Virgo, Coniunx, Mater: The Wrath of Seneca's Medea Author(s): Gianni Guastella Reviewed work(s): Source: Classical Antiquity,

Vol. 20, No. 2 (October 2001), pp. 197-220 Published by: University of California Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/ca.2001.20.2.197 . Accessed: 11/05/2012 15:47
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GIANNI GUASTELLA

Senecas Medea is inevitably marked by the signs of wrath which are her literary inheritance, such as the frenn barj xloj of Euripides Medea (Medea 1265). 1 Yet the wrath of Senecas Medea also takes shape in its own distinctive context. 2 Speci cally, I will argue that the behavior and actions of Senecas Medea recall still more closely a character such as the Atreus of Senecas Thyestes,3 although the revenge unleashed by Medeas wrath will prove even more complicated, elaborate, and methodical than in the case of Atreus and Thyestes. To understand the logic of Medeas revenge, I will analyze the way in which her revenge, ultio, is driven by wrath, ira, based on the model of revenge which Seneca himself proposed in his treatise De ira .4 The basic idea is that ira is a passion that has gotten out of control, causing a sort of madness in the injured party. The resulting desire for vengeance lacks any sense of justice and instead seeks to repay the original injury with a crime that is entirely disproportionate to the initial oVense. This model of ira and ultio provides the basis for a new and complex understanding of Medeas story, in which the subject matter of the myth, the literary tradition, and Roman cultural reality are all inextricably intertwined.
An earlier version of the paper was presented at the 1998 Heller Colloquium at Berkeley, organized by James Ker and Laura Gibbs, who also translated the original Italian text of this article. I wish to thank her for her help and valuable suggestions. I am also grateful for some useful comments from an anonymous reader. 1. See Knox 198. See also the famous Horatian prescription (Ars poetica 123): sit Medea ferox invictaque . 2. For Euripides Medea , see Guastella 2000. 3. For an analysis of Senecas Thyestes in these terms, see Guastella 1994. 4. This notion is developed in Books I and II of De ira , and especially in 2.3.42.4.2. Classical Antiquity. Volume 20, Number 2, pages 197219. ISSN 0278-6656(p); 1067-8344 (e). Copyright 2001 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Send requests for permission to reprint to: Rights and Permissions. University of California Press, 2000 Center Street, Ste 303, Berkeley, CA 94704-1223.

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In particular, I will focus on the way in which the Romans understood the role played by kinship, especially the bonds of matrimony and of maternity, in the story of Medeas ira and ultio . The central issue of Senecas play is the problem of ending a marriage, and he addresses this problem in particularly Roman terms. In the plot of this play, and also in its rhetorical construction, Seneca consistently invokes the juridical terminology and reality of his day: these aspects of the story thus depend on Roman ideas about marriage, and cannot be easily understood outside this Roman context. 5 Obviously, we should not expect to nd that a tragedy based on ancient Greek mythology would perfectly reproduce in every detail the social reality of imperial Rome,6 but it is also true that the text insistently invokes some speci c terms such as repudium and motifs such as the restitution of the dowry which can be directly compared to the actual reality of Roman divorce.7 Jasons rejection of Medea is something that she absolutely refuses to accept: the divorce deprives her former life of any meaning, confusing the whole series of crimes which Medea committed against her own family of origin in order to assist the hero Jason and win his love. After all that she had done for him in the past, Jason now abandons his coniunx , yielding to the demands of Creon, the ruler of Corinth, who wants Jason to marry his daughter Creusa. Medeas revenge, which consists of burning down the royal palace and then killing her own children, is de nitely meant to in ict injury on Creon and on Jason, as was the case in Euripides play. In Senecas version, however, there is an additional dimension to this story of vengeance and criminality: Medeas actions now become a way of reconstructing her own identityan identity thrown into disarray by her separation from Jason while at the same time exacting a compensation for the crimes she had committed in the past.
T HE PR EMISES OF THE R EVENGE

Already in the plays opening lines, we encounter the motif of ultio, revenge, as Medea invokes the Furies, the ultrices deae:

5. See Pratt 9091 and Seidensticker 132. On the relationship between the De ira and Senecas tragedies see Staley, who pursues an even closer relationship between these texts, forcing the tragedies to serve as a kind of on-going demonstration of the Stoic theory which Seneca advances in his philosophical writing. However close the connection between these texts may be, Staleys work is perhaps too much focused on the philosophical side of the question. 6. As opposed to the recent eVort of Abrahamsen who tries to demonstrate that the relationship between Jason and Medea can be described as a matrimonium iniustum . Yet it is certainly the case that many of the diVerences between the Senecan tragedy and Euripides Medea do depend on the presence of these speci cally Roman elements. It is enough to consider the situation of the children: in Euripides play, Medea refuses to accept Jasons proposition that the children be raised as illegitimate children in the house of Creon, while in Senecas version the children always remain with their father, as would normally occur in a Roman case of repudium . On this topic, see Guastella 2000. 7. On this topic, see Treggiari 32364 and 43582.

guastella : Virgo, Coniunx, Mater nunc, nunc adeste sceleris ultrices deae, crinem solutis squalidae serpentibus, atram cruentis manibus amplexae facem, adeste, thalamis horridae quondam meis quales stetistis: coniugi letum novae letumque socero et regiae stirpi date. Medea 1318 Be present, be present you goddesses who avenge crime, your hair foul with writhing snakes, grasping the smoking torch with your bloody hands, be present now, as once you stood dreadful beside my nuptial bed; bring destruction upon this new wife, and destruction on this father-in-law and the whole royal lineage.

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The ill-omened wedding was a popular element in Roman literature, at least as early as its use by Vergil in the Aeneid , along with several such episodes in Ovid.8 Seneca, however, puts this traditional material to a highly original use when Medea links the funereal ritual of Jasons rst wedding to his subsequent marriage to Creusa. Both weddings are attended by the Furies, the goddesses of revenge. The Furies had attended Jasons rst wedding as a result of Absyrtus murderand this murder will prove to be central to the development of Senecas play. As we will see later on, Medea actually interprets her brothers death as a loss which she had to bear, a crime committed against herself which must be avenged by the murder of her sons. 9 For the moment, however, Medea limits herself to invoking the Furies so that they might now bring disaster upon the house of Creusa, just as the Furies had brought disaster down upon her own house when she married Jason. It is as if Medea were projecting onto this new wedding the vengefulness which the shade of her brother had previously cast upon her own wedding to Jason. The parallel between Medeas past and her present is the fulcrum of what we might call the psychology of Senecas Medea. Her life is split in two by this divorce: after the repudium , everything that Medea had previously done to win her coniugium with Jason has suddenly been rendered null and void. This dimension of the plotthe full force of Medea as an active character, making choices and committing crimes in her original adventures with Jasonis strongly emphasized by Seneca. We can see this, for example, in the way that both Jason and Creon attempt to make Medea assume full responsibility for all of her crimes.
8. For a discussion of the motif, see Cleasby 4546, Cazzaniga 816, Bo mer 12426, and Pease on Vergils Aeneid 4.168. For Ovid, see Metamorphoses 10.18 and Heroides 2.11720 and 7.96 (and compare Seneca Oedipus 64446 and Trojan Women 113236). Quite similar to Medeas wording is a passage in the Metamorphoses where Ovid describes the wedding of Procne and Tereus (6.42834). Even more directly connected with Medeas story is what Hypsipyle says in the Heroides when she describes her own wedding with Jason (6.4546). In all of these passages, we are dealing with weddings that came to catastrophic ends. 9. On the literary precedents of this theme, see Bremmer 8388.

