Medeia

Medeia or Medea is a Kolkhian woman in Greek mythology. She was the daughter of King Aeëtes of Kolkhis,[1] niece of Kirke, granddaughter of the sun god Helios, and later wife to the hero Jason, with whom she had two children, Mermeros and Pheres. In Euripides's play Medeia, Jason leaves Medea when Kreon, king of Korinth, offers him his daughter, Glauce. The play tells about how Medeia avenges her husband's betrayal. The myths involving Jason have been interpreted by specialists as part of a class of myths that tell how the Hellenes of the distant heroic age, before the Trojan War, faced the challenges of the pre-Greek "Pelasgian" cultures of mainland Greece, the Aegean and Anatolia. Jason, Perseus, Theseus, and above all Herakles, are all "liminal" figures, poised on the threshold between the old world of shamans, chthonic earth deities, and the new Bronze Age Greek ways.

Medeia figures in the myth of Jason and the Argonauts, a myth known best from a late literary version worked up by Apollonios Rhodios in the 3rd century BC and called the Argonautica. However, for all its self-consciousness and researched archaic vocabulary, the late epic was based on very old, scattered materials. Medeia is known in most stories as an enchantress and is often depicted as being a priestess of the goddess Hecate or a witch. The myth of Jason and Mediea is very old, originally written around the time Hesiod wrote the Theogony.