On Medea's Great Monologue (E.Med.1021–80)

Abstract

In his new text of Euripides (Oxford, 1984) James Diggle shows that he has the courage of his convictions: he deletes the last twenty-five lines of Medea's great monologue. He is to be applauded for followingratio et res ipsawhere it leads him and being undaunted by the sight of so much blood. No editor of Euripides before him, as far as I am aware, has ever been courageous enough to put these lines in square brackets, although their deletion had been a subject of discussion for exactly one hundred years at the time Diggle's edition appeared.But though Diggle is to be praised for his courage in following reason, I believe he is mistaken. The arguments for excision are far from negligible, and defenders of the passage show a regrettable tendency to underestimate their force. But while I shall give these objections as much weight as any of those who urge deletion, I shall argue that there is a much more economical way of dealing with them than large-scale amputation. I shall accordingly pay close attention to the problems for which excision is the proposed solution, with inevitable repetition of earlier scholars' arguments. Since I have myself recommended athetesis of long passages on several occasions, I do not think I will be regarded as insufficiently alive to the possibility of interpolation or overly reluctant to wield the knife. In this instance, however, there are strong stylistic grounds for believing in the genuineness of most of the passage in question.