Instant Classics

Mary and Charlotte explore Medea’s afterlife, from Ancient Athens into the 21st Century - the way her story continues to beguile and challenge us. To do this, they are joined by Edith Hall, Professor of Classics at Durham University and renowned author of many books including the recent Medea: A Life (Yale University Press, 2026)

Edith describes her life-long relationship with Medea - from watching the same 1970s production that changed Mary’s life - to this year’s book. Having two children along the way certainly changed her perspective. Ultimately, she understands Medea as a narcissist, unable to connect with anybody’s needs but her own.

Edith also talks about the challenge Medea has always presented to theatre-goers. She believes the reason why Euripides’ play ‘lost’ the Athens theatre competition in 431BC is because Medea knows she is about to do wrong, but does it anyway (tragic heroes are normally convinced of their righteousness until the last moment). With the rise of European nationalism in the 19th Century, directors became interested in the outsider-exile quality of Medea’s story, casting her as a Jewish woman then, in the 20th Century, as a black woman. Feminist (and anti-feminist) readings of Medea date back to the 1850s when changes to the divorce laws in the UK gave women greater rights.

Today, actors and directors have to answer big questions about whether she is experiencing psychosis or a cold schemer. Or both. Edith describes her experience working with the legendary Helen McCrory on her National Theatre Production in 2016.

Further reading:

In addition to the bibliography we gave for our first two episodes on Medea . . .

For Robert Brough’s burlesque on Medea, see E. Richardson’s article, “‘A conjugal lesson’” in the journal Ramus 2003. The text of the burlesque itself is available online: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=iau.31858023958535&seq=3

The career of Amy Levy is discussed by Linda Hunt Beckman, Amy Levy (Ohio UP, 2000)

The Cambridge Greek Play has a really good website, with plenty of detail on its history: https://www.cambridgegreekplay.classics.cam.ac.uk/ For the production of Medea we mentioned, see https://www.cambridgegreekplay.classics.cam.ac.uk/past-plays-0/medea-1974

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In September, Mary and Charlotte appeared at the FT Weekend Festival for a wide-ranging conversation covering Greek tragedy, Ukraine, the Bayeux Tapestry, tech bros and - inevitably - Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. Here - as a bonus - is a recording of that event, with our thanks to the FT Weekend Festival.

Further reading:

We both draw on our recent books in this discussion: Charlotte’s Ukrainian Lessons: Art in a Time of War (Jonathan Cape, 2026), and Mary’s Talking Classics: The Shock of the Old (Profile Books, 2026)

For the gruesome bits of the Bayeux Tapestry, see the full online version: https://www.bayeuxmuseum.com/en/the-bayeux-tapestry/discover-the-bayeux-tapestry/explore-online/ (we have now posted a podcast episode on the Bayeux Tapestry)

One of the most evocative translations of Sappho is by Anne Carson, If Not, Winter (Knopf, 2002). We discuss Carson, the newest classical Nobel laureate, in a recent episode of the podcast. There is a good new translation of Catullus (with facing Latin text) by Stephanie McCarter in the Penguin Classics series.

Those unfamiliar with the phrase “Caecilius est in horto”, can find it in Book 1 of the Cambridge Latin Course (revised version, Cambridge UP, 2022)

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Recorded at the FT Weekend Festival. © The Financial Times Limited 2026. All rights reserved. Used with permission

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Last episode, we saw how Medea was driven to murder her own children, using Euripides’ famous play as our primary source. In this episode, Mary and Charlotte delve deeper into Medea’s life both before and after this shocking incident. Her earlier adventures are told through Apollonius of Rhodes’ Argonautica, written in the 3rd Century BCE.

Prince Jason of Iolcos is sent by his uncle to steal the Golden Fleece from King Aeëtes of Colchis. Knowing his task is impossible, Athena, who is Jason’s protector, makes King Aeëtes’ daughter Medea fall in love with him and betray her own people. Princess Medea is also the niece of Circe and has inherited her aunt’s witchy powers. Medea helps Jason steal the fleece and escapes with him across the Black Sea.

They have many adventures on the way home, many of which involve Medea killing someone. She murders her own brother, when he is sent out to capture her. She tricks the daughters of Jason’s uncle/usurper, King Pelias, into killing their father, which forces her and Jason’s flight to Corinth.