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This eVort to exonerate Jason requires considerable sophistry on their part, given that Jason was certainly the bene ciary of Medeas crimes, even if he did not actually commit the crimes himself.10 Medea admits her guilt, 11 and tries in vain to show that this is precisely what binds her to Jason, whose destiny Creon plans to sever from hers. Despite all her eVorts, however, Medea is unable to regain the coniunx acquired by the criminal acts she committed.12 As a result, those crimes recoil against Medea, who is now left completely isolated, bearing all alone the burden of her guilt. But if Medea is now alone, what purpose, what meaning, can be assigned to all her past and the crimes that she committed? What was the point of choosing to abandon her own royal family and her homeland? What was the point of having assassinated Absyrtus, a crime which aroused the Furies against Medea herself? For whose sake did Medea dare such things, if the very bene ciary of those deeds now pushes her away? This seems to be the point from which Seneca began to develop his version of the myth of Medea. Senecas Medea reveals a deep division between the Medea of once upon a time, the love-struck virgo ready to do anything for Jason, and Medea the coniunx /mater , who has attained the object of her love and consolidated her union with Jason by having borne him two sons. It must be clearly emphasized that the functions of coniunx and mater represent two sides of the same coin in Roman culture: the children are actual tokens, pignora , whose existence, whose very bodies attest to the commingling of the mothers blood with the fathers. 13 This is why I would make a clear distinction between Medea the virgo on the one hand and Medea the coniunx /mater on the other hand, although we will see that Medeas maternal function will become increasingly problematic as the plot unfolds. The divorce strips away the meaning of everything that the virgo Medea did in order to become the coniunx / mater. Creons demands, following the normal rules of a Roman divorce, deprive Medea of her coniunx and also of her sons. 14
10. Medea not only admits to having committed these crimes but also implies that this violated the norm of behavior for a virgo: that is, the expectation that a virgo should defend her pudor and be loyal to her pater (see Medea 23841: virgini placeat pudor / paterque placeat: tota cum ducibus ruet / Pelasga tellus, hic tuus primum gener / tauri ferocis ore agranti occidet ). On the acknowledgement of guilt, see especially Medea 24551, which is highly reminiscent of some lines in Heroides 12 where the theme of conscious guilt is developed at length (see Heroides 12.10632 and the discussion in Bessone ad loc. , who supplies a long list of parallel passages). 11. Senecas Medea tries, for her part, to separate the idea of being guilty from the idea of being responsible (see Perrenoud). These crimes are what link her destiny to Jasons, since he was the bene ciary of the crimes which she materially committed. 12. For a discussion of the end of Jason and Medeas marriage, see Guastella 2000. 13. For a discussion, see Guastella 2000. 14. Medea 14346: Culpa est Creontis tota, qui sceptro impotens / coniugia solvit quique genetricem abstrahit / gnatis et arto pignore astrictam dem / dirimit . About the fact that in a Roman divorce the children are supposed to follow the father, see the discussion in Guastella 2000. Given that the function of marriage was to assure a male line of descent from the domus of a paterfamilias , and that divorce usually involved the removal of the wife from her husbands house, it is clear that

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Medeas revenge is thus based on a logic of awesome precision, meticulously matching the crimes she committed to become coniunx / mater with even greater crimes that she will now commit in order to re-establish the identity thrown into total disarray by Jasons repudium : Quodcumque vidit Phasis aut Pontus nefas, videbit Isthmos. E Vera ignota horrida, tremenda caelo pariter ac terris mala mens intus agitat: vulnera et caedem et vagum funus per artuslevia memoravi nimis: haec virgo feci; gravior exurgat dolor: maiora iam me scelera post partus decent. Accingere ira teque in exitium para furore toto. Paria narrentur tua repudia thalamis: quo virum linques modo? Hoc quo secuta es. Rumpe iam segnes moras: quae scelere parta est, scelere linquenda est domus. Medea 4455 Whatever horror Pontus or Phasis has seen, Isthmos will see. My heart deep inside is planning wild deeds, unheard-of, horrible calamities at which heaven and hell alike will tremblewounds, slaughter, death, creeping from limb to limb. Too trivial are the deeds I mentioned; such were my crimes when I was a girl. Let my grief rise stronger; greater crimes become me now that I am a mother. Arm yourself with wrath, and be prepared for deadly deeds with the full force of madness. Let the story of your divorce match the story of your marriage. How will you leave your husband? Just as you followed him! Break oV now dull delay; the home you gained by crime, by crime must be abandoned. Senecas Medea declares that scelus, crime, has been the guiding thread of her life, and so it will supply the means by which she can attempt to reconstruct her own identity.15 This erce barbarian woman, whose cultural marginality constitutes a danger for the city which has taken her in, is the ideal character to dramatize the eV ects of unrestrained ira and of a furor that exceeds the very limits of rationality. But this ira is also subject to a precise and perverted ratio , a reckoning which is extraordinarily accurate in all its calculations. Thus, just as the marriage between Jason and Medea was the unconventional and unethical union of a Greek hero and a barbarian virgo, their divorce also takes on a clearly anomalous and criminal character: it is a separation whose procedures basically observe the requirements
the sons would need to remain, in normal circumstances, in the house of their father. See Treggiari 46671 for a discussion of the rare exceptions to this rule. 15. In her last attempt to induce Jason to remain with her, Medea invites him to run away together, even if it is a crime (scelus , 515). Alternatively, Jason could remain, as always, innocens , leaving it up to Medea to destroy every possible enemy (52128).

