![]() Walter Burkert viewed the death of the children as a sacrificial act that harks back to the ritual origins of tragedy.1 Pietro Pucci brilliantly studied the dialectics of a "remedial discourse of pity" that plunges us into the suffering in order to help us face the pain of life.2 Others have seen the play as a reflection of a moral nihilism or of a new tension between the individual and the polis on the eve of the Peloponnesian War.3 However one tries to account for the violence, the play retains its power to shock and alarm even in our atrocity-worn age. Interpreters, beginning with the chorus, are of course tempted into finding explanations. Nowhere else in Euripidean tragedy is there a greater gulf between a major character's rational justification for a course of action (Medea's revenge) and the emotional impact of that action when it unfolds on the stage (her murder of her young children). Obra reproducida sin responsabilidad editorial EurÃpides. She has resorted to her betrayals worst stratagems to allow the triumph hero over his trials. When Jason landed to conquer the Golden Fleece, Medea left everything to follow him. ![]() I must say that the writing and the place of the womens choir help us. In the Medea, as in the Bacchae, Euripides makes us confront the darkest possibilities of human behavior and no literary criticism can do full justice to the spectacle of violence that, as the chorus says, takes the form that is hardest to comprehend, a mother turning murderously upon her own children. I found Euripides 'Medea' text relatively easy to read for an ancient Greek tragedy. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |