Euripides Medea Analytical Essay

The theatre has long stood as a place to lecture to a captive audience. The play Medea, by the ancient Greek playwright Euripides, is no exception. Euripides uses it as a vehicle to convey his subversive political messages to his fellow Greeks. Euripides’ play Medea serves as a social commentary to state that the Greek views on their gods and women are erroneous. Euripides argues that the Athenians’ subjugation to the gods is misplaced. To start with, god's manipulate mortals in the god’s search for glory. When Jason is confronted over the aid Medea provided in his quest, Jason rebuts that “[i]t was the goddess of Love and none other … who delivered [him] from the dangers [his] quest” (Euripides 49). By proposing that it was Aphrodite
Jason has no claim to the quest’s laud and honor that are due only to its leader; the only glory he finds is the glory that a careless craftsman, or goddess, grants her tools-ignoble death beneath the bow of the Argo. The goddess is kind enough to deliver him from danger when it suits her purposes, but nothing beyond. By showing mortals as puppets on the strings of divine puppeteers, Euripides makes it clear to the Greeks that their submission is a form of acquiescent abuse. Additionally, with the gods, justice does not exist. After murdering her sons, Medea appears “in a magic chariot, give [her] by the Sun,” after perpetrating a crime “most loathsome … to the gods … and all mankind” (69). For her murders, Medea is doomed to eternal misery in the Fields of Punishment, a doom that mortal justice would hasten. However, in granting Medea his chariot, Helios, the Sun, speeds her flight from this justice, prolonging her mortal existence, and thereby granting her many happy years to which she is not entitled. By aiding Medea, Helios is an accomplice to the act of murder, and warrants the same doom as she. No death, however, awaits him, and so, Helios cannot be constrained to his rightful