Paintings on fourth-century B.C. Greek pots can be an outcome of the interaction between plays and visual art, as exemplified by the ones relating to Euripides’ Medea and Hippolytus, which present a critical reflection of the Athenian audience’s response to the tragedies of their time. The vessels provide evidence suggesting a strong connection of Greek plays with religion – specifically, the admiration of Medea’s divinity and wizardry, the establishment of cult, and the acknowledgement of deities’ intervention as the impetus for Hippolytus’s tragedy. It is also manifest, however, that these Athenian interpretations often differ from the commonly accepted understanding in modern times, which puts more emphasis on love and marriage as themes of these plays. Therefore, Greek vase-paintings, associating literature with art, provide an intriguing narrative on how perceptions of Greek tragic themes are shaped by contemporary culture and how they change throughout history.
In the modern era, tragedies like Medea and Hippolytus are likely associated with themes of sex, marriage, and foreign identity, and, in some cases, are established with certainty as portrayals of marital conflicts. Conversely, the allusion to religion is rarely seen, whether in theater performances, online popular culture, or more scholarly interpretations. At first, modern performance offers a direct illustration of how directors and the audience alike shape the understanding of Greek plays in the theater. For example, a production of Medea by the National Theatre of Scotland that premiered in 2022 describes the play as “the classic drama of the eternal battle of the sexes”, highlighting Medea’s struggle with Jason, her abandonment, and the “hold-your-breath heartbreak and revenge”.[1] Dominic Cooke, director of the 2022 performance at Soho Place, considers that “at its core, Medea is about the battle between archetypal male and female ideas of power”, and aims to display how a female character refuses to obey male characters and their patriarchal values.[2] Similar themes are also found in the Deutsches Theater production of Medea. Stimmen, written by Christa Wolf. Telling the story from Medea’s perspective, the director reveals “how she had to leave her country, discovered a horrendous crime, asked inconvenient questions, and how a mesh of defamations and lies drove her out of the palace”.[3] Furthermore, when Medea was adapted to Hebei bangzi, a genre of traditional Chinese opera, it is celebrated for the rich depictions of characters’ psychology and personalities, enhancing, for the modern Chinese audience, the impression that Greek culture is characterized by discussions of gender, emotions, and ethics.[4]
Theater performance of Hippolytus, too, reflects a reinterpretation of Euripides’s play in the modern context. As an example, the summary of a version of the National Theatre of Greece performed in the 2010s describes the play as an interwoven story of the misunderstanding between mortals and the punishment from immortals.[5] A Spanish production directed by Emilio del Valle, likewise, presents the tragedy as a struggle between men – namely, “the dilemmas between passion and logic, lawless love, oestrus and its tragic consequences”.[6] Others, to a greater extent, attribute the cause of the tragedy to Hippolytus alone, remarking that it is “being tied to an oath of silence that prevents him from saving his own life”.[7] Besides, adaptations have often portrayed goddesses not as unapproachable or mysterious figures but instead as characters in possession of intense emotions, as mortals are. Though the performances, unlike Medea, are explicitly religious, the role of religion is typically considered as a bridge between men and deities, now portrayed as manlike. This notion can be observed in the production by a theater group named Actors of Dionysus, which depicted Aphrodite as a mortal servant in order to help the modern audience understand the original religious context, according to the production team.[8] However, as Aphrodite and Artemis acquire more human characteristics, the difference between the immortals and the mortals diminishes. What follows is the recognition of religion not as a belief, as the Athenians did, but as a natural constituent of the plot.
Apart from depicting marriage, sex, and revenge in the conventional way, modern adaptations of Medea in particular often address contemporary issues, among which is gender equality. In the early twentieth century, Harley Granville Barker directed his interpretation of the tragedy in England and, through it, advocated women’s suffrage in a time when voices of opposition were prevalent.[9] In 1991, Tony Harrison’s version, Medea: A Sex-War Opera, depicted Medea as a heroine and Jason as a ferocious villain. The production presents women’s predicament in the modern world from a new perspective, by emphasizing Medea’s normality and Jason’s insanity.[10] Evidently, the feminine role of Medea has become a subject for further exploration throughout modern times and has obtained increasing attention amidst calls for women’s rights.
Modern playwrights, in addition, appear to be especially fond of modifying Medea to suit a context of immigration and colonialism, drawing inspiration from Medea’s foreign (or even barbarian) identity. Luis Aflaro’s Mojada, A Medea in Los Angeles, for example, is centered on the issue of illegal female immigrants in the United States and expresses concerns for women’s rights.[11] Other productions, including The Hungry Woman, A Mexican Medea[12], Além de Rio (Medea)[13], Asie[14] and Demea[15], also put much emphasis on Medea’s foreignness and use her as a colonial symbol. Set in different parts of the world – Mexico, Brazil, France, and South Africa – these plays all examine the status of women under colonialism and while suffering racism. This ancient tragedy has thus been employed as a means for rallying against discrimination and injustice, a theme to which no attention had been drawn in the original production.
