Medea

One of Greek culture’s most famous mythological figures, Jason is portrayed as a hero past his prime. Like many of his heroic counterparts in tragedy, Jason struggle to adapt to a life outside of myth. His most famous exploits—assembling and leading the Argonauts, securing the Golden Fleece—are behind him, and events before the play saw him exiled from his home of Iolcus and made a refugee in Corinth.

While we do not see as much of Jason’s interior life and reasoning as Medea’s, his actions make sense from a practical standpoint. He has secured the best possible outcome for himself and his sons, if not his ex-wife: He found an escape hatch from his second-class existence by marrying into the local royal family. This marriage erases the shameful brand of exile and also grants Jason an extraordinarily powerful new network of allies. His father-in-law Creon has the political clout to immediately expel Medea from Corinth, simply because she poses a threat to his family. While Medea starts the play in a position of absolute vulnerability, Jason sits pretty at the top of the Corinthian food chain.

Even so, Jason does not want to be considered a villain. Medea has already won the Chorus over to her side before he enters at line 448, and he must therefore engage in an uphill battle to win his Corinthian neighbors (and the audience) over to his side. He argues that given societal norms, he’s hardly done wrong by Medea. In fact, he went above and beyond in giving her the house and in trying to leverage his social network to find her safe lodging. But the Chorus—and the audience—sense his disingenuousness. Could Jason have truly intended his remarriage to improve Medea’s situation as well as his own? He claims he hid it from her because he knew she would never go along with it, and perhaps this is true; we know Medea to be vindictive and quick to anger. Or, as Medea charges, was Jason always looking for an out, always resentful of her as his foreign spouse who was once useful but now an embarrassment? Once the children are killed and Medea’s escape is imminent, Jason seems, in a moment of anger, to confirm Medea’s accusation: “How wrong I was,” he says, “to bring a barbarian home / to Greece” (1304-5).

The ancient audience would have recognized Jason as a typical tragic hero. Past his prime, degraded, demoted, he is eventually brought low by his fatal arrogance (or hubris): He did not pay Medea the respect she was due. In the mythological tradition, after the events of the play, Jason ends his life destitute and penniless. Homeless, he is killed while sheltering in the shadow of the Argo, as the rotten prow breaks off and crushes him beneath it.

The king of Corinth, Creon is featured in only one scene of the play—his dramatic banishment of Medea—though his off-stage death at the hands of Medea’s poison is described in graphic detail by the Messenger (1165-92). As the king of the city, Creon steps down from his high station and somewhat degrades himself even by engaging with Medea, a foreign-born immigrant woman and the ex-wife of his son-in-law. His willingness to speak with her is his downfall. Though Creon offers the most resistance to Medea’s powers of persuasion—perhaps because he is furthest removed from her, socially speaking—he too comes under the “spell” of her words and is convinced to allow her to stay one day more.

This fatal misstep is perhaps the most important turning point of the plot. If Creon had insisted that Medea leave Corinth immediately, as he had intended, none of the subsequent action could have occurred. Creon succumbs to his innate—or perhaps socially pressured—desire to show mercy or pity. He is determined not to not be seen as a tyrant, but his enemy is willing to do and be seen as anything—and Creon pays with his life.

The king of Athens, Aegeus arrives in Corinth following a visit to the oracle of Delphi, unaware of the situation between Jason and Medea. Like Creon, Aegeus’s presence in the play is limited to one conversation with Medea, but unlike Creon, her most strident and hostile opponent, Aegeus is a kind and attentive friend. He shares his troubles conceiving with his wife, respecting both Medea’s famous cleverness and her reputation as a magical woman, and notices she’s been crying without Medea bringing it up.

Aegeus’s fatal flaw, then, is his willingness to believe Medea’s claim of her complete lack of culpability in her divorce and exile (“I’m blameless,” she says [687]). With Medea, Aegeus’s guard is down, whether due to their friendship or because Medea is a woman. Unlike Jason or Creon, Aegeus does not wonder what horrors Medea might be capable of if given free rein. He blindly agrees to offer her his assistance, and like Creon, his acquiescence permits the horror that follows. If Aegeus had not made Medea a solemn promise to shelter her, Medea may have still gone ahead with her crimes, but the promise of safe harbor gave her a huge confidence boost. Aegeus’s help makes her believe the gods are on her side (755-62).

Composed of neighboring freeborn Corinthian women, the Chorus in Medea acts as a stand-in for the audience and as a barometer for ancient Greek social rules and mores. While they are convinced of the justice of Medea’s anger at Jason’s betrayal, they are also shocked at her murder of the princess—an innocent bystander—and more repulsed still by her murder of her children.