It's nothing new: Gridlock and bad air, A.D. 2009. Photo: Eric Demarq, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Roman poetry is filled with entertaining rants against urban evils, which I revisited with glee while preparing for a gallery class I taught at the Getty Villa last month.

Some of the most illuminating diatribes come to us from D. Iunius Iuvenalis (Juvenal), an embittered poet of the late first and early second centuries A.D. As translated by Peter Green, his verses showcase many of the irritants still encountered in city life today, from traffic jams to fashion requirements.

1. The Rent Is Too Damn High

Juvenal emphasized the excessive cost of living in the city, with rent easily adding up to the cost of a house one could have bought in a country town.

If you can tear yourself loose from the Games, a first-class
house can be purchased, freehold, in any small country town
at the price of a year’s rent, here, for some shabby, ill-lit attic.
(Juvenal, Satire 3.223–225)

2. Slumlords Shrug at Fires, Collapses

Cheap construction was another fear of the city dweller, and a reasonable one, since fires often started in largely wooden “high rises” of up to 5 or 6 stories.

Who fears, or ever feared, the collapse of his house in cool
Praeneste, or rural Gabii, or Tivoli perched on its hillside,
or Volsinii, nestling amid its woodland ridges? But here
we inhabit a city largely shored up with gimcrack
stays and props: that’s how our landlords postpone slippage,
and—after masking great cracks in the ancient fabric—assure
the tenants they can sleep sound, when the house is tottering.
Myself, I prefer life without fires, and without nocturnal panics.
(Juvenal, Satire 3.190–197)

3. Street Hustlers Torment with Bad Performances

Almost as bad as fires resulting from cheap construction, Romans had to put up, like us, with street performers. To a poet, nothing was worse than hearing fellow (lesser) poets reciting in public in the hottest weather:

“. . . myself, I’d prefer a barren island to down-town Rome:
what squalor, what isolation would not be minor evils
compared to an endless nightmare of fires and collapsing
houses, the myriad perils encountered in this brutal
city, and poets reciting their epics all through August!
(Juvenal, Satire 3. 5-9)

Juvenal’s fellow satirist M. Valerius Martialis (Martial), translated in verse by Garry Wills, also hated public poets:

You wonder why no people pay you heed?
Well, I’ll unveil the mystery—you read.
Incessantly you foist on us your rhymes,
a legendary peril of our times.
No mother tiger snarling near her cubs,
no snake attacking us despite our clubs,
no scorpion paralyzingly come near,
can deal us such humiliating fear
as you, in undeterr’d reciting mode
producing endless drivel by the load. . .
(Martial, Epigram 3.44)

4. Noise Pollution Causes Insomnia

And then there was the nighttime traffic. The noise at night in Rome could be deafening, because carts with produce and products were only allowed into the city after dark. The daytime streets were already too crowded. Only the wealthy with homes on a secluded hill could avoid hearing the noise of traffic all night long.

Insomnia causes most deaths here . . . Show me the apartment
that lets you sleep! In this city sleep costs millions,
and that’s the root of the trouble. The waggons thundering past
through those narrow twisting streets, the oaths of draymen caught
in a traffic-jam, would rouse a dozing seal—or an emperor.
(Juvenal, Satire 3.232–238)

5. Rich Snobs Make the Streets Unbearable

Daytime traffic was just as bad, especially for the pedestrian. The really rich were carried in commodious litters (curtained traveling couch-beds) by eight muscular slaves trained to move together to afford the most comfort to their masters.

If the tycoon has an appointment, he rides there in a big litter,
the crowd parting before him. There’s plenty of room inside:
he can read, or take notes, or snooze as he jogs along—
those drawn blinds are most soporific. Even so
he outstrips us: however fast we pedestrians may hurry
crowds surge ahead, those behind us buffet my rib-cage,
poles poke into me; one lout swings a crossbeam
down on my skull, another scores with a barrel.
My legs are mud-encrusted, from all sides big feet kick me,
a hobnailed soldier’s boot lands squarely on my toes . . .
(Juvenal, Satire 3.241–248)

6. Men Bankrupt Themselves for Urban Fashion Requirements

And, of course, there was the need to dress fashionably in the city. For men, a toga was a burden dreaded more than a man’s wool suit today. This national formal (male) dress was the equivalent of a gigantic woolen blanket, carefully folded and draped, hard to clean (dry cleaners tended to use urine), and unbearably uncomfortable. Juvenal pretends that nowhere else were men stuck wearing this garment that announced both citizenship and (by its decoration) important distinctions in status.

Throughout most of Italy—let’s admit it—no one is seen
wearing a toga until he’s dead. Even on public
holidays, when last year’s shows are cheerfully staged
in the grass-grown theatre, when peasant children, sitting
on their mothers’ laps, shrink back in terror at the sight
of those gaping, whitened masks, you’ll still find the entire
audience—top row or bottom—dressed exactly alike.
Even the highest magistrates feel themselves entitled
to no better badge of status than a plain white tunic.
But in Rome we must toe the line of fashion, spending
beyond our means, and often on borrowed credit.
(Juvenal, Satire 3.171–181)

7. Falling Pots (and Worse) Brain Pedestrians

In one way, most modern urbanites have it far better than the Romans: we have indoor plumbing lacking in ancient apartment buildings. The Roman inhabitants of upper stories sometimes threw trash, garbage, broken pottery, and even the contents of their chamber pots out the window.

…it’s a long way up to the rooftops, and a falling tile
can brain you. Think of all those cracked or leaky vessels
tossed out of windows—the way they smash, their weight,
the damage they do to the sidewalk! You’ll be thought most improvident,
a catastrophe-happy fool, if you don’t make your will before
venturing out to dinner. Each open upper casement
along your route at night may prove a death-trap:
so pray and hope (poor you!) that the local housewives
drop nothing worse on your head than a pailful of slops.
(Juvenal, Satire 3.269–277)

Although ancient Rome offered its inhabitants many of the same irritants we complain about today, there are no parallels for some contemporary problems—like parking tickets, car alarms, and people who talk loudly on their cell phones in public. Which may be a pretty low price to pay for indoor plumbing.

Juvenal: The Sixteen Satires, translated by Peter Green. Revised edition, 1999 (eBook)

Martial’s Epigrams: A Selection, translated by Garry Wills. 2009 (eBook)

View of the inside of a kylix (stemmed wine cup) by the painter Onesimos, made in Athens, about 500 B.C.

Elite Greeks and Romans reclined to dine, and ordinary people copied them when they could. Although the practice seems strange to us, it must have been both comfortable and convenient, since reclining during meals spread throughout the Mediterranean and survived for over a millennium!

At the Getty Villa we revived Greek and Roman practices of drinking and dining for a recent gallery course, which provided the opportunity to reenact (and, of course, photograph) ancient lounge-drinking practices. I’ll talk about Greek customs, moving to the Romans in a follow-up post.

