Character and Punishment in Euripides’ Medea By Esraa Wasel By the end of Euripides’ Medea, the Colchian princess for whom the play is named has murdered her two young sons in a revenge scheme against her unfaithful husband, Jason, and escaped in a serpent drawn-carriage sent by the god Helios. She seems immune to punishment. This is not the first of the heinous crimes she has escaped. Those she has murdered include her brother (Prince Apsyrtus), King Pelias, Princess Glauke, and King Creon (Glauke’s father). The conclusion to Euripides’ play has long confounded scholars. Their confusion might stem from Medea’s failure – or refusal – to offer up an ending audiences (scholars included) find more intuitive or satisfying, one in which Medea is punished. An obvious consequence of so terrible a crime as child murder, audiences might feel, is that she must be brought to some kind of justice. As I will argue, reducing the audience’s desire for Medea’s punishment to a natural consequence of her admittedly awful actions absolves them of the responsibility to engage the Colchian princess in her complex entirety. The approach of this article will be to analyze Medea through the jurisprudential lens of character theory, which tries to understand the extent to which “the moral assessment of an offender’s character is a necessary prerequisite of criminal liability and punishment” (Mousourakis 51). Doing so allows us to challenge the audience’s desire to punish Medea by asking important questions: If Medea’s actions justify her punishment, can the same be said of her moral character? To what extent are her actions reflections of her moral character? And vice versa? Most importantly, by what precepts do we assess Medea’s character if it is (in whatever ways and to whatever degree) distinguishable from her actions? Especially this last question, which challenges audiences to engage Medea’s story in its full sympathetic 28
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