What happens in Chapter 4 of Medea?
The First Stasimon captures the Chorus of Corinthian women stepping back from the unfolding drama to contemplate the chaos sparked by Medea's crisis. After Jason's cold justification for his remarriage and Medea's furious rejection of his reasoning, the Chorus shifts its focus outward and upward. They describe a world turned upside down: rivers flowing backward, they proclaim, and traditional morals flipped on their heads. Women, long maligned in song and tales, will finally receive the respect they deserve, as the era of female suffering is being rewritten. The ode then shifts to Jason's betrayal—his broken oaths and abandonment of Medea after she saved him and sacrificed her homeland. The Chorus doesn't outright condemn Medea's anger yet; instead, it presents her as a woman wronged by a man who has violated the most sacred bond. Corinth, which should have provided refuge, instead brings her further shame. The stasimon concludes with themes of exile and rootlessness: Medea has no city to return to, no family to shelter her, and the man who was her only support has cast her aside.
Analysis
Euripides uses the First Stasimon as a structural pivot, presenting the Chorus not as mere spectators but as a moral compass that clearly favors Medea. The ode begins with a striking image of rivers flowing backward, one of the most captivating instances of adynaton, a rhetorical figure that expresses impossibility, here used to indicate real cosmic upheaval rather than absurdity. The world is out of balance, and Jason is to blame.
The gender dynamics in the stasimon are sharp. Euripides has the Chorus openly confront the tradition of misogynistic lyric poetry, a self-aware move that reflects on the genre within which the play operates. By calling out the cultural legacy of women's slander as something that needs reevaluation, the playwright weaves a critique of Athenian literary norms into a choral ode—the most traditionally conservative part of tragic structure.
The tone of the stasimon transitions from cosmic upheaval to personal sorrow. This shift occurs through the mounting burden of Medea's losses: her homeland, her father, the safety of family ties. Each loss is stated plainly, without embellishment, lending the passage its profound despair. The Chorus's empathy is not sentimental; it feels judicial. They are calculating a debt. This restraint showcases Euripides at his most exact—he holds back pity to heighten the audience's awareness of injustice, setting the stage for the violence that the play's unfolding logic is already signaling.
Key quotes from Chapter 4
“Back to their sources flow the sacred rivers, and justice and all things are reversed.”
The Chorus opens the stasimon with this image of cosmic inversion, establishing the *adynaton* that frames Jason's betrayal as a rupture in the natural order itself.
“The female sex is honoured now; no more will foul-tongued slander fasten on us.”
The Chorus explicitly challenges the tradition of misogynist lyric poetry, turning the stasimon into a self-aware critique of the literary culture surrounding the play.
“You have no father's house to which you can turn, unhappy one, and another queen of the bed has been set over your house.”
The Chorus catalogs Medea's compounded losses—exile, abandoned kinship, displacement—in plain, unadorned language that carries the weight of a legal indictment against Jason.