Introduction: Medea in Greece and Rome

Home , Absyrtus, Acastus, Aegeus, Aeson, Creon (king of Corinth), Ennius

INTRODUCTION: MEDEA IN GREECE AND ROME

A J. Boyle

maiusque mari Medea malum. Seneca Medea 362 And Medea, evil greater than the sea.

Few mythic narratives of the ancient world are more famous than the story of the Colchian princess/sorceress who betrayed her father and family for love of a foreign adventurer and who, when abandoned for another woman, killed in revenge both her rival and her children. Many critics have observed the com plexities and contradictions of the Medea figure—naive princess, knowing witch, faithless and devoted daughter, frightened exile, marginalised alien, dis placed traitor to family and state, helper-màiden, abandoned wife, vengeful lover, caring and filicidal mother, loving and fratricidal sister, oriental 'other', barbarian saviour of Greece, rejuvenator of the bodies of animals and men, killer of kings and princesses, destroyer and restorer of kingdoms, poisonous stepmother, paradigm of beauty and horror, demi-goddess, subhuman monster, priestess of Hecate and granddaughter of the sun, bride of dead Achilles and ancestor of the Medes, rider of a serpent-drawn chariot in the sky—complex ities reflected in her story's fragmented and fragmenting history. That history has been much examined, but, though there are distinguished recent exceptions, comparatively little attention has been devoted to the specifically 'Roman' Medea—the Medea of the Republican tragedians, of Cicero, Varro Atacinus, Ovid, the younger Seneca, Valerius Flaccus, Hosidius Geta and Dracontius, and, beyond the literary field, the Medea of Roman painting and Roman sculp ture. Hence the present volume of Ramus, which aims to draw attention to the complex and fascinating use and abuse of this transcultural heroine in the Ro man intellectual and visual world. The present introduction briefly outlines Medea's Greek history before examining in detail her journey through Republi can Rome. It concludes with a survey of her imperial configurations and a pre liminary framing of the studies which follow. The contradictions and complexities of the Medea myth were mentioned above. To them should be added its instability. Here is a succinct retelling of the main elements of the myth as they appear in several of the main Greek and Roman sources:

The mythical time is that of the generation before the Trojan War. Medea is the daughter of the Oceanid, Iduia, and Aeetes, ruler of Col chis, a kingdom at the south east coiner of the Black Sea; she is the granddaughter of the sun god and niece of the sorceress Circe.

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Jason and the Argonauts arrive in Colchis from Greece on their quest/ task to capture the golden fleece taken from the ram of the Greek Phrixus.' The ram had carried Phrixus through the air from Orchomenus in Greece to Colchis and had subsequently been sacrificed to Zeus/Jupi ter. Its fleece was kept as a religious object by the Colchians, guarded by a serpent.

The young Medea falls in love with Jason and through the use of her own magic enables him to overcome the obstacles set by king Aeetes and to capture the golden fleece. She helps Jason escape with the fleece by killing Apsyrtus (Absyrtus), her brother, or by having him killed, and (in most versions) scattering his dismembered corpse. On the return voyage Medea helps the Argonauts reach their destination safely.

After disembarking in Jason's home-town of Iolcus in Thessaly, Greece, Medea rejuvenates Jason's father, Aeson, and offers to rejuvenate the aged king Pelias, Jason's uncle, who had set Jason the task of recovering the fleece. Medea deliberately misleads the daughters of Pelias into kill ing their father rather than rejuvenating him.

Medea and Jason flee to Corinth, where they and their children receive sanctuary. At Corinth Jason abandons Medea and marries the king's daughter. Medea is exiled (in some non-Senecan versions, together with her sons). Medea responds by killing the king and his daughter and her own children by Jason. She escapes in a flying chariot sent by the sun god.

In some versions (e.g. those of Euripides and Ovid, but not Seneca) she flies to Athens and marries the Athenian king, Aegeus. There she tries but fails to kill Aegeus' son, Theseus. Some versions have Medea escap ing to the east, where she helps restore her deposed father to the throne of Colchis or places her son, Medus, upon it. Medea or Medus becomes the ancestor of the Medes. As for Medea's ultimate destination, one leg end originating in the Greek archaic period places Medea in the Elysian fields, married to Achilles. Her ex-spouse, Jason, dies an ignoble death (in most versions killed by a falling beam of the Argo).

Many of the details of the above narrative vary in addition to those already noted: the name of Medea's mother (Iduia or, in one variant, Hecate); the na ture of the tasks set by Aeetes and performed by Jason (yoking of fire-breathing bulls, ploughing a field with the same, sowing the field with dragon's teeth, killing the earth-born warriors who arise, some of the above);2 the presence or otherwise of a serpent guarding the golden fleece and the method of overcom ing the serpent (killing or tranquillising); the age of Medea's brother (a baby, a

boy, a young adult) and the place where he is killed and his corpse dismem bered and (in most versions) scattered (in Aeetes' palace, at Tomis, out at sea, over fields, on an island); the name of Medea's brother (Apsyrtus, Absyrtus, Aegialeus), his precise relationship to Medea (full or half brother) and the iden tity of his killer (Medea or Jason); the route of the return voyage of the Argo (four main variations);3 the political situation in Iolcus on Jason's return (Pelias a usurper, not a usurper, the crown promised to Jason, not promised to him); Medea's rejuvenations in Iolcus (of the ram, of Jason's father, of Jason, of her self, of one, two or three of the above); the number and gender of Medea's and Jason's children (seven sons and seven daughters, one son, two sons, three sons, one son and one daughter); the name of the Corinthian princess whom Jason marries (Creusa or Glauce); the motives for the new marriage (self- advancement, protection of the children, fear of Acastus); the gifts sent to Ja son's new bride (cloak/robe, necklace, headband/crown, one, two or three of the above); the departure of Medea in a flying chariot or not, and the absence or presence of serpents/dragons drawing the chariot; Medea's destination after Corinth (Athens, Thebes, the heavens); the method Medea uses in her attempt to kill Theseus (poison or a dangerous trial or both); Jason's death (killed by a falling beam of the Argo or suicide); the father of Medea's son, Medus/Medeus (Jason or Aegeus). Even Medea's intentional infanticide is omitted in the earli est versions, in one of which Medea seems to kill her children unintentionally in the attempt to make them immortal and in another the children are killed by the Corinthians.4 There is also a partial infanticide account (first century BCE),5 in which Medea kills two of three sons but the third escapes.

Medea in Greece Medea is not in Homer, although Circe, Medea's aunt (in most accounts), famously is {Od. 10-12), as, briefly, are Jason, Aeetes and the Argo (Od. 12.69- 72). Medea is, however, in Hesiod (c.700 BCE), where she seems to be re garded as a goddess married to the mortal Jason after the completion of the tasks imposed on him by Pelias (Theog. 992-1002). Hesiod also names a son born to the pair: Medeus. If ancient testimonia are to be believed, Medea seems also to have been mentioned in several archaic epics, one of which is reported as dealing with her taking of an unguarded golden fleece, her flight with Jason and the death of Pelias, another with her rejuvenation of Aeson (with lines cited to that effect), another with her children by Jason (a boy Medeus, a girl Erio- pis).6 One (perhaps eighth century) epic purportedly has Medea as queen of Corinth and Jason as king, and is said to tell of Medea burying her children in the temple of Hera, as soon as they were born, in order to make them immor tal.7 This seems to have been the first mention of Medea as an (but, note, unin tentional) infanticide.8 The sixth century lyric poet Ibycus mentions Medea and is the first to tell of Medea's marriage to Achilles in Elysium (frag. 291 Camp bell vol. 3). He was followed in this by Simonides, in whom the scholiasts re port that Medea boils Jason to rejuvenate him and is herself queen of Corinth

(frags. 545, 548 Campbell vol. 3).9 Archaic painting also features Medea. One of the earliest representations of Medea is of her rejuvenation of a man (Jason?) in a cauldron (c.630 BCE)10—a general subject (rejuvenation of a ram/Jason or boiling of Pelias) which remained 'popular into the fifth century'." Among other seventh century representations are two of Jason's killing of the serpent and capture of the golden fleece.12 In the fifth century many of the ingredients of the myth most familiar to us start to stabilise. Pindar's Fourth Pythian details the origins of the Argonautic expedition, the formation of its crew, the voyage to Colchis, Medea's falling in love with Jason, her marriage to him, her use of magic drugs to help him both to perform the tasks set by Aeetes (the sowing of the dragon's teeth is omitted) and to slay the serpent guarding the golden fleece, her departure with Jason. There is also a concluding reference to her killing of Pelias, who in Pindar is a usurper and has promised Jason the crown on his successful return (Pyth. 4.109-15, 165f.);13 but there is no reference to either fratricide or infanticide. Elsewhere (01. 13.54) Pindar heralds Medea as the saviour of the Argonauts. Early fifth century comic dramatists of Sicily (Epicharmus, Dinolochus) also dealt with Medea (indeed had plays with that title) and the historian Herodotus (7.62) mentions her, attributing to Medea's arrival among the 'Arians' ("AQIXH) the latter's change of name to 'Medes' (Mf|ôoi). Vase-painters, too, continued their interest; even the Medea-Theseus episode finds representation on an Attic pelike of c.450 BCE and a calyx-crater of the so-called 'Parthenon period'.'4 But it was the formulation of the Medea myth in fifth century Greek tragedy, especially by Euripides, which was to have the greatest impact on the evolution of the myth. Both Aeschylus and Sophocles produced plays which referred to or featured Medea. Aeschylus' Trophoi ('Nurses') seems to have dealt with Medea's rejuvenation of the Nurses of Dionysus, while Sophocles' Rhizotomoi ('Root-Cutters') also focused on Medea's magic skills.15 Sophocles' Colchides ('Women of Colchis'), if the scholiasts are to be trusted, dramatised a substan tial amount of the Medea-Jason story, including Medea's instructions to Jason concerning the tasks set by Aeetes and Jason's successful performance of the tasks. His Scythae ('Scythians') dealt with the return voyage of the Argonauts with Medea. The play joins Colchides in containing the earliest references to Medea's murder of her baby brother (which seems to take place in Aeetes' pal ace in Colchides and off the Scythian coast, perhaps even at Tomis, in Scythae). It is possible that the above three plays formed a trilogy.'6 Euripides also wrote at least three plays featuring Medea: Peliades ('Daugh ters of Pelias'), Aegeus and Medea. Peliades was produced in 455 BCE, tradi tionally as part of Euripides' first production of plays at the City Dionysia in Athens. Its subject was the death of Pelias at the hands of his own daughters, as they attempted to rejuvenate him through the magic of Medea. At the end of the play the kingdom seems to have passed to Pelias' son, Acastus, and Jason and Medea leave for Corinth.17 Aegeus (date uncertain) seems to have dramatised the young Theseus' return to Athens from Troezen, Medea's attempt to kill him

