Medea: Lines 501-600 Summary & Analysis

By eliminating Medea's agency and attributing all of her devotion and assistance she has given to him as simply a product of Aphrodite, goddess of love, Jason heaps insult on the injuries he has done Medea. Like a lying child who changes the name of the friend he says gave him a toy he actually stole, Jason promptly changes his story, saying it was not Aphrodite, but Eros (Love himself) whom he has to thank for his good fortune. In Jason's world of twisted deceit and neglected duty, Medea has done nothing for him.

Jason continues to advance empty arguments: that being Greek is in and of itself better than being from any other country because of the Greeks' superior insight and that fame is the greatest possible human achievement. Jason's shortsightedness blocks him from seeing that people can be famous outside of Greece and from accounting for the tremendous difference between fame for heroic deeds and infamy for terrible actions.

Jason's most hypocritical and insulting argument—that he abandoned Medea and his children for their own good—is presented here. Jason is such a cunning rhetorician (arguer) that he is almost able to make his blatantly untrue position seem plausible. In reality, a sentence of exile in ancient Greece would have been incredibly onerous on a single mother with young children. Unprotected, Medea and the children would face danger and possible death at all times.

Jason adds another entirely flawed argument to his speech—that the concerns of men are wholly dissimilar, higher, and more civic, than the concerns of women. It does not take a psychologist to see that Jason has abandoned his aging wife and young children not for their benefit and, at least in part, because of the opportunity for a fresh, young sexual prospect. The Chorus, naturally, is unconvinced by Jason's arguments. Euripides has made him a parody of empty rhetoric.

Medea is an advocate for principled speech—one should only use arguments and rhetoric in service of justice and the truth, not to make false claims seem believable. If Jason were to acknowledge his despicable behavior as despicable, then, according to Medea's view, he wouldn't deserve the severe punishment she is soon to administer.

Money—an arbitrary sign of a thing's imagined value—and hypocrisy are intimately linked even from this earliest stage of Western literature and philosophy. Jason thinks that he can buy himself justice when, in reality, justice stems from proper conduct and is, like truth, invaluable. Medea attributes Jason's decision to abandon her to his unmanly fear of being an outsider and a pathetic need for social ease achieved via conformity.

Perhaps most surprising in the list of fatuous aids Jason proposes to give Medea are the "letters of recommendation." Though in some ways dissimilar from their modern counterparts, these letters, like money, represent a kind of social pretense. They are inflated representations constructed to avoid and diminish social obligations rather than fulfill them.