Medea - Media

Do not confuse the proper nouns 'Media and 'Medea'.

'Media' - pronounced with the stress on the first syllable, IPA: /ˈmiːd ɪ ə/ - is the name of an ancient country which occupied the northwest of present-day Iran. Its inhabitants, the Medes, overthrew the Assyrian Empire in 612 BCE, and were in turn conquered by the Persian king, Cyrus the Great, in 550 BCE. For a biblical reference to the Medes and Persians - the two nations are often linked - see, e.g., Daniel 6, viii, "Now, O king, establish the decree and sign the writing, that it be not changed, according to the law of the Medes and Persians which altereth not". There is no connection, etymological or otherwise, between the proper noun 'Media' and its homophone and homograph, the common noun 'media' (for which see Media - medium).

'Medea' - pronounced with the stress on the second syllable, IPA: /mə ˈdiː ə/ - is a figure in Greek mythology. She was a princess in Colchis (a region bordering on the Black Sea south of the Caucasus Mountains, i.e., roughly modern Georgia). She helped the Argonaut Jason, with whom she had fallen in love, to obtain the Golden Fleece from her father, king Aeetes, and then fled with him to his native city of Iolcus (in Thessaly, in northwest Greece). Later, enraged at Jason's planned marriage to the daughter of king Creon of Corinth, she took her revenge by murdering the children she had had with him. The story of Medea's revenge on Jason forms the plot of Euripides' tragedy Medea. The name 'Medea' (in Greek Μήδεια, Medeia) means 'the cunning one', a reference to Medea's possession of magical powers.