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Analysis of Euripides’ Medea

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 13, 2020 • ( 0 )

When Medea, commonly regarded as Euripides’ masterpiece, was first per-formed at Athens’s Great Dionysia, Euripides was awarded the third (and last) prize, behind Sophocles and Euphorion. It is not difficult to understand why. Euripides violates its audience’s most cherished gender and moral illusions, while shocking with the unimaginable. Arguably for the first time in Western drama a woman fully commanded the stage from beginning to end, orchestrating the play’s terrifying actions. Defying accepted gender assumptions that prescribed passive and subordinate roles for women, Medea combines the steely determination and wrath of Achilles with the wiles of Odysseus. The first Athenian audience had never seen Medea’s like before, at least not in the heroic terms Euripides treats her. After Jason has cast off Medea—his wife, the mother of his children, and the woman who helped him to secure the Golden Fleece and eliminate the usurper of Jason’s throne at Iolcus—in order to marry the daughter of King Creon of Corinth, Medea responds to his betrayal by destroying all of Jason’s prospects as a husband, father, and presumptive heir to a powerful throne. She causes a horrible death of Jason’s intended, Glauce, and Creon, who tries in vain to save his daughter. Most shocking of all, and possibly Euripides’ singular innovation to the legend, Medea murders her two sons, allowing her vengeful passion to trump and cancel her maternal affections. Clytemnestra in Aeschylus’s Oresteia conspires to murder her husband as well, but she is in turn executed by her son, Orestes, whose punishment is divinely and civilly sanctioned by the trilogy’s conclusion. Medea, by contrast, adds infanticide to her crimes but still escapes Jason’s vengeance or Corinthian justice on a flying chariot sent by the god Helios to assist her. Medea, triumphant after the carnage she has perpetrated, seemingly evades the moral consequences of her actions and is shown by Euripides apotheosized as a divinely sanctioned, supreme force. The play simultaneously and paradoxically presents Medea’s claim on the audience’s sympathy as a woman betrayed, as a victim of male oppression and her own divided nature, and as a monster and a warning. Medea frightens as a female violator and overreacher who lets her passion overthrow her reason, whose love is so massive and all-consuming that it is transformed into self-destructive and boundless hatred. It is little wonder that Euripides’ defiance of virtually every dramatic and gender assumption of his time caused his tragedy to fail with his first critics. The complexity and contradictions of Medea still resonate with audiences, while the play continues to unsettle and challenge. Medea, with literature’s most titanic female protagonist, remains one of drama’s most daring assaults on an audience’s moral sensibility and conception of the world.

Euripides is ancient Greek drama’s great iconoclast, the shatterer of consoling illusions. With Euripides, the youngest of the three great Athenian tragedians of the fifth century b.c., Attic drama takes on a disturbingly recognizable modern tone. Regarded by Aristotle as “the most tragic of the poets,” Euripides provided deeply spiritual, moral, and psychological explorations of exceptional and domestic life at a time when Athenian confidence and certainty were moving toward breakup. Mirroring this gathering doubt and anxiety, Euripides reflects the various intellectual, cultural, and moral controversies of his day. It is not too far-fetched to suggest that the world after Athens’s golden age in the fifth century became Euripidean, as did the drama that responded to it. In several senses, therefore, it is Euripides whom Western drama can claim as its central progenitor.

Euripides wrote 92 plays, of which 18 have survived, by far the largest number of works by the great Greek playwrights and a testimony both to the accidents of literary survival and of his high regard by following generations. An iconoclast in his life and his art, Euripides set the prototype for the modern alienated artist in opposition. By contrast to Aeschylus and Sophocles, Euripides played no public role in the life of his times. An intellectual and artist who wrote in isolation (tradition says in a cave in his native Salamis), his plays won the first prize at Athens’s annual Great Dionysia only four times, and his critics, particularly Aristophanes, took on Euripides as a frequent tar-get. Aristophanes charged him with persuading his countrymen that the gods did not exist, with debunking the heroic, and with teaching moral degeneration that transformed Athenians into “marketplace loungers, tricksters, and scoundrels.” Euripides’ immense reputation and influence came for the most part only after his death, when the themes and innovations he pioneered were better appreciated and his plays eclipsed in popularity those of all of the other great Athenian playwrights.

Critic Eric Havelock has summarized the Euripidean dramatic revolution as “putting on stage rooms never seen before.” Instead of a palace’s throne room, Euripides takes his audience into the living room and presents the con-fl icts and crises of characters who resemble not the heroic paragons of Aeschylus and Sophocles but the audience themselves—mixed, fallible, contradictory, and vulnerable. As Aristophanes accurately points out, Euripides brought to the stage “familiar affairs” and “household things.” Euripides opened up drama for the exploration of central human and social questions embedded in ordinary life and human nature. The essential component of all Euripides’ plays is a challenging reexamination of orthodoxy and conventional beliefs. If the ways of humans are hard to fathom in Aeschylus and Sophocles, at least the design and purpose of the cosmos are assured, if not always accepted. For Euripides, the ability of the gods and the cosmos to provide certainty and order is as doubtful as an individual’s preference for the good. In Euripides’ cosmogony, the gods resemble those of Homer’s, full of pride, passion, vindictiveness, and irrational characteristics that pattern the world of humans. Divine will and order are most often in Euripides’ dramas replaced by a random fate, and the tragic hero is offered little consolation as the victim of forces that are beyond his or her control. Justice is shown as either illusory or a delusion, and the myths are brought down to the level of the familiar and the recognizable. Euripides has been described as drama’s first great realist, the playwright who relocated tragic action to everyday life and portrayed gods and heroes with recognizable human and psychological traits. Aristotle related in the Poetics that “Sophocles said he drew men as they ought to be, and Euripides as they were.” Because Euripides’ characters offer us so many contrary aspects and are driven by both the rational and the irrational, the playwright earns the distinction of being considered the first great psychological artist in the modern sense, due to his awareness of the complex motives and ambiguities that make up human identity and determine behavior.

