Essay on Medea and Nietzsche's Will to Power

Nietzsche believed that at there finest the Greek gave room for the task between the Apollo and the Dionysus. Weirdly for a philosopher Nietzsche believed that Greek culture started to go wrong when the Greeks started to forget about the Dionysus, they became two Apollonian because of philosophy in general and Socrates in particular, with the arrival of Socrates on the scene the Greeks fell in love with the idea of being able to control every thing through there minds, being totally wise, and being able to understand every thing, they turned agents drinking, wine and unreason. Nietzsche argued that this was deeply

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.

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

In Medea’s monologue where she ponders what to do with her children, the translations differ in how Medea exhibits her endearment for them. The Johnston and Kovacs translations are more effective than Svarlien’s by portraying Medea’s guilt towards the future tragedy. Therefore, Medea’s embedded guilt clearly emphasizes Euripides purpose to stimulate pity for Medea.

When Jason leaves Medea she curses her own name and one of her own children and then comes up with the plans to kill her children and her husband’s new wife. Medea goes through a transformation throughout the play going from a depressed wife to a sadistic murderer caring more about the pleasure she will gain from seeing Jason suffer than the ones that she killed, including her own children. The audience wants to sympathize with Medea and even make her out to be the protagonist of the play, but she her actions against her own children is too horrendous to see her as nothing but a villain. Euripides’ development of Medea coincides with the type of writer that he is. Euripides is known for being more of a dark, realistic writer portraying characters for how they really are.

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.

In the Greek tragedy of Medea there are many twists and turns throughout the story causing many to question who is more of the victim of the story. This essay will discuss who is the bigger victim of the story. Medea was the victim because she killed her children even though she didn’t want to & she also when she was under the spell of Aphrodite killed her brother so her love was able to get what he wanted and then disowned her family these things proved that Medea was the victim.

Following this is the death of Greek tragedy as we see the dionysian be eliminated from the greek world and the three waves of exhaustion. Relating back to Homer’s stylized poems that initially created the greek world into a tragic culture perspective demonstrated an individual lived in someone else’s world or fantasy. Poems were being incorporated into the society and structured based on these meanings in a hierarchical authority. Nietzsche found it sad that these poems were used and people lived in someone else’s world instead of their own. For example, in society a hard working person such a farmer who would do all the manual labor while the aristocrats decided upon the ways how institutions should be structured was living in someone else’s world. The poor worked hard and the rich stayed rich; which continues today if Nietzsche saw it now. A world of “heroes” is unstable,who engaged in agonistic struggle in a moral, political and cultural level. The culture didn’t change much as most us live in someone else’s world, not making our own decisions in life. Power isn’t available for some individuals that they could not redefine it or assert it. Consequences leading to an individual aspect and the elements that lead up to the elimination of the Dionysian from the Greek world. Nietzsche states,” Greek tragedy met her death in a different way from all the older sister arts: she died tragically by her own hand, after irresolvable conflicts, while the other died happy and peaceful at an advanced age”. Main reason tragedy dies is because metaphysics eliminates the dionysian. Real implications relating to agon of instability from heroic and tragic culture because they keep getting caught up between the tension of apollonian and dionysian as it demonstrates irresolvable conflicts. Exhaustion proved it led to the death of tragedy as truth will exist. Instability

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.

Human or inhuman, Medea is still a woman. Her identification of the latter is so potent in that Euripides’s conscious ploy to utilize such an empowering female cast deeply ingrains an intimate association to her femininity. Moreover, the chorus serves as a microcosm of average Corinthian women as well as a form of aid in Medea’s grief where she is initially perceived as a woman wronged, scorned, and jettisoned for another. At first, the chorus sympathizes with Medea as they go on to say that “[t]o punish Jason will be just” (25) and subsequent to King Creon’s contempt against Medea declaring her exile, the chorus expresses that “[her] grief touches their hearts” (28). Medea thus supplicates and “venerates” (29) to Hecate, a goddess and sorceress, and in turn, the chorus supports.

Many philosophical minds assume that during his time Friedrich Nietzsche didn’t adapt along the line of any traditional conception of the philosopher. Furthermore, one can say that Nietzsche is the interpretation of the “wise man” after all he is serene, temperate and Apollonian. Furthermore, Nietzsche used his beloved Apollo along with Dionysius in his philosophies of response to tragedy even though there is tension between the two opposing forces known to him as the “Apollonian” and the “Dionysian.” In the first place we must familiarize ourselves with the Greek god Apollo known to be the god of light and reason. Comparatively, this leads Nietzsche to identify the “Apollonian” way of life humanitarian power represented by means of restraint

Euripides, in his tragedy, ‘Medea’ has embodied values of his time by critiquing and questioning his own social, cultural and historical context. The play, sensitive to the zeitgeist and its influence on philosophy, was written having recourse on the apprehensions and morality of non-partisanship and equilibrium, set against a discordant society. The characterisation of Medea allowed Euripides to challenge customary xenophobic beliefs delimitating the humanity of herself and others. The obstinacy of such values gave birth to the rebel with a cause.

Apollo is the god of prophecy, music, and healing. He is the god known to have inspired mankind to reach for the stars. “In mythological art Apollo is represented as a handsome youth, beardless or bearded. He may wear a garland of laurel or carry bow and arrows or be associated with a tripod. His chariot is pulled by swans”

However, the reality of the matter is quite the opposite, for it through Aegeus that Euripides tells the audience that Medea is incapable of filicide. Hinting that Medea’s motherly nature would overcome her efforts to harm her children, Euripides puts out a fire that will later return in full blaze: “Leave them alone, unhappy one, spare the children.”(Euripides, 239) Therefore, his words act put out the danger that Medea initially poses to the children, as alluded to by the nurse: “She hates her own children and has no pleasure at the sight of them. I fear she may form some new and horrible resolve.”(Euripides, 215) Euripides does this with Aegeus’ description of how pathetic life is without offspring, and his willingness to do things for Medea in the hopes of being rewarded with a child: “the childlessness is pictured as undesirable that conceit applies as well as to Medea as to Jason, and can be taken as assurance that she will not go so far.”(Buttrey, 4) Aegeus’ sterility is supposed to convince the audience that the fate of childlessness is way out of the question for the mother in Medea, and will not become a fixture in her ultimate plan for revenge. As a result, the audience is left completely unaware of the horror that awaited them later in the play, as they still believed that the Corinthians would be the ones responsible for the children’s deaths: “All along we have known that the children are in some danger from the Corinthians, and the underlying uneasiness which we felt while Aegeus was before us now comes to the surface.”(Buttrey, 14) Prior to the Aegeus scene, the theme of childlessness applied to both with Creon, whose fear for his daughter’s life compelled him to exile Medea and her children, and Jason,

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