Introduction

Ideas about the appropriate roles of men and women change a lot over time, as do those about sex in general. What is unthinkable in one society and at one time, becomes normal in another. The tendency is, of course, to believe that we now have it right. But this is a naïve view, and one which makes no effort to see beyond the rules imposed by a particular society at a particular time: our society, our time. Understanding needs to proceed beyond this, and particularly needs to pass beyond the politics of a particular time and situation, in order to achieve a perception of the liberating concepts of the universal, which alone afford a landscape that really does nourish the spirit. 

Without this effort of imagination to embrace the universal, the understanding remains like a fly trapped in a bottle. The fly has no concept of glass, so can't get out of its prison, and does not understand why it can't get out. It keeps banging its head on the same invisible substance. In the same way the understanding of the individual is caged by prejudices which he cannot see, but which have been fixed early in his mind from the society in which he develops. His understanding is then only a reflection of the prejudices he holds with unthinking conviction. His intelligence is used simply to defend these prejudices, the very beliefs that are stopping him from escaping from his cage.

Our objective is to free the fly from the bottle.

Aspects of the universal are described variously and very poetically in the stories about the Gods and heroes of the ancient Greeks. In particular, the myths enshrine an understanding of the world which sees beyond the particular individual and recognises that Ideas are the reality and that Substance (material existence) is a transient phenomenon which expresses the Idea in various forms. The expression of this play of Ideas in Substance is what constitutes Poetry: it is both universal and contradictory, and it is not susceptible to rational organisation. The effort which seeks to reduce the myths to an ordered framework in which there are coherent relationships between the different Gods is part of the process of understanding, but can never be completed: there are always different versions, incoherent plots, contradictions and confusions, all of which are allowed to stand side by side. The link between them is not rationality, but poetry.

1. The Story of Medea : from the play Medea by Euripides : 5th century BC.

The story of Medea holds a variety of opportunities for Euripides to examine the roles of men and women, to examine also the particular circumstances of Medea herself, who is an 'immigrant' into the Greek community, having originated in Colchis, at the Eastern end of the Black Sea. For the Greeks this was effectively the edge of the world.

Medea has assisted Jason in stealing the Golden Fleece from her own father, king Aeetes, and, in their subsequent flight, killed her own brother and chopped up his body, throwing pieces into the sea to slow down the pursuing army. She has also helped him to revenge himself on the aged Pelias by getting Pelias' daughters to chop up their father, having persuaded them that it was possible to rejuvenate him by this method. She has borne him two sons, but at the opening of the drama, Jason has decided to desert her for the princess Glauce, daughter of Creon, king of Corinth.

The Story of Medea : Quotes

She's all obedience around Jason, and in marriage that's the thing that is most needed. A wife who is obedient to her husband's will.
Euripides Medea Nurse of Medea 13

Old love is ousted by new love.
Euripides Medea Tutor to Nurse 77

Show me an innocent man. Everybody loves himself more than his neighbour. These boys are nothing to their father : he's in love.
Euripides Medea Tutor to Nurse 85

A queen is used to giving orders, not obeying them; and her rage once roused will not be subdued easily.
Euripides Medea Nurse of Medea 119

What if your husband has somebody new -  that's nothing unusual - why get angry about it?
Euripides Medea Chorus 156

You will have to admit that, of all creatures on earth that live or crawl, we women are the worst off. After we have bought a husband for an extravagant sum, we have to accept that he is the possessor of our body. This is to pile one wrong on top of another. Then we have to ask anxiously : is he any good? For women, divorce is not acceptable and the idea of refusing a man what he wants, impossible. That's even more the case with a foreign woman, arriving in a strange land where the customs and laws are unknown to her. She is in sore need of some sort of magic to find out how to get by, how to treat the man whose bed she shares. And if we are successful in this, by skill and hard work, and our husband does not complain under the yoke of marriage, our life can be good. Otherwise, it would be better to die. If a man grows tired of his wife, he can go out and find solace elsewhere, but we wives are forced to look to only one man. And then they tell us that we are lucky, that we live free from danger, while they have to go out to battle! Fools! I'd rather be in the front line a dozen times than bear one child.
Euripides Medea Medea 231

We were born women - useless for honest purposes, but skilled in all kinds of evil.
Euripides Medea Medea 406

