The plan named

The chariot of Athens is waiting in her future, and Medea, alone with the Chorus, allows herself the speech she has been holding back. The plan is this. She will send for Jason and pretend to have come around. She will ask him to plead with the new bride that the children may stay in Corinth. The children will take the gifts to her: a fine robe and a golden necklace, treasures from the line of the Sun. The bride will put them on. The poison will burn through the cloth into her body, and anyone who touches her in her dying will die too. And then she will kill her own two sons. Jason will be left childless.

The Chorus break in. They have followed her to this point. They cannot follow her here. The Leader begs her not to do this. You cannot kill the fruit of your own body. Medea answers that she can if it pains the man she hates the more. The Chorus push harder. They tell her she will be the most miserable woman alive. She is unmoved. She forgives them their smallness — they have not been wronged as she has — and claims the Nurse, who has come out. She sends the Nurse to fetch Jason. Tell him nothing. Be a woman, she says, as I am.

The Nurse leaves. The Chorus sing — not against Medea now but about Athens, the city she has just secured. They sing of its gardens and its wisdom and its rivers, and ask whether such a city can possibly receive a woman with the blood of her own children on her hands. They ask her, in song, to stop. They beg by her knees and her soul. There is one thing she cannot kill. Not her child. The song ends. Jason is on his way back to the door.