The Betrayal of Medea

To go to any lengths for love, even betraying one’s own origins and fundamental identity.

The betrayal of Medea is a scene that occurs at the origin of the events that will lead to the tragedy bearing her name: it is the moment preceding the murder of her brother Absyrtus, whose scattered body parts will serve only as a diversion for her to escape with her lover, Jason, a way to distract her father—King Aeetes—from pursuing them.

Medea, like Lamia, is a femme fatale: her emotions are uncontainable but rationalized with cold lucidity. In young Medea’s eyes, there is awareness of the act she is about to commit, there is slight remorse that will nonetheless not stop her from achieving her goal.

In her hands—hidden in the shadows—she brandishes the knife that will foreshadow the second crime she will commit one day by killing her own children; on her body, a red dress like the blood she will shed; on her face and her long dark curls, the sun of Apollo that will welcome her onto his chariot at the end of the tragedy.

Salvi thus pays homage to the Greek myth and makes it a universal symbol of the relationship we have with our impulses, sometimes so irreparably difficult to ignore, that we lose contact with our own identity and cruelly end part of ourselves to achieve a goal. The author thus reminds us that there is a Medea in each of us when we justify crimes against ourselves to seek external acceptance.