What is the role of the Nurse in Euripides's Medea?

The Nurse's role in Medea is to bring the audience into the world of the play. In the prologue of the play, she gives the historical background, provides commentary on these events, and introduces the major characters: Medea and Jason.

At the end of the Nurse's opening monologue, the Attendant enters and tells the Nurse about the rumors being spread about Medea and Jason, providing additional background for the play.

The Chorus enters, and with the voice of Medea lamenting her current woeful situation in the background, the Nurse discusses Medea's tumultuous emotional state of mind and physical decline with the Chorus.

By the time the Nurse leaves the stage, never to return, she's served her purpose (her role), which is to give the audience the information they need to understand the rest of the play.

The audience never actually sees the Nurse in her role as "nurse" to Medea. The Nurse and Medea have no scenes together. The Nurse makes only passing reference to her "princess" and her "mistress," indicating that she holds a subservient position in Medea's household, but there are only a few lines spoken by the Attendant that give any hint as to her actual role:

ATTENDANT: Thou ancient treasure of my lady's room . . .
Will our mistress be
Content, this long time to be left by thee?

As for the Nurse never returning to the play, this is not at all unusual in Greek plays. Once a character like the Nurse serves their purpose, they were never seen or heard from again.

Also, until Sophocles introduced the innovation of adding a third actor to his plays, two actors played all of the speaking characters in a play, and only two characters spoke on stage at the same time. (The Chorus usually spoke in unison, "in one voice," as a single character, although the Leader of the Chorus often spoke to other characters.)

There are never more than two characters speaking on stage at the same time in Medea, and since the Nurse had already served her purpose in the prologue, the actor playing the Nurse could play other characters through the rest of the play.

Medea's nurse functions as a kind of storyteller who helps the audience understand the background of the story; she also provides a warning about the tragedy that will later occur.

The Nurse is the first person to speak in the play. Her prologue gives the audience the background for the whole story. It explains Medea's history: how she married Jason, bore his children, turned her back on her own country, and was set aside for the daughter of Creon. It explains that she is miserable and is not listening to those who offer counsel. The Nurse says that Medea is smart and dangerous and that she's scared of what might happen.

The Nurse also foreshadows Medea's murder of her children for the audience. She says, "And she hates her children, takes no pleasure in seeing them." It's clear that Medea no longer feels motherly affection for them because her hatred for Jason is stronger than her love for the children they share.

What was the role of women in Medea?

Euripides "Medea" was produced in Athens in 431 BC. Athenian society was what is often termed homosocial; men and women had very different roles and educations and socialized mainly with their own gender. Women were normally married at the start of their reproductive years (12-14) to men who had inherited responsiboilities for running estates (30+ years old). Women were responsible for weaving, food, and child-rearing, rarely were literate, were not allowed to attend symposia (intellectual dinner parties), theatre or athletic contests, and had their own quarters and many all-female religious activities and festivals. Medea would have been performed by an all-male cast of actors (including the role of Medea) to an all male audience at the festival of Dionysius.

In the play, the nurse and Jason's second wife are women in conventional Greek roles. Medea is a barbarian sorcerer, and acts as a sort of cautionary tale of what happens in foreign societies where women are allowed too much freedom. For the male audience, the evil deeds of Medea confirm their belief that women should be kept uneducated and firmly subjugated to prevent their uncontrolled emotions from destroying family and civic life. (Women might not agree with this judgement, but the play as written by a man for other men).