A Greek myth, retold for our modern times

The Medea of ancient Greece was a woman suited to her times. Like all good myths, her story explained in comprehensible, human form the essentially inexplicable and arbitrary nature of life. She provided good and evil, where before there had only been good luck and ill fate.

Princess of Colchis, grand-daughter of Helius the Sun-god, wise woman and healer, she was also a priestess of the goddess of the underworld. The good witch could also be a bad witch, capable of inhumanity and evil.

One of the good things she did, for love, was help a wandering prince, Jason, to win the Golden Fleece in the face of impossible odds, in a vain attempt to regain his kingdom. The two then eloped, prompting her father to chase them.

One of the bad things she did was to kill her own brother to halt the pursuit. That bit was also for the love of Jason. Then out of revenge on Jason, when he jilted her, she killed her rival, the daughter of the King of Corinth, and murdered her own children.

In Christa Wolf's retelling, Medea kills nobody. She is the scapegoat for other people's murders: the victim of an ancient smear campaign. She is a myth for our own Machiavellian times.

The ancient Greeks were hardly strangers to the scheming and brutalities of power politics. The story of Jason's own lost throne, usurped by a cunning uncle, is testimony to that. But the fully drawn, psychologically developed characters of modern novels do not act with the same predictable simplicity as players in Greek tragedy.

This Medea inhabits a more modern universe. Moreover, as Margaret Atwood points out in her introduction to this English edition, Wolf can also draw on the insights of modern anthropology.