Part Seven: The Slave's Voice

In the Nurse's speech the slave's voice is heard, perhaps not crying for freedom,²⁸ but asserting a moment of freedom that is not hers. She is not heard from again after the parodos, but her point of view is maintained. Why does Euripides open the play with two slaves?²⁹ Does their status illuminate the central figures?

This elderly woman is revising and wishing she could undo the heroic tale in the lurid light of Jason's betrayal. As a slave she has no life of her own. Her life depends absolutely on her masters. She, like her mistress, is an exile far from her birthplace for whom there can be no return, because a slave has no home to return to, eeven if she had the means. Her present and future are especially insecure.

What could be more poignant than the Nurse's nearly Odyssean words in praise of the ideal marriage (14-15 see Odyssey VI.181-5)?³⁰ The stability of her masters' union is the only security she can have. Her humanity depends upon her relations with her mistress, for as a slave she has no family, no country, no home. She maintains humanity through her concern for Medea and the children.

And yet this woman, by coming out alone to speak to heaven and earth, asserts her freedom, telling intimate details, tales best unsaid, betraying secrets to no one ... and to everyone: for whether we in the audience are aware of ourselves and our role as "authorial" audience, we are certainly participating in the getting of knowledge which is our function during the prologue.

For all the sympathy she generates, the slave's intimate knowledge of Medea's past and present, establishes her mistress first as "of the other kind," (cf.304, 808-10) and only after situating her in heroic legend does she give her a place as a woman, mother, and wife. After which she undercuts the sympathy she has just evoked by describing her mistress' immoderate temper: the immoderate temper, after all, is tyrannical (119ff; lines which, I believe, refer to Creon and his daughter and to Jason as much as to Medea's temper).

Everybody is equal before geological and astronomical phenomena. The assertion of egalitarianism and freedom is interrupted by the next person up in the pecking order: this time by a male slave who enters from the outside, who talks of the doings of men and even of kings, who stands in for all the men in the play who use and oppress women and also for those men who grant favors only with reluctance. The arrival of the Paidagogos (child-minder) turns the scene into a collision of male and female stereotypes. He takes back the Nurse's freedom. He reminds her of her status and duties. He asserts control by having knowledge to dole out and the power to share it or withhold it.

This becomes especially clear when he asks her why she is agous' eremian ("keeping apart" 50): as a slave she has NO aloneness. Er mia ("aloneness") for a slave is like argia ("idleness").³¹ A slave is a belonging, always busy. The old man's rebuke reveals the startling nature of what Nurse has been doing: asserting a self, a will, a desire.

His own part in the story is as an outsider, a third party but also like the very elderly men sharing gossip about the royal family. But still he is outside the scene he describes, pretending not to listen. A conduit, not a participant. Unseen even by his contemporaries because he is a slave, also, therefore, unseen by many of the critics.

As Nurse's part continues, she shows herself to be a good Athenian democrat expressing approval of equality and the curbing of individual excess and showing how selfish individualism is inimical to the social order and detrimental to one's dependents.

A meaningful quest is to find references in the play to status and then to see how Medea fits into the status that have been established and especially how she manipulates her own position(s).

If we turn now briefly to the status of Medea, she is mistress, despoina and despotis (6, 17, 49, 58, 81, 142, 172, 185, 1002; 54, 823) . She has -one would suppose- no mortal masters but invokes Hecate as despoina and as co-worker (395), putting herself and the goddess on a more equal footing (and doubtless alerting us if we need it to the fact that Medea is different from the average housewife who worships Hestia: Hecate is a goddess of the crossroads, the outside; Hestia of the interior of the house, the grounding of women).

An assignment using the concordance is useful here: who are the masters; who are the "betters"? For Medea does speak of masters as if her status were more ambiguous. Speaking generally of marriage (233), she calls the husband a "master for the body" and more specifically claims that she had been carried off as booty (256), like a captive concubine who can be easily discarded: the present has changed how she sees the past.

Medea plays both roles as Pucci³² brilliantly shows: "her whole argument becomes the rhetorical display of a master disguised as a slave." Later she will call Creon's daughter despotis.

First to Aigeus (694): "he has a wife, mistress of the house over me." And then (970) sending the children to the palace she enjoins them to "beseech your father's new wife, my mistress." To Creon she claims that she will be silent, "defeated by my betters" (315) and Jason inadvertently imitating her language and blaming her for being exiled says she could have stayed in Corinth if she had gone along with "the decisions of your betters" (449). Who are Medea's betters?

The students take to this question quite well. The problem is that they sometimes have difficulty accepting the verisimilitude of the treatment of Medea by characters who should know better. Helping them overcome that understandable difficulty is a pedagogical delight in itself.

Part Eight: "And the Old Woman speaks," Aristophanes, Frogs 950 Back to the top of this page