Feminism in Greek Literature from Homer to Aristotle

by F. A. Wright

This isolation was the worst feature in a Greek woman’s life: to a clever woman it was soul-destroying, and Medea is incomparably cleverer than any man in the play. The scenes where she forces the two old men, ‘King’ Creon and ‘King’ Ægeus to do, not what they want, but what she wants, are masterpieces of satirical humour. With her husband her cleverness fails her: she is too angry to reason: she hisses her scorn and foams her disgust. Jason keeps cool and so far has the best of the argument.

‘You certainly are a clever woman,’ he says, ‘but you are only a woman. I am a very fine figure of a man: you fell in love with me; and it was only natural.’

Jason is in many ways like Admetus. Both are lovers of outward show and have a great regard for men’s opinion. Both say with some emphasis that a family of two children is quite large enough. Both have the same opinion of women; and this is how Jason concludes—‘Men ought to be able to get their children from some other source: the female sex should not exist: and then there would be no trouble for mankind.’

Such sentiments naturally fail to please either the chorus or Medea. The comment of the chorus is, ‘You have made the best of your case, but still, surprising though it may seem to you, I think you are acting unfairly in betraying the woman who has shared your bed.’ Medea gives full vent to her anger: she contemptuously refuses the help in money which Jason says he is ‘ready to give with an ungrudging hand,’ and at last scornfully dismisses him—‘Be off with you. You are yearning for the new girl you have broken in, all the time that you linger outside her house. Go and play the bridegroom with her.’

But in the next scene Medea has mastered her temper and pretends to submit. ‘We are but what we are,’ she says, ‘just women. You must not take pattern by the evil nor answer folly with foolishness. I give way: I acknowledge that I was wrong.’ Jason is patronising and friendly in his answer: ‘I approve your present attitude, and, indeed, I do not blame your past behaviour: it is only to be expected: woman is a thing of moods.’ He consents to ask his new wife for a remission of the children’s exile. ‘Certainly I will, and I fancy that I shall persuade her.’ ‘Yes, indeed, you will,’ Medea says, ‘if she is one of us: all women are alike. But I will help you once again in this enterprise, too.’ And as in the past she had given him an antidote against the fire-breathing bulls, so now she gives him the fiery robe which is to destroy the young bride.

Then comes the crucial scene of the play: Medea kills her children and we are faced by the problem—when is killing murder?

A mother who kills her child is to us a dreadful figure, and the death penalty is invoked against the deserted girl-mother: no punishment is inflicted upon the father, perhaps because no punishment can be adequate. Greek law and custom went further and in a different direction. The father was allowed to decide whether the child whom his wife had brought forth should be reared. Child killing in this fashion, when done by the father, was not a crime, and the exposure of children after birth was a common, and by no means held to be a reprehensible act. Plato, indeed, thinks it a fit subject for a jest in the Theætetus (p. 161). ‘Do you think,’ says Socrates, ‘that it is right in all cases to rear your own child? Will you be very angry if we take it—the argument—from you, as we might take a baby from a young mother with her first child?’ ‘Oh, no,’ answers the other. ‘Theætetus will not mind: he is not at all hard to get on with.’

The mother who did mind was regarded as a difficult person, but whether she minded or not, decision lay with the father—as we see in Terence’s play, The Self Tormentor. There the wife says to her husband, ‘You remember, don’t you, when I was pregnant, you told me emphatically that if the child should be a girl you would refuse to rear it.’ The child proved to be a girl, and so without further question it was got rid of. Male children were more valuable, and unless the circumstances of their birth were exceptional, as in the case of Paris and Œdipus, they were not often exposed.

There is this further point: what differentiates killing from murder is the question of risk. You kill, you do not murder, when you risk your own life. A soldier is not a murderer, and in sport a fox-hunter is a man of different type from a pigeon shooter. Now the Athenian women were not Amazons, but they fought a battle no less dangerous. ‘They say of us,’ cries Medea, ‘that we live a life free from danger within doors, while men are fighting like heroes with the spear. But men are fools. Rather would I stand three times in the battle line of shields than bear one child.’ A mother had already risked her life in bringing a child to birth; is she not far more justified than the father in ending that child’s life, if such be her will? Moreover, children are the pledges of marriage, the securities given for a business arrangement. Is it right that the party who wilfully breaks the compact should retain possession of the securities?

Such I believe are some of the questions that Euripides meant to suggest. It is no answer to them to say that it is an unnatural crime for a mother to kill her children, for it is equally unnatural and criminal for a father, and yet ancient fathers killed their children without compunction and without blame.