Medea, Hippolytus, Electra, Helen Book

"Of everything that is alive and has a mind, we women are the most wretched creatures. First of all, we have to buy a husband with a vast outlay of money - we have to take a master for our body. The latter is still more painful than the former. And here lies the most critical issue - whether we take a good husband or a bad. For divorce brings shame on a woman's reputation and we cannot refuse a husband his rights...I would rather stand three times in the battle line than bear one child." Medea (230-51)



Medea by Eugène Delacroix, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lille France (wikiArt.org)

"This kind of speech outraged the Christian writer Origen, who criticised Euripides for inappropriately making women express argumentative opinions (Contra Celsum 7.36.34-6); in 'Frogs' Euripides claimed to have made tragedy 'more democratic' by keeping his women - young ones and old ones - talking alongside their masters (498-50).

Until recently critics were debating whether Euripides was a misogynist or a feminist. But the only certainties are that he repeatedly chose to create strong female characters, and that as a dramatist he had a relativist rhetorical capacity for putting both sides of the argument in the sex war. "
(From the introduction by Edith Hall, p. xxvi+xxvii).