Few couples in mythology begin as promisingly, or end as terribly, as Jason and Medea. She was the princess and sorceress who made his quest possible; he was the foreign hero for whom she betrayed her father, her country, and her own brother. They escaped together with the Golden Fleece, married, and had children. Then Jason abandoned her for a younger bride with a royal dowry, and Medea’s revenge became the most notorious act in all of Greek tragedy. The story has been retold for two and a half thousand years, and every age has asked the same question: is Medea a monster, a victim, or both?
A Granddaughter of the Sun
Medea was the daughter of Aeëtes, king of Colchis, and granddaughter of Helios, the sun. Her aunt was the enchantress Circe, who turned Odysseus’s men into pigs. Medea herself was a priestess of Hecate, the goddess of witchcraft, crossroads, and the night, and she knew the uses of every herb and root.
When Jason arrived in Colchis, the goddesses who favoured him arranged for Eros to shoot Medea with an arrow of desire. In the Argonautica of Apollonius, her love is not a simple enchantment: she lies awake all night, weighing shame against passion, and even contemplates poisoning herself rather than betray her father. In the end she chooses Jason.
The Price of the Fleece
Medea’s help made the winning of the fleece possible (see The Quest for the Golden Fleece). In return, Jason swore by the gods to take her to Greece as his wedded wife and never abandon her. That oath is the hinge of everything that follows.
The escape required a crime. The Colchians, led by Medea’s brother Apsyrtus, pursued the Argo. In the older and grimmer version, Medea took her young brother with her on the ship, then killed and dismembered him, throwing the pieces into the sea so that her father would have to stop and gather them for burial. In Apollonius’s version, Apsyrtus is a grown man leading the pursuit, and Jason ambushes and kills him after Medea lures him to a meeting. Either way, the couple’s union was founded on the blood of her kin. Zeus was angered, and the Argonauts had to be purified of the murder by Circe before they could continue home.
Magic in Iolcus
When they reached Iolcus, Medea used her magic both to heal and to kill. Ovid tells how she restored Jason’s aged father Aeson to youth: she gathered herbs for nine days and nights in a dragon-drawn chariot, drained the old man’s blood, and filled his veins with her potion, until his white hair turned black and forty years fell from him.
To punish Pelias, who had usurped Jason’s throne, she deceived his daughters. Before their eyes she cut up an old ram and boiled it in a cauldron with herbs, and a young lamb leapt out. The daughters, believing they could restore their father’s youth in the same way, killed Pelias and cut him into pieces. Medea did not provide the herbs. The horrified people of Iolcus expelled Jason and Medea, and Pelias’s son Acastus took the throne.
Exiles in Corinth
The couple found refuge in Corinth, where Medea had ancestral claims (in some traditions her father had once ruled there). They lived together for ten years and had several children — usually two sons, sometimes named Mermerus and Pheres.
Then Jason saw an opportunity. King Creon of Corinth offered him the hand of his daughter Glauce (called Creusa in some sources). Marriage to a Greek princess would give Jason what he had never regained: a throne and a secure place in society. Medea, a foreign woman with no family to protect her, was cast aside. Creon, fearing her powers, ordered her to leave Corinth with her children immediately.
Euripides’s Medea
The version of the story that has shaped every later telling is Euripides’s tragedy Medea, first performed in Athens in 431 BCE. It placed third out of three in the dramatic competition that year — the Athenians were apparently not ready for it — but it has become one of the most performed plays in history.
Euripides gives Medea some of the most powerful speeches ever written for a woman on the Athenian stage. She speaks to the women of Corinth about the injustice of a wife’s lot: a woman must buy a husband with a dowry and take a master for her body; she cannot divorce him with honour; and men say women live safely at home while they fight with the spear. “I would rather stand three times in the battle line,” she says, “than bear one child.”
Jason, in the play, is smug and self-justifying. He argues that his new marriage is really for the benefit of Medea and the children, and that she should be grateful he brought her from barbarian lands to civilized Greece. His hollow reasoning makes Medea’s rage almost sympathetic.
The Revenge
Medea gains one day’s delay from Creon. She uses it to secure a refuge: Aegeus, king of Athens, passing through Corinth, promises to shelter her in return for her help in curing his childlessness. (This same Aegeus would later father the hero Theseus.)
Then she acts. She sends her children to the princess with gifts: a fine robe and a golden crown, both steeped in poison. When Glauce puts them on, the crown bursts into flame and the robe eats into her flesh. Creon, embracing his dying daughter, is caught in the poison and dies with her.
Finally — and this is the element that may have been Euripides’s own invention — Medea kills her own sons. In earlier versions of the story, the children were killed by the Corinthians in revenge for the death of their king, or died accidentally when Medea tried to make them immortal. Euripides makes their death a deliberate choice: Medea kills them to leave Jason childless and without a future, and to prevent them from being killed by her enemies. Her monologue before the act, in which she changes her mind several times, is one of the most harrowing speeches in world drama.
At the play’s end, Medea appears above the stage in a chariot drawn by dragons, sent by her grandfather the Sun, with the bodies of her children. Jason, below, begs to be allowed to touch them. She refuses and flies to Athens.
After Corinth
In Athens, Medea married Aegeus and bore him a son, Medus. When the young Theseus arrived in Athens, Medea recognized him as Aegeus’s heir and tried to poison him, but Aegeus recognized his son’s sword just in time and dashed the cup away. Medea fled again, with Medus, eventually returning to Asia; the ancients said the Medes were named after her son.
Jason, having broken his oath, lost the favour of the gods. He died alone beneath the rotting hulk of the Argo.
Monster or Victim?
Readers have always been divided. The Roman philosopher Seneca wrote his own Medea as a study of passion overwhelming reason. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Medea was reclaimed as a figure of women’s rage against a society that left them powerless; the play was performed in support of women’s suffrage. Others have read her as the archetypal outsider — a foreign woman, feared for her knowledge, abandoned once she is no longer useful.
What makes the story endure is that Euripides refuses easy answers. Medea’s grievance is real, and Jason’s betrayal is contemptible. But her revenge falls hardest on the innocent. The play leaves its audience horrified and uncertain — which is exactly what great tragedy is meant to do.
Last reviewed: September 2026.