Although students and scholars alike know well that ancient Greece was immensely misogynist and patriarchal, nevertheless, there have been numerous attempts to retrieve voices from the classical world at least empathetic to the plight of women. Frequently these attempts turned out to be abject failures. However, many continue to peruse the Greek literary tradition, and archaeological remains for non-misogynist voices. Euripides, at least within reasonably recent history, is for many just such a voice. Medea is one of the first feminist characters in Western literature, which involves the recognition of a significant cultural shift. Euripides'<i> Medea</i> indeed questions contemporary beliefs and standards in ancient Greek society, substantially those of the heroic masculine ethic. Still, it did so at the expense of women, not in their support. Through this paper, I would like to show the depiction of the women situation in ancient Greek and how Medea, as a female pr...

The current article draws on Judith Butler's gender performativity theory to analyse two classical text of Greek Antiquity-the Bacchae by Euripides and The Republic by Plato. The concept of gender performativity will be used to illustrate analogously even anachronically, how much the Greek imaginary, in spite of being temporally distant, can fruitfully contribute to, what we would identify as one of the most sophisticated contemporary theories in contemporary gender studies, both as this imaginary emerges from the literary discourse of the tragedy or the discourse of philosophy. This will allow us to show how the two above mentioned texts can contribute to the contemporary debate on the critical theory of gender identity, as these are fixed in performative acts that make gender conform to anatomic sex, limiting gender to the two possibilities of masculine or feminine. Considering the historical context and the question that are specific to the world of Ancient Greece, our analysis will permit us to cast light, in particular, on the strategies that Plato and Euripides drew on to disrupt the gender norms of the polis. Examining the texts allows us to argue that in antiquity, as well as in the contemporary world, albeit in different ways, discussions of gender relations are fitted primarily by the political discourse regarding these relations.

Eminently an Athenian institution, Greek ancient theatre addressed fifth century B.C. social and political issues by resorting to mythical figures. More than a show, it stood for a way of reuniting Athenians around representations of Greek society and of the confrontation between the social categories and ethnic groups that were brought face to face within the settings of a prolonged war. With the Peloponnesian conflict opposing the Athenians to other Greek cities, identity – be it ethnic or of gender – was continuously questioned. Both in tragedy and comedy, the individual underwent a series of transformations which forced him or her to continuously reaffirm and prove his or her identity. Analysing a series of Euripidian tragedies we note that as opposed to reality where only men went to war, women were represented as the primary perpetrators of violence and murder, in a context of treachery and occult practices. Such is the case of Medea, the Barbarian princess who, upon Jason’s infidelity and her imminent marriage dissolution, decides to murder her own children in order to take revenge on her faulty husband. Her position is not unlike that of the Greek princess Iphigenia who finds herself alone in a barbarian land in Tauris and is forced to sacrifice her own people, i.e. the Greek captured in the barbarian lands, to the goddess Artemis. These two examples allow us to address the issues of self-agency and of the construction of individual identity. While in both cases a woman is considered to be vulnerable if she is living among strangers with no husband and no friends and thus she needs to resort to violence to reassert her identity, Euripides seems to rank these women on the basis of ethnic criteria. While Medea is a Barbarian who kills her own children, Iphigenia is a Greek princess with high-valued function and status that explain her killings. By cross-examining these examples with the historical context of the Peloponnesian war, this paper will try to re-evaluate the representation of gender identity in the ancient Greek theatrical speech in the light of the intersection of ethnic, geographic and social standing criteria. Key words : identity, gender, ethnicity, geography, social standing, Greek theatre, Euripides, Medea, Iphigenia

Reacting to the concerns expressed by Sue-Ellen Case and others that Greek tragedies were written by men and for men in a patriarchal society, and that the plays are misogynistic and should be ignored by feminists, this article considers how female directors and writers have continued to exploit characters such as Antigone, Medea, Clytemnestra and Electra to make a powerful statement about contemporary society.

