Before his intimacy with Medea, Ægeus had a son named Theseus, who had been sent to Athens with his father's sword, by the sight of which he was to introduce himself to his father's knowledge when he grew up; as Theseus attempted to make himself known to his father, Medea, who had grown jealous of the glory he had achieved, tried to poison him at an entertainment to which he had been invited. She failed in her purpose. The king, recognized by the sword he bore, his long lost son, and Medea had recourse to her dragons once more, to make her escape through the air, to Colchis, where, by some it is stated, she was re-united to Jason; while according to other authorities, Jason lived a melancholy and unhappy life; and, as he was reposing one day by the side of the ship which had borne him to Colchis, a large beam fell upon and crushed him to death. Medea also died at Colchis, and after her death is said to have been married to Achilles in Elysium.
It is asserted by some writers, that the murder of the two youngest of Jason's children, was not committed by Medea, but by the Corinthians themselves, in the Temple of Juno Acrea; and that to avoid the vengeance of heaven, and to free themselves from a plague which devoured the country after so frightful a massacre, they engaged the poet Euripides to write a tragedy which should tend to clear them of the murder, and throw the crime upon the guilty Medea. Festivals were also appointed, in which the mother was represented as destroying her own offspring, with all the attributes of a fury, and was regarded as a day of solemn mourning.
"O haggard queen! to Athens dost thou guide
Thy glowing chariot, steeped in kindred gore;
Or seek to hide thy foul infanticide
Where peace and mercy dwell for evermore?
The land where Heaven's own hallowed waters play,
Where friendship binds the generous and the good,
Say, shall it hail thee from thy frantic way,