Original subtitles

(suspenseful music) (warrior shouting)

(snakes hissing)

(wolves growling)

- The tales have been told since man first gathered

around the fires of pre-history.

Tales of the strange and wondrous things hidden

in the vast unknown shadows of the world.

Tales of creatures divine and beasts demonic,

of gods and kings,

(dragon blowing steam) of myths and monsters.

From dark forests to the lands of ice,

from desert wastes to the storm thrashed seas.

Every corner of the earth has its legends to tell.

Stories of heroes and the villains they encounter,

of the wilderness and the dangers within.

Stories of battles, of love, of order,

(dogs barking)

and of chaos.

(dogs barking)

But what are the roots of these fantastic tales

and why have they endured so long?

In this series,

we'll explore the history behind these legends

and reveal the hidden influences that shaped them.

(swords clashing) War and disease,

religious and social upheaval,

the untameable ferocity of the natural world,

(waves crashing)

and above all,

the monsters lurking within ourselves.

(dramatic music)

(flames crackling)

(insects chirping)

(soft choral music)

Love is patient.

Love is kind.

Love never fails.

It is our most prized emotion.

We pursue it.

We treasure it,

and we mourn its loss.

(sinister dramatic music)

But there is a darker side to love,

for with desire comes jealousy,

and with devotion, betrayal.

(sinister dramatic music)

Unleashed, love can wreak violence,

destruction, madness, and murder.

It is in myth and legend that society wrestles

with the twisting nature of love.

How it can inspire us and devour us.

How we try to explain it

and whether we can ever control it.

(tense dramatic music)

- Love stories can tell us

about the value placed on love,

about the significance given to it,

about how it was conceived.

- The love stories and myths

are often about ways in which societies react,

ways in which societies structure gender roles.

- [Liz] What always strikes me about them

is how few stories we would call love stories

in the ancient tradition

don't somehow rest on a power imbalance.

- [Juliette] They are really telling us about the fears,

the aspirations, and often the dynamics

in the society in which they're told.

- What is tells us is that we're not

the rational human beings that we think we are.

That we're also big squashy tubs of deep feeling.

That we can't altogether manage.

(tender music)

- Stories of love and betrayal

in all its forms have provided the inspiration

for some of our greatest works of literature and art,

and we still return to them time and again.

They tell us love can be great,

but that it can also be dangerous.

(ominous music)

(solemn music)

(carriages rattling)

"The royal convoy jolted over dirt roads.

"The journey had been a long one.

"Not a breeze disturbed the furnace heat of the day.

"Princess Iphigenia peered out at the countryside.

"Her mother, Queen Clytemnestra, dozed beside her.

"They had not stopped since that breathless messenger

"had first come to the palace.

"It was an urgent message from her husband, King Agamemnon.

"Clytemnestra was to join him at the distant port of Aulis,

"and she was to bring with her their beloved daughter,

"the beautiful Iphigenia.

(solemn music)

(carriage rumbling)

"The carriage rumbled on.

"It would be hours before they reached their destination.

"Iphigenia examined an errant lock of hair.

"This would not do.

"She called the convoy to a halt

"and summoned her handmaidens.

"They shaped her hair into intricate braids.

"Jewels of gold were set about them.

"She wanted to look her best.

"For Iphigenia was on her way to get married."

(air whooshes)

In modern society, most marriages,

to start with at least, are based on love,

but that was not always the case.

In centuries passed, marriages,

especially among the elite,

were more often an alliance

between families or nations.

You did not marry for happiness.

You married to fill a treasury, to avoid a war,

or, as in the Norse tale of "The Lay of Thrym",

to reclaim something that was stolen.

(eerie music)

In the mythology of the Norse men of Scandinavia,

there was a land far beyond the realms of men and gods.

It was a land bleak and beautiful,

of towering forests and raging storms.

It was the home of the giants.

This was the unforgiving realm that Thor,

the God of Thunder,

ventured to in search of his stolen hammer.

(ground rumbling)

Without that mighty weapon,

he was unable to defend Asgard from its enemies.

He had to reclaim it.

The story of how he did,

is part of the Poetic Edda,

a fragmentary collection of old Norse poems.

