Part Nine:

Strangers and Citizens

How does Medea become hellenized, learn to be Greek, so fast? Is she a victim of unjust laws that she cannot understand? Is she able to participate in justice?

In her first scene with Jason, with a sarcasm that is largely lost on him, Medea says "in return [for my favors to you, saving your skin, killing the dragon] you have made me an object of admiration to Greek women" (509-10). Jason in his transparent, unintelligent, self-serving attempt to answer her point by point claims that she got more than she gave in saving him (534-7):

But Jason has missed the scene in which Creon threatens her first with violence and then with death and uses his autocratic power to deny her the right to a city and home.

Yet another side to the ambiguity of Medea is that she is at once a Greek and a foreigner. She is accepted by the chorus, rejected and threatened with violence by Creon. The two scenes of Medea with a king show that she is accepted and rejected for the same reasons: her wisdom and knowledge of magic.

When Jason says "No Greek woman would have done such a thing" (1339-40), he is missing the point. Anyone could have done it.

Medea the free woman, princess, goddess (or close kin to the gods) has been treated by Jason as if she were his spear prize (or a pirate's booty). She has been discarded for a richer princess with better connections in the city-state, if not in the cosmic scheme. And for kin and political alliances.

Creon has treated her as a non-person without any rights in the polis. This is what she is in Hellas. Without Jason she is nothing in the social setting and therefore barely human. This is certainly something she learns in the Creon scene. The laws under which the self-satisfied chauvinistic Jason claims she lives do not apply to her. How could she have respect for such a society, for Greek law and order?

Her answer is devastation on both levels: she destroys both polis and oikos. She can be so effective only because she has learned well what these mean to the men who believe they can control her fate and their own and, because they have taken away what little status she had as wife of Jason, they have set her free from the constraints that bind most free women and men. Euripides (as Aristophanes notes in the Frogs, 950f. through Euripides' own mouth and to which his Aeschylus responds that he ought to be put to death for it) gives voice to those usually silenced: to slaves, women, foreigners, to those whose humanity is diminished or denied.

Part Ten: Politics in Corinth
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