Medea

Medea was the daughter of King Aeetes of Colchis and Idyia, an Oceanid. That parentage made her a granddaughter of the sun god Helios and a niece of the sorceress Circe. Apollonius of Rhodes gives her a role in Hecate's own temple, spending her days learning to handle magic herbs under the goddess's teaching rather than in her father's house. When Jason and the Argonauts reached Colchis seeking the Golden Fleece, Hera and Aphrodite arranged for Eros to shoot Medea with a love-arrow. Apollonius devotes long, sympathetic attention to her fear before she decides to help a stranger against her own father. Aeetes had set Jason an apparently fatal task: yoke two fire-breathing bronze bulls, sow a field with dragon's teeth, and defeat the armed warriors that sprang from them. Medea gave Jason a protective drug and made him swear to marry her and take her to Greece. She then told him how to survive the earth-born warriors, led him by night to the sacred grove, and put the fleece's guardian serpent to sleep so he could take it.

The two accounts of what happened next during the escape do not agree. Apollodorus's Library has Medea's brother Apsyrtus sail with the fleeing pair. When Aeetes catches up, she kills her brother herself, cutting his body into pieces and throwing them into the sea. Her father stops the chase to gather the remains. Apollonius of Rhodes tells a darker but different story. There, Medea lures Apsyrtus into a nighttime ambush at a temple of Artemis, promising to betray the Argonauts to him, and it is Jason, not Medea, who strikes the killing blow while she looks away. Both versions agree the murder was a genuine atrocity. Apollodorus reports that Zeus sent a storm against the Argo in anger, and Apollonius has the ship itself refuse to sail on until Circe purifies Jason and Medea of the bloodshed at Aeaea. Back in Iolcus, Jason's uncle Pelias still refused to give up the throne he had usurped. So Medea persuaded Pelias's own daughters to kill and boil their father, falsely promising that her drugs would restore him to youth. She proved the method first on a ram, boiled into a convincing lamb. Pelias's son Acastus then expelled Jason and Medea from the city.

Exiled from Iolcus, Jason and Medea settled in Corinth. Euripides's tragedy Medea picks up the story years later: King Creon has betrothed his daughter Glauce to Jason, and Jason abandons Medea for the advantage of the match. Medea sends Glauce a robe and crown steeped in poison. It burns the princess and her father Creon to death when he tries to save her. What happens to Medea's own children is where the ancient sources split most sharply. Euripides has Medea kill her two sons herself, judging that hurting Jason through them mattered more than sparing them. She then escapes Corinth in a winged chariot sent by her grandfather Helios, out of Jason's reach. Apollodorus records this version but also names another tradition entirely, in which Medea leaves the children as suppliants on the altar of Hera and the Corinthians kill them instead. Pausanias, describing Corinth centuries later, found the Corinthian version already fixed in local memory and cult. He names the children Mermerus and Pheres, records their tomb near the city's market, and reports that the Corinthians stoned them for bringing Glauce her poisoned gifts. The killing was so shocking that yearly sacrifices were later required to appease it.

Medea fled next to Athens and married King Aegeus. Pausanias adds that her flight afterward carried her as far as the land later renamed Media in her honor. When Aegeus's unrecognized son Theseus arrived in the city, Medea saw him as a threat to her own son's claim to the throne. She persuaded Aegeus to poison him at a feast. Aegeus recognized Theseus by his sword only just before the cup reached his lips, dashed it away, and banished Medea instead. The oldest surviving source on Medea, Hesiod's Theogony, knows nothing of any of this violence. It simply records her birth to Aeetes and Idyia and her marriage to Jason, who takes her to Iolcus after his labors. By her he has a son, Medeius, raised in the mountains by the centaur Chiron. That short, conflict-free genealogy is centuries older than Euripides's tragedy. It is a reminder that the murderous Medea most readers know is a later, contested elaboration, not the whole of her ancient tradition.