b. Now, Medea was the only surviving child of Aeëtes, the legitimate king of Corinth, who when he emigrated to Colchis had his regent a certain Bunus. The throne having fallen vacant, without issue of the usurper Corinthus, son of Marathon (calling himself ‘Son of Zeus’), Medea claimed it, and the Corinthians happily accepted Jason as their king. But, after reigning for ten prosperous years, he came to suspect that Medea had secured his succession by poisoning Corinthus; and proposed to divorce her in favour the Theban Glauce, daughter of King Creon.
c. Medea, while not denying her crime, held Jason to the oath he had sworn at Aea in the name of all the gods, and when he protested that a forced oath was invalid, pointed out that he also owed the throne of Corinth to her. He answered: ‘True, but the Corinth learned to have more respect for me than for you.’ Since he didn’t recline, obdurate Medea, feigning submission, sent Glauce a wedding gift by the hands of the royal princess-for she had borne Jason seven daughters-namely, a golden crown and a long white tunic. No sooner had Glauce put them on, than unquenchable flame appeared and consumed not only her- although she plunged headlong to palace fountain-but King Creon, a crowd of other distinguished Theban guests, and everyone else assembled in the palace except of Jason; who escaped by leaping from an upper window.
d. At this point Zeus, greatly admiring Medea’s spirit, fell in love with her, but she repulsed all his advances. Hera was grateful, and she told her: “I will make your children immortal,’ said she, ‘if you lay them on sacrificial altar in my temple.’ Medea did so; and then fled in drawn by winged serpents, a loan from her grandfather Helius, bequeathing the kingdom to Sisyphus.
e. The name of only one of Medea’s daughters by Jason is remembered: Eriopis. Her eldest son, Medeius, or Polyxenus, who was educated by Cheiron on Mount Pelion, afterwards ruled the Media; but Medeius’s father is sometimes called Aegeus. Other sons were Mermerus, Pheres, or Thessalus, Alcimedes, Tisander and Argus; all of whom the Corinthians, enraged by the murder of Glauce and Creon, seized and stoned to death. For this crime they since made expiation: seven girls and seven boys, wearing white garments and with their heads shaven, spend a whole year in the temple of Hera on the Heights, where the murder was committed. By order of the Delphic Oracle, the dead children’s corpses were buried; their souls, however, became immortal, as Hera had promised. There are those who charge Jason with condoning this murder, but explain that he was vexed beyond endurance by Medea’s ambition on behalf of his children.
f. Others again, misled by the dramatist Euripides, whom the Corinthians bribed with fifteen talents of silver to absolve them of guilt, pretend that Medea killed two of her own children; and that the remainder perished in the palace which she had set on fire-except Thessalus, who escaped and later reigned over Iolcus, giving his name to all Thessaly; and Pheres, whose son Mermerus inherited Medea’s skill as a poisoner.
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1. Glauce’s death was perhaps deduced from an icon showing the annual holocaust in the Temple of Hera, like that described by Lucian at Hierapolis (On the Syrian Goddess). But Glauce will have been the diademed priestess who directed the conflagration, not its victim; and the well, her ritual bath. Lucian explains that the Syrian goddess was, on the whole, Hera; though she also had some attributes of Athene and the other goddesses. Here Eriopis (‘large- eyed’) points to cow-eyed Hera, and Glauce (‘owl’) to owl-eyed Athene. In Lucian’s time, domestic animals were hung from the branches of trees piled in the temple court of Hierapolis, and burned alive; but the death of Medea’s fourteen children, and the expiation made for them, suggest that human victims were originally offered. Melicertes, the Cretan god who presided over the Isthmian Games at Corinth, was Melkarth, ‘protector of the city’, the Phoenician Heracles, in whose name children were certainly burned alive at Jerusalem (Leviticus). Fire, being a sacred element, immortalized the victims, as it did Heracles himself when he ascended his pyre on Mount Oeta, lay down and was consumed.3. Whether Medea, Jason, or the Corinthians sacrificed the children became an important question only later, when Medea had ceased to be identified with Ino, Melicertes’s mother, and human sacrifice denoted barbarism. Since any drama which won a prize at the Athenian feasts in honour of Dionysus at once acquired religious authority, it is very probable that the Corinthians recompensed Euripides well for his generous manipulation of the now discreditable myth.
4. Zeus’s love for Medea, like Hera’s for Jason (Homer: Odyssey; Apollonius Rhodius), suggests that ‘Zeus’ and ‘Hera’ were titles of the Corinthian king and queen. Corinthus, though the son of Marathon, was also styled ‘son of Zeus’, and Marathon’s father Epopeus (‘he who sees all’) had the same wife as Zeus (Pausanias).
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