LifeCharacter said:
And, to the Greeks, breaking your oath to someone who is solely responsible for all of your success is pretty terrible. I'm well aware of Jason's ineptness and reliance on everyone else for everything he does, but oaths are oaths, unless they're to a savage barbarian in which case they don't matter and she should just be happy to live in Greece in whatever position he sees fit to give her. And, all the while he insults her and her home country that she wishes she never left.
Sorry for the late reply, I was buried in end of term work.
If I remember correctly, Jason's oath is specifically that he will "love Medea forever". It is possible to love someone (even romantically) without being to married them. I have many friends and family members who are in common law relationships with partners they love deeply, despite not be officially married to them. If we accept this as possible, the actual breaking of the oath could be seen as Jason no longer loving Medea after she murders their children. That being said, this particular bit relies on specific translations and cultural ideas that the Greeks may not have shared, for example the writer may have translated "marriage" as "love" or the two share a Greek word.
So because he doesn't want to betray his friend for the throne of Iolchus, a place they had to flee from as fugitives for killing the king, we're meant to take it as him not having a motivation of power and wealth and fame that he think he deserves?
The idea is that if Jason were truly motivated by power lust and was willing to take it by any means necessary, then he would have betrayed his friend Acastus and taken over the city. They only need to flee because Jason refuses to point the finger at Acastus's sisters for committing a crime that he knows Medea is ultimately responsible for. This isn't even the first time Jason has turned down a kingship on principle, as he almost becomes king of Lemnos during his quest for the Golden Fleece but turns it down to continue the quest.
Now you could still make the argument that Jason regrets turning down the crown of Iolchus and, seeing the chance to become king again decides that he will take it. However, you could also still interpret that sympathetically. After all, Jason's family has barely survived one brutal exile because he didn't become king. He could see becoming king of Corinth as his last chance to save the people he loves from the fate they just barely escaped.
This is actually something I really love about Greek Mythology. The characters are all multi-faceted enough to allow for multiple interpretations of both them and their actions.
It certainly doesn't help that his desire to protect his family means forcing them into a societal role of his barbarian slaves who will never be recognized as his rightful wife and children, to giving them support in their exile, to giving them some money in their exile when she questions his whole oath-breaking and making his royal, demigod wife what amounts to a servant.
Umm.... Okay, uh.... This is actually where we get into a lot of values dissonance between us and the Ancient Greeks. Their society, especially in Athens where most of these plays come from, was deeply patriarchal. As the father and head of the family, Medea and their children are already subservient to Jason. Now, you might say that such a thing was a Greek notion and not true of the kingdom she came from. In that case, I actually couldn't debate you because I don't know enough about her home kingdom to say for sure.
Now, I'm fairly sure not everyone at the time would have agreed with these patriarchal notions. There are stories going as far back as the Hymn to Demeter, of wives refusing to just allow their husbands to run their and their childrens' lives. Gaia, one of the four primordial beings and the most powerful being in Greek mythology, is female. Personally I actually think of Euripides as something of a proto-feminist for his work in
Medea, even if I find Jason a sympathetic character.
If she had left them alive they would be the property of a man with nothing but spite for their mother in a city with nothing but spite for their mother and, as illegitimate barbarian children, would have absolutely no protection.
Wouldn't they have Jason's protection? Nothing in the stories implies to me that he didn't love and care for his children. Again, his first reaction upon the deaths of the princess and king is to try to get them out of the city safely. Then again, mythology is also filled with stories of stepmothers trying to kill their spouse's children from previous relationships, so maybe not.
And how do the gods feel about murdering ones children, generally? You can take it as Helios just helping out his granddaughter, or as Euripides just being controversial (because he was certainly that), but that seems like a rather surface reading of it.
It's a little hard to tell how they feel about child killing in particular, as most of the people who do it in mythology normally have also done some other horrendous thing that the gods also hate. One example of this is Tantalus, who murdered his son Pelops as a way of testing the gods' omnipotence, which is something that no mortal has the right to do. I believe that ultimately they hate it though, as it's one of the few crimes that they can't double standard their way out of (they can commit a number of acts atrocious to humans specifically because they're gods). In this instance I'm speaking of Kronos, the king of the gods before Zeus, whose sin in eating his own children is considered so great that Gaia herself decides to overthrow him.
I know that Helios saving Medea at the end is supposed to signify that she has the gods' blessing for what she did. That's what made the ending so controversial in the first place, that the gods would view someone murdering their own children as being in the right. It is a little hard to understand in the context of other myths though. Juxtapose it against the Herakles story as an example: Herakles is struck mad by Hera and murders his wife and children in a fit. He is not blessed or forgiven for this though, and spends the majority of his life attempting to atone for it (that's the Twelve Labours). When Euripides writes about the event, he describes Herakles as being driven to the point of suicide in despair of his actions, and being so polluted by miasma that no city will take him in. It can be very difficult for people to rationalize or understand how Medea could knowingly do something so cruel and be both justified and blessed for it, while Herakles is punished for it.
My idea of it just being because Helios is looking after his granddaughter is partly an attempt to rationalize and understand the gods' behaviour here. Though trying to rationalize Greek mythology is something of a lost cause due to it having hundreds of different authors over hundreds of years, and thus multiple conflicting details. That many of the later stories start to get very "fanfiction-y" doesn't really help in that regard.
Oh, I didn't mean that the Greeks saw her as heroic, I meant that when you take what makes a classical hero and apply it to Medea she certainly qualifies.
Ah, sorry about that it was a misunderstanding on my part.