Greek dining couches of the archaic and classical periods were intended for men and, sometimes, their female companions (courtesans or prostitutes—like the woman on the painted vase above—but not elite wives and daughters). The couches were “single beds” that could accommodate an additional person, especially during a symposion (symposium), the after-dinner male drinking party.

From seven to fifteen beds were arranged against the walls of the andron, the male dining room, each bed with its own little table and often a step stool. Rather than actually lying down, the men reclined on their left elbows and used their right hands to eat and drink. They propped themselves up quite high on pillows and kept their balance by bending their right knees and bracing them against the left (and probably by leaning against the wall, when necessary). This pose requires a flexible waist!

Getty Villa docent Don Peterson reclines on his left side, elbow raised on a stack of pillows, with his right knee bent. He holds a skyphos, a common stemless drinking cup.

After dinner, the drinking party began. Often high-toned symposiasts—Socrates, for example—held educational as well as convivial conversations; other times, the drinkers got down to partying ASAP.

If additional people joined the drinking party, they could be squeezed onto the couches. Since the room was designed for right-handed people, lefties had to accommodate to the layout, or turn and face the wall.

Latin students Petal Niles and Athena Schlereth squeeze onto one couch for a symposion. Athena (right) holds a kylix as she contemplates the philosophical discussion she intends to initiate; Petal (left) examines the image on her skyphos as she awaits the arrival of the wine-pouring slave.

The area in the middle of the Greek dining room was left open for serving food and drink, for entertainment, and for a stand to be placed during kottabos, a drinking game in which the drinker tossed the lees in his wine cup to knock something off the stand. Wine was not filtered and strained as it is today, and the dregs were left in the bottom of the cup. In this video I demo the basics.

The painting on the cup at the top of this post shows a naked slave woman playing kottabos, hooking her forefinger into one handle of her skyphos as she prepares to toss her wine dregs toward the stand in the middle of the room.

There won’t be any drinking games, but this Saturday, we’re offering another homage to ancient Greek drinking with a lecture and wine tasting celebrating the symposion that combines erudition and wine. Or try kottabos at your next dinner party, recreating the Greek dining couches with benches and lots of pillows.

This painting by Roberto Bompiani captures a common 19th-century association of Roman dining and excess. A Roman Feast, late 1800s. The J. Paul Getty Museum, 72.PA.4

The ancient Greeks had a recumbent approach to their (male-only) dinner parties, as I discussed in a previous post: elite men reclined, propped on pillows, to drink, converse, and—sometimes—overindulge.

The practice of reclining and dining continued into ancient Rome, but with a few additions—for one, respectable women were invited to join the party, and for another, drinking was not a separate, post-dinner event, but became part of the dining experience. An association of dining with luxury led to 19th-century depictions, like the one above, of Roman diners leading the soft life (here, without reclining).

The Greeks used single couches onto which companions were often squeezed for after-dinner drinking parties. The practice seems to have been adopted from the east, where it was a form of dining for elites. In Rome, couches for single (generally male) diners existed, but by the late Republican and early Imperial period the practice at dinner parties was for guests to recline on three large beds placed in a U shape in a triclinium (dining room).  Reclining at parties continued to be primarily an elite practice—poorer people had no room for beds of this size. Although in the “old days” reclining had been shameful for respectable women, they now reclined with men, although some old fogeys disapproved, as we know from texts by Isidore of Seville (Etymologiae 20.11.9) and Valerius Maximus (De Institutis Antiquis 2.1.2).

Surviving triclinia with built-in cement dinner couches (the elegant mattresses long since destroyed by time) show that the beds were strongly angled upward to elevate the diner above the tabletop. In contrast, portable beds used cushions like those on Greek beds to elevate the diners.

Angled cement beds (mattresses missing) in the triclinium of the House of the Cryptoporticus, Pompeii. Photo: Ministro per la Coesione Territoriale, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

As still happens at formal dinners today, places were designated for host, favored guests, and less-favored guests. In his Satire 8, the Roman poet Horace reveals “status seating” in action and shows how hard a Roman host (in this case, an unappreciated one) might work to impress a guest.

Ancient sources of course take it for granted that the reader knew all about dining protocol, and therefore authors didn’t bother to explain the rules for dining with crystal clarity. Scholars sometimes debate the locations of the best seats. (The Romans themselves called the reclining spots sedes, seats.) We know that the middle bed (lectus medius) offered a very good location, and there is evidence that the middle seat in this middle bed was an especially honorable one. Certainly it would have suited the Roman appreciation for symmetry. Queen Dido positioned herself “on a golden couch, in the middle,” when she feasted with Aeneas and Cupid, disguised as Aeneas’s son (Virgil, Aeneid 1.1.297–700).

This digital recreation of diners in the triclinium of the Roman villa at Boscoreale shows how the eyes of a person entering the dining room were drawn to the middle seat on the middle couch.

Guests reclining on this middle couch (lectus medius) could speak easily with the host to their right (on the low couch, lectus imus) and also look out at a view of the home’s courtyard or garden, a view carefully designed to impress, as shown on the seating diagram above. In contrast, diners on the high couch (lectus summus) to the left of the important guests (to the right of the person entering the room) could not see the view without twisting uncomfortably.

Re-creation of the layout of Roman dining beds using yoga mats and cushions (these “beds” are lacking legs to raise them off the floor). Villa docents Donald Peterson and Monica Wolfe each recline on the host bed (left, lectus imus), docents Ellie Rosen and Lou Rosen recline with me on the honorable guest bed (middle, lectus medius), and docents Jeanne Dahm and Karen Taylor make do with the lowest-status bed (right, lectus summus).

The re-creation of dining couches in the famous Villa of the Mysteries (below) shows how guest and host beds permitted a view out the main doorway (through which the viewer is entering), and in this case also into a peristyle at right, while the less important diners could only see the opulent wall paintings that decorated Roman triclinia—still not a bad view, however!

Digital reconstruction of the triclinium of the Villa of the Mysteries, Pompeii. Image copyright © 2011 and courtesy of James Stanton-Abbott

In time, Romans with space for serious entertaining increased the number of couches and hosted bigger dinner parties. Another type of couch, a semi-circular stibadium, eventually replaced the three beds. While literary descriptions of reclining and dining faded in the third century A.D., dining rooms for extremely wealthy recliners endure in the archaeological record into the sixth century. However, the collapse of the western Empire and the incursions of “barbarians” with newfangled dining agendas inevitably took their toll. In the eastern Empire, imperial dining rooms and elaborate church art still reference reclining and dining until A.D. 1000. Thus, the elitist practice of recumbent dining lasted the longest in the east, where it originated.

To explore more about the history of reclining and dining, see the entry in Brill’s New Pauly, and this article on status at mealtime in the Roman house. Or pull up a bed and crack open the wonderful book The Roman Banquet: Images of Conviviality by Katherine Dunbabin—along with, of course, a bottle of wine.

