FOREIGNNESS IN EURIPIDES MEDEA One of the main issues in the play is the one of Medea being a non-Greek.

. The first thing we hear about her from the nurse is that Jason would not have met her if he had not travelled to Colchis on the shores of the Black Sea in search of the Golden Fleece. The nurse in the prologue refers to her several times as an exile who has earned the welcome of the citizens of Corinth and has behaved with all obedience to her husband. We hear also in the prologue that Medea weeps for her home and for her father whom she betrayed. Now she learns through pain what blessings they enjoy who are not uprooted from their native land. Medeas opening lines actually on stage refer to her status as a non-Greek, that is an inferior one of course a stranger must conform. She goes on to sum up in a withering fashion the position of women in society but adds that to be a foreign woman is even worse Still more a foreign woman coming among new laws, new customs, needs the skill of magic to find out what her home could not teach her, she says to the chorus But the same arguments do not apply to you and me. You have this city, your fathers home, the enjoyment of your life, and your friends company. I am alone.

Medea points out to Creon when he says he fears her that it is dangerous to seem too clever, especially when you do not belong Those who are fools will call you ignorant and useless when you offer them unfamiliar knowledge.because I am clever, they are jealous. The chorus again sympathises with her plight as an exile So you Medeahere, living in a strange country,

your marriage lost, your bed solitary, you are driven beyond the borders, an exile with no redress Jason, in his first encounter with Medea in the play tries to argue in his defence that he did her a favour by bringing her from a barbarous land to become a resident of Hellas (Greece), he says that because of this in return for saving me you got much more than you gave. He lists all of the advantages she has in Greece here you have known justice; you have lived in a society where force yields place to law. Moreover here your gifts are widely recognised, you are famous; if you still lived at the ends of the earth your name would never be spoken. Here, Euripides is possibly criticising the Greek, and particularly Athenian, habit of assuming that anywhere foreign just did not count. Medea, in pinning down why Jason has left her, makes an interesting comment which throws light on her sense of inferiority and exclusion as a foreigner Youre an ageing man, and an Asiatic wife was no longer respectable. In the choral ode which follows this first encounter between Jason and Medea, one of the stanzas concerns the misery of exile. O my country, my home! May the gods save me from becoming a stateless refugee, dragging out an intolerable life in desperate helplessness! That is the most pitiful of all griefs; death is better. Should such a day come to me I pray for death first. Of all pains and hardships none is worse than to be deprived of your native land.

If this essay comes up in the exam, it is not relevant to discuss Medeas foreignness in connection with the terrible crimes she commits. She does not kill her children because she is foreign. What does matter is that being both a woman and a foreigner means that she has no protection, no support, no means of defending herself. This leaves her, as she sees it, no other means of

asserting her rage than a terrible act of revenge. So, central to her position in the play is that she is an outsider, different, suspected of magical powers and has no rights at all. Perhaps it is this very marginalisation that leads her to such desperate acts.