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.