ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that it is profitable to read Medea via Toni Morrison's Beloved; that is, to utilize recent critical interventions into the novels and the narratives of American slavery in order to highlight the representation of vexed questions of contract, property, and inheritance in Euripides' play. As the extensiveness of critical material on the subjects implies, Euripides' Medea is a play to which notions of contract, property and inheritance are vital. Moreover, Euripides' decision not to name the boys in his account of the myth is significant for the way in which it intimates their precarious status in relation to the Jason's oikos, or household. As Medea herself admits in the play's parados, she is guilty of an earlier murder — that of her brother, Apsyrtus. To the Greeks of Euripides' audience, kin-murder was a genuinely appalling crime.
