The complexity and contradictions of Medea still resonate with audiences, while the play continues to unsettle and challenge. It is little wonder that Euripides’ defiance of virtually every dramatic and gender assumption of his time caused his tragedy to fail with his first critics.

Medea frightens as a female violator and overreacher who lets her passion overthrow her reason, whose love is so massive and all-consuming that it is transformed into self-destructive and boundless hatred. The play simultaneously and paradoxically presents Medea’s claim on the audience’s sympathy as a woman betrayed, as a victim of male oppression and her own divided nature, and as a monster and a warning. Medea, triumphant after the carnage she has perpetrated, seemingly evades the moral consequences of her actions and is shown by Euripides apotheosized as a divinely sanctioned, supreme force. Medea, by contrast, adds infanticide to her crimes but still escapes Jason’s vengeance or Corinthian justice on a flying chariot sent by the god Helios to assist her. Clytemnestra in Aeschylus’s Oresteia conspires to murder her husband as well, but she is in turn executed by her son, Orestes, whose punishment is divinely and civilly sanctioned by the trilogy’s conclusion. Most shocking of all, and possibly Euripides’ singular innovation to the legend, Medea murders her two sons, allowing her vengeful passion to trump and cancel her maternal affections. 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.

Euripides medea text