Vengeance In Euripides 'Hop-Frog'

Have you ever acted out in retribution for something done to you? Some examples could be if you punched someone for intentionally kicking you, or if someone deliberately hurt the feelings of someone you love and you retaliated in kind. You probably thought the punishment you received for your actions was too harsh or lenient. Many factors went into the decision of what discipline you received for this act and some were fair while others probably were not. This is true for the actions of many people in Aeschylus’s Oresteia. In each of the three plays, someone is seeking vengeance for a wrong done unto them, someone they know/love, or both. For this paper, I will be focusing on the vengeance enacted by Clytemnestra, Orestes, and the Fates. The vengeance that each person enacted was deemed just or unjust depending on many factors including the people who were doing the judging. Vengeance in Aeschylus’s Oresteia is viewed through the social lens of the society that it was enacted in. This lens is made up of the popular values, beliefs, and social conventions of the period as well as the judge’s personal views and/or experiences. These factors (such as gender and relation to the victim, as well as the presence or absence of transgressions on the characters part) lead to different opinions about the guilt of the accused individual and the individual themselves. The view of vengeance in Aeschylus’s Oresteia is very subjective.

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.

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.

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.

The play Medea, produced by Euripides in 431 BCE is based on an intense debate of justice and betrayal between Medea and Jason. Euripides portrays the play Medea as repayment of Medea for Jason marring Creon’s daughter. However, as per to Medea’s perspective it was displayed as justice for her to kill her own children. Euripides set forth Medea’s intense love as a passion that it prevents her to let go of Jason without any revenge Moreover, Medea’s pride for herself forces herself to put an end to her children’s life without any second thought. Euripides also uses Medea to illustrate how women had limitations compared to men.

Medea by Euripides’ challenges the pre-conceived views of women in the patriarchal society of Ancient Greece. Women were expected to be subservient to men and conform to the expectations of being an obedient and dutiful wives and nurturing mothers, this is evident when the nurse details that Medea is “all obedience” and “accepts her husbands will”, which reflects the Greeks belief that in a healthy marriage men had all the power. After being betrayed by her husband, Medea laments about the injustices that fall upon women declaring that “we women are the most unfortunate”. In her monologue, she examines the inequalities of women claiming that they are the “most wretched” as they must purchase their husbands for an “extravagant sum” and then

Agamemnon by Aeschylus, Antigone by Sophocles, and Medea by Euripides are all well-written plays highlighting the tragic tales of three women scorned. Exposing all their flaws along the way, Clytemnestra, Antigone, and Medea let their untamed emotions build their paths that shines some light on the true nature of their relationships with the people around them and society in general in the hopes that their heightened emotions will help fix all of their troubles. Some fail to realize that there are levels to revenge and each of these women were all seeking revenge, but they were not all on the same level of the revenge they were seeking. These levels of revenge pertaining to these specific situations can be put in two main categories of direct and indirect revenge. From these two categories we can weigh the intended damage to the collateral damage. Throughout these production, we see that all different aspects of artistic designs are

As Aristotle has posed, tragedy is formulaic and imitative, composed of distinct parts that inspire pity or fear which ultimately culminate into a depressingly satisfying ending. Sophocles’ play Oedipus the King in particular, incorporates Aristotelian characteristics as detailed in the Poetics. Through its manner, the play presents a singular yet complex plot and, an imperfect main character dealing with the consequences of his actions. Given the various rules to tragic aspects, Oedipus the King embodies the elements of a perfect tragedy holistically.

The Chorus delivers these final lines of Euripides’s Medea, “…the end men look for cometh not, / And a path is there where no man thought; so hath it fallen here.” (Euripides, 80) This quotation not only signifies the events, which have transpired in the plot of Medea, it also shows the recognition of a very curious aspect of Medea: that the protagonist of the play, Medea, is not the tragic hero. A tragic hero by Aristotelian standards is one who possesses a driving aspect– or hamartia – which causes his or her downfall, who endures a reversal of fortunes leading to immense suffering – called peripeteia, and who undergoes an anagnorisis: a profound change or realization. Medea does not have any of these attributes. Instead, it is

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

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

When Medea kills her children, audiences react with shock and horror. Any sympathy viewers have built for the woman is, in the words of Elizabeth Vandiver, “undercut” by this act (15). Since Medea is the protagonist, we question why Euripides chose to make her a child murderer. Most scholars agree that he invented this part of the myth. He also lessened her role as witch by drawing attention to her human qualities. This only highlights the infanticide (14) because we cannot excuse her ruthless act as monstrous and non-human. However, Medea remains very human until after she kills her sons. Appearing at the end of the play in the deus ex machina, she takes over not only the position but also the