In Greek mythology, Medea is the daughter of King Aeëtes of Colchis, a sorceress and worker in pharmakeía often depicted as a priestess of Hecate. Granddaughter of the sun god Helios and niece of Circe, she aids Jason in winning the Golden Fleece, flees Colchis with him, and later — in Euripides's tragedy and related traditions — murders their children and Jason's new bride after he abandons her in Corinth. Her story is one of the most debated female figures in Greek myth, combining helper-maiden, exile, and avenger.
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I.Genealogy and divinity
Medea descends from Helios through her father Aeëtes; Hesiod's Theogony makes Helios and the Oceanid Perseis parents of Circe and Aeëtes, and Aeëtes then marries the Oceanid Idyia, by whom Medea is born. She has a sister Chalciope and a brother Absyrtus (Apsyrtus), though accounts differ on whether Absyrtus shares her mother. Connections with Hecate, goddess of magic, amplify her powers; some rationalizing authors make Hecate her mother by Aeëtes.
Ancient sources disagree on how divine she is. Apollonius's Argonautica presents a young woman swayed by Hera and Aphrodite; Hesiod lists her marriage to Jason among unions of mortals and divinities; Euripides emphasizes her mortal vulnerability even as her exit in Helios's chariot places her among figures who command the stage like gods.
II.Jason and the Golden Fleece
When Jason arrives in Colchis to claim the Golden Fleece, Medea falls in love with him — by divine prompting in Apollonius — and aids his tasks: she gives him the Charm of Prometheus against fire-breathing bulls, advises him how to defeat the earthborn warriors sown from dragon's teeth, and drugs the sleepless dragon that guards the fleece. She flees with the Argonauts and, in many versions, kills or helps kill her brother Absyrtus to delay Aeëtes's pursuit; the Argonauts later seek purification from Circe on Aeaea.
On the return she overcomes the bronze guardian Talos on Crete and, at Iolcus, tricks the daughters of Pelias into killing their father by a false rejuvenation ritual. Jason and Medea then settle in Corinth.
III.Corinth, Athens, and later traditions
In Corinth Jason abandons Medea for Creon's daughter Glauce (Creusa). Pre-Euripidean variants blame the children's deaths on accident or on the Corinthians; Euripides's Medea (431 BCE) makes Medea deliberately poison the bride and kill her own sons, then escape in a dragon chariot sent by Helios. She finds refuge with Aegeus in Athens, bears or raises Medus, and plots against the arriving Theseus until Aegeus recognizes his son and she flees.
Later accounts restore her to Colchis, send her among the Medes (Herodotus links her name to that people), or have her heal Heracles of madness. Diodorus notes that tragic poets' love of the marvelous produced the many inconsistent versions of her career.
IV.Literary personae
Euripides's Medea became the dominant image: a woman of exceptional intelligence who violates Athenian gender norms, combining "feminine" poison with "masculine" violence, and whose maternal love coexists with filicide. Apollonius instead stresses the helper-maiden torn by love, shame, and loyalty to her family. Modern critics have also read her as a figure of the colonized or the outsider turning the tables on those who cast her out.
She appears across Greek and Latin literature from Hesiod and Pindar through Apollonius, Euripides, Ovid's Metamorphoses and Heroides, Seneca's Medea, and the Roman Argonautica of Valerius Flaccus.