Euripides! Master! How well you knew women!

A detailed Summary of Euripides! Master! How well you knew women!

In this paper I will demonstrate why I believe, contrary to widespread opinion and possible even his own, that Aristophanes, not Euripides, was, of the four major dramatists fo Athens' Golden Age, the one who least respected women.

Having become aware at the ouset of this leterrature course of the position of women in the otherwise enlightened thought of Greece in the Fifth Century B.C., I kept my eyes open during our reading for evidences of, if I may comit an anchronism, chauvinism in the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. Consoled by the knoledge presented in the text that Aristophanes had accused Euripides of hating women. I didn't look for it in Lysistrata. Nevertheless, that is where I found it.

In interpreting attitudes toward women in the dramas, I accepts certain prevailing tradtions as given and tried to give the playwrights the benefit of the doubt, turning my head at such practices as using only male actors in the plays and leaving the women in the kitchen while attending the plays. Having concedes those points, I set about "listening" to the playwrights.

In Agamemnon, Aeschylus addresses some remarks toward his Clytaemnestra which could possibly be interpreted as disparaging. She is

said to "maneuver like a man," and Cassandra exclaims, "What outrage--the woman kills the man!" The chorus asks her "What drove her insane" enough to kill a man. Her lover, Aegisthus, although he gloats over the body he cringed from cutting down, allows that "the treachery was the woman's work, clearly." Far from denigrating women, however, I believe these parrotings of the prevailing attitudes, when juxtaposed with Aeschylus' portrayal of an intelligent, capable Clytaemnestra, a gullible, ususpecting Agamemnon and a spineless, parasitical Aegisthus, achieve the result of satirizing those attitudes. At the close of the play, Clytaemnestra challenges her listeners, on-stage and off: "That is what a woman has to say. Can you accept the truth?"

Aristophanes does employ satire when he has the Comissioner say, "The idea of women bothering themselves about peace and war!" and, "It would take a woman to reduce state questions to a matter of carding and weaving." I believe Lysistrata does clumsily try to do women justice, and that is precisely why I believe Aristophanes to have been the most profoundly smitten with the disease of perceived male superiority. At one point, when the women respond to the taunts and threats of the men with taunts and threats of their own, the male chorus calls out, "Euripides! Master! How well you knew women!" I believe Euripides did understand a great deal more about women than was common in his time. I believe Aristophanes thought he knew women, and I don't think he ever even realized the serious injustice Lysistrata does them.

Aristophases lampoons Euripiedsa and his perceived hatred of women. I have not read Thesmophosriazusae, in which the text informs us women avenge themselves on Euripides, so I cannot respond to it. I have, however some reactions to Lysistrata. The very concept of the sex strike gives credence to the idea that sevice of men is the only value women have, that withholding that sevic

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Approximate Word count = 1320
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: History