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This article is about the Greek mythological figure. For other meanings, see Medea (disambiguation).
Medea by Evelyn De Morgan.
Medea by Evelyn De Morgan.

In Greek mythology, Medea (Greek: Μήδεια) was the daughter of King Aeëtes of Colchis, niece of Circe, and later wife to Jason. In the play Medea, Jason leaves Medea when Creon, King of Corinth offers him his daughter.

The myths involving Jason also invoke Medea. These have been interpreted by specialists, principally in the past, 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, and 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, archaic matriarchies, and the Great Goddess and the new Bronze Age Greek ways.

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 BCE and called the Argonautica. But 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 Hecateie a witch. She is the granddaughter of the sun Helios and a niece of the witch Circe.

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[edit] Jason and Medea

Media, 1868 painting by Anthony Frederick Augustus Sandys"
Media, 1868 painting by Anthony Frederick Augustus Sandys"

Medea's role began after Jason arrived from Iolcus to Colchis to claim the Golden Fleece as his own. After he arrived,Medea fell in love with him. She promised to help him, but only on one condition: if he succeeded, he would take her with him and marry her. Jason promised. 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. 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 decipher where the rock had come from, the soldiers attacked and defeated 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. (Some accounts say 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 pursues them, and is killed by Jason. In the flight, Atalanta was seriously wounded, but Medea healed her.

According to some versions, Medea and Jason stopped on her aunt Circe's island so that they could be cleansed after the murder of her brother, relieving her of the blame for the deed.

Jason et Médée by Gustave Moreau (1865).
Jason et Médée by Gustave Moreau (1865).

On the way back to Thessaly, Medea prophesied that Euphemus, the Argo's helmsman, would one day rule over all Libya. This came true through Battus, a descendant of Euphemus.

The Argo then came to 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 only one 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 hypnotizes him from the Argo, driving him mad so that he dislodges the nail and dies (Argonautica 4.1638). In any case, when the nail is removed, Talos's ichor flows out, exsanguinating and killing him. After his death, the Argo lands.

While Jason searched for the Golden Fleece, Hera, who was still angry at Pelias, conspired to make him fall in love with Medea, who she hoped would kill Pelias. When Jason and Medea returned to Iolcus, Pelias still refused to give up his throne. 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 (alternatively, she did this with Aeson, Jason's father). During the demonstration, a live, young ram jumped out of the pot. Excited, the girls cut their father into pieces and threw them into a pot. He soon perished due to these injuries. Having killed Pelias, Jason and Medea fled to Corinth.

[edit] Many endings

In Corinth, according to ancient historian Didimos, the Corinthian King Creon convinced Jason to desert Medea for Glauce, Creon's daughter. Medea slew Creon and fled to Thebes but was unable to take her children with her and was forced to leave them in Corinth, where they were later killed by Creon's family in revenge.

Alternatively, Jason is sometimes said to have married Glauce of his own volition, whereupon the evil Medea bewitched a robe with magic herbs and sent it to the princess as a gift. When Glauce put it on, the garment immediately caught fire and burned her to death. Medea then killed her own children by Jason and escaped in a chariot sent by either Helios, god of the sun or Hecate, who is said by some to be Medea's mother.

Medea by Eugène Ferdinand Victor Delacroix (1862).
Medea by Eugène Ferdinand Victor Delacroix (1862).

The tragic situation of Medea, abandoned in Corinth by Jason, was the subject matter transformed by Euripides in his tragedy Medea, first performed in 431 BCE. In this telling, Medea resorts to filicide before her flight to Athens. Euripides was revolutionary in his retelling of Medea's myth because he was the first one to show that she hadn't killed her children because she was mad or a barbarian, but because she was extremely distressed and furious at Jason for leaving her to marry a princess [citation needed]. Fueled by a need for revenge, she sends Glauce a poisoned dress and crown that burn her to death. Creon finds her corpse and clutches it in mourning, crying, "Let me die as well. " the dress was poisoned so as to kill anyone who touched the girl. It pulled him down and killed him as well. After some hesitation and self-debate, Medea then killed her two sons, Mermeros and Pheres, to hurt Jason. Some contemporary critics of Euripides accused him of accepting a gift of five Attic talents, a huge sum, by wealthy Corinthians who wanted no part of the blame for the children's death [citation needed].

Fleeing from Jason, Medea made her way to Athens 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 in anger drove her out against Heracles' protests.

And so, after losing her home in Thebes she fled to Athens where she met and married Aegeus. They had one son, Medus. 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, promptly killed her uncle, and restored the kingdom to her father.

Some say Medea married Achilles in the underworld. In another version of her legend, Zeus tried to court her but failed; for being the only mortal to ever successfully resist him, she was granted immortality by Zeus' wife, Hera.

Confusion sometimes occurs among readers of Greek mythology over whether there were two Medeas and/or what order events in her story occur. Supposedly Medea lived her whole life in Colchis until the Argonauts arrived and she fled to Greece with them. Yet Theseus (who is often listed among the Argonauts) supposedly drove Medea out of Thebes during his first heroic quest. Medea could not have been in Thebes until after the Quest for the Golden Fleece, yet, if Theseus was an Argonaut, the Quest for the Golden Fleece could not have happened until after Theseus drove Medea out of Thebes. This could be considered a continuity error which might naturally arise from dozens or hundreds of different poets telling different stories using the same characters, or it could be explained away as there being two different witches named Medea.

[edit] Music

Medea - METAL

[edit] Cinema and television

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[edit] Medea in popular culture

  • A "Medea complex" is sometimes used to describe parents who murder or otherwise harm their children.
  • Born Susie Benjamin, Medea Benjamin, co-founder of both Code Pink and the international human rights organization Global Exchange, renamed herself after the Greek mythological character Medea during her freshman year at Tufts University.
  • Medea is featured in the visual novel game and anime series Fate/stay night as an example of the Caster-class Servant.
  • The Medea of the modern times
  • In 2006 The Abingdon Theatre Company produced a spoof on the Medea novels, "My Deah" by John Epperson.
  • Playwright Christopher Durang wrote a short spoof of Medea.
  • Medea is one of the NPC villains in the Freedom City campaign setting for the Mutants and Masterminds role-playing game. Talos, the bronze man of Crete, is also featured as an NPC villain.
  • Singer/songwriter Vienna Teng wrote a song entitled My Medea.
  • The genetic technique called Maternal effect dominant embryonic arrest, which favors offspring with particular genes, is named after Medea.
  • In Stephen Sondheim's musical, "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum," the opening number, "Comedy Tonight," contains the line, "Nothing that's grim; nothing that's Greek. She plays Medea later this week."
  • In the PS2 game Persona 3, Medea is the Persona for the character Chidori. Appropriate to the "Medea complex", Medea herself tries to strangle Chidori at one point in the game.

[edit] References

[edit] Primary sources

Heroides XII
Metamorphoses VII, 1-450

[edit] Secondary material

[edit] Related Literature