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Medea
by Euripides, Greece, (c 480-406 BC)
==
Medea has been betrayed. Her husband Jason has left her for a younger woman. He has forgotten all the promises he made and is even prepared to abandon their two sons. But Medea is not a woman to accept such disrespect passively. Strong-willed and fiercely intelligent, she turns her formidable energies to working out the greatest, and most horrifying, revenge possible...
==
Medea (
Greek
:
Μήδεια,
Mēdeia
,
Georgian
:
მედეა
,
Medea
) is a
Colchian
woman in
Greek mythology
. She was the daughter of
King Aeëtes
of
Colchis
,
[1]
niece of
Circe
, granddaughter of the sun god
Helios
, and later wife to the hero
Jason
, with whom she had two children,
Mermeros and Pheres
. In
Euripides
's play
Medea
, Jason leaves Medea when
Creon
, king of
Corinth
, offers him his daughter,
Glauce
.
[2]
The play tells about how Medea avenges her husband's betrayal.
The myths involving Jason have been interpreted by specialists
[3]
as part of a class of myths that tell how the Hellenes of the distant heroic age, before the
Trojan War
, faced the challenges of the pre-Greek "
Pelasgian
" cultures of mainland Greece, the Aegean and Anatolia.
Jason
,
Perseus
,
Theseus
, and above all
Heracles
, are all "
liminal
" figures, poised on the threshold between the old world of
shamans
,
chthonic
earth deities, and the new
Bronze Age
Greek ways.
[4]
Medea figures in the myth of Jason and the
Argonauts
, a myth known best from a late literary version worked up by
Apollonius of Rhodes
in the 3rd century BC and called the
Argonautica
.
However, for all its self-consciousness and researched archaic vocabulary, the late epic was based on very old, scattered materials. Medea is known in most stories as an enchantress and is often depicted as being a priestess of the goddess
Hecate
or a witch. The myth of Jason and Medea is very old, originally written around the time
Hesiod
wrote the
Theogony
. It was known to the composer of the
Little Iliad
, part of the
Epic Cycle
.
Jason and Medea
Medea's role began after Jason arrived from
Iolcus
to
Colchis
, to claim his inheritance and throne by retrieving the
Golden Fleece
. In the most complete surviving account, the
Argonautica
of
Apollonius
, Medea fell in love with him and promised to help him, but only on the condition that if he succeeded, he would take her with him and marry her. Jason agreed. In a familiar mythic motif, Aeëtes promised to give him the fleece, but only if he could perform certain tasks. First, Jason had to plough a field with fire-breathing oxen that he had to yoke himself. Medea gave him an
unguent
with which to anoint himself and his weapons, to protect him from the bulls' fiery breath. Then, Jason had to sow the teeth of a
dragon
in the ploughed field (compare the myth of
Cadmus
). The teeth sprouted into an army of warriors. Jason was forewarned by Medea, however, and knew to throw a rock into the crowd. Unable to determine where the rock had come from, the soldiers attacked and killed each other. Finally, Aeëtes made Jason fight and kill the sleepless dragon that guarded the fleece. Medea put the beast to sleep with her
narcotic
herbs. Jason then took the fleece and sailed away with Medea, as he had promised. Apollonius says that Medea only helped Jason in the first place because
Hera
had convinced
Aphrodite
or
Eros
to cause Medea to fall in love with him. Medea distracted her father as they fled by killing her brother
Absyrtus
. In some versions, Medea is said to have dismembered his body and scattered his parts on an island, knowing her father would stop to retrieve them for proper burial; in other versions, it is
Absyrtus
himself who pursued them, and was killed by Jason. During the fight,
Atalanta
, a member of the group helping Jason in his quest for the fleece, was seriously wounded, but Medea healed her.
According to some versions, Medea and Jason stopped on her aunt Circe's island so that she could be cleansed after the murder of her brother, relieving her of blame for the deed.
On the way back to
Thessaly
, Medea prophesied that
Euphemus
, the helmsman of Jason's ship, the
Argo
, would one day rule over all
Libya
. This came true through
Battus
, a descendant of Euphemus.
