Top Highlights

• The chorus wonder how this sacred place can possibly give shelter to a woman who has murdered her own children—a woman, we may add, who embodies the power of Aphrodite, eros and “cleverness” at their most terrifying.1 In mythology, Athens would do just that, with near-disastrous consequences: Medea tried to poison Theseus, the greatest Athenian her...
• Euripides’ drama concerns the position and treatment of women and outsiders in Athenian life and ideology in his own day.
• and in which Medea declared that she would rather “stand three times behind/a shield in war than give birth to one child”
• they also raise questions about the value of violence and warfare, which played such a huge role in Greek life and literature. Like Medea herself, the Peloponnesian War would destroy many children of the rising generation. But the extended bloodshed of that war was yet to come, and whether or not the play questions male military values, it did not ...
• Medea, the daughter of Aietes and a nymph named Iduia (“she who knows”), is a disturbing mythological figure. Her own name suggests Greek words for “cunning” or “full of plans”