Agamemnon is a great warrior, but not a great family man. O

“Great people’s tempers are terrible, always having their own way, seldom checked, dangerous they shift from mood to mood. How much better to have been accustomed to live on equal terms with one’s neighbors... Greatness brings no profit to people. God indeed, when in anger, brings greater ruin to people’s houses,” says the nurse in the beginning of Euripides’s play Medea (119-130). She is foreshadowing the theme of the story and Euripides is voicing his message plainly through her. He uses the play to show that when men attempt to become powerful, or in Jason’s case, attempt to become heir to a throne, they forget what is truly important and will suffer loss because of it. As the nurse so bluntly put it, the gods punish those who aspire to individual greatness.

Oedipus’s fall is terrible. He exposes himself as his father’s murderer and his mother’s lover. He has committed two of the sins which the gods consider the worst. Guilt-stricken, he gouges out his eyes: “To this guilt I bore witness against myself- with what eyes shall I look upon my people?” (1384-1385). His wife and mother, Jocasta, hangs herself. He is cast out and his children, the products of incest, will be shunned. He has lost his kingdom completely. He is punished by the gods because he tries to achieve perfection, which is not for man to do. He is so full of himself that he believes he can be like a god. Sophocles felt that no one man should or could aspire to be so powerful, and he presented the story of Oedipus in a way that makes the idea of a king seem very foolish. A king is more preoccupied with his own status than the general good of the people, and the people suffer because of his weakness. At the end of the book, Creon takes over, but the Greek audience, who is familiar with the story in Sophocles’s trilogy, knows that he too will become arrogant and corrupt. It is another reminder of human weakness, and why an individual shouldn’t hold absolute power.

The bulk of the play deals with the consequences of Jason’s ambition to be great. He has abandoned his wife and children in order to marry Creon’s daughter and join the royal family. His first wife, Medea, is a powerful woman who has no place to go, so she becomes desperate. She immediately begins plotting against the lives of her husband, his bride, and his father-in-law the king. Her reactions illustrate how easy it is to upset a nation’s stability when its entire system of rule can be overthrown by the deaths of a king and his children. In this way, because it is much less stable, monarchy is presented as obviously inferior to democracy. Creon, hearing rumors that she is talking about killing him, approaches her and threatens to banish her. She begs for one more day, and is given it, and thus an opportunity to follow through with her plans, by Creon, who doesn’t want to look like a cruel king. “There is nothing tyrannical about my nature, and by showing mercy I have often be

Some topics in this essay:
Oedipus Rex, Aeschylus Agamemnon, Euripides's Medea, Euripides Medea, Oedipus Jason, , Aeschylus's Agamemnon, wife children, democratic system, greek dramas, fall power, wife mother, front wife, oedipus claims, absolute power, people aren’t,