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THE ARGUMENT.

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JASON, having come to Corinth, and bringing with him Medea, espouses Glauce, the daughter of Creon, king of Corinth.  But Medea, on the point of being banished from Corinth by Creon, having asked to remain one day, and having obtained her wish, sends to Glauce, by the hands of her sons, presents, as an acknowledgment for the favor, a robe and a golden chaplet, which she puts on and perishes; Creon also having embraced his daughter is destroyed.  But Medea, when she had slain her children, escapes to Athens, in a chariot drawn by winged dragons, which she received from the Sun, and there marries AEgeus son of Pandion.

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MEDEA.

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NURSE OF MEDEA.

Would that the hull of Argo had not winged her way to the Colchian land through the Cyanean Symplegades,[1] and that the pine felled in the forests of Pelion had never fallen, nor had caused the hands of the chiefs to row,[2] who went in search of the golden fleece for Pelias; for neither then would my mistress Medea have sailed to the towers of the Iolcian land, deeply smitten in her mind with the love of Jason; nor having persuaded the daughters of Pelias to slay their father would she have inhabited this country of Corinth with her husband and her children, pleasing indeed by her flight[3] the citizens to whose land she came, and herself concurring in every respect with Jason; which is the surest support of conjugal happiness, when the wife is not estranged from the husband.  But now every thing is at variance, and the dearest ties are weakened.  For having betrayed his own children, and my mistress, Jason reposes in royal wedlock, having married the daughter of Creon, who is prince of this land.  But Medea the unhappy, dishonored, calls on his oaths, and recalls the hands they plighted, the greatest pledge of fidelity, and invokes the gods to witness what return she meets with from Jason.  And she lies without tasting food, having sunk her body in grief, dissolving all her tedious time in tears, after she had once known that she had been injured by her husband, neither raising her eye, nor lifting her countenance from the ground; but as the rock, or the wave of the sea, does she listen to her friends when advised.  Save that sometimes having turned her snow-white neck she to herself bewails her dear father, and her country, and her house, having betrayed which she hath come hither with a man who has now dishonored her.  And she wretched hath discovered from affliction what it is not to forsake one’s paternal country.  But she hates her children, nor is she delighted at beholding them:  but I fear her, lest she form some new design:  for violent is her mind, nor will it endure to suffer ills.  I know her, and I fear her, lest she should force the sharpened sword through her heart, or even should murder the princess and him who married her, and after that receive some greater ill.  For she is violent; he who engages with her in enmity will not with ease at least sing the song of victory.  But these her children are coming hither having ceased from their exercises, nothing mindful of their mother’s ills, for the mind of youth is not wont to grieve.