MEDEA
(mih-DEE-uh)
A
princess and sorceress who helped Jason obtain the Golden
Fleece Common clues: Jason's
wife; Sorceress of mythology; Golden fleece seeker; Euripides
tragedy; Greek sorceress; Jason jilted her; She helped Jason get
the Golden Fleece Crossword
puzzle frequency:
2 times a year Frequency
in English language:
49463 / 86800 Video: The
Love I Fear
Love
makes the time pass. Time makes love pass ~ Euripedes
In
Greek mythology, Medea was the daughter of King Aeetes of
Colchis, niece of Circe, and later wife to Jason.
Medea
figures in the myth of Jason and the Argonauts, a myth we know
best from a late literary version worked up by Apollonius of
Rhodes in the 3rd century BCE and called the Argonautica. But for
all its self-consciousness and researched archaic vocabulary, the
late epic was based on very old, scattered materials.
Medea
was the daughter of King Aeetes of Colchis, and is most often
described as a priestess of Hecate. She is related on her
father's side to Helios the sun God, and to Circe, the witch who
Odysseus famously encounters.
Medea's
role began after Jason arrived from Iolcus in Colchis to claim
the Golden Fleece as his own. In a familiar mythic motif, King
Aeetes of Colchis promised to give it to him only if he could
perform certain tasks. First, Jason had to plough a field with
fire-breathing oxen that he had to yoke himself. Then, Jason had
to sow the teeth of a dragon in the ploughed field (compare the
myth of Cadmus). The teeth sprouted into an army of warriors.
Jason was forewarned by Medea, however, and knew to throw a rock
into the crowd. Unable to decipher where the rock had come from,
the soldiers attacked and defeated each other. Finally, Aeetes
made Jason fight and kill the sleepless dragon that guarded the
fleece. Medea put the beast to sleep with her narcotic herbs.
Jason then took the fleece and sailed away with Medea, who had
fallen in love with him. (Some accounts say that Medea only
helped Jason in the first place because Hera had convinced
Aphrodite or Eros to cause Medea to fall in love with him.) Medea
distracted her father as they fled by killing her brother,
Apsyrtus. She is said to have dismembered his body and tossed the
limbs into the sea, knowing her father would stop to retrieve
them for proper burial. In the flight, Atalanta was seriously
wounded, but Medea healed her.
This
article is licensed under the GNU
Free Documentation License.
It uses material from the Wikipedia
article "Medea".
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