A little further on we have this description of her:—
"She said, she rose;
Her maiden chamber's solitary floor
With trembling steps she trod: she reached the door,
Fain to her sister's neighbouring bower to haste;
And yet the threshold hardly had she passed,
Sudden her failing feet are checked by shame,
And long she lingered there, then back she came.
Oft as desire would drive her forth again,
So oft does maiden bashfulness restrain.
Thrice she essayed to go, thrice stopped, then prone
In anguish on her couch behold her thrown."[1]
Such was Medea a few years only—if there be such a thing as dramatic time—before the tragedy begins. Her children are very young. Jason and herself appear to have not been long at Corinth, and so she must be regarded as still in the bloom of her youth and beauty, and not a hot-tempered lady of uncertain age. The desertion of her by her husband has accordingly the less excuse.
There is no prologue to this play, for the opening speech of the nurse—nurses on the Greek stage perform very similar functions to those of the indispensable confidantes of the classic drama of France—cannot be considered as such. This old servant does not go much into family history; indeed, a barbaric woman—for such Medea is—was supposed by the pedigree-loving Greeks to have no ancestors worth mentioning. She merely lets the audience know the very critical position of affairs between Jason and his wife. The nurse
- ↑ Dean Milman's 'Translations from Valerius Flaccus.'
