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.”
This page prints on a single page. Use Ctrl+P / Cmd+P.
Medea
Euripides (-431) · 60pages · Classical Antiquity · 6 AP appearances
Summary
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.
Why It 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...
Themes & Motifs
Diction & Style
Register: 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
Narrator: There is no narrator — this is drama. The Nurse serves a quasi-narrative function in the prologue, providing backstor...
Figurative Language: High
Historical Context
Classical Athens, 431 BCE — the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War, the height of Athenian imperial democracy: Medea premiered at a moment of maximum Athenian anxiety. The Peloponnesian War had just begun. The city was debating whether its imperial behavior — extracting tribute, punishing dissent, breaking ...
Key Characters
Talking Points
- Medea says 'I understand the evil I am about to do, but my anger is stronger than my reason.' Is she describing a failure of will, a failure of reason, or something else entirely? What does Euripides suggest about the relationship between knowing what is right and doing what is right?
- Medea's speech on women's condition ('Of all creatures that have breath and sense, we women are the most unhappy') is a systematic critique of gender inequality. Does the fact that she later kills her children invalidate her analysis, or do the analysis and the action exist in separate moral categories?
- Jason defends his remarriage as rational and beneficial. He is not entirely wrong — the marriage would have given his children royal status. Does the play take his argument seriously, or is it entirely satirical?
- Euripides places Medea on the mechane — the crane reserved for divine appearances — at the play's end. What does this staging choice say about Medea's relationship to the divine order? Is she being endorsed by the gods, or has she moved beyond their jurisdiction?
- The Chorus of Corinthian women supports Medea's grievance, pledges silence, and then does nothing when they hear her children being murdered. What does their inaction represent? Is it cowardice, complicity, or the inevitable limit of solidarity?
Notable Quotes
“I wish the Argo had never winged its way to the land of Colchis through the dark-blue Symplegades.”
“She hates the children and takes no pleasure in seeing them. I fear she may plan something dreadful.”
“Of all creatures that have breath and sense, we women are the most unhappy.”
Why Read This
Because Medea will not let you be comfortable. You will sympathize with her in the first half — her analysis of women's condition is devastating and accurate. Then she does something unforgivable, and Euripides forces you to reconcile the woman wh...