Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

Years after the Argonautic return, Jason and Medea lived in Corinth with their sons. Jason arranged to marry Glauce (also called Creusa), daughter of King Creon of Corinth, to secure a royal alliance, and accepted Creon’s decree that Medea—a foreign witch and inconvenient wife—be exiled at once. Medea’s nurse and the chorus of Corinthian women hear her curses; she confronts Jason with the catalogue of her services: Pelias’s death, the fleece, the betrayal of her home. Jason answers with cold sophistry—Cypris saved him; he has repaid Medea with Greek fame; the new marriage will benefit their sons. Medea wins a single day’s delay from Creon. She secures from Aegeus of Athens, who passes through Corinth childless, an oath of asylum in Athens if she can reach him. Then she activates her revenge: she sends the children to Glauce with a poisoned gown and golden diadem as wedding “gifts.” Glauce puts them on; the drugs burn her flesh; Creon clasps her and dies with her. To complete Jason’s ruin and deny her enemies the power to mistreat her sons, Medea kills the children with a sword inside the house. She appears above the stage on a chariot of the Sun (Helios her grandfather), refuses Jason’s plea to touch the bodies, prophesies his lonely death, and escapes to Aegeus at Athens—where later Attic myth will show her plotting against Theseus (catalogue entry 051). Apollodorus summarizes the same Corinthian end: Jason weds Glauce; Medea poisons her and kills Creon and the children, then flees to Athens. Euripides’s play is the classic form of the aftermath: not a voyage episode but the domestic and civic explosion of the Colchian marriage Jason discarded.