EURIPIDES

upon their hands. However, the result of this crime was no
advancement for Jason but rather exile for him, Medea, and
their two children.

From lolcus they came to Corinth, the scene of Eurip-
ides' play. Here Jason, either, as he says himself, wishing to
strengthen his own economic position, or, as Medea thinks,
because he was tired of his dangerous foreign wife, put her
aside and married the daughter of Creon, king of Corinth. It
is at this point that the action of the play begins; but the
Athenian audience would know well enough what the plot
would be. They would know that Medea, in her jealous rage,
would destroy both Creon and his daughter by means of a
poisoned robe which clung to the flesh and burned it; that,
despairing of her children's safety and wishing through them
to injure Jason in every way, she would kill them with her
own hands; and that, finally, by supernatural means, she
would escape to their own city and take refuge with the old
King Aegeus.

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