Tragedy: An Introduction

Euripides is also one of the first playwrights to feature heroic women at the center of the action. Medea dominates the stage as no woman character had ever done before. The play opens with Medea’s nurse confirming how much Medea is suffering from Jason’s betrayal and the tutor of Medea’s children revealing that Creon plans to banish Medea and her two sons from Corinth. Medea’s first words are an offstage scream and curse as she hears the news of Creon’s judgment. The Nurse’s sympathetic reaction to Medea’s misery sounds the play’s dominant theme of the danger of passion overwhelming reason, judgment, and balance, particularly in a woman like Medea, unschooled in suffering and used to commanding rather than being commanded. Better, says the Nurse, to have no part of greatness or glory: “The middle way, neither high nor low is best. . . . Good never comes from overreaching.” Medea then takes the stage to win the sympathy of the Chorus, made up of Corinthian women. Her opening speech has been described as one of literature’s earliest feminist manifestos, in which she declares, “Of all creatures on earth, we women are the most wretched,” and goes on to attack dowries that purchase husbands in exchange for giving men ownership of women’s bodies and fate, arranged marriages, and the double standard:

When a man grows tired of his wife and home, He is free to look about for someone new. We wives are forced to count on just one man. They say, we live safe at home while men go to battle. I’d rather stand three times in the front line than bear one child!

Medea wins the Chorus’s complicit silence on her intended intrigue to avenge herself on Jason and their initial sympathy as an aggrieved woman. She next confronts Creon to persuade him to postpone his banishment order for one day so she can arrange a destination and some support for her children. Medea’s servility and deference to Creon and the sentimental appeal she mounts on behalf of her children gain his concession. After he departs, Medea reveals her deception of and contempt for Creon, announcing that her vengeance plot now extends beyond Jason to include both Creon and his daughter.

There follows the first of three confrontational scenes between Medea and Jason, the dramatic core of the play. Euripides presents Jason as a selfsatisfied rationalist, smoothly and complacently justifying the violations of his love and obligation to Medea as sensible, accepted expedience. Jason asserts that his self-interest and ambition for wealth and power are superior claims over his affection, loyalty, and duty to the woman who has betrayed her parents, murdered her brother, exiled herself from her home, and conspired for his sake. Medea rages ineffectually in response, while attempting unsuccessfully to reach Jason’s heart and break through an egotism that shows him incapable of understanding or empathy. As critic G. Norwood has observed, “Jason is a superb study—a compound of brilliant manners, stupidity, and cynicism.” In the drama’s debate between Medea and Jason, the play brilliantly sets in conflict essential polarities in the human condition, between male/female, husband/wife, reason/passion, and head/heart.

Before the second round with Jason, Medea encounters Aegeus, king of Athens, who is in search of a cure for his childlessness. Medea agrees to use her powers as a sorceress to help him in exchange for refuge in Athens. Aristotle criticized this scene as extraneous, but a case can be made that Aegeus’s despair over his lack of children gives Medea the idea that Jason’s ultimate destruction would be to leave him similarly childless. The evolving scheme to eliminate Jason’s intended bride and offspring sets the context for Medea’s second meeting with Jason in which she feigns acquiescence to Jason’s decision and proposes that he should keep their children with him. Jason agrees to seek Glauce’s approval for Medea’s apparent selfsacrificing generosity, and the children depart with him, carrying a poisoned wedding gift to Glauce.

First using her children as an instrument of her revenge, Medea will next manage to convince herself in the internal struggle that leads to the play’s climax that her love for her children must give way to her vengeance, that maternal affection and reason are no match for her irrational hatred. After the Tutor returns with the children and a messenger reports the horrible deaths of Glauce and Creon, Medea resolves her conflict between her love for her children and her hatred for Jason in what scholar John Ferguson has called “possibly the finest speech in all Greek tragedy.” Medea concludes her self-assessment by stating, “I know the evil that I do, but my fury is stronger than my will. Passion is the curse of man.” It is the struggle within Medea’s soul, which Euripides so powerfully dramatizes, between her all-consuming vengeance and her reason and better nature that gives her villainy such tragic status. Her children’s offstage screams finally echo Medea’s own opening agony. On stage the Chorus tries to comprehend such an unnatural crime as matricide through precedent and concludes: “What can be strange or terrible after this?” Jason arrives too late to rescue his children from the “vile murderess,” only to find Medea beyond his reach in a chariot drawn by dragons with the lifeless bodies of his sons beside her. The roles of Jason and Medea from their first encounter are here dramatically reversed: Medea is now triumphant, refusing Jason any comfort or concession, and Jason ineffectually rages and curses the gods for his destruction, now feeling the pain of losing everything he most desired, as he had earlier inflicted on Medea. “Call me lioness or Scylla, as you will,” Medea calls down to Jason, “. . . as long as I have reached your vitals.”

Medea’s titanic passions have made her simultaneously subhuman in her pitiless cruelty and superhuman in her willful, limitless strength and determination. The final scene of her escape in her god-sent flying chariot, perhaps the most famous and controversial use of the deus ex machina in drama, ultimately makes a grand theatrical, psychological, and shattering ideological point. Medea has destroyed all in her path, including her human self, to satisfy her passion, becoming at the play’s end, neither a hero nor a villain but a fear-some force of nature: irrational, impersonal, destructive power that sweeps aside human aspirations, affections, and the consoling illusions of mercy and order in the universe.

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Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Medea — Themes in Medea by Euripides Medea

Themes in Medea by Euripides Medea

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Published: Mar 20, 2024

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Introduction, role of women.

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Natural Law—the idea of a moral code integral to and inseparable from whatever it is that makes us human—is tested in the events of Medea when characters make decisions contrary to their nature, when Jason , a husband, abandons his wife or when Medea , a mother, murders her children . Medea's decision to kill her children, even as a form of retribution, was as shocking to the ancient Athenians as it is to us today. It was then, as it is now, considered a violation of Natural Law. What is less intuitive for the modern reader is that Medea's being a "wild" woman from an uncivilized (i.e. non-Greek) country, rather than a Greek citizen of a city-state, suggests, at least for the other characters in the play, that she is volatile and poised to do something "unnatural." It is Natural Law as well that governs The Roles of Men and Women.

