Please identify these passages: Speaker? To Whom? Importance?
- Our rulers have frightening tempers / rarely governed, always in charge, / they can't let go of their
anger. / Better to stay on a level plain. …"Moderation" is a fine motto./ and we do well to live by it.
- Women of Corinth…Of all living, breathing, thinking creatures,/ women are the most absolutely
wretched. (Also, list the reasons she gives.)
- We should have some other way of getting children./ Then there would be no female race, / and mankind
would be free from trouble.
- It's just that women are…well, not quite wicked …
- Can I really bear to be laughed at / and let my enemies go unpunished?
- No Greek woman would ever do that / To think I bound myself to you instead / in a hateful, ruinous
marriage / with an inhuman wife, a lioness…
II. From Aristotle's Poetics… "Tragedy is an imitation of an action …effecting through pity and fear the
catharsis of such emotions." In Poetics, Aristotle gives the characteristics of a tragedy. He also analyzes
Oedipus and Medea, commenting on the strengths and weaknesses of these plays. What does he like
about Oedipus? What is the greatest weakness of Medea?
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