Lion Attacking a Horse, Greek, 325–300 B.C.; restored in Rome in 1594. Marble, 150 x 250 cm. Sovraintendenza ai Beni Culturali di Roma Capitale—Musei Capitolini

In August, the Greek sculpture Lion Attacking a Horse flew over the back wall of the Getty Villa and took up residence in our Atrium. We have now lived with the sculpture for over three months, and are already lamenting its coming departure in early February. This is definitely a sculpture that benefits from long acquaintance, close observation, and historical context. It grows on me every day, but I am still struck by how alien it is in some ways: visitors are interested, but many are not sure how they feel about the attack.

Today, watching visitors staring at the Lion with surprise, awe, and bemusement, I found myself making a  list of reasons the Lion appeals to me, both as an artwork and as a window into understanding the classical past.  Here are just seven ways of approaching this fearsome creature:

1. As Mighty Beast. Everyone is impressed by lions; we can trace a Western fascination with this powerful animal back to Homer and the Bronze Age, and humans have proved themselves against lions for millennia.

2. As Fragment of Lost Grandeur. This 3½-ton piece, only a fragment of a once-larger work, provides a rare glimpse of the size and grandeur of large sculptural groups in antiquity—most of which are now lost.

3. As Dialogue Across Time. A follower of Michelangelo restored the horse’s head and legs and the lion’s hindquarters, so this artwork merges two great periods of art history across 2,000 years. Thus it also encourages close observation of what is original and what was added. How do the restored parts affect our interpretation? I like to ask viewers to examine the lion’s legs. If you were a lion biting into a kicking horse, what would you do with your legs? (Hint: not what you see here.)

4. As Beauty and Pain. The lion with its shadowed eyes and mane, digging with claws and teeth into the poor stallion’s mobile flesh, embodies a Hellenistic approach to torment made beautiful. Late fourth-century B.C. (and later) artists maintained their appreciation for the perfect, calm forms of the fifth century. But they also experimented in new ways, and here we see how an artist beautifies the infliction of pain.

5. As Canvas for the Imagination. How much more impressive this sculpture would be if its color, long worn off by time, had survived! Visitors can imagine the two beasts painted with delicate tints, add the blood dripping down the horse’s flank and then compare their mental picture with the Roman mosaic upstairs depicting a similar scene, with the colors crude, but intact.

6. As Stone. Realizing how hard it was to get the lion here and to install him in the Atrium helps us appreciate the difficulties of transporting objects weighing many tons across the ancient Mediterranean, before mechanization or air travel.

7. As Art. The sculpture is beautiful from all angles. Walking around what seems like the “back” (but would not have been on an intact sculpture), you can see how the lion’s body crushes downward, his weight and power  beautifully  contrasted with his almost delicate elbow.

As two of my curatorial colleagues prepare to teach an entire gallery course about this sculpture, I realize too clearly that there is no way to cover all these ways of seeing the Lion Attacking a Horse in one quick stop in the Atrium. When you visit the Villa, stop for a good, long look at the lion and the horse as you come and as you go—one look is definitely not enough.

Baffling calendars, made-up quotes, and ominous livers underlie the story of Julius Caesar’s death

Consult a good soothsayer before heading out this weekend. Artwork: Portrait of Julius Caesar (detail) from the Forum of Trajan, Rome. National Archaeological Museum, Naples, Inv. 6038. Photo: S. Sosnovskiy, 2008

Julius Caesar, the famous dictator, was assassinated in 44 B.C. on the “Ides” of March. We’ve all heard of the Ides—but what exactly were they, and what made them so ominous?

Sorting Out the Roman Calendar

Common sense doesn’t rule our daily lives; culture and habit do. Proof lies in the Roman method of describing calendar dates. You could not make this more unreasonable if you tried.

Every month had an Ides (Idus in Latin), signifying a day (although, to complicate things, the noun is plural) in the middle of the month…sort of. In the longest months—in the calendar that Caesar reformed only a few years before his death—there were 31 days in March, May, July, and October, and the Ides fell on the 15^th. In all the other (shorter) months, the Ides fell on the 13^th.

And it gets worse; that’s not even touching on the Kalends, the Nones, and an impossible system of counting back from fixed days. For example, the day after the Ides of March, the 16th, was expressed as “17 days before the first day of April.” (Why 17? Because both March 16 and April 1 are included in the count.) This dating system is the bane of Latin students everywhere. The Wikipedia entry on the Roman calendar isn’t bad, if you can follow it.

At any rate, the Ides per se were not all that special, but they got a lot of attention after Caesar’s assassination.

Really, The Ides Are Shakespeare’s Fault

John Wilkes Booth (left) and his two brothers dressed for their 1864 performance in Julius Caesar. Brown University, McClellan Collection

Despite Caesar’s fame, the only reason most of us have heard of the “Ides of March” (now that everybody doesn’t have to read Latin) is that Shakespeare made them famous in his play Julius Caesar. In real life, did anyone ever really say to Julius Caesar, “Beware the Ides of March?” Not exactly.

Roman sources such as Suetonius, Plutarch, Cicero, and Valerius Maximus report that an Etruscan soothsayer named Spurinna warned Caesar about danger on (or leading up to and including) the Ides. Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, published in translation in 1579, was especially popular. The text was first translated from Greek into French, and then by Thomas North into English, so the ancient text was a bit diluted by the time it influenced Shakespeare.

Interesting aside: in 1864, John Wilkes Booth, Lincoln’s assassin, acted with his brothers in a performance of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in New York.

It was probably Shakespeare’s decision to turn Spurinna into a mysterious figure in a crowd—issuing a clipped command about the Ides, in a loud shrill voice—that kept the term active (Act I, Scene II).

How Did the Soothsayer Know?

How did the soothsayer Spurinna know the Ides would be a bad day for Caesar? Roman soothsayers were in the business of checking out omens and portents in order to identify lucky and unlucky times for private and public activities. This particular seer is identified in ancient sources as an haruspex, one who could assess the good or bad implications of the entrails of sacrificial animals. The name Spurinna is Etruscan, and Etruscans were known for their skills with guts.

This life-sized Etruscan bronze sheep’s liver unearthed in Italy in the 1870s probably served as a training tool for seers; it is divided into regions, possibly reflecting the heavens, inscribed with the names of gods.

Model liver from Piacenza, Italy, now held in the Museo Civico

Livers and other organs were read for signs of divine approval or disapproval. Discoloration, defect, oozing, bad smell, failure to burn properly, and many other clues provided indications of divine ill will, and different regions of an organ might point the interpreter in different, usually bad, directions. However, the details of this once essential practice are now mostly lost.

