Greek Drama · Part 9 · Euripides · C1
Euripides: Medea
Part 9 of Greek Drama: Medea, the foreign princess who gave up everything to help Jason win the Golden Fleece, is abandoned by him in Corinth for a younger, richer bride, and ordered into exile. Euripides gives her some of the most powerful speeches ever written about the position of women and outsiders, and then an ending that still shocks audiences. Cleft sentences and emphasis (What I cannot forgive is…; It was Jason who…; I did help you), mixed conditionals, and the language of betrayal and injustice, with Philo, Sophia, Marcos and Demetria. The play ends with the deaths of Medea’s children, told briefly, as in the play, off stage.
You remember Jason and the Argo. Without Medea, the king’s daughter of Colchis, he would never have won the Golden Fleece: she gave him the magic to survive the bulls and the dragon, and she left her country and her family for him. Tonight we see them ten years later, in Corinth.
No, Demetria. Jason has decided to marry the king’s daughter, for money and position, and leave Medea and their two sons. Euripides lets Medea speak, and her words about the lives of women, and of foreigners, still sound modern. But what she decides to do is terrible. This is a hard play, and I will tell its ending briefly.
Then let us listen carefully to both her grievance and her crime.
Euripides (about 480–406 BCE) was the youngest of the three great tragedians and the most controversial. He won first prize only four times in his life, but after his death he became the most popular of all; nineteen of his plays survive, more than Aeschylus and Sophocles together. His characters often question the gods and the rules of society, and many of his most powerful roles are women.
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