Medea - Greek Mythology
AI interpretation of Medea

Princess of Colchis

Medea was a princess of Colchis, granddaughter of the sun god Helios, niece of the sorceress Circe, and a priestess of Hecate, goddess of witchcraft. She was one of the most powerful magic users in all of Greek mythology. When Jason arrived in Colchis seeking the Golden Fleece, Aphrodite caused Medea to fall desperately in love with him. Without Medea's help, Jason would have died on his first trial.

Saving Jason

Medea gave Jason a magical ointment that made him invulnerable to the fire-breathing bronze bulls. She told him how to defeat the warriors that sprouted from dragon's teeth. She drugged the sleepless dragon that guarded the Fleece. She betrayed her father, her country, and her family for a man she had known for days. When her father's fleet pursued them, Medea murdered her own brother Absyrtus and scattered his body parts in the sea, forcing her father to stop and collect them for burial. She sacrificed everything for Jason.

The Betrayal

Jason and Medea settled in Corinth, where they had two sons. For years they lived together. Then Jason announced he was leaving Medea to marry Glauce, the princess of Corinth, a political marriage that would secure his position and advance his career. He told Medea she should be grateful: their sons would be raised as Greek princes. He expected her to accept this quietly.

The Revenge

Medea did not accept it quietly. Euripides' tragedy Medea (431 BC) dramatizes what followed with devastating psychological realism. Medea sent Glauce a poisoned golden robe and crown as a wedding gift. When Glauce put them on, the poison burned her alive. Her father Creon, trying to save her, embraced her and was consumed by the same fire. Then Medea did the unthinkable: she killed her own two children to ensure Jason would have no legacy, no heirs, no future. She escaped in a chariot drawn by dragons sent by her grandfather Helios.

Jason, who had once been the great hero of the Argonauts, was left with nothing. His new wife was dead. His children were dead. His former wife had escaped divine justice. He died alone years later, crushed by a falling timber from the rotting Argo, the very ship that had carried him to glory.

Why Medea Matters

Medea is the most morally complex female character in Greek literature. She is simultaneously a victim (betrayed by the man she sacrificed everything for) and a monster (she murders her own children). Euripides refuses to let the audience settle into easy judgement. The play forces you to understand why she does what she does without excusing it. Modern audiences continue to debate her: is she a feminist icon who refused to be discarded, or a cautionary tale about the destructive power of vengeance? The answer is both, and that is why her play has been performed continuously for 2,400 years.

Classical Sources

Cross-referenced with multiple classical sources for accuracy.

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Family, name and early sources

Hesiod's Theogony gives Medea's parents as Aeëtes, son of Helios, and the Oceanid Idyia, which makes Circe her aunt; Diodorus later preserves a version in which her mother was Hecate herself. The same poem already knows the core story: Jason brings her from Aeëtes' palace after completing his labours, and she bears him a son, Medeius. Her name is usually connected with the Greek verb medomai, "to plan" or "to contrive," and the cunning intelligence it implies, metis, is as much her weapon as her drugs.

In Pindar's fourth Pythian she appears as a prophet, foretelling the founding of Cyrene, and in Apollonius of Rhodes she is a young priestess of Hecate whose tormented night of indecision, before she agrees to betray her father, is one of the great psychological passages of ancient poetry.

Three disputed crimes

Absyrtus. The version in which Medea dismembers her small brother and scatters him in the sea to delay the Colchian fleet comes from Pherecydes and Apollodorus, and Ovid uses it to explain the name of Tomis, his own place of exile. Apollonius tells it very differently: Absyrtus is a grown man commanding the pursuit, Medea lures him to a parley at a temple of Artemis, and Jason kills him from ambush, then cuts off his extremities and spits out his blood to avert the vengeance of the dead. The murder is why the couple must later be purified by Circe.

