INTRODUCTION TO THE MEDEA

The Athenian audience who saw the first performance of
Euripides' Medea at the state dramatic contest in 431 B.C.
and who. awarded the third prize to Euripides would have
been familiar v^ith the whole story of the chief characters, and
we, twenty-three centuries later, are handicapped in our
understanding of the play if we have not at least some knowl-
edge of the same story.
The Athenians would have known Medea as a barbarian
princess and as a sorceress, related to the gods. She came
from the faraway land of Colchis at the eastern extremity of
the Black Sea, where her father, King Aeetes, a sorcerer him-
self and the son of Helius, god of the sun, kept the Golden
Fleece. Here Jason had come with the Argonauts, the first ex-
pedition of western Greeks against the eastern barbarians.
Medea had fallen in love with him, and by her aid he was
able to avoid the traps laid for him by Aeetes, to regain the
Golden Fleece, and to escape, taking Medea with him. She, to
assist the escape, had murdered her own brother, strewing the
pieces of his body over the water so that her father's fleet,
while collecting the fragments for burial, might lose time in
the pursuit of the fugitives.
Medea and Jason then settled in Jason's hereditary kingdom
of lolcus, where Pelias, his uncle, still cheated him of his
rights. Medea, hoping to do Jason a favor, persuaded the
daughters of Pelias to attempt, under her guidance, a magic
rejuvenation of their father. The old man was to be killed, cut
in pieces, and then, with the aid of herbs and incantations,
restored to his first youth. The unsuspecting daughters did as
they were told, and Medea left them with their father's blood