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

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  • Essay length: 1454 words
  • Submitted: 28/06/2004
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AS and A Level Classics

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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 women hold a lower stature.

In the first of the three Greek tragedies, The Trojan Women takes place in front of the sacked city of Troy, which has been defeated by the Achaeans and the husbandless Trojan women are waiting to be enslaved. The chorus in this play

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