Medea was a powerful
sorceress and the daughter of a king, Aeetes of
Colchis. Her part in
Greek Mythology generally starts when
Jason (and
the Argonauts) came to steal the
Golden Fleece,
Aeetes' most prized treasure.
Medea fell for Jason and asssisted him in overcoming the challenges that lay between himself and the prize. Because of this traitorous action, she was forced to leave with Jason - and in order to delay their pursuers, she killed her brother and strewed the pieces of his body along their wake.
Medea was a devotee of the goddess Hecate, other sources say she was the goddess' daughter. In the context of her life with Jason, she exemplifies the other, the dark, mystical, powerful, destructive and antisocial side of femininity - she is a foreigner, in some accounts of darker complexion, has a strong will and is quick to anger.
The episode of her life that is most well known is the one dramatized by Euripedes. After she had borne two children to Jason, he courted a more suitable wife: the young, fair daughter of Creon, a neighboring king. When she discovers that they are to be married, and that Jason plans to divorce her (a good political move on his part, and also ridding him of a headstrong and difficult wife), she becomes, to put it lightly, extremely angry. She used her magic to impregnate with poison a headdress she sent to the bride, which caused the girl to burst into flames. Creon also succumbed to the poison when he went to embrace his daughter. When Jason returned home from this terribly botched attempt at a wedding, he found that Medea had murdered their children in order to complete her revenge. She escaped in a chariot drawn by winged dragons, with the children's bodies.
There are other stories of her violent escapades and intrigues: violence and betrayal seemed to follow her. Yet in the murder of her children, and in the huge powers she held, Medea became the perfect illustration for the psychoanalytic concept of the "phallic mother" - the figure with the power of life and death. Not that i advocate psychoanalytic theory.