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anneliesb 's review for:

Medea by Euripides
4.0

About medea:

So… you save husbands life, have a family, then he leaves you for another woman ‘for the good of your family’, yeah, honey, great plan, why not! No wonder you’re, let’s say, slightly upset.

I wondered whether the killing of the children is an act of revenge or an act of motherly love? Is she convinced they will die anyway and therefore prefers to kill them herself?

"My friends, I am resolved upon the deed; at once will I slay my children and then leave this land, without delaying long enough to hand them over to some more savage hand to butcher. Needs must they die in any case; and since they must, I will slay them-I, the mother that bare them.”

Now about the soft-boiled egg Jason:
After his new wife dies he goes to Medea’s house to take the children:

"Ladies, stationed near this house, pray tell me is the author of these hideous deeds, Medea, still within, or hath she fled from hence? For she must hide beneath the earth or soar on wings towards heaven's vault, if she would avoid the vengeance of the royal house. Is she so sure she will escape herself unpunished from this house, when she hath slain the rulers of the land? But enough of this! I am forgetting her children. As for her, those whom she hath wronged will do the like by her; but I am come to save the children's life, lest the victim's kin visit their wrath on me, in vengeance for the murder foul, wrought by my children's mother.”

He speaks of the vengeance of the royal house, not of his own anger or vengeance. Does he not care for the murder of his new wife? Furthermore, I wonder about his motives to save his children. Does he save them to provide a buffer for himself? "lest the victim's kin visit their wrath on me”?