Haruspices also paid attention to strange animal behavior and unusual weather. But since, according to the Roman historian Suetonius, Spurinna warned Caesar while the seer was performing a sacrifice, presumably there was something defective in the organs of the unlucky animal. Around this same time, at a sacrifice conducted by Caesar (perhaps on the very day of his assassination, or on the occasion when he first sat in public in a kingly purple robe), the sacrificial ox was missing its heart—a terrible sign!

Furthermore, during a sacrifice the next day, his sacrificial victim was missing part of its liver (says Cicero in On Divination 1.119). Of course, although a sacrificial victim with a disgusting or missing organ was taken very seriously, there were also plenty of opportunities to twist interpretations for political or personal reasons.

Why Didn’t Caesar Beware the Ides?

In hindsight it might seem a bit odd for Caesar to have disregarded the warning about the Ides, but the dictator had in fact discounted many a divine warning before, including plenty of bad news about the Ides…keeping in mind that many of the reported omens probably came later, with hindsight. He followed protocol, but often didn’t believe in, or just thought he was above, the negative messages from the gods.

One bad sign did worry him. The night before the Ides, his wife had a dream about his bloody murder that upset them both. This delayed his attending the Senate the fateful morning of his death, but his friend Decimus Brutus—confusingly, not his more famous, deceitful friend Marcus Brutus—ridiculed seers and dreams and talked him into coming to the meeting place (Plutarch, 64.2–5). There he was stabbed 23 times (Plutarch, 66).

As Caesar entered the Senate, he supposedly said to Spurinna, “You realize the Ides have come?” (As in, “How good a seer are you?”) Spurinna’s reply: “You realize they have not yet gone?” (As in, “Just wait!”) That swift retort, more dramatic in the ancient sources than the third-person statements of warning, also survives in Shakespeare (Act III, Scene I), but is not as famous.

Moral of the story: “If the sacrificial liver looks bad, stay home.”

What to Do the Week of the Ides

It would be appropriate to muse on the Ides of March during a visit to the Getty Villa, inspired by the Villa dei Papiri at Herculaneum—very possibly the getaway villa of Julius Caesar’s father-in-law, Lucius Calpurnius Piso. The villa was buried during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79, and its ground plan inspired J. Paul Getty when he commissioned the original Getty Museum.

Perhaps even visit the Villa on the Ides…if you dare.

What to Read Next

On Julius Caesar

Suetonius, Life of Julius Caesar, 81.2–3

Plutarch, Life of Julius Caesar, 63–66

Valerius Maximus, Nine Books of Memorable Deeds and Sayings, 8.11.2. Here’s an English translation.

Cicero, On Divination, 1.119

Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

On Haruspicy (aka what a haruspex did)

Interesting evaluation of the warnings to Caesar and a consideration of whether astrology was a skill of Spurinna’s (verdict: no):
John T. Ramsey, 2000. “’Beware the Ides of March!’ An Astrological Prediction?” The Classical Quarterly, New Series 50 (2): 440–454

Analysis of the Piacenza Liver

L. Bouke van der Meer, 1987. The Bronze Liver of Piacenza: Analysis of a Polytheistic Structure

The Western world’s oldest surviving play is also one of its most sorrowful. What to know about the unique tragedy coming to the Getty Villa this fall

SITI Company production in progress: Ellen Lauren as the Persian Queen against a backdrop of golden drapery. At right, J.Ed. Araiza, actor in the Persians Chorus. Photo: Ellen Mezzera

An opulent drama told through the voices of Persian courtiers, Aeschylus’s Persians combines visual spectacle with powerful, lyrical storytelling.

The play is a challenge to translate and interpret because of its alien grandeur and despair—almost half the play was sung or chanted while the chorus danced, but the Greek poetry and song are almost impossible to render into English. The desperate funereal lament at the end of the play has no modern parallels. Yet it is well worth the effort to try to understand this play and see it through ancient eyes as well as our own.

Here, a guide to the essential elements of Persians, from its historical background to the message it sends to those who read or see it today.

The Plot

Elderly advisors to the Persian court serve as the play’s chorus. Their king, Xerxes, has left to invade Greece with a mighty army, but has not returned. The chorus’s fears mount; the men worry alongside Xerxes’s frightened mother, learn terrible news from a messenger, and invoke Xerxes’s father, the great deceased King Darius, to rise from his tomb onstage. The advisors eventually meet the disgraced and defeated Xerxes upon his return, and together they mourn the devastation of Persia.

More accurately, while the Persians lost decisively in this invasion (after, however, burning Athens), they did not lose their empire, as Aeschylus suggests. In fact, they remained a powerful force for generations.

The Play

Persians is the earliest Greek play to survive, and also the only extant play based on historical events. Its focus is the Battle of Salamis, won by the Greeks against an overwhelming Persian naval force in 480 B.C., eight years before the production.

Aeschylus glorifies the victors, but also universalizes the horrors and lessons of one specific war. Persians was originally presented alongside three mythological plays—each standing alone, or all perhaps linked thematically to a military threat. The Athenian playwright fought the Persians under Darius at Marathon in 490, and he probably took part at Salamis as well. Writing as a soldier and veteran of wars with Persia, Aeschylus was biased toward the Athenians, and intentionally represents the enemy as arrogant, luxury-loving, and overly emotional. However, he also allows us to sympathize with Xerxes’s family and royal court.

Persians was chosen many times over many centuries, by unknown but key decision-makers, to represent Aeschylus’s work. The play was copied and recopied, first as a scroll and then a book. It was one of just seven of his plays selected from an original total of perhaps 70 to 90. The earliest complete manuscript of Persians dates to around A.D. 1000. Known simply as “M” today, this manuscript was collected by Lorenzo de’ Medici in the fifteenth century. Some 100 years later, the first printed copies circulated in Europe.

The Playwright

Marble bust of Aeschylus (Rome, Museo Capitolino) reproduced in Aeschylos. Tragedies and Fragments (London, 1901). The Getty Research Institute, 86-B18055

When Persians won first place in 472 B.C. at the City Dionysia, the annual Athenian festival honoring the god Dionysos with singing and theatrical performances, Aeschylus was probably in his early 50s, a conservative master of plays incorporating complex poetry, song, and dance. According to Aristotle, he was also an innovator who introduced the second actor to tragic performance. Before this, a single figure interacted with the chorus, and before that, in the late sixth century, the chorus performed alone.

Aeschylus was known for his grand ideas, complex poetry, fabulous costumes, dramatic choreography, and beautiful lyrics. He invented his own adjectives, which could make his plays hard to follow. While he was much admired, other artists—and presumably the general population—sometimes poked fun at his dense language and serious themes.

In the comedy Frogs (produced in 405 B.C.), Aristophanes pits Aeschylus against Euripides in an underworld competition for the title of best playwright. Aeschylus had died fifty years earlier, and Euripides one year before the first production of Persians. Euripides and Dionysos, the judge of the contest, both reference Aeschylus’s solemn incomprehensibility. Aeschylus himself proudly describes how he improved the theater with his martial heroes, declaring that in Persians he “taught men to be eager to conquer their rivals.” Dionysos admires Persians, too, but in order to make fun, Aristophanes reduces the play to dramatic cries and sorrowful clapping (see lines 1026 and following).

