Medea
Euripides (-431)
“A woman betrayed by the man she sacrificed everything for chooses the most devastating revenge imaginable — and the play dares you to understand why.”
At a Glance
Medea, a foreign sorceress who abandoned her homeland and murdered her own brother to help Jason win the Golden Fleece, has been cast aside. Jason has married the princess of Corinth for political advantage. When the king of Corinth banishes Medea and her children, she devises a plan of horrifying completeness: she poisons the princess and the king, then kills her own two sons to ensure Jason loses everything. She escapes on a divine chariot, leaving Jason destroyed.
Read full summary →Why This Book Matters
Medea is the first surviving work of Western literature to place a woman's psychological experience at the center of a tragedy and to demand that the audience understand — not forgive, but understand — why she commits an act of monstrous violence. It invented the sympathetic villain as a dramatic category. It is the earliest sustained critique of gender inequality in Western literature. And it raised a question that has haunted drama ever since: can we empathize with someone who does the unforgivable?
Diction Profile
Formal verse throughout — Greek tragic trimeter in dialogue, lyric meters in choral odes — but Euripides pushes closer to colloquial speech than Sophocles or Aeschylus, particularly in Jason's sophistic arguments and the Nurse's anxious domesticity
High