The water of the sacred river
Flows uphill. Tradition, order,
Laws are all reversed, o'erturned.
Deceit is now normal in men, and oaths,
The Gods' dishonour. Fables will now
Reverse the people's ideas about women,
And a time will come when woman's name
Will be revered: that old discordant
Slander shall no more apply.
The bearded bards of old, who sang
Of faithless women, fall silent now.
Phoebus, Lord of the tuneful Muse,
Never bestowed the lyric gift
On a woman's understanding.
Otherwise, we'd find our themes
For verse, and counter with our epics,
Telling tales about the deeds
Of faithless men. Oh Time is old,
And in his store of tales, men
Are figured every bit as base as
Women.
Euripides Medea Chorus 414

As far as you women are concerned, if everything's OK with your sex-life, you're alright, but once that goes wrong, everything turns sour. If only children could be got somehow without involving women! If only there were no women, life would be so simple.
Euripides Medea Jason to Medea 570

We women, I won't say that we are bad by nature, but we are what we are. You, Jason, should not copy our bad example, or try to emulate us. If you do, you are simply returning folly for folly.
Euripides Medea Medea to Jason 888

Note : Medea is here dissembling to appease Jason. She wants to lull him into a false sense of confidence before carrying out her plan to murder Glauce, Creon and Jason's (and her own) two sons.

Women are women, tears come naturally to us.
Euripides Medea Medea to Jason 928

There was a time when I imagined that you would care for me in my old age, that you would be there to mourn over me and wrap my dead body for burial. I thought, 'How people will envy me my sons!' But that sweet thought has faded now. Once parted from you, my life will be full of anguish. You will no longer look on your mother with those dear eyes.
Euripides Medea Medea to her sons 1031

Often have I argued a point,
Become more subtle, heated, insistent
Than is perhaps allowed to a woman;
Though if you think about it, women
Also have intelligence.
Yes, for that is also part
Of our nature - not all of us
For sure, but some, a few, a handful -
We also think, reflect and imagine.
Euripides Medea Chorus 1082

Medea sends a poisoned gown and coronet by way of her two sons to Glauce. The poison burns the flesh of the princess when she puts it on. She is unable to take it off, and she dies an agonising death. Creon, who rashly embraces her in her death throes, is also poisoned and dies. Jason comes to find Medea and discovers that she has butchered their two sons. Medea scorns him and flies away in a chariot drawn by two dragons.

2. The Story of Hero and Leander : from the long poem The Heroides of Ovid : 1st century AD

The Emperor Augustus banished Ovid to Thomis on the Black Sea, the west side of the Black Sea, so not quite the edge of the world, but far enough away from culture and civilisation to make Ovid's last years miserable. It is not always noticed that those who pursue power do so at the expense of poetry, and that the trade off is a bad one, though there are plentiful examples to prove it. Poetry is the breath of life: who, with this perspective in mind, would trade if for money or power? Besides, if the poet is going to speak for everybody, he must of necessity stand outside the 'social' system.

Ovid's great work is the Metamorphoses which recounts some six hundred myths of the classical world with an authority and sense of poetry which stands behind Marlowe and Shakespeare's later achievement. The Heroides contains a series of letters from the women of myth to their lovers (and some replies from their lovers to them).

The story of Hero and Leander is of a love-at-first-sight between two young people who live either side of the Hellespont, a stretch of water about four miles wide, which George Gordon, Lord Byron swam in 1810 in imitation of Leander. Leander makes the crossing several times to spend the night with Hero, but ultimately pays the price for his nocturnal adventures.

The Story of Hero and Leander : Quotes

Come! That I might have in fact the greetings
You sent to me in writing. All waiting is tedious;
Forgive the confession: I cannot wait with patience
For love. We burn with the self same desire, but I
Am the weaker, for man is stronger than woman, you know,
Stronger in body and stronger in spirit. So delay,
And you might kill me.

You men can go out hunting,
Or take up farming upon some pleasant ground
Or go to market, attend a wrestling match,
Or slip a bridle on your horse's neck,
Draw a fish or snare a bird and then,
At the end of the day, relax with a fine glass of wine.
But I am denied these pastimes, I can only
Love, and what remains, I do, I love,
And love far more than you could ever love
In return.

The text and the translations are the copyright of Adnax Publications 2005

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