1. The Prologue is everything that happens before the parodos (or entrance-song) of the chorus. Most Greek tragedies have them (Aeschylus’ Persians being an exception). The prologue is spoken by an actor in the mask of a character who often, but not always reappears in the play. The Euripidean prologue usually takes the form of an opening monologue that not only gives background, but establishes the tone and the ethos of the play. Here the mood of regret, the might-have-been opposed to the reality, is fixed from the first. Often the monologue is followed by a dialogue (or scene between two characters). It is unusual for the opening monologue to be spoken by a slave. In several plays (Alcestis, Hippolytus, Trojan Women, Bacchae) it is a god who opens the play. Another play that opens with a slave is Aeschylus’ Agamemnon. Sophocles favors a prologue in dialogue form (as in Antigone and Electra).

2. The Clashing Rocks are the Symplegades. They clashed together, smashing any ships that went through. Once the Argo passed through, they remained open. In Greek legend the Argo was the first ship. Nurse is thus wishing away a major development in Greek history as well as a favorite saga from the past. As is common in Greek thought she goes back further than the actual sailing, here to the trees on Pelion, cut down to build oars (and the ship itself) seeking for first causes.

3. The word she uses is aristoi (in the genitive aristÇn, "of heroes"), literally, "the best men." The Greek word heroes refers to men and women who are after death the object of cult, worshiped as chthonic (or earth) deities usually to ward off disasters. I imagine the Nurse, herself a slave, to use this term sarcastically.

4. The death of Pelias was famous and is pictured on vase paintings. Medea was able to rejuvenate people. In order to help Jason regain the kingdom of Iolcus from his uncle who had usurped the throne, Medea offered to rejuvenate him by cutting him up and putting him into a large cauldron. She persuaded his daughters to cooperate in this by rejuvenating an old ram. They tried the same with their father but he did not emerge.

5. According to the Scholia (ancient commentaries, written in the margins of some of the manuscripts), Medea pleased the citizens of Corinth by using her spells to save them from a famine.

6. The Greek says "pale neck." The neck is a particularly alluring and vulnerable place on a woman’s body. See Nicole Loraux (tr. A. Foster), Tragic Ways of Killing a Woman, Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1987.

7. Many editors bracket all or parts of lines 38-43 in the belief that they are a later interpolation. As they stand they are in part repetitious of sentiments already expressed or about to be expressed and could be an explanation by a commentator. Lines 40-41 with slight change come up at 379-80 where they clearly refer to Medea’s intention to dispatch the princess. Here, if genuine, they appear to refer to a possible suicide attempt by Medea..

8. Literally, "passing the pessoi [that is, according to the scholiast, or ancient writer of marginalia, the place where the game was played] where the very old men sit..." . Pessoi may be a game of dice or a board game, such as the one Achilles and Ajax are pictured playing on numerous vases. See Leslie Kurke, "Ancient Greek Board Games and How to Play Them," CPh 94 (1999):247-67: Pollux 9.98 "The game, which uses a large number of pebbles (as playing pieces), is a board having areas marked off in lines. The board is called polis. Each one of the pebbles is a dog (kuon). The pebbles are divided into two sets according to their colors. The art of the game is the capture a pebble of the opposite color by hemming it in with two of the same color." Aristotle Politics 1273a7 writes about the person who is apolis being like an isolated piece in pessoi (pettoi).

9. The old man makes this pronouncement a complicated mini-drama through his word order and strategy of postponement.

10. The manuscripts have a line here (87), bracketed by most editors: [some justly, others out of self-interest].

11. This is a highly theatrical introduction to the character: the disembodied voice issues from the house. Cries from the house are ominous in many plays (that is, in any play in which there are cries from the house). Often they are the cries of victims of murder (as in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon and Choephoroe (or Libation Bearers) and later in this play where the cries of the children are integrated into the last choral ode. The house itself is ominous, being the hidden space, the domain of the female, where secrets are hidden. Another ploy Euripides uses in this play and other early dramas is a double introduction of his female character. Here the anguished cries of an unseen Medea, like the howls of a caged animal, more frightening because she is unseen and because Nurse has said "I’m afraid of her" (37) are followed in her first entrance by a composed, rational, persuasive woman who knows she is playing to an audience. In the Alcestis, Alcestis’ first words are the delirious outbursts of a woman in death’s embrace from which she rouses herself to give a perfectly articulate speech, rationally stating her position and her last wishes. Likewise in the Hippolytus, Phaedra’s ravings about a fantasy life as a sort of wood nymph or huntress maiden are the first we hear of her, but later she gives a powerful philosophical oration about the reasons people fail to do what is right. In all these plays we see the emotional side first and then the rational. In this play, I believe, that it is the fact of the audience that brings out Medea’s persuasive skills.