(birds chirping) (gentle music)

The Poetic Edda was compiled in the 13th century,

but the stories it contains are far more ancient.

They're remnants of an oral tradition dating back centuries.

(mystical music)

The tale of Thor and his missing hammer

is among the collection's most popular stories.

The Thunder God soon realized where his hammer had gone.

It had been stolen by Thrym,

the hideous chief of the giants,

and he would only return it on one condition.

Freyja, the Goddess of Love had to marry him.

Thor and his brother,

the trickster God Loki,

tried to convince her,

but Freyja refused.

If Thor was to get his hammer back,

he would have to find another way.

His fellow gods had a suggestion.

Thor himself should be Thrym's bride.

The Thunder God was unimpressed with the idea

of disguising himself as a woman,

but he had no choice.

- "The Lay of Thrym" gives people a chance

to kind of play the what if game.

If this were possible,

what would happen?

So very rarely in these love stories

do you get a picture of what society is like.

You get a picture either of what society could be like,

or what some of the pitfalls and important dynamics

of marriages and love affairs are within the society itself.

- There's a lot of wacky gender-bending

in and around the Norse way of thinking,

and it doesn't seem like that was because

they were comfortable with gender-bending.

It actually seems like the opposite.

- But you can certainly see how important marriage was.

Marriages were alliances.

They were not love marriages whatsoever,

and you can see this because the giants will sort of say,

"Well, we have this,"

or, "We will do this,

"but only if you give us Freyja in marriage".

(tense music)

- With his brother Loki beside him dressed as a bridesmaid,

Thor went to the land of the giants for the wedding feast.

As part of the ceremony,

the hammer was placed in his lap.

(lightening thundering)

His chance had finally come.

(suspenseful music) (lightening crackles)

He seized his weapon

and threw off his disguise.

The giants scattered,

but there was no escape from the Thunder God.

Thor struck down first his stunned husband-to-be Thrym

and then all the other giants as well.

Victorious, he returned to Asgard.

His hammer and his masculinity restored at last.

The tales of the Norse Gods were often grotesque,

but they represent a kind of fun-house mirror

to Viking culture.

Distorted though they may be,

something of the true form can still be seen.

(gentle music)

In a way Thor's disguise reflects

the position women held in Norse society.

The macho god was silenced

as he donned the bridal robes.

He remained quiet throughout the deception.

His deep voice, of course,

would have given him away,

but his silence is revealing.

To become a Norse woman in public,

Thor had to lose his voice.

(air whooshing) (dramatic music)

(foliage crunching)

The structure of Norse society

was undoubtedly a patriarchal one,

but that did not mean women were without power.

- The thing with patriarchal societies

is that you're actually talking about

the structure of society.

In practice things were often very different.

Just in pragmatic terms,

the women are very important.

They would in effect be much more equal

in terms of what was going on.

- Norse society consisted of two kinds of activity.

You have the Vikings

when they're off in their war bands doing raids,

and then you have, if you will, the Vikings at home.

The Vikings at home

you have a strikingly different picture.

It's almost matriarchal. (birds cawing)

The women in Iceland

and in the Norse lands are very powerful,

and they are strongly in control

of what goes on within their kinship network.

- Norse women did not become chieftains

nor accompany men on their foreign raids.

They forged their own roles instead,

less visible perhaps,

but influential all the same.

The story "The Lay of Thrym"

reminds us that silent and meek

though they may have appeared,

Norse women could be powerful, too.

(gentle music)

"The Port of Aulis.

(air whooshing)

"Here, King Agamemnon had gathered his vast army

"and here, they waited.

"For there was no sign of the wind

"needed to carry them to war.

"In a tent perched high above the placid seas,

"Princess Iphigenia waited with her mother.

"She had never looked more beautiful,

"but then she had never met her future husband before.

"In the greatest army ever assembled,

"he was the greatest warrior, Achilles.

"This was the man Iphigenia had come so far to meet.

"This was the man her father had promised her.

"Achilles noticed Iphigenia staring at him and smiled.

"He looked every inch the son of a Goddess.

"Iphigenia bowed.

'What is it that brings you to Aulis,' the warrior said.

"He did not know of any wedding.

"Agamemnon had lied.

