The Tale of Medea and Jason
At a Glance
- Central figures: Medea, sorceress and granddaughter of the sun god Helios; and Jason, hero of Iolcus and leader of the Argonauts.
- Setting: Colchis, Iolcus, and Corinth; the myth belongs to the pre-Trojan War heroic cycle and is told most fully in Apollonius of Rhodes’ Argonautica and Euripides’ tragedy Medea.
- The turn: Jason abandons Medea in Corinth to marry Glauce, daughter of King Creon, seeking royal power - after Medea had betrayed her own family and homeland for him.
- The outcome: Medea kills Glauce and Creon with a poisoned robe, then kills her own children to deny Jason any legacy, before escaping in a chariot sent by her grandfather Helios.
- The legacy: Jason is left alive but stripped of everything - no wife, no children, no throne, no future - the consequence Medea intended as the precise answer to his betrayal.
Jason had one task: bring back the Golden Fleece from Colchis and Pelias would return the throne of Iolcus. It was a death sentence dressed as a bargain. Colchis sat at the far end of the Black Sea, ruled by Aeëtes, son of Helios, a king who did not give things away. The fleece hung in a sacred grove, guarded by a dragon that never slept. But Jason built the Argo, assembled his crew - the Argonauts, the greatest collection of heroes Greece had yet managed - and sailed east anyway.
What met him in Colchis was not just a dragon.
The Challenges at Aeëtes’ Court
Aeëtes had no intention of surrendering the fleece. He offered Jason a deal that was not a deal: yoke two fire-breathing bulls, plow a field with them, sow it with dragon’s teeth, and then defeat the warriors that sprouted from the earth. Complete all three in a single day, and the fleece was his. It was the kind of offer a king makes when he expects a man’s charred bones to be the only outcome.
Jason would have died in that field. He knew it. His companions on the Argo knew it. What none of them knew was that Aeëtes’ daughter Medea had already seen Jason and that Hera, who favored Jason, had asked Aphrodite to see to it that Eros strike Medea with one of his arrows. The arrow hit. Medea burned.
Medea’s Bargain
She was a priestess of Hecate and a sorceress of genuine power - the granddaughter of Helios, trained in every herb and incantation that could compel, protect, or destroy. She did not need Jason to survive. She chose to help him, and the distinction matters.
What Medea gave Jason was this: an ointment made from a crocus that had grown where Prometheus’s blood fell, which when rubbed over the body would make a man proof against fire and bronze for a full day. She told him how to use it. She told him what to do when the earth-born warriors rose from the sown teeth - throw a stone among them; they will turn on each other. In return, Jason swore by the gods to marry her and take her to Greece.
He took the ointment. He swore the oath. He yoked the bulls without burning, plowed the field, sowed the teeth, threw the stone, and watched the warriors slaughter each other in the furrows. Then Medea led him to the sacred grove at night and sang the sleepless dragon down into sleep with her spells. Jason took the fleece from the tree. It was heavy and it shone gold even in the dark.
They ran.
The Flight from Colchis
Aeëtes’ ships came after them. Medea had her brother Absyrtus with her - whether he came willingly or was taken is a question the sources answer differently - and as the Colchian fleet closed on the Argo, Absyrtus died. In some versions, Medea killed him herself and scattered his body in pieces on the sea, knowing her father would have to stop and gather the remains before they could be buried properly. It worked. The Argo pulled ahead.
That act alone should have told Jason something. A woman who could do that for him was a woman capable of anything. He said his vows again when they reached the island of Circe, who purified them both for the killing, and they sailed on west and south toward Greece.
Pelias and the Cauldron
Iolcus was no easier than Colchis. Pelias, who had sent Jason east expecting never to see him again, was not about to step off the throne just because the man had come back with a fleece over his shoulder. Medea dealt with Pelias herself. She approached his daughters with a demonstration: she cut an old ram into pieces, put the pieces in a cauldron with certain herbs, and the ram came out whole and young and bleating. The daughters were convinced. They cut their father apart and put him in the cauldron.
Medea did not add the herbs.
Pelias died. Jason and Medea were driven out of Iolcus anyway - Pelias’s son Acastus saw to that - and they settled in Corinth. They had children there. Two sons. They lived in Corinth for years.
The Wedding Gift
Jason’s ambition did not rest. Creon, king of Corinth, had a daughter named Glauce, and marrying her would give Jason a throne he had not had to bleed for. He accepted the offer. He told Medea she should be grateful - he was securing a better future for the children, he said. His new marriage would raise them all.
Medea’s response was measured, at first. She asked only one concession before she left Corinth: to be allowed one day to say goodbye to her sons and send a wedding gift to Glauce. Creon agreed, reluctantly. Medea sent the gift - a robe and a golden crown, both soaked in poison she had prepared.
Glauce put on the robe. The fire took her almost at once, burning through flesh, impossible to tear away because the poison had bonded it to her skin. Creon ran to his daughter and embraced her. He could not pull free. He died holding her.
What Remained
The children were still alive. Jason still believed he had a future, some line of sons who would carry his name through Corinth and beyond. Medea killed both boys.
Her reasoning - and Euripides gives her the stage to make it, in full - was that they were already dead. Corinth would not let them live after what she had done to Creon and Glauce. Better her hands than an enemy’s. And Jason would feel it more, knowing she had chosen it. That was the precise geometry of her revenge: he had taken everything from her, and she would leave him exactly what she had been left with. Nothing.
The chariot of Helios came for her. She left Corinth with the bodies of her children and flew toward Athens, where King Aegeus had already promised her sanctuary. Jason stood in the street below and she did not look down.
He lived for a long time after that. The stories say he died alone, sheltering under the rotting hull of the Argo, when a piece of the prow broke off and struck him. Whether that is true or whether it is simply the ending he deserved, the Argo took him in the end - the ship he had built for a quest that had cost everyone around him everything.