Produced by Barbara Watson and the Online Distributed Proofreading Canada Team at http://www.pgdpcanada.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries) THE MEDEA OF EURIPIDES TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH RHYMING VERSE WITH EXPLANATORY NOTES BY GILBERT MURRAY, M.A., LL.D. SOMETIME PROFESSOR OF GREEK IN THE UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW; FELLOW OF NEW COLLEGE, OXFORD OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS AMERICAN BRANCH NEW YORK: 35 WEST 32ND STREET 1912 Copyright, 1906, by OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS AMERICAN BRANCH INTRODUCTION The _Medea_, in spite of its background of wonder and enchantment, is not a romantic play but a tragedy of character and situation. It deals, so to speak, not with the romance itself, but with the end of the romance, a thing which is so terribly often the reverse of romantic. For all but the very highest of romances are apt to have just one flaw somewhere, and in the story of Jason and Medea the flaw was of a fatal kind. The wildness and beauty of the Argo legend run through all Greek literature, from the mass of Corinthian lays older than our present Iliad, which later writers vaguely associate with the name of Eumêlus, to the Fourth Pythian Ode of Pindar and the beautiful Argonautica of Apollonius Rhodius. Our poet knows the wildness and the beauty; but it is not these qualities that he specially seeks. He takes them almost for granted, and pierces through them to the sheer tragedy that lies below.