And, of course, he got the golden fleece with Medea’s help, as is so common in myth. She helped him on the understanding that he would marry her and take her with him when he left Colchus’ golden fleece in hand. And so he did. Like the Amazons, Medea is an extremely powerful woman who does not hesitate to use violence against males when she needs to, she’s not a warrior like the amazons there’s no indication that medea ever enters into battle directly rather she uses magic and sorcery to assert her power.
But like the amazons when she has to when need arises she is quite capable of direct overt physical violence against males the most obvious and horrifying example is that when she and jason are fleeing colchus when they’re on the argo sailing away from colchus and Medea’s father, the rightful owner of the Golden Fleece, is giving chase to them in his own ship. Medea delays her father by killing her little brother Absyrtus, cutting his body into small pieces, and throwing the pieces overboard one by one so that her father has to slow down and gather up the pieces of his son so that he can give the boy a proper funeral. Medea knows that this will slow her father’s progress down enough that she and Jason can get away.
So she is perfectly capable of using horrible physical violence against males, even males of her own family, when it suits her purposes. And like the Amazons, Medea is no less desirable, no less sexually desirable, for the fact of being frighteningly powerful and willing to use violence. Jason marries her, and begets at least two children with her. After her marriage with Jason falls apart, for reasons I’ll get back to in just a second, she becomes the wife of Aegis, as we’ve already discussed. You’ll remember that she tries to kill Theseus when Theseus first presents himself to his father Aegis in Athens.
So Medea parallels the Amazons in coming from the area of the Black Sea, in being a very powerful woman who is both capable of and willing to use violence and in being no less sexually desirable to Greek men for the fact of her power and her violence. There’s one other way in which she parallels the Amazons and that is in the fact that she kills her own sons. Now, her motivation for doing so and the time at which she does so is very different from the Amazons. You’ll remember that the Amazons kill their baby boys because they want daughters and not sons and they kill the boys or get rid of the boys as infants. Medea, at least as Euripides presents her story, wants her children and even seems to love her children until Jason decides to leave her for another woman.
And it’s when Jason decides to set her aside and marry a young Greek woman that Medea kills her sons. And she does this within the logic of her own story, specifically to make Jason suffer. She knows that the worst thing she can do to him is deprive him of his sons, kill his children. And so despite the fact that they’re also her children, the desire to make Jason suffer outweighs in her mind her maternal affection for her sons. So she kills the sons to make Jason suffer.
But this act can also be seen as reasserting Medea’s Amazon-like status as she leaves her marriage to a Greek hero, an anomalous marriage for a foreign woman and particularly for an Amazonian type woman. As she leaves her marriage to the Greek Jason, Medea reasserts her Amazon-like status by doing what an Amazon mother would have done in the first place, killing her two male children. So there are many ways in which Medea follows the patterns of the Amazons and also reverses completely the pattern of a Greek woman. The most unimaginable thing a Greek woman could do, I think it’s safe to say, would be to kill her children, particularly her male children. This puts Medea absolutely outside the pale of normal female human behavior in the Greek view of things. Well, we might say in anyone’s view of things.
Now, there is one more category of mythic females to look at very closely, as well as the Amazons and Medea, and that is the very large number of threatening female monsters who show up in many Greek myths.
I’m not saying that all monsters are female. There are certainly many male monsters. You might remember triple-bodied Gerion, for instance, whom Heracles had to encounter in his tenth labor. But there are a lot of monsters who are females, and they seem to play some particular or some specific roles associated with their female nature.
There are various different types of these monsters, but the two most important types are female monsters who eat men. Scylla, whom Odysseus encounters during his wanderings, would be an example of this. Scylla is a multi-headed, multi-bodied monster. She has six heads, six upper bodies. She’s a snake or snakes from the waist down. She lives in a cave halfway up a cliff when ships sail too close to her, she leans out of the cave with all six of her upper bodies, grabs men off the decks of the ship and eats them alive in front of their comrades. So she’s a particularly threatening, frightening and nasty female monster. The Sphinx is another example of a female monster.
She’s normally shown as having the body of a lion or of some other beast sometimes and a woman’s face and upper body, sometimes wings as well. And of course, as we saw in discussing Oedipus, she kills and devours men. There are also monsters who kill men but don’t eat them, who are not cannibalistic monsters. Medusa, encountered by the hero Perseus, whom unfortunately I haven’t had time to talk about in this course, is perhaps the most famous example of a monster who kills but does not eat.
Medusa is a Gorgon, that is she’s one of three mythic female monsters with snakes for hair whose gaze turns men to stone. Just looking at her face literally petrifies anyone, well man or animal, who looks at her. Now one very interesting point about such monsters is that very frequently they became monsters in the first place because of some kind of sexual transgression, on their part or on the part of some male who encountered them. Let’s take Scylla as an example.
Scylla, according to Ovid, was loved by a sea god named Glaucus. Glaucus was in turn the beloved of the goddess Circe, the same sorceress goddess whom Odysseus encounters in the Odyssey. Because Glaucus loved Scylla, Circe was jealous of Scylla, who started life as an extremely beautiful young woman. And Circe therefore turned Scylla into a monster specifically to punish her for attracting Glaucus. So Scylla’s monsterhood was a result of the sexual attraction she had exerted as a beautiful young woman on the sea god Glaucus.
Perhaps even more horrifyingly, Medusa, again according to Ovid, becomes a monster because Poseidon raped Medusa in Athena’s temple. And Athena therefore punished Medusa, the victim of the crime, by making her a monster with snakes for hair. Now, in both of those stories, well, very clearly, we see again the idea that intentions, or in this case even actions, are irrelevant. It’s the result that seems to count. Scylla did not actually do anything. She simply attracted Glaucus.
Medusa certainly did not do anything. She was Poseidon’s victim. And yet both of those young women are punished by goddesses for the very fact of their sexual attractiveness. They’re punished by the goddesses by being turned into monsters who kill men. I don’t think we have to delve too deep into psychological theory to see a connection there between sexual attractiveness and danger, between the woman who is sexually attractive and the woman who devours. All of that kind of psychological anxiety seems very clearly to be here in this story in which innocent young women whose only crime is being beautiful become devouring monsters who literally destroy men.
Now, there’s one fascinating example of a female monster in Greek myth who is not particularly threatening, despite being associated with snakes and despite being encountered by a hero. This is the Scythian echidna, a word that’s often translated viper woman or snake woman, as described by the Greek historian Herodotus. This is an unusual story in many ways, not least that it shows up in the first work of Greek history, rather than in a work having overtly to do with myth.
Heracles encounters this snake woman as he is driving Gerion’s cattle home from the far west. He encounters her in Scythia, and that’s bizarre to begin with. If Gerion is in the far west and Heracles is driving the cattle home from the west to Greece, I have never been able to determine what on earth he’s doing in Scythia. But there he is, up by the Black Sea.
He wakes up one morning, Heracles wakes up and discovers that his mares are missing, the mares who have been driving his chariot. He goes looking for them and finds living in a cave a snake woman whom Herodotus says is a woman from the waist up and a snake or snakes from the waist down. This snake woman tells Heracles that she has his mares and she will give them back to him if he’ll have sex with her.