It may look like a typo, but it's not. Many of the Greek names that are typically transliterated as ending in -ia or -ea actually end in -eia in the original Greek. (eg Deidameia, Iphigeneia, Penthesileia, etc.) That may thus leave you wondering why I chose to use a spelling that will make people do a double-take and/or think I've misspelled it?
Well.
That's because.
Um.
I could say that it was to free her of the negative associations people have with the Medea spelling. (Like my decision to spell her aunt's name Kirke instead of Circe.)
I could say that. But it wouldn't, strictly speaking, be true.
I think, at the heart of it, I went with the -eia spellings across the board because it's hard to draw a line of "here's as far as I go in trying to use the original Greek spellings." I tried to be even more accurate in Are You A Better General Than Agamemnon?, to the extent of using "Achilleus" and "Alexandros," but even my own fingers kept rebelling against those more-accurate spellings, so I pretty much had to not try using those again. But as to the others, like the -eia spellings...for one reason or another, I decided to adopt them.
Anyway, that's all beside the point. Medea's story is pretty well-known...or at least, one version of it is.
She was the daughter of King Aietes of Colchis, and when Jason came to steal away the Golden Fleece, she helped him out of love (or the illusion/delusion of love, anyway) and helped him escape, even going so far as to murder one of her brothers in some versions. {Jason should technically be Iason, but again, my fingers rebel if I try it...} Then after they get back to Iolcos, the pair--or Medea alone--trick Pelias and his daughters, leading to Pelias' death. They're exiled for murder, and King Creon of Corinth purified Jason of the murder, then promptly starts trying to set up Jason with his daughter. Realizing she's being thrown over, Medea murders Creon, his daughter, and even her own sons by Jason, and flies off in a chariot pulled by dragons, then goes around being blamed for any number of other unpleasant events across the Mediterranean.
Well. Part of that is the case in all versions. The part about helping Jason obtain and escape with the Golden Fleece. Pretty much everything else is not.
Now, this gets complicated, but I'll just give the most brief of summaries. There's an excellent reference work called Early Greek Myth: A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources by Timothy Gantz, which pretty much just tells you what every single known source (including fragments, mentions in history and philosophy and poetry) has to say about every single myth. It doesn't narrate the myths, though, so this isn't a good book for general readers, but it's invaluable for those with a more academic interest in myths and how they changed over time. His discussion of Medeia's time in Greece with (and without) Jason takes up from the bottom of page 365 to the top of page 373, so there's a lot of material there to digest. But the most important points can be summed up in two major points. First, in Hesiod's Theogony, "their life together would seem to be without further problems" and there's certainly no mention of murdering children, or even of killing Pelias, for that matter. (Page 366) As to Euripides' famous play, the one that everyone knows (and yes, it's an excellent work, don't get me wrong on that score), Gantz has this to say: "we have evidence from another story cited by the scholia (and ascribed also to Parmeniskos) in which the Korinthians are said to have paid Euripides five talents to shift the blame from their ancestors to Medeia (Σ Med 9). However doubtful this tale may seem as a historical fact, it could not have been plausibly fabricated if there was any sort of well-known pre-Euripidean tradition in which Medeia was the culprit. Most likely then (whatever his motive), Euripides is the inventor of the idea that Medeia knowingly killed her children." (Page 369) Knowing this to be the case, and preferring (in most cases) to go with older traditions when I can, I decided to cobble together my own version out of various details from the assorted pre-Euripidean versions.
So, in The Golden God of Aiolia, Atalanta, Ariadne and Eurysakes discover a cave on Mount Pelion that's protected by a huge stone statue that comes to life and attacks them when they get too close. Naturally, the thought of just leaving does not occur to them, and they fight the monstrous statue, eventually destroying it. Then they go into the cave...
As they slowly made their way into the cave, Atalanta found that it was surprisingly bright, due to a number of torches and a fire, above which a cauldron simmered. A woman stood at the cauldron, her back to the cave’s entrance, stirring the foul-smelling mixture within it, and she seemed entirely pre-occupied with her task, to the extent of being unaware of the cousins and even the very loud battle they had just had outside the cave mouth.
The cauldron was not far from the stream, which ran along the base of one wall of the cave. Sitting near the fire was a low bowl filled with the bones of a ram, which didn’t seem entirely odd—marrow was marrow, right?—despite that whatever the woman was cooking didn’t smell anything like food to Atalanta. Less normal, however, were the two sets of human bones that were carefully laid out on top of beautifully woven pillows near the dry wall of the cave. Atalanta didn’t even want to think about why this woman was displaying two human skeletons—pretty small ones, at that, as if they were only children!—in such a gruesome fashion.
