ca has Medea make this speech, while Euripides selects Medea's Nurse. Euripides makes the more dramatic choice, because the audience, gradually learning the details of the play and its characters, increasingly wants to see and hear Medea herself, whose tragedy the Nurse is describing. In Seneca, on the other hand, Medea is already standing there, ranting and raving, and the audience is cheated of the thrill and anxiety of anticipation.
In Seneca, the opening speech shows Medea to be a woman driven by little but rage. She is hardly a sympathetic character with whom the audience will feel an emotional bond. In Euripides, on the other hand, Medea's grief is made paramount, and is spoken not by Medea herself, but by the sympathetic nurse, with whom the audience can identify in her helpless longing to ease Medea's pain. Euripides' nurse describes Medea as a woman certainly capable of doing great damage, but that desire to destroy comes out of her grief and not simply an evil personality.
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