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 plot of the Greek poet Euripides’ Medea tragedy is convoluted and messy, rather like its antihero, Medea. It was first performed at the Dionysian Festival in 431 BCE, where it famously won third (last) prize against entries by Sophocles andEuphorion.
In the opening scene, the nurse/narrator tells us that Medea and Jason have lived together for some time as husband and wife in Corinth, but theirs is a troubled union. Jason and Medea met at Colchis, where King Pelias had sent him to capture the magical Golden Fleece from Medea’s father King Aaetes. Medea saw and fell in love with the handsome young hero, and so, despite her father’s desire to retain possession of the precious object, helped Jason to escape. The couple fled first Medea’s Colchis, and then after Medea was instrumental in the death of King Pelias at Iolcos, fled that region, finally arriving at Corinth.
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 over-reacher 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.
The form of the play differs from many other Greek tragedies by its simplicity. Most scenes involve only Medea and someone else. The Chorus, here representing the women of Corinth, is usually involved alongside them. The simple encounters highlight Medea’s skill and determination in manipulating powerful male figures. The play is also the only Greek tragedy in which a kin-killer makes it unpunished to the end of the play, and the only one about child-killing in which the deed is performed in cold blood as opposed to in a state of temporary madness.
Euripides’ characterization of Medea exhibits the inner emotions of passion, love, and vengeance. The character of Medea has variously been interpreted as either fulfilling her role of “mother and wife” and as acting as a “proto-feminist”. Feminist readings have interpreted the play as either a “sympathetic exploration” of the “disadvantages of being a woman in a patriarchal society”, or as an expression of misogynist attitudes. In conflict with this sympathetic undertone (or reinforcing a more negative reading) is Medea’s barbarian identity, which some argue could antagonize a 5th-century BC Greek audience.
Thus, the story of Medea by author Euripides conveys the loathsome side of human relationships, especially within a family. The society being presented in the story mirrors major situations happening in our society. Medea is a woman who has suffered a lot, and over time, she became twisted by her own pain. Euripides uses gender roles, love, marriage, and being a foreigner as a common motif in this short story. True power of love lies in the lack of protection and comfort it provides for the protagonist. She recognizes her marriage as
a representation of betrayal and dishonour. She is clouded with thoughts of revenge, without realizing from the beginning that her love serves as a time bomb for her self-destruction.