Medea is Seneca’s most concentrated tragedy of revenge, and the purest study in the corpus of a will that grows to match its own crime. The matter is the oldest in Greek tragedy — Euripides’ Medea stands behind it — but Seneca’s play is not a dramatization of a marriage breaking down; it is the anatomy of a self being remade. From the first word the outcome is fixed: the abandoned wife of Jason, daughter of the Colchian king Aeetes and granddaughter of the Sun, will repay her husband’s marriage to Creusa, daughter of Creon of Corinth, by destroying the bride, her father, and — the act toward which the whole play bends — the two sons she has borne to Jason. What Seneca dramatizes is not whether she will do it but how she talks herself into being able to.

The play opens not with exposition but with an invocation: Medea calling down the gods of marriage and then, pointedly, the gods it is “more fitting for Medea to invoke” — the powers of eternal night. The prologue already contains the whole movement of the tragedy in miniature: a prayer for the bridegroom that curses him with survival, a recognition that the vengeance is “born already” because she has given birth, and the command to herself that recurs as the play’s refrain, that “greater crimes befit me now.” Against this stands the Nurse, the voice of Stoic restraint who counsels that “anger that is hidden does harm,” and the play’s most famous exchange compresses the argument to two words: when the Nurse warns “Medea —”, the answer is “Fiam” — “I shall become her.” The name is a program. To become Medea is to become the sum of her past crimes — the murdered brother Absyrtus scattered on the sea to delay her father’s pursuit, old Pelias boiled in the cauldron by his own deceived daughters — and the play’s recurring gesture is Medea reciting that résumé to spur herself on, until in the final act she can say “Now I am Medea,” a self at last equal to its history.

Three confrontations structure the rising action: with Creon, who grants her a single day’s reprieve and so unwittingly gives her exactly the time she needs; with Jason, whose defense — that he yielded to necessity, that he chose the marriage for the children’s sake — she dismantles and then turns to her own purpose when she sees how much he loves his sons (“a place lies open for the wound”); and finally with herself. The long fourth act is a set-piece of stage magic unmatched in ancient drama, the Nurse’s report of Medea ransacking the world’s venoms followed by the incantation itself, a hymn to Hecate in shifting meters in which Medea offers her own blood at the altar and poisons the robe that will burn Creusa and Creon alive. The play’s two great choral odes give it its frame: the ode on the Argo — the first ship, the first violation of the sea’s God-set boundaries, of which “Medea, an evil greater than the sea,” was the freight — and within it the lines that a later age could not stop reading as prophecy, that “there will come, in the late years, an age in which Ocean will loosen the bonds of things \ and Thule be no longer the last of lands.”

The fifth act is the most searching child-murder scene in classical literature because Seneca refuses to make it simple. Medea kills the first son in the grip of a vision of her brother’s avenging ghost; but before the second she breaks down completely — “the mother returns, the wife wholly driven out” — and the speech that follows, in which anger and pietas fight like “discordant waves” driving the sea both ways, is the corpus’s fullest dramatization of the Stoic adfectus, the passion that overruns reason and that the wise man must extirpate before it does exactly this. She loses the fight on purpose: “yield to devotion, grief” is answered, a line later, by “Anger, where you lead, I follow.” She kills the second son on the roof, in full view of Jason, having realized that a crime without its intended spectator is wasted — and then escapes in the chariot of the Sun, her grandfather, drawn by serpents, untouched and unpunished. Jason’s last line is the bleakest theological statement in Senecan tragedy: “bear witness that, where you travel, there are no gods.” The murderer ascends; the just man is left below with the bodies. The play offers no answering providence, only the spectacle of a passion that, given its day, accomplishes everything it set out to do.

The translation renders the verse in clear modern English lines, keeping the line structure of the Latin and the line-for-line cut of the stichomythia, and imposing no English meter or rhyme; the choral odes’ shifts of meter are left to register through their syntax rather than through any English metrical imitation. Section numbers approximate the line numbering by which the play is cited. The gods are kept Roman (Jupiter, Phoebus, Dis, Hecate, Trivia, Lucina), and the geography of Medea’s catalogues — the Thermodon of the Amazons, the gem-bearing Hydaspes, the venoms of Eryx and Caucasus — is preserved rather than glossed in the body, with the named persons, places, and realia carried in the glossary.