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of the Roman institution, but which will also involve drastic criminal acts. Because Medea brought about her marriage with Jason by means of a series of crimes committed against her own family in her future husbands favor, the dissolution of that marriage, in Medeas perverse frame of mind, must now be accompanied by a new series of crimes balancing out her past actions, or even exceeding those old crimes with a new, unprecedented ferocity.
CR EDITS AND DEBITS

As Medea herself describes the development of her revenge,16 she begins by considering the merita , the credits she had earned by helping Jason in his struggle: Hoc facere Iason potuit, erepto patre patria atque regno sedibus solam exteris deserere durus? merita contempsit mea qui scelere ammas viderat vinci et mare? Medea 11822 Did Jason have the heart to do thishaving robbed me of my father, homeland and kingdom, could he so cruelly leave me alone in a foreign land? Has he scorned my well-deserved merits, having seen ames and sea conquered by my crime? Medea here juxtaposes her merita, which were systematically the result of criminal activity,17 with three items she claims to have lost as a result of helping Jason. These losses are, speci cally, her father, her homeland, and her royal position. It is important to keep these items in mind, because they will return again later (along with others) in Medeas accounts of giving and getting as she calculates her revenge. Unlike earlier literary versions of this myth, Senecas Medea does not list her merita as an oVering of help made in vain to an ungrateful man; instead, Medea expresses herself in terms of losses which she has su Vered, and for which she demands some form of compensation. 18 When she followed Jason into uncertain exile, Medea had to renounce her family and her homeland, thus also renouncing the safe asylum they would have been able to oVer her in case she
16. Medea, like Atreus, elaborates this plan in a sort of slow and painful gestation. On this topic see Picone 1995 and on the traits shared by Atreus and Medea, see Staley 107 (and passim), Seidensticker 126, Picone 1984: 11112, Picone 1989: 5963, and Picone 1995: 149n. 9. More recently, see also Burnett 1018. 17. For merita , see also Ovid Heroides 12.2122 and the discussion in Bessone 9093. Although Senecas Medea does not dwell on reproaching Jason with the things she did on his behalf (as both Euripides Medea (see Medea 46572) and Ovids Medea do), Senecas Medeas way of talking about her past merita resembles that of Ovids Medea in the rst half of her letter in the Heroides . 18. Liebermann 205 has treated this problem thoroughly: Medea fordert bei Seneca nicht Lohn fu r gute Taten, sondern schlicht Schadenersatz. Inside the frame of his revenge plan, Seneca is emphasizing the motif of loss and deprivation that was already at work in Euripides Medea (for this speci c aspect of Euripides tragedy, see Menu 11921).

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was abandoned by her husband. Moreover, to free herself of her family and her homeland, Medea committed a series of crimes, most important of which was the murder of her brother Absyrtus. 19 How then is Medea going to be compensated for these losses? At this point, Medea begins to imagine a series of future crimes that will parallel those crimes of the past: Unde me ulcisci queam? Utinam esset illi frater! est coniunx: in hanc ferrum exigatur. Medea 12426 Whence can I get vengeance? I wish he had a brother! He has a wife; let the sword strike her heart. Medea wishes that Jason had a brother so that the murder of this brother could compensate for the murder of Medeas brother Absyrtus. But Jason doesnt have a brotherwhat he has is a wife, and it is this wife who will be the rst of Medeas victims.
MY THS OF INF ANTIC IDE: THYE ST ES AND PHI LOME LA

Yet by itself, the murder of Creusa will not be enough: in order to fully realize her revenge, Medea intends to repeat all the crimes of the past with exact precision. The crimes of the past have to come back (cuncta redeant , 130),20 recreating the same circumstances in which the virgo Medea had once found herself: Scelera te hortentur tua et cuncta redeant: inclitum regni decus raptum et nefandae virginis parvus comes divisus ense, funus ingestum patri Medea 12932 Let your own crimes urge you on, and let them all come backthe bright ornament of the kingdom stolen, and the wicked virgo s little companion torn to pieces with the sword, his murder forced upon his father. Medea does not see the murder of her brother simply as the loss of a blood relative, but more precisely as an injury in icted on a father: funus ingestum patri . The importance of understanding Absyrtus death in these terms becomes clear if we compare these lines from Senecas Medea with a parallel passage from Senecas Thyestes, along with another close parallel in Ovids famous account of Procne

19. This is also the Ovidian version of Absyrtus story: see Heroides 6.12930 and especially Tristia 3.9. 20. For the notion of redire and retro verti in Senecas tragedies see Schiesaro 9195.

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and Philomela in the Metamorphoses ; taken together, these passages constitute what seems to me a highly signi cant cluster of allusions. 21 Let us take the Thyestes passage rst, where Atreus contemplates the horrible crime that he is about to commit, using words very similar to Medeas funus ingestum patri : tota iam ante oculos meos imago caedis errat, ingesta orbitas in ora patris. Thyestes 28183 Already before my eyes its the whole picture of the slaughter; his lost children heaped up before their fathers face. Senecas description of orbitas , the lack of sons, ingesta...in ora patris brings us to Ovids text, where we nd a similar expression used to describe the moment when Philomela throws Itys severed head at his father Tereus, in ora patris : Ityosque caput Philomela cruentum misit in ora patris. Metamorphoses 6.65859 and Philomela threw the bleeding head of Itys in his fathers face. In both cases we are dealing with children who are killed in order to carry out a revenge that punishes a guilty father. This is not precisely the situation in the case of Medeas father, Aeetes: although Aeetes is a tyrant, his son is murdered only in order to put a stop to his pursuit of Medea and Jason. 22 Nevertheless, Medea considers this act of infanticide to be an injury inicted on the victims father.23 The words Medea uses to describe the murder
21. While I believe it is worthwhile to read these texts together in order to see more clearly the cultural elements which are the common parameters of stories that are so fundamentally similar to one another, I am not attempting to establish which of the plays was written rst, a task which seems to me impossible to achieve. For a review of the hypotheses on the dating of Senecas plays, see Fitch, Zwierlein 1983: 23348, and Tarrant 1013. 22. There is also an analogy between these stories of infanticide and the story of Harpalyce (Parthenius Erot. 13; Hyginus Fab. 206, and Euphorion frag. 24a), who takes revenge on her father, Clymenus, who committed incest with her and killed her husband. Harpalyce supposedly fed to her father the esh of her brother (or, according to one version of the myth, of the child she herself bore to her father). 23. Ovid too had already described in a similar way both the killing of Absyrtus and that of Itys. In Tristia 3.9, Ovid describes Medeas deeds in a way that is very similar to Metamorphoses 6.61960, where Procnes infanticide is described. In both cases the child accidentally comes into the room while the woman is seeking a solution to her dilemma; in both cases the child does not understand what is happening; and in both cases when the body has been dismembered it is the hands and feet which are shown to the father (Tristia 3.2131: Dum quid agat quaerit, dum versat in omnia vultus, / ad fratrem casu lumina exa tulit. / Cuius ut oblata est praesentia: Vicimus, inquit; / hic mihi morte sua causa salutis erit. / Protinus ignari nec quicquam tale timentis / innocuum rigido perforat ense latus / atque ita divellit divulsaque membra per agros / dissipat in multis invenienda

