THE DYNAMICS OF EMOTION IN EURIPIDES’ MEDEA

Medea's emotions loom large in a wide range of dramatic, literary, and philosophical sources from Euripides onwards. In focusing on aspects of the emotional texture of the original Euripidean play, all one can do is scratch the surface of an enormous subject, both in that play and in its reception in ancient literature and thought. Fortunately, we have the other articles in this issue of Greece & Rome to supplement this inevitably limited perspective. My procedure in this short paper is simply to highlight certain aspects of the dramatization of emotion in Euripides’ Medea that strike me as especially worthy of analysis in terms of ancient or modern emotion theory.

One of the most striking features of Euripides’ play, in terms of the emotions it portrays and elicits, is the extent to which the emotions in question are emotions about emotions. Medea's emotions loom large in the concerns of other characters even before she appears on stage. First the Nurse, then the Paedagogus react, in their own emotional ways, to her emotional situation and her emotional responses to it,¹ and so begins the process of steering audience emotion – our emotions, that is, about the characters’ emotions – that will continue throughout. One does not need to be an emotion researcher to see how deeply the play is marked by mixed emotions: especially at the height of the drama, before the killing of the children, Medea herself is emotionally torn (922–31, 1007–80, 1236–50); but her mixed emotions are also the focus of those of the Chorus, still sympathetic but now simultaneously appalled (976–1001, 1251–70, 1279–81); and both the shifts in Medea's own emotions and the shifts in the Chorus's emotional reactions to Medea's emotions influence the shifts in our emotions as spectators.

Thus there is a dynamic and interactive quality to the emotional texture of the play, as indeed there is to emotional life (or just ‘life’) in general. Emotions, in the audience and as represented in the characters, are embedded in ongoing processes of social interaction, processes which are, to a large extent, a matter of emotional responses to the perceived emotions of others. Audience responses to the emotions of characters in visual or verbal narratives reflect the centrality of narrative in the ways that we understand our own and others’ emotions in everyday social interactions, as events with a script- or narrative-like structure of their own, embedded in contexts with their own narrative structure (including the narratives that derive from our cumulative experiences of ourselves and others).² This in turn reflects the centrality of emotion in discussions of motivation: emotions prepare us for and guide our actions – there is no motive for doing anything without at least some form of affectivity.³ The characters’ emotions thus form part of the basis on which we as audience members evaluate their motives.

In providing reasons for action, emotions are context-sensitive; we assume that people's emotions constitute an appraisal of a given scenario or state of affairs and we expect these appraisals to be contextually appropriate. To that extent, they will often be predictable: the Paedagogus thinks he is bringing good news of the children's reprieve, and so finds Medea's reaction – she stands confounded and cries aiai – to be ‘out of tune’ with his report (1005–10). He had assumed that a certain scenario would elicit a particular appraisal and a commensurate emotional response, but was mistaken. He recognizes his mistake (δόξης ἐσϕάλην, 1010) from Medea's body language and paralinguistic behaviour. The Paedagogus’ expectation was a belief, a doxa, but that was based simply on the assumption of a normal relation between a given scenario and the emotional reaction to which it will typically give rise in a particular individual who stands in a certain relation to that scenario. This is a matter of events with a narrative structure and agents with a certain narrative role. Equally, when the Paedagogus realizes his mistake, this is an immediate consequence of the discrepancy between the narrative as he understands it and Medea's response, as directly perceived in her demeanour. The discrepancy, in turn, calls for an alternative account of Medea's motivation.

The capacity in play here has, in recent years, been typically referred to as ‘mindreading’ or theory of mind, and much ink has been spilt in disputes over the extent to which theory, as such, is actually involved.⁴ Though the main rival of ‘theory theory’ has for long been simulation theory (according to which we understand others’ mental states by – somehow – simulating them ourselves),⁵ alternative (simpler and, to my mind, more plausible) accounts based on direct perception, primary interaction, and narrative are now gaining ground.⁶ For our purposes, however, and whatever account of ‘mindreading’ we favour, one point that emerges from the Paedagogus’ perplexity at Medea's response is that some minds may be more difficult to read than others: Medea in this play regularly confounds the expectations of other characters and creates scenarios which lead them to believe that her motives are other than they really are. To some extent, we, the external audience, are also implicated in these strategies, though we are at the same time, and by the very ways in which these strategies are constructed, challenged to discern and evaluate the motives that lie behind them.⁷

