Eksodos
Jason
Ladies, stationed near this house, pray tell me is the author of these hideous deeds,
Medea, still within, or hath she fled from hence? For she must hide beneath the earth or soar on wings towards heaven’s vault, if she would avoid the vengeance of the royal house. Is she so sure she will escape herself unpunished from this house,
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when she hath slain the rulers of the land? But enough of this! I am forgetting her children. As for her, those whom she hath wronged will do the like by her; but I am come to save the children’s life, lest the victim’s kin visit their wrath on me, in vengeance for the murder foul,
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wrought by my children’s mother.
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Chorus
Unhappy man, thou knowest not the full extent of thy misery, else had thou never said those words.
Jason
How now? Can she want to kill me too?
Chorus
Thy sons are dead; slain by their own mother’s hand.
Jason
O God! what sayest thou? Woman, thou hast sealed my doom.
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Chorus
Thy children are no more; be sure of this.
Jason
Where slew she them; within the palace or outside?
Chorus
Throw wide the doors and see thy children’s murdered corpses.
Jason
Haste, ye slaves, loose the bolts,
undo the fastenings, that I may see the sight of twofold woe, my murdered sons and her, whose blood in vengeance I will shed.
[Medea in mid air, on a chariot drawn by dragons; the children’s corpses by her.
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Medea
Why shake those doors and attempt to loose their bolts, in quest of the dead and me their murderess? From such toil desist. If thou wouldst aught with me,
say on, if so thou wilt; but never shalt thou lay hand on me, so swift the steeds the sun, my father’s sire, to me doth give to save me from the hand of my foes.
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Jason
Accursed woman! by gods, by me and all mankind abhorred as never woman was,
who hadst the heart to stab thy babes, thou their mother, leaving me undone and childless; this hast thou done and still dost gaze upon the sun and earth after this deed most impious. Curses on thee! I now perceive what then I missed
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in the day I brought thee, fraught with doom, from thy home in a barbarian land to dwell in Hellas, traitress to thy sire and to the land that nurtured thee. On me the gods have hurled the curse that dogged thy steps, for thou didst slay thy brother at his hearth
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ere thou cam’st aboard our fair ship Argo. Such was the outset of thy life of crime; then didst thou wed with me, and having born me sons to glut thy passion’s lust, thou now hast slain them. Not one amongst the wives of Hellas e’er had dared
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this deed; yet before them all I chose thee for my wife, wedding a foe to be my doom, no woman, but a lioness fiercer than Tyrrhene Scylla in nature. But with reproaches heaped a thousandfold
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