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of Absyrtus funus ingestum patri point both towards the murder of Thyestes sons and to the murder of Itys, a comparison that will achieve its full realization in Medeas nal crime: by murdering their children, Medea punishes Jason in a way that is analogous to the way in which Procne punished her husband Tereus (in revenge for Tereus having raped her sister) and the way in which Atreus punished his brother Thyestes (in revenge for Thyestes having committed adultery with his wife).
FROM AMOR TO IRA

As Medea gradually unfolds her plans for vengeance, we see that there are two juxtaposed emotions which drive Medeas crimes, past and present: et nullum scelus irata feci: saevit infelix amor. Medea 13536 None of my crimes did I do in wrath: my unfortunate love rages on. The scelera of the past were prompted by amor, but from now on it is no longer love but wrath, ira, which will drive Medeas revenge. 24 As the chorus itself observes, this revenge will arise from a fusion of ira and amor : Frenare nescit iras Medea, non amores: nunc ira amorque causam iunxere: quid sequetur? Medea 86669 Medea does not know how to curb her wrath or her love: now that wrath and love have joined cause, what will the outcome be? The criminal career of the virgo Medea was driven by love,25 while that of the coniunx /mater will be marked by the consequences of that same love, now deeply wounded. 26 It is this fusion of amor and ira that will give Medea the means to

locis / neu pater ignoret, scopulo proponit in alto / pallentesque manus sanguineumque caput / ut genitor luctuque novo tardetur et, artus / dum legit extinctos, triste moretur iter ; compare, for example, Metamorphoses 6.513 with vicimus here at line 23). For the analogies between these two accounts, see DeglInnocenti Perini 15354. 24. The theme of Medeas ira as a result of her wounded love had already been developed by Ovid: see, for example, Ars amatoria 2.37386, Remedia amoris 55, and Tristia 2.387 88: tingeret ut ferrum natorum sanguine mater / concitus a laeso fecit amore dolor . 25. See Kullmann 15859. Ovids version in Heroides 12, following the rules of elegy, only hints in the last line at the crimes that will follow. On the possible literary implications of this line, see Spoth 202204, Barchiesi 34345, Hinds 3443, and Bessone 3241. 26. After her dialogue with Creon, Medea herself will equate her past feelings and her present hate, caused by her earlier love (Medea 39799): Si quaeris odio, misera, quem statuas modum,

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reassemble the shattered pieces of her identity, now that she has lost all that had once been hers: NVT. Abiere Colchi, coniugis nulla est des nihilque superest opibus e tantis tibi. ME. Medea superest: hic mare et terras vides ferrumque et ignes et deos et fulmina. Medea 16467 Nurse . The Colchians are no longer on your side, your husband has proved faithless, and there is nothing left of all your wealth. Medea. Medea is leftin her you see sea and land, and sword and re and gods and thunderbolts. Nihil superest , Medea has lost everything: in this dialogue the nurse emphasizes the material loss of Medeas homeland as well as the end of her marriage, the loss of her coniugis des. But Medea superest , Medea remains, and she declares that she will take what is left and put the pieces of her life back together: NVT. Profuge. ME. Paenituit fugae. NVT. Medea ME. Fiam. NVT. Mater es. ME. Cui sim vide. NVT. Profugere dubitas? ME. Fugiam at ulciscar prius. Medea 17072 Nurse . Run away. Medea . I dont want to. Nurse . Medea Medea . I will be. Nurse . You are a mother. Medea . You see for whom. Nurse . Do you hesitate to run away? Medea. Ill run away but rst Ill be avenged. Fiam: Medea is not lost, but she must become herself. Her identity as a coniunx /mater no longer makes sense without Jason, who has rejected her (the precise meaning of this cui is a point to which we will return). Medea must thus avenge herself in a way that allows her past to regain the meaning which was destroyed by the divorce. It is precisely the logic of this revenge that will allow Medea to reacquire her identity.
MEDEAS DOWRY

Among the losses which Medea has lamented so far, we could list her pater , patria , regnum ,27 and also her coniugis des. The theme of loss is also emphasized

/ imitare amorem. Regias egone ut faces / inulta patiar? In her dialogue with Jason, Medea will then try for the last time to use the power of amor (46590). 27. Among Medeas losses we can also include the nobility and the opes mentioned by the nurse (Medea 16465). Medea comes back to this point several times. During her dialogue with Creon, for example, she complains about her former identity as a noble descendant of the Sun (20910), the daughter of a very powerful and rich king (21116), a bride very much courted (21819). Medea says she has lost all of this in order to save the Argonauts, taking only Jason for herself (22535).

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in Medeas dialogue with Jason, as Medea reminds him that she had been willing to commit any sort of crime in order to follow him into exile: Ex opibus illis [ . . . ] nil exul tuli nisi fratris artus: hos quoque impendi tibi; tibi patria cessit, tibi pater frater pudor hac dote nupsi. Redde fugienti sua. Medea 48389 Of all that wealth [ . . . ] I brought away nothing in my exile but my brothers limbs. Those too I spent for you; for you my country has given way, my father, my brother, my chastitywith this dowry I married you. Give me back what is mine now that I am banished. Medea now explicitly includes her brother and her former status as a virgo pudica in the list of other losses which she has su Vered (regnum , pater , patria ),28 and she links this nal, catastrophic reckoning of accounts to the Roman institution of the dowry. Medea considers these losses to be the equivalent of a dowry paid to her husband. Of course, this can only be a metaphorical dowry: Medeas marriage was completely unusual, without any of the normal guarantees required by a proper matrimonial exchange. 29 The dowry was not paid by Aeetes as it should have been, but by Medea herself, and at her own loss. Senecas rhetoric thus imposes a kind of formal metaphorical order on an irregular and criminal union, treating that union as if it followed all the rules of a regular marriage. Insofar as Jason and Medeas wedding is assumed to follow the rules of marriage, it is only logical that their divorce should do the same, and in the case of a repudium the rejected womans dowry must be returned to her family of origin. 30 Yet here the logic fails: Jason cannot give anything back to a father-in-law who had not even agreed to the marriage. Indeed, it would not be Medeas father who requires compensation, but Medea herself, since it was Medea who paid the price, so to speak, of her wedding. Medeas belief that a dowry was paid is already a paradox; so too is this request for its return. In Heroides 12, Ovids Medea also demands the restitution of her dowry, but in a far less radical sense: 31
28. These are the same elements found in Ovid Heroides 12.10914: proditus est genitor, regnum patriamque reliqui, / munus in exilio quodlibet esse tuli; / virginitas facta est peregrini praeda latronis; / optima cum cara matre relicta soror. / At non te fugiens sine me, germane, reliqui! / De cit hoc uno littera nostra loco . 29. See Guastella 2000: 15257. 30. See Treggiari 325 and 44682, especially 466: The legal eVect of divorce was normally considered to be the physical separation of the coniuges and the restoration of the dowry, apart from whatever the husband retained on account of children, fault, expenses, gifts, or things taken away. 31. It could be argued that Ovid might have developed this theme in his own Medea because Ovids Medea in the Heroides brings her speech to an abrupt end exactly when she gives herself over to wrath and to vengeful designs, pronouncing a threat in the last line of the letter. Similar