The Modern Challenge

SITI Company’s production-in-progress for Aeschylus’s Persians at the Getty Villa. Photo: Sara Radamacher

Any modern producer of Persians—including SITI Company—faces multiple artistic challenges.

Poetry.  In ancient Greek, Persians is a rich poem. It is full of complicated lyrical singing meters, plus three meters for speech, and a chanting meter. As originally performed, the play was only half spoken; in particular, a long speech by the messenger who recounts the loss of the Persian navy is a tour de force. The other half of the play is taken up with formal, archaic singing and dancing. Contemporary artists must translate these into a modern performance, and re-imagining the original format is a very difficult enterprise, rarely confronted head-on.

SITI Company has focused especially on the chorus’s ancient rhythms of chant and dance, and the company incorporates music, Greek passages recited in meter, movements based on the beat of the meter, and gestures that remind us of the chorus as a synchronized entity.

Grief.  Persians is deeply sad. Aeschylus starts the play with the worried courtiers, and sends the story downhill from there, culminating in what amounts to the destruction of Persian civilization. The play ends with an intense funereal dirge enacted by the chorus and Xerxes, who tear their hair and clothes and fill the theater with cries of sorrow, extreme in their time, and difficult to understand today (consider that we have no accepted exclamations of grief, aside from such old-fashioned expressions as Woe! or Alas!). But as Aeschylus displayed the Persians’ deep emotions to his ancient audience, they would have remembered their own wartime reactions of hope, fear, and desperation. SITI Company uses the chorus as a communal body from which individuals step forth to comment, advise uselessly, worry, and grieve.

War.  Recent translations and performances of Persians have often made explicit parallels between contemporary wars and the Persian Wars. Choosing whether or not to draw these parallels—which make the events more relatable but also introduce a note of political commentary—is an important artistic choice. When SITI Company read Persians in Aaron Poochigian’s 2011 translation to a Getty Villa audience in spring 2014, the experience and the audience response convinced the company to present the play using his direct, but poetic, translation.

At certain moments in the play Aeschylus must have meant the Athenian crowd to be filled with pride. At other times he may have meant Athenians to question their own behavior in political matters and as leaders of their own small empire, a group of city-states who joined together after Salamis for self-protection. The play has many layers, and we should not imagine that we see them all or that everyone in the audience, which included visitors from outside Athens, would have reacted to the performance in the same way.

The Message

Persians celebrates the Athenians and their victory and represents the Persian King Xerxes as an arrogant and rash youth who ruins his people. However, Aeschylus also personalizes the true devastation of war visited upon one family: the anguish of a mother and queen, the horror of a father and king crushed by the folly of his son, and the humiliation and pain of the Persian court. The deep sorrow of the chorus is palpable as the old courtiers first fear and then confirm that all is lost.

To play-goers in fifth–century B.C. Athens, the Persians’ lamentation was an extreme but recognizable expression of profound communal sorrow. The audience, too, was affected by the dreadful outcome of Salamis—the Athenians by their own losses, the visitors by their recollections of warfare. Despite the historical license Aeschylus took with Persian culture and politics, he effectively shows a stricken enemy’s point of view, and thereby permits viewers, and even the victors, to share in collective grief. His is a warning about the wages of war that bridges time, culture, and place.

_______

Further Reading

Persian History and Archaeology

The World of Achaemenid Persia: History, Art, and Society in Iran and the Ancient Near East, John Curtis and St. John Simpson. London: I. B. Tauris, 2010. Chapter 3 (pp. 21–31) treats the history of western scholarship on Persia and the quest to treat Persian history in its own right.

Aeschylus and the Play

Persians, Seven against Thebes, and Suppliants, Aeschylus in translation by Aaron Poochigian. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2011.

Online English text of Persians with available Greek translation

Aeschylus: Persae, A.F. Garvie. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Ancient Sources on Aeschylus

Aeschylus: A Guide to Selected Sources

Online English text of Aristophanes’ Frogs with available Greek translation

Aeschylus the Playwright

Aeschylean Tragedy, Alan H. Sommerstein. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2010.

Greek (and Roman) Attitudes toward Persians

The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity, Benjamin Isaac. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2006. Chapters 4 and 8 discuss Greeks and the East and Parthia/Persia.

Greeks and Barbarians, Kistas Valssopoulos. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Pages 53–64 cover the Persian Wars and their aftermath.

Persian Kings in the Play

“A Tale of Two Kings: Competing Aspects of Power in Aeschylus’ Persians,” Rebecca Kennedy, in Ramus 42 (2013): 64–88. Rebecca Kennedy will speak at the Getty Villa about the play at 2:00 p.m. on Saturday, September 13, 2014.

Approaches to Performing Persians

Greek Tragedy on the American Stage: Ancient Drama in the Commercial Theater 1882–1994, Karelisa Hartigan. London: Greenwood, 1995. See especially pp. 102–104.

Reimagining Greek Tragedy on the American Stage, Helene Foley. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012. See pp. 154–159 and Appendix C.

Five questions for Ellen Lauren, who portrays the queen of Persia in SITI Company’s production of Aeschylus’s Persians

Ellen Lauren as the Queen of Persia

SITI Company, under its director Anne Bogart, began a remarkable journey when they took on Aeschylus’s Persians. Always collaborative and analytical, the actors interrupt rehearsal constantly to rethink a few lines or entire scenes. Anne has divided up responsibilities for sections of the play, and leaders guide and encourage questions and dissent. The company pays close attention not just to Aaron Poochigian’s poetic translation, but also to the ancient Greek text itself, often discussing in depth the meaning of a line or passage, what it meant 2,500 years ago, and what it means today.

I have had the great pleasure of participating in these conversations and watching Ellen Lauren confront the role of the strong Persian queen and make it her own. Before the company began rehearsals here at the Getty Villa, Ellen recorded an excerpt of the play, a moment before she invokes the ghost of her husband Dareius. I asked her about the text she recorded, her reactions to Aechylus’s poetry, and her challenging role as queen.

What unexpected discoveries have you made about the queen since starting to rehearse Persians?

Knowing I’m in process as I write this, I’ll try to capture where I am right now. It’s a rich experience working on this role, one that has me constantly questioning my assumptions. Every week brings new respect for the power and depth of this text, how potent it is. I’ve likened it to a kind of incantation. Persians is a mystical piece dealing with visions and rituals that call up the dead.

But too, at the same time, it’s so deeply human in how it portrays the stages of grief, anguish, hubris, terror. People are flawed in it; it’s ambiguous in so many ways and strange because it feels so modern despite being the first extant play.  So things keep changing for me, and the play keeps casting its spell in new ways.