Emotions are, or should be, at the centre of debate over the forms and possibilities of other-understanding, especially because they are associated with externally visible signs, symptoms, and behaviour patterns, and because these external factors are typically taken as signs of appraisals, motivations, and values. If characters within a drama can attempt to understand each other's motives in this way, then so can we as readers and spectators. We have no direct access to the inner life of dramatic characters – because they have no such inner life. But still an inner life is constructed for them, as it is constructed in real life, on the basis of what they do, what they say, and what others say about them. We impute agency and motivation on the basis of agent-like behaviour, whether we are talking about dramatic fictions such as Medea or the geometrical shapes used in the well-known experiments of Heider and Simmel.⁸ The fact that we can attribute agency, intention, and emotion not just to (masked) actors on stage or to the characters created in a purely verbal narrative, but also to simple shapes moving on a screen, shows that such attributions need not be limited to cases that are ‘just like real people’. Yet this in no way detracts from the truth that in attributing agency to those geometrical shapes we are deploying skills that we use in everyday social interaction.⁹

Just as we can perceive emotions as motives in the absence of words, so people often assume and attribute emotional motives behind what is said in words. In the agôn, for example, both Medea and Jason claim to know the other's true emotions, which betray their true motivations, as each charges the other with a reprehensible obsession with sex (491, 555–6, 568–73, 623–6). In the same way, Creon recognizes that Medea's pleas have and are designed to have a certain (soothing and reassuring) emotional effect; but he (‘within his phrenes’, i.e. ‘deep down’) retains a sense of dread (orrôdia) that her true intentions are malign (λέγεις ἀκοῦσαι μαλθάκ’, ἀλλ’ ἔσω ϕρενῶν | ὀρρωδία μοι μή τι βουλεύῃς κακόν, 316–17). In both his case and, he assumes, Medea's, the emotions that appear on the surface vie with deeper and darker feelings. Other-understanding can be a matter of direct perception, especially in interactive contexts (as when the Paedagogus, above, sees that Medea is troubled); but when others attempt to conceal their true feelings and motivations in order to deceive us or to present their conduct in a more positive light, we need to resort to less immediate forms of inference and deduction. This is not to say that we need a developed and explicit theory of others’ motives; but our interpretations may require more complex and better-informed kinds of narrative.¹⁰ Even then, however, it is not only the motivations of skilled manipulators that may remain opaque; and, miraculous though our ability to understand others’ minds may be, we also need to accept that it has its limits.¹¹ In this respect, the mimetic representations of drama may provide more cues and material for interpretation than would everyday life, but perhaps not as many as diegetic narrative sometimes can, especially in narratives with a strong and reliable narratorial voice; something of the uncertainty and speculation that can bedevil real social interaction can remain.

The very existence of debate between Medea and Jason presupposes that the emotions that motivate them and that they see as motivating others are in principle – though not, as it turns out, in practice – modifiable by reasoned persuasion. But the rhetoric of the debate – in which each impugns the other's emotional motives – reminds us that emotions are themselves subject to evaluation in the light of shared ethical and social norms. That evaluation, in turn, is itself often, if not always, emotional.¹² One essential driver behind the various ways in which emotions reflect and enact shared ethical and social norms rests – in the play and in reality – on the interplay of esteem and self-esteem in social interaction. As Erving Goffman has taught us, all partners to social interaction bring some degree of ‘face’ to the encounter; social interaction is a matter of strategies of self-presentation and recognition (what Goffman calls, respectively, demeanour and deference).¹³ In cooperative encounters these are strategies of self-protection, respect, and mutual recognition, but it goes without saying that people can also seek to protect their own face while threatening the face of the other.¹⁴ These features apply in asymmetrical and unequal as well as in equal and mutual relationships. The core Greek term here is timê (honour), around which a very wide range of emotions and reactive attitudes circle.¹⁵ Medea's concern for timê (in her desire for revenge, in her determination to avoid mockery, in her sense of who she is and what she deserves) is thus a fundamental feature of the negotiations of recognition and respect on which social interaction is based. This is not something that is essentially or exclusively heroic or masculine in nature, though there are indubitably cases in which Medea's formulations are inflected by attitudes that are at least more frequently associated with the male heroes of epic and tragedy.¹⁶

