The Slave's Voice in Euripides'
Medea


References

    Deborah Boedeker, "Euripides' Medea and the Vanity of LOGOI," CP 86 (1991):95-112.

    Page duBois, Torture and Truth, New York and London, 1991.

    Gregory Crane, "A Change of Fashion and Euripides' Medea 190- 203," Mnemosyne 43 (1990):435-8.

    N. T. Croally, Euripidean Polemic: The Trojan Women and the function of tragedy, Cambridge, 1994.

    Yvon Garlan, Slavery in Ancient Greece, 1982 ( Lloyd) Ithaca, 1988.

    Peter Garnsey, Ideas of Slavery from Aristotle to Augustine, Cambridge, 1996.

    Christopher Gill, Personality in Greek Epic,Tragedy, and Philosophy, Oxford, 1996.

    Bernard Gredley, "The Place and Time of Victory: Euripides' Medea," BICS 34 (1987):27-39.

    Orlando Patterson, Freedom in the Making of Western Culture, New York, 1991.

    Pietro Pucci, The Violence of Pity in Euripides' Medea, Ithaca (Cornell University Press), 1980.

    Katerina Synodinou, On the Concept of Slavery in Euripides, Ioannina, 1979.

    Oliver Taplin, The Stagecraft of Aeschylus, Oxford, 1977

    Joseph Vogt, Ancient Slavery and the Ideal of Man, Oxford (Blackwell), 1974 (tr. Thomas Wiedemann).

    T. E. J. Wiedemann, Slavery, Greece and Rome: New Surveys in the Classics, 19, Oxford 1987.

Abstract

    Much of what has been written on slavery in Euripides has to do with the captive women taken in the Trojan War. But even ordinary household slaves like Medea's Nurse may "betray characteristics of the free which the free themselves do not possess" (the words of N. T. Croally in Euripidean Polemic, Cambridge, 1994:102-3 concerning the Trojan captives in TW) and in this way cast light on the status of their masters.

    In coming outside to voice her thoughts and feelings to Earth and Sky, the Nurse asserts a freedom she does not in fact have and is quickly reminded of her object status by the next actor to make an entrance, the aged paidagogos of Jason's children (at lines 49-52). This character, as Other as a person can be--slave, female, foreign--is also the voice of moderation and egalitarianism (especially 119-130), making her more the spokesperson of Athenian democratic values than any of the free, male, Greek characters in the play, breaking down these distinctions based on gender, ethnicity, and status, and questioning even the self-other polarity.

    If we turn now to the status of Medea, she is mistress, de/spoina and despo/tij. But speaking generally of marriage, she calls the husband a "master for the body" (233) and more specifically claims that she had been carried off as booty (256). Creon's daughter is her despo/tij (694, 970). Medea the free woman, princess, goddess (or close kin to the gods) has been treated by Jason as if she were his spear prize (or a pirate's booty). Creon has treated her as a non-person without any rights in the city-state. This is what she is in Hellas. Can she (or her creator) also be hinting that the humanity of those denied a voice, whether slave or free, is potentially explosive enough to destroy the false and fantastic structure that excludes them?

Women...not only invented personal freedom but
brought something special to its expression, beyond
the primal desire for the removal of brute constraint...
Orlando Patterson,
Freedom