Women in Ancient Greek
Introduction
The ancient Greece was a very patriarchal society. Ancient Greek men were well known like Hercules and Alexander the great. Sports were mainly reserved for men just as well as to other aspects like philosophy, politics and literature. Literary Greek writers represented the social and political life in ancient Greece with clearly well defined gender roles. I will compare the two plays Hippolytus and Medea both written by Euripides. The author exposes social order that restricts women and he explores how the male and female characters deal with their intellectual or social and their sexual and passion selves. His main concern is therefore to reveal how men and women react and act when there is a clash of their instinctual, irrational passions and their more conventional intellects.
Medea
This is one of the simplest tragic plays by Euripides. It talks of an implacable protagonist ravaging wife Medea towards her tracheas husband through the murder of a new bride and her sons. The murderess at the end of the play flees off to save her life in a safe place in Athens, a place earlier extorted from Aegeus. Euripides shows this scandal by suggesting that Medea is quite immortal as a granddaughter of the sun. The play presents humanistic aspects of an obsessive passionate woman and an absolutely selfish man. Medea is a competitive, vengeful and sexually honest woman. Euripides presents her as the very first Greek mythological character to perform a cold blood murder. Thus, the play leaves a disturbing crime to the readers and audience because the death cries of the two children are heart breaking.
Medea is a representation of the writer’s picture of an abandoned wife. She is filled with despise, vindictiveness and humiliation for the husband has left her for a younger model. This aspect still applies in our present day society.
Medea repudiates the gender role bestowed to her an ancient Greece woman of the fifth century. Her monologue at the beginning of the play marks her exit from feminine sphere to masculine citizenship and cleverness. She combines masculine heroic values and feminine qualities of maternal, love and compassion.
Hippolytus
This is an ancient Greek tragedy by Euripides. The story is based on a myth of Theseus and his father Hippolytus. Most parts of the myth are now lost. The Gods play an important role in this play such as Aphrodite at the beginning of the mythology and Artemis at the end. The gods are represented as statutes, signifying human conflicting emotions of chastity and passion. Phaedra is represented as a misogynistic and unsympathetic puritan by the writer just the way he has represented his other main female characters Medea and Ectra. Phaedra‘s experience is that of an unveiling struggle with passion and shame which at the end, she suffers the decisive words of her lips. She flies to her death with despair.
Through Phaedra, Euripides represents the psychological disturbances of a woman possessed with demonic like powers. She is a victim of despair without reflection and therefore instinctive. Euripides has archived to paint Phaedra with a fatal resolution with delicate discrimination. Modern readers have different concept of sex and we fail to understand the characters motive to kill herself. This concept portrays the ancient Greece view point that a woman has no right to express herself sexually and the only option was death so as to evade ‘shameful’ life experiences.
Comparison of Medea and Hippolytus
The plays, Medea and Hippolytus are both antifeminist plays. They have tragic ends in which the main female characters Medea and Phaedra are doomed to suffering and self pity, self destruction and even death. Though Medea flees back to Athens, she has nothing left of her…no husband or a place to call her own. She is back to her ancestral home where she was condemned not to marry Jason who was from Greek origin. Phaedra tragic end is as a result of a cursed lineage. She is the grand daughter of Europa who was raped by Zeus and a daughter of Pasinae. She harbors passion and struggles against her lust which makes her to be ashamed and responsible for her guilt which leads her to committing suicide.
Hippolytus is a debate among verities of sexuality, as one is in conflict with the society and each other. It is a tragedy of human relationship that applies to the main characters and minor characters as they act as an absurdity of human dilemma. The author clearly presents the complex relationship of ones inner self between a man and a woman and between individuals and nature. It is construction of a female- male relationship under a major trial both from the society and on the individual. Just like Sophocles play Oedipus complex on Incest; Hippolytus characters are faced with the same challenge. Phaedra undergoes conflicts with natural instincts on one hand and the dictates of societal standards on the other characters. Nature and fate form the central issue in this play. Phaedra is a descendant of an aristocratic family which is cursed by tragedy and suffering.
Medea is from the Athenian family linage. She is an Alien of her new city state for she stresses that a barbarian woman would cause embarrassment (591-2).Jason her husband is one trying to make a life in the new city with a woman who is not Greek or a local. This casts doubts on the legitimacy of their union which proved to give rise to unfortunate offspring. Euripides intentionally turns her from being one of the Corinth women into being a barbaric as the poet describes her clothing and appearance different from them. This means that Medea did not conform or even fit into the roles and expectations of Greek women.
Medea betrays fidelity. she disowns the gender roles assigned to her. Her exist from the sphere of the house tells us that she is no ordinary woman. Medea poses masculine heroic values of revenge, status and honor in her psyche. She fulfills these qualities at the end of the plays as she kills the new bride and her very own children as she flies back to haven Athens to escape punishment. Phaedra conforms to her guilt of having uncontrolled passion towards her son by commenting suicide. She however, leaves a letter that leads to the eventual punishment and death of her son. Both women characters reveal the weaker side of women who have no control over their actions for they have no say in the society. They opt for the worst options as a solution to end their suffering.
The men in the two plays Jason and Hippolytus as the major protagonist are represented as having more ethereal, abstract and intellectual view of women and life. Jason sees that his marriage to the king’s daughter will be prestigious for him. He does not consider Medea’s feelings. Medea vows to ravage which is seen when she sends Glauce a golden coronet dress covered in poison (Middleton, 2008 p 16). Hippolytus on the other hand attempts to live in an ethereal plane, unreal, pure, and abstract where women are goddesses chaste and removed from natural passions. He values chastity too highly in others and in himself. Just like Jason, he thinks highly of himself as a man of modern wisdom. This is why he refuses to listen to the other story of his son who was innocent. This causes Hippolytus to have a warped view of human passion. He denies sexuality and worships chastity as observed in his adoring worship of the goddess Artemis and scornful denial of Cyprus. He causes his vileness and deceptiveness of women in his nearly maniacal speech of rave to Phaedra’s Nurse (11, 664-65). This shows that women sexuality is something not recommend and feared in the ancient Greek society which causes suffering to both Medea and Phaedra.
Conclusion
Female characters in the two works have to struggle with each other, their self image and the society. Medea views herself as an outsider as she is considered barbaric. Her hatred for the new bride forces her to ravage in a deadly and unspeakable manner which readers view the act as total insanity. Phaedra on the other hand has to continuously repress her strong emotions to save her self image and embarrassment from the powerful forces of the universe. The society- Greece is inhabited by humans who cannot reconcile their feeling s and thoughts that muddle their lives. The only solution which lingers in a dim light for the two plays is human forgiveness and reconciliation.
Reference
Middleton, H (2008) Ancient Greek Women, Paw publisher
Barrett, W. (1994). (ed.), Euripides, Hippolytus, edited with Introduction and
Commentary, Oxford: Clarendon Press,
Quetia (2010) Medea, Retrieved from
http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=14570023
On 7th April 2010
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