sacrifice of her family and
homeland, and applied her considerable talents to make Jason into a hero. The
least he could have done was live up to his obligations as a husband and father
in the present. Where Aeschylus was concerned with a lack of prudence by Athenian
majorities, Euripides was concerned with a lack of sense of obligation, individual
and social. Obligation, if it means anything, means the keeping of a promise, stated
or implied, over and above what prudence would dictate. Otherwise, obligation
could not be distinguished from adherence to the indications of a cost-benefit
analysis. This was the root of Medea's complaint. Presented with a better marriage,
Jason did the prudent thing in defiance of his obligation to her and their children.
Later Medea said to Aegeus:
He was greatly in love this traitor to his friends.

A passionate love--for an alliance with the king (698, 700).
A man without a sense of obligation was shameless and not much of a man at
all. A man who ignored his obligations in the name of prudence was worse than
one who was overwhelmed by passion, even if for a pretty, innocuous princess.
Medea was furious with herself for dishonoring herself to aid such a worthless man.
In spite of her conventional nature, the Nurse appreciated the seriousness of Medea's
injury and rage.
Do you hear what she says, and how she cries

On Themis, the goddess of Promises, and on Zeus,
Whom we believe to be the Keeper of Oaths?
Of this I am sure, that no small thing
Will appease my mistress' anger (168-172).
Just as the polis would have been endangered by a lack of prudence, it would
for Euripides have been equally imperilled by an excess of prudence, that is, by
material calculations which subverted a sense of obligation. Disequilibrium had
many sources. The more obvious perhaps were those which came from a disregard
of human limitations which defy the gods or nature. Less obvious, but equally
disruptive, were those which came from an inability to rely on good faith efforts
to fulfill obligations. As economic activity and opportunity expanded, Athenian
51
society was increasingly a tissue of cost-benefit calculations. Much of the Solonic
and Kleisthenic reforms were responses to the disruption of basileus-based
traditional society by social change. The success of these reforms, which for our
purposes here can be summarized as the placing of all Athenian citizens equally
under the law, despite an increasing range of economic wealth, led to more economic
activity and a further erosion of traditional social and political bonds. Nonetheless,
these calculations presumed a civil order in which obligation obtains. 52 Law is but
another name for socially sanctioned obligation. Zeus and Themis were responsible
for maintaining the legal order and were thus quite properly invoked by Medea
and Euripides to punish any breaches in the wall of obligation.
The emphasis by Medea on courage and obligation can be considered an
important check on the otherwise free and prudent play of self-interest. The
significance of the willingness of male citizens to stand in hoplite ranks--for
ordinary men to assume the Homeric mantle, in defiance of self-interest and
prudence individually conceived--was obvious to all Athenians. It was rightly
honored and lavishly praised. To a great extent Athenian society was structured
to extract military valor from unlikely sources. Athens' success in this regard was
the measure of their superiority over their rivals. The willingness to be obliged by
one's own agreements, express or implied, individually undertaken or socially
understood, comes from the same source as the willingness to provide military
service. A citizen must simply suspend self-interest in the name of the social order.
This not only requires self-abnegation to one degree or another but often the same
sort of courage that one needs on the battlefield. When Medea says that
I would very much rather stand

Three times in the battlefield than bear one child (251),
her primary purpose was to throw a mantle of courage around the shoulders of
mothers. At the same time, however, she was indicating the unquestioned sense
of obligation women feel and are expected to feel by others and which men should
feel but all too often don't. Men fighting in hoplite phalanxes gathered strength
and courage from their brothers in arms. Women bearing children did so with far
greater danger alone. The purpose of both activities was the same and equally
essential, the preservation of the oikos and through it the polis. Yet male obligation
seemed to be all too easily consumed in war or its prospect, when it was needed
on a daily basis in the oikos. Medea was not asking for a renegotiation of her
"contract" but merely compliance with it by Jason. When her expectations were
unfulfilled in the name of male preference, glossed by prudence, she quaked in
humiliation at her vulnerability. Those who knew her shivered in anticipation of
her response when her courage returned. Euripides for his part wondered at how
a society which held together by selfless courage on the battlefield and on the
birthing bed could fail to see an erosion of obligation as anything but catastrophic.
Medea's invocation of Zeus and Themis testified to her despair of individual or
political capacity to live up to or enforce its obligations. Unable to rely on male
promises, a woman could no longer have reasonable expectations. She might as
well be abandoned like a deformed child on a hillside to die. Medea called upon
the gods to do what should have been done by the polis. The law of the polis, for
all its voluntary mutual obligation, failed. The law of the gods would, with all its
harsh arbitrariness, prevail. The progress of the Eurnenides could be undone.
Although this invocation of the gods to secure human order might seem
Aeschylean, it, too, had a Euripidean twist. Let us step back to properly Aeschylean
sources of disorder: passion and intellect. The play opens with the Nurse's wish
that Medea had never met Jason, for in her "passionate love for Jason" lay the
source of "hatred everywhere" [8, 16]. This despite the Nurse's understanding that
This is the greatest salvation of all--

