Although Euripides was known for his propensity to challenge tradition and complacency, his Medea was quite controversial when it was introduced in 431 BC into classical Greece (ca. 479 -323 BC). Athenian society, a world organized in a masculine way, provided no place for women outside the home. When a girl was young, she was ruled by her father, and after he had chosen whom she would marry, her new master was her husband, and she "received much male advice on the subject of staying at home and keeping quiet" (Bowra 85 ). Women essentially shared an equal status with slaves in Athenian society, having no privileges and certainly no power other than that held within the home over servants. The culture expected women to display great virtues and submit completely to their husbands. Medea is not only a woman, but she is also a foreigner, which places her at an even lower status. However, she exercises power over her husband and every other character, both female and male, and she does so with extreme violence. Written in what could certainly be called a male-dominated society and time, Euripides' Medea is a feminist piece and Euripides himself, traditionally thought to be misogynistic, is exactly the opposite. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Athenian society was certainly a masculine world where women were expected to run the household and remain hidden. Very often many marriages were arranged for religious, political or economic purposes and rarely for love. Many times husband and wife never met until marriage. Once the marriage was permanent, the woman was essentially limited to the marital practices of managing servants, weaving on the loom and raising children. Medea's negative feelings towards this are revealed when she exclaims: "A man, when he is tired of domestic company, leaves the house and puts an end to boredom... What they say about us is that we live in peace at home, while they fight in war. How wrong they are! I would rather be on the front three times than give birth to a child" (Euripides 441, 246-49). This is not only the voice of Euripides mocking male selfishness and society's high view of war, but also a clue to Medea's dissatisfaction with the confines of her sex. Men, on the other hand, including married men, enjoyed every freedom, including complete sexual freedom. freedom (Flaceliere 66). The men of Athenian society were known for their extreme arrogance, as we see in a statement by Thomas Rosenmeyer: "It is said of Socrates - or Plato - that, rising every morning, he gave thanks for having been born Greek and not Greek. A foreign barbarian, free and not slave, man and not woman." (Rosenmeyer 123) This is precisely the attitude of superiority that Euripides embodies in Jason, Medea's Greek husband. We see the same smug vision when Jason tries to convince Medea that he has done more for her than she for him, taking her out of her barbaric homeland and into Greece. Jason represents the typical Greek male and would generally be more inclined to play the part of the hero. However, Medea is not a typical play and Euripides defied convention. We are told that Euripides "loved Athens but detested its arrogant exclusivity, detested its imperialist ambitions, detested war." (Rosenmeyer 152) For this reason, Euripides sets out to attack the vanity of Athenian society. Feminism can be difficult to define. A specific viewpoint of this particular work is that “women have the same abilities, good or bad, as men” (Durant 362). In thecase of Medea, feminism has to do with power. Who exercised power in Athenian society? Of course, men have done it. Who exercises power over Medea? When she is betrayed she doesn't give up or give up, she fights the only way she knows how. If Medea's response had been a lukewarm protest, no one would have listened to me. The modernist writer Flannery O'Connor, as part of her distortion theory, once said that "large and startling figures are drawn for the almost blind" (qtd. in Lauter); Medea does just that. Because of his inferior position, his retaliation must be extreme. After the loss of her family, her homeland, her husband, and now her new home, Medea has nothing left but revenge. Her pride has been wounded and she vows to never be humiliated by Jason again. Feminism in Euripides' Medea has nothing to do with women's equal social status, but rather with power gained after being repressed for a long time. This power is not available to all women, only to Medea, who must obtain it through extreme acts. Medea gains control of power through the use of her many faculties. Medea is intelligent, charming, deeply in love with Jason, and, most dangerous of all, oppressed. Because she is intelligent, she is feared, as King Creon's words show: "I am afraid of you...You are an intelligent woman, skilled in evil arts, and you are angry at having lost the love of your husband" ( Euripides 441. 