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I. in temptation
Colchis sat on an island surrounded by rocky ridges that no ship passed through. To the Greeks, Colchis was the end of the world, but for the Colchians – for Medea – the rest of the world had not even existed before Jason and his ship docked on their shore.
When she was still young, her father had been told by an oracle that a foreigner would challenge his rule, and he was suspicious of the sailing ship before it arrived and established a cult to Hecate to sacrifice the strangers to her. It was not a usual practice in Colchis, but murder as sacrifice was still more acceptable than under any another name. Over this cult, he let Medea preside.
She preformed these rites for two of the Argonauts before Jason was sent to her. She had not meant to kill the leader so early, but he volunteered and his bravery compelled her. Later, she would find it was arrogance instead; he had never expected her to kill (resist) him. But she found that compelling too.
He did not struggle like the two before him, but let her anoint him, and when she started to pull her hands away from him, he reached up and held on to them gently, ”Please,” he said in slow, carefully pronounced words in her native tongue, “Let us talk to King Aeetes. He might appreciate what we have to offer.”
It wasn’t his words that caught her, but his touch and she could not look away from his eyes. So she let him convince her, still holding on to her hands. And she felt something she hadn’t before and it was exhilarating, intriguing, and new. It wasn’t love; she did not love easily, but there were other things to feel for him, and so she did.
She knew that taking him to her father alone would be an act of betrayal for which Aeetes would never forgive her. But she took him with her to the Sun Palace despite that.
He stayed as a guest – a prisoner, in reality – at the palace, and this put him within her reach. She asked for stories at first – of his people, his world, his adventures – and then more. Or maybe he asked first. It made no difference; the result was the same. He was no longer just a person, but a whole new world waiting to be discovered. And she wanted him, wanted the world he could offer.
Sometimes, he would talk to her in Greek as they lay in bed together, and she would let him, listening to the sounds more than the meaning of his words, letting the sound of his voice guide her to sleep. At other times, she would reveal to him the secrets of the sleepless dragon and the golden fleece in Colchian, and when he would ask her to slow down so he could decipher her words, she would just laugh. It was better, she knew, that he should understand only half of what she said. The other half would help her save Aeetes if Jason desired more than the fleece, if he betrayed her.
When it was time for him to leave, she liked that he asked her to come with him even though he must have known that she had no choice but to go after her actions.
She offered him – gave up for him – all of her world (but not much of her self). They swore, not to love each other, but to protect each other. And their marriage vows -- a pale echo of this first pledge, sworn in secrecy on the name of the highest (and the lowest) of all gods -- much later, in another city, could not bind Medea more fully to Jason than this promise did.
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II. in love
What Medea loved best about Jason, in the early days of their marriage, in Iolcos, was his indifference. It gave her a kind of freedom she had never known before. All his attention -- and love, she sometimes thought -- was for his kingdom that his uncle still refused to pass on to him. And she was free to roam the halls of his palace, learning their ways and their secrets. Still it seemed such a waste to let this kingdom go -- the one he had given up years of his life to find and she, her home for. So she played on King Pelias' desire to rule - to live - forever, and let his daughters think she could restore health and youth to Pelias, letting them be the instruments of his death.
Jason came to her with the news while she was still contemplating turning back on her actions, but the look on his face told her that it was too late. When she asked him, he confirmed it.
Then he said, "They've asked me to be their king."
He did not seem happy with that outcome so she asked, "On what condition?"
"That I find and execute the murderer of Pelias."
This is what she had been afraid of, and so remembering her oath, she offered, "I can leave."
She had already left her home, and this kingdom, no matter how dear to Jason, was just another place. Still, she did not know where else she would go. She knew only that she could not go back.
She wondered if he knew exactly what had happened to King Pelias, but he did not ask, so she said, "Do they know how Pelias died?"
"No, and it doesn't matter how," he replied. "You're clever, Medea, but you do not know our ways. It is going to be the story of the princesses against the words of a foreign woman who cannot even speak their language."
She did not want him to be the one to exile her from his home; she had not yet forgotten the exile imposed on her by her own father. So she turned away from him and started to leave the room.
