The dynamics of emotion in Euripides’ Medea

Medea's emotions loom large in a wide range of dramatic, literary, and philosophical sources from Euripides onwards. In focusing on aspects of the emotional texture of the original Euripidean play, all one can do is scratch the surface of an enormous subject, both in that play and in its reception in ancient literature and thought. Fortunately, we have the other articles in this issue of Greece & Rome to supplement this inevitably limited perspective. My procedure in this short paper is simply to highlight certain aspects of the dramatization of emotion in Euripides’ Medea that strike me as especially worthy of analysis in terms of ancient or modern emotion theory.