"He had lied to his wife.

"He had lied to his daughter.

"Tears pricked her eyes,

"but she would not let them see.

"She ran from the room pushing past the guards.

"If it was not Achilles,

"then who was she there to marry?"

Iphigenia's disappointment is understandable.

Rejection and dashed expectations,

are the price often demanded by love,

but in mythology even those who do marry

may not find happiness.

(air whooshing)

(bright magical music)

Cornwall in Southwest England,

an ancient coastline carved

by the long ravages of sea and wind.

This is a land of cove and beach, cliff and valley.

A land with its own culture, its own language,

and its own legends to tell.

The story of Tristan and Isolde

dates back to the 12th century.

It tells of a love triangle

between a handsome young knight,

a beautiful Irish princess,

and her husband the King of Cornwall.

(air whooshing) (soldiers shouting)

The match between Isolde and King Mark

was intended to bring peace

between long warring kingdoms.

Tristan was Mark's nephew and favorite knight.

He was the one entrusted with bringing Isolde

to Cornwall from Ireland.

On that journey however,

Tristan and Isolde drank a potion

which made them fall madly in love.

(water swashing)

- The significance of the love potion varies a bit

depending on which author is talking about it,

but it is often administered to Tristan and Isolde

without either of them knowing what's going on.

- The potion just represents overmastering desire.

That moment where you just throw caution to the winds

and even though you know you shouldn't,

you're longing to do it so much

that you just do it anyway.

- [Juliette] It absolves them from morality in the sense

that it allows the authors in this story

to kind of look at other things.

What is the nature of a knight

who is very loyal to the king

and indeed the nephew of the king in many of these stories,

what happens when that person becomes

totally involved in this kind of emotion?

(bell tolling)

- Isolde did go on to marry Tristan's uncle, King Mark.

Peace between Ireland and Cornwall demanded it,

but the potion had not worn off.

The affair with Tristan continued.

All three characters loved one another.

Tristan desired Isolde,

but respected his uncle.

The king loved Tristan as a son and Isolde as a wife.

She was grateful for his kindness,

but could not resist her lover.

All three were plagued by terrible dreams of the future.

These would prove prophetic.

(mournful music)

For eventually King Mark did discover the affair.

He plotted to kill the treacherous young couple.

(somber mournful music)

Tristan and Isolde managed to escape death,

fleeing into the wild,

but they found no happiness there either.

They were still consumed with guilt.

Their story was inspired by earlier Celtic tales.

It, in turn, would shape later romances.

Its influence can be seen

in the tale of Lancelot and Guinevere.

The first known account of the tragic love affair

between King Arthur's wife and his greatest knight

dates from the 12th century.

It was written by Chretien de Troyes,

a French court poet.

- Chretien de Troyes is one of the most famous

of the medieval romance writers.

He pretty well invented Arthurian romance.

The most famous story is Lancelot and Guinevere.

Chretien introduces Lancelot into the Arthurian legend.

- Lancelot is a latecomer really to the round table,

and he comes from a much more courtly era

than those earlier sort of wilder, hairier knights.

He's much more polished.

He not only has great physical prowess,

but also really knows his way around a banquet hall,

is good with fashion, is physically beautiful,

rather than just being big and burly and strong,

that's what Chretien brings into the story.

(air whooshing)

(horse neighing)

- [Juliette] By the time Chretien

was writing in the 12th century,

the notion of courtly love was becoming very popular,

and what this meant is that the warrior knight

would be civilized through the love of a lady.

The idea was that if you loved this unattainable woman

it would spur you onto do greater and greater deeds.

(air whooshing)

(soft moderate music)

- [Nicholas] The story was an appealing one

for the women of the French court.

In their everyday lives,

the dynastic and political

triumphed over the romantic.

Arranged marriages were the norm.

Husbands would disappear for years at a time

on pilgrimages or crusade.

While they were free to have mistresses,

for women the bonds of marriage were unbreakable.

- One of the key things to understand

is that many of the most powerful patrons

to which these writers of the 11th and 12th centuries

are trying to appeal are women.

If you're trying to appeal to these highly educated,

very sophisticated French speaking women,

you're obviously going to want to tell them stories

about other very highly educated,

very sophisticated women

and their interesting love lives.

