Footnote 12 In fact, Trevet’s dedication to explicating a single manuscript, and one which came from a large tradition that was missing the ending of Seneca’s Medea, serves as the starting point for appreciating the uniqueness of his interpretation.įrom his commentary, Trevet’s Medea emerges. Footnote 10 But for decades the more traditional evaluation of Trevet’s work was reflected by Ezio Franceschini’s comment that Trevet was merely a grammar teacher who explained the text to his pupils and did not concern himself with anything else Footnote 11 or by Richard Tarrant’s brief appraisal: ‘Since Trevet’s notes are elementary and often quite wrong, his importance for students of Seneca derives from the role played by his MS in the history of the transmission’. ![]() Recent Italian scholarship has been much kinder to Trevet, including him in the evaluation of the 14th-century revival of interest in Seneca’s tragedies, Footnote 6 and focussing on his definition of tragedy, Footnote 7 use of the scholastic method Footnote 8 and erudition with respect to geography Footnote 9 and mythology. Footnote 2ĭespite the great esteem his contemporaries had for him, Trevet has been largely neglected by modern scholars: apart from interest in his conception of tragedy and renewed attention to his Boethius commentary, the bulk of research on this Dominican scholar is over fifty years old. These, at least, are the crucial aspects of interpretation derived from the Anglophone commentaries on the Latin text of Seneca’s Medea used today. What emerges is, on the one hand, a Jason whose practical anxieties about his and his sons’ safety are woefully paired with a lack of concern for Medea and on the other hand, a Medea who, once offended, transforms herself through anger into the all-destroyer that she always had the potential to become, approaching divinity itself at the end. Jason even claims that his marriage alliance with King Creon of Corinth is out of concern that his sons might be targeted by Acastus (438–9), and Creon himself describes Jason as ‘panic-struck in weighty terror’ (‘graui terrore pauidum’, 255–6) at the threat of punishment by Acastus. Jason, for his part, appears in Seneca’s play as a desperate man with a target on his back, pursued by his cousin Acastus for the death of King Pelias at the hands of his own daughters who were tricked by Medea into butchering him. ![]() Medea stabs the second son in front of Jason’s eyes, and then asks him whether he ‘recognizes his wife’ (‘coniugem agnoscis tuam?’, 1021), before escaping Corinth unharmed in a divine chariot pulled by flying snakes. Footnote 1 From the start of the play, Medea speaks of how she ‘will become’ Medea (‘Fiam’, 171), and this culminates in her decision to avenge Jason by killing their sons, chillingly signalled with the phrase ‘now I am Medea’ (‘Medea nunc sum’, 910). Today’s readers of Seneca’s Medea are fascinated by the construction of Medea’s identity and how she builds upon her past crimes – her use of witchcraft to enable Jason to steal the golden fleece, and the murder of her own brother – in order to take revenge against Jason and his new bride in Corinth. These are all subtle interpretations that cumulatively form a unique ‘reading’ of Seneca’s Medea offered by the very first commentator on all of Seneca’s plays, seven hundred years ago. Finally, when Medea argues back and forth with herself, Trevet attributes Medea’s regard for her sons as ‘not mine’ to her loss of power over them because of her exile from Corinth, without any mention that the sons might now belong to Jason’s new wife Creusa. Furthermore, the theme of Medea as Jason’s saviour, and this act of salvation itself as the cause of crime, informs Trevet’s reading (and misreading) of important passages. For Trevet, Jason’s alliance with Creon’s daughter Creusa is calculated not to protect himself and his sons from an angry and dangerous Acastus, but in order to save Medea’s life. It is Trevet’s Medea, and not Jason, who is being pursued by Pelias’s son Acastus. Trevet did not know a Medea who told her Nurse that she ‘would become’ Medea. Because Trevet relied on a single manuscript from the A tradition, he and his readers did not have access to a Senecan Medea who asks Jason whether he ‘recognizes his wife’ before departing Corinth in a flying chariot drawn by serpents because the last nineteen lines of the play did not exist in A. ![]() Trevet’s interpretation of character and plot in Seneca’s Medea differs in many ways from 21st-century classical scholars. In 1314, the Oxford Dominican monk Nicholas Trevet was commissioned to write a commentary on Seneca’s tragedies.
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