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Life of Euripides
Euripides, the last of the great tragedians, lived a life filled with controversy and moral issues that influenced, as well as appalled, many people of his time. Throughout the centuries he has gained more acceptance in the literary circles as well as in the eyes of the public. It is difficult to write about his life only because he lived so long ago and there are many different opinions and theories as to what is factual and what is not. What is known about his life, and how he lived it, has remained an interesting topic. What his work influenced and who followed his ideas have contributed to his lasting popularity. His life was filled with triumphs and controversies that contributed to his greatness. It is this greatness that people have followed for over the last two thousand years.
Euripides was born on the island of Salamis around 480 B.C. However, a Parian marble states that his birth was in 485 B.C (Bates 5). He was born into a somewhat rich family and was educated in the arts (as in painting) and trained in athletics. He began to write around the age of eighteen and became interested in philosophy soon after. Many people considered his ideas and thoughts as being too controversial for the time period. Euripides wrote on subjects such as religion, injustice, the gods and women. Being the free thinker that he was, these topics were considered socially abnormal.
Euripides often wrote of socially insignificant people like women and slaves while giving them god-like powers. He often made his women characters evil by making them violent Medea. The more taboo subject of incest was brought into his plays also. Euripides wrote many great plays during his lifetime, yet he was constantly beaten in the State competitions. The official judges of the competitions were against him because he did not cater to the views and opinions of the Athenian crowds. Throughout his life he only won five awards, and the fifth one was not awarded until after his death (www.imagi-nation.com). He was under constant criticism from others about his tragedies. One well-known critic was Aristophanes, who constantly spoke negatively about Euripides ( Bates 7). He wrote Women at the Thesmophoria, which was about the murder of Euripides, and Frogs, in which Euripides was parodied again.
The plays of Euripides had influenced many other authors over the years.
In The Bacchae, I believe that Euripides uses the relationship of male and female to explore the alluring concept of feminine empowerment in a patriarchal society and to demonstrate the cost this empowerment subsequently has on ordered civilization. In this paper, I will argue that Euripides uses the conflictual relation between the genders to criticize the role of women in Greek society while also showing the consequences of a total feminine revolt. Through developing this conflict, Euripides is demonstrating how the path to the most successful civilization is through a balance of masculine rationality and feminine emotional freedom. I will prove this by analyzing the positions of Pentheus, the Bacchants, and Dionysus throughout the play. The character Pentheus
Sophocles was one of the most influential writers of Ancient Greece. He was thought to be born around 496 B.C.E. in Colonus, near Athens Greece, and died at around 406 B.C.E. meaning that he only lived for about 90 years. He was born into a wealthy family, his father being Sophillius, and he was an amour manufacturer in the rural community
Aeschylus, was a master dramatist - he liked to portray conflict between persons, human or divine, or between principles.1 His trilogy of plays, the Oresteia, develops many conflicts that must be resolved during the action of the Eumenides, the concluding play of the trilogy. The central theme of the Oresteia is justice (dike) and in dealing with questions of justice, Aeschylus at every stage involves the gods.2 The Oresteia's climactic conflict in the Eumenides revolves around justice and the gods - opposing conceptions of justice and conflicting classes of gods. This essay will describe and discuss these conflicts and, more importantly, the manner in which they are resolved so that the play, and indeed the entire trilogy, might reach a satisfactory conclusion.
Grene, D., and Lattimore, R., eds. ?Antigone? and ?Prometheus Bound.? Greek Tragedies: Volume 1. The University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1991. 178-232, 65-106.
To begin to understand what Euripides was doing, it is best to understand the medium of his art: the Greek theater. Theater was a competitive art among playwrights, with several competitions throughout the year, the greatest of which was at the Dionysian festivals in the spring. Greek drama, tragedy in particular, had little in common with modern acting productions. There was little or no suspense as to the outcome of the play; most all were based on Homeric tales from The Iliad and The Odyssey. The skill, therefore, was not in creating a fascinating plot, but in the subtle changes the playwright could incorporate to increase the dramatic effect. Changing the reasons for conflicts, dialogue, order of events, and sometimes even the outcome of the play were all ways to do this. With all these devices available to the fifth century playwright, what made Euripides so special that he was almost exclusiv...
Several similar themes are present between the three plays Antigone, Medea, and Oedipus Rex, written by Sophocles and one by Euripides. The three plays were written during the time of the ancient Greek civilization and, therefore, contain the morals and values of that time. Throughout the three plays, it is observed that the protagonists all carry similar traits: a sense of duty and stubbornness in their ways. Both of these traits lead to a tragic ending for the characters in the three plays. By observing the three plays and comparing them, readers are able to see these two traits play out among them and see how they ultimately lead to their downfall.