The purpose of justice in the play is to restore the natural balance disrupted by Jason's violation of Natural Law, his "unmanliness," in betraying his marriage vows to Medea. Creon , too, is guilty of injustice. His decision to exile Medea is doubly, perhaps even trebly, unjust. First, it is unjust for him to disrupt Natural Law by ignoring, when giving his daughter to Jason in marriage, the simple fact that Jason is already married. Second, he punishes Medea for his own violation of the natural order. Then based on hearsay and fear, he rhetorically justifies his unjust action by suggesting that Medea might harm his daughter: the crime he fears has not been committed. His ultimately being right (correct) does not make the original decision just (fair). There is an overarching sense in the play that Medea isn't seeking justice in response to Jason and Creon's crimes alone, but, rather, is seeking to correct one of Nature's fundamental injustices—the unequal suffering allotted to women and men. And yet, in seeking this justice, Medea commits the most violent act against Natural Law: she kills her own children. And in that action the entire idea of Natural Law becomes more complicated, as Medea's effort to seek justice leads to the deepest injustice, the inconsistencies of Natural Law and the justice required to maintain is revealed as problematic and irresolvable.

Justice and Natural Law ThemeTracker

Justice and Natural Law Quotes in Medea

I hear the first danger sign, Her wailing. It is a cloud she will ignite To flame as her fury grows.

Do you think I would have fawned on Creon Except to win some profit by my schemes? I would not have spoken to him – nor touched him. But he is such a fool that, When he could have arrested all my plans By banishing me, he has allowed me To stay this one day, in which three of my enemies I'll send to their death…

The direct way is best, the one at which I am most skilled: I'll poison them.

…But we are women too: We may not have the means to achieve nobility; Our cleverness lies in crafting evil.

Sacred rivers flow uphill: Justice and all things are reversed.

I'll send her gifts, the finest in the world: A finely woven dress and crown of beaten gold. The boys will take them.

All for nothing tortured myself with toil and care, And bore the cruel pains when you were born. Once I placed great hopes in you, that you Would care for my old age and yourselves Shroud my corpse. That would make me envied. Now that sweet thought is no more. Parted from you I shall lead a grim and painful life.

Hateful creature! O most detestable of women To the gods and me and all the human race! You could bring yourself to put to the sword The children of your womb. You have taken my sons and destroyed me.

No Greek woman Could ever have brought herself to do that. Yet I rejected them to marry you, a wife Who brought me enmity and death, A lioness, not human…

Medea (Seneca) Essay Questions

By lucius annaeus seneca, essay questions.

These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community. We are thankful for their contributions and encourage you to make your own.

Written by Siciu Magdalena

How can this play be characterized?

This play is a fabula crepidata, or a Roman tragedy which has a Greek subject. The only surviving literature pieces which still exist today and belong to this genre all are written by Seneca. It is believed these types of plays were supposed to emulate the Greek plays, appreciated during the time when Seneca wrote his plays. These fabulas crepidatas were all set in Greece and followed the general Greek narrative. The major characters are often kings, queens, Greek gods and goddesses, and their quests are generally supernatural. All these characteristics are found in Medea as well, making it a fabula crepidata.

Why did Medea vow to get revenge against Corinth?

Before the beginning of the play, Medea was married to a man named Jason whom he helped in his supernatural quests. The two settled down near Corinth where they had two children together. In time, Jason realized he could never be happy by Medea's side and seduced Creusa, the daughter of King Creon. Jason is successful in his endeavor and the two are bound to be married. When Medea claims she wants revenge against Corinth, she does not mean she wants to hurt the innocent men living in the city. Instead, through this, she transmits the idea she wants to hurt its ruling class, the King and his heirs. By destroying the ruling class, Medea is also affecting the city as a whole because, without a King, the city would have most likely fallen into ruin in a short period of time.

Why is Medea told not to be courageous by her nurse?

Medea trusted her nurse above everyone else, especially after her husband betrayed her. When Medea expressed her desire to get revenge, the nurse tells her to be happy with her lot in life and not try to change her fate. This advice may be the author's way of transmitting his own stoic ideas through the play. Seneca is one of the most well-known stoic philosophers and he compiled many essays on this subject. In his opinion, misfortunes in life are unavoidable and a person's purpose is not to fight against them but rather to accept them as being inevitable and to do the best they can with what they are given. Medea in the play is not a stoic but rather lets herself be guided by her feelings and emotions. This proves to have deadly consequences for multiple characters in the play, including her own children.

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Medea (Seneca) Questions and Answers

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Study Guide for Medea (Seneca)

Medea (Seneca) study guide contains a biography of Lucius Annaeus Seneca, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About Medea (Seneca)
• Medea (Seneca) Summary
• Character List

Essays for Medea (Seneca)

Medea (Seneca) essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Medea by Lucius Annaeus Seneca.

• Formal Comparison of Euripides' and Seneca's Versions of 'Medea'

Wikipedia Entries for Medea (Seneca)

• Introduction
• Euripides vs. Seneca

1997.07.19, Medea: Essays on Medea in Myth, Literature, Philosophy and Art

Joachim vogeler , louisana state university, [email protected].

