Medea: Summary

Medea · Summary

A beat by beat guide to what actually happens in Euripides’ Medea, the play Leaving Cert 2027 students meet on the comparative course, set out in the order it unfolds onstage.

Before the Play Begins

Medea is a princess of Colchis and a sorceress. Before the action of the play starts, she helped Jason steal the Golden Fleece, betrayed her own father in the process, and killed her own brother to slow down those chasing them. Later she engineered the death of Jason’s uncle Pelias, again in Jason’s interest. By the time the play opens, years have passed and Medea and Jason are exiles living in Corinth, married, with two young sons. None of this history is shown onstage. Everything the audience actually sees is built on top of it.

A Marriage Announcement, and a Woman Screaming Offstage

Jason has agreed to marry the daughter of Creon, the king of Corinth. His justification, stated openly, is that the new match secures a future for the whole family, Medea and the boys included. Medea does not appear onstage straight away. Instead the audience hears her screaming from inside the house, a sound that tells everyone, before she ever speaks a word of argument, the scale of what has just been done to her.

Buying a Single Day

Creon comes in person to banish Medea from Corinth at once, afraid of what she might do once the marriage goes ahead. Medea persuades him to grant her one extra day before she has to leave. It is the only concession she asks for in the entire play, and it turns out to be everything she needs to set the rest of her plan in motion.

An Escape Route from Athens

Aegeus, the king of Athens, passes through Corinth while Medea is still there. In exchange for a promise of a cure for his childlessness, he swears to give her sanctuary in Athens. That guarantee of somewhere to go afterwards is what makes the rest of her plan possible. Without it, acting on her anger would leave her with nowhere left to run.

The Poisoned Robe and Coronet

With her extra day secured and her escape arranged, Medea sends her two sons to Jason’s new bride carrying a robe and a coronet as gifts. Both are poisoned. The princess dies wearing them, and Creon, her father, dies trying to save her. Neither of these two deaths is the final blow Medea actually intends to land.

The Final Act

Medea kills her own two sons offstage. When Jason finally arrives, it is too late. He finds her above him, carried in a chariot sent by her grandfather the Sun, holding the bodies of their children and refusing to let him bury them. The play ends there, with Jason left below her, having lost the marriage, the family, and any say in what happens next.

Who’s Who

Medea is the granddaughter of the Sun, a sorceress, a princess who gave up her homeland for Jason, and by some distance the most articulate character on the stage. Jason is not written as a monster, which is arguably worse. He genuinely believes his new marriage is a sensible, practical decision that benefits everyone, and he never once grasps why Medea is so angry. Creon is a father trying to protect his daughter, and it is that single act of mercy, granting Medea one extra day, that ultimately kills him. The Nurse and the Tutor open the play and tell the audience what to fear before Medea ever appears onstage. As servants, they see everything first. The Chorus of Corinthian women is unusually active for a Greek chorus: they sympathise with Medea, stay silent when they could have warned Creon, and beg her to stop at the very end. They are the nearest thing the play has to a stand in for the audience.

A Note on Translation and Quotation

Medea was written in Greek, and the exact wording of any line depends entirely on which translation a class is using. Public domain versions by translators such as E. P. Coleridge and Gilbert Murray are widely available, but they differ from each other and from more modern versions. Because of that, this page describes what happens in the play rather than quoting it directly. If you are quoting for the exam, learn the wording from your own edition and name the translator if the question invites it. The moments themselves are the same in every version, even where the exact phrasing changes.

Medea Summary: Using This in the Exam

How to use it: Four moments carry almost any question on Medea: the request for one more day from Creon, the arrangement with Aegeus, the sending of the poisoned gifts, and the final confrontation from the chariot. Name the moment and the character involved, then make your point about it rather than simply retelling the story. Keep any quotation short and drawn from your own edition, since an examiner familiar with a different translation will notice a misremembered quote faster than a missing one.

Conclusion

The plot of Medea moves in a straight, deliberate line: a betrayal, a bargain for time, an escape route secured, and a revenge carried out in careful stages rather than in a single furious act. Knowing the order of these beats, and who is responsible for each turn, gives you the groundwork for the character and theme work built on top of it elsewhere in this study set.