Euripides shows his views on female power through Medea. As a writer of the marginalized in society, Medea is the prime example of minorities of the age. She is a single mother, with 2 illegitimate children, in a foreign place. Despite all these disadvantages, Medea is the cleverest character in the story. Medea is a warning to the consequences that follow when society underestimates the
Aristotle, a philosopher, scientist, spiritualist and passionate critic of the arts, spent many years studying human nature and its relevance to the stage. His rules of tragedy in fact made a deep imprint on the writing of tragic works, while he influenced the structure of theatre, with his analysis of human nature. Euripides 'Medea', a Greek tragedy written with partial adherence to the Aristotelian rules, explores the continuation of the ancient Greek tales surrounding the mythology of Medea, Princess of Colchis, and granddaughter of Helios, the sun god, with heartlessness to rival the infamous Circe. While the structure of this play undoubtedly perpetuates many of the Aristotelian rules, there are some dramatic structures which challenge its standing with relevance to Aristotle's guidelines, and the judgment of Medea as a dramatic success within the tragic genre.
*Although Medea is arguably the most intelligent character in Euripides’s piece, shown in her dialogue with Creon, she has become ridiculed, and viewed as barbarous and less desirable following her separation from Jason. She is no longer a wife to a Greek man. She is simply an outsider, and a burden on a prosperous
In Greek society, the role of women was considered to be insignificant compared to the Greek men. The women had very few rights, no room to voice personal opinions, and a very bleak future with few options for a better life. According to Moses Hades, professor of Greek studies, women in ancient Greek plays are known to be the main characters and take the role of the villain, victim, or the heroine. In Euripides’ play Medea, Medea, the main character, plays all these roles. She represents the heroine by helping her husband secure the Golden Fleece prior to their marriage, and then portrays the victim by being betrayed by her husband, and finally the villain by murdering her loved ones. Therefore, Euripides follows the standard format for a Greek tragedy.
This paper aims to study two significant playwrights, Sophocles and Euripides, and compare their respective attitudes by examining their plays in respect to plot and character structures. To achieve this goal, the paper is organized into two main sections. In the first section, we provide a brief biography of both Sophocles and Euripides. The second and last section includes summaries of Sophocles’ Electra and Euripides’ Electra which were based on same essentials and give an opportunity to observe the differences of the playwrights. This section also includes the comparisons that are made by our observations about the plays.
In Euripides' Medea, the main character of the same name is a controversial heroine. Medea takes whatever steps necessary to achieve what she believes is right and fair. She lived in a time when women were expected to sit in the shadows and take the hand that life dealt them without a blink of their eye. Medea took very radical steps to liberate herself and destroys the life of the man who ruined hers. She refused to accept the boundaries that a patriarchal society set upon her. Medea was a very wise and calculated woman who was brave enough to leave her homeland, along with everything she knew and loved, in order to follow her heart down the path of what she expected to be eternal happiness.
Sophocles’ tragic play, “Oedipus the King”, or “Oedipus Rex” as it’s known by its Latin name, is the Athenian drama that revolves around the events which lead to the demise of Oedipus Rex. The King Oedipus is forced down a preordained path that throws his entire world into a spiral of tragic providence, in this trilogy of a Theban play. Sophocles assigns the tragic hero to a downfall with the impossibility of changing the written fate; perhaps the views of today’s society would feel sympathy for the predicament that Oedipus is forced into, however, the publics of ancient Greece would accept that the path laid before them was a creation of the Gods. “Oedipus the King” reflects the ancient Greek credence in the belief that a person can do nothing to avoid their destiny, an idea that contrasts with what society believes today.
In Greek tragedy, three masters were paramount. They were Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. These three playwrights all wrote for the festivals of Dionysius, but none of the three were alike. Aeschylus writes about Athenian power, arrogance, and ancient rule. Sophocles accepts the gods as the way they are. He does not believe in the violation of cosmic order. Euripides questions spirit. He also faults the old way of doing things.
Oedipus is depicted as a “marionette in the hands of a daemonic power”(pg150), but like all tragic hero’s he fights and struggles against fate even when the odds are against him. His most tragic flaw is his morality, as he struggles between the good and the evil of his life. The good is that he was pitied by the Shepard who saved him from death as a baby. The evil is his fate, where he is to kill his father and marry his mother. His hubris or excessive pride and self-righteousness are the lead causes to his downfall. Oedipus is a tragic hero who suffers the consequences of his immoral actions, and must learn from these mistakes. This Aristotelian theory of tragedy exists today, as an example of what happens when men and women that fall from high positions politically and socially.