and his recognition by his father Aegeus. Both Peliades and Aegeus survive only in fragments. Not so his Medea, produced in 431 BCE on the eve of the Peloponnesian War. Its dramatisation of Medea as the abandoned wife who takes revenge by killing her rival, her rival's father and her own children and escaping in a flying chariot sent by the sun god seems to have been as innova tive as it was transformative. Although the loss of much archaic and classical Greek literature makes it impossible to be certain on such matters, Medea's innovations may have included: the whole theme of marital betrayal; the in strument of revenge (poisoned apparel to be delivered by children); Aegeus' visit to Corinth; departure in a flying chariot (but apparently not drawn by ser pents).18 Most distinctively, Euripides' tragedy is the earliest attested instance of the intentionally infanticidal Medea. The play's impact on succeeding ac counts—especially its complex and disconcerting exploration of social aliena tion, moral responsibility and moral action, the nature of maternity, humanity, 'self and 'other'—was profound.19 Other apparently fifth century dramatists such as Neophron and another Eu ripides are credited with plays entitled Medea. Names of fourth century trage dians who wrote on the subject of Medea include Theodorides, Dicaeogenes, Diogenes (or Philiscus), Aphareus—and Carcinus, whose Medea seems not to have killed her children (Aristot. Rhet. 1400b9-16). The fragments of the Medea attributed to Neophron are also sometimes assigned to the fourth cen tury.20 Biotus (date unknown), too, is said to have written a Medea. The Medea theme was not restricted to tragedy. Comic dramatists from the fifth to the third century (Cantharus, Strattis, Antiphanes, Eubulus, Rhinthon) exploited the sub ject.21 In the visual arts vase-painters, especially in the fourth century, exploited the theatrical popularity of Medea and produced representations of scenes from the play (especially the infanticide and the departure in the chariot, now drawn by serpents), in several cases clearly influenced by Euripides' canonic tragedy. On some vases Medea is represented in Greek dress, on others in oriental dress, a patent embodiment of the foreigner, the outsider, the 'other' ,22 We have to wait until the third century before we encounter our next major literary treatments of the myth: Apollonius Rhodius' epic narrative, Argonau- tica, and Callimachus' shorter narrative poem, Hecale. Hecale (270s BCE) exists only in fragments, but its focus on Theseus' early heroic exploits is clear, as is its contribution to the Medea myth: it contains the first literary reference to Medea's attempt to poison Theseus while she was living with Aegeus in Athens (frags. 3-7 Hollis). Apollonius' Argonautica (mid-third century BCE) is extant and is the most detailed Greek literary account of the Jason-Medea story up to the couple's safe arrival in Iolcus. In what seems to be a deliberate inver sion of Euripides' focus Apollonius presents his readers with Medea as the 'helper-maiden' of folktale and epic narrative, a young, impressionable, vulner able girl (there is a sustained interplay with the Nausicaa episode of Odyssey 5),23 who is not simply overcome with passion but is literally assaulted by the love god himself (3.275-98),24 Medea is also the priestess of Hecate (3.25 If.)

and has special magical powers, which she uses to help Jason not only with the tasks set by Aeetes and the golden fleece, but also on the return voyage, engi neering the death of the bronze Talus on Crete (4.1638-88). In Apollonius Ja son has no explicit claim on the throne of Iolcus but does have a pronounced penchant for violence. Apollonius' account noticeably attributes more killing on the expedition directly to Jason, showing him, for example, mowing down most of the earth-born warriors himself (1377-98) and making him responsible for the murder of Apsyrtus. Jason kills Medea's now adult, even older bro ther,25 who has been pursuing them, while she herself looks away (4.452-81). He also dismembers Apsyrtus, though the corpse is buried, not scattered. Apol lonius also reiterates the archaic myth of Medea's and Achilles' marriage in the underworld (4.811-16), as does the erudite poet of Alexandra (174f.), com posed perhaps in the early second century BCE. The latter also mentions the cutting up and rejuvenation of Jason—but at Colchis (Alex. 1315).26

Medea in Rome: Ennius to Cicero

The very last years of the third century BCE or the early second century wit nessed the appearance of a Latin Medea at Rome. Performances of Greek Med- eas by the travelling Dionysiac guilds would undoubtedly have preceded, but her appearance in Latin dress followed the arrival of the poet Ennius in Rome in 203 BCE. Roman drama by that time was a potent cultural force, embedded in and reflective of the city's political, social and religious institutions. Its adap tation of Greek drama was always and necessarily ambivalent, as much a statement about Roman cultural inferiority and penetrability as it was an act of appropriation and 'triumphalist' display of Roman power. Rome's subsequent fascination with Medea, whose ambivalence (both captured spoils and invading presence) reflects that of the whole east, is unsurprising. Her popularity on the Roman republican stage was substantial. Each of the three great Roman trage dians of the republic, Ennius, Pacuvius and Accius, wrote plays concerned with Medea. And even Plautus cannot resist a casual allusion to her (Pseud. 868-72). However, not a single play of the three tragedians survives intact. What we have in the case of the Medea plays are a possible hypothesis and a few frag ments from diverse sources, ranging from the Ad Herennium and Cicero in the first century BCE to late imperial grammarians. All conclusions are necessarily speculative. The first to tackle the subject was Ennius, who seems to have written two Medea plays, Medea Exul, set in Corinth, and Medea, set in Athens. Medea Exul, of which several fragments survive, was an 'adaptation' of Euripides' Medea?1 The term, 'adaptation', is likely to mislead. The transference of any play from fifth century Athens to second century Rome necessarily involved the production of different meanings at the point of reception. The following three fragments show how creative and ideological this process of adaptation or rather appropriation was—easily matching the innovative energies of the sec-

ond century architects who transformed the Greek temple into a complex image of Roman power.

utinam ne in nemore Pelio securibus caesa accidisset abiegna ad terram trabes, neue inde nauis inchoandi exordium cepisset, quae nunc nominatur nomine Argo, quia Argiui in ea delecti uiri uecti petebant pellem inauratam arietis Colchis, imperio regis Peliae, per dolum. nam numquam era errans mea domo efferret pedem Medea animo aegro amore saeuo saucia. (Medea Exul, frag, ciii Jocelyn)

I wish that beams of fir had not been felled By those axes in a Pelian grove, So no point of origin could arise For the ship which is now named with the name Argo, because in it an 'Argive' elite Travelled to get by trickery a ram's Gold fleece in Colchis, ordered by King Pelias. Never would my mistress have strayed from home, Soul-sick Medea, wounded by savage love.

These iambic trimeters open Ennius' play. They are delivered by Medea's Nurse. Comparison with the opening of Euripides' Medea reveals that Ennius has reversed his model's rhetorical sequence (sailing—tree-felling) and has adopted a less metaphoric, but more alliterative, heavy, periphrastic style. He has also changed several details to suggest an analogy with a Roman naval ex pedition: pine is replaced by the Roman ship-building material, fir (Livy 28.45.18); the Argive 'elite' are made to travel on the Argo rather than to row it, perhaps even 'ferried' (uecti) like Roman soldiers;28 Pelias is transformed from a person interested in the voyage to one who has used his imperium to command it. The Latin poet also revels in etymological punning, employing a figura etymologica (line 4) before the etymological exegesis itself. The etymol ogy is innovative and functional. It changes the Argonauts into 'Argives', the resonances of which during decades of collapsing Rome-Greece treaties may have been less than positive. Note Ennius' focus (also not in the Euripidean 'model') on 'trickery', dolus, not only a non-heroic way to achieve a goal, but the very opposite of the Roman ideal of uirtus, 'manliness', 'courage'.29 Al though, as in Euripides, this is the perspective of Medea's Nurse, the transfor mation of Euripides' heroic Argonauts into Argive marines/tricksters not only raises complex issues of cultural identity and difference but discourages any easy alignment of the audience with the Argonauts themselves. The underscor-

ing of dolus pushes the audience's sympathy initially at least in the direction of the Colchian princess, whose status as displaced exile is underscored by a ref erence to Medea's 'home' (domo) absent from the 'source-text' and by a strik ing pun, era errans ('mistress missing her way')—Medea's displacement allit- eratively inscribed. Ennius has transformed Euripides, as his patron's Temple of Hercules Musarum with its Greek Muses, Roman Camenae and Roman Fasti transformed the temples of Greece. Our second and third fragments again display the realignment of a Greek text in accordance with Roman priorities and continue the play's empathy with its titular heroine. They also reveal something else.

quae Corinthum arcem altam habetis, matronae opulentae optumates, ne mihi uitio uos uortatis [exul a patria quod absum], multi suam rem bene gessere et publicam patria procul; multi qui domi aetatem agerent propterea sunt improbati.

nam ter sub armis malim uitam cerneré quam semel modo pariré. (Medea Exul frags. 5 and 6 Boyle 2006)30

Wealthy, well-born ladies who possess Corinth's high citadel, Find no fault with me [as an exile away from my fatherland]. Many have performed private and state business well far from the fatherland; Many who passed their days at home have been despised for it.

For I'd rather risk my life thrice in arms Than give birth but once.

