Medea

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Colchis sits at the eastern end of the Black Sea, where the rivers come down off the Caucasus — for the Greeks the edge of the navigable world, a kingdom of gold and sun at the limit of the map. Its king is Aietes, son of Helios, and into his line the sun’s blood runs undiluted. Medea is his daughter: granddaughter of the sun-god, niece of the witch Circe who keeps her island in the far west, and so kin on both sides to the family that knows how the bright and the hidden powers of the world are worked. She is a votary of Hecate, priestess in the goddess’s grove, and from that service comes the thing she is remembered for above her royalty: her command of pharmaka — the drugs, salves, roots, and spoken charms that stand at the root of the Greek word for both medicine and poison. She enters the story of the world when Jason and the Argonauts come up out of the western sea seeking the Golden Fleece, and nothing in that kingdom, or in his life, is the same afterward.

The Argonautica: desire and betrayal

The fullest early account is the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes, composed in the third century BCE, when the tale was already old. Apollonius makes the turn of the whole poem an act of the gods upon a young woman’s body. Hera and Athena, who want Jason saved, send Aphrodite, who sends Eros, and the arrow goes into Medea where she stands — and from that wound the epic’s center shifts from the voyage to the inside of her mind. What follows is one of antiquity’s first sustained studies of a divided will: she lies awake, argues both sides of her own heart, reaches for poison to die and sets it down again, and chooses at last to betray everything she was born to rather than see the stranger killed. She goes to him in Hecate’s grove and gives him what he cannot win for himself — a salve, drawn from a plant sprung where the tortured Prometheus bled, that makes flesh proof against fire and iron for a day, and the knowledge that lets him yoke her father’s fire-breathing bulls, sow the dragon’s teeth, and live. When the Fleece still hangs guarded by a serpent that never sleeps, it is she who lulls the creature with her voice and her drugs while Jason lifts the gold. The hero of the poem that bears his name accomplishes the central task only because she unmakes her own house to let him.

The flight is darker than the winning. Aietes pursues, and to slow him the oldest strand of the myth has Medea kill her young brother Apsyrtus, cut his body apart, and cast the pieces into the sea so that the grieving king must stop to gather his son — a horror that ancient writers tied by false etymology to the Black Sea town of Tomis, reading its name from the Greek verb for cutting. Apollonius softens this into a lured ambush rather than a child’s dismemberment, but the shape is fixed: her loyalty, once turned, turns all the way, and the first price of love is blood already.

Iolcus, Pelias, Corinth

Back in the Greek world her arts keep working, and they keep killing. She restores Jason’s aged father Aeson to youth — Ovid would later give the recipe in verse, the old man’s blood drawn off and the cauldron filled with herbs gathered under the moon. Then she turns the same craft into a trap. The usurper Pelias, who had sent Jason after the Fleece expecting him never to return, she destroys by a demonstration: she shows his daughters how an old ram, cut up and boiled with the right herbs, leaps from the pot a lamb, and persuades them to do the like for their father — withholding only the herbs that matter, so that the loving daughters butcher the old king for nothing. It is a murder committed entirely through other people’s hands and other people’s love, and it is the purest distillation of what she is: knowledge used as a weapon that the victim carries willingly. Driven from Iolcus for it, she and Jason come at last to Corinth.

Euripides: the deliberated murder

What fixed her finally in the Western imagination was a single play. Euripides’ Medea was staged at the City Dionysia in Athens in 431 BCE, the year the Peloponnesian War broke out; it placed third, last of the three competitors, behind a set of plays by Euphorion and one by Sophocles. The judgment of the festival has not survived as the judgment of the centuries. The play takes up the moment Jason sets her aside to marry the daughter of the Corinthian king, leaving the foreign woman who gave up everything for him stateless, kinless, and replaceable. From that situation Euripides builds something colder and harder than a wronged-wife revenge. Medea sends the bride a poisoned robe and crown that burn the princess and the king who tries to save her to death; and then, after a monologue in which she turns again and again between her fury and her love and chooses against her own children with her eyes open, she kills the two sons she bore Jason — to leave him with nothing, and to keep them from any other hand. At the end she does not fall. She rises: her grandfather the Sun sends his chariot, and she escapes into the air above the man she has emptied out, holding the bodies, beyond his reach and beyond ordinary justice.

