Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>This chapter argues that Medea conceives of, plans, and carries out her revenge according to two main principles: that of symmetry, in so far as she is obsessed with the idea of repeating her past crimes, and that of excessiveness, in so far as she simultaneously desires to surpass them. In this way, Seneca interrogates the boundary between proportionate and excessive revenge. Medea embodies several of the characteristics of Senecan revenge, such as the inherent excessiveness of revenge; meticulous, rational planning; recourse to trickery; and an obsession with surpassing other avengers held up as exempla (in Medea’s case, herself). The chapter shows how the play makes dramatic capital of the problematic concept of appropriateness (decorum), an important concept in Aristotle’s Poetics and in the Stoicism of Panaetius which can have both an aesthetic and a moral sense. It argues that the concept of decorum also lends itself to metaliterary application as it constitutes the framework on the basis of which Seneca constructs his relation to Euripides’ Medea. From the very beginning of the play, it is made clear that Euripides is Seneca’s primary model, and he presents his own Medea as both faithfully adapting and surpassing it. Finally, the chapter argues that Seneca frames Medea’s revenge as one of the transgressions which brought about the transition from the Golden to the Iron Age and, by means of an allusion to Vergil’s reception in Eclogue 4 of Aratus’ myth of Justice in the Phaenomena, he identifies Medea with Aratus’ Justice.</jats:p>