Medea here addresses the chorus of Corinthian women. If the Euripidean model was adhered to, fragment 6 would have been towards the end of the speech begun in fragment 5 (see Eur. Med. 250f.). Note the highly sententious, ana phoric and alliterative style of fragment 5 (cf. Eur. Med. 214-18), and the asso nance and verbal jingle of fragment 6. The metre is trochaic and would have been accompanied by music. The fragments may have been part of Medea's entrance speech and their operatic nature contrasts sharply with the iambic Eu ripidean lines which the passage 'translates'. There is a contrast of character, too. The deceptively ingratiating figure of Euripides' play has been replaced by a Medea with apparent self-assurance, unafraid to confront her foreign hosts with an implied critique of their behaviour. (Wives who keep their husbands home do not serve the state well.) Notice how Medea's address to the Corin thian women, which highlights their rootedness and settled position in the city (in Euripides they are simply addressed as 'Corinthian women', Med. 214),

implicitly signals Medea's exilic status, which is then (possibly) stated overtly and (certainly) transformed through association with the praiseworthy category of service to the respublica abroad. Note, too, the particularly Roman character of Medea's contrast in lines 3 and 4 of fragment 5 between home and abroad (which replaces the Euripidean contrast between public and private), especially Medea's defence of (Roman) public service abroad, which, as the city's impe rial commitments grew, was being demanded more frequently of Rome's elite. Such demands conflicted with traditional Roman disapproval of prolonged ab sence from the family and domus. It is difficult not to see here, too, some self- reflection by the poet from Rudiae, who spent most of his creative life 'abroad' at Rome, eventually receiving Roman citizenship in 184 BCE.31 Behind Medea's own 'otherness' from Corinthian society embodied in her recitative may be detected Ennian isolation and a contemporary moral and social de bate.32 Ennius' tragedies are conspicuously, even necessarily, political.33 Performed at public religious festivals financed by both the state and the Roman elite and (after 194 BCE) before a hierarchical image of Roman social and political power, they are firmly rooted in contemporary political and social debates. In deed at times Ennius' characters not only employ the values of Rome's second century elite but speak with all the tautologous cant of contemporary politics {Erectheus frag, lxi Jocelyn) or propound axioms of second century political life {Hecuba frag, lxxxiv Jocelyn). The tragedies are at one level dramatic stud ies in the nature of the Roman 'other', as the 'Greek' figures of the plays are likely to have been received by some members of Ennius' audience—and in the evils of monarchy with transferable semiotics to the 'tyrants' of Ennius' day. Creon's death-threat to Medea- si te secundo lumine hic offendero moriere (Medea Exul frag. 8 Boyle)34

If I catch you here at dawn tomorrow You shall die

—was used in the following century as the paradigmatic utterance of the tyrant (see below). In plays such as Medea Exul there are also wider concerns. The immigrant Ennius seems to have been the first Roman dramatist to tackle the subject of Medea. Its exploration of the problems of alterity and cultural and personal isolation within a foreign city would have had obvious relevance to an increasing and increasingly diverse and anxious Roman urban mass. And Medea's own 'otherness' from what is already a Roman 'other' (Corinthian society) would have drawn sympathy from the Roman audience, while at the same time creating a special bond with those members of the audience who felt alienated from, and marginalised by, Rome itself. One cannot discount, too, the

politics of place. Though the date of the play's first production is unknown, political and cultural resonance would clearly have emanated from the setting of the action in Corinth, a city which had played an important and contradictory role in Rome's post-Hannibalic foreign policy down to the sack of the city in 146 BCE.35 Medea Exul became one of Ennius' best known plays and part of the tragic repertoire of the late republican stage.36 It was succeeded by Pacuvius' Medus and Accius' Medea siue Argonautae. Pacuvius was Ennius' nephew, but not one of his attested thirteen tragedies has the same title as any of his uncle's plays. Their relationship to the Ennian tragic corpus is at times rather that of (often recondite) sequel to, or competitive variant on, his uncle's canon.37 His tragedies seem self-consciously 'late' and serve to complement and respond to previous dramatisations. Such is certainly the case with his fragmentary Medus, the plot of which may be gauged from what seems to be the play's hypothesis preserved in Hyginus.38

Persi Solis filio fratri Aeetae responsum fuit ab Aeetae progenie mortem caueret. ad quern Medus Aegei et Medeae filius dum matrem persequitur . tempestate est delatus. quern satellites comprehensum ad regem Persen perduxerunt. Medus ut uidit se in inimici potestatem uenisse Hippoten Creontis filium se esse mentitus est. rex diligentius quaerit et in custo diam eum conici iussit. ubi sterilitas et penuria frugum dicitur fuisse, quo Medea in curru iunctis draconibus cum uenisset, regi se sacerdotem Dianae ementita esset, dixit sterilitatem se expiare posse, et cum a rege audisset Hippoten Creontis filium in custodia haberi, arbi- trans eum patris iniuriam exequi uenisse, imprudens filium prodidit. nam regi persuadet eum Hippoten non esse sed Medum Aegei filium a matre missum ut regem interficeret, petitque ab eo ut interficiendus sibi trad- eretur, existimans Hippoten esse, itaque Medus cum productus esset ut mendacium morte puniret, ut ilia aliter esse uidit quam putauit, dixit se cum eo colloqui uelle atque ensem ei tradidit iussitque aui sui iniurias exequi. Medus re audita Persen interfecit regnumque auitum possedit. ex suo nomine terram Mediam cognominauit. (Hyginus Fabulae 27)

Perses, son of Sol, brother of Aeetes, had an oracle to the effect that he should beware of death at the hands of a descendant of Aeetes. Medus, son of Aegeus and Medea, while in pursuit of his mother, was driven by a storm to Perses. Guards captured him and led him to king Perses. When Medus saw that he had fallen into his enemy's power, he lied that he was Hippotes, son of Creon. The king questioned him carefully and ordered him to be cast into prison. The area was said to be marked by crop failure and famine .When Medea arrived there in her chariot drawn by serpents, she lied to the king that she was Diana's priestess, claiming

to be able to expiate the famine. And when she had heard from the king that Hippotes, Creon's son, was being held in prison, thinking that he had come to avenge the wrong suffered by his father, she unwittingly betrayed her son. For she persuades the king that he is not Hippotes, Creon's son, but Medus, son of Aegeus, sent by his mother to kill the king, and she asks him to hand him over to her to be killed, thinking that he was Hippotes. So when Medus was led out to pay for his lie with death, because she saw that things were other than she thought, she said that she wanted to speak with him and handed him a sword and told him to avenge the wrongs done to his grandfather. On hearing this Medus killed Perses and took possession of his grandfather's throne. He named the land Media after his own name.

As has been remarked, the plot has much in common with the self-consciously iate', 'escape-tragedies' of Euripides,39 but, as with other plays of Pacuvius (Dulorestes, ¡liona), the actual plot of Medus cannot be traced to a Greek or earlier Roman 'model'. It seems likely to be original. Pacuvius was regarded by later Roman critics as the most 'learned' (doctus) of the republican tragedians (Hor. Ep. 2.1.55, Quint. Inst. 10.10.1.98), but his penchant was not simply for the exotic or obscure, but for the novel. Even the name of Medea's brother changes in this play: Aegialeus, not Apsyrtus nor Absyrtus (Cie. ND 3.48). Pacuvius was drawn to the visually spectacular and sensational. Medus seems to have featured an epiphany-like appearance of the beautiful Medea in her airborne chariot drawn by serpents—

angues ingentes alites iuncti iugo * # # # linguae bisulces actu crispo fulgere * * * * mulier egregissima forma {Medus frags, ix-xi D'Anna)

Huge winged snakes joined to the yoke * * * * Forked tongues flashed with flickering movement * * * * ...a woman of most outstanding Beauty

— in a scene which would have been not only spectacular, but metadramatic: Medea arriving directly from Ennius' play. Cicero is probably thinking of the scene when he envisages 'travelling in the famous Pacuvian chariot of winged snakes', Mo Pacuuiano inuehens alitum anguium curru (Rep. 3.14).

The fragments of Medus show Pacuvius' fascination with language, his ver bal audacity, prolixity and experimentation. Pacuvius was an accomplished painter—according to Pliny (HN 35.19), the most famous painter of his genera tion in Rome. His bold verbal gestures, often criticised, are the linguistic col- ourist at work. Thus Medea, claiming to be able to help Perses:

possum ego istam capite cladem auerruncassere. (Medus frag, xv D'Anna)

I can averticate that disaster from your head.

The unusual word, auerruncassere, was already archaic in Pacuvius' time, re served for religious ritual as Cato's use of it in De Agricultura (141.2) illus trates.40 Pacuvius' use of it was mocked by Lucilius (Bk. 26, frag. 616 Kren- kel), but it elevates the diction and gives Medea's discourse an appropriately ritualistic 'colour'; yet it still operates in a register familiar to his audience. Elsewhere in Medus, as often in the tragedies, Pacuvius' painterly style is drawn to the macabre and to the latter's possibilities for evocative depiction, as in the graphic description of the dilapidated appearance of Aeetes:

refugere oculi, corpus macie extabuit, lacrimae peredere umore exanguis genas. situm inter oris barba paedore hórrida atque intonsa infuscat pectus inluuie scabrum. {Medus frag, xix D'Anna)

The eyes have sunk, the body wasted thin, Dripping tears have eaten bloodless cheeks. On ravaged face a shaggy beard stiff with filth and Unshorn darkens a breast scabrous with dirt.

Especially noticeable in Pacuvius' treatment of the Medea myth is his use of it to exploit his favourite issues of identity and recognition and of mother-son separation/reunion, structuring the plot to play cleverly with lies, truth, the fal sification of identities and even the falsification of falsified identities before an omniscient audience. The dramatist also enjoys considerable metadramatic play with Medea. Her metadramatic arrival was mentioned above. Note, too, how the filicidal, father-betraying, regicidal, anarchy-producing Medea of Ennius saves her son, is reconciled to her father, and brings political order to Colchis. Pacuvius' Medea certainly presents herself to Aeetes as the inversion of her past self:

cum te expetebant omnes florentissimo regno, reliqui. nunc desertum ab omnibus

summo periclo sola ut restituam paro. (Medus frag, xxiv D'Anna)

When all sought you at the peak of your power, I left you. You're now in grave danger deserted By all; I alone prepare to restore you.

But Medea is still Medea. The means of her triumph are the same as in Ennius' tragedy: lies, trickery, the killing of a king; so, too, her transport: the serpentine chariot of the sun; so, too, her murderous intent towards the house of Creon. Nor does this seem merely metadramatic play. What perhaps results is a kind of self-imploding redemption of the Medea figure, in which evil redeems itself by producing good but remains unchanged.41 The regular Pacuvian themes of the abuse of power, of justice, injustice, vengeance and punishment permeating the drama keep the audience's focus on moral semiotics. There is something else, too. There are grounds for arguing that in Medus Pacuvius' aetiological inter ests are not restricted to the origin of the Medes. The killing of a usurping uncle to restore a deposed grandfather's throne is of course, as several scholars have noted,42 a famous element of the foundation myth of Rome articulated in the history of Fabius Pictor, and repeated by later writers such as Livy, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Ovid and Plutarch. To have the same sequence of events played out in Colchis as a foundation myth of Media has the unsettling effect of deconstructing the polarities of self and other, civilised and barbarian, centre and periphery essential to another kind of identity, a cultural one—Romanitas. The moral disquietude of the ending of Medus penetrates the foundation issue. Medea was not the only, nor even the most famous, fratricide. On cultural iden tity Pacuvius' Medea seems to have been (to use a scholarly cliché) 'good to think with*.43 When Accius began writing plays Pacuvius was still active in the theatre. They both produced plays for the same ludi in 140 BCE (Cic. Brut. 229). It is possible but unlikely that Accius' dramatic treatment of the Medea myth— Medea siue Argonautae—predates Pacuvius' Medus. Little survives of the play, not even a hypothesis. But Accius seems clearly to have responded to the En- nian and Pacuvian treatments by creating a prequel to them both. Indebted per haps to Sophocles' Scythae and certainly to Apollonius' epic (4.303ff.),44 the play is set on the island of Peuce in the mouth of the Danube in the northern Adriatric, and dramatises Medea's entrapment of her brother, Absyrtus, and his death. The most extensive fragment (a dramatisation of Apollonius 4.316-22) is given us by Cicero (ND 2.89). It seems to come from a prologue, in which a shepherd, who has never seen a ship before, expresses his amazement at the arrival of the Argo.

tanta moles labitur fremibunda ex alto ingenti sonitu et spiritu.

prae se undas uoluit, uortices ui suscitât, ruit prolapsa, pelagus respergit, reflat. ita dum interruptum credas nimbum uoluier, dum quod sublime uentis expulsum rapi saxum aut procellis, uel globosos turbines existere ictos undis concursantibus— nisi quas terrestres pontus strages conciet; aut forte Triton, fuscina euertens specus subter radices penitus undanti in freto molem ex profundo saxeam ad caelum emit.

sicut citati atque álacres rostris perfremunt delphini

Siluani melo consimilem ad auris cantum et auditum refert. (Medea siue Argonautae frags, i-iii Dangel)

So immense a mass slides Roaring from the deep with mighty howl and hiss. It swirls waves before it, forces whirls in its wake. It plunges headlong, splashes, spews back the sea. You would believe a burst thundercloud rolled at you That a boulder was caught and hurled by the winds Or storm-clouds, or that twisting waterspouts Sprang up from the shock of colliding waves — Unless the sea stirs some havoc for the land; Or maybe Triton, heaving up some caverns' Deep roots with his trident in the billowing sea Hurls heavenward a craggy mass from the deep.

