Greek Architecture and Medea

Ancient Greek Architecture

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Doric order

The Main Elements of the Doric Order (Temple of the Dioscouri at Agrigento)

The fluted columns of the temple of Apollo Epicurus at Bassae bear a striking resemblance to the stem of angelica (angelica sylvestris).

Wild Angelica http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Illustration_Angelica_silvestris0.jpg

Ionic column and the frond of bracken (pteridium aquilinum)

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Martin, Thomas R. Ancient Greece: From Prehistoric to Hellenistic Times. New Haven: Yale UP, 1996.

Public revenuesAthens received substantial public revenues form harbor fees, sales taxes, and the tribute of the allies. Buildings paid for by public funds from these sources constituted the most conspicuous architecture in the city of the Classical period of the fifth and fourth centuries.

Agora and council The scale of these public buildings was usually no greater than the size required to fulfill their function, such as the complex of buildings on the agoras western edge in which the council of five hundred held its meetings and the public archives were kept.

The Acropolis 447 BCESince the assembly convened in the open air on a hillside above the agora, it required no building at all except for a speakers platform. In 447 B.C., however, at Pericles instigation, a great project began atop the Acropolis, the mesa-like promontory at the center of the city, which towered over the agora.

ParthenonMost conspicuous of all were a mammoth gate building with columns straddling the broad entrance to the acropolis at its western end and a new Athena temple, the Parthenon, to house a towering image of the goddess.Video: NOVA | Optical Tricks of the Parthenon | PBS http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzhA3yiEofI&feature=related

Expensive construction programThese buildings alone cost easily more than the equivalent of a billion dollars in modern terms, a phenomenal sum for an ancient Greek city-state. The program was so expensive that the political enemies of Pericles railed at him for squandering public funds. The finances for the program apparently came in part form the tribute paid by the members of the Delian League.

ParthenonParthenon, the name of the new temple built for Athena on the Acropolis, meant the house of the virgin goddess. As the patron goddess of Athens, Athena had long had another sanctuary on the acropolis honoring her in her role as Athena Polias (guardian of the city).

EntablatureColumnStylobateFriezeArchitraveCorniceTriglyphMetopeHigh-relief

pedimentCornice

Sculptural decorationThe Parthenon was extraordinary in its great size and expense, but it was truly remarkable in the innovation of its refined architecture and elaborate sculptural decoration.

http://cheriesplaceblog.blogspot.com/2009/04/parthenon-sculptures.html

Optical illusionSince perfectly rectilinear architecture appears curved to the human eye, subtle curves and inclines were built into the Parthenon to produce an optical illusion of completely straight lines: the columns were given a slight bulge in their middles, the corner columns were installed at a light incline and closer together, and the platform was made slightly convex.

Euripides and Medea

Greek Tragedy and Comedy Greek TragedyAeschylusSophoclesEuripidesGreek ComedyAristophanes

sourcesThis is the title of a long poem, very popular in classical days, by the third-century poet Apollonius of Rhodes. He tells the whole story of the Quest except the part about Jason and Pelias which I have taken from Pindar. It is the subject of one of his most famous odes, written in the first half of the fifth century. Apollonius ends his poem with the return of the heroes to Greece. I have added the account of what Jason and Medea did there, taking it from the fifth-century tragic poet Euripides, who made it the subject of one of his best plays.

Journey by waterThe first hero in Europe who undertook a great journey was the leader of the Quest of the Golden Fleece. He was supposed to have lived a generation earlier than the most famous Greek traveler, the hero of the Odyssey. It was of course a journey by water. Ships did not sail by night, and any place where sailors put in might harbor a monster or a magician who could work more deadly harm than storm and shipwreck. High courage was necessary to travel, especially outside of Greece.

the ship ArgoNo story proved this fact better than the account of what the heroes suffered who sailed in the ship Argo to find the Golden Fleece. It may be doubted, indeed, if there ever was a voyage on which sailors had to face so many and such varied dangers. However, they were all heroes of renown, some of them the greatest in Greece, and they were quite equal to their adventures.

The Argonautic expedition

Penteconter, 50-oared shipas pentecontor or pentekontor (Greek: , fifty-oared) was an ancient Greek galley in use since the archaic period.

