Nurse: But here come the children, finished with their running, with no thought of their mother's troubles; a young mind does not like to grieve. Tutor: Old servant of my mistress's house, why are you standing at the gates alone, lamenting your troubles to yourself? How can Medea want to be left without you?

The children come in from their running, "with no thought of their mother's troubles; a young mind does not like to grieve." Their tutor follows, an old slave like the nurse. He finds her alone at the door, talking to herself. Euripides uses the servants to tell the audience what the house cannot say aloud. The tutor calls the nurse an "old possession of the house," κτῆμα, the ordinary word for property, and in Athenian law he was property too.