Euripides ranks as one of the great Athenian
dramatists. A distinguishing feature of his work is his consistent use and
development of female characters. Roche writes, “As to women, Euripides was obsessed
with their plight. Out of his nineteen extant plays no fewer than twelve are
about women”(vii). According to Zeitlen, Euripides’ “affinity for the feminine”
was noted by his contemporaries, and the debate between Aesychlus and Euripides
in Aristophanes The Frogs, may be interpreted as the struggle between the
“new intellectual trends that confuse and unsettle the older, simpler (hence
more manly) values of the city...”(90). Euripides’ use of the feminine was a
deliberate and controversial move, understood by the Greeks as more than the
revival of ancient stories about the lives of women.
Euripides’
handling of the feminine is a subject of ongoing interpretation, and his plays
are now read with a modern sensitivity to the notion of a “woman’s voice.”
Vellacott, one translator of his work, summarizes three themes that appear
repeatedly; “the destructive folly of violence; the sordid ugliness of revenge,
and the subjection and suffering imposed upon the female by the injustice of
the male”(38). Paul Roche goes even further, asserting that, “Medea and Alcestis are propaganda tracts
for women’s liberation”(vii). But Christine Downing observes that investigation
of Euripides’ treatment of the feminine has resulted in claims that he was a
misogynist, as well as a proto-feminist (3).
What
was Euripides purpose? I think that the concerns of modern day feminism are an
overlay brought to the work by the modern reader, and the search for evidence
of a “feminist” attitude is a tangent. That women suffered at the hands of men
is not
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