3. 11.1 Medea kills her son. Red-figure
amphora. Ixion Painter. 340–320 BCE.
Louvre Museum, Paris, France. Erich
Lessing / Art Resource, NY, ART23396.
Five Traits of Greek Heroines
• Heroines share the same five point definition of
heroes:
• Heroines were women who had died
• They performed extraordinary deeds that
may or may not be moral
• They die prematurely, violently, or
mysteriously
• They were worshiped at their gravesites
• They obtained a form of immortality
through song and cult
• There were still differences between the
heroes and heroines
5. 11.2 Opheltes is strangled by a snake as his nurse,
Hypsipyle, watches. Corinthian sarcophagus. Second
century CE. Museum of Ancient Corinth, Corinth
Greece. Courtesy of the Ephorate of Antiquities of
Corinth.
• The story of Charilla illustrates one type
of Greek heroine
• Her actions are not exemplary, but she
still had the opportunity to bring
suffering to Delphi, and therefore had
to be appeased with ritual
• Children could also be worshiped as
heroes, often because they died
prematurely or violently
Greek Heroines
• Psamathe and her son Linus both die prematurely and are worshiped as
heroine and baby hero by the Greeks in order to prevent Poene, an
avenging spirit, from punishing them
6. 11.4 Asclepius and his daughter Hygeia
(Health) with a snake. Marble funerary relief
from the Therme of Salonika. Fifth century
BCE. Archaeological Museum, Istanbul,
Turkey. Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY,
ART21941.
Heroines in Cult
• Heroines rarely had their own cult
shrines, instead they shared them with
heroes, frequently sons, husbands, or
fathers
• Independent heroines include the
prophetess Sibylla, the poet Sappho, and
the Spartan athlete Cyniska
7. 11.3 Medea rides a chariot given to her by her grandfather, the god Helios.
Two winged females variously identified as Poenae (plural of Poene) or Erinyes
watch Medea from above. Lucanian red-figure krater, 400 BCE. Cleveland Museum
of Art, OH, USA / Leonard C. Hanna, Jr. Fund / Bridgeman Images, CVL1761945.
Heroines in Myth
• There are both vertical and horizontal
traditions of the adventures of heroines
• Women make only a few appearances in
epic poetry
• In the Classical period, they were often
protagonists in drama, which was more
concerned with demands of city and
household than epics, which focused on
adventures
• Euripides devoted a significant number of
his plays to women
8. 11.5 The birth of Helen from an egg
set on an altar. Red-figure krater.
Caivano Painter. 340–330 BCE. National
Archaeological Museum of Naples,
Naples, Italy. Scala / Art Resource, NY,
ART310015.
Helen
• Helen was the daughter of Leda and Zeus
• Her life was defined by abductions, first by
Theseus as a child, then later by Paris
• Helen’s beauty is depicted as nearly divine
• After death, she and Menelaus dwell on the
Islands of the Blessed in the Underworld
• She was worshiped with Menelaus in Sparta,
along with her brothers, the Dioscuri
• She was worshiped independently in Sparta
and Rhodes
10. 11.7 Priam and Hecuba (together, far left)
raise their hands as they watch Achilles
(wearing a plumed helmet) drag their son
Hector’s body from his chariot. Athenian
black-figure hydria (water jug). c. 520–510 BCE.
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts,
USA / William Francis Warden Fund / Bridgeman
Images, BST487715.
Hecuba
• Hecuba was queen of Troy, the wife
of Priam
• She sings a lament for her son,
Hector, in the last book of the Iliad
• In Euripides’s plays she seeks
vengeance for her murdered children
by forcing the murderer to suffer the
same loss that she has suffered
• Her actions rank with those of
vengeful spirits
16. • Seneca’s Medea depicts her as suffering because she failed to embody Stoic
ideals
• Her failure is in placing too high a value on Jason and her love for him,
therefore she cannot endure his betrayal
• In the Heroides, Ovid portrays Medea as a jilted lover begging Jason to
return to her
• She is shown as subdued and powerless, unlike the Metamorphoses, which
depicts her as a powerful sorceress
Medea in Rome
19. 11.11 Margaret Garner or Modern Medea
(1867). Thomas Satterwhite Noble (1835–
1904). From the Collection of the National
Underground Railroad Freedom Center.
African American Medea
• In 1856, escaped slave Peggy Garner was
put on trial for killing her two year old
daughter Mary
• Mary may have been the child of Peggy’s
owner, introducing an element of revenge
to the story
• Her story was compared to that of Medea
• Noble’s painting of the event asks
whether Margaret or the slave catchers
who cornered her are the monsters in this
event
• Medea is unique partially because of her agency in the death of her children a
20. • Modern African American writers have linked Medea’s foreign identity to her
political oppression
• Countee Cullen was a poet of the Harlem Renaissance
• His Medea received mixed reviews at the time as black critics questioned whether
Medea’s experience offered any insight on the African American experience
• The text evokes the experience of a black Medea in white America, and also
explore the obligations of Jason and Medea to their children
• Do they have the right to dispose of them as a possession?
• Owen Dodson, head of the theater department at Howard University, wrote The
Garden of Time, an interpretation that takes Jason and Medea from ancient
Greece to Haiti and Georgia before the Civil War
• Toni Morrison’s Beloved is possibly the most famous treatment of Medea, which
portrays the life of a mother after she is forced to kill her own child
African American Medea