Medea
Jason has set aside the wife who betrayed her own family to win him the Golden Fleece, and he intends to marry a Corinthian princess. Medea, foreign, brilliant, and days from exile with her two sons, answers with a revenge that consumes her along with everyone else: the bride dies, the bride’s father dies, and Medea kills her own children before escaping to Athens in a chariot sent by her grandfather, the sun. Euripides offered his audience no moral exit and no reassurance that heaven was watching. First staged in 431 BCE, where it placed last at the festival, the play became the most performed Greek tragedy of the twentieth century, largely for how plainly Medea states what a woman is owed and denied. Free to read in PDF and EPUB.
About the Author
Euripides wrote for the Athenian stage through the long war with Sparta, and his sympathies ran toward the losers: slaves, foreigners, captives, women. Roughly nineteen of his ninety-odd plays survive, the largest surviving body of work by any Greek tragedian. He died in Macedonia in…
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