One very important way in which the human capacity for other-understanding is exploited in the play is in what one might refer to as Medea's emotional intelligence.¹⁷ For her own (emotional) reasons, and in ways that inevitably engage the emotional evaluations of internal and external audiences, she repeatedly exhibits a subtle understanding of other characters’ emotions, motivations, and dispositions. One particular emotional disposition that she is adept at fostering and exploiting is trust, an attitude that rests fundamentally upon our readiness to believe that we can, in fact, discern others’ motives and judge their character from their words and actions.¹⁸ Trust is a basic prerequisite for cooperation and rests on affective capacities and tendencies that are deeply rooted in human intersubjectivity. Early in the play, Medea gets the Chorus on her side by exploiting their shared experience as women, especially in the famous lines 248–51:¹⁹

λέγουσι δ’ ἡμᾶς ὡς ἀκίνδυνον βίον

ζῶμεν κατ’ οἴκους, οἱ δὲ μάρνανται δορί,

κακῶς ϕρονοῦντες⋅ ὡς τρὶς ἂν παρ’ ἀσπίδα

στῆναι θέλοιμ’ ἂν μᾶλλον ἢ τεκεῖν ἅπαξ.

They say that we live a risk-free life at home, while they fight with the spear: but they're wrong – I'd rather stand three times in the phalanx than give birth once.

Medea's references to shared experience imply shared emotional attitudes and create a basis for sympathy (even as Euripides makes her acknowledge that she is not a typical woman – ἀλλ’ οὐ γὰρ αὑτὸς πρὸς σὲ κἄμ’ ἥκει λόγος, ‘but the same account does not apply to you and me’, 252). And the Chorus do sympathize: Medea has gained their trust. But to ensure that she can trust them she makes them promise (259–63, 267–8) not to divulge her plans. The Chorus's sympathy and trust are then sorely tried when they realize, to their regret, that the silence to which they have agreed involves complicity in filicide (811–13, 853–65, 906–7, 976–1001, 1251–70, 1279–92).

The common ground that Medea finds or feigns between herself and the Chorus constitutes a fundamental condition for sympathy (eleos), all the way from the exemplary demonstration of the principle in practice in Iliad 24 to its theoretical statement in Aristotle's Rhetoric and beyond.²⁰ Medea creates a similar bond between herself and Creon (as parents, 344–5). Here she also uses the ritual of supplication, in which physical and emotional constraints combine (324–56). There is an emotional reluctance to break the physical bond, but also a prototypical emotional response (aidôs) that is traditionally regarded as characteristic of the encounter itself.²¹ The fact that aidôs (shame, respect) is the characteristic response here reminds us that the importance of timê in everyday social interaction can also be formalized and institutionalized in specific practices of ritual and religion. Having won the trust of Aegeus simply through the cogency of her case (690–708), Medea exploits not only the ritual of supplication (709–18) but also that of the oath (735–55) in ensuring that she can trust him to support her in future (731–40):

Μη. ἀλλὰ πίστις εἰ γένοιτό μοι

τούτων, ἔχοιμ’ ἂν πάντα πρὸς σέθεν καλῶς.

Αι. μῶν οὐ πέποιθας; ἢ τί σοι τὸ δυσχερές;

Μη. πέποιθα⋅ Πελίου δ’ ἐχθρός ἐστί μοι δόμος

Κρέων τε. τούτοις δ’ ὁρκίοισι μὲν ζυγεὶς

ἄγουσιν οὐ μεθεῖ’ ἂν ἐκ γαίας ἐμέ⋅

λόγοις δὲ συμβὰς καὶ θεῶν ἀνώμοτος

ϕίλος γένοι’ ἂν κἀπικηρυκεύμασιν

τάχ’ ἂν πίθοιο⋅ τἀμὰ μὲν γὰρ ἀσθενῆ,

τοῖς δ’ ὄλβος ἐστὶ καὶ δόμος τυραννικός.

Med. But if I had a pledge [pistis] of your support, I'd have all I could possibly want from you.

Aeg. Don't you trust me? Or what is your difficulty?

Med. I do trust you. But the family of Pelias is hostile to me, as is Creon. If you were bound by oaths you could not give me up to them if they tried to take me from your country. But if we had only a verbal agreement and you swore no oath by the gods you might make an alliance and give in to their heralds’ requests. For I am weak, but they enjoy prosperity and dynastic power.

