Jason and Medea: The Greek Myth of Love and Betrayal

← Back to the blog

The Girl Who Cannot Sit Still

Medea cannot sleep. She gets up, paces, sits back down, then gets up again. In the third book of Apollonius of Rhodes's Argonautica, this is what falling in love looks like. Not a swoon — an argument with herself that she keeps losing. She changes her mind about helping Jason three or four times in one night. Then she goes to the temple of Hecate to wait for him anyway. Eros has already shot his arrow, Aphrodite has already arranged the outcome, and her own will was never really running the show.

Apollonius is kinder to Medea than most of the tradition that follows him. He shows the girl, not only the witch she becomes. And he counts exactly what falling in love costs her. She betrays her father. She uses her magic to make Jason immune to the bronze bulls and the men who spring, fully armed, from the dragon's teeth. She kills her own brother, Absyrtus, and scatters pieces of his body in the sea to slow the ships chasing them. Each act closes a door behind her. Each one makes the next a little easier.

By the time the Argo reaches Corinth, Medea has given up everything: her country, her family, her standing as a king's daughter. She arrives as Jason's wife. She also arrives as something more precarious — an exile in a city not entirely comfortable having her, dependent completely on the one man she left everything to follow. This is where Euripides's play actually begins. Not the romance. The bill for it, come due years later, once the adventure has worn off and the real terms of the arrangement are visible.

Euripides's Decision

Euripides's Medea, first performed in 431 BC, did something the tradition had not quite done before. It showed the destruction from Medea's side, and made that side make sense. The play opens with news: Jason intends to abandon Medea and marry the daughter of Creon, king of Corinth — a match that will secure his position in the city. He is not offering to keep Medea on as a second wife, which the tradition would have allowed. He is arranging to have her exiled from Corinth before his new marriage even happens.

His reasoning, laid out in the long debate scene at the center of the play, is almost admirable in its self-interest. He argues the marriage will actually benefit Medea and their sons. He argues he will keep supporting them financially. He argues that the magic she used to save his life in Colchis was really a favor to her — it got her out of what he calls a barbaric country. He is wrong about all of it, and he knows he is wrong. He simply does not have to admit it.

If you like this kind of myth, told the same way: browse the full ten-book series →

What Euripides understood about Jason — and what makes the play devastating rather than just gruesome — is that he is not a villain in any simple sense. He has used someone completely, and now he is making the convenient arrangement his circumstances suggest. He has built a justification so airtight that he can say it to Medea's face without flinching. He gave her nothing, really: the gods sent the love, she supplied the magic, she paid every cost. He only received. Now that the receiving is finished, he is moving on. He seems to actually believe what he is telling her. That is the frightening part.

Why Did Medea Kill Her Children?

Here is the detail most retellings skip. The killing of the children — the single most famous thing about this myth — is not the old story. Earlier versions had the Corinthians kill them, in a riot after Medea's poisoned gifts kill their princess. Other versions have the children die by accident, or simply survive. Euripides made Medea do it on purpose, and audiences in 431 BC found the choice shocking enough that people are still arguing about it. He does not hide what he has done to the myth, either. Medea, on stage, chooses. She knows she is choosing. Her monologue right before the act is one of Greek tragedy's most carefully built passages — maternal love and cold calculation trading lines back and forth, and neither one wins. She does it anyway. The play does not let you look away.

The children are the last thing she can take from him. She knows it. She knows the princess and Creon are already dead from her poisoned gifts. She knows Jason will arrive in time to see the wreckage, and too late to stop any of it. Killing the children closes every exit at once. He cannot retaliate — she will already be gone, lifted away in the chariot her grandfather Helios sends for her. He cannot recover — the children who were meant to be his future in Corinth are gone too. The law cannot reach her — the chariot carries her straight to Athens. It is the most complete revenge the myth has to offer. It is also the most complete act of self-destruction, because the children were hers too, and she knew that, and she did it anyway.

Of all the myths in this tradition, this is the one I find hardest to write around instead of through — there is no comfortable place to stand in it. Apollonius's Medea, the girl who cannot sit still, and Euripides's Medea, standing over her sons' bodies, are the same person. The path between them is built from small choices, each one reasonable at the time, each one narrowing what came after. That is what this myth is actually about. Not villainy. Not sorcery. Not the foreigner nobody should have trusted. It is about what happens when someone gives everything to a man who takes it as his due, and what she does when the debt is never paid. Euripides understood that in 431 BC. He wrote it down anyway, and let her rise into the sky in her grandfather's chariot, leaving Jason on the ground with nothing left to argue with.