As James Clauss reminds us in the preface, this excellent collection of twelve essays on Medea grew out of a panel organized by Sarah Johnston for the 1991 meeting of the American Philological Association in Chicago. An excellent introduction by Sarah Johnston outlines the scope of this collection and provides a superb and concise summary of the twelve essays on Medea. According to Johnston, “Medea was represented by the Greeks as a complex figure, fraught with conflicting desires and exhibiting an extraordinary range of behavior” (6). After sketching Medea’s mythic history from antiquity to the twentieth century and her reception in literary and art history, Johnston explores how Medea’s complexity continues to challenge our imaginations, confront our deepest feelings, and make us realize “that behind the delicate order we have sought to impose upon our world lurks chaos” (17). Without specifying to which theories in the field of psychology she is referring, Johnston elaborates on the dichotomy of self and other which she identifies as a common element in many of the essays. A complex Medea figure unites “the opposing concepts of self and other, as she veers between desirable and undesirable behavior, between Greek and foreigner; it also allows [authors and artists] to raise the disturbing possibility of otherness lurking within self —the possibility that the ‘normal’ carry within themselves the potential for abnormal behavior, that the boundaries expected to keep our world safe are not impermeable” (8). The juxtaposition of self and other serves as the theoretical background against which Johnston contrasts the twelve essays of this collection.

In part one, entitled “Mythic Representations,” the first four essays trace the possible origins and developments of Medea as mythological figure. In part two, entitled “Literary Portraits,” the next four essays focus on the Medea figure in Pindar, Euripides, Apollonius, and Ovid. Part three, “Under Philosophical Investigation,” examines the influence Medea had on ancient philosophers who dealt with the effects of passion on the human psyche. The fourth and final part, “Beyond the Euripidean Stage,” features the influence of Euripides’ Medea on ancient vase painting and the modern stage. The editors should also be commended for compiling a very useful and extensive bibliography of almost all works cited in the papers, an index locorum, and a general index. This collection of essays on Medea displays an amazing coherence for an endeavor of this kind, and paints a very coherent and complex picture of an influential mythological figure. Most authors in this collection also make illuminating cross-references to the essays of their fellow contributors. As with any well researched project on a literary theme, scholars as well as students ought to be very pleased with a most up-to-date publication such as this 1997 work. My only point of criticism would be to note that a project taking such a comprehensive approach should be familiar with the work of Jacques Lacan, and that it would have been helpful if the editors had included a psychoanalytic investigation of Medea’s passion. Nonetheless, I expect the present volume to become a standard textbook and an obvious starting point for any students of the Medea figure. A brief survey of the twelve essays will demonstrate the scope and the quality of this project.

Fritz Graf, known for his introduction to Greek Mythology (1993), opens part one of this collection on “Mythic Representations” with an essay entitled “Medea, the Enchantress from Afar: Remarks on a Well-Known Myth.” Distinguishing between “vertical tradition” (different versions of the same mythic episode, developed over the course of centuries) and “horizontal tradition” (different versions of the same mythic episode within the same time frame), Graf furnishes an overview of Medea’s episodes in Colchis, Iolcus, Corinth, Athens, and Persia. After analyzing the themes and variations within both of these traditions and noting the consistencies and tensions between them, Graf identifies two unifying elements that tie together all the stories about Medea: her foreigness and her initiatory role. “[S]he is a foreigner, who lives outside of the known world or comes to a city from outside; each time she enters a city where she dwells, she comes from a distant place, and when she leaves the city, she again goes to a distant place” (38). Medea’s representation as the other corresponds with Johnston’s introductory remarks that, as “a geographical and cultural stranger … repeatedly exiled within Greece,” Medea implicitly demonstrates how the outsider, the other, is a threat to the inside, to the self” (14). In Graf’s second unifying theme, he identifies Medea as being “connected with a whole line of narratives that clearly are associated with initiation rites” (42). We can understand Medea as “initiatrix” when she helps Jason to overcome the dangers he must undergo in his “initiation ritual” to acquire the fleece and claim the throne back home.

