The Nurse

The Nurse is a nameless household slave who opens Euripides' Medea with one of the most celebrated prologues in ancient drama. Her namelessness is significant; she is defined entirely by function and loyalty rather than by individual identity. Having accompanied Medea from Colchis to Iolcus and finally to Corinth, she occupies a rare position of intimate knowledge — closer to Medea's interior life than any other character in the play, yet structurally powerless to alter its trajectory. She is neither citizen nor free woman, and Euripides uses that marginality deliberately. The Nurse sees everything, understands everything, and can do nothing. This combination of perception and impotence makes her the play's most poignant moral witness.

The Nurse's arc moves from anxious foreboding to helpless grief. In the prologue she mourns the past — the Argo's voyage, Medea's sacrifice of family and homeland for Jason — and in doing so establishes her primary motivation: love for Medea bound up with terror of what that love now faces. Her fear is tangible. She reads Medea's silence and stillness as warning signs, recognizing that a woman of Medea's "great heart" will not absorb humiliation passively. When she urges the children to stay away from their mother, she acts on this intimate knowledge. As the play proceeds, the Nurse's active role diminishes — she fetches the Tutor, appeals to the Corinthian women, and attempts to manage access to Medea — but each action confirms the same motivation: to protect those she loves from a catastrophe she already senses is inevitable. By the play's end, she has no further lines; she recedes into the background as the machinery of tragedy takes over, her earlier warnings fulfilled in the most terrible way.

• The prologue monologue is the Nurse's defining scene. Her famous wish that the Argo had never sailed frames the entire drama as the consequence of a single catastrophic voyage. She catalogs Medea's sacrifices — betrayal of father, murder of brother, uprooting from Colchis — and makes the audience feel the weight of Jason's ingratitude before Jason himself appears.
• Her warning to the children (early in the play, before the Tutor enters) is among the most chilling moments of dramatic irony in classical theatre. Telling the boys to keep their distance from their mother, she unwittingly anticipates the infanticide. The audience who knows the myth understands the full horror of her words.
• The exchange with the Tutor grounds the play's tragedy in the domestic sphere. Their conversation — two slaves comparing notes on a disaster neither caused nor can stop — shifts the perspective from heroic myth to anxious, ordinary human experience.
• Summoning the Chorus: by calling in the Corinthian women and sharing her fears, the Nurse performs a dramaturgically vital function, transitioning the play from private prologue to public drama and handing the role of communal moral voice to the Chorus.

With Medea, the Nurse's bond is the deepest and most contradictory in the play. Her love is genuine and long-standing, rooted in decades of shared experience, yet the prologue makes clear that love has curdled into fear. She knows Medea better than anyone, and it is precisely that knowledge that terrifies her. She is protector and prisoner simultaneously — unable to leave, unable to intervene.

With the Tutor, she shares the solidarity of the powerless. Their dialogue is the play's only sustained conversation between two enslaved people, creating a counter-perspective: while the aristocratic characters perform their passions, the servants absorb the consequences. Their mutual helplessness quietly indicts a social order that gives them full knowledge and zero agency.

Her relationship to Jason is entirely mediated through Medea's suffering. She never addresses him, yet her prologue is a sustained accusation. By cursing the day the Argo sailed, she holds Jason — not Medea — morally responsible for everything that follows, shaping how the audience receives all subsequent events.