Then night drew darkness over the earth. Out at sea the sailors looked from their ships to the Great Bear and the stars of Orion; every traveler and gatekeeper longed for sleep, and deep sleep wrapped even a mother whose children had died. No dogs barked any longer in the town, there was no echoing sound, and silence held the deepening dark.

Night falls on the whole world before it reaches Medea. Mooney calls this one of the most intensely human passages in Greek literature: the sailors watching the stars, the traveler and the gatekeeper, and a mother whose children have died, asleep at last. Virgil built Dido's sleepless night on it (Aeneid 4.522–528). Mooney also sets "silence held the darkness" beside Simaetha's "the sea is silent, the winds are silent" (Theocritus, Idyll 2.38). In both poems the whole world goes quiet except one young woman in love.