Modern literary comprehension of Greek plays resembles popular culture in many ways – it tends to underscore the theme of romance and sex but rarely discusses religion, which was presumably the core concern of the Athenian audience. This is evident in common online resources, which not only reflect the thoughts of popular audiences but may also shape how modern readers, specifically students, interpret the literature. For example, Wikipedia describes that Euripides’s Medea “exhibits the inner emotions of passion, love, and vengeance” and is “centered on Medea’s calculated desire for revenge against her unfaithful husband”, which readily leads to the impression that the tragedy has little connection with religion.[16] Likewise, LitCharts summarizes the play into themes such as “exile”, “the roles of men and women”, “justice and natural law”, and “duty”, whereas religion or cult is not included.[17] In an article about Hippolytus, Wikipedia explains how the tragedy embodies “two aspects of the human spirit in conflict: one aspect is love…the second aspect is what the play refers to as sophrosyne [moderation]”, stressing human nature over the roles of the goddesses.[18] Britannica, too, only refers to the deities as the representation of “sexual passion” and its opposite, offering little description of its religious significance.[19] Indeed, the picture painted in scholarly understanding, unfortunately, is not particularly dissimilar. In the introduction of Oxford University Press’s Medea, Michael Collier’s statement that “as exotic as Medea is, she is still a woman; as unusual as her story is, it is nevertheless the story of a marriage……” clearly shows that despite the abundance of other themes, sex and marriage are the most prominent characteristics of the Greek play for some modern scholars.[20] On the other hand, the introduction to Hippolytus acknowledges that “Hippolytus contains the hard knowledge that life without religion is as impossible as life with it” and that “religious power enters the play from two fountainheads, Aphrodite and Artemis, who appear high over the stage”.[21] Although the association of Hippolytus with religion is more observable than Medea, most scholars tend to believe that Euripides utilizes religion as a tool to exhibit “the characters’ inability to penetrate and understand each other’s inner lives”. In this way, religion is only what helps with the narration of the story, that “if in the manner of modern playwrights he did not have the gods as facilitators, we would be denied this play’s clairvoyance as to the reality of its characters’ inner lives”. Such interpretation, nevertheless, does not explicitly accept the religious nature of the Greek plays. It views religion as a feature less significant compared to themes of love and vengeance and dismisses the possibility of it forming the core of tragedies.
However, paintings found on ancient Greek pots reveal that the religious nature of tragedies was widely accepted by the Athenian audience. In other words, the Athenians perceived plays such as Medea and Hippolytus not only as a form of art, as the modern audience does, but also as a representation of their religious belief. While tragedies observe human feelings of love and hatred, the celebration of the prominence of the gods perhaps played a larger role in ancient times. A scene from Hippolytus painted on an Apulian calyx-krater, dating back to approximately 330 B.C., displays the story in two separate registers.[22] On the upper level, a group of gods are seated in a relaxed manner: Aphrodite and Eros, the goddess and god respectively of love and sex, Athena, the protector of Athens, and Hermes, who acts as the messenger of the divine world to the mortals. Underneath the gods are three human figures, who are likely Hippolytus, Phaedra, and the nurse. An almost identical layout is found on a volute-krater that dates back to around 340 B.C., a vase painting on which the deities and humans are also separated into two levels, albeit with more figures.[23] The group of gods includes not only Aphrodite, Eros, and Athena, but also Poseidon, father of Theseus, and Apollo, who most likely replaces Artemis. The scene of the mortal world, however, is less peaceful than that of the previous depiction: Hippolytus, cursed by Poseidon and avenged by Aphrodite and Phaedra, struggles to control his chariots while the horses are terrified by the bull. A modern audience might expect Aphrodite and Poseidon to react to Hippolytus’s imminent wound, but surprisingly this is not true. The gods above are having conversations, looking into each other’s eyes and paying little attention to the dramatic scene below. The indifference of the deities enhances the fact that the two levels are not at all connected – the gods are not concerned about human events or mortals’ sufferings, and, similarly, humans could hardly seek assistance from divinity. However, the paintings do not intend to show that the gods are unrelated to Hippolytus’s tragedy. On the contrary, they display the gods as the driving force behind tragedies, affirming the notion that the gods simply exist and, after deciding individuals’ fate, rarely intervene. Unlike modern interpretations, the theme of divinity departs from the plot itself and is represented as a reality – it is, essentially, the belief of the playwright, the audience, and the vase-painter.
