Nurse: If only the hull of the Argo had never flown through the dark Clashing Rocks to the land of the Colchians, and the pine had never been cut down in the glens of Pelion, and never put oars in the hands of the best of men, who went after the golden fleece for Pelias. For then my mistress Medea would never have sailed to the towers of Iolcus, her heart struck with love for Jason.

The play opens with Medea's old nurse wishing the whole story undone, all the way back to the pine tree that became the Argo. She names her mistress in the seventh line and gives the cause in the eighth: ἔρωτι θυμὸν ἐκπλαγεῖσ’, her heart knocked out of her senses by love. The Roman poet Ennius put these lines into Latin, and Cicero quoted his version more than once. Euripides staged the play at Athens in 431 BC, the year the war with Sparta began, and it took third prize.