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Dos ubi sit, quaeris? Campo numeravimus illo, qui tibi laturo vellus arandus erat. Aureus ille aries villo spectabilis alto dos mea, quam dicam si tibi Redde, neges. Dos mea tu sospes, dos est mea Graia iuventus; i nunc, Sisyphias, improbe, confer opes! Quod vivis, quod habes nuptam socerumque potentes, hoc ipsum, ingratus quod potes esse, meum est. Quos equidem actutumsed quid praedicere poenam attinet? Ingentes parturit ira minas.32 Heroides 12.199208 You ask where my dowry is? I counted it out on that eld which you had to plow so that you could carry away the eece. That golden ram, with his remarkably thick coat of wool, that is my dowry, the dowry which you would deny me when I tell you to give it back. My dowry is you, safe and sound, my dowry is those Greek youthsgo now, traitor, and compare your Sisyphian wealth. The fact that you are alive, that you have a bride and a father-in-law who are powerful, the very fact that you can be ungrateful, that is all due to me. And as for them, I am going tobut what does it matter if I say what the punishment will be? Awesome are the perils being hatched by my wrath. Within the epistolary framework, the words of Ovids Medea become a mere rhetorical device, an utterly impossible demand.33 Senecas Medea, on the other hand, not only expects the return of her dowry 34 but constructs her revenge in such a way that she can paradoxically claim that she has in fact received compensation. Ovids Medea speaks about a dowry only in order to construct a metaphor, but Senecas Medea takes that metaphor and pursues it according to the cultural model on which it depends, thus de ning the rules that her revenge will ultimately follow.

motifs can be found, although di Verently distributed, in the dialogues of Senecas Medea with both Creon and Jason. The theme is also found in Hypsipyles letter to Jason (Heroides 6.13738: quid refert, scelerata piam si vincit et ipso / crimine dotata est emeruitque virum? ). 32. Already according to Leo 16869, Seneca was quoting these lines in Medea 48689. For more recent discussions about the signi cance of Senecas citation of these lines, see Bessone 26686 and Heinze 20619. 33. Ovids Medea seems willing to acknowledge that Jason not only would not give her back this dowry, but that this would be impossible to do. 34. Medea asks for the restitution of her dowry using almost the same words she uses to ask for the restitution of her coniunx (Medea 27273: redde fugienti ratem / vel redde comitem ). For the juridical value of such words, see Perrenoud 49597, who interprets the expression at line 272 in terms of the notion of reddere crimen found in lines 24446.

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The infanticide which makes it possible for Medea to punish her coniunx in the very body of his children is conceived and carried out in haste, all within the last act of Senecas tragedy. Yet this is in fact the core of Medeas revenge, the real focus of her eVorts. The murder of Creon and his daughter is of considerably less importance in Senecas version of the story than in Euripides, and constitutes only a small part of Medeas overall project.35 There is absolutely no comparison between the logical and rhetorical eVorts which Seneca devotes to the murder of Medeas children and the scant attention which he pays to the fates of Creon and Creusa. Medea herself describes her revenge as unfolding in two stages, with the rst stage serving as a mere prelude that is by itself incomplete: Pars ultionis ista, qua gaudes, quota est? Amas adhuc, furiosa, 36 si satis est tibi caelebs Iason. Quaere poenarum genus haut usitatum iamque sic temet para. Medea 89699 How much of your revenge is this, that you are so happy with it? You are still in love, madwoman, if it is enough for you that Jason is unmarried. Look for a kind of punishment no one has ever tried and prepare yourself for this. The real revenge, the more terrible punishment, has yet to begin, but the elaborate rhetoric of Medeas long monologue shows clearly that this is where the whole plot has been leading. It is only now that the heroine starts to untangle the confusion of her past life that has been created by Jasons repudium . Here is where we can discern the project that will unite all of these aspects of Medeas life into a meaningful whole, an aspiration that is as clear and articulate as it is utterly insane:
35. Seneca seems to have wanted to quickly discharge his debt to the literary tradition, in which the myth involved the murder of Creon and Creusa. In Senecas play, this murder does not have the same importance as in Euripides version (see Guastella 2000). Before the sudden preparation of this crime, the only allusions to the need to kill Creon and Creusa are found at lines 12526 and 14349. Even during the long scene of witchcraft, no reference is made to the reasons why Medea needs to kill her rival, apart from a generic hint to the hated novi thalami (743). Seneca devotes only 12 lines to the messenger speech about Creon and Creusas death (87990), compared to the more than 90 lines in Euripides. Seneca has mostly used this crime in order to construct an impressive scene of witchcraft, according to the literary taste of his own times. The atmosphere of this scene (670848) owes much to the character of Medea as presented by Ovid in the Metamorphoses (see Newlands 18692 on the subject of Medea the witch). 36. The correction furiose , which was proposed by Bentley and is now accepted by both Costa and Zwierlein, is unnecessary. The correction is not needed for the meter, and I do not think that it is so unlikely that Medea would brie y interrupt her apostrophe to the animus in order to address herself. Indeed, it seems to me instead rather improbable that Medea would address her animus , rather than herself, as still in love.

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Prolusit dolor per ista noster: quid manus poterant rudes audere magnum, quid puellaris furor? Medea nunc sum; crevit ingenium malis: iuvat, iuvat rapuisse fraternum caput, artus iuvat secuisse et arcano patrem spoliasse sacro, iuvat in exitium senis armasse natas. Quaere materiam, dolor: ad omne facinus non rudem dextram aVeres. Medea 90715 In them my grief was but practicing; what great deed had my inexperienced hands the power to do? What, a girls rage? Now I am Medea; my identity has grown through crime: glad am I, glad, that I tore oV my brothers head, glad that I carved his limbs, that I robbed my father of his guarded treasure, glad that I armed daughters for an old mans death. Seek the right stuV, my grief: no untrained hand will you bring to any crime. Once again Medea makes an account of the wrongs committed in her earlier criminal career, those deeds that Medea the virgo committed in a puellaris furor . These crimes are now interpreted as the means to a new end, a preparation for redemption (iuvat , as Medea insists four times in three lines). At last, by means of all her su Vering, Medea can achieve a full realization of her identity: Medea nunc sum.37 Medeas identity thus emerges in three different phases: 38 beginning with the total disorder in which only the erce energy of the abandoned woman continued to function (Medea superest , 166), followed by Medeas intention to put her ruined life back together (Medea Fiam, 171) and nally the realization of the actual revenge. When she is nished, Medeas life will have regained a new meaning. We have now reached the moment in which the virgo Medea will be integrated with the spurned coniunx /mater so that Medea, at last, will be able to become herself once and for all.

