Medea

Apollonius of Rhodes' third century BCE epic the Argonautica gives Medea her fullest surviving narrative arc, and it is a story engineered by the goddess Hera and Aphrodite as much as chosen by Medea herself: to help Jason survive the impossible tasks her father Aeetes sets him, the gods have Eros strike Medea with sudden, overwhelming love for the Greek stranger. Once smitten, Medea uses her considerable skill in pharmaka, herbal and magical preparations learned as a priestess in Hecate's service, to protect Jason from fire breathing bulls and a dragon guarding the Golden Fleece, then flees Colchis with him and the Argonauts rather than face her father's fury. The escape turns brutal quickly: in the best known version Medea lures her own younger brother Apsyrtus into a trap and Jason kills him, and the pair scatter pieces of his body behind their ship to slow their pursuing father, who stops to gather his son's remains for burial.

Reaching Iolcus, Medea's magic serves Jason's cause once more and once more turns dark, when she tricks the daughters of the usurper king Pelias into believing they can restore their father's youth by cutting him apart and boiling the pieces, a demonstration she stages successfully on a ram first. The trick succeeds in killing Pelias but exiles Jason and Medea from Iolcus in disgrace, setting up the far better known final chapter of her story at Corinth, where Euripides picks up the narrative for his own very different purposes.

Medea's standing as a religious figure rather than simply a folk villain rests heavily on her attachment to Hecate, goddess of magic, crossroads and the night; ancient sources including the Argonautica present her as a priestess in Hecate's temple at Colchis, and Walter Burkert's survey of Greek religion places her firmly within the wider category of mortal women whose sorcery is understood as a specialized, dangerous form of religious knowledge rather than mere trickery, learned through initiation rather than invented independently. That religious framing sharpens rather than softens the ending Euripides gave her in 431 BCE, in which Medea, abandoned at Corinth when Jason marries the local princess for political advantage, murders her own two sons by Jason as the ultimate act of revenge before escaping in a chariot sent by her grandfather Helios, untouchable and unpunished.

Euripides' version became the dominant one in later reception, but it was not the only ending ancient audiences knew: a rival Corinthian tradition held that the city's own women killed Medea's children in a shrine and that local guilt, not maternal vengeance, was covered up by blaming the foreign sorceress, a version some scholars, including Daniel Ogden in his sourcebook on Greek and Roman magic, connect to a genuine hero cult once paid to the dead children at Corinth. Medea's figure sits at the center of enduring debate about how ancient Greek culture used the foreign, magically empowered woman to work through anxieties about revenge, motherhood and the limits of sympathy, a debate her myth was already having with itself in antiquity.