Manipulative Characters: Medea and Jocasta

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Throughout many different Greek plays, there are people who will try to manipulate other characters, to either get their way, help another character out or just to be cruel to another. In Oedipus the King, Jocasta tries to convince Oedipus to believe in her lies, so he will not find out the truth. In Medea, Medea tries to make Jason believe that she’s happy for him finding someone else and that she wants to give gifts to his new love Glauce, who is the daughter of King Creon of Corinth. These characters may have two completely different stories, but they’re both manipulative in so many different ways than one. Jocasta isn’t really known for being deceiving or manipulative in this play, but she does try to convince her husband that all of the prophecies are not true at all. The prophecy with Oedipus is that he was supposed to kill his father and marry his mother, when Jocasta and her late husband Laius found out the prophecy of their new born son, they casted him out of Thebes to die. But in fact that baby did not die because he was taken in by king Polybus and queen Merope of Corinth. Then later on in the play Oedipus gets word of his father’s death in Corinth and then finds out in fact that Polybus was not his biological father at all. When all of the takes place and Oedipus gets back to Thebes, Jocasta realizes that the prophecies could be true and she tries to convince Oedipus that they are not because she and Laius’s son died after they got word of the prophecy that was foretold to them. So Oedipus was relieved to hear that one half of the prophecy was not true, but then the shepherd tells Oedipus not to worry because he knows that Oedipus came to Corinth as a baby and that Polybus and Merope were not his real parents at all. This really makes him worried at this point because now he does not know who his parents are. He then asks the shepherd how he
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