Medea Euripidis Poetae Tragici Georgio Buchanano Scoto Interprete

George Buchanan is best known now for his role as tutor to James VI of Scotland, the future James I of England, and for his controversial political theory, which emphasised that a monarch's power and right to rule derived from the people, and could if abused be taken away (his De Iure Regni apud Scotos was condemned and even burned at various points after its publication in 1575). His Latin translations of Euripides belong to an earlier period of his life, and can be seen as part of the development of both his pedagogy and his politics. His Medea was first printed in 1544 by Michel de Vascosan in Paris, in the version which forms the basis for this edition. He appears to have begun work on it in Paris in the 1520s (Walsh 1986, 99), with the intention of improving his Greek, as he later wrote (see McFarlane 1981, 119). He then came back to it in the early 1540s, when while teaching at the Collège de Guyenne in Bordeaux he was required to produce a Latin play each year for his pupils to perform. Medea was staged in 1543, commemorated at the end of several editions of the play including the first one (Acta fuit Burdegalae an.M.D.XLIII, sig. D8v). Buchanan taught another famous pupil while at Bordeaux: Michel de Montaigne, who claimed to have acted the principal roles in Buchanan's Latin tragedies while at school, and so could potentially have played Medea herself in that performance (see Martyn 1977, 137-8).

Buchanan acknowledges in his preface to Medea that his Euripidean translations were inspired by Erasmus' precedent, writing of his awareness that 'this task, attempted previously by many, had yielded to Erasmus alone' (hanc a plerisque rem prius tentatam uni Erasmo ita successisse). Indeed, even the idea of translating Euripides to practice one's Greek had been espoused by Erasmus, who gave that reason for initially embarking on his translation of Hecuba (first printed with his Iphigenia in Aulis in Paris in 1506). P. G. Walsh further remarks that 'Medea was composed [...] after close study of Erasmus', observing that 'in a hundred lines of Medea there is no diaresis between the two halves of the line' - whereas '[b]oth Euripides and Seneca regularly observe the diaresis', Erasmus does not (Walsh 1986, 100). Buchanan's Medea was also linked closely to Erasmus' popular translations in its publication: the 1544 edition printed it not by itself but after the Erasmian Hecuba and Iphigenia in Aulis.

In his choice of play, however, Buchanan might not have met with Erasmus' approval. When he brings up some of the plot in his Adages (2.10.98), he shows some distaste for it: 'if I was not afraid that I might seem to the insufficiently learned to have omitted them through carelessness, since they are found in popular collections, I would never have added these kinds of fables', he grumbles (Mynors 1992). But Buchanan was not alone amongst the learned in his interest in Euripides' Medea; it had been included in the very first edition of Euripides' plays to appear in print, a volume produced by Janus Lascaris in Florence in 1495, which contained Medea, Alcestis (the other play by Euripides which Buchanan would translate), Hippolytus, and Andromache. In manuscript, François Tissard translated the first three into Latin in early 1507, while a Parisian MS from c.1530 contains the first half of Medea (see de Nolhac 1898, 299-307). Stand-alone Greek editions of Medea were printed by Jean Loys in Paris in 1539 and 1543, and Petreius Tiara's Latin translation was printed in 1542 and 1543. Buchanan's choice of play, while not likely to have been directly influenced by Tissard or these later publications, can be set in the context of this wider evidence for interest in Euripides' Medea in the first half of the sixteenth century.

Buchanan's fame remained considerable in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and after the initial edition of Medea in 1544 his translations of Euripides appeared in print fairly frequently until the early eighteenth century (see 'Witnesses Description', below). Medea was published in two primary contexts: among collections of Buchanan's works (1568, 1595, 1609, 1621), and along with the Greek text either in parallel as a stand-alone text (1576, 1598, 1620), or separated from it, as in Estienne's collection of Tragoediae selectae (1567). Nowadays, the story is rather different. Buchanan's translations have received relatively little attention, and the only modern edition is that of Peter Sharratt and P. G. Walsh (1983), which has been extremely useful in preparing the present edition. Separate critical discussions of Medea are rare, as critical attention tends to be more focused on Buchanan's original neo-Latin Biblical dramas, Baptistes and Jephthes. Jean-Frédéric Chevalier's chapter on 'Buchanan and the Poetics of Borrowing in the Latin Translation of Euripides' Medea' (2009) deserves special mention as a sustained analysis of Buchanan's stylistic choices. Chevalier shows that 'Buchanan's debt to Seneca's tragedies is relatively small', instead borrowing from a wide range of Latin authors in order 'to enrich the diction suitable for Latin tragedies by translating from Greek' (183; 93). Zoé Schweitzer also dedicates attention to the play in her 2013 article 'Buchanan, helléniste et dramaturge, interprète d'Euripide (Medea et Alcestis)'. 