- At this period you get another thing

which is very interesting

which is the beginning of proper feminist literature.

You have female writers sort of saying,

"Look, women are not just Eve figures,

"who introduced sex into the world.

"They're not just bargaining chips in marriage.

"They have a psychology of their own.

"They have morality.

"They have something to contribute."

Aristocratic women at least were beginning

to be able to articulate their place in society,

their own psychology, their own identity.

(air whooshing) (dramatic music)

- More was at stake in these stories

than hurt feelings alone.

Tristan and Isolde's affair endangered

the truce between Cornwall and Ireland.

Peace was only assured

when the couple decided to separate.

Isolde returned to King Mark,

and Tristan left Cornwall forever.

In these stories the fate of nations

rests on affairs of the heart.

They remind us that behind great moments of history,

often lie human relationships and human failings.

They explore how all of us must reconcile private passions

with other responsibilities,

and they ask when our loyalties,

our loves compete,

which will triumph,

and what will the consequences be?

(curious music)

"The miserable Iphigenia

"was dressed in her wedding finery.

(gentle music)

"Her mother led her towards the altar.

"Her father Agamemnon waited there.

"All the other kings of Greece stood with him,

"but which of the old men was to be Iphigenia's husband?

'We are all of us but mortal,'

"the king's voice trembled.

'We cannot defy the Gods.'

"Iphigenia was blindfolded.

"For Agamemnon had displeased the Goddess Artemis.

"She was the one who had stilled the winds.

(ominous music)

"A terrible sacrifice was demanded

"if ever the Greeks were to reach Troy.

(ominous music)

"Clytemnestra surged forward,

"trying to reach her daughter,

"but strong arms held her back.

"She cried out,

"begging her husband not to harm their child.

"But Agamemnon drowned out her words with prayer.

(suspenseful music)

(sword slashes)

(woman wailing)

(woman screaming)

"Clytemnestra screamed

"as her daughter slumped to the ground.

"Then it began.

"Quietly at first,

"but soon spreading from harbor end to harbor end.

"The ropes and rigging of 1,000 ships,

"limped so long, bucked against their stays.

"The wind was blowing again.

(wind blowing)

"With the death of Iphigenia,

"Agamemnon's fleet was free to depart for Troy."

The war there would last for 10 long years.

When victory finally came,

the sack of the city was a bloody one.

(wind blowing) (flames roaring)

But some Trojans did survive.

Among them was a prince called Aeneas.

Although his wife died in the carnage,

he managed to escape the burning city

with his aging father and infant son.

His story is told in the great epic poem the "Aeneid".

It was written over a period of 10 years

in the 1st century BC by the Roman poet Virgil.

It is widely regarded as his masterpiece.

(air whooshing)

(dramatic music)

As Aeneas's fleet sailed across the Mediterranean,

it was beset by a devastating storm.

Aeneas and his men were forced onto the shores of Africa.

Its plains were veiled with cork oak and olive trees.

Its hills charred by the sun,

seemed to lope eagerly towards

the shade of distant mountains.

It was on this harsh and arid coast

that the city of Carthage was to be found.

Aeneas and his men might have expected a hostile welcome.

Instead the Carthaginians

and their Queen Dido took pity.

For Carthage was a new settlement

founded by refugees just like the Trojans.

In Aeneas, Dido saw a mirror of herself.

She too had lost a spouse to violence.

She too had been forced to flee her home.

(dramatic music)

- [Liz] Dido is a very competent, very capable leader.

Virgil says, "femina dux facti",

woman was the leader of the action.

She's very positively presented as a leader.

- [Diane] Venus enchants Dido into falling in love

with Aeneas to ensure that he gets

a warm welcome and the supplies he needs.

So, it's kind of a mean trick.

Poor Dido's just innocently

extending sacred hospitality to a stranger,

and Venus sort of creeps up behind her

and fills her heart with passion.

(tense sultry music)

- [Nicholas] Dido offered the Trojan

not simply a place to recover after a storm,

but a home as well.

Cloaked in her kindness however,

was an act of hostility.

Aeneas faced many foes on his journey to Italy,

but love was to prove the most dangerous.