Jason and Argonautsthe Golden Fleece is the fleece of the gold-haired winged ram. It figures in the tale of Jason and his band of Argonauts, who set out on a quest for the fleece in order to place Jason rightfully on the throne of Iolcus in Thessaly.

King Phineus & the Harpies, Athenian red-figure hydria C5th B.C., The J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu

Alice Y. Chang

Alice Y. Chang

Colchisancient region at the eastern end of the Black Sea south of the Caucasus, in the western part of modern GeorgiaIn Greek mythology Colchis was the home of Medea and the destination of the Argonauts, a land of fabulous wealth and the domain of sorcery.

Symplegades/ Clashing Rocks

And then. . . When Jason and Medea returned toIolcus, Pelias still refused to give up his throne. So Medea conspired to have Pelias' own daughters kill him. She told them she could turn an old ram into a young ram by cutting up the old ram and boiling it. During her demonstration, a live, young ram jumped out of the pot. Excited, the girls cut their father into pieces and threw him into a pot. Having killed Pelias, Jason and Medea fled toCorinth.

Medea avenges herself on Jason by slaying her own children upon the altar, and destroying Kreon and Glauke by fire in the palace (not shown). Triptolemos arrives on the scene with a flying, serpent-drawn chariot to assist Medea in her escape.

Medea

Medeathe daughter of King Aetes of Colchis, niece of Circe, granddaughter of the sun god Helios, and later wife to the hero Jason, with whom she had two children: Mermeros and Pheres. In Euripides's play Medea, Jason leaves Medea when Creon, king of Corinth, offers him his daughter, Creusa or Glauce. The play tells of how Medea gets her revenge on her husband for this betrayal.

Meda--an enchantressMedea figures in the myth of Jason and the ArgonautsMedea is known in most stories as an enchantress and is often depicted as being a priestess of the goddess Hecate or a witch. The myth of Jason and Medea is very old, originally written around the time Hesiod wrote the Theogony.

Medea kills her son, Campanian red-figure amphora, ca. 330 BC, Louvre (K 300)

Jason & the Dragon

Greek Tragedy, Euripides and MedeaWeek 15Alice Y. Chang

Watch the modern rendering1. MEDEA (1983) Zoe Caldwellhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zInoTXKyOvI

Alice Y. ChangThe fifth century BCE and intellectual revolutionMost of these plays date from the last half of the fifth century B.C.; they were written in and for an Athens that, since the days of Aeschylus, had undergone an intellectual revolution. It was in a time of critical reevaluation of accepted standards and traditions that Sophocles produced his masterpiece, Oedipus the King, and the problems of the time are reflected in the play.

Alice Y. Chang

Alice Y. ChangMysterious + contemporary The use of the familiar myth enabled the dramatist to draw on all its wealth of unformulated meaning, but it did not prevent him from striking a contemporary note. Oedipus, in Sophocles play, is at one and the same time the mysterious figure of the past who broke the most fundamental human taboos and a typical fifth-century Athenian. His character contains all the virtues for which the Athenians were famous and the vices for which they were notorious.

Alice Y. Chang

Alice Y. ChangPericles and OedipusThe Athenian devotion to the city, which received the main emphasis in Pericles praise of Athens, is strong in Oedipus; his answer to the priest at the beginning of the play shows that he is a conscientious and patriotic ruler.

Alice Y. Chang

Alice Y. ChangEURIPIDES

480-406 B.C.

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Euripides

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Alice Y. Chang

The Works of EuripidesAlcestis Written 438 B.C.E Andromache Written 428-24 B.C.E The Bacchantes Written 410 B.C.E Hecuba Written 424 B.C.E Helen Written 412 B.C.E Translated by E. P. Coleridge The Heracleidae Written ca. 429 B.C.E Translated by E. P. Coleridge Alice Y. Chang

Alice Y. Chang

Works of EuripidesIphigenia At Aulis Written 410 B.C.E Iphigenia in Tauris Written 414-412 B.C.E Translated by Robert Potter Medea Written 431 B.C.E Translated by E. P. Coleridge Rhesus Written 450 B.C.E The Suppliants Written 422 B.C.E Translated by E. P. Coleridge The Trojan Women Written 415 B.C.E Alice Y. Chang

Alice Y. Chang

Medeaan ancient Greek tragedy written by Euripides, based upon the myth of Jason and Medea and first produced in 431 BC. The plot centers on the barbarian protagonist as she finds her position in the Greek world threatened, and the revenge she takes against her husband Jason who has betrayed her for another woman. Alice Y. Chang

Alice Y. Chang

Jason bringing Pelias the Golden FleeceAlice Y. Chang

Alice Y. Chang

Alice Y. ChangMedeaEuripides Medea, produced in 431 B.C., the year that brought the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, appeared earlier than Sophocles Oedipus the King, but it has a bitterness that is more in keeping with the spirit of a later age.

