Mommy?

That day and this, were, and are, quite the days for Medea. It was gloomy today, dreary, and wet. I bet it was the same for Medea on her fateful day. Medea, some brave-heart child killer, only in spite of the man who was her lover. Unfortunately, as I believe, what became his demise was not his hubris, his pride, or even his penis, but his short attention span that all men of all generations and cultures share. A.D.D. was the hunter’s best trait when he failed to catch one fish, so that he could see the bird numbly and dumbly, lanky as it were, trying to catch the same fish he was, unaware of him because of it’s less evolved peripheral eyes.

Medea shared obsession from the gathers, so obsessed were they with their baskets and collections of what they were in charge of collecting, to compete with the other collector/gathers at the end of the day. She obsessed over her man, the cases of Jason and Medea of course, are of an older generation of human, when our animalistic traits, perchance, still ran our lives.

Euripides still should not be praised for his apparent observation of his generation, the Greeks

specifically. But rather his modern eyes that saw women as being capable of having great power, in a time when men were the center of society. It was a cultural paradox when Medea committed such enormity. But then again, her lineage traced back to the Titans. That in itself, is a good enough spot to end what I’m trying to say.

Medea, granddaughter of the sun-god Helios, who was son of the Titans Hyperion, and Theia (Hesiod)

was also extremely adept in sorcery. As a testimony of love to Jason, she not only helped him cheat her own father’s test for the Golden Fleece, but also murdered her own brother to help Jason succeed in returning to his throne. When that fails, she performs the dirty work for Jason in murdering his usurping uncle by tricking his own daughters into cutting him into pieces. And two kids and many years later, Jason cheated on her. So Medea wanted revenge, reasonable, being the powerful woman that she was. She killed Creon and Glauce, and then her two kids. Then, grandpa Sun sent her a golden chariot driven by Dragons, since everyone knew winged-horses were a “Perseus” thing.

That was what we covered in my History of Western Theatre class today, minus the whole A.D.D. man and O.C.D. woman part. So far I’ve seen two interesting things of the Students and Professors that I have met in the Theatre Department. In New Orleans and in Taipei, the professors resemble each other more than the students. Elder woman motherly Professor, and a younger, edgier, well-dressed woman professor of great intellect and equal influence in their respective fields. It caught me off guard, but then I saw the students, and I saw the abundant possibilities of youth again. Faces all aimed in different directions, with equally determined hearts to follow. Before the class ended we entered a very interesting dialogue between the class body and the professor. My colleagues were all rather upset by the story, some felt that the filicide was excessive; killing Creon and Glauce was already a lot, his future was ruined and he had no retreat, his family was leaving. But he still had heirs, he still had a glimmer of future, of hope. And Medea would just not have that. One of my classmates who, is quite the character, said that Medea could always resurrect her sons with the same spell that she used to trick Jason’s cousins all those years ago

, since she kept the corpses from Jason. She wouldn’t even let him bury them.

One girl who clearly disliked the filicide, “If Jason was a man who wanted and took pleasure in titles, why didn’t she just ruin his reputation or reduce him to a beggar or shame him?” But Jason was already a man of great renown, people loved and worshiped him because of the heroic deeds he had done in the past and they supported his marriage to Glauce as his Manly Right. Also, Euripides had to write the story into a timeframe of less than or equal to twenty-four hours, since that’s how Greek tragedies were always written.

Medea apparently has a Text-to-World connection to the time it was written. Scholars (and I love it when they do this) speculated that Euripides used the mad woman to reflect a small colony owned by Corinth that was approached by Athens during the Peloponnesian War; Athens offers independence, or something-a-rather, and the small colony gives Corinth the bird, and somehow, becomes yet another colony to Athens. So... I like the more surface reading that Euripides was basically empowering woman, and scaring men with their “steel balls” with such wise words as “She’s actually pretty good with a knife” and “You always carry your shield around home?” or my favorite, “Jason, why have you been sleeping on Creon’s couch lately? Oh right...”

Thank you for your time.

¹ Keep in mind, these were the ancestors who were too drunk to fight off their powerful descendants, who went on to create Caesars, kill a Messiah, and pioneer new methods and means of fornication, among the famous Cleopatra, and for some odd reason, lionesses.

² See “Helios” Wikipedia.

Fun fact: Helios had a brother and a sister, respectively Eos and Selene. The dawn and the moon. Class comes from the word Classics for a good reason.

³ When Medea convinced Jason’s cousins to murder their father, it was because of a spell she taught them, in which she slaughtered an old goat and put it’s carcass into a boiling cauldron, then she momboed some jumbo and out came a little lamb; the cousins, being the blonds they were, forget to ask Medea to write down the jumbo, and just made some daddy-stew. Medea did the same trick on Jason’s freshly dead father in some versions of the Golden Fleece, which brought him back a youth.