Four years elapse before the action of _Medea_ commences. Medea has borne two sons to Jason; as a husband and father he returns to Greece with the object of his quest. But he is now received rather as the husband of a sorceress than as the winner of the Fleece. Ostracism and banishment accentuate the humiliation of marriage to a barbarian. Medea has sacrificed all to serve him; without her aid his expedition would have been fruitless, but with her he cannot live in the civilized community where she has no place. She frantically endeavors to become a Greek, but to no purpose. Jason strives to overcome a growing repugnance and loyally makes common cause with her; but he cannot follow her in banishment from Corinth, nor appreciate the feelings of the wife who sees him about to marry Creusa, and of the mother who sees her children prefer Creusa to herself. Then the barbarian in Medea reasserts herself and the passion of a just revenge, stifling all other feeling, moves her to the destruction of all her enemies and a final divorce from her heartless husband. To Jason she can give no other words of comfort than that he may be stronger in suffering than he has been in acting. Such an eminently personal tragedy Grillparzer constructed on the basis of a mythological story. The Fleece, like the hoard of the Nibelungen, is the occasion, but the curse attached to it is not the cause, of crimes; this cause is the cupidity of human nature and the helplessness of the individual who allows the forces of evil to gain sway over him. Jason, in overweening self-indulgence, attaches himself to a woman to whom he cannot be true. Medea, in too confident self-sufficiency, is not proof against the blandishments of an unscrupulous adventurer and progresses from crime to crime, doing from beginning to end what it is not her will to do. An unnatural and unholy bond cannot be severed even to make way for a natural and holy one. And the paths of glory lead not to the grave but to a living death in the consciousness of guilt and the remorse for misdeeds. Grillparzer never again wrote with such tumultuous passion as swayed him at the time of his work on the first half of _The Golden Fleece._ His illicit love of Charlotte Paumgarten gave him many a tone which thrills in the narrative of Jason and Medea; the death of his mother brought home to him the tragedy of violence and interrupted his work in the midst of _The Argonauts;_ his visit to Rome enabled him to regain composure and increase his sense of the local color of ancient civilization; so that when he completed _Medea,_ in the fall and early winter of 1819-20, he wrote with the mastery of one who had ventured, suffered, observed, and recovered. In his own person he had experienced the dangers of the _vita activa_ against which _The Golden Fleece_ is a warning.