Alice Y. Chang

Alice Y. Chang

Alice Y. Chang

Prologue of MedeaNURSE Oh how I wish that ship the Argo had never sailed off to the land of Colchis, past the Symplegades, those dark dancing rocks which smash boats sailing through the Hellespont. I wish they'd never chopped the pine trees down in those mountain forests up on Pelion, to make oars for the hands of those great men who set off, on Pelias' orders, to fetch the golden fleece.Alice Y. Chang

Alice Y. Chang

Nurse Then my mistress, Medea, never would've sailed away to the towers in the land of Iolcus, her heart passionately in love with Jason. She'd never have convinced those women, Pelias' daughters, to kill their father. She'd not have come to live in Corinth here, with her husband and her childrenwell loved in exile by those whose land she'd moved to. She gave all sorts of help to Jason. Alice Y. Chang

Alice Y. Chang

Alice Y. Chang

Alice Y. Chang

Medea Alice Y. Chang

Alice Y. Chang

golden coronet, covered in poisonIn Corinth, Jason abandoned Medea for the king's daughter, Glauce. Medea took her revenge by sending Glauce a dress and golden coronet, covered in poison. This resulted in the deaths of both the princess and the king, Creon, when he went to save her.

Alice Y. Chang

Alice Y. Chang

The golden chariotAccording to the tragic poet Euripides, Medea continued her revenge, murdering her two children by Jason. Afterward, she left Corinth and flew to Athens in a golden chariot driven by dragons sent by her grandfather Helios, god of the sun.

Alice Y. Chang

Alice Y. Chang

Alice Y. ChangIronic expression If Oedipus is, in one sense, a warning to a generation that has embarked on an intellectual revolution, Medea is the ironic expression of the disillusion that comes after the shipwreck. In this play we are conscious for the first time of an attitude characteristic of modern literature, the artists feeling of separation from the audience, the isolation of the poet.

Alice Y. Chang

Alice Y. Changrejected by his contemporariesThe common background of audience and poet is disappearing, the old certainties are being undermined, the city divided. Euripides is the first Greek poet to suffer the fate of so many of the great modern writers: rejected by most of his contemporaries (he rarely won first prize and was the favorite target for the scurrilous humor of the comic poets), he was universally admired and revered by the Greeks of the centuries that followed his death.

Alice Y. Chang

Alice Y. ChangQuestioning the received ideasYounger than Sophocles ( though they died in the same year), he was more receptive to the critical theories and the rhetorical techniques offered by the Sophist teachers; his plays often subject received ideas to fundamental questioning, expressed in vivid dramatic debate.

Alice Y. Chang

Euripides MedeaHis Medea is typical of his iconoclastic approach; his choice of subject and central characters is in itself a challenge to established canons. He still dramatizes myth, but the myth he chooses is exotic and disturbing, and the protagonist is not a man but a woman.

Alice Y. Chang

Alice Y. Chang

Alice Y. ChangThe citizen rights?Medea is both woman and foreignerthat is, in terms of the audiences prejudice and practice she is a representative of the two free-born groups in Athenian society that had almost no rights at all (though the male foreign resident had more rights than the native woman).

Alice Y. Chang

Alice Y. ChangAnti-socialThe tragic hero is no longer a king, one who is highly renowned and prosperous such as Oedipus, but a woman who, because she finds no redress for her wrongs in society, is driven by her passion to violate that societys most sacred laws in a rebellion against its typical representative, Jason, her husband.

Alice Y. Chang

Alice Y. ChangEarth and SunAll through Medea the human beings involved call on the gods; two especially are singled out for attention: Earth and Sun. It is by these two gods that Medea makes Aegeus swear to give her refuge in Athens, the chorus invokes them to prevent Medeas violence against her sons, and Jason wonders how Medea can look on Earth and Sun after she has killed her own children.

