How Metamorphoses drew on Medea
A documented line of influence: Ovid demonstrably engaged Euripides’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
Relevance
6/10
On Metamorphoses’s page
- Book 7's Medea is a tragic palimpsest — Euripides' heroine rewritten underneath Ovid's lines
- Her opening soliloquy, weighing passion against reason, echoes the deliberation Euripides put on the Athenian stage
- Read the play first and you'll hear the older voice still speaking through Ovid's verse
On Medea’s page
- Euripides gave the abandoned wife her terrifying inner voice — and Ovid took it whole
- Medea's deliberation on the stage, torn between love and fury, becomes the torn lover's soliloquy of Metamorphoses Book 7
- Where Euripides stages one catastrophic day, Ovid stretches Medea across her entire career, folding the tragedy into a continuous epic sweep