37. See Kullmann 16164, who has correctly noted that this line is the culminating moment of the progress of Medeas ingenium over the course of the play. 38. See Liebermann 189, who provides a useful schema of the three phases of Medeas character development. About the extraordinary fortune of the theme Medea am in later versions of this story, see Friedrich 22737. For the Ovidian precedent, see Heroides 12.5, 12.25, and 12.182, with a discussion in Bessone ad loc. In comparison to these lines of Ovid (along with Heroides 6.12728 and 6.151), Seneca multiplies his variations about the name Medea throughout the play (see lines 8, 166, 171, 179, 362, 496, 517, 524, 567, 675, 867, 892, 910, 934). Both Traina and Segal 1982 discuss the repeated naming of Medea in the course of the play.

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Now that she must persuade herself to kill her own children, Medea relies on a series of expressions which dramatize the incompatibility of her identity as a mother with the reality of her divorce. Separated from her children, Medea tries to make herself believe that her children in fact belong to Creusa, the stepmother under whose jurisdiction the children now live.39 But despite the monumental rhetorical eVort, Medeas decision remains unthinkable, and she must undergo the internal questioning traditionally associated with the heroines of myth who murder their own children: Ira discessit loco materque tota coniuge expulsa redit. Egone ut meorum liberum ac prolis meae fundam cruorem? Melius, a, demens furor! Incognitum istum facinus ac dirum nefas a me quoque absit; quod scelus miseri luent? Scelus est Iason genitor et maius scelus Medea materoccidant, non sunt mei; pereant, mei sunt. Crimine et culpa carent, sunt innocentes, fateor: et frater fuit.40 Medea 92736 Wrath has given way; the mother has all come back, the wife is banished. Can I shed the blood of my children, of my own oVspring? Ah, mad rage, say not so! Let not that unheard-of deed, that accursed guilt attend even me! What sin will the poor boys atone? Their sin is that Jason is their father, and, greater sin, that Medea is their mother. Let them die, they are not mine; let them be lostthey are my own. They are without crime and guilt, yes, they are innocent. I acknowledge it; so, too, was my brother. Medea nds herself having to overcome the gap between her maternal identity ( mater tota, 928; Medea mater, 934) and her marital identity (coniunx , 928). At the moment of her divorce, these two aspects of Medeas identity became
39. Medea 92122: Quidquid ex illo tuum est, / Creusa peperit . See also 924: liberi quondam mei. For a discussion, see Guastella 2000: 15762. 40. Nussbaum 227 has proposed a quite interesting punctuation for this line: Pereant. Mei sunt, crimine et culpa carent, / sunt innocentes fateor: et frater fuit . In this reading, the children belonging to Medea would be, for this same reason, innocent, so that they would turn out to be innocent victims in exactly the same way as Absyrtus had been. However, I am afraid this would represent a banalization of the text. Apart from the improbable undoing of the strong syntactical parallelism (which is typically Senecan, as well as Ovidian), such a solution also cancels an important thematic element. Medea has said (93334) that her children share the scelus that comes from being born as a result of a criminal union. Medea is here proposing a twofold reason for the infanticide: the children are to die because they are at this time both Creusas and Medeas sons and because they must share the same destiny as Absyrtus (only this second aspect would remain in the text as punctuated by Nussbaum).

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incompatible. For whom, cui , is Medea now a mother? The problem is stated quite clearly in the dialogue between Medea and the nurse which was cited earlier (Medea 171): NVT. Mater es. ME. Cui sim vide . Medea is saying that a mother (a Roman mother, we might add) is not a mother in some absolute sense, but is a mother only with respect to someone elses bene t (cui ). It is here that we nd the central element in the logic of the infanticide, as we can see by comparing Medeas words to analogous expressions found in similar myths, such as Ovids account of Procne in the Metamorphoses . Procne is also suVering a crisis of identity, vacillating between her role as a sister who wants to avenge the rape of Philomela and her role as mother who does not dare to murder her son Itys: quam vocat hic matrem, cur non vocat illa sororem? Cui sis nupta, vide, Pandione nata, marito. Degeneras! Scelus est pietas in coniuge Tereo. Metamorphoses 6.63335 When he calls me mother, why does she not call me sister? See whom you have married, you, Pandions daughter! Will you betray your birth? With such a husband as Tereus, aVection due to kin is a crime. Cui sis nupta, vide : Procnes words are a terrible sophism, but at the same time they reveal a great deal about the Roman notion of marriage. To be the mother of Itys and to be the wife of a despicable man like Tereus are two sides of the same coin, a situation which manages to somehow justify a crime (the elimination of their common oVspring) which would otherwise be unthinkable. Sarah Iles Johnston has recently observed that the fascination which is still exerted today by Medea and her story owes much to the fact that a mothers deliberate slaughter of her children undermines one of the basic assumptions upon which societyindeed humanityis constructed: mothers nurture their children. 41 In ecting this argument according to the cultural paradigms of ancient society, we would need to add that this nurturing function of the mother does not take place in isolation, but to someone elses advantage, as Medea herself observes. 42 To be a wife and to be a mother were functions both linked to the bene t of one and the same man. As a result, the sacri ce of the children is the culmination of the divorce, a visible manifestation of the need to make this separation into a loss not only for the woman who has been abandoned, but above all for the man who had previously bene ted from the union, and who would otherwise continue to pro t from its fruits, keeping the sons for himself. Thus many ancient stories of infanticide involve not so much the complete negation
41. Johnston 44. 42. Both Senecas Medea and Ovids Procne use the dative cui , which is normal in Procnes case, but less so in Medeas, since Medea is not discussing whose mother she is (as Procne is discussing whose wife she is) but for whom she is a mother.

