Instead, he creates a nuanced, sympathetic portrayal of a woman betrayed and her attempts to regain her power and life in a male-dominated world.

Euripides does not tell a straightforward story of revenge and murder. However, this compelling narrative has endured through the ages and become part of popular culture. When it was first performed, the play received last place in the City Dionysia festival, a shocking turn of events for the famous playwright. Euripides creates a character so engaging that by the end of the story, Jason still seems more like the villain than the victim. She then begins to plot her hideous revenge, all the while detailing the sacrifices she made for Jason. The play opens on Medea’s house where her Nurse explains to the audience that. Originally performed in 431 BCE, The Medea is based on the mythological story of Jason and Medea, the hero who piloted the Argonauts and the sorceress who helped him succeed. The audience hears Medea shriek from inside the house, scorned, angry, and shamed. Euripides’s Greek tragedy The Medea has horrified audiences for centuries. The play opens on Medea’s house where her Nurse explains to the audience that Jason has decided to leave Medea and their two children in order to marry Glauce, the king’s daughter, and gain a socially advantageous position. As such, it too examines agonizing grief after the pain of marital infidelities.Euripides’s Greek tragedy The Medea has horrified audiences for centuries. Aeschylus' trilogy, The Orestia, concerns the return of Agamemnon from the Trojan War, his murder by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus, and the subsequent aftermath as Agamemnon's children seek revenge against their own mother. In Antigone (a kind of sequel to Oedipus Rex) the king, Creon, prohibits Antigone (Oedipus's daughter) from burying her brother as is necessitated by divine law. Oedipus Rex deals with the aftermath of Oedipus's terrible fate to kill his own father and to marry his mother. Sophocles' Oedipus Rex and Antigone are tragedies that, like Medea, grapple with intense situations of familial strife. In this stunning translation, poet Charles Martin captures the rhythms of Euripides original text through contemporary rhyme and meter that speak directly.

Euripedes' The Bacchae is the story of Bacchus, the god of wine and revelry, causing a group of Theban women to rip a man, Pentheus, limb from limb for failing to acknowledge Bacchus as a god.

The three men wrote many plays with related themes or other similarities. Euripides was one of the three great dramatists of Athens golden age, along with Sophocles and Aeschylus.

Medea euripides full text