"The boys have perished by their mother's hand:
Open these gates, thou'lt see thy murdered sons.
Jason. Undo the bolt on the instant, servants there;
Loose the clamps, that I may see my grief and bane,
May see them dead, and guerdon her with death."
He sees them dead, indeed, but may "not kiss the dear lips of his boys;" "may not touch his children's soft flesh." Medea hovers over the palace, taunts him with her wrongs, mocks at his new-born love for the children he had consented to banish, and triumphs alike over her living and her dead foes:—
"'Twas not for thee, having spurned my love,
To lead a merry life, flouting at me,
Nor for the princess; neither was it his
Who gave her thee to wed, Creon, unscathed
To cast me out of his realm. And now,
If it so like thee, call me lioness,
And Scylla, dweller on Tursenian plains;
For as right bade me, have I clutched thy heart."
The story of Medea, unconnected as it is with any workings of destiny or fatal necessity—such as humbled the pride of Theban and Argive Houses—has been taxed with a want of proper tragical grandeur, as if a picture of human passion were less fit for the drama than one of the strife between Fate and Free-will.