Occasionally, the gods portrayed on pots are not entirely associated with the scenes. For example, the depiction of Medea and her chariot, found on a Lucanian hydria in around 400 B.C., includes Aphrodite and Eros, who are not present in Euripides’s Medea.[24] However, the presence of the two gods can easily be justified as they are more than appropriate for a story of sex and revenge. Another possible explanation is that the smaller figure could have been one of the Erinyes, but this can equally be understood as a representation of Medea’s fury. The two deities present, regardless of their actual identities, show precisely how religious the tragedy was perceived as being – in fact, their presence is quite unnecessary for viewers to understand the painting as part of Medea’s story. It may be that the presence of the gods simply follows the Greek artistic tradition of depicting deities next to human figures in tragic scenes, but it must be acknowledged that the formation of such a tradition is inseparable from a highly religious culture.
Furthermore, there is evidence that Greek tragedies often relate to the establishment of cults—a fact that is almost entirely neglected by the modern audience but is meanwhile strikingly exhibited in Medea. There is, in fact, a direct piece of evidence from Pausanias’s Description of Greece that the ancient Greeks performed rites for Medea’s children. Pausanias offers a description of the Corinthians’ cult, that into the Well of Glauce a Corinthian “threw herself in the belief that the water would be a cure for the drugs of Medea. Above this well has been built what is called the Odeum, beside which is the tomb of Medea’s children. Their names were Mermerus and Pheres……but as their death was violent and illegal, the young babies of the Corinthians were destroyed by them until……yearly sacrifices were established in their honor and a figure of Terror was set up”.[25] By the time of Pausanias (around the second century B.C.), there had already been a custom in Corinth of making sacrifices for Medea’s murdered children in order to protect their own children. Ancient vase paintings, then, strengthen this description by showing the Greek audience’s fascination with Medea’s mystical power. There is, for instance, an Apulian bell-krater from around 350 B.C. that depicts Creusa, daughter of Creon, being poisoned by Medea’s gifts.[26] In the scene, Creusa is on fire, with her headdress and robe ablaze, while those around her flee in terror. It is also notable that the Erinyes hover above the figures, signifying Medea’s furious revenge. The selection of this particular scene, instead of one portraying Medea and Jason in conflict, probably suggests that people were obsessed with the magic power, or even wizardry, that Medea possessed. This idea becomes yet more convincing in scenes of Medea’s chariot, which is often surrounded by snakes. The painting of one Lucanian calyx-krater even depicts Medea, on her golden chariot, in the center of a sun with rays of glorious light radiating outwards.[27] The colors are so dazzling that the painting naturally arouses the feeling of Medea’s semi-divinity. At the same time, Jason appears to be weak and pathetic, a sharp contrast with Medea who is afloat in the air. Apparently, the depiction is intended to be a celebration of Medea’s strength and holiness. The painter’s intention can be further testified by a subtle – yet crucial – detail: that the corpses of the children are laid on an altar, pointing to the establishment of a cult.
In summary, the modern understanding of Medea and Hippolytus, tends to focus on themes of love, marriage, and sex. Modern adaptations of the plays, prevalent online interpretations, and even scholarly works often conclude that the tragedies are in essence portrayals of rich human emotions. Though this commonly held notion does reflect some important themes in the plays, it fails to associate Euripides’s plays with their Greek religious context. Vase paintings on ancient Greek pots, which provide an account of the interaction between the plays and their Athenian audience, suggest that religion plays a role that is generally neglected by the modern audience. Apart from being a significant theme, religion should also be recognized as an inherent part of the plays, such that the ancient Greeks brought it from the theater to their real life, as exemplified by the cult in Medea. While the context of Greek tragedies changes throughout different historical periods, it may be beneficial to redirect the modern audience’s attention to religious themes in future performances of Medea and Hippolytus. The reason that religion is often neglected in productions today is precisely that it is considered as less relevant to modern society – gender, on the other hand, is strongly relevant and is therefore stressed. Yet, while religion itself is not the primary concern, having a nuanced perspective on the intersection between gender and religion remains crucial for the modern audience. The issue of this connection often lies at the hearts of modern political contentions – for instance, religion is often used as an argument in the clash between the Democrats and the Republicans on the issues of abortion and gay marriage, as well as in the debate on whether religious individuals have the right to deny service to gay couples. Thus, a theatrical emphasis on religion, presumably, would offer people a new perspective to examine these present issues.
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