In “Corinthian Medea and the Cult of Hera Akraia,” Sarah Johnston argues that no single author invented the image of the murderous mother and that fifth-century authors inherited an infanticidal Medea from the mythical tradition. This mythical figure may have been an earlier goddess of the Corinthians who “evolved out of a paradigm found in the folk beliefs of Greece and many other Mediterranean cultures—the reproductive demon, who persecuted pregnant women and young children” (14). According to Johnston, the paradigm of the reproductive demon “is likely to have been associated with the Corinthian cult of Hera Akraia” (45). As a mother who lost her children because of Hera’s refusal to protect them and help nurture them to maturity, Corinthian Medea originally emblematized the results of Hera’s neglect and/or anger (64). According to Johnston, this loss would have caused Medea to become a reproductive demon that killed other mothers’ children. At the end of Johnston’s stimulating essay, however, she has to admit that the specific reasons why the Colchian and Corinthian Medea were joined together are beyond our secure recovery (67). In an excellent essay on “Medea as Foundation-Heroine,” Nita Krevans explores Medea’s role as founder of cities. With foundations in antiquity centering primarily on male founders, the traditional roles for heroines in myth include “that of the eponymous nymph, who brings to life the metaphor of woman-as-landscape” (72), “that of the dynastic heroine, mother of a founder or of a line of local rulers” (73), and that of “the missing girl … sought by a male kinsman (or kinsmen)” (74). Often foundations are associated with a mother’s heroic child, leaving little more than a footnote for heroines. Although some foundation stories portray Medea in these traditional roles, other appearances “form a striking exception when seen against this backdrop…. [F]or every version in which she seems to follow the normal scheme, there is a variant that portrays her as a defiant anomaly” (75). With the foundation of Tomi, for example, which is associated with Apsyrtus, “we arrive at a complete inversion of the ‘kidnapped heroine’ motif” (78). Medea is the kidnapping sister, not the victim. The inversion of the gender roles sees the female as kidnapper and the male as helpless victim. Likewise, (female) Medea appears as a powerful prophet of divine status who instructs future (male) settlers about the location and destiny of their colony (78-79). The presentation of Medea in powerful, masculine roles is virtually incompatible with female fertility (80). Although Medea’s prophetic powers and divine attributes challenge the traditional boundaries between male and female, most foundation tales focus on Medea’s “extraordinary capacity for destruction” which make her “a heroine not of foundation but of annihilation” (82). Jan Bremmer’s essay asks: “Why Did Medea Kill Her Brother Apsyrtus?” rather than any other family member. After examining the specifics of this “treacherous, sacrilegious, and brutal murder” (88) as it has been described in various ancient sources, Bremmer conducts a detailed comparison of Greek sibling relationships. He concludes that brother-brother relationships and sister-sister relationships were not as close as brother-sister relationships, and it was the opposite-sex relationships on which the Greeks placed the greatest importance. In ancient (and in contemporary) Greece, “brothers [are] supposed to guard the honor, and in particular the sexual honor, of their sisters” (95). Compared with same sex sibling relationships, “brother-sister conflicts are very rare in Greek Myth” (96) and the “close contact between sisters and brothers must have continued even after the sister’s marriage” (95). “[T]he brother was responsible for the sister, and she was dependent upon him” (100). Medea’s murder of her brother Apsyrtus had such a great impact because “Medea not only committed the heinous act of spilling family blood, she also permanently severed all ties to her natal home and the role that it would normally play in her adult life. Through Apsyrtus’ murder, she simultaneously declared her independence from her family and forfeited her right to any protection from it…. There was only one way for Medea to go, then: she had to follow Jason and never look back” (100). Bremmer concludes his convincing analysis with the assumption that Medea’s fratricide elicited great feelings of horror from the Greek audience—because we hardly find any artistic representations of Apsyrtus’ murder on Greek vases (100). In “Medea as Muse: Pindar’s Pythian 4,” Dolores M. O’Higgins suggests that Pindar presents Medea as a muselike figure. In archaic Greece, people distrusted human and divine females (103-104). “For the Greeks all women were no less than a race apart. Medea most fully exemplifies the potential disloyalty present in all wives, living as necessary but suspect aliens in their husbands’ houses” (122). Foreign, female intelligence—both Medea’s and that of the Muse—had to be appropriated before the male hero, Jason, or the male poet, Pindar, could use it to his own advantage (107-108). “Traditionally, the process of song making,” O’Higgins explains, “was a joint effort…. The human bard requires a song of the Muses” (108). Pindar relied on female Muses, to create his song, and at the same time, the Muses had the capacity to dangerously intoxicate or even paralyze the poet or his audience (110). For a fuller understanding of Pythian 4, it is important to realize that Pindar also presents Medea as powerful, prophetic female, “a Muse of sorts” (114). Pindar changes the traditional parameters of the poet “as the passive vessel for information” (117), and he appropriates his Muse by basically telling her what to sing about. Pindar also appropriates Medea, the former Colchian “Muse,” who first immobilized Jason’s opponents, but then has herself fallen victim to the poetic skills of Jason—or Pindar, as O’Higgins suggests (123). “Jason ultimately may have failed in harnessing the supernatural abilities of Medea, but Pindar has not; he tames the dangerous Muse,” O’Higgins concludes (126). In “Becoming Medea: Assimilation in Euripides,” Deborah Boedeker observes that the Medea figure was not yet firmly established when Euripides composed his play. “Besides the deliberate infanticide, alternative Medeas were still possible” (127), and even within a single episode, an author was able to and ultimately had to make choices in motivating and designing the story line. Boedeker suggests that Euripides gives his protagonist her overpowering presence and canonical status by employing poetic mechanisms, namely a series of similes and metaphors, to categorize his heroine initially. During the course of the play, “Medea is gradually dissociated from such apparently obvious definitions of what she is … [and] subtly assimilated to several figures in her own story, such as Aphrodite, Jason, and the princess” (128). Medea’s implicit assimilation to other figures by mutual resemblances in diction and action gives her “an almost unbearably focused power and allows her action a certain claim to reciprocal justice” (148). “She destroys her enemies by becoming more like them, ruins them for being too much like herself. Ultimately Euripides’ Medea expands to the point where she obliterates the other characters in her myth, fully transcending—and eradicating—her own once-limited identity as woman, wife, mother, mortal” (148). Medea’s self has been consumed by the other, Johnston concludes in her introduction (11), the former victim has turned victimizer—a development for which we can both pity and fear Medea. In “Conquest of the Mephistophelian Nausicaa: Medea’s Role in Apollonius’ Redefinition of the Epic Hero,” James J. Clauss argues persuasively that Apollonius assigns Jason to the traditional role of hero, and that Medea usurps the role of “helper-maiden,” contributing to the Argonautic expedition by helping him to complete the contest (149-150). Jason, however, is not an independent hero like Heracles, who completes his contests by himself, but “thoroughly dependent on the assistance of others” (151). Jason’s brand of leadership and heroism finds its expression in “his ability to make deals with foreigners” (155). Comparing Jason and Medea to Odysseus and Nausicaa, Clauss demonstrates that Jason’s contest is not of a military kind; Medea represents his real contest and she is completely charmed by Jason’s beauty and his diplomatic skills: “To conquer Medea is to win the fleece, the opposite of the usual folktale motif, which has the young hero perform the contest to win the bride” (167). The often clueless and all too ordinary Jason ultimately succeeds as he secures the golden fleece but Apollonius’ heroism is of a