Wednesday, December 15, 2010

Reasoning: Thoughts on the Medea

I have been reading the Μήδεια in Greek with a friend of mine who is in Turkey (skype is awesome). One of the things that we notice recently was that not only is there an ever-present sense of doom in the beginning of the text, but it is clear from the rhetoric that the Τροφός (Nurse) and the Παιδαγωγός (Tutor) use that they know from the beginning (or at least fear) that Μήδεια will kill her children in an act of vengeance in a way that does not seem as imminent in the English.

Two questions emanate from this: 1) do we (as the audience) ignore the rhetoric because we know the ending, but notice it reading the Greek because we focus on it word by word (and therefore the Greek audience would not have noticed this aspect) or 2) if Euripides' version was the original version of the myth in which Μήδεια killed her children, what would the audience have been thinking during this opening scene?

Just food for thought.
Euripides: Medea (Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics)

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