Medea was first performed in 431 BC at the City Dionysia festival.[6] Here every year, three tragedians competed against each other, each writing a tetralogy of three tragedies and a satyr play (alongside Medea were Philoctetes, Dictys and the satyr play Theristai). In 431 the competition was among Euphorion (the son of famed playwright Aeschylus), Sophocles (Euripides' main rival) and Euripides. Euphorion won, and Euripides placed third (and last).[6] Medea has survived the transplants of culture and time and continues to captivate audiences with its riveting power (Tessitore). The play's influence can be seen in the works of later playwrights, such as William Shakespeare.
While Medea is considered one of the great plays of the Western canon, Euripides' place in the competition suggests that his first audience might not have responded so favorably. A scholium to line 264 of the play suggests that Medea's children were traditionally killed by the Corinthians after her escape;[7] so Euripides' apparent invention of the filicide might have offended, as his first treatment of the Hippolytus myth did.[8] That Euripides and others took liberties with Medea's story may be inferred from the 1st century BC historian Diodorus Siculus: "Speaking generally, it is because of the desire of the tragic poets for the marvellous that so varied and inconsistent an account of Medea has been given out."[9] A common urban legend claimed that Euripides put the blame on Medea because the Corinthians had bribed him with a sum of five talents.[10]
In the 4th century BC, South-Italian vase painting offers a number of Medea-representations that are connected to Euripides' play — the most famous is a krater in Munich. However, these representations always differ considerably from the plots of the play or are too general to support any direct link to Euripides' play. But the violent and powerful character of Medea, and her double nature — both loving and destructive — became a standard for later periods of antiquity. Medea has been adapted into numerous forms of media, including operas, films, and novels.
With the text's rediscovery in 1st-century Rome (the play was adapted by the tragedians Ennius, Lucius Accius, Ovid, Seneca the Younger and Hosidius Geta, among others); again in 16th-century Europe; and with the development of modern literary criticism: Medea has provoked multifarious reactions.
