She causes a horrible death of Jason’s intended, Glauce, and Creon, who tries in vain to save his daughter. After Jason has cast off Medea-his wife, the mother of his children, and the woman who helped him to secure the Golden Fleece and eliminate the usurper of Jason’s throne at Iolcus-in order to marry the daughter of King Creon of Corinth, Medea responds to his betrayal by destroying all of Jason’s prospects as a husband, father, and presumptive heir to a powerful throne. The first Athenian audience had never seen Medea’s like before, at least not in the heroic terms Euripides treats her. Defying accepted gender assumptions that prescribed passive and subordinate roles for women, Medea combines the steely determination and wrath of Achilles with the wiles of Odysseus.
Arguably for the first time in Western drama a woman fully commanded the stage from beginning to end, orchestrating the play’s terrifying actions. Euripides violates its audience’s most cherished gender and moral illusions, while shocking with the unimaginable. When Medea, commonly regarded as Euripides’ masterpiece, was first per-formed at Athens’s Great Dionysia, Euripides was awarded the third (and last) prize, behind Sophocles and Euphorion. Werner Jaeger, Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture It is impossible for us to admire the play wholeheartedly yet it was a revolution in its time, and it shows the true fertility of the new art. Jason is stiff with cleverness and magnanimity while Medea philosophizes on the social position of women-the dishonourable necessity which makes a woman surrender herself in marriage to a strange man and pay a rich dowry for the privilege-and declares that bearing children is far more brave and dangerous than fighting in battle. Accordingly, the disputes, the abuse, and the logic used by all its characters are essentially bourgeois. Medea, with its conflict between the boundless egoism of the husband and the boundless passion of the wife, was a completely up-to-date play.
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