Ancient Greece and Women

Women of Ancient Greece: The Plays of Euripides The plays of Euripides reveal how poorly women were viewed in ancient Greece. From Medea to Sthenoboea to Phaedra, Euripides' women cover a wide range of forms: the vengeful, jilted lover; the plotting wife; the incestuous, lustful mother.

As Chong-Gossard points out, Euripides does not shy away from "tapping into men's anxieties and frightening them with Medeas and Phaedras...women keeping silent about their devious plots."[footnoteRef:1] If anything, Euripides plays serve to reinforce the notion that in a patriarchal society, a man can never let down his guard against a woman -- because, judging from the works of Euripides, women are some of the most treacherous beings to ever walk the face of the earth.

This paper will show how female power was depicted so monstrously in the works of Euripides and what it meant to Greek viewers. [1: James Harvey Kim On Chong-Gossard, Gender and Communication in Euripides' Plays (MA: Brill, 2008) 246.] Strong female characters in Euripides' works typically figure in tragedies: their power and strength plays a part in a tragic sequence of events that brings catastrophic suffering to others. In Medea, for instance, the title character is a strong "foreign-born" woman who has married Jason and come to live in Greece.

But when Jason leaves Medea for a "better" match, she vows to have her revenge. Her revenge is so cruel, however, that the moral of the story for the patriarchal society surely was that strong women should be avoided.

Medea herself asks why she is being expelled from the land and Creon answers: "I fear thee...thou art a witch by nature, expert in countless sorceries."[footnoteRef:2] Medea is feared by Creon because he knows that Jason has decided to leave her and that she, in her fury, is likely to wreak havoc and the ones he loves. Thus, he is pre-emptive in his maneuverings: he attempts to remove her from the vicinity before she can lash out.

The plan, of course, does not work: Medea kills her own children to spite their father -- her husband -- Jason. It is a monstrous demonstration of vengefulness that only supports the concept that women are corrupt and must be controlled or else they will tear down society the moment they are offended. [2: Euripides, Medea (PA: Filiquarian, 2007), 13.] In Euripedes' Sthenoboea, the title character is a passionate and unfaithful wife, whose advances towards another man are repulsed.

Insulted and offended that the man she lusts after does not want to begin an affair with her, she denounces him to her husband, who sends him away. But he returns and in despair/fear that her false accusations might be made known, Sthenoboea kills herself. Phaedra in the playwright's Hippolytus is as equally dreadful: she wants to engage in an incestuous love affair with her stepson.

Phaedra herself points out her own nature, as though to say that she herself knows how terrible women are: "I am only a woman, a thing which the world hates."[footnoteRef:3] And in Euripides' Andromache, the title characters states, "No cure has been found for a woman's venom, worse than that of reptiles.

We are a curse to man."[footnoteRef:4] Hermione responds: "Men of sense should never let gossiping women visit their wives, for they work mischief."[footnoteRef:5] Each of these lines in the playwright's different plays conveys a sense of the sexist attitudes that the patriarchal society held towards women. They drip with contempt for the female sex, viewing women as traitorous, conniving, treacherous, venomous -- in short, not to be trusted.

Euripides showed that women could be powerful -- but he also conveyed the idea that their power was not one that should be exercised in public. It was far too dangerous to be left uncontrolled. In fact, according to Euripides, the women themselves know how terrible they are -- and they say as much as though needing to reinforce the notion to the members of their own gender lest one of them get the idea that they could rise up and assert their power in society.

After all, Athens was not Sparta -- and it was in the latter city-state that women exercised a great deal of influence in society. In Athens, women did not have any such say in society -- and so the plays of Euripides show: women in them represented immoral qualities that would be deemed horrific in a modern day genre. They were portrayed as unfeeling monsters interested solely in their own pursuits and passions. [3: Euripides, Hippolytus (UK: Oxford University Press, 1973), 37.] [4: Euripides, Andromache (NY: Sparksgroup, 2003), 13.] [5: Euripides, Andromache (NY: Sparksgroup, 2003), 13.] In conclusion,.