Like swift and sprightly dolphins humming Through their beaks

It sends music Like Silvanus' song to my ears and hearing.

A showpiece of a speech to display Accius' rhetorical and linguistic prowess.45 A metatragic speech, in which tragic language draws attention to itself and pa rades its own artifice, as Accius' verbal virtues (uerborum uirtutes, Vitr. 9, Pref. 16) are manifested in baroque description, heavy and mannered allitera tion, elaborate, shifting similes, polysyllabic, sometimes exotic diction, asyn detic structures, a translingual pun (behind perfremunt, 'humming', lies the Greek f3oéu£iv, used of both speech and music)46—the shepherd's helpless

astonishment reflected in astonished and astonishing language. Linguistic spec tacle anticipates, in part constitutes, dramatic spectacle—and introduces a na ture/culture opposition ironically reflected and dissolved in the unsophisticate's verbal and rhetorical sophistication. This sharp, initial focus on the ignorance of the shepherds of Peuce before the technological marvel of the Argo (as in Apollonius they disperse in terror: frag, v Dangel) indicates that one of the main themes of the play was that of civilisation versus savagery. Another frag ment, perhaps a description of the Argo by Jason (so Dangel), points in the same direction:

prima ex immani uictum ad mansuetum applicans. (Medea siue Argonautae frag, vii Dangel)

First leading (men) from a savage to a civilised way of life.

The metadramatic play of the prologue is not restricted to a parade of tragic language. The amazement of Accius' prologue-Shepherd is clearly also de signed to contrast with the 'knowing' condemnation of the Argo by Ennius' prologue-Nurse (see above). Other fragments also have the potential for meta dramatic effect:

ego me extollo in abietem alte; ex tuto prospectum aucupo. (Medea siue Argonautae frag, iv Dangel)

I lift myself high into a fir-tree; I catch a view in safety.

The speaker climbs into a fir-tree on 'pine' island (Peuce). It may be no coinci dence that the Argo itself is made of fir in Ennius (see above) and of pine in Euripides (jreiiXT], Med. 4). Perhaps the speaker is the Shepherd describing himself viewing the Argo (so Warmington and Dangel) and unknowingly cov ering the variants of the literary tradition. An address to Medea (by Absyrtus: Warmington; by a local priestess: Dangel) could certainly have been viewed metadramatically by an audience familiar with Pacuvius and his uncle:

tun dia Medea es, cuius aditum expectans peruixi usque adhuc? (Medea siue Argonautae frag, xiv Dangel)

Are you the divine Medea, whose arrival I've waited for all my life?

Unless the trochaic septenarii quoted by Cicero at De Natura Deorum 3.67 come from this play (which is most unlikely: see below), nothing is known about Accius' handling of the death of Absyrtus other than the dramatist's fo cus on Aeetes' grief (frag, xvi Dangel). One fragment, however, seems to deal with Medea's plan to lure Absyrtus to his death (cf. Ap. Rhod. 4.415f.):

nisi ut astu ingenium lingua laudem et dictis lactem lenibus. (Medea siue Argonautae frag, xii Dangel)

Except to flatter his person slyly with the tongue and lure him with soft words.

But Medea may not have struck the fatal blows. Indeed Accius' indebtedness to Apollonius may have led him to have Jason kill and dismember the brother while Medea looks away (Ap. Rhod. 4.452-81). If so, the audience may have witnessed the collapse of the polarities (esp. civilisation/barbarism) with which the play began—and attendant upon that the collapse of the opposition between (civilised) self and (savage, barbaric, foreign) other, which Accius' audience would have been enticed to impose upon the play. Too precise an application of the play's possible criticism of Jason's behaviour to contemporary historical figures and events is difficult to sustain in the absence of textual evidence.47 Even the limited views expressed above are speculative, but it seems likely that Medea functioned in Accius, as she had in Ennius and Pacuvius, as a figure intrinsically structured to dissolve the categories of self and other dictated by local ideologies.48 One might further speculate that Medea is likely to have functioned in some way as a vehicle for the investigation of another permeating polarity of ancient tragic drama: divine versus human. The anapaestic fragment on chance, which could have come from anywhere in the play but is positioned by Klotz and Dangel at the end, perhaps pronounced by the Chorus, suggests that issues of human responsibility and causation were at the heart of Accius' tragedy:

fors dominatur neque uita ulli propria in uita est. {Medea siue Argonautae frag, xvii Dangel)

Chance is the master. No one's life In life is his own.

The sentiment could have come from Seneca (cf. the choral anapaests at Pha. 978f.). Indeed Seneca was to end his own Medea with a similarly portentous statement: Jason's (misguided) rejection of divine governance of the world {Med. 1027). In the first century BCE at Rome the Medea myth reveals itself embedded in the city's literary, theatrical, legal and political culture. Allusions to Ennius' Medea from outside the theatre may be found even before this—in the speeches, for example, of the late second century radical politician, Gaius Gracchus (Cic. De Orat. 214). But in the first century especially there is a wealth of evidence indicating the widespread nature of the myth. There are attested performances of about half of Ennius' and Pacuvius' tragedies, includ-

ing Medea Exul and Medus*9 both of which were clearly very familiar to Cicero, who had seen them staged (De Or at. 3.217, F am. 7.6.1, Rep. 3.14). The plays of Accius were also performed in the late republic, some of them several times. But Medea siue Argonautae is not one of the plays whose performance is attested. Cicero had clearly read the play, since he quotes extensively from its prologue (ND 2.89), which is, however, his only certain reference to it. He had also read and read carefully Ennius' Medea, which he quotes from frequently— sometimes as part of a forensic or philosophical argument. At Tuse. 3.63, for example, he cites a couple of lines spoken by Medea's Nurse (frag, cvi Jocelyn) to illustrate the practices of grief, and in the following book (Tuse. 4.69) a line of Jason's (frag, cvii Jocelyn) is used to show the disgraceful nature of erotic love. At ND 3.65-66 the speaker (Cotta) is made to cite several lines of Medea's (frag, cviii Jocelyn) to exemplify the abuse of reason (ratio). Else where Cicero uses the Ennian Medea's prologue in discussions of causation (Fat. 35, Top. 61) or bad argumentation (¡nu. 1.91), and twice employs the same Ennian aphorism (frag, cv.221 Jocelyn) for the purpose of advice or moral discussion (Fam. 7.6.2, Off. 3.63). The advocate's citation of Ennius' Medea in legal trials (Mur. 88, Cael. 18, Rab. Post. 29) firmly suggests that the play was widely known. Pacuvius' Medus was also clearly a staple of the tragic repertoire of the late republican Roman theatre. Indeed Cicero points to it as a favourite play for actors who relied primarily on 'voice' (uoce freti, Off. 1.114) rather than 'ges ture' (gestu). Cicero alludes to the play several times, quoting from (among other passages) Medea's reconciliation speech to Aeetes (Inu. 1.90: Medus frag, xxiv D'Anna, cited above), which the orator uses as an example of trivial (leue) argument. Other fragments, too, cited by Cicero, may belong to the same scene (Tuse. 3.26, 4.69: frags, xix, xxiii D'Anna).50 Cicero was clearly taken with the entrance of Medea in her serpent-drawn chariot, since he both cites a line from the play's description of the entrance (Inu. 1.27: frag, ix D'Anna, cited above) and uses the incident itself as a model of transport that would en able one to visit 'many diverse nations and cities' (multas et uarias gentis et urbes, Rep. 3.14). Cicero's quotations of the Roman republican tragedians are clearly designed to enrich the appeal of his philosophical and oratorical prose and to enliven his argumentation. But there is something else at issue. In De Finibus 1.4-5 Cicero argues that plays such as Ennius' Medea and Pacuvius' Antiopa should not only be seen but be read and that knowledge of them was an essential constituent of Roman paideia. And certainly knowledge of, for example, Ennius' Medea is required for a fuller understanding of the opening of Catullus 64 and of other literary works.51 But the kind of knowledge Cicero was concerned with had application beyond the literary. He quotes the Ennian Creon's tyrannical death- threat to Medea (frag. 8 Boyle 2006, cited above)52 in two separate contexts, each with clear contemporary resonance (Rab. Post. 29, Att. 7.26.1) and atten dant imperatives for action:

quae non ut delectemur solum légère et spectare debemus, sed ut cauere etiam et fugere discamus. (Pro Rábido Postumo 29)

These are things we ought to read and view not only for pleasure but also that we may learn to guard against and avoid them.

When Cicero called Clodia Palatina Medea, 'The Medea of the Palatine' (Cael. 18), or compared Mithridates' flight from Pontus to that of Medea (Leg. Man. 22), or quoted Creon's tyrannical edict in a letter of February 49 BCE (Att. 7.26.1) he appealed not simply to widespread cultural knowledge but to a knowledge which he expected to have a strong relationship to action.53 One thing remains to be discussed: Cicero's problematic citation of the tragic fragment noted above describing the death of Medea's brother:

postquam pater adpropinquat iamque paene ut comprehendatur parat puerum interea obtruncat membraque articulatim diuidit perqué agros passim dispergit corpus, id ea gratia ut, dum nati dissupatos artus captaret parens, ipsa interea effugeret, ilium ut maeror tardaret sequi, sibi salutem ut familiari pareret parricidio. (De Natura Deorum 3.67)

After her father Drew near and was almost ready to seize her She beheads the boy, dismembers his limbs, scatters The body all over the fields, with this intent: That, while the father hunts for the son's scattered limbs, She might escape, that his grief might retard his pursuit, That she might win safety by family slaughter.

