Medea: Euripides’s Most Disturbing Play

When Jason abandons Medea for a more politically useful marriage, she doesn’t rage at him in the way Greek tragedy usually lets a wronged woman rage. She calculates. She lets the audience watch her plan, in cold and total detail, the murder of her own children — not as a crime of passion but as the most devastating weapon she has left against the man who humiliated her.

Athenian audiences found it nearly unwatchable, and it reportedly placed last in the competition it premiered in. Euripides had done something the other tragedians rarely risked: he’d made the audience understand a monster from the inside, sympathize with her reasoning even as it recoils from her conclusion, and refused to give anyone — Jason included — a clean moral exit.

It’s the play that makes clearest what set Euripides apart from Aeschylus and Sophocles: less interested in fate and the gods, far more interested in what ordinary human cruelty looks like up close.

Read The Complete Plays of Euripides →