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of all the rules, but rather involve a methodan extreme method, but with a clearly de ned aimwhich can be used either to dissolve erroneous marriages or to punish the (male) parents who engage in sexual relations with prohibited partners. 43 Thus, in order to propose a correct anthropological account of the dichotomy between Medea coniunx and Medea mater as depicted here by Seneca, we must begin with the following question: for whom, cui , is Medea now a mother? The answer is that she is a mother for a coniunx who has rejected her. As a result, her sons remain linked to her by blood since she is still their mater , but at the same time they are alienated from her insofar as she is alienated from the father, the man for whom, cui , she had assumed the role of mother. This rejected coniunx , carried away by ira, can imagine the possibility of killing those children, even though the mater , still moved by amor and pietas , is horri ed by this idea.44 In this moment of con ict, the childrens innocence will not be enough to avert Medeas fatal blows, even though she is their mother, just as once upon a time the innocence of Absyrtus had not been able to restrain the fatal blows struck by his sister (et frater fuit , 936).
MEDEA AND THE ACT OF INFANTIC IDE

There is thus a fundamental con ict here between relations of blood kinship (Medea as mater) and relations with kin acquired by means of marriage (Medea as coniunx ). To better understand the signi cance of this con ict in a story like Medeas, we can compare Medeas situation to that of two analogous characters, Procne (again) and Althea,45 although I will only be able to brie y outline the comparison here. In Ovids version of Procnes story (Metamorphoses 6.62735)

43. The valuable ancient and modern evidence collected twenty years ago by Easterling needs to be reexamined in this light. I suspect that the cultural reasons underlying these crimes changes over time. For instance, in our culture the psychological attitude seems to be the same for both parents who might commit infanticide: the man and the woman aim at harming their partner in more or less the same way by killing their children. In ancient myth, however, this seems to be a crime intended to injure fathers, not mothers (see also Segal 1996: 16, who cites the case of Procne and also that of Hecuba, who kills the sons of Polymestor in Euripides Hecuba ). Even in stories where infanticide seems to be directed against a mother (as in the story of Ino and Athamas), the woman is usually not punished by the father of the child, but by some other character (in Inos case, by Hera). As Segal observes (1996: 16): Her [sc. Medeas] behavior here departs from modern patterns of child murder, for modern society does not place so much emphasis on the fathers need for children to continue the male line. 44. Medea 94344: ira pietatem fugat / iramque pietascede pietati, dolor . Compare the description of Medeas crime in Ovid Metamorphoses 7.39697 (after the killing of the nova nupta ): sanguine natorum perfunditur inpius ensis / ultaque se male mater Iasonis effugit arma . Liebermann 19091 rightly points out that the last part of this tragedy is centered upon the oppositions pietas / dolor, amor /ira, mater /coniunx . 45. Althaeas story is explicitly evoked by the chorus (Medea 77980). For the similarities between these two stories, see Friedrich 202203.

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and also in his account of Althea (Metamorphoses 8.46284), 46 there is a similar con ict in kinship loyalties. Both women decide to kill their children in order to avenge the victimization of their siblings by their enemies: Procne avenges her sisters rape by her husband and Althea avenges her brothers murder by her son. In both cases, the women must choose between loyalty to their acquired family and loyalty to their family of origin. In other words, they must decide whether to be a good mother or to be a good sister. Of course, Medeas situation is somewhat di Verent, since it was in fact Medea herself who committed the crime against her family of origin, killing her own brother. Yet even though Medea does not face a con ict between her role as a mother and as a sister synchronically (that is, Medea is not choosing now between being a good mother and the alternative of being a good sister, as Procne and Althea do), she does face this dilemma diachronically. That is, Medeas renunciation of her role as a mother reproduces her earlier refusal of her sisterly identity in an act of revenge that is meant to expiate the original crime by means of another, entirely analogous infanticide. By killing her children, Medea does aYrm her role as a sister, but in a delayed and perverted way, avenging the death of her brother at her own hands by later killing her own children. Ultimately, Medeas murder of her children is imagined as a sacri ce o Vered to the Erinyes of her brother, those same Furies evoked in the opening lines of the play. In the end, Medea gives herself over completely to dolor and is surrounded by the Furies urging her to carry out her crime,47 until the actual ghost of her dismembered brother appears before her, turning her hand (perhaps even literally) to the murder of her rst child. 48 Senecas Medea, therefore, does not punish Jason simply because he has betrayed her, as is the case in Euripides. Instead, in this version of the story Medeas wrath unleashes a much wider-reaching strategy. Medea does not intend only to deprive Jason of his progeny, but also to obtain compensation for the
46. Ovid Metamorphoses 8.475 77: Incipit esse tamen melior germana parente / et, consanguineas ut sanguine leniat umbras / inpietate pia est . Compare Medea 77980: piae sororis, impiae matris (about Althaea). For a discussion of these passages, see Jakobi 59, who comments also on the stylistic similarities between Medea 93944 and Ovid Metamorphoses 8.47077, providing a list of parallel passages. 47. Medea might have seen the Furies on stage, if the tragedies had theatrical performances. The theme of Medea urged by the Furies was traditional, as in Neophrons tragedy (frag. 2.1012: see Dingel 1074). In Euripides (Medea 133335), Jason remarks that he is the victim of divine vengeance being exacted for Medeas fratricide. Ovid (Heroides 12.160) also has Medea say, albeit in a diVerent context, that the divorce was celebrating the inferiae of her brothers umbra (inferias umbrae fratris habete mei ). 48. Medea 96371: Cuius umbra dispersis venit / incerta membris? Frater est, poenas petit: / dabimus, sed omnes. Fige luminibus faces, / lania, perure, pectus en Furiis patet. / Discedere a me, frater, ultrices deas / manesque ad imos ire securas iube: / mihi me relinque et utere hac, frater, manu / quae strinxit ensemvictima manes tuos / placamus ista . Hosidius Geta actually made the umbra Absyrti a speaking character in his cento (39091). Friedrich 21112 discusses the subsequent versions in which this same detail can be found.