Though the quotation immediately follows a cluster of three citations from En- nius' Medea, it is not to be assigned to Ennius.54 Nor is it to be assigned to Ac- cius.55 Despite occasional assertions that the fragment belongs to either Ennius or Accius, neither the style nor the details of this fragment seem especially ap propriate to either.56 It is more convincingly assigned to an otherwise unattested play, probably, given ie classicisme qui caractérise tout le style de ce passage', of the first century BCE.57 Rome boasted a host of tragic dramatists in the last decades of the republic, whose names have survived but only rarely the titles of their works.58 Cicero's De Natura Deorum was composed in 45 BCE. What the citation and context of this fragment indicate—it is the fourth of a quartet of citations from tragedy using Medea as an illustration of the criminal use of 'reason', ratio—is the sheer embeddedness of the Medea myth in first century

BCE Rome. Her later casual appearances in Virgil's Eclogues (8.47f.) and Horace's Ars Poética (123, 185) were those of a literary and theatrical celeb rity.

Medea in Rome: Ovid to Valerius Three poetic works stand out in the first century BCE at Rome for their role in the evolution of the Medea myth: Varro Atacinus' epic, Argonautae, Ovid's Medea and his Heroides 12.59 Unfortunately little can be gauged about the first two. Argonautae, the first attested mythological Latin epic since Livius' Odys sey, adapts the four books of Apollonius' great poem, but few fragments sur vive.60 Praised by Ovid {Am. 1.15.21, Ars 3.335f.) and Velleius Paterculus (2.36.2), Varro received a lukewarm judgement from Quintilian: interpres op ens alieni non spernendus quidem uerum ad augendam facultatem dicendi pa- rum locuples, 'the not despicable translator of another's work but infertile ground for the development of eloquence' (Inst. 10.1.87). Since Varro was also the author of another poem, Bellum Sequanicum, on Caesar's military cam paign in 58 BCE, some scholars have suggested that Argonautae may also have been Caesarian in ideology, perhaps composed in the mid forties BCE in con nection with Caesar's intention to conduct a campaign against Parthia in the east, the whole poem functioning 'comme une annunciation mythique de l'extension de la conquête romaine'.61 Certainly Caesar was not averse to the subject of Medea, since he acquired the famous painting of her by Timomachus of Byzantium and placed it for general viewing inside the Temple of Venus Genetrix in his new Forum Caesaris, dedicated in 46 BCE.62 Caesar's 'Medea' and Varro's Latin hexametric Argonautae were patent acts of cultural appro priation. It is a matter of speculation if and how they were related at the level of ideological intent. Worthy of note, however, is that Argonautae is quoted by both the elder Seneca (Con. 7.1.27) and his son (Ep. 56.6). Quintilian did praise Ovid's Medea (Inst. 10.1.98), as did Tacitus (Dial. 12.5), and it most certainly influenced Seneca's great tragedy; but only two lines survive:

seruare potui. perderé an possim rogas?

(Medea frag, i Klotz)

I could save. You ask if I can destroy?

feror hue illuc ut plena deo. (Medea frag, ii Klotz) I'm tossed here, there, filled with god.

Both lines were clearly delivered by Medea. The first line is an iambic dialogue line (technically a 'trimeter' because of its correspondence to Greek practice)

and was presumably spoken by Medea to Jason or (less likely) to a nurse or other intimate. In Seneca's play Medea's saving of the Argonautic crew is an important motif of the scene with Creon, but the menacing tone of the Ovidian line makes a confrontation with Jason or a riposte to a doubting intimate a more probable context. Note the rhythmic alliteration of ps and nuanced repetition of rs, making it a forceful and speakable line reflective of Medea's contempt and strength of will. Quintilian (Inst. 8.5.6) cites the line for its force, uis, which he attributes to its particularity. The second line is anapaestic and must have been part of a canticum sung by Medea. A plausible context would have been an aria just before she kills her children.63 The elder Seneca (Suas. 3.7) quotes the line to illustrate Ovid's 'open borrowings' from Virgil. In his sole tragedy, as in his poetic work at large, Ovid displayed his place in the Latin literary tradition. Heroides 12 survives intact.64 This fictional verse letter from Medea to Jason presents Medea at the same moment in her story as in the opening of Act II of Seneca's Medea, viz. immediately after the wedding of Jason and Creusa—or in the case of Euripides' Medea before the action of the play begins. It is a self- portrait of an abandoned woman, written more in the style of a dramatic mono logue or soliloquy than an epistle. It shows the psychological and linguistic turmoil of Medea as she contemplates her passion for Jason, her past services, her betrayal of her family and country and betrayal by Jason in turn, and her embryonic desire for revenge. Its relationship to Ovid's lost tragedy has been much debated. The poem is filled with tragic language and allusion and seems at times overtly dramatic in form; it either anticipates the Ovidian play or refers to it throughout, creating a dynamic interplay (almost irrecoverable) with the lost dramatic script.65 The poem's handling of the death of Absyrtus is notewor thy. Ovid reverts to the Pherecydes version, in which the latter is just a child and Medea kidnaps and dismembers him (Her. 12.113-16), but, according to Heroides 6 (129f.), the body is scattered over fields (per agros; cf. Cie. ND 3.67, cited above). The poem ends, as commentators have observed,66 with a metapoetic pointer to the lost tragedy:

nescioquid certe mens mea maius agit. (Heroides 12.212)

Something greater, for sure, plays in my mind.

Peter Davis in his essay below examines the literary and moral complexity of Ovid's elegiac Medea, situated 'between past and future, guilt and innocence, epic and tragedy'. The poem's interplay with Euripides presents a Medea 'poised to become Euripides' heroine', while Apollonian allusions show her rootedness to an epic and mythical past. Defined by epic and tragic ira and the conventional wretchedness of the abandoned elegiac lover, the Medea of Ovid's Heroides, according to Davis, is yet a self-critical as well as a generi-

cally hybrid heroine, whose precursors include other writers of Ovidian epis tles. Ovid was clearly fascinated by Medea, who is sometimes contended to be 'a felt presence throughout' all the Heroides.61 Certainly the 'writer' of Heroides 6, Hypsipyle, spends a substantial part of the verse epistle attacking her rival, Medea, whom she castigates as a 'barbarian whore', barbara paelex (81), a dangerous sorceress who has drugged Jason, a cruel potential nouerca to her and Jason's children, a bloody fratricide, traitor to her father and people, and curses her and Jason. Even Helen in Heroides 17 cannot avoid expressing her fear of elopement with Paris in terms of Medea's experience (229-33). Medea makes brief appearances in Amores (2.14.29-32), Ars Amatoria (1.336,2.103f., 381f., 3.33f.) and Remedia Amoris (59f., 261f.), and inevitably the exile poems find room for the exile par excellence. In Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto Medea and/or Jason appear in association with Ovid's place of exile or as a fig ure/figures of exile itself (Jr. 3.8.3, Pont. 1.4.23-46, 3.1.1, 3.79f.). In Tristia 2 (526)08 the poet even uses domestic paintings of Medea in defence of his own art. Tristia 3.9 is especially noteworthy. Ovid devotes the whole of the poem ostensibly to 'proving' that Tomis derives its name from Medea's dismember ment, 'cutting' (Greek tour)), of her brother's body:

inde Tomis dictus locus hie quia fertur in illo membra soror fratris consecuisse sui. (Tristia 3.9.33f.)

Hence this place was called Tomis because here, they say, A sister cut up her brother's body.

Much else is happening here, and Medea has seemed to some to operate in Tristia 3.9 as a figure partly for the exilic poet, 'proliferating poems to ward off destruction', partly for the emperor himself, Caesar, 'the cutter'.69 It is, how ever, in Metamorphoses that he offers his most extensive extant account of Medea. He devotes in fact half a book to her (7.1-424)—as well as a third of another book to her aunt (14.1-74,216-415). In Metamorphoses 7's linear 'epic' narrative Ovid separates two aspects of the Medea figure which he had conjoined in Heroides 12: the young, vulner able helper-maiden, headlong and helpless in love, and the maga, the expert sorceress and murderess, driver of a serpentine chariot across the sky. Initially the poet's attention is on Medea's passion for Jason and the futile struggle within her between ratio (reason) and furor (passion, 7.9-11), mens (intellect) and cupido (desire, 19f.), the resulting collapse of her moral values, rectum pietasque pudorque ('right and filial love and modesty', 72), and the young girl's painful self-awareness of her own irrational, self-deceptive and obsessive capitulation (92f.). Although related to Apollonius' focus on the young Medea in Argonautica 3, Ovid's account eschews the overt manipulation of gods to

underscore human agency, psychology and feeling. Even the depiction of Ja son's performance of the tasks set by Aeetes is in part at least psychological, presented through the eyes of the desiring Medea (134-38,144-48), who is sub sequently nominated as Jason's 'trophy' (157). In the body of the account, however, the psychological focus is dropped and the poet returns to the early Greek emphasis on Medea's magic. Ovid's narra tive is devoted not to Medea's motives, thoughts and feelings but to her actions and rituals, with especial attention to her invocatory rites, her gathering of herbs and drugs, her powers of rejuvenation (Aeson, the ram) and murderous withdrawal of them (Pelias),70 and her serpentine flight from Iolcus to Corinth (159-392). The final flight is to Athens, where she fails in her attempt to kill Theseus (398-424). The narratives of the plots of Pacuvius' and Accius' trage dies are omitted (there is no mention of the murder of Absyrtus), and the plots of Euripides', Ennius' and (to anticipate) Seneca's tragedy are reduced to four lines (394-97). Medea's relationship with Jason—a central theme of the Medea saga from Euripides to Seneca and presumably at the heart of Ovid's play- disappears from the narrative after the section's short opening dialogue (164- 78), and apart from the brief reference to the infanticide (396f.) Medea mater is also absent. Such omissions exacerbate the disjunctions in Medea's presenta tion: naive young girl/experienced witch; helpless lover/Colchian poisoner; untravelled virgin/omnipotent, semi-divine surveyor of the whole mediterra nean world. Some critics have suggested that the disjunctions in the Medea figure- emphasised by disjunctions of narrative focus (internal/external), descriptive mode (humanising/demonising) and authorial tone (sympathetic/distant)—are presented openly in Metamorphoses 7 to invite 'reflection' on the mythic tradi tion.71 More certainly, what Ovid presents the reader with is a 'metamorphosis of Medea',72 one which emphasises Medea's own ability to create metamor phoses with magic and words and is reflected in the metamorphoses attached to the places surveyed by Medea in her aerial journey to Corinth (350-90). The poet's disjunctive account underscores the extreme nature of Medea's meta morphosis, contrasted with the human ordinariness of its initial cause: amor- furor. It belongs to a series of amatory, transgressive narratives in Books 6-8 of Metamorphoses in which women (Procne, Medea, Scylla) metamorphose into moral monstrosities prompted by, or in the face of, amor. But, as Gareth Williams shows in his essay below, Ovid's Medea does and does not belong in the company of Procne, Scylla and the others, 'whose asser tions of female power lead...to personal catastrophe'. Her 'superhuman inviola bility' makes her stand apart. As does her relationship to the poet. Williams's analysis of the first half of Metamorphoses 7 leads him to focus on the metapoetic aspect of the narrative, in which Medea's energies and ambition, her crea tion of metamorphosis through magic and language lead to a flight to Corinth, where the fifteen metamorphoses of the journey offer 'a micro-version of the Metamorphoses itself. Williams does not, however, see Medea as a simple

