It’s interesting that we may find ourselves sympathizing with Euripides’ Phaedra more than Racine’s. The former creates the slander that kills an innocent young man. But her absolute powerlessness in the face of a divine plot she cannot control or even influence makes her more pitiable than villainous. Whereas Racine’s Phaedra is operating on a far more human scale of lust and jealousy, and even though she does not create the falsehood which kills Hippolytus, she stands by it from wholly base motives.
But what if we read Euripides’ play in the light of all we know about Ariadne, and Theseus’ extensive, destructive sexual adventures? Would it change the way we view his wretched Phaedra? The nurse finally persuades the queen to confess that it is love, specifically love for Hippolytus, which is causing her to sicken almost to death. And she does this by reminding Phaedra that her children will be shunted into obscurity by Hippolytus if she dies while they are still young. By the end of the play, Phaedra is dead, Hippolytus is dead, and her children are Theseus’ only heirs. She has – perhaps – achieved her ambition without ever crystallizing it in her thoughts. Theseus’ line from his previous wife, or sexual partner, or rape victim （we cannot forget that Antiope/Hippolyta, the Amazon mother of Hippolytus, has a shifting status in Theseus’ life, depending on who is telling the myth） has been obliterated. A healthy older son has been removed from the equation so Phaedra’s sons can inherit their father’s property and titles. Could we read this play as a horrifying revenge on Theseus, for the damage he did to Phaedra’s family: killing her brother Asterion （the Minotaur）， and abandoning her sister alone on the shores of Naxos? We certainly could. Read this way, Phaedra may still be Aphrodite’s pawn （as are all the characters in Euripides’ play, except Artemis）， but she is also engaged in retributive justice. The play is no less troubling on this reading, but perhaps it acquires an extra dimension. And so does Phaedra, the wicked stepmother who defends her young and destroys all threats to their future, even at the cost of her own life.
Medea
THE VIDEO OF ‘HOLD UP’ BEGINS WITH BEYONCé SWIMMING through the rooms of a house filled with water. In a voiceover she explains the many ways she has tried to change, to make herself more amenable, less challenging. She seems to speak for all the women who have been told they are somehow too much. The actions she lists become more extreme, more symbolic: fasted for sixty days, wore white, bathed in bleach. She moves through the water like a mermaid. But then comes the real question: is he cheating on her? And then the camera cuts to a huge pair of doors, flanked by four vast Ionic columns: this house or palace is Neoclassical in style. Beyoncé flings open the doors and water floods out around her, flows down a stone staircase. She walks down the stairs in a saffron gown （a colour often worn by young women in Greek myth: Iphigenia was described as wearing one in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon.1 There is even a word in Greek – krokotophoreo – which means ‘to wear a yellow dress’）。 As she strides through the streets, she acquires a pair of mighty heels and a baseball bat, with which she smashes fire hydrants, CCTV cameras and the windows of assorted cars. She wonders if it’s worse to look jealous or crazy. Eventually, she smashes the camera filming her, and drops the bat on the ground. Jealous or crazy? Perhaps she is both. The message is clear: cheat on her at your peril. Her revenge will be public and spectacular. As William Congreve put it, ‘Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turn’d, nor hell a fury like a woman scorn’d.’2
In 431 BCE, Euripides’ Medea was performed for the first time at the Dionysia festival in Athens. The story of a woman who asks herself the same question – jealous or crazy – and comes up with a horrifying answer must have sent shockwaves through the city. The set of tragedies to which it belonged came third in competition, out of three. Were the audience shocked by the story of a woman who committed the iciest revenge on her cheating husband? We tend to think that tragedy audiences knew roughly what they were getting when one of the big playwrights tackled a story everyone already knew. But – as we have already seen many times in this book – myths change, and it is rarely possible to say that one story is definitively original and all other versions deviate from that. There is every chance that Euripides made a crucial change to the plot of Medea’s story and that is what caused such consternation among its earliest audience. We’ll come back to this shortly.
As we saw with Clytemnestra, there were few things more alarming to ancient Greek men than the machinations of a clever woman, and Medea is the cleverest of them all. If Clytemnestra is the worst wife in Greek myth, Medea can lay a strong claim to being its worst mother. But before she becomes that （in the second half of the fifth century BCE）， she is already a dangerous figure: clever, female, foreign and magical.