A Dream Of Passion By Euripides ' Medea And Apollonius 's Argonautika

Euripides’s plays often featured uncanny insight into the human condition and the struggle that his characters bore due to their expected roles within society.

Ancient expectations for women include always putting the responsibilities of being a mother above all else, as shown in Euripides’ Medea and Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, as well as Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis. Both Clytemnestra and Medea exhibit motherly love and tend to those responsibilities, but commit atrocious, unladylike acts, which jeopardize the sympathy felt for them by an audience. The respective playwrights of each story use their character’s motivations and how they align with their roles as mothers first and women second to ultimately characterize each in either a negative or positive light. The motherly motivation that Clytemnestra and Medea exhibit excuses their vengeful and deceitful actions, however Medea’s final action,

Medea’s strength is portrayed as her madness as she takes control and decides the fate of her enemies. She is a strong character and Euripides allows Medea to have a voice by allowing the audience to witness her break from the norm of what a woman of her time is expected to do. After giving up her family and former life to be with her husband, Jason, he decides to marry a younger princess while still married to Medea. Medea realizes that women are left to face the most miserable situations and says, “We women are the most unfortunate creatures” (229). Jason feels that Medea is to be grateful for what he is doing by marrying into royalty as it will afford all of them a better life. The representation of Medea by Euripides is powerful, manipulative, and extremely smart, yet because she is a woman she has limited social power.

Superficially, Medea is a critique of relations between men and women, the struggle between Jason and Medea; then the struggle between Creon and Medea. However at the deeper level, Medea is a critique of the quality and state of the contemporary culture of Euripides (Arrowsmith 361). The unique symbolism is that

Commonly considered one of Euripides greatest pieces, Medea is an insightful depiction of how a woman’s love for her husband, churns into a gruesome revenge scheme against him. This tragedy illustrates a tale of a woman who challenges Greek societal norms. In the era that the story takes place; women are often seen in submissive roles. However, the play’s main character, Medea, challenges their customs through her actions against the Kingdom of Corinth and Jason.

Although Medea, like many women, gives up her family, home, and body for her marriage. Medea feels that “of all things we women are the most unfortunate creatures,” (8) and further discusses the difficulties and unjust situations women face such as “for there is not easy escape for a woman, nor can she say no to her marriage” (8) and how men do not use the same rules. For example, Medea feels that “what applies to me does not apply to you” (9). She seems envious of the freedom men possess.

Medea is the tragic story of a woman desperate for revenge upon her husband, after he betrayed her for another woman’s bed. It was written by Euripides, a Greek playwright, in 431 B.C. Throughout the play each character shows us their inconsistent and contradicting personalities, in particular, Jason and Medea. The play opens with the Nurse expressing her anxiety about Jason betraying and leaving Medea for another, wealthier, woman. Our initial reaction is to feel empathetic towards Medea, who has been abandoned so conveniently. But towards the end of the play, when Medea takes revenge on

Euripides and Sophocles wrote powerful tragedies that remain influential to this day. The vast majority of work recovered from this time is by male authorship. What remains about women of this time is written through the lens of male authors’ perspective and beliefs about the role of women in Greek culture. The works of these two playwrights frequently characterize women as unstable and dangerous. Agave, Antigone, and Medea are all undoubtedly the driving force behind the tragic action in these plays. It is their choices that lead to the pain and death of the people around them. Through an examination of the evidence from three separate works, Antigone, The Bacchae, and The Medea, the role of women in ancient Greek tragedy becomes clear. The actions of Agave, Antigone, and Medea repeatedly prove their characters instability and danger.

In ‘Medea’, Euripides shows Medea in a new light, as a scorned woman that the audience sympathises with to a certain extent, but also views as a monster due to her act of killing her own children. The protagonist of a tragedy, known as the Tragic Hero is supposed to have certain characteristics which cause the audience to sympathise with them and get emotionally involved with the plot. The two main characters, Medea and Jason, each have certain qualities of the Tragic Hero, but neither has them all. This makes them more like the common man that is neither completely good nor evil, but is caught in the middle and forced to make difficult decisions.

Euripides Medea is a play that largely embodies themes of sex and gender within Greek life, marriage and society. Lars Von Trier, Danish Screen writer, controversially took on and altered Euripides' classic Medea in the form of film. Although complex and compelling, Von Trier's film fails to capture major themes and qualities presented in the text version of the infamous Medea and relay them to an audience. Through the use of close reading and comparison, it can be proved that Lars Von Trier's film depiction of Euripides' Medea does not allow an audience to see the complexity and major themes of gender and masculinity that Euripides originally portrays to his audience, but rather depicts a story of lost love and femininity within the protagonist.

Amongst Euripides' most famous plays, Medea went against the audience's expectations at his time. Indeed, the main character of the play is Medea, a strong independent female who neglected moral and . She was therefore in all ways different to how women were perceived in Ancient Greece. This essay will explore how Euripides' controversial characters demonstrate that his views were ahead of his time.

To conclude, Medea’s actions can be seen an act of desperation from her side, as she realises that her functional life in Greece is practically over: she is a woman with no man, therefore no rights. Although through her barbaric background and natural cunningness, she forges a plan to escape this miserable prospect of her life, her actions, as terrible and inhumane as they are, empower her to free herself from her discriminating

The poetic tone of Aristophanes' Lysistrata differs greatly from the poetic tone of the Greek tragedies we have read in class. However, after analyzing this Greek comedy, it seems to share some of the main characteristics of Euripides' Medea. Within these plays, we meet shrewd, powerful masculine women who use the art of manipulation to get what they want from others and to accomplish their goals. This theme of manipulation is employed through various means and techniques. The women of these plays also seem to contradict the stereotypical woman and have characteristics similar to the Homeric Greek warrior.

As the famous Greek playwright Euripides once said: “Stronger than lover's love is lover's hate. Incurable, in each, the wounds they make.” Such ideas are portrayed in one of him most famous plays, Medea. This play is a fascinating classic centered on the Greek goddess Medea. Despite its recent fame, during his time, Euripides was unpopular since he used what would be considered a ‘modern’ view where he would focus on women, slaves and persons from the lower classes. In the play, Medea commits filicide, which initially appears extremely horrendous, but as the audience is guided through the play, they develop sympathy towards Medea. In order to achieve this empathy and enhance the understanding of Medea’s pride and ideals, Euripides

Society establishes a set of expectations by which males and females are expected to conduct themselves. For example, a mother is expected to nurture her child, stay at home to take care of her children, be patient, be kind, love unconditionally and to never get angry. If a mother does not live up to these expectations established by society, then that mother is deemed a “bad mother.” Since a mother gives birth to her children and nurtures them, a mother who kills her children is considered to be unredeemably bad. Medea, in the play of the same name, kills her two sons and by societal standards, she would be deemed a bad mother. Contrary to society’s expectations of mothers, I will argue that Medea is not a bad mother. I will do this by proving that: Medea defies the social conventions of motherhood in three ways; she kills her children in order to protect them; and, that she rebels against her husband’s control and male domination by depriving him of his “immortality” by killing his sons and ending his bloodline.