For a wife not to stand apart from her husband (14-15).
Notwithstanding its great potential for salvation, passion is too dangerous to be

housed in a well-ordered oikos. Medea echoed the thought, marking an all too
ordinary male limitation:
Oh what an evil to men is passionate love! (330).
The reason is clear. Passion gets in the way of prudent calculation. Not only does
it create obligation, it allows for a feeling of betrayal when obligation is unfulfilled.
Sensitive to at least a portion of Medea's l o s s - - o f himself of c o u r s e - - J a s o n offered
a conventional form of compensation. Appealing to prudence, he tried to monetize
her suffering:
In exile to have some of my money to help you,

Say so, for I am prepared to give with an open hand,
Or to provide you with introductions to my friends
Who will treat you well. You are a fool if you do not
Accept this. Cease your anger and you will profit (611-615).
Absent passion, this might seem reasonable even generous, then and now, but not
to Medea whose nature defied conventionalizing (and trivializing) her feelings and
her role. However much Jason might have approximated the sensibilities of a
suburban husband, Medea in no way anticipated a suburban wife. Not only would
she rather die, she would rather have her children die than submit to this
humiliation, this betrayal of sworn oaths, this renunciation of male obligation.
If this were all there was to Medea--and many have thought it is--Euripides
would have merely reiterated Aeschylus' fear of passion's capacity to destroy the
harmony of the polls, dissolving it in a maelstrom of revenge and retribution. That
this is not the case can he seen by comparing Medea's transformation of the Nurse's
speech:
Great people's tempers are terrible, always.

Having their own way, seldom checked,
Dangerous they shift from mood to mood...
Greatness brings no profit to people.
God indeed, when in anger, brings
Greater ruin to great men's houses (119-130).
Medea mirrored this Aeschylean thought with significant emendation:
A person of sense ought never to have his children

Brought up to be more clever than the average.
For, apart from cleverness bringing them no profit,
It will make them objects of envy and ill-will.
If you put new ideas before the eyes of fools
They'll think you foolish and worthless into the bargain;
And if you are thought superior to those who have
Some reputation for learning, you will become hated.
I have some knowledge myself of how this happens (292-303).
One can hardly imagine a more Euripidean thought, words more in his own voice
than this. Note the transformation. The Nurse's focus was psychological and
Medea aod The Reformation of the Tragic Po/is 453
theological. Greatness, by its imperviousness to the checks which restrain ordinary

people, brings on the wrath of the gods and ruin in proportion to the greatness.
Medea's was more specific and social. Passion and mood swings in a self-possessed
adult became, in Medea's version, cleverness and superiority of intellect in children.
Where greatness for the Nurse brought on divinely instigated catastrophe, greatness,
in Medea's view, brought on envy and ill-will by fools. Ruin, for the Nurse, was
the proper and inevitable reward for deviation from the norm, for the gods were
jealous of human distinction. Ruin, for Medea, came from the inability of ordinary
human beings to tolerate distinction even in children to say nothing of an adult
like Medea, who was distinguished in many respects.
In the Nurse's speech, the omitted lines can now be quoted:
How much better to have been accustomed

To live on equal terms with one's neighbors.
I would like to be safe and grow old in a
Humble way. What is moderate sounds best,
Also in practice is best for everyone (123-127).
One might say herein lies the difference between a good woman like the Nurse and
an arrogant woman like Medea. Better to live without Medea's unquestioned gifts
than to live on the precipice of her moods and her violent action. The difficulty
with this reading is that Euripides took pains to indicate that Medea agreed with
the Nurse on this point:
And a foreigner especially must adapt himself.