surrogate for Ovid but rather as a poetic rival, and interprets the narrative as a struggle between the poet and his character for control of the poem itself. He argues that Medea's ever-increasing ambition and performance in Metamor phoses 7 fulfil the nescioquid maius of Heroides 12.212 in a manner which threatens Ovid's own maius opus. Unsurprisingly Medea became a favourite subject of the most popular theat rical art-form in imperial Rome: pantomime. Lucian's De Saltatione (40, 52- 53) testifies to the long-term popularity of the Colchian princess in that highly sophisticated ballet.73 And pantomime may well have affected the composition of the next major literary work after Ovid in the Roman story of Medea: Se neca's great tragedy.74 Not that the dramatist's use of Medea is restricted to her eponymous play. There are references to her in both Agamemnon (119f.) and Phaedra (563f., 697). The first Phaedra reference deserves quotation for its use of Medea in a misogynistic rant as paradigm of the deadly stepmother:

sileantur aliae. sola coniunx Aegei Medea reddet feminas dirum genus. {Phaedra 563f.)

Let others pass unnamed. Alone, Aegeus' wife, Medea, will prove women a damned race.

Seneca's Medea, however, offers a more nuanced, indeed extremely com plex presentation of its titular heroine, whose role in the play is metadramatic, thematic and psychological. Medea's overt performances manufacture the the atrics of the play's closure; but she also functions as a cardinal element of an exploration of civilisation itself. The play problematises the stability and dura bility of social order, which it sees as created by that which will inevitably de stroy it (greed/ambition/Medea). This problematic works itself out via the para dox of Medea, the giver of life and of death, whose intricate psychological por trait dominates the play and motivates its action. Lisl Walsh's essay on Se neca's Medea focuses on the heroine's psychology and examines the crisis in the heroine's identity caused by the dissonance between present and past, her exclusion from normal gender roles and complete social isolation. Walsh sees the play as in part the dramatisation of a solitary, even solipsistic Medea's reso lution of this crisis through performance—performance of masculinity, per formance of divinity and reperformance of her past self. Ovid's Medea has not survived; Senecan interplay with the Ovidian tragedy cannot be gauged. Walsh therefore goes to Metamorphoses 7 and sees Seneca's tragedy not only as sup plying the detailed account of Medea's murderous stay in Corinth missing from the Ovidian narrative but as dramatising and focusing upon something more importantly, if less conspicuously, absent from Ovid's disjunctive account: the psychological and praeternatural process by which the transformation of Medea from vulnerable virgin to potent, accomplished maga takes place. A crucial

aspect of Medea's metamorphosis, according to Walsh, is the full emergence of the heroine's divinity—ironically a return to Hesiod and the archaic Greek goddess, Medea {Theog. 992-1002). Seneca's nephew Lucan is credited with a Medea, which almost certainly postdates that of Seneca. Nothing survives of it. But Lucan's use of Medea in De Bello Ciuili provides some indication of the approach he may have taken in respect of the Colchian princess. There are references to Medea's magic at 4.552-56,6.441f.; but the most striking reference is in Book 10, where Lucan is describing Caesar, barricaded in the palace at Alexandria, keeping Ptolemy close to him as a hostage:

sic barbara Colchis creditur ultorem metuens regnique fugaeque ense suo fratrisque simul ceruice parata expectasse patrem. {De Bello Ciuili 10.464-67)

So the barbaric Colchian Is thought—fearing vengeance for kingdom and flight- To have waited for her father, her sword And brother's neck at the ready.

'Impious barbarian' and 'bloody fratricide' join Lucan's earlier references to her sorcery to create a fairly demonic portrait of Medea which may (or may not) have featured strongly in the drama attributed to him. Medea seems to be absent from Silius' long epic and almost absent from Statius' extant works,75 even though their fellow-Flavian poet Martial com plains about readers and writers of 'the Colchian' and contemporary philoso phers such as Epictetus employ the Medea figure in their discourses following the tradition of Chrysippus.76 The dramatist of Hercules Oetaeus makes but one reference to her, but it is a powerful one, part of Deianira's self-condemnation and demand for punishment:

láxate, manes, recipe me comitem tibi, Phasiaca coniunx. peior haec, peior tuo utroque dextra est scelere, seu mater nocens seu dira sóror es. {Hercules Oetaeus 949-52)

Make room, dead spirits. Take me as your comrade, Wife from Phasis. This hand is worse, is worse Than both your crimes, whether as guilty mother Or heinous sister.

The literary field seems to have been left open for Curiatius Maternus in tragedy (Tac. Dial. 3.4) and Valerius Flaccus in epic. Maternus' tragedy, writ ten under Vespasian, has not survived. Valerius seems to have composed his unfinished epic in the second decade following the civil wars of 68-69 BCE, consciously choosing a subject which by his time had become a major grammar of Roman civilisation. From Catullus onwards major Roman poets had used the voyage of the Argo as a paradigm of the initial stage of postlapsarian decline following the end of the fabled Golden Age of harmony between man, god and nature, and had deployed the myth as part of a negative critique of the devel opment of civilisation and, thus, of Rome.77 Virgil explicitly connects the voy age with the 'original sin', prisca fraus, of Prometheus {Eel. 4.31, 6.42), who made technology possible by stealing fire from the gods, and in both Catullus (64.399) and Virgil {Eel. 4.12) the voyage is presented as an emblem of the moral malaise which was to realise itself in the Roman sin, scelus, of civil war. For Valerius' tragic predecessor, Seneca, the Argonautic myth drew attention to the self-destructiveness of civilisation itself. Medea's relationship to the Argo nautic expedition was always a cardinal element of her presentation. Andrew Zissos' essay focuses on Valerius' innovative account of that relationship in which the Colchian princess is marked not by erotic infatuation with Jason but by moral principle—moral principle which is corrupted by external forces. Specifically she is marked by pudor and pietas—the latter manifesting itself principally in the form of dutiful and profound affection for her father, Aeetes. According to Zissos, Valerius significantly downgrades Medea's relationship with Jason, which is described in 'relentlessly bleak and forboding terms'. This deeply moral father's daughter is embedded in the 'physical, social and cultural landscape of Colchis'. She loves her Colchian home, fights heroically to resist the erotic onslaught of Juno and Venus, falls victim to them and to 'historical fate', but (so Jupiter prophesies: Arg. 5.683-87) will eventually atone for the betrayal of her father by returning to Colchis to restore him to the throne from which his brother Perses will cast him. Perhaps the greatest of all 'intertextual heroines',78 Medea will attain redemption in an appropriately intertextual man ner: through reincarnating her Pacuvian predecessor. It is important, however, to note that in the early empire Medea was far more than an intertextual heroine of literary history. She was a subject not simply for the literary scroll, the schools of rhetoric, the recitation hall and the stage, but also one appropriate for gemstones worn upon the body,79 for the relief work of stuccoed ceilings (see the Underground Basilica by the Porta Maggiore in Rome)80 and more obviously, as Ovid informs us {Tr. 2.526) and the frescoes of Pompeii and Herculaneum attest,81 for the adornment of the walls of peristyles and the interior walls of Roman houses. The infanticidal Medea on the verge of the slaying seems to have been an especially popular subject, indeed the only one surviving on domestic walls.82 An impulse to the fashion was undoubtedly provided in the late republic by Julius Caesar's acquisition of Timomachus' 'Medea', which seems to have been 'widely replicated'.83 Indeed Caroline Vout

attributes 'Rome's peculiar fascination' with Medea's 'lonely, meditative mo ment' precisely to the impact of Timomachus' painting, which she examines both as an unfinished representation of 'unfinished business' and as a cele brated text of imperial power invested with Caesarian auctoritas, influencing poet and painter alike. In her discussion of two Campanian paintings in their archaeological context, Vout underscores the theatrics and intellectual density of the painted scenes and argues for interplay with Apollonius, Virgil and Se neca and for complex political resonance. Medea is used not simply as a fa mous/infamous mythological figure but as a paradigm of the social and moral tensions and category confusions evident in the new imperial system. In the post-Neronian era, however, there are signs of the Colchian's movement into 'cliché' and the 'grotesque', evident in a Flavian image from Pompeii of a the atrically costumed Medea. As Vout shows, the influence of Timomachus' 'Medea' was not restricted to the visual arts. It generated several ekphrastic epigrams, some of which ap peared in the Garland of Philip™ published probably in the principate of Gaius c.40 CE. Here is the epigram by Antiphilus, which may have been published in the Garland or later, perhaps in Neronian Rome:85

Tàv ò\oàv Mí]ôeiav ox' eyga^e Tiuouáxou X£ÍQ ÇáXqj xal xéxvoiç ávxiu£0etatouévav, UUQÍOV âgaxo uóx9ov, ïv' r|0ea ôiooà xo-Qà%r\, (bv tò uèv E'LÇ ÒQyàv veíie, xò ô' eiç eX,eov. áuxJHo ô' èjtX.f|Q(Daev. opa xíutov. év yàg àiœikq. ôáxQuov, èv ô' èXétp 8uuòç àvaaxoé(|>exai. ágjceí ô' á |iéX)aiaiç, 'é$a ao(j)óç. alua ôè xéxvcov ëjtoejTE MT]ôeía xoi) XEQI Tiuouáxov. (Greek Anthology 16.136)86

When Timomachus' hand painted murderess Medea, Torn asunder by jealousy and children, His infinite task was to portray her two characters, One bent to rage, the other to pity. He showed both in full. Look at the sketch. Tears dwell In her threats, anger in her pity. 'Intention suffices', said the sage. Children's blood Suited Medea, not Timomachus' hand.