- When Dido and Aeneas go off on a hunting party,

the Goddesses arrange a great big storm

that is so bad that they have to take shelter,

separated from the rest of the party in a cave,

and they consummate their relationship

to the sound of the wolves howling,

which is not really a very good omen.

(rain pattering) (thunder rumbling)

- Dido represented a threat

not just to the onward progression of the story

but to the future of the world itself.

For Carthage offered a viable alternative for Aeneas.

Merging their families and people,

he could have ruled the prosperous city

by Dido's side.

He could have been happy there.

(air whooshing) (dramatic music)

If he chose to stay however,

his people would never reach Italy.

They would never found Rome.

The history of the world,

the "Aeneid" tells us,

hinged on this moment.

(dramatic music)

- What happens in the poem is that the God Mercury

is sent to shake up Aeneas, to wake him up.

Remind him he's got a destiny

he's meant to be fulfilling.

So he comes down,

and he says to Aeneas, "What are you doing?

"You're standing around on the walls of Carthage.

"You've got your own place to go and found."

When Dido hears that he is going to leave,

she confronts him and accuses him

of planning to leave secretly,

and he tells her that he's being torn by duty.

He's not going of his own choice.

This isn't his own free will.

He's being forced to do this by the Gods.

(dramatic music)

- [Nicolas] Dido was heartbroken.

Aeneas had abandoned her for a future

even he struggled to believe in.

She was overcome with anguish.

(woman wailing) (fire crackling)

As Aeneas sailed away,

she built a great pyre in the center of her palace,

climbed on top, and plunged a sword through her heart.

(sword clinks)

(fire crackling) (melancholic music)

- Sadly, I think that Aeneas leaving Dido

was meant to be the key Roman moment in the entire epic.

I think it's meant to imply the Roman male's ability

to renounce sensuous pleasure,

and the appeal of everything that Carthage represents,

which is kind of seductive, bad religion,

naughty immoral practices,

in favor of the straight linear Roman legion ideal.

- It's also a triumph over sort of luxury

and Orientalism and comfort.

One of the things that Mercury criticisms Aeneas for

is wearing sort of a rich purple robe

that Dido has given him.

- [Diane] I think it's meant to be a moment for drum beating

and the sound of trumpets.

The fact that it's also imbued with Pathos

is because Virgil's writing it,

and Virgil really never writes anything

without imbuing it with Pathos.

That's his thing.

So he portrays Dido as this helpless tragic victim,

but it's not meant to make us think

that Aeneas made the wrong choice.

(air whooshing) (birds cawing)

- From his ship,

Aeneas saw the burning pyre

and the walls of the palace aglow with its flames.

He knew what it meant.

Once again, he was leaving behind a city shrouded in smoke,

torn apart by outsiders.

However, this time, he was responsible.

Dido would haunt him

throughout the rest of the "Aeneid".

Her city Carthage would trouble Rome for centuries.

(air whooshing) (dramatic music)

- In Dido's dying words she says she is rejoicing

to travel to the underworld,

and she hopes that Aeneas will see the pyre

and that her death will be an omen,

an omina for the Romans.

Now what this foreshadows is several centuries of conflict

in between Rome and Carthage.

(dramatic music)

(soldiers shouting)

- [Diane] Rome and Carthage had by Virgil's time

fought three very vicious wars called the Punic Wars,

and Virgil is almost saying

it's intrinsic to Rome to be opposed to Carthage

because of this choice that Aeneas made.

- [Nicholas] Virgil lays bare love's destructive potential.

It tempted Aeneas to forget his duty,

and it transformed Dido from a wise strong leader

into a humiliated, savage creature,

but there is a second transformation at work,

one subtler and perhaps more subversive.

Virgil was writing in the aftermath of a civil war.

The assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BC

had led to a power vacuum

at the heart of the Roman republic.

The struggle for supremacy would last more than a decade.

In the end it was Octavian,

adopted son of Caesar who triumphed.

At the Battle of Actium,

he defeated his one time ally, Mark Antony.

(soldiers shouting) (suspenseful music)

At Mark Antony's side to the end was his lover,

Cleopatra, the Queen of Egypt.

(air whooshing)

She was a figure of mockery,

fear and hatred in Rome.