The way in which these rituals exploit religious sanctions, religiously calibrated emotions, and the emotions of everyday social interaction to underpin trust is a significant theme in the play. Medea and her supporters in the Chorus indignantly deplore the breakdown of these institutions through the faithlessness of Jason (439–40, 492–8);²² but she of course uses them, and the emotional susceptibility of men such as Creon and Aegeus towards them, to her own advantage and the others’ detriment.²³ A scenario of this sort can get off the ground only if Medea is able to use her own skills in reading and understanding the minds and motives of others to encourage them falsely to believe that they can read and understand her mind and motives.²⁴

Medea is both conscious of and explicit about her ability to manipulate others’ emotions and exploit their susceptibilities.²⁵ When Creon departs, and the Chorus sympathize with Medea on account of her impending banishment, she confirms that her emotional performance in the previous scene was merely a ploy to exploit the king's emotional weakness (368–75):

δοκεῖς γὰρ ἄν με τόνδε θωπεῦσαί ποτε

εἰ μή τι κερδαίνουσαν ἢ τεχνωμένην;

οὐδ’ ἂν προσεῖπον οὐδ’ ἂν ἡψάμην χεροῖν.

ὁ δ’ ἐς τοσοῦτον μωρίας ἀϕίκετο

ὥστ’, ἐξὸν αὐτῷ τἄμ’ ἑλεῖν βουλεύματα

γῆς ἐκβαλόντι, τήνδ’ ἐϕῆκεν ἡμέραν

μεῖναί μ’, ἐν ᾖ τρεῖς τῶν ἐμῶν ἐχθρῶν νεκροὺς

θήσω, πατέρα τε καὶ κόρην πόσιν τ’ ἐμόν.

Do you think I would ever have fawned on him unless it were to make some gain, in pursuit of some scheme? I would not even have spoken to or laid a hand on him. But he has reached such a level of stupidity that, although he had the chance to check my plans and expel me from the land, he has allowed me to remain for this one day, on which I'll turn three of my enemies into corpses – father, daughter, and my husband!

Clearly, the emotion that Medea really feels in Creon's case is contempt.

Similarly, Medea tells the Chorus in advance that her plans (bouleumata) will involve summoning Jason and speaking ‘soft words’ that will transform her situation from that of humiliated victim to that of triumphant avenger (764–89). In the ensuing scene, her confidence in her ability to feign emotion in order to manipulate Jason's emotions is proved to be fully justified. But, in manipulating Jason, Medea is also manipulating his new wife: just as she foresees her soft words winning Jason over, so she foresees her gifts appealing to the bride (784–9, 947–75). Jason says he is confident of persuading his wife, ‘if she is a woman like any other’ (945), but Medea – having just presented herself as ‘a woman like any other’ in manipulating Jason – now exploits the princess's feminine sensibilities as a bride, the appropriateness of her means of revenge to the circumstances of the wedding that is still in progress, and the emotions that are associated with yet another ritualized institution, presenting her gifts as if they were the culmination of the happiness and good fortune that marriage is meant to ensure (952–8). It works: the royal bride accepts the gifts with pleasure (δῶρα νύμϕη βασιλὶς ἀσμένη χεροῖν ἐδέξατ’, 1004–5). Medea's planning is driven by astute assessments of other people's emotional character and a vivid imaginative sense of the kind of future that she wishes to bring about. She is a good example of how emotional intelligence (what some people sometimes call ‘cognitive empathy’) need not give rise to pro-social behaviour.²⁶

This is where Medea's plans and her anger coalesce: her planning is geared towards fulfilling the desire for retaliation, revenge, or redress (antilypêsis, De an. 403a29–30; timôria, Rh. 1378a30) that Aristotle sees as an essential aspect of anger. Both as plans and as anger there is a very pronounced element of imaginative projection (phantasia) in this: Medea repeatedly dwells on, fantasizes about, and vividly imagines the form that her vengeance will take – there are so many possible ways, she says; but she might, for example, enter their bedroom in secret and kill them in their marriage bed (374–80). In the same way, when she outlines her plan to kill Creon's daughter she envisages the sending of the gifts with the children, describes them in the kind of detail that emphasizes their attractiveness to their victim, and imagines the painful demise of the girl and anyone who touches her after she has put them on (784–9). This is a scene that Medea pictures again at 1065–6, with a telling use of the particles καὶ δή – ‘Look: the crown is on her head; the royal bride is dying in her robes’ (καὶ δὴ ’πὶ κρατὶ στέϕανος, ἐν πέπλοισι δὲ | νύμϕη τύραννος ὄλλυται). When the Messenger then comes with the news that the princess and her father are dead, Medea rejoices (1125–35): having imagined the event so many times, she now wants to hear exactly how it happened – it will give her twice as much pleasure if the Messenger can confirm that they died a horrible death (1134–5).