It is likely that the deliberate murder of the children by Medea’s own hand is Euripides’ own stroke. Older versions had the children die otherwise — killed by the Corinthians in revenge, or by Medea’s failed attempt to make them immortal at Hera’s altar; a rival tragedian, Neophron, also wrote a child-killing Medea, and ancient critics argued over who borrowed from whom, with the balance now generally favoring Euripides’ priority. What he made was not a monster who acts and a victim who suffers, but a single figure in whom both are true at once and neither cancels the other. She is right about the world that has used her — about the position of the foreign wife, the woman bartered in marriage, the outsider whose service is taken and whose loyalty is discarded — and she is the most terrible thing in the play. Euripides lets both stand and supplies no god to settle which is the truer.

Ovid and Seneca: the Roman witch

Later antiquity kept refining her, and the Roman poets pushed the magic to the front. Ovid returned to her more than to any other mythical woman: a verse letter in the Heroides in her own voice on the edge of her ruin; the long central panel of Metamorphoses Book 7, where her night-craft and the rejuvenation of Aeson are set out at length, the witch ranging the dark and calling the moon down; and a tragedy, now lost, that the ancients counted among his finest. Seneca’s Medea, written for a Rome that read its Stoicism in blood, made her colder and more absolute — vengeful from the first line, doubting the gods even as she compels them, a woman who across the play hardens deliberately into the thing her name has come to mean. His Medea announces her own becoming: where Euripides shows a person arriving at an unbearable act, Seneca shows a will willing itself into a force of nature. The supernatural that Euripides kept at the edges of the stage moves, in Seneca, to the center.

The maga and the template of the witch

Across all these tellings two threads twist together — the abandoned woman and the woman who works pharmaka — and it is the second that the long afterlife seized on. As the maga who knows herbs, gathers roots by the dark of the moon, commands the dead, and bends nature to a furious will, Medea became one of the templates from which later Europe assembled its idea of the witch — set beside her aunt Circe, who turns men to swine on her island, and the night-goddess Hecate at the crossroads whom they both serve. The image of the woman who draws down the moon, mixes the drug that heals or kills, and trafficks with the powers of the underworld runs from these Greek figures through Roman poetry into the medieval and early-modern conception of witchcraft; the very vocabulary of magic as a learned, dangerous, woman-marked art carries her fingerprints, and the strand of her craft that compels and questions the dead feeds the long European fear of necromancy. When the modern revivals of Paganism reach back for ancestors of the practitioner-priestess, Medea is among the figures they find waiting at the oldest layer of the record, already complete.

Sources and scholarship

The myth survives in no single canonical text but is assembled across the tradition. The indispensable early narrative is Apollonius of Rhodes’ epic, whose third book is the great ancient anatomy of Medea’s divided love; the standard public-domain English is R. C. Seaton’s Loeb translation, read here in the Theoi Classical Texts Library edition, where the lines naming her priestess of Hecate and fetching her casket of drugs can be found. The Roman re-imaginings are best approached through Ovid: the University of Virginia e-text of the Metamorphoses gives Book 7 and the rejuvenation scene, and recent scholarship on the self-portraying Medea of Heroides 12 is set out in Laurel Fulkerson’s study in Greece & Rome.

For the figure as a whole the touchstone is the collection edited by James J. Clauss and Sarah Iles Johnston, Medea: Essays on Medea in Myth, Literature, Philosophy, and Art (Princeton University Press, 1997), reviewed in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review, which treats her across Euripides, Seneca, the visual record, and the modern stage. The standard scholarly edition of the Athenian play is Donald J. Mastronarde’s Euripides: Medea in the Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics (2002); on the vexed question of who first put the child-murder in Medea’s own hands, the case is laid out by E. A. Thompson and successors in the Classical Quarterly. Her place in the Greek imagination of magic, the restless dead, and Hecate’s service is mapped in Sarah Iles Johnston’s Restless Dead: Encounters between the Living and the Dead in Ancient Greece (University of California Press, 1999).

To stand at the seam where the abandoned wife and the working sorceress become one woman is to see why the figure does not let go. The wrong done to her is ordinary — a husband’s new marriage, a city’s indifference to a foreigner. The answer is not. Medea is the point where a powerlessness anyone might recognize meets a power almost no one has, and the meeting produces neither pity nor punishment but a woman lifted alive into the sky on her grandfather’s fire, owing the world below nothing it can collect.

→ Related: Jason · Hecate · Cassandra · Witchcraft · Magic · Necromancy · Modern Paganism