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Versions of Medea in Classical Latin

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chapter 3 Versions of Medea in Classical Latin Andrés Pociña and Aurora López 1 Medea in the Fragmentary Plays of Latin Tragedians1 A little over thirty years ago, in a work that sought to define in only a few pages the fundamental aspects that can be used to characterise Latin tragedy (Pociña 1986), when discussing the most popular themes among Roman playwrights, the author mentioned as key elements their preference for the Trojan saga, their inclination for horrific subjects, and their tendency towards melodrama; as regards the frequency of their choice of plots that could be described as horrific, or cruel, if you prefer, we should note the repeated presence, from the beginnings of Latin tragedy, of developments on such themes as Tereus, Atreus, Thyestes, and, alongside these, also the Medea theme, on which the au­ thor wrote: “el tema de Medea se repite en Enio, Acio, Ovidio, Lucano, Séneca y Curiacio Materno […], y el Medus de Pacuvio, único caso conocido en la trage­ dia tanto griega como latina de dramatización de la leyenda del hijo de Medea y Egeo”2 (“the theme of Medea is repeated in Ennius, Accius, Ovid, Lucan, Seneca and Curiatius Maternus […], and in Pacuvius’ Medus, the only known case of a dramatisation of the legend of Medea and Aegeus’ son in both Greek and Latin tragedy”). The legend of Medea, about which there is no data that might led us to suppose that it was approached by either the first Latin playwright, Livius Andronicus, or his next and closest follower, Gnaeus Naevius, was the subject of at least one drama by each of the members of the great triad of writers who, from the late 3rd century till the beginning of the 1st century AD, fathered trag­ edy in Rome: Quintus Ennius, Marcus Pacuvius, and Lucius Accius. There is a huge bibliography on their drama versions of the subject in hand, i.e., the different fundamental moments in Medea’s existence, which means that only 1 This research was developed under the project UID/ELT/00196/2013, Centre for Classical and Humanistic Studies, funded by the Portuguese FCT – Foundation for Science and Technology. 2 Pociña (1986) 34. The existence of general studies on the presence of Medea in archaic Latin tragedians is therefore not surprising; two examples are Dondoni (1958) and Arcellaschi (1990), a comprehensive study which has become a classic. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004383395_005 32 Pociña and López a limited number of specific aspects that might be significant for the general purpose of this book can be discussed here; that is, we shall be approaching our theme from the point of view of the ancient hypotexts for the Medea re­ writings in Portuguese. According to the theory supported by most researchers, albeit not all, each of the Latin tragedians took up a different aspect of the Medea legend: in his Medea, or Medea exul, Quintus Ennius (239–169 BC) deals with the same sub­ ject as the Greek tragedy that served as his model, Euripides’ Medea: the vicis­ situdes of the protagonist’s life in her relationship with Jason, during her life in Corinth, culminating in the Argonaut’s plans to leave Medea, which ulti­ mately leads to her murdering their two children. In his play Medus, Marcus Pacuvius (c. 220–c. 139 BC), Ennius’ successor in the cultivation of tragedy and a nephew of his in real life, presented a lesser known event in the life of our heroine: many years after fleeing from Corinth, having returned to Colchis, where she had spent her childhood, Medea meets Medus, the son she had had by Aegeus, king of Athens; not knowing who he was, for the young man had hid his identity, our heroine nearly killed him. And last, Lucius Accius (170–c. 86 BC), the third of the three major tragedians, also dealt with the le­ gend of Medea, although he focused on the initial stage of the saga, i.e., the episode recounted principally in Apollonius of Rhodes’ Argonautica (4. 303– 81): Jason and Medea’s flight from Colchis, taking the Golden Fleece with them. But let us look at some specific aspects of interest in the versions of each of the three playwrights. In the case of Quintus Ennius, an issue that has per­ sisted for a long time, and has not yet been unanimously resolved, has to do with the possibility that this author may have written two tragedies on our heroine, a Medea and a Medea exul. This possibility is based on Otto Ribbeck’s classic Tragicorum Romanorum Fragmenta (Ribbeck 1897: 49–57), in which sixteen fragments of a tragedy that may have been based on Euripides’ Medea are presented under the title Medea exul, followed by a single fragment of the version simply titled Medea; the belief in the existence of these two trag­ edies, explained in detail by Ribbeck himself in his monumental work Die rö- mische Tragödie (Ribbeck 1897: 157) and supported almost one century later by H. D. Jocelyn in his edition of Ennius’ tragedies (Jocelyn 1967: 113–23), is based on the fact that Hyginus (Fabulae 25, 26) mentions both a Medea exul (the mis­ adventures of the heroine in Corinth) and a Medea (Medea’s life in Athens up to her flight to Colchis). However, Ettore Paratore (1957: 143; 2005: 152) and William Beare (1964: 59–60) believe that Ennius wrote only one tragedy about the Colchian heroine, titled Medea exul. In 1990, André Arcellaschi wrote per­ tinently about this long­debated issue:.
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