Suddenly, the woman released the implement she had been using to stir the brew, and picked up the bowl with the ram’s bones in it. She poured the bones into the cauldron, then watched the bubbling surface of the liquid for several anxious minutes, her whole body visibly tense. But nothing happened, and the woman let out a low, disappointed moan.
“Not again! Great Hecate, what am I doing wrong?” the woman cried, her voice trembling with sorrow.
She tipped the cauldron over, sending the still-boiling liquid roiling out into a small channel carved in the cave floor, a channel that led directly into the stream, which hissed angrily as the hot brew entered it. The woman moved around in front of the mouth of the empty cauldron, and began reaching inside it with her bare hands.
It was only as she was removing the steaming ram’s bones from the cauldron and placing them back in the bowl that she acknowledged her visitors. After depositing the ram’s skull back in the bowl, she glanced at them over her shoulder, her lips pursed and brow furrowed.
“Well?” she asked. “Are you ever going to explain yourselves? What are you doing here? Why would you risk your young lives to enter here?”
They stood there in dumbfounded silence for a moment or two. “We…umh…” Atalanta looked at her cousins for support. What in the world were they supposed to say?
“We defeated the statue creature,” Eurysakes said, though it almost sounded like a question. “Was it your protector? Or jailer?”
The woman sighed sadly. “My husband. Former husband. Late husband.” She shook her head mournfully. “What does it even matter?” She resumed retrieving the ram’s bones from the cauldron.
“What are you doing?” Atalanta asked uneasily, shuddering at the thought of the burns those bones had to be causing on the woman’s hands. “What was supposed to happen when you put the bones in the cauldron?”
“They were supposed to come back to life, of course,” the woman replied, sounding annoyed.
After it comes out that she is, in fact, Medeia, daughter of Aietes and rumored murderess of King Pelias of Iolcos, the trio want to know more. (She has not aged, of course, being fully immortal like both her parents. Her immortality was established in the Theogony.)
“It was Hera who was responsible for his death,” the woman replied just as firmly. “Jason and I were just her tools. Used up and discarded, like any other mortal touched by the gods. She saw her chance to be rid of Pelias and took it, no matter that it made me look like a monster. Better to vilify a mere foreign woman than to risk riling her brother Poseidon’s ire by killing his son directly.”
“What happened?” Atalanta asked curiously. She had heard rumors, of course, but they hadn’t been terribly consistent. Everyone knew the basic facts: Jason, son of Aison, had gone to Colchis to fetch the legendary Golden Fleece at the behest of his father’s half-brother Pelias, but that was where the certainty ended, as no one seemed sure of anything else, not even why Pelias had wanted the Golden Fleece in the first place. Atalanta had heard claims that Jason and his crew had succeeded in their quest, that they had reached Colchis but failed to obtain the Fleece, and even one claim that they had never gone further than Lemnos, simply staying there until Heracles abandoned them out of boredom and they returned home in shame. But they all did agree that Jason had brought back with him Medeia, the daughter of Aietes, the King of Colchis, and that Medeia had killed Pelias through sorcery and trickery, and most said that she had later killed Creon, King of Corinth. (The one who said the Argo had never gotten past Lemnos had trouble explaining where Medeia had come from, of course, and hadn’t really come up with a story that made any sense in that regard.) There had been a lot of other rumors floating around the agora in Methymna, most of them turning Medeia into an immortal bogey-woman, something for Achaian mothers to use to frighten their children into being good. Most of those rumors hadn’t even made sense. But the stories about Pelias and Creon…there had been a certain amount of cruel logic to them…
“When Pelias found out that I was a devotee of Hecate, he wouldn’t stop pressing Jason for information on what I could do,” Medeia said, returning her attention to her cauldron, tipping it the rest of the way over, dumping even more potion into the stream. Atalanta was surprised that she wasn’t burning her hands on the base of the cauldron, which had so recently sat in the fire. “He was a terrible, greedy man, despite having a god for a father. He wanted potions that would make him wealthy, immortal, anything at all, so long as it would benefit him!” In a violent motion, she righted the cauldron again with such a clang that it sounded like Ares banging his spear against his shield to summon his allies into battle. “He learned that I knew a spell that could restore lost youth. But I never told Jason of such a spell! Hera herself had told him that. Once Pelias knew about it, he wouldn’t stop asking for it. Demanding it! He had me test it on a ram, and then on his own half-brother, Aison. It worked then! Oh, yes, it worked just fine then! But when the daughters of Pelias cut up their father and put his body in the cauldron…nothing! He just simmered there, like meat for a Lastrygonian stew!” She kicked the cauldron so hard with her thinly shoed foot that Atalanta couldn’t help thinking that she must have broken several bones in the process.
