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Euripides medea

"Forgive what I said in anger! I will yield to the decree, and only beg one favor, that my children may stay. They shall take to the princess a costly robe and a golden crown, and pray for her protection."

The prayer is granted and the gifts accepted. But soon a messenger appears, announcing the result:

"Alas! The bride had died in horrible agony; for no sooner had she put on Medea's gifts than a devouring poison consumed her limbs as with fire, and in his endeavor to save his daughter the old father died too."

Nor is her vengeance by any means complete. She leads her two children to the house, and that no other may slay them in revenge, murders them herself. Very effective is this scene in which, after a soliloquy of agonizing doubt and hesitation, she resolves on this awful deed:

In vain, my children, have I brought you up,

Borne all the cares and pangs of motherhood,

And the sharp pains of childbirth undergone.

In you, alas, was treasured many a hope

Of loving sustentation in my age,

Of tender laying out when I was dead,

Such as all men might envy.

Those sweet thoughts are mine no more, for now bereft of you

I must wear out a drear and joyless life,

And you will nevermore your mother see,

Nor live as ye have done beneath her eye.

Alas, my sons, why do you gaze on me,

Why smile upon your mother that last smile?

Ah me! What shall I do? My purpose melts

Beneath the bright looks of my little ones.

I cannot do it. Farewell, my resolve,

I will bear off my children from this land.

Why should I seek to wring their father's heart,

When that same act will doubly wring my own?

I will not do it. Farewell, my resolve.

What has come o'er me? Shall I let my foes

Triumph, that I may let my friends go free?

I'll brace me to the deed. Base that I was

To let a thought of wickedness cross my soul.

Children, go home. Whoso accounts it wrong

To be attendant at my sacrifice,

Let him stand off; my purpose is unchanged.

Forego my resolutions, O my soul,

Force not the parent's hand to slay the child.

Their presence where we will go will gladden thee.

By the avengers that in Hades reign,

It never shall be said that I have left

My children for my foes to trample on.

It is decreed.

Jason, who has come to punish the murderess of his bride, hears that his children have perished too, and Medea herself appears to him in the chariot of the sun, bestowed by Helios, the sun-god, upon his descendants. She revels in the anguish of her faithless husband.

"I do not leave my children's bodies with thee; I take them with me that I may bury them in Hera's precinct. And for thee, who didst me all that evil, I prophesy an evil doom."

She flies to Aegeus at Athens, and the tragedy closes with the chorus:

Manifold are thy shapings, Providence!

Many a hopeless matter gods arrange.

What we expected never came to pass,

What we did not expect the gods brought to bear;

So have things gone, this whole experience through!"

This drama is a masterly presentment of passion in its secret folds and recesses. The suffering and sensitiveness of injured love are strongly drawn, and with the utmost nicety of observation, passing from one stage to another, until they culminate in the awful deed of vengeance. The mighty enchantress who is yet a weak woman is powerfully delineated. The touches of motherly tenderness are in the highest degree pathetic. The strife of emotions which passion engenders is admirably shown; and amid all the stress of their conflict, and amid all this sophistical and illusive commonplaces which work upon the soul, hate and vengeance win the day. Medea is criminal, but not without cause, and not without strength and dignity. Such an inner world of emotion is alien from the genius of the religious and soldier-like Aeschylus; Sophocles creates characters to act on one another, and endows them with qualities accordingly; Euripides opens a new world to art and gives us a nearer view of passionate emotion, both in its purest forms and in the wildest aberrations by which men are controlled, or troubled, or destroyed.