Medellin—Medford
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second wife and her own children, she fled from Corinth in her car drawn by dragons, the gift of Helios, to Athens, where she married king Aegeus, by whom she had a son, Medus. But the discovery of an attempt on the life of Theseus, the son of Aegeus, forced her to leave Athens (Apollodorus i. 9, 28; Pausanias ii. 3, 6–11; Diod. Sic. iv. 45, 46, 54–56). Accompanied by her son, she returned to Colchis, and restored her father to the throne, of which he had been deprived by his own brother Perses. Medus was regarded as the eponymous hero and progenitor of the Medes. Medea was honoured as a goddess at Corinth, and was said to have become the wife of Achilles in the Elysian fields. The chief seat of her cult, however, was Thessaly, which was always regarded as the home of magic. As time went on her character was less favourably described. In the case of Jason and the Argonauts, she plays the part of a kindly, good-natured fairy; Euripides, however, makes her a barbarous priestess of Hecate, while the Alexandrian writers depicted her in still darker colours. Some authorities regard Medea as a lunar divinity, but the ancient conception of her as a Thessalian sorceress is probably correct. The popularity of the story of Jason and Medea in antiquity is shown by the large amount of literature on the subject. The original story was probably contained in an old epic poem called Μινυᾲς ποίησις, the authorship of which was ascribed to Prodicus of Phocaea. It is given at some length in the fourth Pythian ode of Pindar, and forms the subject of the Argonautica of Apollonius Rhodius. There is a touching epistle (Medea to Jason) in the Heroides of Ovid. Medea is the heroine of extant tragedies of Euripides and Seneca; those of Aeschylus and Ennius (adapted from Euripides) are lost. Neophron of Sicyon and Melanthius wrote plays of the same name. Among modern writers on the same theme may be mentioned T. Corneille, F. Grillparzer and M. Cherubini (opera).
The death of Glauce and the murder of her children by Medea was frequently represented in ancient art. In the famous picture of Tomomachus of Byzantium Medea is deliberating whether or not she shall kill her children; there are copies of this painting in the mural decorations of Herculaneum and Pompeii.
See Léon Mallinger, Médée: étude sur la littérature comparée, an account of Medea in Greek, Roman, middle age and modern literature (1898); and the articles in Daremberg and Saglio's Dictionnaire des antiquités and Roscher's Lexikon der Mythologie.
MEDELLIN, a city of Colombia and capital of the department of Antioquia, 150 m. N.W. of Bogota, on a plateau of the Central Cordillera, 4823 ft. above sea-level. Pop. (1906 estimate), 50,000. Medellin, the foundation of which dates from 1674, stands in the valley of the Porce, a tributary of the Cauca, and is reputed to be one of the healthiest as well as one of the most attractive cities of the republic. It has a university, national college, school of mines and other educational institutions, assaying and refining laboratories, a public library and a mint. The principal industry of the surrounding country is mining, and gold and silver are exported in considerable quantities. Coffee and hides are also exported, but the trade of the city has been greatly impeded by difficulties of transportation. A railway from Puerto Berrio, on the Magdalena, was begun many years before the end of the 19th century, but political and financial difficulties interposed and work was suspended when only 43 m. were finished. The completion of the remaining 80 m. was part of a larger scheme proposed in 1906 for bringing the Cauca Valley into railway communication with the national capital.
MEDEMBLIK, a seaport of Holland, on the Zuider Zee, the terminus of a branch railway from Hoorn, 10½ m. S. Pop. (1903), 3012. Once the capital of West Friesland and a prosperous town, many of its streets and quays are now deserted, though the docks and basins constructed at the end of the 16th and beginning of the 17th centuries could still afford excellent accommodation for many ships. Close to the harbour entrance stands the castle built by Florens V., count of Holland, in 1285. It has been restored, and is used as a court of justice. The West church, formerly called after St Boniface, the apostle of Germany, was once the richest in Friesland, and belonged from an early date to the cathedral chapter at Utrecht, where, until the Reformation, the pastor of Medemblik had a seat in the cathedral. It contains the tomb of Lord George Murray (q.v.). Among the public buildings are the town-hall (17th century), weigh-house, orphanage, the old almshouse, the house (1613) of the Water Commissioners, and a large building formerly belonging to the admiralty and now used as a state lunatic asylum. There are many interesting brick houses, dating chiefly from the first half of the 17th century, with curious gables and picturesque ornamentation, carvings and inscriptions.
MEDFORD, a city, including several villages, of Middlesex county, Massachusetts, U.S.A., on the Mystic river and Lakes, 5 m. N. by W. of Boston. Pop. (1900), 18,244, of whom 4327 were foreign-born; (1910 census) 23,150. The city is served by the Southern Division and a branch of the Western Division of the Boston & Maine railroad, and is connected with Boston and neighbouring cities by electric railways. The Mystic River, a tidewater stream, is navigable for small craft as far as the centre of the city. There are manufactures of considerable importance, including bricks and tiles, woollen goods, carriages and wagons, food products, iron and steel building materials and machinery. The city covers a land area of about 8 sq. m., along the Mystic river, and extending to the hills. The western portion borders the Upper and Lower Mystic Lakes, which are centres for boating. In the north-west portion of Medford is a part of the Middlesex Fells, a heavily wooded reserve belonging to the extensive Metropolitan Park System maintained by the state. The broad parkways of this system also skirt the Mystic Lakes, and here is the greater part (1907, 267 out of 291 acres) of the Mystic River Reservation of the Metropolitan System. Among the city parks are Hastings, Brooks, Logan, Tufts and Magoun. Within the city limits are some of the oldest and most interesting examples of colonial domestic architecture in America, including the so-called “Cradock House” (actually the Peter Tufts house, built in 1677–1680), the “Wellington House,” built in 1657, and the “Royall House.” The last was built originally by Governor John Winthrop for the tenants of his Ten Hills Farm, and was subsequently enlarged and occupied by Lieut.-Governor John Usher, and by Isaac Royall[1] (c. 1720–1781) and his son, Isaac Royall, Jun.
Medford has a public library of about 35,200 volumes, housed in the colonial residence (reconstructed) of Thatcher Magoun. The city has also a city hall, a high school and manual training school, an opera house, and one of the handsomest armory buildings in the country (the home of the Lawrence Light Guard), presented by General Samuel C. Lawrence (b. 1832), a liberal benefactor of Medford institutions and the first mayor of the city (1892–1894). The Salem St. Burying Ground, dating from 1689, is one of the oldest burial places in America. The Medford Historical Society maintains a library and museum in the birthplace of Lydia Maria Child. Medford is the seat of Tufts College, planned and founded as a Universalist institution in 1852 by Hosea Ballou, its first president, and others, and named in honour of Charles Tufts (1781–1876), a successful manufacturer, who gave the land on which it stands. The college, which had 1120 students and 217 instructors in 1909, comprises a college of letters, a divinity school, and a school of engineering (all in Medford), and medical and dental schools in Boston; it is now undenominational. Among the twenty college buildings, the Barnum Museum of Natural History (1885) founded by Phineas T. Barnum, and the Eaton Memorial Library (1907), presented by Mrs Andrew Carnegie in memory of her pastor, are noteworthy. The college endowment amounted in 1908 to $2,300,000.
Medford was first settled in 1630. A considerable portion of its area formed the plantation of Matthew Cradock (d. 1641), first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Company, who in 1630
- ↑ 1 A prominent Loyalist, whose estate was seized during the War of Independence, but was restored to his heirs about 1800. He endowed the first professorship of law in America—at Harvard College.
