background
- 431 BCE won 3rd place at the City Dionysia
- Male anxiety about female power
- Clytemnestra: bad, Antigone: noble
- Awe-inspiring, terrifying figure
- → proto-feminist positions
- Culmination of gender on the Athenian stage
- Least acclaimed among contemporaries
- Most popular today; most modern, different form of connection
- Peloponnesian war, 27 years, Athens collapses at its height
- This play debuted at the beginning of the war
- Trilogy: Philoctetes, Dictys
- Satyr: Theristai — didn’t survive
- Jason: get Golden Fleece to regain control of homeland
- Group of heroes and Heracles, Orpheus
- Sail on Argo to Colcos (Argonauts)
- Medea: princess that helps him get the Fleece from her father
notes
- 1–13 the Nurse wishes the two had never met
- 230–240 Medea conforms to the idea that women are irrational and emotional
- Amazing given social and cultural context
- Perspectives on gender
- Viewed as enemy of women in antiquity for making them look bad
- Gender sensitivity draws attention to structural inequalities
- Childbirth was dangerous without modern medicine
- Euripides presentation of Jason
- Aegeus: prudent politically
- Different Creon from Antigone