Medea

Medea,
in mythology, granddaughter of Helios, and daughter of Aeëtes, king of Colchian Aia, and his wife Eidyia; ancient writers frequently associate her name (perhaps rightly) with mēdesthai, ‘to devise’, and she became the archetypal example of the scheming, barbarian woman. Already in our earliest testimony, Hesiod's Theogony, she is associated with the completion of Jason's challenges in Aia in his quest for the golden fleece, and leaves Aia with him to live in Iolcus (vv. 992–1002), but her mastery of drugs and potions, a skill she shares with her aunt Circe, is not mentioned. This passage appears in a catalogue of goddesses who slept with mortal men, and Medea was clearly always conceived as a divine being (cf. Pindar Pythian Odes 4. 11; West on Hesiod Theogonia 992). In one Archaic legend she married Achilles in the Elysian Fields...

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