文档介绍：Week Sixteen
Euripides’ Medea
Plato and Aristotle
Video
Euripides and Medea
An introduction
Euripides’ Medea
Euripides’ Medea, produced in 431 ., the year that brought the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, appeared earlier than Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, but it has a bitterness that is more in keeping with the spirit of a later age.
If Oedipus is, in one sense, a warning to a generation that has embarked on an intellectual revolution, Medea is the ironic expression of the disillusion that comes after the shipwreck.
rejected by most of his contemporaries
Euripides is the first Greek poet to suffer the fate of so many of the great modern writers: rejected by most of his contemporaries (he rarely won first prize and was the favorite target for the scurrilous humor of the comic poets), he was universally admired and revered by the Greeks of the centuries that followed his death.
Iconoclastic
His Medea is typical of his iconoclastic approach; his choice of subject and central characters is in itself a challenge to established canons.
He still dramatizes myth, but the myth he chooses is exotic and disturbing, and the protagonist is not a man but a woman.
Medea is both woman and foreigner, that is, in terms of the audience’s prejudice and practice she is a representative of the two free-born groups in Athenian society that had almost no rights at all (though the male foreign resident had more rights than the native woman).
great intellectual power
She is not just a woman and a foreigner, she is also a person of great intellectual power.
Compared with her the credulous king and her complacent husband are children, and once her mind is made up, she moves them like pawns to their proper places in her barbaric game.
The myth is used for new purposes, to shock the members of the audience, attack their deepest prejudices, and shake them out of their complacent pride in the superiority of Greek masculinity.
Finds no redress
The tragic hero is