Wolf manages to pull off making her characters both mythic symbols and real people, and nowhere better than with this 13-year-old girl whose life is destroyed by her father’s ambitions.
Unlike Agameda, he actually does wield power over the lives of others. And he convinces himself that everything he does – the lives he destroys – is all for the good of Corinth. Echoing Jason, “we must do quite a few things that give us little pleasure” (p. 90) and “of course, the price one might be called upon to pay for this could be very painful.” (p. 95) But Wolf uses that echo of Jason’s complaint to illustrate how, ultimately, Akamas is as powerless as the Argonaut.
AKAMAS: Akamas is the villain of the piece
While he admires Medea, Akamas has no qualms in abetting the schemes of Agameda and her other enemies among the Colchians or fanning the fears of the Corinthians. It removes a disruptive influence from the politics of Corinth.
MEDEA: Medea is the ideal. The only truly adult person developed in the course of the novel. (We are introduced to Oistros, her lover, and Arethusa, a Cretan exile, who share her beliefs and live their lives as they wish but they’re secondary characters.) Her charisma is palpable to everyone she meets as is apparent in this excerpt where Jason describes their first meeting:
Then again the woman, the one who came up to us in Aeetes’s vine-covered court, was the opposite of the horrible corpse-fruit, or maybe it heightened the impression she made on us. The way she stood there, stooped over, in that red and white tiered skirt and close-fitting black top they all wear, and caught the water from the spout in her cupped hands and drank. The way she straightened up and notice us, shook her hands dry, and approached us frankly, taking quick, strong steps, slender, but with a well-developed figure, and showing off all the virtues of her appearance to such advantage….
Her refusal to compromise her beliefs added to the fact that she knows Creon’s secret make her a dangerous person in the eyes of the ruling elite
Of course it was odd, how she greeted us with her hands raised in the sign of peace, a sign proper only to the King or his envoys; how she openly gave her name, Medea, daughter of King Aeetes and High Priestess of Hecate; how she desired to know our names and our destination, as though it were her right to do so, and I, taken by surprise, revealed to this woman what was meant for the King’s ears only. (pp. 32-3)
And those same qualities make the Corinthian populace fearful and angry since, as Agameda remarks, “they need their belief that they live in the most perfect land under the sun.” (p. 59)
LEUKON: I saved Leukon for last because his voice spoke loudest to me. It’s not a terribly complimentary comparison but when he opened his chapter with the following, I was nodding my head in sympathy:
I see plainly what will happen to her. I shall have to stand by and watch the whole thing. That is my lot, to have to stand by and watch everything, to see through everything, and to be able to do nothing, as though I had no hands. Whoever uses his hands must dip them in blood, whether he wants to or not. I do not want to have blood on my hands. I want to stand up here on the roof terrace of my tower, observing the milling throngs below me in the narrow streets of Corinth by day and bathing my eyes in the darkness of the heavens above me by night, while one by one the constellations emerge like familiar friends….