What did you expect from this role?

I don’t think I understood how complex a role the Persian queen really was before we actually began rehearsals. I knew the energy required to perform it, as in all the Greek plays, would be extraordinary. And I was respectfully wary of it, knowing it to be one of the very first “characters” in Greek drama.

Dramaturgically, the role is the most sustained, and the queen is a kind of connective tissue holding the play together. As wife to Dareius and mother to Xerxes, she allows us to see the contrast between the former revered dead king and the present defeated one.  When I considered these things, I thought my task would be to discover expressive choices to serve these functions.

I’d read so much about how this role added up to little more than a function of the plot, without the depth or grandeur of Clytemnestra, for example. Going back to those books now, I shake my head in wonder at how different my understanding is.

In rehearsal: Ellen Lauren (foreground) as the queen of Persia; Will Bond (left) as the Messenger

Describe the queen as a character in Persians.

Queen, mystic, mother, widow: she is powerful and deeply conflicted.

As a devoted mother, her joy at her own son’s survival only points to the anguish of all the mothers who have lost their husbands and sons, and this complicates her own relief. The news does seem to give her the strength to move forward and take action, though— another hallmark of the character.

As queen, she is the only member of the royal family present when the play opens. She speaks of her unrest, and there is a sense of the loneliness and pressure on her in the situation: to hold up, to perform the necessary rites for the well-being of her community.

Most of the movement [in the play] comes from her decisions. She has the strength to hold up as the Messenger relays the news of the Persian loss. She has the presence of mind (when the Chorus can’t summon their own) to speak directly to the Ghost of Dareius, driven by both courage and desperation. Even in her lowest moment she resolves to take action to focus on her son.

It’s complicated; she isn’t a stock character or easy to judge as good or bad. She’s human, and so she’s flawed. But the sense of doing the best she can and not simply allowing grief to consume her is present in the words.

You said the queen provides the “movement” in Aeschylus’s play. How does she do this?

It is in her role as mystic that she proves to be the real engine of the play.

Aeschylus shows us a woman of a great sensitivity and moral conscience. She dreams of Xerxes’s defeat before directly hearing of it, and recognizes the losses yet to come. And in a stunning show of faith and again, courage—yes, from desperation too—she summons the ghost of her husband.

It is here, in the beautiful description of the libations she brings, that the playwright has created an extraordinary portrait of the senses. Somewhat like Lady Macbeth, though without the malevolence or direct guilt, the Queen’s senses have shattered from the Messenger’s news [of Persia’s defeat]. Her speeches are based almost completely on her recounting the feeling of her experiences through sight, smell, and touch. It feels as if Aeschylus’s invention—to separate a character out from the chorus—allowed him to talk about what it means to feel human. And under the pressure of great shock, what happens to the senses.

For an actor, this is a gift—to have such a clear roadmap to what she is literally smelling, hearing, seeing, feeling. She has this extraordinary way of articulating, and she does so to try to find a shred of hope in the situation. Is she driven by guilt for her son’s role in the death of so many? I don’t know. I know that I have to stay very physical, very focused on the quality of her energy. It helps me make choices that will not draw the audience into a situation that would be off-putting, or too distant or ancient.

For you as an actor, what is the most challenging, or affecting, scene in the play?

When King Dareius finally appears from the underworld, answering the queen’s and the Chorus’s pleas, there unfolds one of the most remarkable scenes ever written in a play: a dead husband and a living wife, discussing the fate of Persia and their son’s role in it. It is a ghost story, it is a domestic story, and it is about the fate of their people. It is all those things in a series of short lines back and forth (the Greek stichomythia). The power of the situation washes over me each time we’ve gone at the scene. I have everything to learn from it.

The scene happens without any real warning in the play. But as we build the staging, the event has to be set up just right, and our interpretation needs to strike the right balance between representing something wild and unknown and something with great dignity.

I knew the potential force speaking the words would have on me, the muscularity of them, but I underestimated their power to work on me in deeper more personal ways. Any role is really of set of words organized to represent facets of human experience, and so it has to run through the self.

Certainly I don’t have magical powers; that’s not what I’m saying. I imagine what quality of energy someone with these powers and insight would exude. What is the shape of their body, how do they breathe? This is all so the audience and I can look at this portrait written so long ago, and feel a relationship to such sadness, struggle, and complexity. We all share this at one point or another. And we all had a mom.

Our idea of an old witch making evil potions can be traced back to a more benign Greek origin (later morphed by the Romans)

As Halloween approaches, children and adults transform into old, warty, spell-casting, potion-brewing witches carrying wands or cauldrons. But where does this image of a witch originate? As with many aspects of our contemporary world—from macabre to sublime—traces can be found in Greek and Roman myths.

The first stories of Greek women skilled in herbal potions and incantations were written down roughly 2,600 years ago. These herbalists—young, wart-free, and attractive—were admired for their useful skills. The most powerful, like Circe and Medea, were divinely descended. Their stories shifted as they were retold over many centuries.

The Oracle, 1880, Camillo Miola (Biacca). Oil on canvas, 42 1/2 x 56 1/4 in. The J. Paul Getty Museum. 72.PA.32

In this nineteenth-century re-imagination of religious ritual, the priestess of Apollo sits on a tripod at Delphi, inhaling fumes (not shown) to allow her to communicate with the god. The connection between drugs and good forces was lost over time and transferred to witches.

Witches’ Tools: Potions, Wands, and Magic

In Greek myths, powerful herbs were depicted as rare and difficult to obtain. The term for herb, good or bad, was pharmakon (the root word for our modern “pharmacy”). The word is variously translated depending on context. Herbs were usually mixed into a drink or a mushy stew in bowls or large cauldrons. They were also soaked in water and the liquid sprinkled or made into an unguent to rub on the body.

Wands were occasionally used to transmit or activate an herbal liquid or potion. Even the gods, who could transform people or animals or manifest their will simply by wishing it, also used herbs and special tools such as wands and love arrows to achieve their desires. In the scene below on a 4^th-century B.C. Greek ritual vessel from southern Italy, Hypnos, the personification of Sleep, helps Zeus (disguised as a swan) seduce Leda. Sleep holds a long, curving wand over the pair, probably a tool to drip sleep-water from Lethe, the underworld river of unmindfulness or oblivion.

Hypnos with a wand that enchants Leda. Detail of a Vessel with Leda and the Swan, about 330 B.C., attributed to Painter of Louvre MNB 1148. Greek, made in Apulia, South Italy. Terracotta; 35 1/2 in. high. The J. Paul Getty Museum, 86.AE.680

There was a great deal of crossover between religion and magic in antiquity. Practitioners needed to speak the correct words, make the right gestures, and offer the appropriate sacrifices and substances to gods and spirits of the upper and lower worlds. Ancient gods of the underworld were acknowledged and honored with their own specific rituals. Certain potent plants, whose roots extended down into darkness, were sometimes associated with the lower world.