A similar gruesome pleasure is evident in her sarcastic dismissal of Jason at 1396: ‘Don't lament too soon; old age is coming!’ (οὔπω θρηνεῖς⋅ μένε καὶ γῆρας.) The representation of anger here bears out a great deal of what Aristotle says about the emotion in the Rhetoric. Both in the discussion of pleasure at Rh. 1.11 and in the account of anger in 2.2, he emphasizes that there is an element of elpis in anger that focuses on the possibility of the desired timôria (1370b12, 1378b3–4). More specifically, in the second of these passages, he suggests that the element of pleasure lies in ‘thinking that one will obtain what one aims at’ (1378b2–3): the pleasure of anger is not just about the future pleasure of timôria; it also involves dwelling on that outcome in the present, imagining oneself exacting revenge and so, Aristotle says, taking the kind of pleasure that people take in dreams (1378b7–9). The elpis that is operative here is not merely (or not exactly) what we call ‘hope’; it coheres closely with the elpis that is important in Plato's account of anticipatory pleasure in the Philebus, where it derives from mnêmê (memory) of previous pleasure and involves constructing images and narratives of future states of affairs that not only promise future pleasure, but also afford pleasure in the here and now (38e–40b).²⁷ The missing term that Plato does not use is one whose significance is elaborated in detail by Aristotle in works such as De anima and De motu animalium, namely phantasia. For Aristotle, both phantasia and pleasure depend on sensory experience (Rh. 1.11, 1370a26–35). Reference to pleasure and pain recurs in the accounts of the emotions in the Rhetoric's second book. But this is not just a matter of valence (whether this or that scenario is good or bad for me), since occasional references to ‘disturbance’ (ταραχή) as an alternative for ‘pain’ (λύπη) indicate that it also encompasses arousal (1382a21, 1383b13, 1386b23). For Aristotle, as for Euripides in his portrayal of Medea, the pleasure of anger also has a pronounced phenomenal aspect – it is not just about how we construe things, but also about how we feel in the light of that construal.

Before leaving this topic, we might just dwell in passing on the vividness of Medea's imagined futures: the scenes of revenge that she conjures up are neither static nor strictly pictorial – they involve agency, movement, and the manipulation of objects. They are not just ‘mental pictures’, but narrative scenarios that are full of action and affordances for action (as well as for emotion).²⁸ And so we can compare Euripides’ use of the same set of techniques in the Messenger Speech: in the opening lines alone there is body language, facial expression, interpersonal interaction, direct speech, and the detailed description of the princess putting on the robe and the crown, with emphasis on her dainty step as she moves through the house (1136–66). The phantasia that such passages demand involves more senses than just the visual; the audience's involvement rests on an invitation to put themselves physically in the scene by virtue of the way that the text provides affordances for the kinds of actions that they, as embodied human beings, might in principle perform. It is about feeling as though we are there, in all the sensory modalities that being there implies, rather than creating detached mental pictures. And this is what facilitates emotional engagement.

The notion of anger as something that has these vividly imagined goals in the future that Euripides’ play shares with Aristotle's theory also illuminates Medea's monologue at 1019 ff., with its much-discussed representation of mental conflict.²⁹ As is regular in these contexts, the representation of competing motives has ready recourse to psychological metaphor.³⁰ Medea begins with lamentation over the loss and suffering that she feels compelled to inflict on herself; but the physical presence and facial expressions of the children, ignorant of what is to come, make her hesitate: her heart, she says, is gone (καρδία γὰρ οἴχεται, 1042). The departure of her heart requires the departure of her bouleumata – she bids them farewell (χαιρέτω βουλεύματα, 1044, 1048). The coalescence here of what the kardia (heart) wants, as a personified metonym (or synecdoche) for anger (as in the well-known image of Odysseus’ barking heart, Od. 20.13–21), and what the bouleumata are about is enough to demonstrate, even before we take the controversy over the authenticity of lines 1056–80 into account,³¹ that we are not dealing with any simplistic opposition between reason and passion.

