The corpus record — Latin

Medea

a celebrated sorceress, daughter of Æetes, king of Colchis. She assisted her lover, Jason the Argonaut, in obtaining…

Generated live from the audited Latin corpus — every figure on this page is a database query, not prose from memory.

Where it lives

Medea 21 · 37.1/10k
Epodon 2 · 6.65/10k
De Arte Poetica liber 2 · 6.47/10k
Argonautica 20 · 5.38/10k
Epistulae 11 · 4.3/10k
Pro M. Caelio 2 · 2.36/10k
Dialogus de Oratoribus 2 · 2.15/10k
De Fato 1 · 2.02/10k
In Rufinum 1 · 1.75/10k
Liber De Persona et Duabus Naturis Contra Eutychen Et Nestorium 1 · 1.71/10k
Elegiae 2 · 1.62/10k
De Imperio Cn. Pompei Ad Quirites 1 · 1.5/10k

Densest 12 of 33 attested works shown, by occurrences per 10,000 attested tokens.

What it meant

Mēdēa — Lewis & Short

Mēdēa, ae (arch.

I gen. Medeaï, Enn. ap. Cic. Tusc. 3, 26, 63; v. Enn. p. 127, v. 292 Vahl.; nom. Mēdē, acc. to id. p. 130, v. 311 Vahl.), and Mēdīa, f., = *mh/deia, a celebrated sorceress, daughter of Æetes, king of Colchis. She assisted her lover, Jason the Argonaut, in obtaining the golden fleece, accompanied him to Greece, and prevented her father, who was in pursuit, from overtaking them, by strewing the sea with her brother's limbs. When Jason afterwards repudiated her, in order to marry Creusa, she killed the children she had had by him, and burned the bride to death in her palace: item ut Medea Peliam concoxit senem, Plaut. Ps. 3, 2, 52; Ov. M. 7, 9 sqq.; Hyg. Fab. 21, 22, 25: ne pueros coram populo Medea trucidet, Hor. A. P. 185.—The subject of tragedies by several authors, v. Quint. 10, 1, 98.—

B Transf.

1 Medea Palatina, i. e. Clodia, Cic. Cael. 8, 18.—

2 Medea nigra, a precious stone, so named after Medea, Plin. 37, 10, 63, § 173.—Hence,

II Mēdēis, ĭdis, f. adj., Medean, magical (poet.): Medeides herbae, Ov. A. A. 2, 101.

In the wild

Medea Claudian, In Rufinum 1.1.153
Medea Ovid, Epistulae 6.151
Medea Seneca, Medea 1
Medea Tibullus, Elegiae 2.4.55
Medea Valerius Flaccus, Argonautica 6.157
Medea Valerius Flaccus, Argonautica 7.589

6 of 107 attestations shown.

Where it came from

No etymology authority pointer is recorded for this lemma yet — an honest gap, not an omission.

Latin text and lemmatization derived from the Perseus Digital Library (canonical-latinLit), CC BY-SA 4.0. Lewis & Short (public domain) via Perseus. This derived data is shared under the same CC BY-SA 4.0 license.