Whether you know your own Medea through the many versions of Jason and the Argonauts or as a mythical witch, murderer, or a deranged maternal filicide intent on bloody revenge, Hall’s Medea brings a non-existent woman to life in vibrant detail; a woman who has ‘existed’ since before Euripides’s tragedy was ever performed in 431BC in Athens. Medea has endured across nearly three millennia, as the subject of plays, films and artworks, providing each generation and culture with new facets to draw from her character to satisfy their own needs. 

As Hall explains, Medea can be a love story with a tragic end; a tale of trickery and deception by a husband and wife intent on power unfazed by murder as a career move; a story of revenge by a homicidal, sometimes unhinged, woman, and more recently Medea as the ultimate symbol of a woman who refuses to bow to male authority. 

From her childhood in Colchis as an unloved marriage pawn for her father, to her escape with Jason on his ship, the Argo, to their arrival in Thessaly, Medea appears adventurous.

She is a woman taking hold of the only opportunity presented to her when confronted with the overbearing power of her father and brother who she is forced to serve upon.

Killing her brother Apsyrtus and despatching him in pieces so that the Colchians cannot return to King Aeëtes with a body becomes necessary for her own escape.

 When they reach Thessaly and learn that Jason’s chances of claiming his birthright have been thwarted, she turns her attention to planning the removal of King Pelias and his son Acastus in order to place Jason on the throne, a plan he approves of if not so keen on knowing the details.

But neither of them see Peleus coming, who claims the throne and throws them out of Thessaly. By the time they arrive in Corinth, their partnership – marriage for Medea, convenient liaison for Jason – is on the rocks. Jason has wheedled his way into Princess Glauce’s affections and King Creon’s palace, abandoning Medea and their sons.

And this is where the greatest paradox in Medea’s story occurs: does she kill her sons with Jason to revenge his cruelty towards her or has being abandoned driven her insane? By the time she takes on Theseus in Athens to secure the throne for her latest son Medeios, she reads as a power-crazed woman focussed on her own advancement.

Hall has done a remarkable job synthesising the ancient sources for Medea. She has concentrated on the Greek foundational sources relying on the earliest works to avoid reproducing any accretions that have seeped into the tale over the centuries, only using Latin and later renditions to corroborate the early evidence or to insert missing details.

From the lost archaic epic Korinthiaka to Euripedes’s 431BC play to Appollonius’s third century BC Argonautica and Scotland’s George Buchanan’s sixteenth-century Latin translation, Hall has painstakingly pieced together the most authentic account of a fictional woman’s life making it feel immediate and real. 

Throughout are constant reminders of ancient Greece in our midst. Kolcheti National Park in Georgia is the site of ancient Colchis; Zephyros god of the west wind, Hymenaem, a nuptial chant, Hypnos the god of sleep reminds us of the roots of our language.

Arguably, the longevity, and fascination, of Euripides’s account of Medea rests on his exploration of the issue of criminal responsibility and the legal difference between premeditated and unpremeditated murder. 

The legacy of the ancient Greeks is threaded throughout our culture so why shouldn’t Medea be repurposed, generation after generation, to meet the needs of each society that embraces her? Over the centuries, she has transitioned from ‘othered’ sorceress to wise woman to women’s heroine.

In the last century, she has been employed to represent the struggles of early twentieth-century suffragettes; to help change society’s perceptions of infanticidal women and more recently to champion abandoned and marginalised women in modern India. 

The ancient Greeks believed Medea really existed, providing her with a genealogy stretching back three generations to Helios and Perseis; Hall’s latest book has achieved immortality for Medea, giving the woman who has never exist, a bright future.

Medea: A life, by Edith Hall, published by Yale University Press,256pp, £20.00