Medea saved Jason's life with her drugs and left her country for him. In Corinth he marries the king's daughter, and Medea sends the bride a wedding present: a fine robe and a golden crown.
Press this book. Your gift commissions the Great Library’s word-by-word interlinear Medea, and the day it is made, it is free for everyone, forever. You are not buying a copy; you are paying for it to exist.
Give what you like. A few dollars helps, or fund the whole of the opening and become its Founder. Every contribution presses it closer to real.
This is how every Great Library book reads, word beneath word. Medea’s own first lines appear here the day its pilot is pressed.
Medea gave up her family and her homeland for Jason. In Corinth he leaves her to marry the king's daughter, and the king orders Medea and her children into exile. She begs for one more day and uses it. The play follows that single day of grief, argument and planning to the most notorious revenge in Greek tragedy. The press starts at the opening, where Medea's old nurse wishes the Argo had never sailed. Nothing is readable here yet; support it and it will be.
Euripides staged Medea in Athens in 431 BC, the year the Peloponnesian War began, and it took third prize, last of the three. An ancient note on the play repeats a story that the Corinthians paid Euripides to put the killing of the children on Medea, because in the older stories the Corinthians themselves had killed them.
Medea's weapon is pharmacy. She promises Aegeus, king of Athens, drugs that will end his childlessness, then smears the robe and the crown with poison. The messenger who reports what the gift did to the princess, and to the father who threw his arms around her, gives one of the most terrible speeches in Greek drama.
Making an interlinear Medea is real work: freezing a scholarly source text, aligning every word to its dictionary form, glossing what resists translation, and proofing it all to a hard quality bar. Pressing a book is how that work gets funded. When enough readers press it, the opening gets made, and then it is free to read forever, for you and for everyone who comes after.
This isn’t a purchase. It’s a commission. You’re not buying a copy; you’re paying for the thing to exist, and putting your name (if you like) on the first true Medea that anyone can read for free.
Leave your email and we’ll write to you the day the Medea opens. No other mail, ever.
Read our finished collection · the library · The Great Library Project
Reading is always free. Patrons and founders are the ones who keep it that way.