Tutor: Is the poor woman not done with weeping yet? Nurse: I envy you. The misery is only beginning; it is not even halfway. Tutor: The fool, if a slave may say this of his masters; she knows nothing of the newer troubles. Nurse: What is it, old man? Don't grudge me the telling. Tutor: Nothing. I take back even what I said. Nurse: No, by your beard, don't hide it from your fellow slave. I will keep silent about it, if I must.

A run of single lines, the form the Greeks called stichomythia. The tutor asks whether Medea is still weeping; the nurse envies his ignorance, since the trouble has hardly begun. He lets slip that there is worse news, then tries to take it back. She makes him tell with a formal appeal, πρὸς γενείου, "by your beard," the words of a suppliant who touches the chin of the person begged. And she promises silence, the first of the promises of silence that run through the play.