Alexander and Euripides' Medea in Plutarch

[hiphys]

I wrote a paper and uploaded it on Academia.edu. The title is 'Alessandro e la Medea di Euripide in Plutarco: una nuova interpretazione del v. 288', by Alina Veneri.

[Alexias]

Thank you for this. I struggled a bit to get a complete translation into English, but if I understood correctly, you believe this bit from Plutarch to be a later interpolation:

For it is said that when Pausanias, after the outrage that he had suffered, met Alexander, and bewailed his fate, Alexander recited to him the iambic verse of the "Medeia":—

"The giver of the bride, the bridegroom, and the bride."

Medea had already made up her mind to kill Creon and his daughter, but to spare Jason so that he might feel the full loss of his children. So, in this case, Alexander, if inciting Pausanius, is actually urging him to kill Attalus and Cleopatra (whom Plutarch implicates in inciting the outrage against Pausanius, the first, dead Pausanius having been her kinsman), rather than to kill Philip.

[hiphys]

Thank you, Alexias. I'll try to explain what I wrote the best I could. If you read Euripides' tragedy 'Medea' from beginning to end, you'll find the heroine Medea changing her mind on Jason three times : 1) in v. 288 ("the giver of the bride, the bridegroom and the bride") Medea threatens Jason (and also his father-in-law, and his new bride) without telling and apparently without knowing what she want to do to them. 2) in vv.374-375 Medea says unequivocally she will put to death "the father of the bride, the girl, and her husband": all of them will become 'dead bodies'. 3) v. 1386: Medea, after the murder of her sons (and of Creon and Glauce), curses Jason and whishes him a shameful death. Euripides knew well that there is no myth of Jason's death telling he was killed by Medea, but, for drama's sake, it was better to show Medea reaching her final curse of Jason gradually, like a thriller. People knew the myth, and its end, but was intrigued to watch how the writer developed it.
Therefore, if people knew well how Jason died, why Alexander would urge Pausanias to kill Philip reciting the verse 288, "the giver of the bride, the bridegroom and the bride", that contains only veiled threats? The most obvious answer is someone (not Plutarch, I think, but an older author), who didn't know the tragedy Medea, interpolated the quote of v. 288, long time after the deed, when no one cared the myth and the truth, but knew only that Philip was murdered by Pausanias, and afterwards Attalus and Cleopatra were killed all the same ( but of course not by Pausanias).
Thre strange thing I don't understand at all is why no scholar, investigating history and Plutarch's quote, took the trouble to read Euripides' Medea through and through...