SOURCE: “A Scapegoat, not a Sorceress,” in Times Literary Supplement, October 4, 1996, p. 17.

In the following review of Medea, Graves finds Wolf's reinterpretation of the myth “too neat” and ultimately “unpersuasive.”

If, as Claude Lévi-Strauss contended, a myth is properly defined as consisting of all its versions, then the dominant image of Medea which has come down to posterity, that of the murderer of her own children, may seem distinctly partial. It is derived, of course, from Euripides’ Medea, where the heroine slays her two sons in an act of fearful vengeance against Jason, her husband, for his unfaithfulness with the daughter of Creon, King of Corinth. Earlier sources tell the story differently, however, ascribing the death of the children either to an accident or to the citizens of Corinth, and a contemporary rumour even alleged that Euripides accepted a Corinthian bribe to transfer the deed in his...