Pelias. Back at Iolcus, Medea showed Pelias' daughters how to make an old ram young again by cutting it up and boiling it with herbs. Persuaded, they did the same to their father, and he did not rise again. Ovid's Metamorphoses 7 sets this beside her genuine rejuvenation of Jason's father Aeson. The murder is why Jason and Medea were exiled to Corinth.

The children. Euripides' infanticide was not the only Corinthian tradition. Pausanias reports that the Corinthians themselves stoned the children to death in revenge for the deaths of Creon and his daughter, and that the epic poet Eumelus told how Medea tried to make her children immortal by hiding them in the sanctuary of Hera, and failed. Later commentators even repeated the story that Euripides was paid by the Corinthians to shift the blame onto the mother; whatever the truth of that anecdote, many scholars think the deliberate killing of the children by Medea was Euripides' own innovation or at least his decisive shaping. Corinth maintained an atonement rite for the children at the sanctuary of Hera Akraia: Pausanias says Corinthian children cut their hair and wore black in their honour, and ancient commentators add that seven boys and seven girls served there for a year.

After Corinth: Athens, Asia and Elysium

In Euripides she flies to Athens, where King Aegeus had already promised her refuge. She married him and bore a son, Medus. When the young Theseus arrived unrecognised, she persuaded Aegeus to give him a cup of poison; Aegeus recognised the sword his son carried and struck the cup away (Plutarch, Theseus 12). Exiled again, she went east, and Herodotus says the Medes took their name from her or her son. A remarkable tradition attributed to the lyric poets Ibycus and Simonides, and repeated by Apollodorus, says that after death she married Achilles in the Isles of the Blessed.

Medea in art and performance

A Lucanian calyx-krater of about 400 BC in the Cleveland Museum of Art shows her escaping in a serpent chariot surrounded by a radiant sun-disc, while Jason and the children's bodies lie below, an image clearly influenced by Euripides' ending. Seneca wrote a Latin Medea in which she kills the children on stage; Ovid wrote a lost tragedy on her and an elegiac letter from her to Jason in the Heroides. Later versions include Cherubini's opera Médée (1797), Delacroix's painting of Medea about to kill her children (1838, Lille), and Pasolini's film Medea (1969) starring Maria Callas.

A common mistake is to treat Medea as purely Greek. In Euripides her foreignness matters enormously: Jason argues she should be grateful for being brought to civilised Greece, and the play turns that claim against him.

Ancient sources

  • Hesiod, Theogony 956–962 and 992–1002 — her parentage and Jason's taking her from Colchis.
  • Pindar, Pythian 4 — Medea's prophecy and her help with the fire-breathing bulls.
  • Euripides, Medea (431 BC) — the betrayal in Corinth, the poisoned robe, the killing of the children and the escape in Helios' chariot.
  • Apollonius of Rhodes, Argonautica 3–4 — her love for Jason, her betrayal of Aeëtes and the killing of an adult Absyrtus.
  • Ovid, Metamorphoses 7.1–424 — the rejuvenation of Aeson, the death of Pelias and the attempt on Theseus.
  • Pausanias, Description of Greece 2.3 — Corinthian traditions of the children's deaths and their cult at Hera's sanctuary.

Frequently asked questions

Did Medea really kill her children in every version?

No. Corinthian tradition reported by Pausanias blamed the Corinthians, and Eumelus told of an attempt to make them immortal that failed. Euripides' version, in which she kills them deliberately, became the standard one.

Is Medea a goddess or a mortal?

She is mortal, though descended from Helios, and some traditions give her a kind of immortality, such as marriage to Achilles in the Isles of the Blessed.

What happened to Medea after she left Corinth?

She went to Athens, married King Aegeus and bore Medus, tried to poison Theseus, and was driven out, heading east to the land later named Media.

Why is Medea connected to Hecate?

Apollonius makes her Hecate's priestess, and her magic draws on Hecate's powers over herbs, night and crossroads. One tradition even made Hecate her mother.