Virgil knew all this,

so it is impossible to ignore the echoes

of the African Queen in his portrayal of Dido.

(suspenseful music)

- It would have resonated,

particularly with Virgil's audience,

which would have just lived through

the second Triumvirate Wars,

which did very much involve

the Antony-Cleopatra Egyptian alliance.

- [Liz] There's very much a way that we can read

the Dido-Aeneas episode as Aeneas teetering

on an Antony-Cleopatra precipice

and narrowly escaping the fate.

- [Diane] Cleopatra was seductive

in some of the same ways as Dido.

She's sort of oriental.

That in itself is seductive.

She comes from what can be understood

as a foreign religion,

a foreign culture.

She's kind of magical in some of the same ways as Dido,

so I think in all those respects the figure of Dido

could have been read by Virgil's original audiences

as a kind of avatar of Cleopatra.

(gentle music)

- You might expect Dido, an enemy twice over,

representing both Cleopatra and Carthage to be vilified.

Yet, Virgil does not ask readers to hate her.

Instead he transforms her

into the poem's most compelling character.

He makes his audience feel Dido's rejection

and the terrible pain she suffers.

He makes us sympathize with the enemy.

"Love," Virgil tells us,

"can be a dangerous thing,

"but if it is,

"then it is one shared across

"divides of politics and nationhood."

(solemn music)

The eastern shores of the Black Sea

in the shadow of the Caucasus Mountains,

this was the edge of the Ancient Greek world.

There was once a kingdom here rich in iron and gold.

Colchis was its name.

This was the land which the Greek hero Jason

came to on his quest for the golden fleece.

(air whooshing)

An exiled prince,

Jason needed the fleece to prove his worth

and reclaim the throne that had been taken from him.

But the fleece belonged to another man, King Aeetes,

and he guarded it jealously.

"If Jason wanted the fleece," the king told him,

"he would have to complete several challenges."

Each seemed impossible and would have been

but for the help of a young woman

who had fallen deeply in love with the Greek hero,

the daughter of King Aeetes himself, Medea.

- Medea is perhaps one of the most fascinating characters

in the whole of classical mythology.

- [Diane] She is generally regarded

and described in the texts of all periods as a witch.

That is she's someone who has huge magical power.

- When we first meet Medea,

she's very much a traditional love sick maiden

brimming with unrequited love and very modest

and very nervous, but even at this stage,

we start to see sort of a much darker,

much more powerful figure starting to emerge.

(air whooshing) (dramatic music)

- With Medea's help Jason completed the king's challenges.

First he had to harness fire-breathing bulls

Then use them to plow a field.

He had to sow serpents teeth in the earth

and kill the soldiers who miraculously grew from them.

Finally he had to overcome a sleepless dragon,

guarding the fleece itself.

Such was her love for Jason,

that when the Greek hero left Colchis in triumph,

Medea went with him.

She would go on to bear his sons

and travel by his side throughout the Greek world.

(wind blowing) (water swashing)

Having already stretched the mold of the helper maiden,

Medea would challenge the constraints

of her future roles as wife and mother, too.

Any happiness Jason and Medea had would not last.

When they reached Corinth,

Jason abandoned Medea for the daughter of the king there.

(somber music) (child crying)

But it was what she did next

that secured her name in history.

She destroyed the things dearest to her husband,

their children.

(ominous music)

(air whooshing)

Medea then fled Corinth and Jason for Athens.

It was in that city that the story

as we know it best today was written.

It's author was the great playwright, Euripides.

- Euripides was the first one really to create characters

who had a psychological reality,

and that probably makes him more interesting

to modern theater goers than perhaps some of the others.

- [Liz] He also has a very lighthearted touch

in that there is a surprising amount

of black humor in Euripides.

He really goes for that kind of dark irony

and that bitterness that still somehow manages to be funny.

- [Juliette] He's kind of free to create this wonderful,

wonderful, not amoral character,

but this character who's driven internally

by her own idea of what ought to happen.

- [Nicholas] Euripides forces the audience

into uncomfortable questions.

As Medea veers between behavior we deem good

to behavior we deem evil,

we ask what it takes to go from one to the other.

