초록 열기/닫기 버튼
This paper is to clarify the meaning and the background of Greek tragedy, especially the tragedy of Medeia of Euripides. The traditional viewpoint on Greek tragedies is to interpret them in terms of the perspective of psychology or literature-skills, structures, plot etc. Recently there has been an attempt to interpret Greek tragedy in terms of historical viewpoint. However, even in this case, it focused on domestic political situation related to democracy. But I argue that we cannot fully understand Attic tragedy without considering international relationship Athens faced at that time. Most of the Attic tragedies were performed in the fifth centuries when Athens underwent significant wars, such as the Persian War and the Peloponnesian War. I have already tried to prove that those representative tragedies such as Oedipus the King, or Oresteia, were the product of the Persian War: the backgrounds of the majority of tragedies are Thebes, Argos, Troy and Persia-the common nature of all these countries is that they played enemy against Athens during the Persian War. And in this paper I try to prove that when Athens faced new enemy-countries during the Peloponnesian War, Euripides, the writer of Medeia, created a new tragedy of Medeia, whose tragedy took place in the palace of Corinth, a new rising enemy of Athens during the Peloponnesian War. Thus it is not surprising that the Medeia was performed in the very year when the Peloponnesian War broke out.