“Why didn’t it work?” Eurysakes asked, his voice considerably more level than Atalanta’s probably would have been if she had tried to ask.
“Hermes led his soul away the instant his daughters cut him to pieces,” Medeia snarled furiously. “He knew we were going to revive Pelias, but he led the soul away anyway! Even though I begged him not to! So Jason and I were exiled from Iolcos as murderers, even though neither of us had lifted a finger in the killing!”
“That’s…unfortunate…” Atalanta said uncomfortably, feeling like someone had to say something, but not really having anything to say, and neither of her cousins were saying anything! Ariadne, in fact, was watching Medeia with an openly skeptical expression, and Atalanta was half afraid that she was going to start denying that any of the tale could be true. This didn’t seem like a good time for that kind of thing…
“We ended up in Corinth, where Creon purified Jason of the death. He wouldn’t purify me, because I was a ‘barbarian.’ And a woman, which he saw as even worse,” Medeia went on, glaring into the empty cauldron. “I was never welcome there. Not for one moment! The longer we lived there, the more Jason listened to them when they tried to tell him that I wasn’t his proper wife. That he didn’t have to respect the oaths he had sworn to love me forever.” Though her voice was still furiously angry, her eyes were crying. “I started to fear for my life…and the lives of my sons. I left them in Hera’s sacred grove, where I was sure they would be safe, and went to plead with Jason for us to leave. He wouldn’t listen…and when I went back to the grove…my sons were dead!” Her voice turned into a wail, and she turned to look at the bones on the pillows.
No, she wasn’t looking at the bones, but at a spot just above them, as if she could see her children standing where their bones now rested.
“By the time I recovered my wits enough to return to town to obtain the ingredients for the potion to revive them, I heard the people of Corinth everywhere around me, whispering that I had murdered my own sons,” Medeia went on. “They did everything they could to delay me, preventing me from obtaining the herbs I needed, so that by the time I could brew the potion, it was too late to revive the boys, because the spell worked only on the freshly dead.” Her eyes slid shut, and she shook her head. “Even worse, they convinced Jason that I truly had done the foul deed. He left me, calling down curses on my head, and swore himself to Creon’s daughter the same day. They had robbed me of everything, just because I was from outside their lands!” She sank down to her knees, clenching her fists. “Of course I begged my grandfather to avenge them—to right the wrongs that had been done to us! And he did! He turned his chariot in the sky and flew down so close to the palace of the king that it caught fire and burned to the ground! Creon, his daughter, the murderers who had killed my sons…they all burned in my grandfather’s divine fire. Jason escaped, but he still didn’t believe I could be innocent. Someone had even convinced him that I had personally burned the palace out of jealousy over his impending marriage to Creon’s daughter. Jason went so many places after that, and told so many lies about me!” She started sobbing heavily. “He was so kind and sweet when we first met! How could he turn into such a cruel brute?”
“Some men do that,” Ariadne said sympathetically. “That’s why I intend to follow Athene’s example.”
Medeia laughed sadly, getting to her feet again. “You say that now, little girl, but I wonder how long you’ll stick to it? I once thought that way myself, dedicating myself to the chastity appropriate for a priestess of Hecate.” She walked to the stream and dipped a large clay vessel into it, filling it with water. “But men can be so handsome and dashing, impossible to ignore or resist,” she continued as she brought the jar of water to the cauldron. “However, the only males I want the company of now are my sons. I won’t rest until I’ve brought them back. I have to perfect the spell so that it will work on the long dead. I have to. I have to bring them back.”
“Don’t you need their souls?” Atalanta pointed out. “Wasn’t that why it didn’t work with Pelias?”
“Of course I need their souls!” Medeia snapped, even as she poured the water into the cauldron. The water’s hiss on hitting the hot metal added further ferocity to her words. “And their souls wait right there!” she added, gesturing towards the place where the bones were awaiting her completed spell. “They’ve been so very patient with me. But even my sweet boys will grow impatient eventually. That’s why I can’t stop working on refining the spell. I crafted my stone guardian to keep people from interrupting me.”
