Play: Medea

Overview

Euripides' Medea (431 BCE) is a Greek tragedy that follows a foreign woman's calculated revenge after her husband betrays her. Set in Corinth and presented at the City Dionysia, it upends heroic myth by focusing on domestic rupture and the extremity of wounded honor. The heroine, a sorceress and granddaughter of Helios, confronts the limits of marriage, citizenship, and motherhood, steering the play toward one of antiquity's starkest endings.

Setting and Premise

After helping Jason win the Golden Fleece, fleeing her homeland, and committing crimes for his sake, Medea lives in Corinth with their two sons. Jason abandons her to marry Glauce, daughter of King Creon, seeking social advancement. Medea becomes a despised foreigner without legal protection, her household dismantled, her value in the Greek city reduced to nothing. Creon, fearing Medea’s wrath, decrees her immediate exile with the children.

Plot Summary

The play opens with the Nurse mourning Medea’s raging grief. Offstage cries reveal Medea’s suicidal despair turning toward vengeance. Creon enters to banish her; Medea persuades him to grant one day’s reprieve, masking her intent. Left alone, she announces a plan to destroy the royal house and contemplate the unthinkable, striking at Jason through their sons.

Aegeus, king of Athens, arrives seeking a cure for his childlessness. Medea secures from him an oath of sanctuary if she reaches Athens, giving her a safe exit route; in return she promises to help him conceive. With escape assured, she solidifies her plot. She feigns submission to Jason, arguing that his new alliance could benefit their sons. To prove her acceptance, she asks him to have Glauce accept a “peace offering”: a fine robe and golden diadem.

The gifts are laced with deadly poison. A Messenger soon reports the catastrophe in vivid detail: when Glauce dresses in the finery, the corrosive poison consumes her flesh; Creon, trying to save his daughter, clings to her and dies as well. Medea then turns to the most terrible deed: after a searing inner debate, she kills her children offstage to annihilate Jason’s future and ensure no enemy exploits them. Their cries pierce the doors while the Chorus of Corinthian women, horrified, stands powerless, restrained by the conventions of the city and the theatre.

Jason rushes in to protect the boys or, failing that, to bury them, but Medea appears above the stage in a chariot of the sun god, lifted beyond human reach. She refuses him the bodies and outlines their burial at Hera’s sanctuary, establishing expiatory rites. She foretells for Jason an inglorious death and departs for Athens, where Aegeus’s oath will shield her. Jason is left shattered, denouncing her as monstrous, while Medea asserts that their suffering is the price of his betrayal.

Characters and Chorus

Medea is cunning, eloquent, and terrifyingly resolute, a liminal figure both divine and alien to Corinth. Jason is pragmatic and self-justifying, claiming his remarriage serves the family’s prosperity. Creon is a fearful ruler whose caution brings ruin; Glauce is the silent center of courtly ambition. Aegeus offers Medea lawful refuge, an anchor for her escape. The Nurse and Tutor frame the domestic stakes, while the Chorus comments with pity and alarm, witnessing a moral order breaking in real time.

Themes and Shape

The drama explores the fragility of oaths and the economics of marriage, the vulnerability of women and foreigners in the polis, and the logic of revenge carried to its extreme. Legal power, divine sanction, and rhetoric entangle until the final tableau, where a god’s chariot seals a human catastrophe. Medea’s victory is absolute and unbearable, leaving a city stunned and a myth irrevocably recast.