Antiphilus' portrait of Timomachus' portrait is also a portrait of the artist him self. The painting was famously unfinished (Pliny HN 35.145). And the 'inten tion' (or 'hesitation')87 which 'suffices' is of both Timomachus and Medea. But whose 'murderess Medea' does Antiphilus read in the paint? Simply that of Timomachus? And/or that of the Greek and Roman visual traditions? And/or that of Euripides, Ennius, Ovid—or even Seneca, if the epigram is Neronian? If

the epigram is Gaian, it is at least a proleptic portrait of Seneca's Medea.88 And Seneca also gives us the blood.

After Valerius Valerius Flaccus died in the early 90s CE and is commemorated in a short, moving obituary by Quintilian (Inst. 10.1.90). Medea's subsequent history is two millenia in length. It ranges from her appearance in such Latin authors as Juvenal (6.643), Apuleius (Met. 1.10) and Augustine (Confessions 3.6.11) and in the Greek writers of the so-called 'Second Sophistic' (Plutarch, Lucian, Aelius Aristides, etc.),89 through reincarnations in late antiquity, the middle ages and the Renaissance, to seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth century drama, opera, ballet and painting, and to more recent realisations in opera, sculpture, ballet, film and on the stage of the twentieth and twenty-first centu ries.90 In several recent works Medea has achieved the status of an icon for those suffering from oppression (sexual, political, ethnic, racial).91 However, less radical approaches are still evident. Even as the 1990s novel of the East German writer Christa Wolf, Medea, was reinterpreting the myth for a post modern, politically nuanced readership, evolutionary geneticists returned to Medea as exemplary infanticide in their proclamation of 'the Medea gene' in flour beetles.92 The final essays of this volume tackle selected aspects of Medea's long and complex post-Valerian reception. The mid to late second century CE preserves the relief panels of nine sarcophagi dealing with the legend of Medea. Sophie Buchanan's essay focuses on the four scenes of the Medea sarcophagus from the Basel Antikenmuseum, where she argues that the Medea story is used as a 'commemorative mechanism for confronting and coping with loss and channel ling grief. Analysing the scenes in detail, Buchanan concludes that their theat rical, baroque style seems designed as an embodiment of 'the pain and loss of bereavement'. The Medea figure is used (and her argument applies also to the other Medea sarcophagi) to challenge the 'traditional empathy of consolatio'1 to be found on other mythological sarcophagi and to provoke instead 'painful con templation', inviting the viewer 'to confront the reality of death—to think about its graphic corporeality and its unforgiving permanence'. Martha Malamud examines two Medeas from Africa: one from Roman Africa of the late second or very early third century, the cento of Hosidius Geta; one from Vandal Africa of the late fifth century, the epyllion of Dracontius. Malamud argues that Hosidius Geta's 'lethal intervention in Vergilian poetics' is a sustained en gagement with the earlier poet which allows Medea to emerge from the figure of Dido, which Medea had herself so substantially shaped. Hosidius dismem bers Virgil's Eclogues, Georgics and Aeneid and re-members them as a dra matic Medea to 'sketch out a poetics for his cento' based on 'allusion, doctrina and etymological wordplay'. A clear debt to Seneca is revealed in the onstage appearance of the ghost of the dismembered Absyrtus. There are few, if any, debts to Seneca in Dracontius' 600-line epyllion, Medea (Romulea 10), even

though Melpomene is one of the three muses invoked in the poem's prologue (20-25). Malamud suggests that pantomime is the main influence on the first half of the poem, and tragedy the main influence on the second, but that both are subject to Calliope, the Muse of epic—and specifically epic in its Statian form. It is Statius, not Ovid, Seneca or Valerius, whom Malamud nominates as the main absent presence in the epyllion, which sends Medea and Jason not to Corinth but to Thebes, where Medea's vengeance and serpentine flight are fol lowed by a concluding 'meditation' on the city's 'tangled history' (570-601). In the epilogue to this collection Siobhán McElduff examines the wide and fragmented use of the Medea myth in medieval Europe. The diversity and in herent flexibility of the Medea myth in the Middle Ages may seem surprising given that its primary source was a single Roman poet, Ovid. The Greek Medea is conspicuously absent and even the Senecan and Valerian versions seem mar ginalised (despite moments of Senecan influence). McElduff argues that much of the flexibility and diversity of the myth derive from medieval reading condi tions and cultural practices, especially those involving women, marriage, relig ious beliefs and the chivalric code. Six major literary texts are discussed from the twelfth to the fifteenth century, as McElduff underscores the role of Medea as subversive woman and as the central figure of a myth which proved not only flexible but unstable. As the post-medieval world has shown, the attempt of the Middle Ages to contain or even neutralise Medea textually was always doomed to failure. But that is not the story of this volume of Ramus.

University of Southern California

NOTES

1. Jason's 'quest' is of the common folktale form of the 'initiation quest', in which a young man must overcome dire challenges in order to claim his birthright. 2. Taking possession of the golden fleece is also sometimes configured as one of Aeetes' tasks (Pind.Pyf/i.4.242-6). 3. The main variations in Hesiod/Pindar, Sophocles, Apollonius and Skymnos: summarised by Gantz (1993), 362. 4. The Corinthians' killing of the children is reported by Parmeniscus in the Hellenistic period and by the (difficult to date) Creophylus, but it is most likely to have predated Euripides. Parmenis cus also credits Medea with fourteen children. For testimonia, see Mastronarde (2002), 50f. 5. Diodorus Siculus 4.54.1-55.2. 6. Naupactia (frags. 6-9 West), Nostoi (frag. 6 West), Cinaethon (frag. 2 West). 7. The Corinthiaca of 'Eumelus' (frags. 20, 23 West). The same poem seems to have included the sowing of the dragon's teeth among the tasks performed by Jason at Colchis (frag. 21 West); so, too, the mid-fifth century genealogist, Pherecydes. 8. Scholars frequently construe the whole incident as an attempt to explain 'a Corinthian cult of |Medea's| dead children, whose tomb was situated in the precinct of Hera' in Corinth: West ad frag. 23 of Eumelus. See Eur. Med. 1379-83. 9. The rejuvenation of Jason is also said to feature in Pherecydes. 10. An Etruscan bucchero vessel found in a grave at Cerveteri: LIMC 'Medeia' fig. 1—for a commentary, see Smith (1999), 197-202.

11. Griffiths (2006), 23. See Harvard 1960.315 (c.510-500 BCE), London E163 (c.485-70 BCE). For a discussion of some Attic black-figure and red-figure vases depicting incidents in the story of the death of Pelias, see Gantz (1993), i.366f.. 12. Two early Corinthian pots (Bonn 860, Samos VM fragments): Gantz (1993), i.359f. 13. The scholia to Horn. Od. 12.69 support the idea of the usurping Pelias. But he seems to be the rightful monarch in several accounts, including Hesiod (Tlteog. 995), Diodorus Siculus (4.40.1) and Apollodorus (1.9.16). 14. Pelike: VAS 2354 in the Staatliche Antikensammlungen und Glyptothek, Munich; crater: NY.56.17148 = fig. 164 in Boardman (1989). Medea's rejuvenation of the ram remained popular: hydria 480-70 BCE, E163 British Museum. 15. Somerstein (2008), ad loc; Lloyd-Jones (1996), ad loc. Sophocles' Aegeus may have fea tured Medea, but the plot is unknown. 16. Lloyd-Jones (1996), ad locc. Sophocles also wrote an Aegeus, but its plot (and whether it featured Medea in any way) is unknown. Medea's murder of her baby brother is first found in Pherecydes, who is the earliest testimony for Medea's abduction of the child and her subsequent dismemberment and scattering of his body. See also Apollodorus 1.9.24 and Gantz (1993), 363. 17. See Lloyd-Jones ad loc. 18. A controversial question. There is no mention in the text of serpents/dragons drawing Medea's chariot. Some scholia suggest that it was drawn by serpents, and post-Euripidean vase painters from c.400 BCE regularly feature a serpent-drawn chariot. But whether either source re flects knowledge of the dramaturgy of the Euripidean play of 431 BCE is most uncertain. See Mas- tronarde ad Med. 1317. 19. All this assumes that Neophron's Medea postdates that of Euripides: see Page (1938), xxx- vi; Mastronarde (2002), 57-64. In respect of one variant Euripides follows Sophocles' Colchides: Medea's killing of Apsyrtus before departing Colchis (Med. 1334f.). 20. To Neophron is to be attributed the suicide-variant for Jason's death. Neophron's Medea apparently prophesies that Jason will hang himself (see his Med. frag. 3 in Mastronarde [2002|, 59f.). At Diod. Sic. 4.55.1 Jason is again said to have killed himself. 21. For post-Euripidean dramatists, see Mastronarde (2002), 64f. 22. See LICM 'Medeia' figs. 29-31, 35-37, 39. For the analysis of several vases, see Sourvinou- Inwood (1997) and Mastronarde (2002), 66-69. The former's argument, however, that Medea is in Greek dress throughout the body of Euripides' play and changes to oriental dress for the finale has no basis in the text itself. 23. Just one aspect of the poem's 'creative reworking of Homer' (Hunter 11993|: xxiv). 24. See Griffiths (2006), 89f. 25. Also in Apollonius (3.241-44) Apsyrtus is half-brother, not full brother to Medea, being the son of Aeetes and the nymph, Asterodeia, and was born before Aeetes' marriage to Iduia. 26. The third century, too, saw Medea interesting the philosophers. The Stoic philosopher, Chrysippus, was clearly fascinated by Euripides' Medea, from which he seems to have quoted frequently (Diog. Laert. 7.180). He was especially interested in Medea's mental conflict (Med. 1078-80), and inaugurated a debate on the matter which was to continue into late antiquity: see Dillon (1997). 27. For a detailed discussion of all the fragments of this play, see Boyle (2006), 71-78. 28. See Erasmo (2004), 23; Cowan (2010), 43. 29. See Vogt-Spira (2000), 270. 30. The Jocelyn reference is not used here, since line 1 is not printed as an Ennian fragment by Jocelyn, who retains Cicero's habebant. Line 2 is not in Jocelyn, but is based on the discussion in Skutsch(1968), 168f. 31. See Skutsch ( 1968), to whose excellent remarks on this fragment I am indebted. 32. See Jocelyn (1967), 362. 33. The recent attempt of Gildenhard (2010) to play down the political nature of republican tragedy is unpersuasive. 34. The assignment of this fragment to Ennius' Medea is disputed by Jocelyn (349) on inade quate grounds. Ribbeck(1875), 152, and Warmington (1935-38), i.316, assign it without hesitation. 35. On the theme of cultural isolation and the political resonances of Corinth, see Vogt-Spira (2000), esp. 273f. 36. See Wright (1931), 50. 37. See Fantham (2003), 102; Manuwald (2003), 39f.