He caught her arm and said, "I do not want you to leave, you understand?"
And because he still held on to her when she tried pulling away, she said, "Come with me, then."
Silence stretched between them, but they communicated better with actions than with words. Pulling her towards him, he leaned his forehead against hers and nodded. She smiled and kissed him.
She could never be sure about his feelings for her, but she was certain that he loved his city, loved the kingdom that was his birthright, that could have been his, and he was willing to give it up -- for her.
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III. in domesticity
It was at the temple of Hera that Glauce first talked to Medea. She was not hard to spot even in a crowded temple full of women. The temple was the last place Glauce expected to see Medea, even though Medea, being married, was more under Hera's realm than Glauce.
But Hera was Queen Merope’s patron, so Glauce brought offerings her mother would've made herself had she been well.
Glauce had been warned away from Medea -- not so much in words, but rather by the example of others. But Glauce’s mother had not opened her eyes in three days and King Creon would not hear about it for a while, so she gave into curiosity and stepped closer to the altar and noticed the other women leaving the temple.
They had all satisfied their curiosity and were content to leave Medea be, but Glauce had found her intriguing since the day she had first seen Medea setting foot on the shores of Glauce’s father’s kingdom almost a year ago. Her stories – the tales of the adventures of Jason and Medea – had preceded them, and Glauce still found her fascinating, intriguing in a way that few women in the palace were.
The first thing she noticed was Medea’s long, loose hair, unbound and uncovered, darker than any she'd ever seen before. She had seen no one except very young girls wear it so. Medea leaned forward to place her offerings on Hera's altar and her hair spilled past her shoulders, towards the burning candles and incense and Glauce, stepping forward, quickly caught it before it reached down fully. Before either of them could say anything, Medea’s son fell and cried out and Glauce, letting go of her hair, offered, "Let me."
Medea was silent for a moment and then nodded. Glauce picked up the child and Medea finished making her offerings.
There was no need for introductions. They were perhaps the two most easily recognized women in Corinth: Medea with her loose hair and exotic clothes, and Glauce with her royal robes.
There were other encounters following this one, and Glauce grew bolder with each one as no one told her to stop visiting the house on the outskirts of the city.
She asked Medea about her home, about her journeys, and eventually about Jason, and Medea told her stories in carefully pronounced Greek. Jason would speak to Medea in her native tongue in those first years she knew them, during which Medea never stopped fascinating her, no matter how much of her mystery she uncovered. But Jason, she thought sometimes, Jason's charm was in that Medea loved him.
Medea lost her Colchian maid in the second year she was in Corinth, and it was a while before anyone in Corinth would come to work for her, and in those days, Glauce would play with the child and listen to Medea's nurse sing Colchian songs while Medea would try to cook or go out to the market place to get things, and Medea was always the only woman there.
Jason would often come home early and try to salvage the remains of the meal from whatever Medea had managed to make. Jason was the one who had spent years alone on a mountain with Chiron and then on a ship while Medea had been raised in a palace. Sometimes, Medea told her, Jason would get up earlier so Medea would not have to go to the market later in the day and send things back with a hired hand.
But Medea learned from Jason quickly and when they finally had a maid, she would still stay in the kitchen and watch her work and prepare for some other inevitability.
While Medea was pregnant with their second child, Jason started serving King Creon as a royal advisor and Medea sometimes would come visit him in the palace. And somehow, she fit here the way Glauce had never seen her fit in the temple of Hera or the festivals in the city. She had her own kind of elegance and nobility, and while her customs had been different, Glauce never doubted that Medea, like herself, had been born to a king.
In the megaron of the palace, Jason spoke to Medea in Greek, and she would pause and choose her words carefully, not used to speaking to him in his native tongue.
Medea wore her hair in braids now, wound up with golden strings and held together with a metal clasp, and sometimes she would cover it with a veil. When Glauce asked her about it, she said only that Jason had bought her the ribbons and the clips, but she did not smile as she used to in the early days when talking about Jason. Now that she spent more time among them, in the palace or at festivals, Jason had thought it would help her fit in.
When she started wearing Greek robes, Glauce thought that if they had met now, she never would've known her at a glance for a foreign priestess.