Ovid’s Metamorphoses is the best source for what happens after she kills her children and Jason’s new bride. She flees again, this time alone, to Athens where she marries King Aegeus. But killing has become an addiction. She tries to trick Aegeus into murdering his son Theseus, but Aegeus uncovers her plot and banishes her. She is never heard of again.

Further reading:

A good recent translation of Apollonius with a very helpful introduction is by Richard Hunter, in the Oxford World’s Classics series

One innovative discussion of Medea in Apollonius is R. Buxton, “How Medea Moves” in Bartel and Simon (eds), Unbinding Medea (MHRA, 2010). Online: https://classics.domains.skidmore.edu/lit-campus-only/secondary/Apollonius/Buxton%202010.pdf

For Ovid, we concentrate on his treatment of Medea in Metamorphoses VII, 1-424; but he also focuses on her in his Heroides 12 (an imaginary letter from Medea to Jason).

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Medea is one of the most intriguing characters in Greek mythology: a sorceress, scion of the sungod, and a serial killer. In the first part of a new series, Mary and Charlotte begin with the incident for which she is most famous: the murder of her own children.

The main source for this version of her story is Euripides’ play of 431 BCE. Mary and Charlotte both have powerful memories of encountering the play for the first time, just at the age when they were first becoming interested in ancient Greece, and how it shaped their understanding of the classics.

In the hands of another, less brilliant playwright, the story could be single-noted. Medea, jilted by Jason (of Argonaut fame), murders his new spouse and her father, then murders her two children with Jason, seemingly out of spite. But Euripides asks us to sympathise with Medea at crucial moments in the play, going out of his way to show how unfair Athenian society was not only to Medea but to all women. The men in the play - King Creon, Jason and the King of Athens - are truly dreadful and Medea is articulate about the prejudices of the patriarchy, the institution of marriage and the domestic responsibilities of wives.

Finally Mary and Charlotte ask why Euripides has Medea kill her own children, because there are other accounts of her story in which this doesn’t happen. Is he asking us to see how far we are willing to go in our sympathies and reflect on our own capacity for violence?

Next week, we’re looking at Medea’s early life and how she helped Jason in his search for the Golden Fleece.

Further reading:

Euripides’ Medea is available in multiple translations, online and in Penguin Classics etc. Charlotte used the one collected in the useful recent anthology of Greek tragedies under the title The Greek Plays, edited by Mary Lefkowtiz and James Romm (Modern Library, 2016).

W. Allan, Euripides Medea (Bristol Classical Press, 2002) is a short introduction to the play .

Edith Hall’s recent book Medea: A Life (Yale, 2026) offers an intriguing ‘biography’ of this mythical figure.

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It’s not every year that a classicist wins the Nobel Prize for Literature (in fact, it hasn’t happened since 1959), so Mary and Charlotte interrupt the schedule to reflect on Anne Carson’s extraordinary career as both a classicist and a poet.

Carson is most famous as a poet, but her work is rooted in her scholarly essays and translations of Ancient Greek. Mary and Charlotte talk about how her pioneering book Eros the Bittersweet (1986, based on her phd thesis) linked Sappho to love poetry throughout the ages, including Emily Dickinson and Virginia Woolf - at a time when ‘Comparative Literature’ was a dirty phrase. This book also informed Carson’s own bittersweet love poetry in books like Glass and God and The Beauty of the Husband.

Mary and Charlotte also discuss Autobiography of Red, her bold re-interpretation of Stesichorus’ account of the monster Geryon and Heracles, which not only responds to an Ancient Greek poet most people haven’t heard of, but brings the story into the present day.

Further reading:

We discussed in particular, Eros the Bittersweet (available in many different editions) and Autobiography of Red (available online here: https://eclass.uoa.gr/modules/document/file.php/PSPA254/AUTOBIOGRAPHY%20OF%20RED.pdf)

H of H Playbook is published by Jonathan Cape in the UK and by New Directions in the US.

Her full (immense) biography has its own wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Carson_bibliography

The interview with Carson in the Paris Review is here: https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5420/the-art-of-poetry-no-88-anne-carson

The 2013 New York Times profile is here:

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/17/magazine/the-inscrutable-brilliance-of-anne-carson.html

And in the Iowa Review, here: https://pubs.lib.uiowa.edu/iowareview/article/id/15965/ (there’s a download link)

Daniel Mendelsohn engaged with Carson on Sappho in the New York Review of Books 14 August, 2003

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Instant Classics handmade by Vespucci

Producer: Jonty Claypole

Video Editor: Jak Ford

Theme music: Casey Gibson



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