different kind, with a Jason relying heavily on Medea as a powerful and indispensable “helper-maiden” (175). The implicit comparison with Nausicaa reveals Medea’s otherness who “possesses the ability to create a Heracles or destroy a man of bronze” (176). Carole E. Newlands takes a comparative approach in analyzing the dissonant structure of the full Medea story in her brilliant essay “The Metamorphosis of Ovid’s Medea.” While his Medea is initially portrayed sympathetically as a young girl whose irrational passion drives her to help Jason, in the second part of Ovid’s narrative (7.7-424), Medea appears exclusively as a witch who has lost her human characteristics. After sketching Medea’s story of the young maiden turning murderess, Newlands compares the bipartite structure of Ovid’s narrative with other marriage tales in Metamorphoses 6, 7, and 8. By juxtaposing the myths of Procne, Philomela, and Tereus (6.424-676), Scylla and Minos (8.1-151), Procris and Cephalus (7.694-862), and Boreas and Orthyia (6.677-721) with the myth of Medea, Ovid approaches urgent moral issues and offers us varying studies of the female as victim and criminal without making moral judgments. “By splitting the Medea of the Metamorphoses into two incompatible types, Ovid suggests the difficulties and inconsistencies in the rewriting of the tradition (191). … But Ovid does not explain the reason for Medea’s transformation into a sorceress and semidivine, evil being” (192), he just offers us refracted images. “Ovid adds complexity to the story of Medea by juxtaposing it with stories that are simultaneously similar and different,” Newlands concludes (207). She continues by suggesting that “Ovid’s marriage group of tales illustrates how society both denies a woman power and rejects her when she uses it” (208). By presenting two very different Medeas, Ovid creates an open-ended story that leaves the ultimate judgment to the reader. John M. Dillon’s brief essay “Medea Among Philosophers” raises many questions for the reader—as Johnston acknowledges in her introduction (10)—without providing answers. Focusing on Medea 1078-1080, Dillon shows how Euripides’ text is employed in philosophical circles to buttress the argument of different philosophical schools (215). Galen and Platonist philosophers would view Medea’s subjugation of her reason to her passion as an argument that the human tripartite soul possesses an irrational part, whereas Chrysippus and the Stoics use Medea to argue for the unity of the soul (212). Medea remains “the paradigmatic example of a disordered soul” for ancient philosophers (218), Dillon concludes. Regrettably, none of the contributors to this collection employs a psychoanalytic approach in discussing Medea’s passion and the state of her soul. “Serpents in the Soul: A Reading of Seneca’s Medea ” is an abbreviated version of chapter 12 of Martha C. Nussbaum’s book The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). In her fascinating essay, Nussbaum argues that as an author Seneca is “an elusive, complex, and contradictory figure, a figure deeply committed both to Stoicism and to the world, both to purity and to the erotic” (246). While “Seneca’s Medea provides a clear expression of the strongest and least circular of the Stoic arguments against passion” (223), the play—and tragedy in general—are “profoundly committed to the values that Plato and Stoicism wish to reject” (247). Medea’s problem is not her love per se but her inappropriate, immoderate love for Jason. However, as Seneca tells us, there is “no erotic passion that reliably stops short of its own excess” (221). He questions the Aristotelian notion “that we can have passionate love in our lives and still be people of virtue and appropriate action” (220). Seneca argues that passionate love creates “a life of continued gaping openness to violation, a life in which pieces of the self are groping out into the world and pieces of the world are dangerously making their way into the insides of the self” (222). Extrapolating from this argument, Seneca’s Medea claims that love may even include the wish to kill. According to Nussbaum, it is not surprising that love, anger, and grief lie close to one another in the heart; these are all judgments, differing only in the precise content of the proposition, that ascribe so much importance to one unstable external being (228). Echoing Lacanian ideas, Nussbaum writes: “Desire is the beginning of the death of the self” (232). Two minor images, that of the bridle and the wave, and a central image, that of the snake, recur throughout Seneca’s play, exemplifying Medea’s passionate love. While love challenges the virtue of Stoic morality, either way of living, a life of love or a life of morality, seems to be imperfect. In her conclusion, Nussbaum returns to Seneca’s concept of mercy as a possible source of gentleness to both self and other, even when wrongdoing has been found—until rage gives way to understanding (248). Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood takes our heroine beyond the stage and investigates the dramatic and iconographical explorations of the Medea figure. In “Medea at a Shifting Distance: Images and Euripidean Tragedy,” Sourvinou-Inwood demonstrates how Euripides’ Athenian audience would perceive Medea’s character through a series of shifting relationships. Euripides constructed Medea’s character in the course of the tragedy using the three schemata of “normal woman,” “good woman” and bad woman” (254). These schemata were important crystallizations of the ancient assumptions that helped Euripides direct audience response (255). Euripides created the Medea figure by deploying a series of what Sourvinou-Inwood calls “zooming devices” and “distancing devices.” Noticing a difference in representations of Medea in Greek dress and oriental dress, Sourvinou-Inwood suggests that Medea was wearing Greek dress throughout Euripides’ play but oriental dress when she appeared in the chariot after murdering her children (289-290). The oriental dress would have enhanced the effect of distancing Medea from the Greek “good” or “normal” woman. “The change in her costume is marked by Jason’s claim, after Medea has appeared in the chariot of the Sun at [ Medea ] 1339-40, that no Greek woman would have dared to do the dreadful thing she did” (291). The zooming and distancing of Medea, the alteration of Medea in oriental dress and Medea in Greek dress allows the exploration of male fears concerning women and deconstructs the oppositional relationship between the “good Greek male self” and the “bad oriental female other” (294-296). In the end, through a series of shifting relationships, Euripides’ Medea allows the more complex perception that “the barbarian is not so different from the self” (296). The final essay in this fine collection offers a look at “Medea as Politician and Diva: Riding the Dragon into the Future.” And indeed, characterizing Medea as a revolutionary symbol, as the exploited other who may fight back, Marianne McDonald not only summarizes some of the other contributors’ main points in the closing essay but also provides a brief summary of the literary history of the various Medea dramatizations taking the reader into the twentieth century and beyond. This essay, which any scholar in comparative literature will appreciate highly, may also stimulate classicists to draw on the rich reception of the Medea theme in their teaching of the myth. McDonald contrasts the 1988 Medea play by Irish playwright Brendan Kennelly with an unpublished opera by Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis which was performed in Bilbao, Spain in 1991 and in Athens in 1993. Kennelly deals with questions of imperialism, the exploitation of women by men, Ireland by England, and he shows us a victimized Medea who victoriously fights back. Theodorakis, in contrast, emphasizes the emotional element in Medea over the rational, and “evokes Euripides’ interpretative genius through the symbolic associations of the music” (317). McDonald views Theodorakis’ opera “as another splendid example of how a modern work can elucidate this ancient text” (314). If nothing else, McDonald’s presentation raises a certain curiosity to explore these two and other modern works dealing with the Medea theme. “The twentieth century is especially rich in reworkings of this myth” (297), she claims, and the publication of the most recent Medea novel by German writer Christa Wolf, Medea: Stimmen (Munich: Luchterhand Literaturverlag, 1996) serves as another good example to support her argument. “Both Kennelly and Theodorakis,” McDonald concludes this remarkable collection of essays, “bring Euripides into modern times and into modern nations. In their own ways, they are true to Euripides and aim at the heart” (323).

