MEDEA, a famous sorceress, daughter of Aeetes, king of Colchis (Gr. Miheea). She fell in love with Jason the Argonaut, and exacted a terrible revenge for his faithlessness (see ARGO NAUTS and JASON). After the murder of Jason's second wife and the death of her own children, she fled from Corinth in her car drawn by dragons, the gift of Helios, to Athens, where she mar ried king Aegeus, by whom she had a son, Medus. But the dis covery of an attempt on the life of Theseus, the son of Aegeus, forced her to leave Athens (Apollodorus i. 9, 28; Pausanias ii. 3, 6-11; Diod. Sic. iv. 45, 54-56). Accompanied by her son she returned to Colchis, and restored her father to the throne, of which he had been deprived by his own brother Perses. Medus was regarded as the eponymous hero and progenitor of the Medes. Medea was honoured as a goddess at Corinth, and was said to have become the wife of Achilles in the Elysian fields. The chief
seat of her cult, however, was Thessaly, which was always regard ed as the home of magic. The popularity of the story of Jason and Medea in antiquity is shown by the large amount of literature on the subject. To name extant works only, she figures largely in Pindar (Fourth Pythian Ode), Euripides, Apollonius of Rhodes, Ovid (Heroides and Metamorphoses), Seneca (Medea), Valerius Flaccus and several prose authors; her story was already known to some at least of the Cyclic poets. She is also a common subject in ancient art. Beginning as a heroine of fairy-tales, she acquires a more human and also more formidable character especially in Euripides.
See the articles in Daremberg and Saglio's Dictionnaire des antiqui Us and Roscher's Lexikon der Mythologie.