NOTES

1. This paper began its life as a report for an NEH Summer Institute: "New Perspectives on Classical Antiquity" at the University of Arizona in the summer of 1996. I would like to thank the Director, Dr. Bella [Zweig] Vivante, the participants and lecturers. My special thanks to Susan Spencer, Ginger da Costa, and Maggie Fusco.

2. What better proof than Garry Wills, "There's nothing conservative about the Classics Revival," New York Times Magazine, February 16, 1997. "The classics," he claims, "only become classics when they are relevant again."

3. The complexity of Medea bewitches us: this is the guiding principal behind the recent Medea: Essays on Medea in Myth, Literature, Philosophy, and Art, edited by James J. Clauss and Sarah Iles Johnston, Princeton, 1997. Pace Edith Hall (in TLS 14 Feb. 1997), who claims that it is Medea's simplicity that explains her attraction now and through the millennia. A simple child-murderess--though she arouses our morbid fascination--does not capture our imagination. Real-life murderers seem tawdry beside Medea's towering mythic persona.

  4. See, for instance, the University of Pennsylvania's web exhibit on daily life in the ancient world, which points out the separate lives of men and women.

5. A good place to start reading on this topic is Margaret Visser, "Medea: Daughter, Sister, Wife, Mother. Natal Family versus Conjugal Family in Greek and Roman Myths about Women," Greek Tragedy and Its Legacy, edited by Martin Cropp, Elaine Fantham, S.E. Scully.

6. Reviews of a multilingual, multiracial presentation in South Africa attest to the continuing power of the play and the myth. See Margaret Mezzabotta and Betine VanZyl Smit in Didaskalia 1.5 and Hazel Friedman in Out to Play.

7. Marianne McDonald, A Semilemmatized Concordance to Euripides' Medea, TLG Publications, Irvine, 1978. There are dangers in excessive reliance on the concordance: a student writing on oaths temporarily missed the scene in which an oath is actually sworn on stage. Ibycus is a computer dedicated to searching the TLG, while The Perseus Project is a popular Classics website run by Tufts University (see hyperlink below).

8. For further exploration of the "helpful princess" motif, see Marcia Lieberman, "'Some Day My Prince Will Come': Female Acculturation through the Fairy Tale," in Jack Ziple (ed.), Don't Bet on the Prince: Contemporary Feminist Fairy Tales in North America and England, Routledge, 1987: 185-200, and Judith de Luce, "Reading and Re-reading the Helpful Princess," in Judith Hallett and Thomas Van Nortwick (edd.) Compromising Traditions: The Personal Voice in Classical Scholarship, Routledge, 1996 (pbk. 1997).

9. The symbol S stands for Scholia, the ancient marginal notes that are found in some of the manuscripts. They include glosses (vocabulary notes), mention of other versions of the myth, stage directions, and literary comments.

10. See Bella Zweig [Vivante], "The Primal Mind" in N.S. Rabinowitz and Amy Richlin (edd.), Feminist Theory and the Classics, Routledge, 1993.

11. See T.V. Buttrey, "Accident and Design in Euripides' Medea," AJP 79 (1958): 1-17, forty years old but still the finest article on the dramatic structure.

12. The matter is insoluble. For the view--with which I agree--that Euripides invented or substantially invented the filicide see Emily A. McDermott, Euripides' Medea: The Incarnation of Disorder, University Park, PA, (1989):9-24 and Francis Dunn, "Euripides and the Rites of Hera Akraia," GRBS 35 (1994):103-15. On the other side, Ann Michelini, "Neophron and Euripides' Medea 1056-80," TAPA 119 (1989):115-35 and Sarah Iles Johnston, "Corinthian Medea and the Cult of Hera Akraia," in Clauss and Johnston (n.2 above):44-70. For the fragments of Neophron see Diotima http://www.uky.edu/AS/Classics/neophron.html and http://www.uky.edu/AS/Classics/neophronnotes.html (these links will open new windows on your browser). For a selection of the scholia see http://www.uky.edu/AS/Classics/medeahyposcholia.html.

13. See Deborah Boedeker, "Euripides' Medea and the Vanity of LOGOI," Classical Philology 86 (1991):95-112 and Emily McDermott, "Double Meaning and Mythic Novelty in Euripides' Plays," TAPA 121 (1991):123-32.

14. "Two Crimes, Two Punishments," by Rick Bragg, New York Times, Section E, p.5, January 22, 1998.

15. Not that the cases are similar in many ways: Medea never denied that she had done the deed. She never says that it is anything other than evil (whether she means morally evil or evil because it makes her own life worse). She justifies it not in itself but as necessary according to the ethos of revenge. And Medea is not a local girl, the young woman whose high school year book we can read, whose neighbors we can talk to. But she has been accepted by the Corinthians and especially by the women.

16. In the tiny town of Uniontown, Washington, in 1901 a woman threw five of her six children in a well and when they did not drown she jumped in and drowned them with her own hands after persuading the last child to join them. After several years of treatment she returned to Uniontown to pass the rest of her life. A marker for the six children can be seen at the Catholic cemetery in Uniontown.

17. Christopher Gill, Personality in Greek Epic, Tragedy, and Philosophy, Oxford, 1996: 154-174.