Let’s talk about how Medea was a killer, how she writhed and cut with vengeance, how she lied, cajoled, and gloated. She left whorish wounds in the land she had loved and in the land of her lover, wrenched the blood from a princess and watched it ooze like resin from a burning pine torch until all that remained was infinitely perishable human flesh. 

Now let’s talk about Achilles. 

Let’s talk about Achilles and how he dragged the raw-bloody-boned corpse of his lover’s killer fifty times around the citadel of Troy. Let’s talk about how Automedon wept for him, how Neoptolemus came blazing with nothing but a sword and his father’s honour, how his story lived on and on, long after Troy had burnt to rubble and its women had been stolen away.

No-one wept for Medea.

Well, she was never meant to be the hero of the story.

They never let her be. Heroes are men who kill with purpose. Heroes are men who take, who are rewarded for taking. Medea, who gave, who burned for giving, was never a hero.

Tell me the story of Medea, who had been born cased in gold, to a king for a father and a nymph for a mother, to a land that ran thick with wealth. She had edges bright and gleaming, with eyes like fire – she was never meant to be soft. Magic was woven in the tangle of her veins and beaded into her skin. It was in the herbs she crushed beneath her fingers, in the smoke curling from the temple fires, in her fevered prayers to Hecate when the night swallowed Colchis whole. So? She had everything at her fingertips, everything in the world and everything all at once. They would tell her story for centuries to come: granddaughter of the Sun-God Helios, child of King Aeëtes, beloved priestess of Hecate.

Then came Jason. 

She loved to oblivion, to delirium. She did not know what else she was good for. He took her crimson hands into his own and smiled with the adoration of a man whose honour had at last been satiated. They had the golden fleece of a god-touched beast on the deck of his ship and a hundred years’ worth of promises – what else could a woman ask for?

Listen, Medea was a witch. She was at home with her sense of tribe. She knew what she wanted and would do anything to get it, so when her father came after her with the wrath of a king betrayed, she sliced her brother into careful pieces and scattered them across the sea, all for her lover’s safe escape. She had done all these things for him and would have done more.

“This isn’t what I thought heroics would look like.” She confided, one night, in the folding darkness of the Argo. They were heading to Circe’s island, where the air was thick with brine and they could cleanse the blood off their hands. 

"No, but it's what love looks like." said Jason, and he let her curl up on the other half of his bed, their crescent-moon spines just touching. 

Tell me about Medea, who ran, who burned her bridges, who did not look back.

You do not get to redeem men who drag others ruthlessly along the mud and then leave young women out to rot. 

Achilles loved Patroclus violently. He followed his companion to the gates of Hades, sighed into the blackened mouth of death and stood at the threshold, feet bloodied from the corpses he had trampled, rage roiling white-hot in the depths of his gut. Somehow his love had been his saving grace.

But Medea, who had loved with the same reckless devotion, the same undying faith, was a witch and a madwoman and a hero’s accomplice at best. 

Tell me, what was the difference?

Medea slit her brother’s throat and let his body bloom across the waves. Medea tricked Pelias' daughters into hacking their father apart, so that Jason could retake his rightful throne. At the end of everything, her hands dripped red. His did not. That was the difference between them. That was the only difference that mattered.

Exile found them again, and it wore the same crown as devotion. Jason left without a throne, but he had his hero’s name. Medea had only the space beside him, the foreignness of her tongue in a city that would never be hers. Didn’t she used to be golden once? Didn’t she used to have everything at her fingertips, everything in the world and everything all at once?

Corinth was soft. Golden streets, golden halls, golden girl. Glauce was young. Unscarred. Unworried by old ghosts or old blood.
Medea screamed with anguish behind the four walls of her new chamber, giving Jason sons, love, peace, all that she had left to give, while he screamed with pleasure behind the gilded walls of another. He felt redeemable while she felt lost.
How dare you? Do you remember what I did? Do you remember what we did? Do you?
They swapped words, insults and frequencies, her shrill in her accusations and him patronizing in his defense. She had given him everything, and he thought she had nothing left.
Fine. Let him have his gold. Let him choke on it.

For days and nights Medea did not sleep. To her, this was the darkest treachery – he had been part of her tribe, her chosen family, and she had done all these things for him and more. She had given up every inch of her soul; she had nowhere to go. The love curdled in her throat like violence, bubbling up, threatening to spill over, because she no longer had a place to put it.
Well, let me tell you a secret. Achilles was sleepless, too. His grief kept him sharp, teeth bared in the dark, anger gnawing at the marrow of his bones. He killed and killed and killed until the sands of Troy drank deep of his fury. No one called him mad. How is this story any different from Achilles at the gates of Troy? From Odysseus razing cities to dust? From Agamemnon bathing in the blood of his own daughter for the favor of the gods?
This is not a request for sympathy. This is a far cry from forgiveness. But in this tale about choice, about love, about the things we do for the people we want, let us give her a story.

Medea sent the girl a wedding gift. Finely spun, beautiful, terrible. Glauce draped it over her shoulders and knew, for the length of a heartbeat, what it felt like to be a queen. Then, fire bloomed. Silk hair blackened. Eyes boiled to ruin.
Pity. Medea liked golden girls – after all, she had been one herself, lifetimes ago. But what else could a woman like Medea do to make her beloved learn his lesson? Where does a woman like Medea go from here?

Let’s talk about the children. Look, she never wanted to kill them – she loved every inch of their little bodies, their darling hands, their darling mouths. But what would a man like Jason have done with them? What sort of life would they have led – these poor, destitute souls with no home to go to? Yes, they had been sons – dreadful reminders of Jason’s disloyalty – but Medea didn’t think of herself as a cruel woman. In another world, in the true folktale, these sons would have met their end at the hands of vengeful Corinthians… She was, very maternally, saving them from a worse death.
When Jason emerged breathless from news of his sons’ fates, Medea rose slowly up to the sky in her grandfather’s golden chariot and smiled. He blathered like a fool beneath her feet and she felt – more than ever before – like a hero.
This was not a completely true triumph, of course. What sort of victory was it to be sitting beside the dead bodies of her own children, who’d been half her soul as much as they’d been half of Jason’s? Still, it felt strangely joyful to be breaking her lover’s heart, to be bidding farewell to him, to be telling him that he had a wife back home to bury. As for Medea? She was the one who had lived this story of betrayal and vengeance, the one who had loved so completely, so fiercely, that when all was taken from her, she had nothing left to give but death. Did he regret her now? Did he?

When they tell the story of Medea, they call her mad. It is important in this story that she is sane.
There is a ‘Medea narrative’ in the judiciary that refutes the psychiatric diagnoses of diminished liability for a crime – a premeditated murder without insanity. In the Greek translation of Euripides’ play, Medea says this: I understand what I am about to do, but anger militarily defeats me and I will do it anyway.
There’s a story here about motherhood, about love, and about what happens when the world tells you that your sacrifices mean nothing. Don’t call it madness. Don’t take her wretchedness away from her and don’t absolve her of her sins by scrubbing her clean with excuses. There are never excuses – but give her a reason. There are always reasons.
Please understand.