Figure 55 Terracotta figurine of a masked tragic actor portraying Heracles, T 862; height 8 cm, ca. 250
BC.
Source: American School of Classical Studies at Athens: Agora Excavations.
We have the texts of 17 of Euripides’ tragedies and one satyr play. The representation on stage of intense
emotion had always been a feature of Attic tragedy: The finale of Aeschylus’ The Persians, for example,
is a lengthy scene of extravagant lamentation, sung and danced by King Xerxes and the Persian chorus.
Euripides, too, includes scenes in which the characters of the play react with violent emotion to the
dramatic situation, but he often complicates the audience’s emotions by causing the audience’s
perspective to shift during the course of the play. For example, Euripides’ famous tragedy Medea
dramatizes the story of the foreign-born Medea, who was married to the Greek hero Jason. Medea had
earlier used her intelligence and her knowledge of magic to help Jason on his quest to steal the Golden
Fleece. In helping Jason, Medea had to abandon her home and her family, since her father was the king
from whom the Golden Fleece was stolen. Now, when the play opens, Jason has decided to leave his wife
of several years and their children in order to marry the daughter of the king of Corinth, where the scene is
set. Jason is a thoroughly unpleasant character whose only interest is in his own personal advancement,
regardless of the harm he does even to members of his own family. The audience’s sympathies, and even
the sympathies of the local Corinthian women who comprise the chorus, are entirely with Medea, alone
and powerless, a woman in a foreign land who has done nothing to deserve the position in which she and
her young children find themselves. In the course of the play, Medea decides to avenge herself – with