The
Argo
then reached the island of
Crete
, guarded by the bronze man,
Talos
(Talus). Talos had one vein which went from his neck to his ankle, bound shut by a single bronze nail. According to Apollodorus, Talos was slain either when Medea drove him mad with drugs, deceived him that she would make him immortal by removing the nail, or was killed by
Poeas
's arrow (Apollodorus 1.140). In the
Argonautica
, Medea hypnotized him from the
Argo
, driving him mad so that he dislodged the nail,
ichor
flowed from the wound, and he bled to death (Argonautica 4.1638). After Talos died, the
Argo
landed.
While Jason searched for the Golden Fleece,
Hera
, who was still angry at
Pelias
, conspired to make Jason fall in love with Medea, who Hera hoped would kill Pelias. When Jason and Medea returned to
Iolcus
, Pelias still refused to give up his throne. So Medea conspired to have Pelias' own daughters kill him. She told them she could turn an old ram into a young ram by cutting up the old ram and boiling it. During her demonstration, a live, young ram jumped out of the pot. Excited, the girls cut their father into pieces and threw him into a pot. Having killed Pelias, Jason and Medea fled to
Corinth
. This is much like what she did with
Aeson
, Jason's father.
Many endings
In Corinth, Jason abandoned Medea for the king's daughter, Glauce. Medea took her revenge by sending Glauce a dress and golden coronet, covered in poison. This resulted in the deaths of both the princess and the king,
Creon
, when he went to save her. According to the tragic poet
Euripides
, Medea continued her revenge, murdering her two children by Jason. Afterward, she left Corinth and flew to Athens in a golden chariot driven by dragons sent by her grandfather Helios, god of the sun.
Before the fifth century BC, there seem to have been two variants of the myth's conclusion. According to the poet
Eumelus
to whom the fragmentary epic
Korinthiaka
is usually attributed, Medea killed her children by accident.
[5]
The poet
Creophylus
, however, blamed their murders on the citizens of Corinth.
[6]
Medea's deliberate murder of her children, then, appears to be Euripides' invention although some scholars believe
Neophron
created this alternate tradition.
[7]
Her
filicide
would go on to become the standard for later writers.
[8]
Pausanias, writing in the late 2nd century, records five different versions of what happened to Medea's children after reporting that he has seen a monument for them while traveling in Corinth.
[9]
Fleeing from Jason, Medea made her way to
Thebes
where she healed
Heracles
(the former Argonaut) for the murder of
Iphitus
. In return, Heracles gave her a place to stay in Thebes until the Thebans drove her out in anger, despite Heracles' protests.
She then fled to
Athens
where she met and married
Aegeus
. They had one son,
Medus
, although
Hesiod
makes Medus the son of Jason.
[10]
Her domestic bliss was once again shattered by the arrival of Aegeus' long-lost son,
Theseus
. Determined to preserve her own son's inheritance, Medea convinced her husband that Theseus was a threat and that he should be disposed of. As Medea handed Theseus a cup of poison, Aegeus recognized the young man's sword as his own, which he had left behind many years previous for his newborn son, to be given to him when he came of age. Knocking the cup from Medea's hand, Aegeus embraced Theseus as his own.
Medea then returned to Colchis and, finding that Aeëtes had been deposed by his brother
Perses
, promptly killed her uncle, and restored the kingdom to her father.
Herodotus
reports another version, in which Medea and her son Medus fled from Athens to the Iranian plateau and lived among the
Aryans
, who then changed their name to the
Medes
.
[11]
Personae
of Medea
Though the early literary presentations of Medea are lost,
[12]
Apollonius of Rhodes
, in a redefinition of epic formulas, and
Euripides
, in a dramatic version for a specifically Athenian audience, each employed the figure of Medea;
Seneca
offered yet another tragic Medea, of witchcraft and potions, and
Ovid
rendered her portrait three times for a sophisticated and sceptical audience in Imperial Rome. The far-from-static evolution undergone by the figure of Medea was the subject of a recent set of essays published in 1997.
[13]
Other, non-literary traditions guided the vase-painters,
[14]
and a localized,
chthonic
presence of Medea was propitiated with unrecorded emotional overtones at Corinth, at the sanctuary devoted to her slain children,
[15]
or locally venerated elsewhere as a foundress of cities
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