Medea

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Medea is the sorceress of Greek myth: a princess of distant Colchis on the Black Sea, granddaughter of Helios the sun-god and niece of the witch Circe, remembered above all for her command of pharmaka — drugs, charms, and the darker arts of a votary of Hecate. She enters the story of the world when Jason and the Argonauts arrive at her father’s kingdom seeking the Golden Fleece.

In the older epic telling, gathered most fully in Apollonius of Rhodes’ Argonautica, she is first of all the foreign princess who falls in love and is undone by it. Struck by desire for the Greek stranger, she betrays her father Aietes, gives Jason the salves and spells that let him survive the tasks set against him, lulls the dragon guarding the Fleece, and flees with the Argonauts — murdering, in some versions, her own brother to slow the pursuit. The cycle that follows is a long descent: she restores Jason’s aged father to youth by her arts, contrives the death of the usurper Pelias at his own daughters’ hands, and arrives at last in Corinth.

What fixed her finally in the Western imagination was a single play. Euripides’ Medea, staged in Athens in 431 BCE, takes up the moment Jason sets her aside to marry a Corinthian princess, and turns the wronged barbarian wife into something far stranger and harder. To punish him she destroys the bride with a poisoned robe and then kills the two children she bore him — deliberately, after a scene in which she argues with herself and chooses — before escaping through the air in the chariot of her grandfather the Sun. The play withholds the easy judgment its premise invites: she is monstrous and she is right about the world that has used her, and Euripides lets both stand.

Later antiquity kept refining the figure. Ovid wrote her grief and rage as letters and metamorphoses; Seneca’s Roman tragedy made her colder and more absolute. Across these tellings two threads twist together — the abandoned woman and the woman who works magic — and it is the second that the long afterlife seized on. As the maga who knows herbs, draws down the moon, and bends nature to a furious will, Medea became one of the templates from which later Europe assembled its idea of the witch, alongside her aunt Circe and the night-goddess Hecate they both served.

Scholarship treats her less as a single character than as a problem the Greeks returned to: the outsider whose knowledge is indispensable and whose loyalty, once given, can be turned to ruin; the woman whose power lies exactly where a woman’s power was most feared. The myth never resolves whether she is victim or villain. That refusal is much of why she has not stopped being retold.

→ Related: Jason · Hecate · Cassandra