Description
"Known to most as the wife of Jason from the myth of Jason and the Argonauts, Medea is said to have crossed the Sahara, founded a city in what is now Slovenia, sailed in the Atlantic, and hypnotized a deadly giant made of bronze who terrorized Crete. Her crimes-she killed her own brother, her own sons by Jason, and Jason's new bride-were appalling, but ancient authors and later artists have shown how they were the desperate methods of a highly intelligent woman living under harsh patriarchal constraints. This is the first biography of Medea ever to have been written. While she has appeared in countless works of art-plays, operas, musicals, ballets, movies, poems, painting, sculptures and novels-no author since antiquity has taken seriously the possibility that her myth is based on a historical figure, a Black Sea migrant to Greece in the late Bronze Age. Edith Hall, as an award-winning scholar with an expertise in ancient Greek culture and its reception, is uniquely placed to scrutinize the plethora of ancient sources and produce a convincing narrative that makes sense of the story of a woman driven to murder, even of her own children, in response to the unbearable pressure. The heart of the book is a face-paced, colorful narrative which brings to life Medea's experiences in a sequence of five episodes that emerge with clarity from the ancient texts and artefacts: her lonely childhood in the eastern Black Sea, her dramatic escape with Jason and the Argonauts; the murders and unsuccessful palace coup she was involved with in Thessaly; the desperate revenge to which she resorted when her husband abandoned her in Corinth; and her twenty years in Athens, as a refugee, then Queen, then driven into exile. Whatever happened to this complicated person-there is no record, anywhere, that she ever died-she has continued to live on in the world imagination"--
