This Jason, is hound by mighty oaths which his own lips said,

When he pledged him to make her, his halls within, his wife true-wed.“[[30]]

Alcinous yielded to his wife’s entreaties on one condition—that Jason and Medea should be married forthwith; for then he could return answer to Aeêtes that he would not separate husband and wife. Thus the two were hurriedly wedded; and sailed in safety from Phæacia, to encounter many a terrible adventure before they reached Iolchos at last, triumphing in the possession of the Fleece. They gained great glory from their enterprise, but little else. For Pelias would not yield the throne to Jason; and it seemed to Medea that all she had wrought had been in vain. She brooded over Jason’s wrongs, chafing at the restraint imposed on her in her new life, and eager to strike for the kingship on his behalf. At last she evolved a plan by which she thought Pelias might be removed from their path, and the throne secured for Jason. Promising the old king renewed youth by means of her enchantments, she induced him to submit to death at the hands of his daughters. Then, in the storm of indignation which arose against her, she and Jason and their two young children fled to Corinth.

So the legend runs to the point where Euripides takes it up. In crude outline it is savage and incredible; and yet it contains all the elements which in the hands of idealistic poets have made a story of enthralling romantic beauty. In the Medea, however, the poet has avoided so far as might be both the barbarity of the legend and its potential charm. He has treated only the final catastrophe—the abandonment of Medea by Jason and her dreadful vengeance upon him. And although he could not escape from the data: although he is compelled to handle some of the most barbarous of them, he has translated them from terms of glimmering wonder and breathless excitement into the language of reality. He has brought Medea out of the region of myth, where she dwelt in eerie and tempestuous beauty, into the stream of human existence. The marvellous and the superhuman drop away, save for a fragment or two in the framework of the Drama; and Medea becomes simply a woman, struggling against her own wild heart and the injustice of her oppressors.

The Drama opens with the monologue of Medea’s old nurse, from which we learn all that is vital to an understanding of the action. Jason has forsaken Medea and is about to marry with Glaucé, the young daughter of Creon, King of Corinth. Medea is sick with misery and is lying in the house prostrate on her bed. Two things the old woman makes quite clear, as she stands talking outside: that the chief cause of Medea’s grief is shame at her betrayal; and that already the storm of passion is tending toward madness. When an attendant comes in, bringing Jason’s children back from their play, there is a clear hint of the catastrophe. The man tells of a rumour that he has heard: Creon has ordered the banishment of their mistress and her boys. The nurse breaks into a wail of commiseration, and then clearly states her fear for the effect of this new wrong upon Medea’s mind. She sends the little ones in before she speaks the dread she has that their mother may lift her hand against their lives; and almost immediately afterward the frenzied voice of Medea is heard, calling bitter curses upon her unfathered children.

There gather gradually the ladies of Corinth who form the Chorus. They are deeply sympathetic; and they give pitying answers to the nurse’s tale; while within the house, at intervals, Medea’s voice is heard, wailing her grief and anger, and the old remorse that has reawakened for her brother’s death.

“Virgin of Righteousness,

Virgin of hallowed Troth,

Ye marked me when with an oath

I bound him; mark no less