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losses that she suVered in order to marry Jason in the rst place.49 The two disconnected halves of Medeas identity thus nally seem to achieve a sort of unity. Originally, Jason was the bene ciary of a crime which had Medea as its subject, and which injured Medeas father by means of Absyrtus murder. Now the situation is reversed: (Aeetes by means of) the ghost of Absyrtus is the receiver of a crime, whose subject is once again Medea, who injures the father Jason by means of his children. 50 With the parallelism that is typical of ultio, revenge, the original iniuria suVered by the house of Medea is compensated for by an analogous iniuria suVered by the house of Jason. In Ovid, too, this motif emerges in the words that Hypsipyle addresses to Jason in the Heroides , in the form of a series of curses against Medea, who has stolen Jason from her in a way that parallels the way in which Creusa in turn will deprive Medea of her coniunx . Hypsipyles nal wish is that the barbarian woman will suVer all the same things which Hypsipyle herself has had to su Ver, and that Medea will commit precisely those crimes which her literary destiny condemns her to carry out: quam fratri germana fuit miseroque parenti lia, tam natis, tam sit acerba viro. Heroides 6.15960 A bitter sister to her brother, a bitter daughter to her wretched father, may she be as bitter to her children, and as bitter to her husband. Here in Ovid we see the same method that Seneca will use to juxtapose the crimes of Medeas past with the crimes she commits after her divorce, based on values that have a strongly marked cultural content. Yet what was a purely verbal exercise in Ovid emerges in the action of Senecas play in a more radical form, exploiting this approach for all of its narrative and dramatic potential. Medea thus emerges as the inversion of the ideal bride: instead of eVecting an alliance between two houses, Medea instead brings disaster on both her family of origin and on the family that she acquires by marriage. More precisely, the logic of Medeas revenge demands that a parallel injury be in icted on her family by marriage as compensation for the injury this marriage in icted on her family of origin. 51 The plan to avenge the crimes committed against Medeas family
49. Revenge is also inserted into the larger context of the nefas committed by the Argonauts. They were haunted by a series of divine punishments, recalled in the third choral ode (Medea 579 669); for a discussion, see Lawall 426. There is also a folkloric prohibition against having a murderer on board a ship. Both Apollonius of Rhodes (Argonautica 4.55791) and Ovid (Heroides 12.11718) feature this motif; for a discussion, see Heinze 166, who provides a list of parallel passages. 50. See Morse 51. The perfect parallelism in Medeas strategy of revenge has been highlighted very well by Hass, who also emphasizes the damage which the loss of the children in icts on the father. 51. On these aspects of Medeas myth see Visser 15359, who clearly shows that the mythical gure of Medea radically reverses the unifying role of the wife by destroying both of the families (her own and Jasons) which she would be expected to unite.

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of origin is completely absent from Euripides play but in Senecas version this aspect of Medeas revenge is what actually motivates the infanticide. When Medea welcomes Jasons arrival on the stage, she gives a shout of victory, announcing that she has now requited those earlier injuries: Iam iam recepi sceptra germanum patrem, spoliumque Colchi pecudis auratae tenent; rediere regna, rapta virginitas redit. O placida tandem numina, o festum diem, o nuptialem! Vade, perfectum est scelus vindicta nondum: perage, dum faciunt manus. Medea 98287 Now, now have I regained my regal state, my brother, my father; and the Colchians have once more the spoil of the golden eece; restored is my kingdom, my ravished virginity is restored. Oh, divinities, at last propitious, oh, festal day, oh, nuptial day! Come, the crime is accomplished; but vengeance is not yet complete; nish it while there is still work for your hands. Similarly, in Senecas Thyestes , when Atreus sees that he has achieved his goal, he also shouts that his revenge has restored to him what he had thought he had lost because of the iniuria he su Vered at his brothers hands (Thyestes 109699): Nunc meas laudo manus, nunc parta vera est palma. Perdideram scelus, nisi sic doleres. Liberos nasci mihi nunc credo, castis nunc dem reddi toris. Thyestes 109699 Now I praise my hands, now is the true palm won. I had wasted my crime if you did not su Ver like this. Now do I believe my children are my own, now may I trust once more that my marriage-bed is pure. With this rhetorical formulation Atreus nourishes the illusion that he has erased the eVects of Thyestes adultery with his wife Aerope, thereby restoring his con dence in the legitimacy of their oVspring.52 Likewise, Medea declares that she has succeeded in picking up the broken thread of her life, having recovered everything that she had given up for Jasons sake: her royal status, her brother, her father, the golden eece, and even her own original identity as a virgo , the whole list of losses which Medea has been lamenting throughout the rst half of the tragedy, the so-called dowry which Medea had paid in order to get married to Jason. 53 If only in the logic of a paradoxical metaphor, Medea has recouped

52. See Guastella 1994: 14547. 53. See Medea 20920 and 48389.

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her losses; her revenge creates the illusion that everything has come back, rediere / redit (984).54
CONCLUSIONS

By the time the play reaches its close, the seduced virgo and the abandoned mater have both been avenged; Medea can nally show herself to Jason in the terms he had refused to accept: no longer as the rival of Creusa, but as his old coniunx , the companion of his exile. Medea then ies oV into the cloudless sky, her identity as a mother discarded and the events of her past annulled. At the end of the tragedy, Jason has not put Medea aside, but instead it is Medea who puts Jason aside, having requited the crimes, scelera , she had once committed on Jasons behalf with crimes now committed against him. Medea had become a mother to Jasons pro t, but now she has ceased to be a mother, and has done so at a loss to him. In this way Medea has succeeded in doing just what she promised at the end of the plays prologue (Medea 55): quae scelere parta est, scelere linquenda est domus . University of Siena guastella@unisi.it
BIB LIOGRAPHY Abrahamsen, L. 1999. Roman Marriage Law and the Con ict of Senecas Medea. QUCC 62: 10722. Barchiesi, A. 1993. Future Re exive: Two Modes of Allusion and Ovids Heroides. HSCP 95: 33365. Bessone, F., ed. 1997. P. Ovidii Nasonis, Heroidum epistula XII. Medea Iasoni . Florence. Bo mer, F., ed. 1976. P. Ovidius Naso, Metamorphosen (Buch 67). Heidelberg. Bremmer, J. N. 1997. Why Did Medea Kill Her Brother Apsyrtus? In Clauss and Johnston, 83100. Burnett, A. P. 1998. Revenge in Attic and Later Tragedy. Berkeley. Cazzaniga, I. 1951. La saga di Itis nella tradizione letteraria e mitogra ca grecoromana . Varese and Milan. Clauss, J. J., and S. I. Johnston, eds. 1997. Medea. Essays on Medea in Myth, Literature, Philosophy, and Art. Princeton. Cleasby, H. L. 1907. The Medea of Seneca. HSCP 18: 3971. Costa, C. D. N., ed. 1973. Seneca. Medea. Oxford. DeglInnocenti Pierini, R. 1980. Studi su Accio. Florence. dien: Vorbilder und poetische Aspekte. In ANRW II, 32.2: Dingel, J. 1985. Senecas Trago 105299. Berlin and New York. Easterling, P. E. 1977. The Infanticide in Euripides Medea. YCS 25: 17791.
54. The reference to the dies nuptialis should probably be understood as a reference to the fact that the loss of coniugis des (164) has now been requited.

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figures 12

joyce

Fig. 1: Punishment of Dirce with Amphion and Zethos apprehending Lykos. Sicilian Calyx Crater. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Antiken Sammlung, F 3296. Photo by Isolde Luckert. bpk, Berlin.

Fig. 2: Dirce under an Ithyphallic Bull. Augustan Carneol. Staaliche Museen zu Berlin, Antiken Sammlung, FG 6897. bpk, Berlin.