Medea: the sorceress of Colchis

Medea was a sorceress of Colchis, a priestess of the goddess Hecate, and a princess born of the line of Helios. Daughter of King Aeetes and niece of the enchantress Circe, she betrayed her own house to win the Golden Fleece for Jason, leader of the Argonauts, and became his wife and the mother of his children. Their marriage ended in abandonment and slaughter, and the trail of her crimes ran all the way to the Island of Creation, where Kratos heard of them from Jason himself.

Blood of the sun#

Medea was born in Colchis, the kingdom of her father Aeetes. Aeetes was himself a son of Helios, so the blood of the sun god ran in his daughter, and her aunt was Circe, an enchantress whose name carried its own dread. Whatever share of power came to Medea by birth, she sharpened it in service to Hecate, whose priestess she became. The chronicles of the Greek world remembered her before all else as a sorceress, a worker of potions, curses, and summonings, and her loyalties were reckoned to three names only: to Helios her grandsire, to Circe her kinswoman, and to Jason, the man for whom she would burn every other bond she had.

The winning of the Golden Fleece#

The Golden Fleece, the hide of a winged golden ram slaughtered in tribute to Zeus, was kept in Colchis under the watch of a sleepless dragon. Jason and his Argonauts sailed there to claim it for King Pelias, and Aeetes had no intention of letting the prize go. The trials he set turned soldiers against one another until they lay dead by each other's hands, and at the last the king demanded that Jason face the sleepless dragon itself.

Medea had fallen in love with the stranger, and she did much to see him win. She distilled a potion from herbs and gave it to Jason, who sprayed it upon the guardian beast. The dragon that never slept sank into slumber, and Jason lifted the Golden Fleece from its keeping. Without the sorceress the quest would have died on the dragon's teeth; because of her, the greatest treasure of Colchis left its shores in a stranger's hands.

Flight of the Argo#

Jason sailed from Colchis with Medea beside him, and she was counted thereafter among the crew of the Argo. Aeetes pursued the fleeing ship in his own vessel, and it was then that Medea showed how far her devotion would carry her. To slow her father's pursuit she killed her own brother and dismembered him, and the king's chase failed.

The Argo's troubles were not finished. With the Fleece aboard, the Argonauts came upon Talos, a towering sentinel of bronze, who hurled boulders at their ship to keep them at bay. Medea answered by summoning the Keres, goddesses of death, and under their influence Talos grazed his ankle. The Ichor that sustained him drained from the wound, and the bronze giant died. Other tellings gave the sorceress a different method, holding that she drove Talos mad with drugs, or that she beguiled him with a promise of immortality before the nail in his ankle was drawn. In every account it was Medea's craft, and not the arms of the crew, that brought the sentinel down.

The fires of Corinth#

Jason and Medea came in time to Corinth, where King Creon received the couple with hospitality. There the marriage that had begun in treason ended in betrayal. Jason set Medea aside in favor of Creusa, Creon's daughter, who was also remembered under the name Glauce, and Creon gave his consent for Jason to wed her.

The chronicles preserved more than one account of what Medea did next. In the telling most widely followed, she sent Creusa a wedding gift, a dress she had cursed, called the Shirt of Flame. The moment Creusa put it on, the dress clung to her body and burned her to death, and Creon himself burned with her, dying as he tried to tear his daughter free. But by Jason's own account, given years later and far from Corinth, he had left Creusa and his children in the care of Medea, and Medea killed them in a rage of jealousy. The accounts differed in the manner of the deaths, yet they agreed on the hand behind them. The household Jason had chosen over his sorceress wife was destroyed by her.

Jason and the Sisters of Fate#

The murders drove Jason to the one power that might undo them. He sailed for the Island of Creation to seek an audience with the Sisters of Fate, meaning to reclaim Creusa and his children from death. He never reached the Sisters. On that island he was set upon and partly devoured by the Mole Cerberus, and it was Kratos, come to the island on his own war against Olympus, who slew the beast. Saved from its jaws, Jason told the Spartan that Medea had killed his lover and his children, and confessed that he regretted ever leaving Creusa in the sorceress's care. One record held instead that Jason sought the Sisters to be reunited with Medea and her children, whom he had abandoned for Creusa; whichever loss drew him across the sea, it was Medea's shadow that lay over the voyage. The Golden Fleece he had carried since Colchis passed to Kratos, and served the Ghost of Sparta through his war against the gods.

Of Medea herself, nothing more was recorded. The chronicles placed her last in Colchis, the land she had betrayed for Jason's sake, and her fate remained unknown.