Title: Medea Author: Euripides Creation Date: 431 BCE Location: Greece (Athens)
Summary
Medea is a foreign princess — granddaughter of the Sun god Helios, a sorceress from Colchis at the edge of the known world — who betrayed her family and murdered her own brother to help Jason and the Argonauts seize the Golden Fleece. Now in Corinth, Jason abandons her to marry Glauce, daughter of King Creon, seeking political advantage. Medea is to be exiled with her two young sons.
The play follows her from despair through calculated fury to a revenge so extreme it has haunted audiences ever since: she poisons Glauce and Creon, then kills her own children to destroy everything Jason values. The great speech before the murders — swinging between maternal love and the compulsion toward annihilation — is among the most psychologically raw passages in ancient literature.
She escapes on the chariot of Helios, beyond human justice, leaving Jason shattered below. There is no resolution, no restored order, no comfort of any kind.
Why This Book Matters
Medea is one of the most radical works of Greek tragedy. It places a foreign woman — the ultimate outsider in Greek society — at its centre, and gives her an intelligence and eloquence that surpass every man in the play. Her speech on the condition of women ("Of all creatures that have breath and consciousness, we women are the most miserable") is among the earliest and most startling statements in Western literature about women's vulnerability within marriage and public life.
The play forces its audience to sympathise with someone who commits an atrocity, and in doing so it collapses every comfortable boundary between victim and perpetrator, civilisation and barbarism, justice and vengeance. Euripides was asking what happens to those who are denied recourse within the system — whether that system is a Greek city-state or any other. The question has never lost its urgency, and no writer has posed it with greater ferocity.
Historical Context
Medea was first performed in 431 BCE at the City Dionysia in Athens, where it placed third in the tragic competition — a result that baffled later generations, who came to regard it as one of the supreme achievements of Greek drama. That same year, the Peloponnesian War began, and Athens was already a city under pressure, its democratic confidence fraying.
Euripides (c. 480–406 BCE) was the most controversial of the three great tragedians, consistently pushing against Athenian assumptions about gender, the gods, and civic virtue. Athens confined women to the household and denied them political rights; it was deeply suspicious of foreigners. His sympathetic portrayal of a barbarian woman who outwits and destroys the Greek men around her was a calculated provocation. Where Aeschylus affirmed civic order and Sophocles tested it, Euripides questioned whether Greek order deserved affirmation at all.
Literary Significance
Medea revolutionised dramatic characterisation. Euripides created a protagonist who is simultaneously sympathetic and monstrous, reasonable and catastrophic — a psychological complexity that anticipates the modern novel by more than two thousand years. The structure is deceptively austere: a single day, a single location, a single arc from injury to annihilation. The debate between Medea and Jason is a masterclass in dramatic rhetoric; each speaks with complete internal logic, and the audience cannot fully side with either.
The play's afterlife is extraordinarily rich. Pier Paolo Pasolini's 1969 film, starring Maria Callas, reimagined it as a collision between archaic and modern worlds. Christa Wolf's novel Medea: Stimmen (1996) rehabilitated Medea as a political refugee framed by Corinthian authorities. Anne Carson's translation Grief Is the Thing with Feathers brought a searing contemporary voice to the text. Few ancient works have generated such a sustained, urgent conversation across two and a half millennia.
Research Notes
Selected to represent Euripides and to ensure the Civilisations collection includes a work centred on gender, outsiderhood, and the limits of justice — all themes ancient Greek tragedy raises but few plays press as hard as this one.
Anne Carson's translation brings a bracingly contemporary intensity; her version treats the Greek as living argument rather than museum exhibit. For a more literal approach, Emily Wilson's translation is precise and clear; Diane Arnson Svarlien's version (available freely through Perseus/Hackett) is reliable for first-time readers. The play's afterlife is exceptionally rich: Pier Paolo Pasolini's 1969 film cast Maria Callas in the title role with haunting effect; Christa Wolf's Medea: Stimmen (1996) reconstructed the myth entirely, making Medea an innocent falsely accused by a corrupt Corinth. Both works confirm that the play has never settled into the past — it keeps returning as a mirror for the present.
The Reading
Prologue
The Nurse stands before the house in Corinth and wishes the past undone:
How I wish the Argo's hull had never winged through the dark Clashing Rocks to the land of Colchis. How I wish the pine trees had never been felled in the glens of Pelion to furnish oars for the heroes who went to fetch the Golden Fleece for Pelias. For then my mistress Medea would not have sailed for the towers of Iolcus, her heart on fire with love for Jason.
This opening traces the chain of causation back to the beginning — to the ship, the voyage, the quest for the Golden Fleece — because what is about to happen in Corinth is the final consequence of a story that began in a faraway kingdom when a princess fell in love with a Greek adventurer and destroyed everything for him.