Humans tried to make gods feel inclined and even obliged to help them, but they could not force divinities to act. Over time, however, powerful, selfish Greek herbalists—who used drugs and invocations entirely for personal motives—gained new powers. In Roman literature we find more clearly identifiable witches, who control underworld beings and natural forces.

Circe: The First Witch?

In Homer’s Odyssey, Circe, daughter of Helios the sun god, appears as the first witch (sort of) in classical literature. She was a beautiful and sensual minor goddess who worked the loom like a proper female. Although immortal, like mortals she had to obey orders from the more important gods. When hosting Odysseus’s hungry crew, she mixed drugs (pharmaka) into a mushy potion (sitos) of cheese, barley, honey, and wine, and then tapped the men with her wand (rabdos) to transform them into pigs and wolves (and other animals as well, in other stories). Her words were not reported.

In this scene on a drinking cup, Odysseus enters from the left, sword drawn. Circe holds her wand and the potion that has transformed the men. She was originally painted white to emphasize her sensual nude flesh, though only traces of white remain.

Detail of a drinking cup (kylix) depicting scenes from the Odyssey, 6th century B.C. Collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Luckily, the god Hermes gave Odysseus the herbal antidote, called in Greek moly (The Odyssey Book X:305). This was a very rare plant with a black root and white flower. After Odysseus used the plant—exactly how is not specified—he was able to resist Circe and threaten her with his sword. Frightened yet impressed, she invited him to bed. First, however, the hero demanded an oath from her (horkon, a formal swearing by the gods) that she would do him no harm. Only then did he accept her seductive invitation.

In the Homeric epic, Circe has few of the negative qualities we associate with witches, and she remained true to her oath not to harm Odysseus. Aside from using a wand to activate her potions, her other supernatural knowledge involved finding the entrance to the underworld and calling dead spirits to come there; but the dead merely provided information they knew when alive.

Roman Circe

About 600 years later, the Roman poet Ovid was more specific about herbs and drugs. In his Metamorphoses, he uses words like gramen, medicamen, herba, and venenum—the last meaning “poison” or “venom.”

Ovid describes Circe’s and Odysseus’s amorous encounter similarly to Homer, but tells how she reversed her spell on Odysseus’s men by moving her wand backwards and reciting her incantation in reverse.

In other stories in Metamorphoses, Circe becomes a far darker figure. She calls upon underworld spirits and the forces of nature for her own devious purposes. When her offer of love is rejected by a youth, she vengefully turns him into a bird. When his friends threaten her in order to find out what happened to their companion, she invokes divinities of darkness, like Night, and of the underworld, like Hecate. In Metamorphoses XIV: 397-416, Ovid writes:

She sprinkled them with harmful drugs and poisonous juices, summoning Night and the gods of Night…and calling on Hecate with long wailing cries.

Marvelous to say, the trees tore from their roots, the earth rumbled, the surrounding woods turned white, and the grass she sprinkled was wet with drops of blood. And the stones seemed to emit harsh groans, and dogs to bark, and the ground to crawl with black snakes, and the ghostly shades of the dead to hover. The terrified band shuddered at these monstrosities.

These monstrosities are standard Roman portents, the sorts of inexplicable manifestations that signaled divine disfavor and required appeasement through religious ritual. Circe invokes and brings about what are usually warnings from major divinities—and her acts cannot be mitigated through proper religious channels. Whereas Homer depicted Circe as a dangerous but controllable female, ultimately loyal to Odysseus, Ovid casts her as a powerful, negative force acting outside social and religious norms. She has become a true “wicked witch.”

Circe’s power to transform men into beasts has fascinated writers and artists for millennia. As just one example, in this 17th-century Flemish painting on view at the Getty Museum, Circe and Odysseus stand surrounded by many more animals than Homer ever envisioned.

Ulysses at the Palace of Circe (detail), 1667, Wilhelm Schubert van Ehrenberg; animals by Carl Borromäus Andreas Ruthart. Oil on canvas, 35 x 47 7/8 in. The J. Paul Getty Museum, 71.PA.20

Read more on ancient witchiness—specifically about Medea—in Part 2.

Further Reading

Ankarloo, Bengt, and Stuart Clark. 1999. Witchcraft and Magic in Europe: Ancient Greece and Rome. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania.

Berti, Irene, and Filippo Carla. 2015. “Magic and the Supernatural from the Ancient World: An Introduction.” In Ancient Magic and the Supernatural in the Visual and Performing Arts, ed. Irene Berti and Filippo Carla, 1–18. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.

Collins, Derek. 2008. Magic in the Ancient Greek World. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Davidson, James. 2001. Magic and Magicians in the Greco-­Roman World. New York: Routledge.

Ogden, Daniel. 2002. Magic, Witchcraft and Ghosts in the Greek and Roman Worlds: A Sourcebook. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Rocca, Giovanna, and Montserrat Reig. 2015. “Witch, Sorceress, Enchantress: Magic and Women from the Ancient World to the Present.” In Ancient Magic and the Supernatural in the Visual and Performing Arts, ed. Irene Berti and Filippo Carla, 67–78. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.

Scarborough, John. 1991. “The Pharmacology of Sacred Plants, Herbs, and Roots.” In Magika Hiera, ed. Christopher A. Faraone and Dirk Obbrink, 138–174. New York: Oxford University Press.

Stratton, Kimberly B., and Dayna S. Kalleres. 2014. Daughters of Hecate: Women and Magic in the Ancient World. Oxford: Oxford University.

Another powerful, formidable proto-witch from ancient Greek and Roman drama: Medea

Medea (left) brings Jason’s father Aeson back to life with a potion that includes foam from a werewolf’s mouth. Medea Rejuvenating Aeson, late 1870s, after a model attributed to Louis-Simon Boizot. Bronze, ca. late 1870s. The J. Paul Getty Museum, 74.SB.6

In an earlier post about the Greek and Roman ancestors of modern witches, the focus was on Circe, an herbalist with ties to the underworld. Medea, like Circe, was related to the sun god Helios. She was a princess from Colchis, knowledgeable in herbs and plants, who evolved into a dark enchantress by Roman times. She is notorious for massacring her own sons in revenge for her husband Jason’s unfaithfulness. (This dreadful act may have been invented by Euripides, who produced his play Medea in 431 B.C.)

The best source for the backstory of Medea is book III of the Argonautica of Apollonius, written in the 3rd century B.C. Medea’s father guarded the Golden Fleece sought by the famous Jason and his Argonauts, and when Medea fell in love with Jason, she betrayed her family to help him. Apollonius calls Medea polypharmakon, which is translated creatively as “enchantress,” but means “skilled in many herbs” (III.27). In helping Jason in his quest for the Golden Fleece, Medea employed both protective and fatal pharmaka (herbs) stored in a special container (III: 802-3). One of her potent dried plants grew from the blood that once dripped from Prometheus’s body while he was chained to a cliff by Zeus and wounded daily by an eagle (III. 845).

