It is Creon, king of Corinth. He comes on stage, his mind made up: he has proclaimed sentence of immediate exile for Medea. She must leave at once: his is afraid of her. Her eloquent appeal falls on deaf ears: his resolve, he says, is fixed. She will never persuade him But she does. He yields, though he knows that he is making a mistake, and gives her one more day.
Medea must also conceal her purpose from everyone else in the play, except the chorus whom she must win over to her side. There is only one person who can and does pose a real obstacle to Medea's plans, who can effectively confront her with an argument "Medea herself. In the monologue she delivers after she hears that her fatal gifts have been delivered into the princess's hands by her children, she pleads with herself, changes her mind, and changes again and then again to return finally and firmly to her intention to kill them. When the children look at her and smile, she loses her courage. "Farewell, my plans!- (1048). But then she recovers. "Shall I earn the world's laughter by leaving my enemies unpunished? No, I must dare to do this!- (1049-51). In this great scene the grim heroic resolve triumphs not over an outside adversary or adviser but over the deepest maternal feelings of the hero herself.
The presentation in heroic terms of a rejected foreign wife, who was to kill her husband's new wife, the bride's father, and finally her own children, must have made the audience which saw it for the first time in 431 B.C.E a bit uneasy. Heroes, it was well known, were violent beings and since they lived and died by the simple code "help your friends and hurt your enemies- it was only to be expected that their revenges, when they felt themselves unjustly treated, would be huge and deadly. The epic poems [i.e., Homer's Iliad and Odyssey] do not really question Achilles' right to bring destruction on the Greek army to avenge Agamemnon's insults, nor Odysseus' slaughter of the entire younger generation of the Ithacan aristocracy.
