Medea

Comparative · 2027 Leaving Cert

Euripides wrote Medea in 431 BC, and it still lands like a punch. A wronged woman decides that the only way to hurt the man who betrayed her is to destroy everything he loves, including their children. For the Comparative course you have one of the most ferocious revenge stories ever staged.

Here is the situation. Medea is a foreign princess from Colchis who once saved Jason’s life and helped him steal the Golden Fleece. She betrayed her own family and fled her homeland for him, and the two settle in Corinth with their two young sons. Then Jason abandons her. He arranges to marry Glauce, the daughter of King Creon, because the match buys him status and security in a city where he and Medea are outsiders. Jason tells himself this is a sensible move that will benefit the whole family. Medea hears it as the worst kind of betrayal: she gave up everything for him, and he has thrown her aside the moment a better offer appeared.

What follows is cold and deliberate. Creon, frightened of what Medea might do, orders her into exile, but she begs for one more day and he relents. That single day is all she needs. She also secures a future refuge in Athens from the visiting king Aegeus, so she is not striking blindly: she has somewhere to run before she ever lifts a hand. Then she sends her children to the palace bearing gifts for the new bride, a robe and a golden crown laced with poison. Glauce dies in agony, and Creon dies trying to save her.

Then Medea turns on the one part of her revenge that costs her as much as it costs Jason: she kills her own two sons, so that he is left with nothing, not even an heir. Euripides lets you watch her hesitate, almost relent, and steel herself again, which is what stops her being a simple monster. By the close she escapes in a chariot sent by her grandfather the Sun, leaving Jason broken and powerless below, his new bride dead, his sons dead, his name finished. It is a play that refuses to give you a comfortable villain, because Medea is wronged first and terrible second, and Euripides makes you sit with both at once. That is exactly why she works so well as a Comparative figure: there is no clean way to judge her.

Study Medea

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