“I’m sorry,” Eurysakes said sheepishly. “I didn’t know,” he added, as if he had been the one to destroy it!
Medeia returned to the stream and again filled her vessel with water. “Why would you fight such a foe? He was designed to frighten off those who would disturb me. Couldn’t you see how terrifying he was?”
“Who can resist fighting a fearsome foe that’s attacking them?” Atalanta replied in total confusion. “That’s like an invitation!”
And from there, Medeia seems to be merely a source of information about where they are and what's going on in the region, though they do hark back to her cynical words from time to time. (She's particularly sour (with good reason!) regarding the way that men of Hellas behave towards foreign women...) But then, several chapters later, as our trio are leaving Delphi and headed back towards Aiolia...
They rode onward without incident until it was past midday. By that time, they had returned to the coast road, which made riding in the chariot far more pleasant, between the soft sea breeze and the wide paving stones preventing all the bumping and jostling of the dirt roads. The incident didn’t start out as anything particularly unusual, just the approach of another chariot from the other direction. But that became odd as they drew nearer to it—even before they could see the passengers—because the chariot was not being pulled by horses, but by two deer, their antlers covered with shining gold, as if they had been dedicated to live on the grounds of one of Artemis’ shrines. In fact, Atalanta couldn’t help wondering if somehow the chariot was actually carrying the goddess herself.
Once they were near enough, she could see that it wasn’t: the driver was Medeia. As the two chariots slowed and came to a stop beside each other, Atalanta could see that standing in the chariot with Medeia were two boys, each holding onto the skirt of her robe. They looked to be somewhere between eight and twelve, if Atalanta’s guess was right, and they had coloration much like Medeia’s own.
“How regal you look!” Medeia exclaimed, smiling at Eurysakes. “That armor suits you well.”
“Th-thank you,” Eurysakes said, his voice wavering with uncertainty. In any other situation, Atalanta might have thought he didn’t believe her words, even though they were absolutely true, but Atalanta had a feeling that Eurysakes was probably so tongue-tied at the thought of what they were witnessing. And it had nothing to with harnessing deer to a chariot.
“Are these…your sons…?” Ariadne asked, though her throat sounded like it was choking on the words. And well it should be! How could those boys be her sons? They had been nothing but bones! Ancient skeletons!
Medeia’s smile widened, and she nodded. “Yes, these are my dear boys,” she confirmed, releasing the reins so she could stroke the hair of both children, “Memeros and Pheres. We’re on our way to Delphi to ask Apollo for a sign so that I can prove to the people of Iolcos that they’re the true heirs to the throne.”
“You actually succeeded?” Eurysakes asked, his voice aghast. “You brought them back to life?”
“Yes, at long last I had some aid with my terrible burden,” Medeia told them. “She was dressed as a priestess of Hera, so I presume the goddess finally decided to make up to me all the hardship she put me through previously. I sorely wish she would have done so while my husband still lived, but…I’m through with men in that regard. They’re much too dangerous.”
She even succeeds in getting her elder son crowned king in Iolcos, putting an end to the warfare over the throne! That's totally out of keeping with the myths, but...considering the novels have to accept the whole invasion of the Heraclidae thing (to the extent that it's actually prophesied in books six and seven) who's ruling Iolcos for the final few decades (I think I ended up setting the invasion about 25 years after the novels end) is probably not of much importance mythologically speaking, considering Iolcos is one of the Mycenaean centers that the archaeological evidence suggests really was destroyed at the end of the Bronze Age (though not due to invading Dorians, of course).
Anyhow, if you're interested in reading the rest of Medeia's appearance in the novel, The Golden God of Aiolia is available in interactive form on itch.io, and in text-only form on AO3. I recommend the interactive form for a lot of reasons, including the 30k word glossary. The novel is entirely free on both itch.io and AO3, and the interactive form can be read in the browser, though the browser version does take a while to load.
EDIT: I forgot! I also wanted to give a weird kind of shout-out to the character of Menesthios, Achilles' nephew (who I tend to assume is about his own age), who can appear in Are You A Better General Than Agamemnon? if you get Achilles killed, and is discussed in The Golden God of Aiolia, though he isn't technically in the novel. But I wanted to share his glossary entry for the interactive version of Golden God, because it just sort of tickles me.
No comments:
Post a Comment