Part Four: Domestic Violence: Medea and Filicide in the Newspapers

 

It is probable that in the version of the story of Medea in Corinth known or best known to the audience, the Corinthians killed the children of Jason and Medea.¹²

There are several versions: in one, Medea has inherited the kingdom of Corinth and the women of the city kill Medea's children because they do not want to be ruled by a foreign woman who is a witch; in another, the kinsmen of Creon kill them in vengeance (a parallel to the Pelias story in which Medea and Jason had to flee from Iolcus to avoid the wrath of Pelias' survivors); in a third Medea, in her capacity as a divine or semi-divine figure, kills the children by accident, trying to make them immortal. The intentional killing of the children by their mother is an innovation on Euripides' part.

Two famous domestic murders and two very different kinds of trial bombarded us in 1995-6: Susan Smith was charged with murdering her two sons; O.J. Simpson with murdering his former wife and a friend of hers. A piece in the New York Times made the astounding statement that the cases were so different because O.J. was one of us and Smith was alien.¹³

How alien, we must ask ourselves, is Medea?¹⁴ Cases of parents killing or abusing their children are as common as dirt (600 filicides a year in the United States according to a Mother's Day report on NPR's Sunday Edition; and the fantasy of freedom must be almost ubiquitous). The prime suspects in the murder of a child are always the parents: the interesting question is why is each one so shocking?

Cases involving superstars are automatically about people not like us except in vicarious rather than genuine fantasy. Consider the two trials: the media circus of the Simpson trial, the dignity, dispatch, and, finally, mercy of the Smith case. Which case approximates a Greek tragedy; which is like real life (that is, which would be believable and meaningful as fiction)? Is the answer the same for both of those questions?

Why is Medea's story remembered for two and a half millennia and shocking but familiar to people all over the world? Are there ever reasons that would justify the killing of one's children? Belief that they are possessed by evil spirits or would grow up to be monsters? To save them from disease, disaster, political persecution or other tragedies of life or from the evil of the world?¹⁵ Fear of the end times? Expectations of immortality as in the third version mentioned earlier? At the end of the Euripidean story Medea immortalizes her children in cult.

In Euripides' telling, to us the best known, Medea kills them in part at least as "an exemplary gesture"¹⁶ to force Jason to see what it means to be human, but the other motivations are not excluded. She also kills them to prevent their falling into enemies' hands, the very thing that happened in other versions of the story, as she says (lines 1238-9, 1060-1).

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