I'd not approve of even a fellow-countryman
Who by pride and want of manners offends his neighbors (222-224).
There was nothing in Medea's behavior before her betrayal by Jason to earn the
slightest reproach, despite her manifest differences from average Corinthians. There
was nothing to indicate that she wanted anything more than to be a good wife
and mother or succeeded in being anything less. Whatever dangers might have been
latent in her passionate personality, they became manifest only upon the greatest
provocation, a provocation instigated by her husband and supported by the state.
I cannot believe that Euripides agreed with the Nurse's fear of greatness, viz., that
it by itself was a sufficient cause of disaster. However much anxiety passion, or
any other extraordinary attribute, might arouse, to eliminate it would risk
eliminating all greatness, including intellect and courage, traits upon which the very
survival of the polis depended; so Euripides suggested. Prudence could not by itself
save the polis, at least not a polis like Athens. It was the better part of prudence
to have individual self-interest subordinated to the requirements of the social order.
This implied that persons capable of unreasoning devotion to the polis were
necessary, notwithstanding that their passions made them difficult to control by
conventional means.
This is not to say that Euripides believed that equilibrium was not as important
as it had been to the Aeschylean polis. Equilibrium, however, has to be measured,
454 THE SOCIAL SCIENCEJOURNAL VoL 31/No. 4/1994
like any other political good, against its cost. Any equilibrium achieved at the price
of eliminating all sources of distinction, including passion, was too expensive. The
political problem was to sustain sufficient harmony among the citizenry to be able
to bring to bear the greatness the polis depended upon. Just as Jason needed
Medea's greatness to become the hero Jason, the polis needed its male citizens to
fight in hoplite ranks to bring it through perilous times. If the polis can be conceived
as the politicization of Homeric virtues, the then Hector must be seen as the model
citizen-soldier, husband, father, and son. Building on this commonplace of the fifth
century, Euripides added that women deserved consideration for their contributions
to the polls, contributions which presumed as many admirable traits as that of
hoplite warriors. Hector could not have been expected to sacrifice his life for a
woman or family unworthy of his sacrifice. The Hector model defined a new form
of hero, not a saint. At bottom, his actions were not altruistic, for they were in
behalf of a wife and family who defined him as much as he defined them. If the
polis required many Hectors, these Hectors required many Andromaches. As
Medea summoned Jason's early manhood expressed in heroic deeds, a proper Jason
would have summoned a proper wife and mother, which in turn would have
summoned the fuller model of heroism represented by Hector. This interdependency
had to be nurtured by mutual obligation.
Furthermore, any equilibrium formed in the absence of a sense of obligation
would be short-lived. It would dissolve in the face of an adverse cost-benefit analysis.
Not only would equilibrium have to meet tests like any other political value, it would
have to become political. Equilibrium resulted from a legitimate political ordering
of the desires, values, conflicts, and material allocations of human life. For Athens
legitimacy took the form of hoplite-democracy. This meant that legitimacy flowed
from the participation of male citizens in the drafting, executing, and adjudicating
the law. Tribal-based rule no longer obtained. The polis now assumed the duty
of enforcing all legal obligations impersonally and impartially. Social peace, if not
justice, would be the consequence to the degree that these human processes were
seen to work properly. Thus the equilibrium of the Euripidean polis would not
come into being by conforming to the edicts of the gods or even of human lawgivers
like Solon. It would have to come from the perceived legitimacy and efficacy of
decisions of Athenian majorities.
This brings us to the Euripidean twist of Aeschylus' second great concern: would
majorities be up to their great task? Euripides was concerned with the capacities
of majorities, although in a way different from Aeschylus. It was not so much that
expectations of male citizens would depart dangerously from reality or divine
injunctions, but that Athenian political decisions would ignore the basis of their
prior success and at the same time fail to see the dangers that success implied. With
desperate brevity, it can be said that Athens rose to preeminence because it resolved
the problem of political legitimacy in favor of hoplite-democracy. In other words,
Homeric valor permeated free Athenian males in a truly political setting, creating
the basis for extraordinary military accomplishments, including the acquisition of
an empire. Not surprisingly, the male virtues were honored and the society
structured to provide them. There was a tendency not to question either Athenian
success or to look deeply into its causes. Nor was there any reason, it seemed, to
examine the domestic price paid for the victories. Still less, it seemed, was their
any reason to consider alternative political arrangements. So much change had been
accommodated in so short a time with so much success, what more could have
been done or even contemplated?
While the man in the agora or the general might have resisted such questions,
Euripides did not. He suggested that the male ethos that premised Athenian success
needed to be amended, if Athens were to retain its power, to say nothing of
remaining worthy of its preeminence. T o Aeschylus's concern for proper and lawful
majorities mindful of h u m a n limits and reverential to the gods, Euripides added
a concern for justice, at least insofar as it entailed the fulfilling of obligations.
Athenian men needed to internalize the manifold heroism of Hector, not ape an
ever-narrowing version of Achilles or Herakles or, still worse, Jason.
By examining heroism, obligation, courage, intellect, as well as, convention,
civility, and propriety, Euripides questioned whether a society which was so biased
toward male predilections, prerogatives, and perspectives could be improved.
Questioning all social givens, he was struck by the lack of basis for presuming that
Athenian wives did not possess in great measure many of the qualities the polis
depended upon for its survival. Did not Jason reflect the dry rot of a society which
refused to appreciate the real basis of its success? Did not Medea incarnate attributes
upon which a reformed polis might be built?
Take Jason first. Medea did not want him to be less of a man but more of one.
She expected him to have desires, preferences, behaviors, or values different from
her own. She did not expect him by now to be a true hero. She wanted him to
live up to their bargain, to subordinate his desires, preferences and the like to a
sense of obligation. She hoped he would have acted at home as his "spear-mates"
would have expected him to act on the battlefield, as a man of h o n o r subject to
the strictures of shame. What she did not anticipate was that in the face of his failure
as a man, his society would support him as if he were essential to its success and
she were expendable. If "manly" virtues like courage and self-denial, were to be
honored, she had more of them than he did, and so did many women. This was
no rare insight. Listen to the Chorus:
Flow backward to your source, sacred rivers,

