Medea

Comparative · 2027 Leaving Cert

Euripides wrote Medea in 431 BC and it still makes audiences uncomfortable, because it hands the argument to the woman everyone in the play has already decided is a monster.

The play was written for the Athenian drama festival and came third out of three, which tells you how badly it landed at the time. Athens was a city where women had almost no legal standing and where foreigners had less. Euripides puts a foreign woman at the centre of the stage, gives her the best speeches, has the chorus of Corinthian women agree with her, and then lets her do something unforgivable.

It is on the comparative list for 2027. A note on quotation: Medea was written in Greek, and the wording of any line depends entirely on which translation your class is using. Public domain versions by E. P. Coleridge and Gilbert Murray are widely available, but they differ from each other and from modern versions. Learn your quotations from your own edition and name the translator if the question invites it. The moments below are the same in every version.

Medea: The Story in Five Beats

One. Medea, a princess of Colchis and a sorceress, helped Jason steal the Golden Fleece. She betrayed her father, killed her own brother to slow the pursuit, and later engineered the death of Jason’s uncle Pelias. All of it for him. The play opens years later in Corinth, where the couple are exiles with two sons.

Two. Jason has agreed to marry the daughter of Creon, king of Corinth. His argument is that the match secures a future for the whole family. Medea, offstage at the start, is heard screaming.

Three. Creon arrives to banish her, afraid of what she might do. Medea persuades him to allow one more day. It is the only thing she asks for and it is everything she needs.

Four. Aegeus, king of Athens, passes through and, in exchange for a cure for childlessness, swears to give her sanctuary. With an escape route secured, the plan becomes possible. She sends her sons to the princess with a poisoned robe and coronet. The princess dies, and Creon dies trying to save her.

Five. Medea kills her two sons offstage. Jason arrives too late and finds her above him in a chariot sent by her grandfather the Sun, holding the bodies, refusing him even the right to bury them.

A Woman Arguing Her Own Case

The first thing Medea does when she finally comes out of the house is stop screaming and start reasoning. Her speech to the Corinthian women lays out the position of a wife in that society with a lawyer’s precision: she is bought with a dowry, has no say in the man she gets, cannot leave without disgrace, and is told she leads a safe life while men go to war. She would rather stand three times in a battle line than give birth once.

Nothing in that speech is about magic or revenge. It is an argument about how a marriage is structured, and it is the reason the chorus takes her side and agrees to keep her secret. Whatever mode you are writing in, this is the speech that keeps the play from being a story about a witch.

The Outsider Who Is Never Allowed to Belong

Medea is called a barbarian by nearly everyone, including her husband. Jason’s most self-satisfied argument is that she should be grateful, because he brought her from the edge of the world to Greece, where there is law rather than brute force. He is telling a woman he is abandoning that she has come out ahead.

Creon is honest in a way Jason is not. He admits he is banishing her because she is clever and because he is afraid of her, not because she has done anything in Corinth. Being intelligent and foreign is enough. Note the double bind: her cleverness is exactly what she used in Jason’s service, and it is now the charge against her.

Revenge Built in Stages

Look at how carefully Euripides stages the plan. Medea does not act on impulse at any point. She secures the extra day from Creon. She secures the sanctuary from Aegeus. Only then does she settle on the children, and she says plainly that she chooses this because it is the thing that will hurt Jason most.

Then Euripides does something no revenge plot needs. He gives her a scene alone with the boys where she holds them, notices their hands and their faces, tells herself to let it go, and changes her mind twice. She is not a woman who does not feel it. She is a woman who does it anyway. That scene is the single most examinable passage in the play.

Who Wins, and What It Costs

The ending refuses to punish her. There is no arrest, no thunderbolt, no remorse. She appears above the stage in the Sun’s chariot, in the position a god would normally occupy at the end of a Greek tragedy, and Jason is left below her with nothing, denied even the bodies. She takes them to Corinth for burial herself.

Whether that is a victory is the question the play leaves open, and the honest answer is that it is both. Medea has destroyed the man who broke his oath and she has done it by destroying the only part of her own life worth having. Answers that pick one side of this are weaker than answers that hold both.

Who’s Who

Medea is granddaughter of the Sun, a sorceress, a princess, a refugee twice over, and the most articulate character on the stage.

Jason is not a monster, which is worse. He is a reasonable man who genuinely believes his new marriage was a practical decision that benefits everyone, and he never once understands why she is angry.

Creon is a father protecting a daughter, and his one act of mercy is what kills him.

The Nurse and the Tutor open the play and tell us what to fear before we ever see Medea. They are servants, and they see everything first.

The Chorus of Corinthian women is unusually involved. They sympathise, they stay silent when they could warn Creon, and they beg her to stop at the end. They are the closest thing the play has to us.

Using This in the Exam

How to use it: Four moments will carry almost any question: the first speech to the chorus, the negotiation with Creon for one more day, the scene alone with the children, and the final confrontation from the chariot. Name the moment and the speaker, then make your point about it. If you are quoting, use your own edition’s wording and keep it to a line, because translations differ and an examiner who knows a different version will notice a mangled one faster than a missing one.

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