The Nurse tells us the situation. Medea — princess of Colchis, granddaughter of the Sun, a woman of formidable intelligence and terrifying power — has been abandoned. Jason, the man for whom she betrayed her father, murdered her brother, and left her homeland forever, has married the daughter of Creon, king of Corinth. He claims it is a political arrangement, a move to secure their children's future. Medea sees it for what it is: the ultimate betrayal.
From inside the house, Medea's voice is heard — a raw scream:
Oh, I am wretched! Oh, the misery of it! I wish I were dead!
The Nurse is frightened. She tells the children's Tutor to keep the boys away from their mother. I know her. She will not rest until she has struck at someone. I only pray it is her enemies and not her loved ones.
Parodos and First Episode
The Chorus of Corinthian women arrives. They have heard Medea's cries and come in sympathy. They ask the Nurse to bring Medea out.
Medea appears. And the transformation is startling. The woman who has been screaming in anguish is now cold, controlled, articulate. She speaks to the Chorus as one woman to others, and she delivers the speech that has echoed through twenty-five centuries:
Of all things which are living and can form a judgment, we women are the most unfortunate creatures. First, with an excess of wealth, it is required for us to buy a husband and take for our bodies a master — for this is an evil worse than the first. And the great question: will he be a bad one or a good one? For there is no easy escape for a woman, nor can she say no to her marriage. She arrives among new customs and rules she has not learned at home, and she must be a prophet to know how best to manage her bedmate. And if we work this out well and a husband lives with us without finding the yoke too heavy to bear, our life is to be envied. But if not, we might as well be dead. When a man is tired of the company at home, he can go out and find relief among his friends. But we are forced to keep our eyes on one alone. They say we live a life free from danger at home while they fight wars — fools! I would rather stand three times in the front of battle than bear one child.
This is not a woman raving. This is a precise analysis of the condition of women in Greek society, delivered with devastating calm. Medea sees her situation with perfect clarity, and she has already begun to plan.
Creon arrives. He has come to exile Medea — he fears her reputation, her intelligence, her anger. He gives her one day to leave Corinth with her children. Medea supplicates him. She grasps his knees, weeps, begs. She asks for just one day to prepare — to find provisions, to make arrangements for her children. Creon, against his better judgment, agrees. He knows he is making a mistake. I know you are planning something, he says. But I am too soft-hearted to deny you.
Creon leaves. Medea turns to the Chorus and the mask of supplication drops. She has already found her method. One day is enough.
Jason's Visit
Jason arrives to explain himself, and the scene between them is one of the most extraordinary pieces of dramatic writing in antiquity — two people who once loved each other, locked in a rhetoric of mutual destruction.
Jason's argument is that he has done nothing wrong. He married the princess for practical reasons — to secure a position for himself and, he claims, for Medea and their children. You would still be a barbarian in a barbarian land, he says, if I had not brought you to Greece. You owe me everything. And you repay me with hysteria.
Medea's response is a masterpiece of controlled fury. She catalogs everything she did for him: she saved his life in Colchis, she killed the serpent that guarded the Fleece, she betrayed her father, she murdered her own brother and scattered his limbs on the sea to slow her father's pursuit, she arranged the death of Pelias — all for Jason. And now?
Where am I to go? To my father's house? Which I betrayed for you? To the wretched daughters of Pelias? Whose father I killed for you? I have made enemies of everyone I knew — for your sake. And the great reward? The most devoted wife in Greece. A wonderful, trustworthy husband I have! I, wretched woman, am to be cast out, exiled, stripped of friends. A fine reflection on a bridegroom — that his former wife and children should be beggars.
Jason offers money. Medea rejects it with contempt. Jason claims the gods, not he, are responsible for Medea's love — Aphrodite made her fall for him. Medea is incredulous: You dare thank the gods and give me nothing?
They part in mutual hatred. But Medea has learned what she needs. Jason's weakness is vanity and ambition. His love for his children is real but shallow — a love of possession, of legacy, not of the children themselves. She knows where to strike.
The Plan
Aegeus, king of Athens, passes through Corinth on his way from the oracle at Delphi. Medea secures from him a promise of sanctuary — she will have a place to flee after the deed is done. This is crucial: Medea does not plan to die. She plans to destroy and to survive.
Now she reveals her full design to the Chorus. She will send her children to the princess with gifts — a golden crown and a finely woven robe, both anointed with poison. When the princess puts them on, she and anyone who touches her will die in agony. And then — the thing that has made audiences gasp and weep and argue for two and a half thousand years — she will kill her own children.
She tells the Chorus. They are horrified. They beg her to stop. She does not waver.