And let the world's great order be reversed.
It is the thoughts of m e n that are deceitful,
Their pledges that are loose.
Story shall now turn my conditions to a fair one,
Women are paid their due.
No more shall evil-sounding fame be theirs (410-420).
And later in the same speech:
Good faith has gone, and no more remains

In great Greece a sense of shame.
It has flown away to the sky.
No father's house for a haven
Is at hand for you now, and another queen

Of your bed has dispossessed you and
Is mistress of your home (439-445).
By contrast Medea was brave, loyal, forthright, and devoted. Her passionate
nature, like her great intellect, helped her to fulfill her role as mother, wife, and
"citizen" of Corinth. Furthermore, she understood that obligation needed to
supplement prudential self-interest if the state were to survive and that women and
men had to be the objects and the subjects of any meaningful covenants. She
appreciated, like the Chorus, in Kitto's translation that "Now is h o n o u r coming
to w o m a n k i n d " (419), now, that is, when men would no be longer deceitful and
shameless and be able to rely on other men to support them in their dishonor.
Until that time when the rivers run upstream, men would run unnecessary risks
to their political order. Moreover, they would do so to the extent that their mothers,
wives, and daughters shared with Medea an understanding of the importance of
obligation in all its forms. Their resentment would not often take on the awful
proportions of infanticide. Nonetheless, countless injuries would cry out to
countless deities for redress. In the meantime all would suffer.
NOTES
1. Alan Little, Myth and Society in Attic Drama (New York: Columbia University Press,
1942), p. 19.
2. Aristotle's famous definition of man as zoon politikon thus is as often defined as social
animal and political animal, depending on the purposes of the writer, each definition
connoting something distinct. Aristotle saw no such distinction. Even distinctions he
did countenance, public and private, for example, carried different weight to him than
to us and different importance. Insofar as they implied qualitative differences, as when
respectable women should have only private lives, a hierarchy was entailed. Women,
private, inferior. Men, public, superior. Insofar as the distinction applied to men, no
qualitative difference was suggested. The private life was simply subsumed in the
political, the part of man's existence that was determined by his biology, not his wit.
3. Charles Rowan Beye, Ancient Greek Literature and Society (Garden City, NY:
Anchor, 1975).
4. Victor Ehrenberg, Sophocles and Pericles (Oxford, England: Basil Blackwell, 1954),
p. 6.
5. Robert Meagher, Mortal Vision: The Wisdom of Euripides (New York: St. Martin's
Press, 1989), p. 34.
6. There is no simple, compelling definition of the political. For the purposes of this essay,
since I depend upon Meier's analysis so extensively in section 1II, his understanding
suffices: "The political denotes a field of association and dissociation, namely the field
or ambience in which people constitute orders within which they live together among
themselves and set themselves apart from others. It is at the same time the field in
which decisions are made about order and delimitation, as well as other questions of
common interest, and in which there is a contention for positions from which these
decisions can be influenced" (Christian Meier, The Greek Concept of the Political
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 4. And again: "To the Greeks
the opposite of the political was the private, personal, self-interested. Political meant
the same as c o m m o n and referred to what concerned everybody. The opposite of

