Medea

Euripides wrote Medea in 431 BCE and the Athenian audience ranked it third in its festival competition. It was too uncomfortable. Twenty-five centuries later, it remains too uncomfortable — which is precisely why it survives.

The setup is simple: Jason, the hero who retrieved the Golden Fleece, has decided to marry a Greek princess for political advancement. His wife Medea — the foreign sorceress who betrayed her own family to help him, who used her powers to save his life multiple times — is being put aside. She is to be exiled with their two sons. Euripides' play asks what Medea does with the rage this produces.

What makes Medea permanently disturbing is that Euripides refuses to make Medea a monster. She is the most intelligent person in the play. She sees her situation with complete clarity — a woman, a foreigner, a wife who is to be discarded — and her analysis of her position is among the most precise accounts of gender and power in ancient literature. She knows what she intends to do. She argues with herself about it. She does it anyway. Euripides gives her full consciousness throughout. The play does not excuse her. It does not reassure you that she is simply mad. It makes you sit with the logic of what she does and consider where it comes from.

Medea — Princess of Colchis, granddaughter of the sun god Helios, sorceress, wife, and finally the agent of her own revenge. She is not sympathetic in a simple sense — she kills her children — but she is comprehensible in every scene up to and including the moment she does it. Euripides constructed her as the smartest person in a play where her intelligence has been used against her.

Jason — The hero, entirely self-serving. His argument for leaving Medea — that the Greek marriage is good for her and the children too — is delivered with the confidence of a man who has never had to account for what he has taken. Euripides renders him with devastating accuracy: not a villain, just a man who doesn't consider his wife a person whose choices matter.

Creon — King of Corinth, who orders Medea's exile. He knows she is dangerous; he grants her one day's delay out of something like pity. The day is all she needs.

The Nurse — Medea's attendant, who opens the play and who loves Medea without understanding her. Her prologue establishes what has happened; her fear of what Medea will do next functions as the audience's emotional guide throughout.

No. 1 · Medea's speech on women (lines 230–251). Shortly after the play begins, Medea addresses the Chorus of Corinthian women with a systematic analysis of what it means to be a woman in her world: to be sold into a stranger's house, to have no recourse if the marriage fails, to be entirely dependent on a man's goodness. The speech is not self-pity; it is a structural argument. Coming from a character who will commit terrible acts, it forces the audience to engage with the justice of her analysis before they encounter what she does with it.

No. 2 · The murder of the princess. Medea sends her children to the new bride with a gift: a poisoned robe and crown. The death of the princess and her father Creon is reported by a Messenger in one of ancient tragedy's most precisely horrible passages — the description of what the gifts do is detailed enough to function as the opposite of theatrical distance. The children return to Medea having delivered the gift.

No. 3 · Medea's final soliloquy. Before she kills her children, Medea speaks directly about what she is about to do — loving them, knowing it is wrong, unable to stop herself. She touches their hands. She takes them inside. Euripides gives her the most psychologically explicit pre-murder scene in ancient tragedy. The line "I know indeed what evil I intend to do, but stronger than all my afterthoughts is my fury" has no equivalent in Greek drama.

Rex Warner translation (University of Chicago, Complete Greek Tragedies series) — clear, direct, serviceable for both reading and study. Good notes.

Diane Arnson Svarlien (Hackett, 2008) — modern, readable, with a useful introduction by Robin Mitchell-Boyask on the play's reception history.

Edith Hall (Penguin Classics, 2008) — Hall's introduction is excellent on the play's gender politics and its history of production; the translation is clear.

For performance: The play has been staged frequently in modern adaptations — Liz Lochhead's version (1999) and Rachel Cusk's (2015) are both worth reading alongside the original.

Medea is for readers willing to inhabit the logic of a character who commits an act they cannot excuse. Euripides is not asking you to approve; he is asking you to understand. The distinction matters, and the play is designed to make you work to maintain it.

It is not for readers who need their tragic protagonists to be either purely innocent or clearly monstrous. Medea is neither. If you're looking for moral clarity in your ancient tragedy, Sophocles — whose characters tend to be destroyed by forces outside their moral control — is a better fit. Euripides specializes in characters whose destruction comes from inside.

The play is short — two hours reading. Read it in one sitting. Pay attention to the Chorus, who are Corinthian women with sympathy for Medea until they don't have it anymore; their shifting relationship with her tracks the audience's own. Notice also how much of the play's action happens offstage and is reported — this is a formal convention of Greek tragedy, but Euripides uses it to particular effect: what Medea does to the princess is too horrible to depict directly.

• Sophocles — Oedipus Rex. Sophocles and Euripides are near contemporaries with entirely different views of human agency; reading them together clarifies what each is doing.
• Toni Morrison — Beloved (1987). A mother who kills her child to save her from slavery; the parallel is not accidental. Morrison has cited Medea directly.
• Anne Carson — Grief Is the Thing with Feathers / Eros the Bittersweet. Carson, the foremost modern translator of Greek lyric, has written extensively about Euripides; her translation Grief Lessons (2006) includes four Euripides plays with essential commentary.

1. Medea's speech on women (lines 230–251) is a structural analysis of her situation, not an appeal for sympathy. Does it change how you judge what she does later?
2. Jason argues that the new marriage is actually good for Medea and their children. Is he lying to himself, or does he believe it? What does Euripides suggest?
3. Medea knows what she is about to do is wrong. She does it anyway. Euripides gives her full consciousness throughout. What does this choice do to the play's moral universe?
4. The Chorus of Corinthian women sympathize with Medea at first and then lose that sympathy. When does the turn happen for you?
5. Medea kills her children to hurt Jason — to take from him the one thing he valued. Is this the play's claim, or is something else also happening?
6. Euripides lost the festival competition with this play in 431 BCE. What might the Athenian audience have found unacceptable about it?