Her heart dropped out of her breast, and her eyes too grew dim; a hot flush seized her cheeks. She could lift her knees neither back nor forward, but her feet were rooted to the ground. Meanwhile all the handmaids had drawn away from the two of them.

Medea's body gives way, in the old vocabulary of love. Mooney gathers the parallels: in the Iliad Agamemnon says his heart leaps out of his breast (10.93–95); Archilochus has a longing for love, coiled under his heart, that "poured a thick mist over my eyes"; Sappho, in the poem Longinus quoted, sees nothing with her eyes while her ears hum (fragment 31). Ovid kept the blush when he told the same meeting: "her cheeks reddened, and her whole face glowed again" (Metamorphoses 7.78). The handmaids draw away without being told, and the two are left alone in the precinct.