Alice Y. Chang

Medea sarcophagusThe relief shows four scenes from the Medea myth, following the homnymous tragedy by the Athenian poet Euripides. Topics from Greek mythology were a popular motif in Rome for sarcophagus reliefs, especially when they depicted, as in the case here, wedding and death and sorrow of life.Made and found in Rome, Porta San Lorenzo, 140-150 AD.Altes Museum, Berlin 2011

Alice Y. ChangThe Magic ChariotThese emphatic appeals clearly raise the question of the attitude of the gods, and the answer to the question is a shock. We are not told what Earth does, but Sun sends the magic chariot on which Medea makes her escape.

Alice Y. Chang

rejected by most of his contemporariesEuripides is the first Greek poet to suffer the fate of so many of the great modern writers: rejected by most of his contemporaries (he rarely won first prize and was the favorite target for the scurrilous humor of the comic poets), he was universally admired and revered by the Greeks of the centuries that followed his death.

Alice Y. Chang

Alice Y. Chang

Iconoclastic His Medea is typical of his iconoclastic approach; his choice of subject and central characters is in itself a challenge to established canons. He still dramatizes myth, but the myth he chooses is exotic and disturbing, and the protagonist is not a man but a woman. Medea is both woman and foreigner, that is, in terms of the audiences prejudice and practice she is a representative of the two free-born groups in Athenian society that had almost no rights at all (though the male foreign resident had more rights than the native woman). Alice Y. Chang

Alice Y. Chang

Finds no redressThe tragic hero is no longer a king, one who is highly renowned and prosperous such as Oedipus, but a woman who, because she finds no redress for her wrongs in society, is driven by her passion to violate that societys most sacred laws in a rebellion against its typical representative, Jason, her husband.

Alice Y. Chang

Alice Y. Chang

Cinema and televisionIn the 1963 film Jason and the Argonauts, Medea was portrayed by Nancy Kovack.In the 2000 Hallmark presentation Jason and the Argonauts, Medea was portrayed by Jolene Blalock.In 1970, the Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini directed a film adaptation of Medea featuring the opera singer Maria Callas in the title role.

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Alice Y. Chang

Latest filmsIn 2007, director Tonino De Bernardi filmed a modern version of the myth, set in Paris and starring Isabelle Huppert as Medea, called Mde Miracle. The character of Medea lives in Paris with Jason, who leaves her.In 2009,"Medea" was shot by director Natalia Kuznetsova. Film was created by the tragedy of Seneca in a new for cinema genre of Rhythmodrama, in which the main basis of acting and atmosphere is music written before shooting. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%22Medea%22

Alice Y. Chang

Alice Y. Chang

endinghttp://video.mail.ru/mail/karelina-natalia/4815/28316.html Alice Y. Chang

Alice Y. Chang

Jason[shouting into the house, as he shakes the doors] You slaves in there, remove the bar from this door at once, withdraw the bolts, so I may see two things my dead sons and their murderer, that woman on whom I shall exact revenge.Alice Y. Chang

Alice Y. Chang

The exodus of MedeaJason shakes the doors of the house, which remain closed. Medea appears in a winged chariot, rising above the house. The bodies of the two children are visible in the chariot.Alice Y. Chang

Alice Y. Chang

MedeaWhy are you rattling the doors like that, trying to unbar them so you can find their bodies and me, the one who killed them? Stop trying. If you want something from me, then say so, if you want to. But you'll never have me in your grasp, not in this chariot, a gift to me from my grandfather Helios, to protect me from all hostile hands.Alice Y. Chang

Alice Y. Chang

CHORUS [Exit Chorus] Zeus on Olympus, dispenses many things. Gods often contradict our fondest expectations. What we anticipate does not come to pass. What we don't expect some god finds a way to make it happen. So with this story.Alice Y. Chang

Alice Y. Chang

Helios, the titan god

Alice Y. Chang

Alice Y. Chang

*****In Doric temples the columns almost invariably stood directly on the floor, tapering upwards towards the roof. They were composed of a number of superimposed drums, held together by dowels of wood or bronze, and were generally fluted (i.e. cut with concave grooves the length of the column) examples without grooves are unfinished. The flutes were possibly meant to imitate the grooves made by a convex-bladed adze used to trim the original logs, although this type of decoration has a long, long pedigree in Egypt. http://www.odysseyadventures.ca/articles/greektemple/greek_temple.htm ************************************************************