Euripides' Medea: summary and themes

Medea is a tragedy by Euripides of Athens. It takes place in front of a house in Corinth. Medea comes from Colchis, a land far from Greece. She helped Jason win the Golden Fleece, left her father's home and sailed away with him (476–485). They have two young sons. As the play opens, Jason has left her to marry the daughter of Creon, the king of Corinth. Creon then orders Medea to leave the city with her children. She begs for one more day, and he gives it to her (340–356).

She uses that day for revenge. Aegeus, the king of Athens, passes by, and she makes him swear to give her a safe home. She sends her sons to the princess with a fine robe and a gold crown as gifts. The gifts are poisoned, and the princess and Creon both die. Then Medea kills her two sons, inside the house, so that Jason will have no children left (803–806). This is the most terrible act in the play, and the play calls it terrible. At the end she escapes out of Jason's reach in a chariot given by the Sun, her grandfather, and leaves for Athens.

In her first long speech (214–266) Medea addresses the women of Corinth, who form the chorus. A foreigner, ξένος, she says, must fit in with the city (222). Then she sets their life against hers. They have a city and a father's house. She is ἔρημος and ἄπολις, alone and without a city, taken ἐκ γῆς βαρβάρου, from a non-Greek land, with no mother, brother or relative to turn to (253–258). The chorus says the same in song: ἐπὶ δὲ ξένᾳ ναίεις χθονί, you live on foreign soil (433–435).

Jason turns this into an argument. She has gained, he says, by living in Greece, ἀντὶ βαρβάρου χθονός, instead of a non-Greek land (536–538). At the end he says that no Greek woman, Ἑλληνὶς γυνή, would have dared to do this (1339–1340). Yet the play is not simply about locals who hate a stranger. Creon says he fears her for other reasons: she is σοφή, clever and skilled in harm, and she has made threats (282–289). The Corinthian women even promise her their silence and agree that punishing Jason is just (267), until they learn what she plans for the children (811–818). Calling this xenophobia is a modern way to read the play. What the text does show is how exposed a person is with no city and no family nearby.

The play comes back again and again to the ὅρκος, the oath. Jason swore to Medea, and she cries out his oaths (21, 161). The chorus sings that the grace of oaths has gone (439). So when Aegeus offers her a home, she makes him swear by the Earth and the Sun (746–755). The modern word for revenge, εκδίκηση, is not in the play: ἐκδίκησις is a later word, found in Polybius and the New Testament. Euripides says τείσειν δίκην, to pay the penalty: her enemies, she hopes, will pay (767).

Medea's killing of her sons is the hardest part of the play, and it is not hidden or excused. She announces it and calls it ἔργον ἀνοσιώτατον, a most unholy act (792–796). The chorus begs her not to do it. She gives her reasons: she will not be laughed at by enemies (797), and this will hurt Jason most (817). She wavers in front of the boys and speaks to her own θυμός, her anger or passion (1056). Then come the famous words: θυμὸς δὲ κρείσσων τῶν ἐμῶν βουλευμάτων, my anger is stronger than my plans (1079). Scholars disagree about this passage: Reeve argued that lines 1056–1080 should be deleted, while Kovacs defends most of them. The deaths are not shown. The audience only hears the boys calling from inside the house (1271–1278).

An ancient summary, the ὑπόθεσις attributed to Aristophanes of Byzantium, gives the date and the result: 431 BC, Euphorion first, Sophocles second, Euripides third, with Medea, Philoctetes, Dictys and the satyr play Theristai. So this famous play came last of three in its own contest. Aristotle later refers to it in the Poetics: Medea kills knowingly (1453b), but he faults the escape ἀπὸ μηχανῆς, by the stage machine (1454b).

Medea may not always have been the killer. Ancient notes on the play (scholia on lines 9 and 264) quote Parmeniscus, who says that the Corinthians killed her children at the altar of Hera Akraia. The same notes repeat a tale that Corinth paid Euripides five talents to move the blame to Medea, which cannot be checked. Pausanias (2.3.6–7) saw a tomb of the children at Corinth, names them Mermerus and Pheres (the play leaves them unnamed), and says they were reported stoned by Corinthians. This suggests that a mother who chooses to kill may be Euripides' own change, though it cannot be proved: an ancient summary reports the claim that he took the play from a Medea by Neophron, whose date is uncertain.