The Metamorphoses of Seneca's Medea

Abstract

Seneca's Medea is not a rewriting of Euripides' character. At least, Seneca's Medea shares more similarities with Ovidian Medeas (the extant ones, at any rate) than the Euripidean Medea. Rather than focusing on Seneca's departures from the tragic legacy of Euripides (however important they are for an informed reading of the play), I would like to focus on Seneca's Medea as a potentially Ovidian character. Specifically, I would like to posit that the Senecan Medea reads more like a dramatisation of Medea's experience within the ellipsed Corinthian episode of Ovid's Metamorphoses (7.394-97). Seneca's Medea (more so than Euripides' Medea) identifies with a specifically transformative project, and, one might initially suspect, supplies a neat explication of the transformation missing from Medea's narrative in the Metamorphoses. What we find, however, is that, in dramatising her process of metamorphosis, Seneca irreparably alters our relationship with the transformed Medea.In the Metamorphoses, ‘Ovid does not explain the reason for Medea's transformation into a sorceress and semidivine, evil being…’, but it is clear in the narration that a metamorphosis does occur: ‘Ovid passes abruptly from a sympathetic portrayal of Medea as love-sick maiden to a tragi-comic account of her career as accomplished pharmaceutria (witch) and murderess.’ But the metamorphosis of Medea's character is signalled just as much by her own retreat into silence. The ‘love-sick maiden’, who lays her thoughts out in the open, gives way to the ‘semidivine, evil being’, who speaks only pragmatically (in incantatory language or to the daughters of Pelias) or not at all (e.g., while flying, in Corinth, and in Athens). The loss of Medea's perspective is much of the reason why Ovid's ‘transformed’ Medea seems so unsympathetic. Seneca provides this missing perspective, and in doing so creates a uniquely sympathetic and inhuman result: Seneca's Medea leaves the stage as abruptly as Ovid's Medea leaves Iolcos and Athens (Met. 7.350 and 7.424, respectively), having committed the same crimes as Ovid's Medea, and as ‘supernatural’ as Ovid's Medea (if not more so), yet her newfound system of values is completely comprehensible. In creating a comprehensible account of her motives for transformation, Seneca's Medea, even as the semidivine ‘pharmaceutria’, seems more sympathetic even as she maintains similarities to Ovid's character.