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IV. in retribution
There were no temples to Hecate in Corinth, maybe none in all of Greece, even. There were cults, she knew, but here, their secrets were never revealed to outsiders and living here for ten years hadn't yet made Medea one of them.
So she had taken up the worship of Hera -- seemed more appropriate to this quiet life she had had to learn to be content with.
Sometime in the past year, King Creon had started entrusting Jason to go on diplomatic missions for him, now that he was old and had no son. Once, she worried over Jason’s recent diplomatic visit to a neighboring city, and Glauce assured her that Jason was back safely at the palace. And just like that, she knew.
She watched him after that, noticed that he only came home to sleep, if that. Noticed him looking at Glauce’s long, loose yellow hair when they were both in the same room.
Then one day, he came home early, spent the day with the boys and the night with her. Someone who knew him less would have let this allay her fears, but as he continued to spend his time with her, she began to wonder if he were deliberating.
And then he did not come home one night, and she burned her hands while boiling water for a healing potion. She cried and pulled at the ribbons in her hair and tore at the clothes that never seemed to fit her right.
He found her like this when he returned and brushed her hair away from her face, smoothing it. He took her hands and held them as she watched him gently dress her burns and said, “Jason, please…just tell me.”
“Medea, I don’t…,” he started in Greek, and she knew that he was going to lie to her so she snatched her hands away from him and covered her ears and screamed in frustration, and told him to go away.
When she stopped, he was gone. Her boys stood in the doorway, staring at her. She did not know what to say to them so she turned away.
Jason did not come home the next day or the day after that, and she rarely left her room in the following days.
Once, her nurse came to tell her that the children were worried, but all she could think of were Jason’s eyes staring back at her in their faces, and she could not bear that thought any more than she could the sight of her husband.
When she finally came out of her seclusion and asked after the children, the nurse told her that Glauce had taken them back to the palace while Medea recovered.
“How thoughtful,” Medea said and bit her tongue to keep from asking about Jason.
In the end, it was the new maid who told her that King Creon was making preparations to celebrate his daughter’s marriage to Jason.
She found herself at the temple of Hera that day, but did not know what to pray for. So she placed her offerings on the altar, not in supplication, but in acknowledgement of their shared predicaments, feeling closer to her adopted goddess than she ever had before. She wondered if she could entice Jason back to her, but his betrayal sat on her heavily, and even if he came back, she could not forgive him.
She heard footsteps behind her and wondered who would enter the temple in her presence. Wearing their clothes, speaking their language, and adopting their gods and customs had not helped them accept her, and so she had let her hair down again and would not again be mistaken for one of them. Glauce had told her once that the Greek women wore their hair loose when in mourning, and this seemed appropriate.
Glauce walked to the altar now and placed a white peplos at the feet of Hera, the traditional gift to the goddess of marriage from new brides. She turned to Medea and said, “You are feeling better, I hope?”
When Medea turned away from her, Glauce reached out to hold her arm. Medea snatched it away with such force that the bracelets on her hands scratched and drew blood on Glauce’s arm. She looked down at the blood on her arm and said, “Medea, you must not act like this. Must not give my father reason to exile you.”
She hated that Glauce looked at her now like everyone else did because whatever else she had done, Glauce had been the one person in all of Corinth who had never seen Medea as a barbarian. And she hated that she could feel this, could feel anything at all.
She returned home to find herself an exile again: King Creon had asked her to leave his city at once. She was able to negotiate a day’s stay to prepare for traveling. Creon did not think a day enough for her to do any damage, but her own world had fallen apart in less than that.
When Jason returned, he found her outside in the little garden she grew herbs in and said, “Medea, what have you done now? King Creon tells me you’re to leave Corinth at once, just when Glauce and I had talked him into letting you stay.”
“I’m what I’ve always been, Jason. It is your relationship with the king that has changed, and it is you, once again, who is responsible for my exile.”
When he did not reply, she did what she had resolved not to do: she begged him to come with her.
“And where will we go?” He asked.
“It doesn’t matter. We had nowhere to go when we left your city.”
“And without the sanctuary Creon has given us, we would be hunted down. By your father, by my uncle’s relatives.”
