Medea, 3 and Antigone, 1

Medea and Oedipus:
Both in Medea and in Oedipus the authors use similar tagic heros as the main characters. Medea is similar to Oedipus in that they both bring on their own downfall. Medea made a bad decision when she chose to leave her home with Jason and killed her brother in order to do so. By abandoning her home she left herself without a place to return to and by murdering her brother she rid herself of any firends she had in her native land. Oedipus brought on his own downfall when he left what he thought to have been his parents and on his journy killed a caravan of people of which unbenounced to him his real father was a part.

The two plays are also similar in that they are designed to purge their audiance of certain emotions, in particular fear and pity. They do this by arrosing the emotions through the play's plot and characters and setting an example of what certain emotions can do to a person. They make the expiriance of fear and pity a painfull one for the audiance. Because it is a painfull expiriance it discourages the emotions of fear and pity.

Antigone literary devices and effects (pg 59-76):
1) Motif seperating the dead from the living: The effect created is that still have purpose and significance but are thought of and treated diffrentely.
2) Metaphor of the country being a ship raveged by the gods on the high seas: idea that they are controled by fate and the city is in their troubles together. Powerless to make changes or decisions about the future.
3) Isemne says, "not since the two of us were robbed of our brothers" (59): The word choice of the verb robbed implys that the brothers were taken by someone or something in a literal or figurative way. Its interesting because we know that they killed each other so Ismene must be blaming something: fate, the gods.