Chevalier, Jean-Frédéric. 2009. 'Buchanan and the Poetics of Borrowing in the Latin Translation of Euripides' Medea'. In Philip Ford and Roger Green eds. George Buchanan: Poet and Dramatist. Swansea: Classical Press of Wales. Pp. 183-96.

Durkan, John. 1994. Bibliography of George Buchanan. Glasgow: At the University Library.

Hopkinson, Neil. 2015. Ed. and trans. Theocritus, Moschus, Bion. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 

Martyn, J. R. C. 1977. 'Montaigne and George Buchanan.' Humanistica Lovaniensia, 26: 132–142.

McFarlane, I. D. 1981. Buchanan. London: Duckworth.

Mynors, R. A. B. trans. 1992. Collected Works of Erasmus 34: Adages II vii 1 to III iii 100. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

de Nolhac, Pierre. 1898. 'Le premier travail français sur Euripide: la traduction de François Tissard.' In A.Fontemoing ed. Mélanges Henri Weil. Paris: Ancienne Librairie Thorin et fils. Pp. 299-307.

Schweitzer, Zoé. 2013. 'Buchanan, helléniste et dramaturge, interprète d'Euripide (Medea et Alcestis)'. Études Épistémè 23: paras 1-28.

Sharratt, Peter, and P. G. Walsh eds. 1983. George Buchanan: Tragedies. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press. 

Walsh, P. G. 1986. 'Buchanan and Classical Drama.' In I. D. McFarlane ed. Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Sanctandreani. Pp. 99-112.

George Buchanan's translation of Euripides' Medea was first printed in 1544 in Paris by Michel Vascosan and was reissued eighteen times up to 1725 (Geneva 1567; Basel 1568; Strasbourg 1576; Heidelberg 1597; Strasbourg 1598; Heidelberg 1609; Hamburg 1620; Saumur 1621; Leiden 1621; Leiden 1628; Amsterdam 1642; Amsterdam 1665; Amsterdam 1676; London 1686; Amsterdam 1687; London 1716; Leiden 1725; see Durkan 1994). The only modern edition is that of Sharratt and Walsh, 1983. The modernised edition presented here is based on the comparison of the 1544 editio princeps with the ten witnesses published earlier than the year 1625:

Four appeared in France (A, D, F, I), two in Switzerland (B, C), three in Germany (E, G, H), and one in the Netherlands (J), which would be the country producing the majority of the editions printed after 1625 (Leiden 1628, 1725; Amsterdam 1641, 1665, 1676, 1687). The critical apparatus provided here takes into account the ten witnesses listed above, as well as the modern edition by Sharratt and Walsh (S&W). 

Of these editions, A, D, E, and F contain only Medea among Buchanan's tragedies, whereas the others feature both Medea and Alcestis. D, F, and H print the Greek original on the parallel page; D and F divide it into acts called δράματα. B also contains the Greek version but not as a parallel text to Buchanan's translation. As the title indicates (Tragoediae selectae Aeschyli, Sophoclis, Euripidis cum duplici interpretatione Latina, una ad uerbum, altera carmine), B is a collection of selected plays from Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides and offers each play in two types of translation, one ad verbum, i.e. a literal translation, with the Greek original on the parallel page; one carmine, i.e. a literary and metrical translation. For Medea, the printer and editor of the volume, Henri Estienne, selected Buchanan's version as the carmine translation. The Greek text that Buchanan used is the Aldine edition, but we do not know whether it was the editio princeps or one of its subsequent reprintings (on this issue, see Fries 1537, and Sharratt and Walsh 1983, 3-4).

The paratextual materials are mostly the same but there are some variations. The dedicatory letter to John of Luxembourg, bishop of Pamiers (1540-1548) present in the first edition (A) is reproduced in B, C, E, G, I, and J. The argument, translated from the one in the Aldine edition, appears in A, B, C, E, G, H, I, and J together with the list of the dramatis personae; D and F feature the argument by Aristophanes of Byzantium, which is also present in J. H has two additional Latin poems on the topic of love, a translation of Mochus' idyll Ἔρως δραπέτης (translated as Amor fugitiuus) and a translation of Bion of Smyrna’s fragmentary idyll (13 Stob. 4.20.57) (see Hopkinson 2015, 535).

A number of pre-1625 witnesses refer to a performance or a reading of the play. A's “Acta fuit Burdegalae an. M.D.XLIII” is reproduced in C, E, and G. F has “Pro theatro, et schola Argentinensi” on the title page; while H was “in gymnasio Hambugersi praelecta a M. Henrico Rumpio, pastore ad s. Johann et linguarum professore”.