Further, and again without going into the dispute over 1056–80, we can see that Medea's competing motives come in sequence – she is sadly and reluctantly resolved to kill the children (1021–39), but then bids farewell to those plans at 1040–8, before recovering her resolve at 1049–55. If these lines are authentic, then there is purchase here for the Stoic (Chrysippan) view that motivational conflict is not between opposing centres of agency or ‘parts of the soul’, but between a series of judgements involving assent first to one impression and then to another.³² Whoever wrote 1056–80, it is likely that these lines are intended to be consistent with this picture: though the address to the thymos (‘spirit’) in 1056–7 (‘don't do it, thymos …’) abandons the ambiguity over killing as opposed to leaving the children that has been maintained up to now, the thymos here plays the same role – the personified aspect of the person that gives rise to emotions such as anger – as is played by the kardia in 1042.³³ The thymos here is still the force behind the bouleumata. This makes it plausible that whoever wrote θυμὸς δὲ κρείσσων τῶν ἐμῶν βουλευμάτων in 1079 wanted it to express the same idea: ‘my anger is master of my plans’.³⁴ But even if the words should not actually mean that,³⁵ the idea itself – that in Medea's case there is no wedge to be driven between anger and the development of practical plans to realize anger's aims – is more than evident from the rest of the play. The motivational conflict that is dramatized in lines 1021–80 is that between the emotion of anger (including the steps to be taken to realize its aims) and the equally affective motivation of maternal affection which threatens to derail Medea's plans.³⁶ Medea personifies her thymos, kardia, and bouleumata as a means of talking about her own motives as agent.

I have been talking about anger. And there are plenty of uses of anger-terms with reference to Medea's attitude towards her abandonment by Jason.³⁷ This is something that has been stressed by David Konstan, as part of his argument that what motivates Medea, both in Euripides’ play and elsewhere, is not jealousy.³⁸ Though she later becomes a type of zêlotypia, that term does not refer to what we call jealousy, and in Euripides’ play (which antedates the first occurrence of zêlotypia) what she feels is not jealousy but anger. Konstan recognizes that ‘Jason complains that Medea and women generally are fixated on the bed (555–6, 568–75), and Medea herself acknowledges its importance in marriage (1367–8).’ He also notes that Aegeus appreciates her distress that Jason has fallen victim to passionate love (erôs) for another (697–703). But ‘the real issue’ is Jason's abandonment of Medea; her own concern, like that of Aegeus, is for her welfare; the focus is ‘not on her amorous sensibilities’.³⁹

But Medea does accept that she took homicidal revenge for the sake of sex (1367–8):⁴⁰

Ια. λέχους σϕε κἠξίωσας οὕνεκα κτανεῖν;

Μη. σμικρὸν γυναικὶ πῆμα τοῦτ’ εἶναι δοκεῖς;

Jason: You actually thought it right to kill them for the sake of sex?

Medea: Do you think that this is a minor trouble for a woman?

And she has already foreshadowed the same response in her remarks to the Chorus at 263–6:

γυνὴ γὰρ τἄλλα μὲν ϕόβου πλέα

κακή τ’ ἐς ἀλκὴν καὶ σίδηρον εἰσορᾶν⋅

ὅταν δ’ ἐς εὐνὴν ἠδικημένη κυρῇ,

οὐκ ἔστιν ἄλλη ϕρὴν μιαιϕονωτέρα.

A woman is fearful in other respects and no good in battle or at facing cold steel; but if ever she's wronged in bed, there's no mind more murderous.

Equally, Jason does allege that her irritation derived from her belief that he had spurned her bed out of desire for a new sexual partner (555–6):

οὐχ, ᾗ σὺ κνίζῃ, σὸν μὲν ἐχθαίρων λέχος

καινῆς δὲ νύμϕης ἱμέρῳ πεπληγμένος

not – the thing that irritates you – because I detested your bed, smitten with desire for a new bride.

And he does attribute this ‘irritation’ to an obsession with sex that is supposedly typical of women (568–73):

οὐδ’ ἂν σὺ ϕαίης, εἴ σε μὴ κνίζοι λέχος.