38. See Arcellaschi (1990), 103. Hyginus modelled other fabulae on Pacuvius' plays, notably Fab. 8 on the famous Antiopa, For a bold, if tendentious, dramaturgical analysis of Fab. 27 into five acts, see Arcellaschi (1990), 104-06. 39. See Cowan (2010), 46, who cites Helen and Iphigenia in Tauris. 40. See also Livy 8.6.11. 41. Cf. Schierl (2002), 276; Cowan (2010), 46f. Arcellaschi (1990), 144-46, argues for an un- problematic redemption: 'une complète réhabilitation de Médée en tant que mère et en tant que fille' (145). 42. See Delia Casa (1974), 295; Schierl (2002), 277; Fantham (2003), 11 If.; Covvan (2010), 47f. For the account in Fabius Pictor, see Wiseman (1995), 1-4. 43. Covvan (2010), 48, advances the interesting suggestion that the foreigner Medea may serve as a model for understanding problematic figures such as Tanaquil in Roman history. 44. Medea sine Argonautae may have been essentially a dramatisation of Apollonius' account of the murder of Apsyrtus in Argonautica 4. Several of Accius' plays seem little indebted to previ ous dramatic versions and were perhaps 'original' dramatisations, taking their subject matter from existing non-dramatic narratives. See Boyle (2006), 112. 45. For Accius' famed rhetorical fire, see Ov. Am. 1.15.19 and Quint. Inst. 5.13.43. 46.SeeBaier(2002),56f. 47. There is also the issue of Accius' 'conservative' politics: see Boyle (2006), 123-27. Ramifi cations of Accius' supposed criticism of the Argonauts for the evaluation of morally problematic behaviour by Roman generals are pursued by Baier (2002), 57-61. Arcellaschi (1990), 185-90, sees Medea as the object of condemnation and the play as a commentary on the fratricidal Mithridates. See also Dangel (1988), 57-60. 48. See Cowan (2010), 50. 49. See Boyle (2006), 260. 50. The three fragments are placed in Act IV by Arcellaschi (1990), 108f. 51. Virgil was later to use Ennius' and Apollonius' Medea in his modelling of Dido. 52. See n.34 above. 53. In the case of Pro Caelio the action expected (and realised) was the acquittal of his client; in the case of his letter to Atticus, the action expected was resistance to Caesar's tyranny. For further citations of Ennius' Medea in Cicero, see De Oral. 214, Tuse. 1.45, ND 3.75, Aft. 10.12.1. 54. See Jocelyn (1967), frag, cviii. 55. Neither Klotz (1953) nor Dangel (1995) assigns it to Accius. For discussion see Arcellaschi (1990), 168. 56. 'It is Accius or Ennius': Warmington (1935-38), ii.601. The assignment to Ennius' Medea Exul is implausible, since there is nothing in Euripides' Medea (in which Apsyrtus is killed 'at the hearth', Med. 1334, i.e., in the palace of Aeetes) to correspond even loosely to this; an assignment to Ennius' other Medea has little to recommend it. The assignment to Accius' Medea sine Argo nautae is also implausible, since in Accius' play the murder of Absyrtus takes place on Peuce, whither the adult Absyrtus had taken the Colchian fleet (Ap. Rhod. 4.303ff.). In the fragment Ab syrtus is a 'child',puerum. 57. See Arcellaschi (1990), 168. Klotz (1953), 343, sensibly assigns the fragment to incertas poeta. 58. For Roman tragedians of the late republic, see Boyle (2006), 143-45. 59. One should also mention the curious variants of the Medea story in the 'historian' Diodorus Siculus (mid first century BCE), Book 4.45-56. Some interesting details: (i) Medea is the sister of Circe and the daughter of Aeetes and his niece, Hecate; (ii) Colchis has the practice of sacrificing visiting strangers; (iii) Aeetes is slain by the Argonauts in Colchis; (iv) in Iolcus Medea, disguised as an old woman, first illustrates her powers of rejuvenation by rejuvenating herself (only later by appearing to rejuvenate a ram); (v) Alcestis does not participate in the killing of Pelias; (vi) after the death of Pelias, Jason hands the kingdom to his son, Acastus (cf. Hyg. Fab. 24), and arranges marriages for all Pelias' daughters; (vii) Medea kills two of her sons in Corinth but a third escapes from her; (viii) from Corinth she flees with her handmaids to Heracles in Thebes and later to Ae- geus in Athens; (ix) Jason commits suicide; (x) the Corinthians bury the bodies of the slain sons in the precinct of Hera; (xi) Medea is later exiled from Athens on a charge of trying to poison Theseus and moves to Asia where she gives birth to Medus, father of the Medes; (xii) Thessalus, the son of Medea and Jason who survived the infanticide, succeeds Acastus on the throne of Iolcus and calls his people Thessalians. Worth noting, too, are the Philippic Histories (Historiae Philippicae) of Pompeius Tragus, which influenced some late medieval accounts. Pompeius may have been a

contemporary of Ovid, but his Histories now survive in the much later Epitome of Justin, and con tain the extraordinary variant (Epit. 42.2.12) that Medea and Jason were reconciled after their di vorce. Together with Medus, Medea's son by Aegeus, they returned to Colchis, where they suc ceeded in restoring the deposed Aeetes to his throne. 60. See Courtney (1993), 238-43. 61. Gayraud (1971), 658, cited with approval by Arcellaschi (1990), 219. 62. Pliny HN 35.136, 145. Timomachus' date is problematic. Pliny places him in the late repub lic, but several scholars regard him as Hellenistic (early third century BCE: see Gutzwiller |2004|, 344). Timomachus' celebrated painting is described by the poet of Aetna as follows (595 Good year): sub truce nunc parui ludentes Colchide nati, 'now tiny sons at play beneath the savage Col- chian'. The description fits Ling (1991), figs. 140 and 146. Ovid's description of a domestic paint ing of Medea at Tr. 2.526—inque oculis facinus barbara mater habet, 'and the barbaric mother has crime in her eyes'—fits the Timomachus painting or copies/imitations thereof. Caesar's 'Medea' receives a political interpretation from Westall (1996). 63. Cf. Sen. Med. 938f, which may recall the Ovidian line. 64.1 see little reason to doubt the authenticity of Heroides 12: see Hinds (1993), and Davis and Williams below. 65. See esp. Hinds (1993), 34-43. Even one of the two surviving fragments of Ovid's Medea (frag. 1) seems clearly alluded to/imitated at Her. 12.75f. 66. E.g. Spoth (1992), 203-05, Hinds (1993), 39-43, Barchiesi (1993), 343-45, and Williams be low. 67. Hinds (forthcoming a), section 3; see also Fulkerson (2005). 68. Cited at n.62 above. 69. Oliensis (1997), 189f.; see also Hinds (2007). 70. Interestingly, Diodorus Siculus, too, focuses on the Pelias episode, offering a detailed ac count of the daughters' failed rejuvenation of their father (430-52). 71.Soe.g.Newlands(1997), 180. 72. See the title of Newlands (1997). 73. Dracontius, Rom. 10.16-19, seems to indicate that Medea continued as a popular pantomime subject through to the late fifth century. 74.SeeZanobi(2008),233. 75. There seem to be no allusions to Medea in Silius and perhaps three in Statius: Theb. 4.551, Silu. 2.1.141, Ach. 2.75-77. 76. Martial Epig. 533.1, 10.4.2, 35.5 (Shackleton Bailey). Epictetus (Disc. 1.28.7-9) cites the famous moral and psychological conflict of Eur. Med. 1078f. as exemplum of an act by a whole but self-deceived soul and contends that Medea is thus deserving of pity. Later Platonists, however, saw the conflict as evidence of a divided soul. Epictetus elsewhere describes Medea's decision to kill her children as the 'collapse of a soul of great vigour', ëxjrrœaiç tyuxfiç fieyâXa veíipa èxoíicrr|ç (Disc. 2.17.21). See Dillon (1997), 214-16, who also cites the use of the famous lines by Plutarch, Lucian, Aelius Aristides, Clement of Alexandria, Synesius, Hierocles, Simplicius, and Stobaeus. For Chrysippus, see n.26 above. 77. See, e.g., Cat. 64, Virg. Eel. 4.31ff., 6.42ff., Hor. Epod. 16.57ff., Sen. Med. 301ff., 578ff. 78. See Hinds (1993),46. 79. See LIMC 'Medeia' figs. 15-17. 80. The stucco reliefs of the ceiling include a representation of Medea placating the Colchian serpent while Jason steals the golden fleece: see Andreae (1978), fig. 342. 81. Ling (1991), 135, reports that 'a type of Medea contemplating infanticide is known in at least six Campanian paintings'. Vout below counts 'seven', as does Schmidt (1992) in LIMC 6.1; they both include a drawing of a Flavian painting no longer extant. For examples, see Vout figs. 1, 4,9, 14; Ling figs. 140, 141, 146; LIMC 'Medeia' figs. 8-11. 82. SeeCarucci(2010),53. 83. See above and n.62. For 'widely replicated', see Carucci (2010), 54. 84. Antipater of Thessalonica xxix, Philippus Ixx-lxxi, in Gow & Page (1968). These epigrams appear with one by Antiphilus, one by Julianus and three anonymous ones—all on Timomachus' 'Medea'—at Greek Anthology 16.135-41, 143. 85. See Gutzwiller (2004), 366. 86. Antiphilus xlviii, in Gow & Page (1968). 87. For 'hesitation', see Gutzwiller (2004), 367f.

88. See esp. the monologue at Sen. Med., 937-44. Gutzwiller (2004), 348, seems unduly restric tive in confining Timomachus' 'Medea' to Euripides' text, even though no single scene from that text correlates with the painting. Certainly Antiphilus could have seen a whole host of Medeas in the painting, and even a Hellenistic viewer (if the painting was Hellenistic: see n.62 above) was likely to have seen much more than the Euripidean heroine. 89. See n.76 above. Mention should be made of: (i) the Genealogy or Genealogies of Hyginus (known as Fabulae), which may be Augustan or (more likely) much later, which offer a detailed summary of the Argonautic expedition and the Medea story (Fab. 12-27); (ii) The Library of Apol- lodorus, which may be pre-Senecan, but is most probably later—the last third of the first book ( 107-47) devotes itself to the Argonautic voyage and the Jason-Medea saga. 90. See esp. Hall, Macintosh & Taplin (2000). 91.MacDonald(1997). 92. Wolf's Medea was published in 1996; the English translation by J. Cullen in 1998. On the 'Medea Gene' see Hurst (2010), who cites Beeman, Friesen & Denell (1992).