“You used to have faith in us,” she said.
“Medea…,” he started, reaching for her hands, but she would not allow him to touch her. “And you would raise our sons on the run?”
“Why not? They have no home now. We are all exiles.”
He did not reply to that, and she understood that it was only she who was being exiled. Jason would keep his sons, keep Glauce, and have this kingdom as his reward. She wanted to scream, to claw at him, at herself, but she would not give him the satisfaction. She could not let him see her as irrational if she had any hope of convincing him. And she hated this, hated him for having reduced her to this.
When she turned away, he said, “I will send the boys to you soon so you can see them.”
It was later that day, when she held the boys close to her and realized how much she had to lose that she knew the best way to repay Jason. It would just be another part of herself that she would be sacrificing for him, but she remembered that they were a part of him too.
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V. in mourning
Before she had left Corinth, she had cursed Jason to wander alone and friendless in strange cities and never be welcomed. But when he turned up in Athens as a suppliant, she could not refuse him.
King Aegeus, her new husband, was away engaging in a battle that had started in a neighboring city, and he had taken most of the men away with him. The palace was deserted these days, but Athens was a powerful city and no one dared attack it, even when it was vulnerable.
She received him in the megaron and sent her maids away. It pleased her to see that he seemed miserable, and she wondered if her own suffering was as easily readable.
She did not say anything to him and understood that he was at her mercy, but before she could decide what to do, he caught her once again with his words. He spoke in Colchian, and she had not heard the sound of her native tongue in so long that she let him go on and closed her eyes, and she could almost pretend that she was back home.
He told her about his travels, but it was his eyes that caught her, and the silver threads in his hair that kept her gaze on him. She found herself stepping closer to him, and when she was within his reach, he raised his hand and ran his fingers through her long, loose hair.
She closed her eyes and let him and said, “Jason, I have committed many transgressions in my life, and been accused of even worse. But adultery has never been one of them.”
He did not reply but pulled her close and kissed her, and she would have pushed him away if not for the fact that she could taste the salt of his tears on his lips, and she would never, ever love this man again, but there were other things to feel, and so she did.
Later, when they lay in bed together, he spoke to her in Colchian, and she, when she replied at all, spoke in Greek, refusing to give this any familiarity or intimacy by the use of her native tongue. Finally, he said, “Your Greek has improved.”
And she laughed – not a happy sound, but one filled with bitterness. She had no one to speak Colchian to, not the husband who had once made the effort to put her at ease by learning it, and not the children who had been eager to learn anything she taught them. Her laugh turned into a sob, and she quickly covered her mouth with the back of her hand, stifling the sound.
“Medea,” he said, reaching over to touch her cheek, but she brushed his hand away and pushed herself out of the bed.
“You should go,” she said.
“Medea,” he said her name again, and when she still did not turn to face him, he asked, “Where did you bury them?”
She had spent years trying to forget everything that had happened during that time, especially during that day. But she could not forget where their bodies lay. She had slept fitfully during her last night in Corinth, but in that time, she had dreamed of Hera and a place where she could leave her children in the protection of the goddess. That is where she had taken them, and she could tell Jason this, ease his mind about them, but even the years had not dulled the sting of betrayal.
She shook her head and said, “If this is what you came for, Jason, you’ve traveled in vain.”
She heard him get out of bed, and without turning, she said, “Goodbye, Jason. I will let the watchman know to let you out.”
And with that, she left him behind. He was gone in the morning, and she knew that she would never see him again.
When she heard of his death, in a manner she had prophesied, she was back in Colchis, after another exile from Athens after the return of Aegeus’ son. Her father had passed away in the years she was away, and the Colchians had been happy to have someone from the divine line of Helios ruling over them again.
It struck her that Jason should die in Iolcos, where he was born, and she would end her days in her own homeland, when he had crossed half the world to meet her, and she had left her world behind to be with him. As if they had never met at all, and the only thing that came out of their union lay buried somewhere on a Greek island, away from them both.
She felt nothing at the news, less than she would have at the death of a stranger. But this indifference sat on her so heavily that it was almost like another loss.
-end-