Glorious Exploits Chapter 23 Summary: The Medea Performance

⚠️ Spoiler Warning: This guide contains detailed spoilers for the entire novel. Proceed only if you've finished reading or are comfortable knowing the plot.

Summary

The chapter opens with the performance venue packed with Syracusans and Athenians, including potters, fishermen, and a few aristocrats. The crowd is unnervingly silent. Lampo, terrified, delivers a shaky opening until Gelon takes over. Gelon announces two plays: the well-known Medea and the Sicilian premiere of Euripides’ Trojan Women. He pours a wine libation on the ground, but a woman screams that the world has gone mad—her husband and son are dead. A scarred man carries her away, and murmurs threaten to unravel the event.

Alcar begins playing the aulos with unexpected skill, and the hissing stops. Gelon seizes the moment, climbing onto a rock and commanding the audience to look at the chained Athenians and see the quarry as the palace of Corinth. The chorus of Corinthian noblewomen enters, but the performance immediately falls apart: an actor trips, loses his mask, and the crowd erupts in laughter. The chorus falters, words overlap, and the audience mocks the “shite Athenians.” Gelon’s face goes pale.

Then Numa enters as Medea in a scarlet robe. He stands still, then begins a slow, menacing dance. When he speaks the line about women being miserable, the crowd falls silent. Numa’s intensity grips everyone. Paches appears as Jason, strutting with the authority of a former aristocrat, and the two engage in a vicious agon (verbal contest). The audience is torn between sympathies. Medea wins and Jason retreats. Offstage deaths are described by a messenger; Numa shrieks with delight. When Medea kills her children, Numa makes the audience pity her. The play ends with Jason weeping, the chorus describing Medea’s escape in a dragon chariot, and rooks flying toward the sun. The audience sits in stunned silence.

Without pause, Gelon shouts that they are now outside the walls of Troy. The backdrop is replaced with blood-streaked walls. The actors, though exhausted, begin Trojan Women.

Key Events

Lampo and Gelon open the performance before a large, mixed crowd.
A grieving woman protests and is forcibly removed.
Alcar’s aulos playing calms the audience.
Gelon delivers a speech redefining the quarry as a theatrical space.
The Medea chorus stumbles, causing laughter and mockery.
Numa’s entrance as Medea silences the crowd.
Paches and Numa perform a powerful agon.
The play concludes with Medea’s escape and audience silence.
Gelon immediately transitions into Trojan Women.

Character Development

Lampo: His terror is palpable—shaking hands, dry mouth, the urge to flee. He tries a weak joke (“Women”) that fails. His tension mirrors the danger of the event. He later admits he is tense specifically waiting for Paches’ entrance, showing his anxiety about the success of the whole project.

Gelon: For a moment after the woman’s protest, Gelon is lost. Then he finds his voice and radiates authority. His speech to the audience is commanding, and he refuses to let the initial disaster derail the play. At the end, he has a “wild innocence” in his eyes, as if seeing the world anew.

Numa: Initially invisible in the chorus, Numa becomes the centre of gravity once he appears as Medea. His stillness, his dance, his snarling delivery—all transform the audience’s laughter into rapt attention. He makes the audience sympathise with a child-killer.

Paches: Before this scene, Paches was merely adequate in rehearsals. On stage, he draws on his past as an Athenian aristocrat and becomes a convincing Jason. His performance elevates the agon to something reminiscent of the battle in the Great Harbour.

Alcar: His aulos-playing saves the event twice: first by drowning out the hisses, then by providing a perfect, ominous backdrop for the play’s dark moments.

Themes, Symbols, and Motifs

Performance as Danger and Redemption: The chapter shows how fragile live theatre is. One wrong move could incite a riot, but when the performance works, it creates a shared emotional experience that transcends the quarry and the war.
Grief and Catharsis: The woman’s protest represents raw, unprocessed grief. The play’s violent story of betrayal and vengeance channels that grief into a structured, collective outlet. The silence afterward suggests catharsis, not hostility.
Transformation of Space: Gelon insists the quarry is Corinth, then Troy. The audience agrees to pretend, and the makeshift graves become part of the stage. The rooks that fly up at the end are read as Medea’s dragons, blending reality and fiction.
The Body as Instrument: Masks, costumes, chains, dance—every physical detail matters. The actors’ bodies are both vulnerable and powerfully expressive. Numa’s scarlet robe “like gushing wounds” visually links Medea’s revenge to the blood spilled in the war.
The Agon as Microcosm of War: The verbal duel between Medea and Jason mirrors the real battles fought between Athenians and Syracusans. The audience’s shifting sympathies reflect the moral complexity of the war.

Why This Chapter Matters

This chapter is the emotional and dramatic climax of the first half of the novel. Everything Lampo and Gelon have worked for comes to a head in a single afternoon. The successful performance of Medea proves that theatre can achieve something politics could not: a space where former enemies sit together and feel the same horror and pity. The chapter also sets up the second play, Trojan Women, which will likely shift the focus to the Athenian prisoners’ own experiences of war. The transition is seamless and leaves readers eager for what comes next.

Study Questions and Answers

1. Why does the woman’s protest nearly derail the performance? The woman’s raw grief reminds the audience of the real deaths the war caused. Her shouts challenge the escapism of theatre and threaten to turn the crowd against the performers. The fact that she is carried away rather than answered shows that the performance cannot accommodate unresolved sorrow—it must be contained for the play to proceed.

2. How does Numa’s performance as Medea change the audience’s mood? Numa begins with stillness and menace, then delivers his first lines with such force that the laughter stops. His dance becomes faster and more violent, and his words about women’s suffering resonate with the crowd. By making Medea both terrifying and sympathetic, he forces the audience to confront the story rather than mock it.

3. What does Gelon mean when he tells the audience “don’t you dare look away” at the start of Trojan Women? He is demanding that the audience witness the next play as they did the first: with full attention. The phrase also echoes his earlier command during the performance, reinforcing that the quarry is now Troy and the audience must accept the reality of the destruction. It challenges their desire to retreat into mockery or denial.