Medea - Free Essay Samples And Topic Ideas

Medea is an ancient Greek tragedy by Euripides, centered on the character of Medea, who seeks revenge against her unfaithful husband Jason. Essays on “Medea” could explore the themes of passion, revenge, and the roles of gender and social status within the play. Discussions might delve into the character analysis of Medea and Jason, the play’s critique of ancient Greek society, and Euripides’ use of dramatic techniques. Moreover, analyzing the enduring relevance of “Medea,” its various adaptations, and its influence on the tragedy genre can provide a thorough examination of this classic narrative and its impact on literature and drama. We have collected a large number of free essay examples about Medea you can find at Papersowl. You can use our samples for inspiration to write your own essay, research paper, or just to explore a new topic for yourself.

Is Medea a Tragic Hero?

The story of Medea has is often debated by modern scholars, to which they are trying to assign who is the true tragic hero in the story. Greek audiences used to conclude that Jason was the tragic hero. However, now it is argued that Madea better demonstrates the real tragic hero in the story. Is Medea a Tragedy? The term hero is obtained from a Greek word that means a person who faces misfortune, or displays courage in the face […]

Euripides’ Medea as a Sympathetic Character

While no one condones Medea's actions, one can sympathize with her unappreciated sacrifices and investments in Jason's ascension, her suffering at the hands of Jason's pride and hubris, and future of a scorned and divorced woman in Greek Society. The action follows as Medea argues her position with the chorus, Creon and Jason. Medea's magic enabled Jason to defeat the impossible task to reclaim his birthright. Yet, when the opportunity arose with a new marriage, Jason's pride enables him to […]

Three Traits of the Golden Age of Athens in Literature

The beginning of the Golden Age of Greece or Athens started with the Persian war, when the Persian army was defeated by Greeks. One of the main defining features of the Golden Age of Athens are that Law comes from men not the gods as we can see in the book of Antigone, another one is explaining history through the actions of people not the gods, as we can see in the book Odyssey, and the last one is focusing […]

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Relationship of Jason, Creon and Medea

During romance, men promise more fancy things to women to win their affection. Sometimes these men can even take an oath to earn the women's confidence and trust. However, some of these promises are not fulfilled and thus mark the beginning of mistrust and heartbreak. The tragic story of Medea provides the consequences of broken vows. The tragedy reveals the essence of staying faithful to matrimonial vows made. The tragedy befalls on Jason because he was unable to keep the […]

The Sanctity of Oaths in Medea

In Ancient Greece, Zeus is the guardian of oaths and to break a sworn oath is not simply to violate a contractual obligation it is also to deny the greater power of the gods altogether. The whole sequence of actions in Medea is prompted by an oath forsworn before the play even begins. Medea and Jason swear an oath that in return for her aid in capturing the Golden Fleece, they will marry. After they are successful, they flee to […]

Analysis of the Play Medea

Romans had a tendency to adopt Greek Mythology and other stories and claim them as their own.  A great example of this is the play Medea, written by the Greek playwright, Euripides.  Did Seneca, the Roman playwright, edit Medea to please Roman culture? Why do the characters differ so much from the two versions and could it be because of their different societies and roles within? The greeks were thoughtful and that shows in Euripides, Medea but the Romans were […]

Feminism in Medea

Throughout history, the focus of media and literature was on "his"tory and rarely on "her"story. Majority of the protagonist in literature and popular media have been males. Nevertheless, not all works of literature focused on a male protagonist, for example in Euripides "Medea", Medea was portrayed as a strong female protagonist with modern feminist characteristics, she can be rivaled to Odysseus from the great Greek Epic, "The Odyssey" by Homer in terms of the intelligence, a difference between the protagonists' […]

Comparison of Dido and Medea

The Aeneid written by Virgil, narrates the adventure of the hero Aeneas as he looks for a new land for the Trojan after the collapse of Troy. As a result, he becomes a hero and an ancestor of the Roman after a big fight between the Trojan and the Italian. Before coming to Italy, there was an incident that leads to the conflict between Dido and Aeneas, and it caused to the death of Queen Dido. In this essay, I […]

Depiction of Character of Medea

Medea is a powerful sorceress who wants to get revenge on a man named Jason for his wrong doings towards her. Jason betrays Medea by leaving her for another woman. Medea wants Jason to be left with absolutely nothing and make him feel how she felt. In the soliloquy Medea by Euripides, Medea manipulates those around her by inflicting pain on them, outsmarting them, and making deals for her benefit. Medea begins her journey of manipulation upon the King of […]

The Femininity in Medea

Living in a country that is foreign to oneself can be quite difficult, especially during the 400 B.C.E. era.  Now, imagine being a woman. A woman has an even lower rank than a foreign man in the Greek culture. It's even more burdensome when you're a foreign woman because this is only one step above slaves and peasants. Medea happens to carry this challenge, plus many more in the self-titled play, Medea by Euripides. Medea is a woman that lives […]

Depiction of Medea’s Character

"She lies there eating nothing. Surrendering her body to her sorrows, pining away in tears unceasingly since she saw that her husband had wronged her. She will not look up, will not lift her face from the ground, but listens to her friends as they give advice no more than if she were a rock or a wave of the sea." (Euripides 1) the nurse described Medea after she was informed about Jason's marriage with the princess in the play. […]

Theme of Medea in Challenging Gender Norms and Societal Expectations

Traditional Gender Roles and Ancient Greek Society The life of women is characterized by the roles that society and the eras of traditions that are forced on them. However, Medea represents that women have the power to defy those eras of tradition and society. Medea did not allow society to force her into the traditional role of being a woman. In ancient Greek society, women lived a life of limiting control with no political privileges like men. Ancient Greek women […]

