So, given that this play is an undeniable masterpiece, why might it have proved so controversial when it was first performed? Remember that it came third in competition at the Dionysia in 431 BCE. Surely the audience can’t have been shocked by the story, which they must have known very well? In fact, though, it is all too likely they did not. We know of two rival traditions in which Medea’s children die in completely different ways. Were they both well known to Euripides’ audience? It’s impossible to say for sure, but it would go some way to explaining why his play was, apparently, so shocking when it was first performed, although it would soon go on to become extremely popular. The first of these traditions is one that both Medea and Jason raise in the Euripides play: the children are killed by vengeful Corinthians. According to the scholia who write about Euripides,42 the Corinthians then start the rumour that Medea had killed her own sons. In a lovely twist （which is almost certainly apocryphal）， the scholia also tell us that Euripides was paid five talents by fifth-century BCE Corinthians to place the blame on Medea and let them off the hook. The second tradition is that Medea kills her children by accident: she takes them to Hera’s sanctuary as soon as they are born, believing the goddess will make them immortal.43 But instead, the children die.
So while we can’t be certain that Euripides was the first writer to make Medea’s infanticide deliberate, it is probable. In which case, no wonder his audience was appalled. They must have turned out expecting a bit of light Corinth-bashing, or perhaps a hapless woman being thwarted by the cruel goddess Hera. And instead they got the terrifying prospect of a clever, violent, rage-fuelled woman: the wife of their collective nightmares.
It is important to note that at no point in Euripides’ play is Medea anything other than sane. The decisions she makes might horrify us, but she makes them after long, reasoned deliberations. I emphasize this because it is so rare to see a contemporary production of Medea which does not make her mad in the final scene. It’s a completely understandable choice: modern audiences might well struggle with the idea that Medea can slaughter her children, causing herself a lifetime’s worth of grief in the process, and do so without being insane. We want to believe that someone could commit such a catastrophic crime only if she is out of her mind. An additional problem is the deus ex machina that so troubled Aristotle. How do you convey to a modern theatre audience all the symbolism inherent in this? That Medea has somehow morphed during the play from an abandoned wife, face down on the ground, howling over her treacherous husband, to an immortal or almost-immortal figure? That the act of killing her children has not broken her, as we would expect, but made her more powerful than ever? There is a gendered element in this disbelief, of course: cinema audiences had no problem believing that Keyser S?ze became his most terrifying form when he decided to kill his family rather than allow himself to be threatened with their loss, in The Usual Suspects. The temptation is to roll the （to our eyes） oddity of the chariot appearance into our expectations of madness as a prerequisite for a woman to kill her children, so that the final scene is a destroyed woman hurling futile abuse at her ex-husband. But for Euripides – and for ancient artists – Medea is far from that.
There is a magnificent calyx-krater （a large wine-mixing bowl） from Lucania in southern Italy, which depicts the scene of Medea escaping Corinth in her chariot.44 This piece was made around 400 BCE, just thirty years after Euripides’ play was performed in Athens. This version of the scene has the children’s bodies left behind on an altar, being mourned by a white-haired older woman, presumably the nurse. Jason appears to the left of the scene: he is just arriving to discover that his sons are dead. In front of him is a small, skipping dog. And flying above the scene in a chariot pulled by glorious coiled yellow serpents is Medea. Her ornate dress, and headdress, remind us that this is a barbarian woman. But she looks every inch a goddess as she flies stony-faced through the air. Her chariot is surrounded by a huge nimbus, reminding us of its divine origin （which explains how it can fly, given the snakes don’t have wings）。 In perhaps one of the greatest digital curatorial comments in any museum in the world, the Cleveland Museum of Art website used to list the description of the pot – ‘Here Medea flees the scene after murdering her children on a flying serpent-pulled chariot’ – under the heading, ‘Fun Fact’。45 I salute this curator.
Much as it may pain our sense of justice, Medea really does get away with murder. She leaves Corinth for Athens, just as she had planned to when Aegeus arrived during the play. In some versions of their story, she is present in Athens to act against Theseus when he arrives to find his father, Aegeus （although, for Apollonius in the Argonautica, Theseus and Ariadne’s relationship predates Jason and Medea’s）。 In many versions of Medea’s story, she has children who survive: Pausanias lists several alternative names,46 and Herodotus also thinks she has a son who survives.47 Diodorus Siculus tells us that these inconsistencies are the fault of tragedians: the problem is they like things to be marvellous48 or miraculous.