despotic, what concerned the few... Political action was correct action within the polis"
(Meier, p. 13). Perhaps easier to understand for Americans is the idea that the political
refers to the framework--socio-economic, legal and institutional--of public decisions.
Politics refers to the "who gets what" or "who decides" kind of question.
7, Little, op. cit., p. 19.
8. There has been a revival of traditional political theory in America in the past decade.
Part of this resurgence has had to do with the political treatment of literature by literary
critics. Another part has been the philosophical treatment of tragedy by political
theorists. A leader in this effort has been Peter Euben. His book, The Tragedy of
Political Theory: The Road Not Taken (Princeton, N J: Princeton University Press,
1990), places Attic tragedy in the great Greek tradition of political philosophy. A central
thesis of his work is that the political philosophy of tragedy has been unjustly and
unfortunately obscured by the brilliant light of Plato and Aristotle, which came to
be seen as the foundation of all political philosophy. Literature, including Attic tragedy,
cannot be and should not be as systematic as a treatise and remain literature. Yet it
can offer political thought as profound in its way as Plato and Aristotle do in theirs.
If Plato's dialogues can be read with profit as literature; Euripides's plays can be read
with profit as political thought.
9. Beye, op. cit., p. 298.
10. It is charmingly human to discern great achievements in distant mists. To ascribe a
creation like the tragic drama to a man like ourselves rather than to a progression
of men stirs our vanity. On the one hand, it suggests that the one creative mind is
not very like us at all; on the other, it calls into question the contribution of all those
who are all too like us. Perhaps for these reasons it has come down to us, since Aristotle
at least, that tragedy evolved over many centuries, beginning in goat-dances and
peasant songs, made all the more accessible by their association with the most vulgar
(in nearly every sense of the word) of all gods, Dionysos. One by one, each man added
his bit to the great achievement, until the few or perhaps the great, Aeschylus or Thespis,
codified the work of the many, becoming the "Homers" of drama. When Gerald Else,
The Origin and Early Form of Tragedy (New York: Norton, 1965), brilliantly
challenges the evolutionary nature of Attic tragedy, he challenges us to appreciate the
capacity of individual genius and the limits of broad social forces. As scholars,
particularly social scientists, we are pleased to make the obvious points that individuals
are products of their cultures no matter how much they seem to transcend them. We
point out that insofar as a creative genius publicly expresses art, he expresses his many-
sided dependence on his audience, to say nothing of his great inheritances from them,
language, sensibilities, and life itself. All these truisms strike with special force at the
achievements of the ancient Athenians. Few societies have been as public as theirs,
few art forms as integral to their society as tragedy. At the same time an honest scholar
can hear Else whispering in his ear, but why then? Why in that form? Why at such
a high level? Social forces always exist, but seldom call forth an Aeschylus or a Pericles.
Of course genius resides in a culture. How else would it express itself?. How would
we see it? But genius also must have its own sources. Otherwise, it could be "artificially"
produced or at least predicted once the circumstances are correct. The historical fact
seems to be that we discern circumstances after genius intrudes itself upon our
consciousness or the consciousness of our ancestors. However much a creative
revolution was conditioned by its society, we only begin to look for the fecundity of
those social forces after it has fructified. This is not to say that genius is the mother
of itself or of its own conditions. It is to say that a society's ability to spawn genius
can only be examined after its geniuses have expressed themselves. The greatness of
a society does not therefore lie in the social conditions of genius anymore than it lies
in unexpressed genius. It lies in its capacity to allow genius space to move through
its medium, including its social conditions, and in its capacity to appreciate the artifacts
of this process. Much of Attic genius was expressed in the peculiar Attic art form of
tragedy.
11. Else, op. cit., p. 7.
12. Else, op. cit., p. 16.
13. Else, op. cit., pp. 40, 45. "Why did Solon chose iambic and trochaic verses for his
final accounting? Must he not have felt that elegiacs were inadequate for such intimate
grapplings with reality? He kept them for certain kinds of utterance, for example his
warnings against tyranny, but they were too distant and impersonal to express the
truth about himself as he had come to see it. For that he needed the flash and cutting
edge of Archilochus' meters. And he wielded Archilochus' instrument with crackling
vigor, yet with a seriousness of purpose, a public sense of involvement and responsibility
with is un-Archilochian. It is the high seriousness of heroic combat tempered by Solon's
down to earth Athenian realism and cast in the form of a direct self-presentation before
the Athenian people" (Else, p. 45).
14. Else, op. cit., p. 33.
15. "All the Greek lyric poets are in one way or another discovers of and proclaimers of
the self. But they made this discovery, almost all of them, as private or semiprivate
persons and as a result of personal grief or thwarted passion. It was through pain,