280 -84). Medea uses her feminine charms to obtain permission from King Eigeus for a place to live after her escape, and again to convince Jason that she is no longer angry but that she understands his decision to remarry and wants peace. Medea's flaw is her excessive love for Jason. The muses, in the first lines of the work, state that her heart is "inflamed with passionate love for Jason" (Euripides 435, 8). Because of this love he carries out many terribly violent acts, including the murder of his two children. In the introduction to Euripides on page 434 we talk about a theme of Medea: "Euripides' theme, like Homer's, is violence, but this is the unspeakable violence of the oppressed, which is greater than the violence of the oppressor and which, because it has long been repressed, cannot be controlled" (Mack). Medea, as a woman in Athenian society, is oppressed by tradition and current opinion. Medea becomes the tragic hero through the combined effects of her intelligence, charm, uncontrollable love, and reluctance to simply accept her fate as a woman. The traditional view of Euripides as misogynist stems from the fact that some of Euripides' characters, such as Medea, are vile murderers who often arouse detestation. Medea herself is willing to point out the wickedness of which her sex is capable: "And women, though helpless in performing good deeds, are the most cunning of the creators of all evil" (Euripides 444. 405-06). Furthermore, there is a shaky tradition that Euripides had an unhappy married life (Bates 119). If critics believed that he hated women, it was most likely due to their incomplete look at his female characters, since although he created vengeful and violent characters such as Medea and Phaedra, his other works included kind and honest women, such as Macaria and Iphigenia ( Bates 119). Furthermore, the fact that Euripides knows the defects of the female sex and exposes them quite realistically is not at all indicative of some kind of contempt for women. Indeed, many agree that he, of all the playwrights of antiquity, best presented the cause of women and supported "the nascent movement for their emancipation" (Durant 416). The previous view of Euripides as a woman-hater is based on short-sighted thinking and has aweak foundation. Furthermore, Euripides evokes much more sympathy for Medea than for the unfaithful Jason. The muses proclaim: "And poor Media is scorned and weeps aloud over the vows they made to each other, righteous hands clasped in eternal promise. Call upon the gods to bear witness what kind of return Jason has made to her love. She lies without food and abandons herself to suffering, consuming every moment of the day in tears" (Euripides 436, 20-23). ​​In addition to this description of her pain, the reader is already aware of the many sacrifices that Medea has made for Jason, and of the many pontisi she burned to be with him. Jason, on the other hand, is a truly unpleasant character. He is weak, selfish and rather childish in his explanations and in the way he treats Medea help but dislike Jason for this poor treatment, for his archetypal Greek masculinity, and for his character in general Even when Medea's vengeful actions are extreme, one hardly feels sorry for Jason. Furthermore, Euripides uses Medea to communicate one's voice on the topic of modernist writing styles. This occurs in Medea's speech to King Creon in lines 290-303 of the play in which she talks to him about the difficulties of being intelligent. Certainly Euripides would not have uttered a message of such personal importance from the mouth of a character he detested. Euripides recognized the drama and power of female emotions and used them, reflecting his creative genius (Bates 119). Medea's first emotion, love, turns to jealousy and then hate as the plot develops. Medea is not just any woman of the time, she is superior, quite elevated. His anger grows from verse to verse. The nurse expresses her fear that something terrible will happen: "The character of great people is terrible, they always have their own way, rarely controlled, dangerous, changing from mood to mood" (Euripides 438. 119-21). Both Medea and her emotions are larger than life. Thus the tragic hero is no longer a king, but a woman who, because she finds no redress for her wrongs in society, is driven by her passion to violate that society's most sacred laws in a greater way. rebellion against her typical representative, Jason, her husband. She is not only a woman and a foreigner, she is also a person of great intellectual power. Compared to her, the gullible king and the compliant husband are children, and once she has made up her mind, she moves them like pawns to the right places in her barbaric game" (Mack 434). Ultimately, although Medea's actions are vile, she she is the winner. Furthermore, there are no consequences for Medea's actions. She simply escapes in a chariot with the divine help of her grandfather, Helios. This further upsets the convention a foreign woman who holds no status does truly heinous acts against Jason, the symbol of a Greek ideal, and flies away intact, with the help of none other than a god - a fifth-century Athenian warrior who has just enough time between making his sacrifices to the gods and visiting his concubine to witness a quick performance of Medea in the theater. The reason for the representation of the gods in this way is due to Euripides' skepticism of the late 5th century [BC] and also his questioning of "traditional religion and morality and criticism of contemporary society" (Marowski 104). This lack of order in the universe is disturbing to today's readers, and was no doubt quite disturbing to contemporary audiences. Euripides is an iconoclast who attacked the aforementioned Greek traditions of male dominance, war and imperialism, the superiority of the Greeks and their religious practices. By creating a heroine who is both female and foreign, Euripides challenges male dominance and Greek superiority. Through the character, 1998.