After reading the ancient Greek plays consisting of Antigone and Medea, I felt that both main characters held strong ideas and arguments. From Antigone, one can visualize a strong-willed and intelligent girl (Antigone), who placed immense love and trust in her family regardless of their misguided actions. It is through this love of hers that she decided to disobey the edict placed by the new ruler, Creon, regarding the improper burial and humiliation of Polyneices (her brother). As a result, her attempts to give proper burial to her brother lead to her arrest, imprisonment, and death. Meanwhile, Medea presents readers/viewers a powerful, godlike woman (Medea) who was betrayed by the man for whom she sacrificed everything. This betrayal leads …show more content…
Whenever people are willing to sacrifice themselves for their beliefs and actions, there are always others who view them with honor, respect, and admiration. Thus, Antigone already had a couple strong elements to her argument, but she presents even stronger ideas in her argument with Creon over her attempted burial of her brother. During this argument, Creon constantly points out how Antigone is breaking the law and burying a traitor (Polyneices) who slayed her honorable brother (Eteocles). Antigone refutes his points through a strong assessment that stresses important ideas that many could understand as being reasonable. For example, Antigone refuted Creon's statement about her insulting her brother Eteocles by refuting, "The dead man would not say that I insult it." This point illustrated the idea that when we die, regardless of whatever emotions or grudges we held toward a person, they are utterly meaningless since we no longer exist in the physical world. Another strong point she used to refute Creon was that she buried Polyneices not as a traitor, but …show more content…
However, Medea's endgame and her horrendous actions toward her innocent children were the major reason for my gravitation toward Antigone's argument as being more convincing. In the play entitled Medea, Medea herself is suffering from a deep sorrow of having been betrayed by the man she loved and for whom she had sacrificed her family, honor, and life. It is in this sorrow that her anger and cries for injustice build to a point that she finds herself being exiled from Corinth by King Creon, the father of her husband's/Jason's new bride. Faced with such a harsh reality of being exiled and losing everything she once held dear, we witness Medea create a plot to punish all offending parties for their humiliation of her. While her plan did consist of horrible actions just as I mentioned above, the ideas utilized in her argument brought a strong defense of her position. An example of such an idea can be shown with how Medea stated, "Of all the living creatures with a soul and mind, we women are the most pathetic. First of all, we have to buy a husband: spend vast amounts of money, just to get a master of our body—to add insult to injury. And the stakes could not be higher: will you get a decent husband, or a bad one?" From this statement alone, Medea provides to her argument the idea of the inequality that