not by taking thought, that the self was discovered in archaic Greece. This was not
Solon's manner. He places himself before us as a public person, and the way to his
self-revelation was not through passion but through rational insight into men's
characters and motive... The unregulated play of individual ego's has been fitted into
a larger frame, the structure of Justice, which allows each man his say but assigns
him the place and role he deserves... There is now a measure by which to judge the
anarchy of competing selves, while leaving them all the rich variety of their disparate
natures. This is one entrance portal to the world of tragedy" (Else, op. cit., p. 43).
16. It is uncertain who instituted the Homeric contests at the Panathenaic festival. It may
have been Solon, Pisistratus, or his sons. "The contest seals the death warrant of the
ancient art of oral epic composition by prescribing a fixed text and by choosing for
recitation just two poems, which are thereby set above all others as the 'best'. But the
old art form was in decline anyhow, and by way of return for hastening its demise
the contest established the solid base for all Attic literature to come; for that literature
remains close to Homer and is based from beginning to end on firm expectation of
love of the poet and close knowledge of his text by the whole Athenian people. We
have no record of such an educational enterprise anywhere else in archaic Greece"
(Else, op. cit., p. 47).
17. Else, op. cit., p. 49.
18. The theatre at Dionysia and its festival, like Dionysos himself, have been cited as
evidence of the evolution of tragedy from ecstatic rituals. Although Else does not
mention it directly, it seems reasonable to assume that the popular attraction of
Dionysos made a festival in his name especially suitable to the introduction of reason
in popular events. It certainly was not beyond the cunning of Pisistratus or his sons
to lure the public into their instruction and to sweeten it with entertainment less
challenging than tragedy, like satyr-plays.
19. Meagher, op. cit., p. 27.
20. "Thespis can never be more than a name to us," Else concedes, but proposes two
hypotheses nonetheless: "(1) that 'Thespis' was indeed our man's real name, given him
at birth, or (2) that it was a nickname or epithet given to him or taken by him at
some later time [thespis, from thespisios, 'divine, divinely speaking,' or possibly for
thespioidos, 'divinely singing"' (Else, op. cit., pp. 50-51).
21. Else, op. cit., p. 64.
22. Else, op. cit., p. 65.
23. Else, op. cit., p. 66.
24. Else, op. cit., p. 76.
25. Else, op. cir., p. 83.
26. Else, op. cit., p. 83. Else summarized Aeschylus' innovations as follows: "(1) an increase
in the size of the acting company, from one to two and finally to three. (2) A more
and more incisive presentation of contrast and conflict, not only between individuals
but also on the occasion between actor and chorus. (3) An increasingly cogent
organization of episodes, so that instead of merely disclosing or interpreting the pathos
they lead up to it and/or away from it. (4) An increasing intensity of focus upon the
tragic choice which leads to the pathos, and upon the aura of fear and foreboding
which surrounds it. (5) Side by side with this intensification of the tragic dilemma,
a more and more clearly revealed optimistic faith in its ultimate resolution. (6) the
appearance and increasingly effective use of the connected trilogy... (7) A far reaching
reinterpretation of the myths. (8) An increasingly concentrated and effective
exploitation of the stage picture and stage effects. (9) A broadening of the scene of
the drama in time and space, leading on occasion to the use of what I call "virtual
action" (Else, p. 85).
27. Else, op. cit., p. 92.
28. Else, op. cit., p. 79.
29. In this, as in so many other matters, scholars disagree. It seems clear, however, that
the legitimating and liberalizing effects of Kleisthenic reforms played an immense role
in preparing Athens for the ordeal of Marathon. The first defeat of the Persians can
been seen as the culmination of hoplite democracy. "She showed astonishing strength,
and we can be sure that, apart from Kleisthenes' leadership, this was due to the
introduction of freedom and democracy" (Ehrenberg, Solon, op. cit., p. 102). This
success laid the groundwork for its extension under Themistocles and the second defeat
of the Persians. "In thirty years Athens had transformed herself from a backward state
still dominated by aristocratic families into the most advanced democracy in Greece,
with the principles of selection by lot for office and the sovereignty of the assembly
over the leadership well established. This development was reinforced by the creation
of the new navy, which shifted the military epicenter away from the hoplite class to
the people as a whole," Oswyn Murray, Early Greece (Glasgow: Fontana, 1980), p.
266. The twin defeat of the Persian threat allowed for the flowering of the most
remarkable seventy-five years in human history. Glotz puts this in terms central to
this article: "The democracy is coming to birth. Hardly born, it was strengthened by
the ordeal of the Persian Wars and the victory... Athens and Greece were saved at
Marathon by the hoplites and at Salamis by the sailors; the middle and lower classes
had won glorious titles to support their claims," Gustave Glotz, Ancient Greece at
Work: An Economic History of Greece from the Homeric Period to the Roman
Conquest (New York: Norton, 1967, 1920), p. 146.
30. Else, op. cit., pp. 79-80.
31. Meier, op. cit., pp. 84-85.
32. Meier, op. cit., pp. 24-25.
33. Meier, op. cit., p. 154.

