Reading Order
Medea Reading Order
Medea (431 BCE) by Euripides is the most disturbing of the surviving Greek tragedies — a play about a foreign woman, abandoned by her Greek husband Jason, who kills their two children to punish him. Medea, the Colchian sorceress who helped Jason win the Golden Fleece (killing her own brother to do so), has been discarded for a politically advantageous Greek marriage to the princess Glauce. The Greek society around her offers her nothing: she has no family, no city, no legal standing. She poisons Glauce and her father Creon, kills her own sons (to prevent them from suffering at the hands of their father's enemies), and escapes in a dragon-drawn chariot, leaving Jason in a grief that cannot be assuaged because he has no one to avenge himself upon. Euripides was the most controversial of the three great tragedians in antiquity — Aristophanes mocked him, and Aristotle called him 'the most tragic of the poets' while acknowledging the difficulty of his approach. His innovation was the psychological portrait: where Aeschylus and Sophocles presented characters who were types as much as individuals, Euripides presented characters whose interiority was visible and disturbing. Medea's monologue before she kills her children — in which she argues with herself, almost stops, and then commits the act — is the most psychologically realistic passage in Greek tragedy and anticipates the techniques of modern drama by two millennia. The play was also politically provocative: Medea is a barbarian woman in a Greek world, and her intelligence, her suffering, and her terrible revenge make the Greek world look considerably less civilized than it likes to think.
Where to start
Medea — the Rex Warner Penguin translation is readable; the David Kovacs Loeb Classical Library translation with the Greek facing is the scholarly standard. The play is short (about 1,400 lines) and can be read in two hours.
Complete Medea Book List
- 1Buy
Medea
Euripides·-431·The play — Jason's abandonment of Medea, her poisoning of Glauce, and the killing of her own children. - 2Buy
The Bacchae
Euripides·-405·Euripides's final masterpiece — Dionysus's revenge on Thebes; the other great Euripidean tragedy. - 3Buy
Electra
Euripides·-420·Euripides's version of Electra and Orestes's revenge on Clytemnestra — far more psychologically disturbing than Sophocles's version. - 4Buy
Iphigenia in Aulis
Euripides·-405·Euripides's late play of Agamemnon's sacrifice of his daughter — the origin of the chain of violence in the Oresteia. - 5Buy
The Oresteia
Aeschylus·-458·Aeschylus's trilogy — the Clytemnestra who kills Agamemnon is a Medea figure; the revenge of a wronged woman against a man who has betrayed her. - 6Buy
A Streetcar Named Desire
Tennessee Williams·1947·Williams's play — Blanche DuBois's destruction in a world that has no place for her; the closest modern dramatic parallel to Medea's situation. - 7Buy
Gone Girl
Gillian Flynn·2012·Flynn's thriller — a woman's terrible intelligence deployed against a husband who has betrayed her; the Medea figure in a contemporary domestic context. - 8Buy
Beloved
Toni Morrison·1987·Morrison's novel — a mother who kills her child to prevent a worse fate; the act at the heart of Medea in a different historical context.
Medea — Frequently Asked Questions
What is Medea about?
Medea follows Medea, the Colchian sorceress who helped Jason win the Golden Fleece, after Jason has abandoned her to marry the Greek princess Glauce for political advancement. Medea is left in Corinth with their two sons, no family (she killed her own brother to help Jason escape), no legal standing in Greek society, and no future. She engineers her revenge: she sends Glauce a poisoned robe as a wedding gift (which kills Glauce and her father Creon when he tries to save her), and then, to cause Jason the maximum suffering and to prevent her sons from being killed by the Corinthians as the children of a murderer, she kills her own sons. She escapes in a dragon-drawn chariot; Jason is left alive to suffer.
Why does Medea kill her children?
Medea's killing of her children is one of the most debated acts in Greek tragedy. Euripides gives her a specific internal logic: she knows the Corinthians will kill her children as the sons of a murderer (Medea has already killed Glauce and Creon); she would rather kill them herself than allow them to die at the hands of strangers. There is also the revenge logic: nothing hurts Jason more than the destruction of his sons, and Medea knows this. The play's great internal monologue (lines 1019–1080) shows Medea almost changing her mind — she looks at her children, imagines their future, nearly stops — before committing the act. Euripides makes the psychology real and disturbing: this is not a woman who has simply lost her humanity, but a woman who makes a horrifying choice while fully conscious of what she is doing.
How is Medea a political play?
Medea is political in ways that would have been immediately apparent to its Athenian audience. Medea is a barbarian — from Colchis, at the edge of the Greek world — and she has been used and then discarded by a Greek man who has everything Greek society values (heroic status, political ambition, citizen privileges). The Greek world around Medea offers her nothing: no legal recourse against Jason's abandonment, no protection, no future. Her revenge is terrible, but the play makes the Greek world look considerably less civilized than it likes to think: the society that prides itself on logos (reason) and nomos (law) has produced the conditions that make Medea's act inevitable. In 431 BCE, Athens was also at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, and the play may be engaging with the situation of resident foreigners in Athens.
What was Euripides's reputation in antiquity?
Euripides was the most controversial of the three great tragedians in his own time and immediately afterward. He won fewer prizes at the Dionysia than Sophocles; Aristophanes mocked him repeatedly in his comedies (particularly in Frogs and Thesmophoriazusae), accusing him of corrupting tragedy with his realistic, unheroic characters, his philosophical debates, and his sympathetic treatment of women and foreigners. Aristotle, in the Poetics, called him 'the most tragic of the poets' — the one who produced the strongest effects of pity and fear — while also criticizing his plotting. By the Hellenistic period, Euripides was the most widely read and performed of the three tragedians; eighteen of his plays survive compared to seven each from Aeschylus and Sophocles, probably because he was more popular in late antiquity.
What should I read after Medea?
After Medea, Euripides's other plays are the natural next step: The Bacchae (his final masterpiece), Electra (his psychologically disturbing version of the matricide story), Hippolytus (the tragic story of Phaedra's forbidden love), and Iphigenia in Aulis (the sacrifice that starts the chain of violence in the Oresteia). For the Medea figure in later literature, Christa Wolf's Medea: A Modern Retelling (1996) is a feminist reimagining; Seamus Heaney's translation and Deborah Warner's stage productions are important in the theatrical tradition. For the broader Greek tragic tradition, the Oresteia provides the theological framework within which Medea operates.
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