The portrayal of Women in The Trojan Women and Medea by Euripides and in Lysistrata by Aristophanes.

... In The Trojan Women and Medea by Euripides and in Lysistrata by Aristophanes the harsh and debasing treatment of women is portrayed by the playwrights' use of the chorus's commentary. In all three plays, women are shown, in the conventional attitudes of the time, as beings made for the household and subordinate to men. In The Trojan Women, the captive women become hopeless slaves to the Achaean captors after the fall of Troy and in Medea, the husband appears as the dominant force in marital decisions in a play when Medea murders her children and the new wife of the adulterous Jason. Accordingly, Aristophanes shows that women are unfit to leave the protection and controlling hands of their husbands through Lysistrata whereas the women revolt against the men in a war of the sexes. In general, these three plays emphasize that Greek men are unjustly more important to society as

want to read more? →