34. Meier, op. cit., p. 143.
35. Meier, op. cit., p. 144.
36. Meier, op. cit., p. 119.
38. "The poet was able, indeed expected, to allow himself greater freedom in the realm
of political reflection, which transcended all factional groupings and related to the polis
and political life in general. The poet might choose to treat a certain myth and interpret
it in a new and essentially political manner, drawing upon political experience and
reflecting current political problems... Tragedy might thus mirror aspects of current
political thinking; in doing so it fulfilled its intended educative function by creating
awareness of the achievements of the polis or the problems it faced, or by reflecting
the nature of politics, while presenting them in a largely nonpartisan manner; it might
also incorporate general admonitions" (Meier, op. cit., p. 88).
39. Victor Ehrenberg, Sophocles and Pericles (Oxford, England: Basil Blackwell, 1954),
pp. 7-8.
40. Meier, op. cit., p. 87.
41. Ehrenberg, op. cit., p. 91.
42. Meier, op. cit., p. 181.
43. Meier, op. cit., p. 89.
44. Meier, op. cit., pp. 121-122.
45. Meier, op. cit., p. 104.
47. Donald Kagan, Periclesof Athens and the Birth of Democracy (New York: Free Press,
1991), p. 9.
48. Marilyn B. Arthur, "Origins of the Western Attitude Toward Women," in Women
in the Ancient World: the Arethusa Papers, edited by Peradotto and Sullivan (Albany,
NY: SUNY, 1984), p. 11.
49. Arthur, op. cit., p. 12.
50. Rex Warner, Medea, Greene and Lattimore, The Complete Greek Tragedies(Chicago,
1959).
51. Manville describes the break down of traditional society: "In summary, the direct and
indirect evidence points toward rising population pressure throughout Attika in the
late seventh and early sixth centuries. The condition hastened the development of
private property as scarcity made men more eager for definition of their own plots
amid increasing competition for land. Older and traditional common lands were
broken up; fields became more fragmented as successive generations of fathers divided
them among sons who worked smaller and smaller plots more intensively; conflicts
arose between powerful men who by custom controlled most Attic property and poor
farmers who faced greater and greater burdens. Marginal lands were opened up for
cultivation; other plots were abandoned as unproductive; Athenians were sold into
slavery for debts owed to other Athenians. The older, regionally based social order
had begun to crumble, creating the potential for a leader who could reorganize the
population into a new form of community, one in which the vagaries of rights,
privileges, obligations, and plots of land would be articulated with new and more formal
boundaries. The unifying and centralizing tends seen in the age of Drakon would
become the basis for the Solonian solution. Out of crisis, Solon created the polis"
(Philip Brook Manville, The Origins of Citizenship in Ancient Athens (Princeton, N J:
Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 123. Of course, increasing economic activity
implied more economic individualism. The tension between the polis and the oikos
continued into the classical period and beyond.
52. Much of modem economic analysis ignores this obvious point by assuming that
economic exchanges can be best conceived as discrete, timeless transactions, containing
no expectations, no experience, and presuming no political/legal context. In other
words, economic exchange exists in its most pristine form in a Hobbesian state of
nature. The absurdity of this view has become apparent to "relational exchange"
economists, who are willing to trade some econometric facility for some reality. It is
impossible to conceive of even the most primitive economic transaction as being devoid
of relational aspects. The Attic economy under discussion presumed and benefitted
from a high degree of social predictability which derived from law, custom, and
practice.

