Aristophane's "Lysistrata" & Euripides' "Medea": pre-class thoughts

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Today we looked at two texts which presented how women can change the world when they exercise either extreme passion or extreme reason.

These texts take very different approaches to the subject of passion and reason. 

In the comedy Lysistrata, the women (led by Lysistrata) use reason to control the men's passion for war, by knowing that their passion for their wives would overcome it.  In Medea, one woman's passionate grief over being cuckolded causes her to kill the royal family and her own children, only to have this horrifying behaviour somewhat vindicated by the gods.

As shown by the graphic above, Lysistrata appears to be a very popular modern play. The cliché  "there would be no more war if women controlled the world" may have not have been started by this ancient play, but it definitely embodies it.  What must have been somewhat of a Twelfth-Night style lark in ancient days (the idea of a network of women rationally getting together to take over the government) has become a possibility in modern days, even as the characterisation of female and male roles have begun to overlap. 

The character of Lysistrata stands out as she is the only person in Greece who is not a slave to her physical passions.  Clearly, she is super-human: outstanding in both the male and female worlds.  She is undoubtedly a rare and special female character, who has lasted through the millenniums.  Still, I had a difficult time getting past the crassness of the play, which Ruden translated in spirit.  The language indicates the gravity with which the audience would have taken this female hero - that is, the crass language mocks even the idea of Lysistrata as a reality.

Medea is thematically very different - a traditional mythic tragedy.  I was surprised - I don't know the story of Jason and the Golden Fleece, but I know of it and imagine it to be a heroic tale like the Odyssey. I associate it with children's bedtime adventure tales, but that must be a Disney version of the story.  This Greek tale is much darker.  Here, Euripides shows that "hell hath no fury like a woman scorned".  By today's standards, the fact that Medea kills her own children is proof that she is evil, although in the text, it is a sign of madness and revenge. The idea of inheritance and lineage is important to this audience, Medea is not only killing her own children, but also killing Jason's heirs (his only heirs at this point).  The horror of this would not be lost on the audience however, as the Nurse and the chorus are appropriately appalled at the death of the innocents.  With this in mind, I am having a difficult time understanding Medea's ultimate support in the eyes of the gods, as shown by her exit on the chariot. There must be a key factor in the text that I'm missing,  because I simply cannot see Jason's disloyalty, manipulation, and oath-breaking being of greater value than kin-slaying, especially of a mother's cold-blooded murder of her children.  I know that the gods are fickle, but there must be a divine-law prohibiting this!

Works Cited:

Aristophanes. Lysistrata. Trans. Sarah Ruden. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003. Print.

Euripides. Medea. Trans. Diane Arnson Svarlien. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2008. Print.