The Agony
But Euripides does not make it easy. Before the murders, he gives Medea a speech of such psychological complexity that it defies every simple reading of her as monster or hero:
Oh my children, my children. You have a city, you have a home. You will live forever — without your wretched mother. I am going to another land, an exile, before I have had the joy of seeing you happy, before I have dressed your brides and made your marriage beds and held the torches at your weddings.
She wavers. She looks at her children and her resolve melts:
Oh, what am I to do? My heart fails me, women, when I see the bright faces of my children. I cannot do it. I renounce my plans. I will take my children with me when I go. Why should I hurt them in order to hurt their father, and suffer twice as much myself? I will not do it. I renounce my plans.
But then the fury returns:
No! By the avenging spirits of the underworld — no! I will not leave my children to be abused by my enemies. The thing must be done. There is no escape. The crown is already on her head. The princess is dying in the golden dress — I know it. No, my heart, do not do this thing. Let the children go. Spare them. They will be a joy to you in Athens.
No. By all the demons of hell, I will not hand my children over to my enemies to mock and mistreat. The thing is decided. They must die. And since they must die, I who gave them life will give them death. My resolve is fixed. It will not change.
She embraces them for the last time. She touches their skin, their hands, their faces. She weeps. And then she takes them inside.
The Messenger
A Messenger arrives from the palace and delivers one of the most gruesome speeches in Greek drama. The princess received the gifts. She was delighted — she put on the crown, admired herself in a mirror, walked up and down, stretching her feet, looking at her ankles. Then the colour drained from her face. She staggered. Foam came from her mouth. Her eyes rolled. She screamed. The golden crown was eating into her skull, melting the flesh, and the robe was consuming her body. Her skin came away from the bones like resin from a pine-torch. Her father Creon ran to her, threw his arms around her, and the poison seized him too — the robe clung to his flesh, and when he tried to rise, it stripped the meat from his bones. Father and daughter died together in a mass of unrecognisable flesh.
The Chorus hears the screams of the children from inside the house. They debate rushing in. They do not.
Exodus
The doors open — or rather, the roof opens. Medea appears above the house, in the chariot of the Sun, her grandfather Helios, drawn by winged dragons. The children's bodies are with her.
Jason arrives, frantic, expecting to find Medea dead at the hands of the Corinthians. Instead he sees her — airborne, untouchable, beyond his reach, beyond human justice.
Jason screams: You monster! You most detestable of women! You killed them — your own children — and you destroyed me.
Medea replies from above: I grieve, but the laughter of my enemies I will not bear.
Jason begs for the bodies — just to bury them, to touch them one last time. Medea refuses. She will bury them herself, in the precinct of Hera, where no enemy can desecrate their graves.
Jason curses her. Medea curses him back: You will die as you deserve — a nobody's death, struck by a piece of the rotting Argo, the ship that carried us to this disaster.
The chariot rises. Medea is gone. Jason is left alone on stage, broken, childless, reaching upward toward the bodies he will never touch.
The Chorus speaks the final lines:
Many are the forms of what is unknown. Much that the gods achieve is surprise. What we looked for did not come to pass. God found a way for what no one expected. So ends this story.
The play offers no consolation, no catharsis in the comfortable sense. Medea is not punished. She escapes on a divine conveyance, suggesting that the gods — or at least the sun, her ancestor — endorse her, or at minimum permit her survival. Jason, whose selfish betrayal set everything in motion, suffers the consequences but learns nothing — his final speeches are self-pitying rather than self-aware. The children, who are innocent, die.
What Euripides has created is a play that refuses to resolve. Medea is simultaneously the wronged woman whose fury is comprehensible and the monster who kills her own children. The audience cannot simply condemn her without acknowledging the justice of her grievance, nor can they sympathise with her without confronting the horror of what she does. This is the play's genius and its cruelty: it places the audience in an impossible moral position and refuses to release them from it. Two and a half millennia later, it still does not let go.
This post is part of Civilisations, a 149-book chronological journey through world literature. See the full collection →
The two recommended standalone translations are Robin Robertson's electrifying verse rendering (Free Press, 2008), which captures the raw fury and emotional momentum of the play, and Diane Arnson Svarlien's precise, graceful version (Hackett Classics, 2008), which is excellent for first-time readers and widely used in university courses. For those who want Medea alongside the other great Greek tragedies, Emily Wilson's translation appears in The Greek Plays (Modern Library, 2016), a landmark anthology edited by Mary Lefkowitz and James Romm.
By Robin Robertson. An electrifying verse translation by the award-winning Scottish poet. Captures the play's raw fury and psychological intensity.
By Diane Arnson Svarlien. Graceful, economical, and meticulously faithful — the ideal introduction for first-time readers.
Includes Emily Wilson's precise translation of Medea alongside fifteen other masterpieces of Greek drama. The best single-volume anthology available.
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