Medea and The Reformation of The Tragic Polis

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Medea and The Reformation of the Tragic Polis

TRAGEDY AS THE SCHOOL OF ATHENS

By reading Medea for its political meaning, my object is political understanding,

RATHER LATE BEGINNINGS: ELSE'S ORIGINS OF TRAGEDY

Whatever may have happened elsewhere, in Polynesia of Peloponnese, it is

Else's critique of the Dionysiac [goat-men/ecstasy] theory of tragic beginnings

leitourgia, the discharging of a serious and economically onerous service to the

THE TRAGIC POLLS: ME|ER'S AESCHYLUS

a matter of controversy, hence a political issue... It was no longer simply a question

politics or man's attempts to accommodate himself to change in general or to locate

The overcoming of self-perpetuating feud (or, more generally, the menacing

More generally, what occurred was the legitimation of conflict resolution by

EURIPIDES AND THE REFORMATION OF THE TRAGIC POLLS

of traditional pressures. He worried that democracy would be too fragile to sustain

O coward in every way--that is what I call you,

Medea was not complaining of an excess of maleness but of an insufficiency of

And then, showing more willingnessto help than wisdom,

Where am I to go? To my father's?

I doubt if I'll succeed, but 111 still attempt it (941).

I will end your childlessness, and I will make you able

Her price is safe haven for herself and her children.

For many reasons, woman, I am anxious to do

It would be tempting to condemn Aegeus for this over-refined (in the

He was greatly in love this traitor to his friends.

Do you hear what she says, and how she cries

I would very much rather stand

This is the greatest salvation of all--

Notwithstanding its great potential for salvation, passion is too dangerous to be

Oh what an evil to men is passionate love! (330).

In exile to have some of my money to help you,

Great people's tempers are terrible, always.

Medea mirrored this Aeschylean thought with significant emendation:

A person of sense ought never to have his children

theological. Greatness, by its imperviousness to the checks which restrain ordinary

How much better to have been accustomed

And a foreigner especially must adapt himself.

Flow backward to your source, sacred rivers,

And later in the same speech:

Good faith has gone, and no more remains

Is at hand for you now, and another queen

the same as c o m m o n and referred to what concerned everybody. The opposite of

33. Meier, op. cit., p. 154.

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