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...
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…
In other words, the Greeks did not merely triumph in the dominance of history books, but their teachings still culturally resonate with simple, human questions and concerns that we ask ourselves as a society -- why do we love, why do we fight our family members, why does fate seem so inexorable? The Greeks do not just leave a legacy of myths and learning, they have created the intellectual and
Women in the Ancient World: Witches, Wives, And Whores One of the paradoxes of the ancient and medieval world is that although women were often discriminated against and treated as second class citizens (or not allowed to be citizens at all); they had an extremely central role in literature of the period. Women fulfilled a symbolic function in literature, representing foreignness, danger, and sexuality. Occasionally, when women's virtue surpassed that of
This double standard is prominent in Medea, for example when Jason admits that it is normal for women to get very angry when their husband is being unfaithful, yet he expects Medea to forget about it. (Euripides, ln 908-910) This is yet another way in which Medea parallels the position of women in our society today who are also expected to keep their feelings hidden. Medea has an inclination towards
Medea Life was hard for women in Greece (or Corinth) as Medea notes in her 1st speech, when she calls upon the "white wolf of lightning to leap" and "burst" her and "cling to these breasts" like a baby. What is she saying? She wants to feed the wild forces of nature. This indicates that there is a great surge of power and rage in Medea -- and the reason, of
Aristophanes Acharnians, Knights, and Clouds are three of the most revered works by Aristophanes. These works are of particular interest to this discourse because they have clear political and social nuances which affected the manner in which they were received in Ancient Athens. The discussion posits that Aristophanes had concrete political concerns and he utilized his craft as a dramatist to expose these matters with the purpose of affecting change in
Odysseus waits for the Cyclops to return home because he "wanted to see the owner himself, in the hope that he might give me a present." (Homer, Book IX) Odysseus introduces himself and his men to the Cyclops as essentially being mass murderers, and they expect that the Cyclops will present them with gifts and offerings for these deeds. "We therefore humbly pray you to show us some hospitality,