In a sense, women were subject to higher levels of social pressure than men in fifth-century Athens B.C. Driven by the deeply ingrained expectations associated with behavior and domesticity, women simply had minimal, if not any, control over their decisions and more significantly, their physical movements. It is only within the realm of tragedy in which gender boundaries are partially diminished and questioned. Nicole Loraux suggests that within tragedy, a woman who commits suicide is liberated because she achieves a certain power over her body, one that was formerly possessed by the men in her life (Loraux 8). However, this notion becomes paradoxical when the woman's motivations to end her life are intricately examined. As illustrated in both Euripides' Hippolytus and Sophocles' Antigone, the characters that commit suicide (e.g. Phaedra, Antigone and Eurydice) all do so only for the sake of preserving their feminine reputations and obligations. For after all, " Every woman who is mortal must compromise the totality of the female state with its tensions, ambiguities, and conflicts (Vernant 143) ". In this way, the status of femininity is not heightened by the tragic woman's choice of killing her body since her incentive for doing so is only to sustain the cultural feminine stereotypes. It is rather the public outcome and mourning produced by her suicide that achieve this imbalance of gender hierarchies in tragedy, as funerals for women were highly privatized and minor compared to the public processions given for men in ancient Greek society (Loraux 3). In addition, the visual possibilities of the theater help to expose a tragic woman's incentives of suicide through these staging elements: the location of the suicide (thalamos), the manner in which the woman commits suicide, and her concealment from the outside world. Essentially, the literal spatial positioning of the woman in combination with the dramatic action effectively symbolizes the psychological stress a woman incurs from adhering to the conventional characterizations of femininity. Nevertheless, because the product of a woman's suicide fundamentally fuels the rest of the plot, femininity attains higher levels of value and public appeal than it would in ordinary life. Thus gender limitations and stereotypes become fluid within the theater. First, it is crucial to understand the rigid principles that women of fifth-century Athens were expected to embody in order to better contextualize the societal pressures and motivations of the suicides in Antigone and Hippolytus. A prime source of these values lies in Xenophon's Oeconomicus in which the upper class Athenian, Ischomachus, " describes the lessons he imparted to his wife for running his home (Oost 226) ". According to Xenophon, one of the most important tasks for a man to accomplish is properly educating their woman, " in such a way as to have them as coworkers in increasing the households (Xenophon 3.10) ". If they are unsuccessful at this 'education', the wife most likely will ruin their estate and wealth (Xenophon 3.10). All in all, the groundwork of creating this submissive woman lies in the following generalizations: the wife conserves and secures the possessions that her husband brings into the household (Xenophon 3.15), she spins wool and makes clothes (Xenophon 7.6) and she makes bread from the crop (Xenophon 7.21). In addition, her fundamental duties are to nourish and successfully bring up their offspring and eventually to send them out to work when they reach a mature age (Xenophon 7.33). Most tasks that Xenophon sets up for a wife to uphold are reminiscent of common stereotypes women experience in throughout any generation of history. Consequently, these societal traditions alone do not promote the immense pressure in the minds of Athenian women, but when combined with the spatial polarity men and women were expected to maintain, women had no other choice but to feel literally imprisoned in their freedom to behave more literally, their positioning in physical spaces. Women are to remain inside their domestic sphere and men are to venture outside in the open air (Xenophon 7.20). More profound and influential on women is the divine explanation for their physical captivity: Since, then, work and diligence are needed both for the indoor and for the outdoor things, it seems to me that the god directly prepared the woman's nature for indoor works and indoor concerns. For he equipped the man, in body and soul, with a greater capacity to endure cold and heat, journeys and expeditions, and so has ordered him to the outdoor works; but in bringing forth, for the woman, a body that is less capable in these respects, the god has, it seems to me ordered her for the indoor works. (Xenophon 7.22-24) Clearly, there does exist biological differences in men and women and because of this they are not equal in that sense however, the attribution to a divine source for this physiological difference, implicitly convinces women that they are meant to oblige to these conditions and in turn it successfully keeps women shut off from the rest of society. This shame women are burdened with is lucratively reinforced by the allusion to Hesiod's Theogony in describing women as bees. On one hand, Hesiod stereotypes women as wasteful creatures that are lazy, stay inside, and contribute nothing of worth to the community: