Medea

• 1. Introduction

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  Medea, daughter of King Aeetes of Colchis, first appears in Hesiod's Theogony around 700 BC. She carries a lineage that traces back to Helios, the sun god, making her the granddaughter of a deity and the niece of Circe, the enchantress. She is a sorceress, a pharmakis, a practitioner of what the Greeks called pharmakeia, medicinal magic. She is also, in most tellings, a woman who kills her own children. What makes a myth endure for nearly three thousand years, recopied and re-argued across dozens of ancient texts? The story of Medea raises that question hard. She is introduced as a helper, reduced to a supporting role in a hero's quest. Then Euripides turns her into one of the most complicated figures in all of classical drama. The documentary ahead asks how a single character can be divine and mortal, faithful and murderous, victim and perpetrator, all at once.

• 2. A Family of Gods and Sorcerers

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  Helios, son of the Titan Hyperion and the Titaness Theia, fathered two children with the Oceanid Perseis: Circe and Aeetes. Hesiod records this in the Theogony, lines 956 to 962. Aeetes then married another Oceanid, Idyia, and their daughter was Medea. That makes her divine ancestry a double strand, sun god on one side, ocean deity on the other.

  The family tree does not resolve cleanly from there. Some sources give Aeetes and Idyia only two daughters, Medea and Chalciope, with a son named Absyrtus born through a different woman, Asterodea. Other accounts place both Medea and Absyrtus as children of Idyia. Whichever version holds, Medea has a sister and a brother, and that brother will become central to her most desperate act.

  Diodorus Siculus, writing in his Bibliotheca historica, adds a stranger twist. He makes Perses of Colchis, a brother of Aeetes, the father of Hecate by an unknown mother. Aeetes then married Hecate and had Medea and Circe by her. Under that version, Medea's connection to Hecate, goddess of magic, is not merely devotional. It is biological. Whatever genealogy a reader accepts, the sources are consistent on one point: Medea's power draws from her descent from both sun and sea, and her ties to the goddess most associated with witchcraft run deeper than priesthood alone.

• 3. The Tasks of Aeetes

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  Hera convinced Aphrodite, or in some versions Eros, to make Medea fall in love with Jason the moment he arrived at Colchis seeking the Golden Fleece. That divine nudge is recorded in the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes, the most complete surviving account of the quest. Medea agreed to help Jason, but only after he promised to marry her. He agreed, knowing her powers were essential to survival.

  Aeetes set Jason three tasks. The first required him to yoke fire-breathing oxen and plough a field. Medea gave him an ointment she called the Charm of Prometheus, which protected him and his weapons from the bulls' fire. The second task was sowing dragon's teeth. Medea warned Jason in advance that the teeth would sprout into soldiers. She told him to throw a rock into their midst; confused, they would attack each other and not him. The third task was killing the sleepless dragon that guarded the fleece itself. Medea put the creature to sleep with narcotic herbs.

  With the fleece taken, Jason and Medea fled. To slow her father's pursuit, Medea killed her brother Absyrtus. In some versions she dismembered his body and scattered the pieces, knowing Aeetes would stop to gather them for proper burial. In others, Absyrtus himself gave chase and was killed by Jason. The Argonautica splits the moral weight further: Medea and Jason stopped at the isle of Aeaea, home of Circe, so that Medea could be ritually cleansed of the killing. During the voyage, Medea also healed Atalanta, an Argonaut who had been seriously wounded in combat, and prophesied that the helmsman Euphemus would one day rule all of Libya. Pindar records that this came true through Battus, a descendant of Euphemus seventeen generations later.

• 4. Colchis to Corinth

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  On the journey back to Thessaly, the Argo reached Crete, which was guarded by Talos, a bronze man with a single vein running from his neck to his ankle, sealed by one bronze nail. Apollodorus gives three versions of his death. In the Argonautica specifically, Medea hypnotized Talos from the ship, driving him mad until he dislodged the nail himself. Ichor, the fluid of the gods, poured from the wound and he died.

  Back in Thessaly, Medea performed what the myth presents as a demonstration of her greatest power. Jason's father Aeson was too old and frail to join the celebrations of the returned Argonauts. Medea drew the blood from Aeson's body, infused it with herbs, and returned it to his veins, restoring his youth. The daughters of King Pelias witnessed this and asked her to do the same for their father. She agreed, but the service was never performed. Hera, who hated Pelias for a separate grievance, had arranged for Medea to conspire against him. Medea demonstrated her method by cutting an old ram into pieces, boiling them in a pot with magic herbs, and producing a live young ram. The daughters, convinced, cut their father apart and threw the pieces in a pot. Pelias did not revive.

  Jason and Medea fled to Corinth, where they married. They lived there for ten years. The known children named in surviving accounts are sons Alcimenes, Thessalus, Tisander, Mermeros, Pheres, Medus, and Argos, and a daughter, Eriopis. During their time in Corinth, Medea ended a famine in the city by sacrificing to Demeter and the nymphs. Zeus then desired her, but she declined his advances to avoid Hera's anger. As a reward, Hera offered to make her children immortal.

• 5. Competing Endings

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  Jason abandoned Medea for Glauce, daughter of King Creon of Corinth. What happened next became one of the most disputed questions in all of Greek mythology. The 1st-century BC historian Diodorus Siculus noted the problem directly: he wrote that "the desire of the tragic poets for the marvelous" had produced an account of Medea so varied and inconsistent that no single version could claim authority.

  Before the 5th century BC, two earlier variant endings existed. The poet Eumelus, credited with the fragmentary epic Korinthiaka, held that Medea killed her children by accident. She buried them alive in the Temple of Hera, believing this would make them immortal. The poet Creophylus placed the blame for the children's deaths on the citizens of Corinth, not on Medea at all.

  Euripides created the version that became standard for later writers. In his play Medea, she sent Glauce a dress and a golden coronet covered in poison. Glauce died wearing them. King Creon also died when he rushed to save his daughter. Medea then killed two of her own sons and refused Jason access to their bodies. She left Corinth in a golden chariot pulled by dragons, sent to her by her grandfather Helios. Bernard Knox observed that this departure mirrors the exit of indisputably divine figures in other Euripidean plays: Medea interrupts the human violence below her, justifies her revenge, gives instructions for burial, prophesies, and announces a cult foundation. The filicide appears to be Euripides's own invention, though some scholars argue Neophron may have established this version first.

  Pausanias, writing in the late 2nd century CE, traveled to Corinth and saw a monument to Medea's slain children. He then recorded five different accounts of what had happened to them. The monument survived the debate about what it commemorated.

• 6. Athens, Colchis, and the Medes

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  Medea stopped in Thebes before reaching Athens, where she healed Heracles from the curse of Hera that had driven him to kill his own sons. Heracles had been an Argonaut; the healing closed a loop across both epics. She then reached Athens, where King Aegeus offered her refuge after she promised to use her magic to help him produce an heir.

  She married Aegeus and they had a son, Medus, though Hesiod's Theogony in lines 1000 to 1002 attributes Medus to Jason instead. Her domestic life in Athens ended when Theseus, the long-lost son of Aegeus, arrived at court. Medea persuaded her husband that Theseus was an imposter and a threat, planning to poison him. As she handed Theseus a cup, Aegeus recognized the young man's sword, the same weapon he had left behind for his newborn son years before. He knocked the cup from Medea's hand and embraced his son.

  Medea returned to Colchis and found that her uncle Perses had deposed her father Aeetes. She killed Perses and restored the kingdom. Herodotus, in his Histories at book VII.62, gives yet another ending: Medea and her son Medus flew from Athens on her chariot and landed on the Iranian plateau, living among the Aryans, who subsequently changed their name to the Medes. Her son Medus, under some accounts, went on to become the ancestor of those people after winning their lands. Pindar also records that she prophesied the foundation of Cyrene. Callimachus and Apollonius describe colonies founded by Colchians who had originally been sent out to pursue her.

• 7. What Euripides Built

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  Euripides's Medea works through a set of deliberate contradictions that scholars have traced in detail. Emma Griffiths identifies a central paradox in the methods Medea uses to kill: she poisons the princess, which would have read to the original Athenian audience as a feminine mode of murder. She kills her children in cold blood, which would have read as masculine. The play shows her in domestic conversation about her sons, displaying what looks like normal maternal love. Then it shows her ending their lives as an act of revenge.

  Deborah Boedeker has traced the Nurse's descriptions in the play's prologue, where Medea is compared to great forces of nature and to animals, including bulls and lions. The nautical references woven through the play by multiple characters tie back to the Argonaut voyage. Boedeker argues these comparisons work on the original audience simultaneously: Medea holds power on the scale of natural forces, operates on animal instinct when her emotions are threatened, and her presence never fully detaches from the sea voyage that brought her to Greece.

  Marianne McDonald argued that Medea's violence, read through a certain lens, makes her an emblem of the colonized turning on the colonizer. Euripides, in McDonald's reading, anticipated horrors that recur in the modern world by showing both the glory and the monstrosity of the oppressed turned oppressor. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, writing in his 2006 book The Happiness Hypothesis, chose Medea to illustrate the divided self. He quoted her directly: "I am dragged along by a strange new force. Desire and reason are pulling in different directions. I see the right way and approve it, but follow the wrong." A character invented or substantially reshaped by a 5th-century BC playwright was still useful to a psychologist writing more than 2,400 years later, explaining the same human problem.