Medea's most infamous crime may not be the oldest version of her story
Most people know Medea as the woman who killed her own children to punish Jason. That is Euripides' version, from the 5th century BC. Earlier poets told it differently: in one, she lost them by accident while trying to make them immortal; in another, the people of Corinth were to blame.
Medea, whose name means something like planner or schemer, was a princess of Colchis, daughter of King Aeëtes, granddaughter of the sun god Helios and niece of the enchantress Circe. She was a sorceress skilled in herbal magic and often a priestess of Hecate. Hesiod's Theogony mentions her around 700 BC, yet her fame rests on two later works, Euripides' tragedy and the 3rd-century BC epic Argonautica by Apollonius of Rhodes. Accounts disagree even on whether she was mostly mortal or mostly divine.
In the Argonautica she is the helper-maiden. Hera arranges for her to fall for Jason, who has come for the Golden Fleece, and she agrees to help if he will marry her. An ointment shields him from fire-breathing oxen; she warns him that sown dragon teeth will sprout into warriors, and that a thrown rock will set them fighting one another; her herbs put the sleepless dragon to sleep. Fleeing, she kills her brother Absyrtus to slow her father's pursuit. On the voyage home she brings down Talos, Crete's bronze guardian, by driving him to dislodge the single nail sealing his only vein.
Her magic cuts both ways. She restores Jason's elderly father by renewing his blood with herbs, then tricks the daughters of King Pelias, who had cheated Jason of his throne, into a fatal copy of the trick after showing them an old ram emerge young from a pot. The couple escape to Corinth, where they live for ten years and, depending on the source, have anywhere from one to fourteen children.
When Jason leaves her for the king's daughter, Euripides has Medea send a poisoned dress and crown that kill the princess and her father, then kill her sons and escape to Athens in the sun god's dragon chariot. Herodotus records a later tradition that she settled among the Aryans of the Iranian plateau, who then took the name Medes.
Source: Medea
