The story
Medea is a tragedy by Euripides, produced at the City Dionysia in Athens in 431 BCE. The play is set in Corinth, where the sorceress Medea, who left her homeland for Jason after helping him win the Golden Fleece, learns that he has abandoned her to marry a Corinthian princess. Medea pretends to accept this, sends the bride a poisoned robe and crown, and then kills her own two sons so that Jason is left with nothing. She flees Corinth in a chariot sent by her grandfather, the sun god Helios.
Euripides gave the story an unusually human center. Medea is a foreign woman with no city or family to protect her, and she speaks bitterly about the position of women in Greek marriage in a famous speech. The poet leaves her motives in tension: she is wronged and also horrifying. Many scholars think Euripides himself invented the child-killing, since earlier tradition has the Corinthians killing the children; this is debated, but the play made the version stick. At the festival, Medea took third place, behind Euphorion (Aeschylus' son) and Sophocles, in the same year the Peloponnesian War began. Later it became one of the best loved plays of the ancient canon, and writers from Seneca to Jean Anouilh, Christa Wolf and Toni Morrison reworked it.
Why it mattered
- Euripides moved tragedy toward psychological conflict inside a household and away from remote heroic fate.
- The play gave later literature its image of a wronged outsider whose revenge destroys her own family.
- Seneca's Latin Medea and many modern adaptations, including operas and novels, grew from it.
Sources
- The Medea of Euripides Cambridge University Press
Community notes
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