What drives humans to inhuman acts,

and what might we be capable of

in the wrong circumstances?

- It's pretty terrifying

because it's two passions opposing one another.

The passion to get your own back at someone you loved

and trusted who's betrayed you in the worst possibly way,

completely unfeelingly and unthinkingly.

Versus the maternal passion for your children,

the longing to look after them and shelter them

and nurture them, and make sure no harm comes to them.

- The Greeks were not necessarily keen on intense emotions.

They felt that restraint was rather more important.

So it would have seemed to them almost natural

that this woman who was an outsider

and a witch and obsessively in love

should have fallen in on herself like this.

So I think it's not a particularly positive attitude

to the emotion of love.

(dramatic music)

- [Nicholas] Euripides' play was first performed 413 BC.

Every year, Athens held a festival

dedicated to the God Dionysus.

New plays were performed and judged.

It was at this festival that Euripides

presented his version of the Medea story.

He came last.

- We don't know what the audience reaction was,

but there are several things that could have made

an audience uneasy or less than happy about it.

- One can assume that this would have been

a very challenging play for them at the time,

just as it remains a very challenging play for us.

I mean one cannot not be attracted to Medea,

but then you stand back and you think,

"Well, what has this woman done?"

- [Juliette] So in a sense she is attacking

all of the institutions of kinship and marriage

that were very central to the Greeks.

She's destroying their sense of order,

and order was really important to the Greek world.

(dramatic music)

- Euripides' telling of the story has inspired writers

and artists from every generation,

(audience applauding) and today his tragedy

is perhaps the most popular of all ancient Greek plays.

(audience applauding)

It's the complexity of the lead character

that drives this endless re-interpretation.

Medea acts on emotion, but is also cunning.

She's the wife of a Greek hero,

but a foreign barbarian at the same time.

She's a loving wife who defies her husband.

A loving mother who murders her children.

She's a woman who rejects the roles

that male dominated society has given her,

even as she embodies them.

- [Diane] Medea's story tells us something very profound

about ancient Greek attitudes to women,

and particularly to the idea that women

can't control their emotions as well as men can.

- The Medea highlights the double standard.

It's perfectly acceptable for Jason

to decide he's going to abandon the woman

who has left her country for him, had his children,

go off and remarry sort of a young Corinthian princess,

and Medea is supposed to just say,

"That's fine dear, that's okay".

- By living through her passions

as the play forces us to do,

we're encouraged to think,

in that situation how could I restrain myself?

- [Liz] While this is obviously a very extreme case,

it also establishes the idea of love

as this dangerous driving force

that can cause problems if it is not paid attention to.

(solemn music)

(air whooshing)

(water dripping)

- [Nicholas] "After 10 years of war,

"the triumphant Agamemnon returned home from Troy.

"But his wife Clytemnestra

"had sworn an oath all those years ago.

(air whooshing)

"The daughter Agamemnon had sacrificed

"to reach Troy had not been forgotten.

(woman wailing)

"At last there would be justice for Iphigenia."

(water dripping)

(knife clinks) (man groaning)

(water dripping)

Love and violence seem bound together in Greek mythology.

Just as in the tales of other cultures,

it recognizes there are many sides to love.

(dramatic music)

All these stories still speak to us,

for the nature of this most powerful of emotions,

has not changed.

(dramatic music)

- The reason that myths of love endure

is that they tell us about human desires,

and they tell us how perverse human desire is.

- It's interesting that very often they aren't about love

in the sense that we would recognize it.

So they're not really like

the romantic novels we're used to.

- [Diane] Human desire is typically

not something under much rational control,

and in myths it often runs away with even the wariest

and smartest heroes and queens and lures them into places

where they'd really rather not be.

(tense dramatic music)

- You have that question of where do you put love

as this irrational driving, powerful emotion,

within a structure of society,

and what happens when it is scorned?

(dramatic music)

- All societies must find a way of channeling this emotion,

for its power over the human spirit is unrivaled.

If at times it does inspire acts of horrifying violence,

it is far more often responsible for kindness,

self-sacrifice, and bravery.

We cannot however have one without the other.

Love is patient.

Love is kind,

but love is also irrational,

and love can be dangerous.

(dramatic music)

(bright music)