Trendall Lecture

We tend to think of Medea, this complex and controversial figure from Greek mythology, as Euripides portrayed her in his eponymous play: a foreign sorceress who killed her own children in revenge against Jason, her unfaithful husband. However, at the beginning of her story, Medea was a maiden who fell in love with the hero when he arrived in her homeland of Colchis in search of the Golden Fleece. Using her magic, she helped Jason overcome the enormous, menacing dragon that guarded the fleece by making it fall asleep with her magic soporific potions. South Italian vase-painters of the fourth century BCE show a particular fascination with the climactic moment in Colchis. They tend to magnify Medea’s presence and foreground her pivotal intervention, often at the expense of Jason’s heroism. They extoll her magic arts, frequently depicting her offering a bowl of drugs to the dragon, an iconographic motif that persisted into Roman times. In this presentation, I bring out the iconographic similarities between Medea and the Hesperides depicted as offering bowls to their respective formidable dragons. I argue that on South Italian vases, the myth of the capture of the Golden Fleece was reimagined in local terms, assimilated with the representation of the Hesperides feeding Ladon, the guardian of the famed golden apples. However, the motif of Medea drugging the Colchis dragon is presented as the antithesis of the ideal maiden’s role, embodied by the exemplary nymphs who dutifully nourished their dragon.