The Evolution of Feminism in Euripides’ Medea

The dictionary defines feminism as "the doctrine advocating social, political, and all other rights of women equal to those of men." Many would argue that Euripides' Medea is an early representation of feminism. While this is true, as evident by Medea's independence and quest for equality, Medea does not exhibit feminist qualities until her first exchange with the women of the chorus. Many believe that Medea's bold decision to abandon her fatherland and fight with Jason shows that she is […]

Overview of Medea Tragedy

Medea is a tragedy for a woman who was the victim of her own loyalty for her husband who left her for another woman. A Greek play writer named Euripides wrote this play Medea, in 431 B.C. In this play, Medea is portrayed as one of the most antagonistic characters. However, she is also the protagonist. Her husband Jason is the biggest villain throughout the play. Jason left her and their two children to marry the king of Corinth's daughter. […]

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Ancient perspectives for modern times

Medea is as relevant today as it was in Ancient Greece

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A new production of Medea recently opened at London’s National Theatre to critical acclaim . This is a Medea definitively set in the modern era: the production opens with two little boys watching television snuggled in sleeping bags. These contemporary touches are present throughout, whether in the duty-free spirits in a plastic bag, the smoking, or the modern wedding with a tiered cake and helium balloons.

Often when ancient plays are updated to a modern setting it can feel unsatisfactory. Frequently there are elements that grate or become implausible, and you’re left feeling that the director is trying too hard to make the play “relevant”. But in the case of Medea, the tragic action seems to fit today’s world as well as that of the mythological past. It speaks to our imaginations with incredible power.

In Greek mythology, Medea was the granddaughter of the sun god Helios, and ran away from her father’s house to marry the hero Jason. Euripides re-sculpted her story in his play, adding the element that made her the Medea we know today – the woman who kills her own children to avenge her husband’s betrayal.

In the earliest versions of the myth, Jason and Medea’s children are killed by a crowd of Corinthians, angry at Medea’s behaviour. Greek tragedy likes to rework older myths to bring out the nastiest aspects of human relationships, especially within the family. Euripides makes Medea breach a fundamental taboo: the bond between mother and child, and the assumption of unconditional maternal love.

So the first audience who saw Euripides’s play would have been in for something incredibly shocking, unfamiliar as they were with a Medea who kills her children for vengeance. When the play was first performed in an Athenian tragedy competition of 431 BC, it came in last place, and it’s often thought that this was because of the heroine’s dreadful actions. But regardless of the first audience’s response, the play quickly became a classic, and Medea’s infanticide supplanted all other versions of the story.

Mothers wilfully killing children has a particular horror, but it’s a sad fact that it isn’t as rare as we might like to think, and stories about women accused of the crime regularly hit the news .

Indeed, Medea’s situation bears a chilling resemblance to current research on maternal filicide. She’s been abandoned by her husband in a foreign land where she has no support network. Isolation, low social status, and stress have been cited as crucial factors in maternal infanticide both in humans and in primates . Medea’s motivation is a desire to punish her husband, a major category used by researchers investigating the background to such crimes. One research article even suggests that mothers are more likely to kill male children if their motivation is vengeance: Medea’s is, and her victims are both sons.

Not only are Medea’s actions psychologically realistic, but so is the way that other characters respond to them in the play. A research study from 2006 examined more than 250 news reports on maternal infanticide in the US to see how journalists present these cases. It concludes that women tend to be presented in over-simplistic terms, either as being driven to insanity due to caring so much, or as fundamentally heartless. At the start of the play, Medea screams hysterically off-stage . At the same time, her nurse describes her as incapable of controlling her emotions due to deep grief.

And after the killing, when Jason confronts Medea, he claims that “no Greek woman would have dared to do this”, implying that Medea acts as she does because she is a “barbarian” and morally “different” to a civilised person. (Jason is wrong, of course – there are other examples in Greek myth of women who kill their children). Both Jason and the Chorus try to present Medea as inhuman to make sense of her actions: she is called a stone, iron , and a lioness . The implication is that a proper human being would be incapable of acting as Medea does (and so perhaps, that “normal” people are safe from such things). Modern reporters similarly present mothers who kill as “mad or bad” to help provide distance.

But what’s truly shocking about Medea is that for most of the play she seems neither irrational nor evil. Euripides points to the broader societal pressures that lie behind what she does. She argues that her situation is an inevitable hazard of the patriarchal rules governing marriage in the Greek world: women are dependent on their husbands, vulnerable, and easily driven to desperation. The chorus of Corinthian wives accepts this argument and promise to help Medea achieve vengeance, swayed by the idea that they too could have been in her place.

Nor does she kill in a state of irrational frenzy or emotional detachment. In a monologue before she commits the murders, Medea acknowledges the wickedness of what she is about to do and expresses her love for the children, and the deep pain she will feel at their death. Yet although Medea is in a desperate situation, it’s clear that she doesn’t see killing the children as the only option. She kills, not from the belief that she can’t cope, nor because she thinks the children will be taken away from her, but out of a cold awareness that this will be the most effective way to destroy Jason’s life.

The power of Greek tragedy lies in its ability to offer the audience space to explore the very worst-case scenarios. It helps us confront the gap between our ideals about the world and our actual experiences of it. Family relationships are framed by a set of stereotypical societal values: mothers are loving and altruistic, fathers protect and provide, children are dutiful and make their parents proud.

We, like the Greeks, know that that life isn’t always like this: marriages can be destructive and family members hurt each other. Tragedy explores the ultimate expressions of our fears that life will disappoint us. They allow us the space to question what happens if marriages aren’t just damaging but actually murderous. Or if parents aren’t just inadequate but set out to destroy their children.

It’s Medea’s ability to uncover our worst fears, combined with its psychological plausibility, that makes it as terrifying today as it was almost 2500 years ago.

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Home / Essay Samples / Literature / Medea / Examining the Use of Animal Imagery in Euripides’ Medea

Examining the Use of Animal Imagery in Euripides’ Medea

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