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A young Athenian girl, Cresa, wandering one day alone in the fields is attacked by a brutal satyr. He drags her into a cave, violates her and then makes[120] his escape. She faints, and on awakening imagines that her assailant, who has disappeared as suddenly as he came, was a being from another world: she had seen him in the full sunlight; he is the sun-god Apollo. She tells no one of her adventure, conceals her condition and when her time comes, makes her way alone to the same cave. The child is born, wrapped by the girl mother in a piece of cloth, and placed, together with a golden bracelet as token, in a wicker basket. Then he is abandoned, and of his fate we hear no more.
About the same time at Delphi, in one of those periods of promiscuous sexual intercourse allowed and encouraged by temple ritual, one of the Delphian women becomes a mother, by a roving soldier of fortune named Xuthus. The latter leaves Delphi, ignorant of his paternity, and the woman is soon after appointed priestess of the temple. Her child, Ion, ostensibly a foundling, is reared within the temple precinct and regards the priestess as his foster mother. Meanwhile, the soldier Xuthus makes his way to Athens and marries Cresa. They have no children, and come to Delphi to ask advice of the oracle. The priestess recognises Xuthus as the father of her son, and so arranges matters---remaining herself unseen---that after a conversation with the boy he acknowledges him as his child, the result of the former hasty connexion.
But though Xuthus has now got a son, Cresa is still a childless wife. In passionate anger she reveals her long hidden secret, denounces the god as the author of her ruin, and with the help of a slave, attempts to poison Ion. The plot fails, she is pursued as a murderess by Ion and is on the point of being put to death. Then the priestess once more intervenes. She has heard Cresa's story---in some details not unlike though more lamentable than her own---and she determines to help a fellow sufferer. She has already given up her son to his father, and she now arranges a second trick whereby Cresa shall believe Ion to be her child. She has in her possession a baby's wicker cradle, a piece of cloth similar to that in which the dead baby was wrapped, and Cresa's own bracelet which has been used in the poisoning plot. By an ingenious subterfuge she makes all three appear to be the recognition tokens of Cresa's child. Cresa with joy, Ion with some painful doubts, accept the new relationship; and so the play ends.
The Ion and the Andromache both abound in incident: the Medea and the Alcestis depend more on a psychological interest. They are 'one-part' plays---the strong woman Medea and the weak man Admetus---and they have many points of resemblance. In the Medea a mother kills her children to save her own pride: in the Alcestis a mother[122] consents to death to save her children's position. Alcestis is a saint: Medea---to some people---a devil.
Medea is certainly not meant to be a pleasant character. She has laboured too long under a sense of injustice to be pleasant either in her thoughts or behaviour. 'You are always abusing the government;' Jason says to her, 'and so you will have to be ejected.' She expresses the revolt of women in its bitterest form. 'Of all things that draw breath,' she cries, 'and have understanding, we women are the most miserable; we are merely a thing that exists. To begin with, we must outbid each other to buy ourselves a lord and take a master of our body. 'Tis a risky business---we may get a knave or an honest man. To leave her husband brings a woman no honour, and we may not refuse our lords. When a woman comes to fresh ways and pastures new, she needs must be a prophet, for she has never been taught at home how best to use the man who now shares her bed. If we work our task aright, and our lord keeps house with us, and does not kick against the yoke, then our life is enviable. If not---better to be dead. A man, if he is vexed with the company of his household, goes out and purges away his heart's annoyance; but we women are compelled to look ever at one soul.'
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' geus 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[124] 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[125] 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 Thetetus (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. 'Thetetus will not mind: he is not at all hard to get on with.'
