Jason and Medea: A Love Story That Ends in Ruins

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Why Did Medea Kill Her Children?

This is Euripides's addition to the myth — earlier versions had the children killed by the Corinthians, or by accident, or not attributed to Medea at all. Euripides made her choose it deliberately. The play does not give a single clean reason, because there is not a single clean reason: the children were the last thing she could take from Jason, and she took them. The monologue before the act is one of Greek tragedy's most technically accomplished passages — maternal love and cold intention alternating in lines that never resolve. She does it. The play does not look away.

The love story begins beautifully. Apollonius of Rhodes, in the third book of the Argonautica, gives us Medea falling in love with Jason with one of antiquity's most precise psychological portraits: the girl who cannot sleep, who gets up and then sits down again, who changes her mind about helping him three or four times and then finally goes to the temple of Hecate to wait for him, because she cannot not go, because Eros has shot his arrow and the goddess Aphrodite has arranged it and individual will is not really the governing factor here. Apollonius is compassionate toward Medea in a way that the later tradition often is not. He shows us the girl as well as the witch. He shows us what it costs her to do what love requires: she betrays her father, she uses her considerable magical knowledge to make Jason proof against the bronze giants and the dragon's teeth, she kills her brother Absyrtus and scatters his dismembered body in the sea to slow pursuit — each step a further point of no return, each commitment making the next one inevitable.

By the time the Argo reaches Corinth, Medea has given up everything. Her country, her family, her position as a king's daughter with her own standing and skills. She arrives in Corinth as Jason's wife — and as something more ambiguous, an exile and a foreigner in a city that is not entirely comfortable having her, who is entirely dependent on the man she left everything to follow. This is the condition Euripides's play begins with, and the situation it inherits from history: not the romance but its aftermath, the lived reality of the arrangement after the excitement of the quest has passed and the actual terms of the partnership become clear.

Euripides's Decision

Euripides's Medea, performed in 431 BC, did something the tradition had not quite done before: it showed the destruction from Medea's perspective and made that perspective comprehensible. The play begins with the news that Jason intends to abandon Medea and marry the daughter of Creon, king of Corinth — a politically advantageous match that will secure his position in the city. He does not propose to take Medea with him as a secondary wife, which the tradition would have allowed. He proposes to dispose of her, arranging for her to be exiled from Corinth before the marriage. His reasoning, as he presents it in the long debate scene that is the center of the play, is almost admirably self-serving: he argues that his marriage to the princess will benefit Medea and their sons, that he will maintain financial support, that the supernatural assistance she gave him in Colchis was actually a benefit to her since it got her out of a barbaric country. He is wrong about everything and he knows he is wrong. He does not admit it because he does not have to.

What Euripides understood about Jason, and what makes the play devastating rather than merely gruesome, is that he is not a villain in the simple sense. He is a man who has used someone very completely and who is now making the expedient arrangement that his circumstances suggest, and who has constructed a self-justifying narrative so airtight that he can deliver it to Medea's face without flinching. He gave her nothing, in any meaningful sense — the gods sent love to her, she used her own gifts and knowledge, she paid the costs. He received. And now the receiving is complete and he is moving on. He genuinely seems to believe his own argument. This is the most frightening thing about him.

What Medea Does and Why

The killing of the children is Euripides's addition to the myth — or at least, the attribution of it to Medea is. Earlier traditions had the children killed by the Corinthians, or killed accidentally, or survived. Euripides made Medea do it deliberately, and the choice was considered shocking in antiquity, and it remains the most morally confronting thing in the play, which is why scholars and directors have never quite finished arguing about it. The play does not conceal Medea's agency: she chooses to kill the children, she knows she is choosing, she describes the internal conflict in a monologue that is one of Greek tragedy's most technically accomplished passages — the mind arguing with itself, the maternal love and the cold intention alternating in lines that never resolve. She does it. Euripides does not provide a simple reason, because there is not a simple reason. There are several reasons, and they are all true simultaneously.

The children are the last thing she can take from Jason. She knows this. She knows the princess and Creon are already dead from the poisoned gifts. She knows Jason will arrive in time to see what has happened and too late to prevent it. The killing of the children is the action that closes every exit: Jason cannot retaliate against her after, because she will have ascended in the chariot sent by her grandfather Helios; he cannot recover from it, because the children who would have been his future in Corinth are gone; she cannot be reached by the law, because the chariot takes her to Athens. It is the most complete vengeance the myth could construct. It is also the most complete self-destruction, because the children were hers too, and she knew it, and she did it anyway. This is the thing the play never lets you look away from: that she knew.

The Jason and Medea story is the one in the mythological tradition that I find hardest to write around rather than through, because it does not have a position that is comfortable to occupy. Apollonius's compassionate Medea falling in love and the Euripidean Medea at the end of the play are the same person, and the path between them is made of choices each of which made sense in the moment and accumulated into catastrophe. This is what the myth is actually about — not villainy, not magic, not the exotic foreigner who cannot be trusted. It is about what happens when a person gives everything and receives exploitation in return, and when the exploitation is so complete that only complete destruction can answer it. Euripides understood this in 431 BC. He wrote it down. We are still arguing about it. Euripides would not be surprised.