ἀλλ’ ἐς τοσοῦτον ἥκεθ’ ὥστ’ ὀρθουμένης

εὐνῆς γυναῖκες πάντ’ ἔχειν νομίζετε,

ἢν δ’ αὖ γένηται ξυμϕορά τις ἐς λέχος,

τὰ λῷστα καὶ κάλλιστα πολεμιώτατα

τίθεσθε.

Not even you would say [that my plan was bad], if it wasn't for the fact that sex is eating away at you. But you women have reached the point that if everything is fine in bed you think you have it all, but if something goes wrong in that area, you regard the best and most satisfactory of situations as hostile.

Jason's charges trivialize and stigmatize (though in fact Medea accepts their essential truth), but the fact that he can make them at all shows that (what we call) sexual jealousy is an issue in the play. Not only Jason (and Aegeus) raise this issue; so do the Chorus (155–9, 207, 627–44, 996–1001, 1290–2). To be sure, Jason's betrayal is much more than a transferal of affection: Medea is to be homeless and exiled, and Jason's action constitutes an abject failure to recognize how much he owes her. But this does not mean that Medea is ‘just’ angry and not jealous, because the dishonour, disloyalty, and abandonment that her anger focuses on involve her husband's rejection of her in favour of another woman. We know that possessiveness with regard to Jason is part of her motivation, because she tells us so, not least through her emphatic use of the possessive adjective ‘my’ in referring to the proposed victims of her revenge at 375 – πατέρα τε καὶ κόρην πόσιν τ’ ἐμόν (‘father, daughter, and my husband’) (cf. 229). Though Medea has lost more than just Jason's affection, and though his offence is more than infidelity, her extreme anger at the insult and injustice that she feels she has suffered can be represented as, and seems genuinely to contain an element of, anger at her husband's rejection, at the loss of his sexual affections, and at the rival who has alienated those affections. The fact that this is part of a wider set of responses does not mean that it is not there, and the fact that anger at insult and injustice does not invariably encompass jealousy does not mean that it may not, where the insult in question involves being rejected by one's sexual partner in favour of another. If we accept that ‘anger’ in English can be used as a description of a jealous reaction, in a scenario that satisfies the conditions for jealousy, then we should also accept it in Greek.

What makes Medea's anger, in this case, a form of jealousy (and what distinguishes anger from jealousy in other, different cases) is not primarily a matter of how the experiences are labelled. And it is not a matter of whatever bodily changes or symptoms may be involved either. It may, partly, be a matter of the way in which the agent appraises the situation; but a difference in appraisal between anger that counts as jealousy and anger that does not is above all a consequence of the difference in the eliciting conditions, in the scenario that the appraisal construes: that is, in the context. If you are angry because your husband has left you and taken up with another woman, we can call it jealousy; if you are angry because a neighbouring country to the south is dragging your country out of the European Union against its will, we cannot.

This is an important reminder that emotions are not just subjective, internal feelings or states of mind. They are also implicated in the relations between people, in the external conditions in which they arise and which give rise to them, and in the actions that we take in a given emotional scenario. They have many dimensions, all of which are important in their definition.⁴¹ Their specificity can depend not just on what is going on in the brain or in the body, but also on what is going on out there in the world. When we ascribe an emotion to a person, we are not just hazarding our best guess about what specific subjective process may be going on within them and then applying a label that will designate that and only that process. We are relating their conduct to a set of narrative cues – about them, their behaviour, and their habits, as well as about the context in which they find themselves – and we are drawing on the shared, intersubjective resource of language to make connections between the scenarios in which emotion terms typically apply, the typical behaviour of individuals in such scenarios, and the subjective states of feeling to which such behaviour typically relates.

As we have seen, this is what the characters portrayed in dramatic fictions such as Euripides’ Medea do when they interpret the motives of their fellow characters. These interpretations themselves provide further narrative cues which we, as external audience members, can incorporate into our own interpretations. The strategies of both internal and external audiences are based on strategies that human beings deploy in real, everyday social interaction. Though real human agents enjoy a rich, complex, and (at least to some extent) private inner life and the agents portrayed in dramatic fictions do not, still the ascription of affective states and emotional motives and the application of linguistic labels to such states and motives do not primarily depend on access to or speculation about undetectable inner processes, and so it can proceed in the case of fictional characters much as it does with reference to the agents we encounter in real social interaction. This is one of the reasons why those of us who are interested in language, literature, culture, and history also have plenty to contribute to emotion research.