Mēdēa

Mēdēa (Mēdeia), in Greek myth, daughter of Aeētēs, king of Colchis, and like her aunt Circē an enchantress. When Jason and the Argonauts arrived at Colchis in pursuit of the Golden Fleece, Aeetes consented to surrender it to Jason if the latter would perform certain apparently impossible tasks. These included the sowing of a dragon's teeth from which armed men arose whose fury was turned against Jason. With the help of Medea's magic the tasks were successfully accomplished, and Medea finally enabled Jason to take the fleece by killing or drugging the serpent that guarded it. She engineered the Argonauts' escape from Aeetes; in one version of the story she murdered and cut into pieces her young brother Apsyrtus, scattering the fragments so that her father might be delayed in his pursuit of the Argonauts by gathering up the body; in other versions Apsyrtus is grown up and leads the pursuit until Medea contrives his murder. At Iolcus Medea took vengeance on Pelias (Jason's uncle) for the wrong done by him to Jason's family. First she restored Aeson, Jason's father, to youth by boiling him in a cauldron with magic herbs, and then persuaded the daughters of Pelias to submit their father to the same process. But on this occasion she deliberately gave them ineffective herbs, and the daughters were unwittingly the cause of their father's death. Acastus, their brother, then drove Jason and Medea from Iolcus and they took refuge in Corinth. For the rest of the story, see MEDEA below. Medea was the subject of tragedies by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, but only that of Euripides survives. Seneca the Younger and Ovid (see (2) and (3) below) also wrote tragedies about her; she receives a more romantic treatment by Apollonius Rhodius, and by Ovid in Heroides and Metamorphoses.