Prometheus’s blood falls to the ground, nourishing a potent herb that Medea uses. Prometheus is being attacked by Zeus’s eagle as punishment for giving humans fire. Drinking cup, 530 B.C. Collection of the Vatican Museums. Via theoi.com

Medea gave Jason the herb grown from Prometheus’s blood to soak in water and rub on his body and weapons. This potion helped him avoid death from fire-breathing bulls and an army of men who magically sprang from the ground. Medea also provided Jason with a liquid sleeping drug to sprinkle on the dragon guarding the Golden Fleece.

As the pair escaped Colchis with the Fleece, Medea participated in killing her brother (or else killed him by herself, or even stabbed him and chopped him up), which distracted her father from pursuit. Back at Jason’s home city, Iolkos, she also tricked the daughters of Jason’s uncle Pelias, the usurper of the throne, into murdering their father. She boiled a cut-up ram in a cauldron with secret herbs and it hopped out, revived and young again. Believing they could similarly rejuvenate Pelias, the girls killed and boiled him, but since Medea did not give them the correct herbs for the broth, the old man’s death was permanent. Jason and Medea were therefore exiled to Corinth.

Medea (at left) brings a dismembered ram back to life with an herbal concoction. Attic black amphora, ca. 500 B.C. Etruscan. Collection of the Harvard University Art Museums

Writers and artists in the 5th century show us a Medea who is a powerful herbalist and murderess, a terrible enemy when wronged, but not yet the evil witch of modern fairy tales. She has secret knowledge and an indomitable will, but she does not control supernatural forces.

Euripides’s 5th-century B.C. version of Medea’s tale begins after she has learned of Jason’s betrayal of her and marriage to the daughter of the king of Corinth. When thinking through various ways to get revenge, including stabbing Jason and his new bride to death, Medea decided to use her knowledge of pharmaka (Euripides, Medea 385). First, to secure asylum for herself in Athens, she told Aegeus, king of Athens, that she could cure his inability to produce children by making him an herbal concoction. Then, to wreak revenge against the disloyal Jason, she smeared a poisoned potion on a gown and golden wreath and gave it as a wedding present to Jason’s new bride, causing her an agonizing death. (789, 1201).

Jason’s betrothed is shown the poisoned golden wreath made by Medea to murder her. Creusa Receiving the Burning Jewelry from Medea (detail), about 1415, unknown illuminator. Tempera colors, gold leaf, gold paint, and ink on parchment, 16 9/16 x 11 5/8 in. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Ms. 63, fol. 9

As the final blow to Jason, she infamously murdered their two sons. She chose to avoid poison and stabbed them with a sword, so the second child had to watch the first one start to die. Vase paintings emphasize the bloody bodies of the children.

Although Medea escapes on a flying chariot at the end of the play, this is a loan from her divine grandfather, Helios, and not the product of her own magic. She is still within the realm of human, although terrible, behavior.

Medea in Ovid

In Ovid’s Metamorphoses (VII.1-179), written about 500 years after Euripedes’s version, the poet clearly associates Medea’s herbs with incantations (songs: carmina, cantus) and secret arts (secretae artes). He characterizes her drugs as “bewitched,” activated by her incantations (incantata herba). She uses potent herbs (pollentes herbae), but they are enhanced by her sung or chanted words (like a witch’s spell). Medea has access to the grasses near the underworld river Lethe, and she teaches Jason the technique for sprinkling a soporific watery drug on the dragon guarding the Golden Fleece. She also teaches him to recite three times the powerful words that bring sleep, calm the seas, and stop the flow of rivers. Such powers more normally belong to the gods.

In Ovid’s telling, Medea now also includes inanimate objects and animal products in her potions, along with herbs. To rejuvenate Jason’s father Aeson (in the same way she rejuvenated the ram that tricked the daughters of Pelias), she makes a hot, bubbling potion with stones and sand from far distant places, the wings and other parts of an owl, the head of a crow that lived for nine lifetimes, and the entrails or foam from the mouth of a werewolf! (VII.234-293).

Is Love an Excuse?

Circe, once attracted to Odysseus by his manliness and smarts in resisting her potion, was in the end not a bad girlfriend. Medea, according to some stories, was compelled by Aphrodite to love Jason obsessively, which explains why she betrayed her family and helped him obtain the Golden Fleece. However, she went far beyond helping Jason, turning into a murderess who used potions and the sword for personal gain and revenge.

It is no wonder that the Medea of today is known as a sorceress and child-killer. Ovid’s descriptions of her behavior, her reliance on underworld forces outside conventional religious rites, her bubbling potions and outlandish ingredients, and her association with the “dark side” of herbs all show her to be a new kind of polypharmakon. Transformed from herbalist to selfish manipulator and poisoner, Medea, like Circe, became another truly wicked witch.

Medea escapes as Jason watches impotently near his dead sons, draped dead across an altar (an allusion to a variant of the story, or perhaps to the sacrilegious act). Mixing Vessel with Medea Departing in a Chariot (detail), about 400 B.C., attributed to the Policoro Painter. Terracotta, 19 7/8 x 19 5/8 in. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio, Leonard C. Hanna Jr. Fund, 1991.1. Photo: Tim Evanson on Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0

Further Reading

• Ankarloo, Bengt, and Stuart Clark. 1999. Witchcraft and Magic in Europe: Ancient Greece and Rome. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania.
• Apollonius, Argonautica
• Berti, Irene, and Filippo Carla. 2015. “Magic and the Supernatural from the Ancient World: An Introduction.” In Ancient Magic and the Supernatural in the Visual and Performing Arts, ed. Irene Berti and Filippo Carla, 1–18. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.
• Collins, Derek. 2008. Magic in the Ancient Greek World. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
• Davidson, James. 2001. Magic and Magicians in the Greco-­Roman World. New York: Routledge.
• Euripides, Medea
• Ogden, Daniel. 2002. Magic, Witchcraft and Ghosts in the Greek and Roman Worlds: A Sourcebook. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Ovid, Metamorphoses, book VII
• Perseus Digital Library, useful for comparing English and ancient texts.
• Rocca, Giovanna, and Montserrat Reig. 2015. “Witch, Sorceress, Enchantress: Magic and Women from the Ancient World to the Present.” In Ancient Magic and the Supernatural in the Visual and Performing Arts, ed. Irene Berti and Filippo Carla, 67–78. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.
• Scarborough, John. 1991. “The Pharmacology of Sacred Plants, Herbs, and Roots.” In Magika Hiera, ed. Christopher A. Faraone and Dirk Obbrink, 138–174. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Stratton, Kimberly B., and Dayna S. Kalleres. 2014. Daughters of Hecate: Women and Magic in the Ancient World. Oxford: Oxford University.