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#PageBody MEDEA targets directly into this discussion we've been having about the place women had in white, European society. Let me first briefly outline the story of Medea: Jason, the Argonaut, predates Euripedes by about seven centuries.

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#PageBody Medea was a sorceress who helped Jason obtain the Golden Fleece. He married her, and at the time of the play, was living with her in exile in Corinth (Greece). As the play opens we learn that Jason has up and left his foreign wife, Medea, and married king Creon's daughter (a foreign wife was a no-no to the Greeks of that era).

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#PageBody Medea, the very embodiment of revenge, manages to kill the king and his daughter; she then kills her own two sons to exact revenge on Jason. Finally, she flees to exile in Athens (the king of Athens, Aegeus, had already sworn to defend and shelter her). Pretty strong stuff!

<P> Essentially an 'object' is a computer model of some real-life (or more or less real-life) object. We could be talking about a single point on your computer screen or the toaster in your kitchen (and we will). An object, in programmer's lingo, combines the DATA required to model something with the CODE required to make the model function.

<P> There are three important qualities that computer objects must have to be object-like: Encapsulation, Multiple Inheritance and Polymorphism. These three form the cornerstone of Object-Oriented buzzwordology! The first, encapsulation, is fairly easy; it simply means that objects act like they are 'black-boxes'. You can't see in — you can't see the structure of the data inside the object.

<P> Multiple Inheritance is about the fact that you can not only build more elaborate objects from basic object, but you can also build more elaborate objects by combining objects. The "Hello World" demonstration of Object- Oriented Programming is the graphics coordinate, an object comprised of an X_coordinate, a Y_coordinate and a Value (i.e. On or Off). You could make a circle object which could INHERIT qualities of the graphics coordinate object along with the new qualities needed by circles.

<P> Imagine that you also have a pen object. This object has qualities like Color and Pattern. If your circle object can inherit qualities from the graphics coordinate object AND the pen object (plus add its own), then you have multiple inheritance. In C and ASM, inheritance (let alone mulitple inheritance) is handled manually or with macros. Multiple inheritance is tied to another buzzword, Code Re-Use, to which I'll return.

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<P> Polymorphism (literally, 'many-shapes') means that one object can look and act much like another. For instance, a circle object can behave much like a square object. You can move them, draw them, erase them, change their sizes, change their color and perhaps in other ways treat them as if they were two examples (in OO we say 'instances') of the same sort of thing.

#PageBody Medea — in a keynote speech — speaks at length about how oppressed women are. King Creon, in his own dialog later, re-emphasizes this, but from the male perspective of, "Yep, that's the way it is." He at one point kisses her forcefully (his son-in-law's former wife!), then throws her to the ground and spits on her. He then makes the biggest mistake of his soon-to-be-ended-life, and allows her one more day in Corinth.

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#PageBody The opening clearly strives to engender sympathy for Medea — left by her husband, oppressed as all women were then and left behind. She later forfits that sympathy, and yet she gets away with it. In fact, in the Guthrie production, stage effects lead us to believe that the very Gods are sheltering her after her misdeeds.

<PRE>
void SetCoordinates (int x, int y) {
     x_coord = x;
     y_coord = y;
}
void TurnOn (void) {
     on_off = 1;
}
void TurnOff (void) {
     on_off = 0;
}

<PRE>
#define NOP     (0)
#define SET     (1)
#define T_ON    (2)
#define T_OFF   (3)
#define T_ERR   (4)
#define T_FLAG  (5)

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<PRE>
PointTest PROC NEAR
     mov   ax, SET
     mov   bx, xin
     mov   cx, yin
     call  p7Point
     ;
     mov   ax, SET
     mov   bx, xin
     mov   cx, yin
     call  p8Point
     ;
     ret
PointTest ENDP

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#PageBody Philip Vellacott writes: “Plays written in Athens in the second half of the fifth century B.C. [were] intended for […] an audience of thousands, both men and women […] What did ancient Greeks find in these plays that was of such value to them? When they left the theatre, few seem to have been depressed by what they had seen and heard. The great majority felt that human life had been shown in its true perspective; that the entire nature of the world had been clarified…” #PageBody “Euripedes was regarded by his contemporaries as a woman-hater, because he presented characters such as Phaedra and Medea. In fact it was Athenian society, not Euripedes, that was guilty of misogyny […] euripedes presents the case for women with truth and candor, showing their unenviable position in a man-made society.”
Emily McDermott writes: “Critics have often shied away from the notion that the play speaks of male/female conflicts in their universality or that Athenian audience was meant to see in Medea (the foreign 'witch') a threat to their own social order. Recent criticism, however, has pointed decisively in the other direction, leading to the recognition that the conflict of Jason and Medea […] culminating in the woman's unspeakable breach of HER SOCIETALLY APPOINTED ROLE AS WIFE AND MOTHER, must necessarily have an adverse comment of fifth-century Athenian mores and struck chords of disquiet in the Athenian audience.”

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