238On arriving she stopped short of the threshold and doors and is covered by the sky alone, and she shuns contact with men and sets up two altars of turf, on the right one to Hecate, on the left one to Youth. 242When she had wreathed these with sacred boughs and woodland foliage, 243not far off, having dug out earth to make two pits, she performs the rites, and plunges knives into the throats of a black-fleeced sheep, and floods the wide trenches with blood. 246Then, pouring over them cups of liquid wine, and pouring cups of warm milk as well, she poured out words at the same time, and summoned the powers of the earth, and begs the king of the shades, with his stolen wife, not to hasten to rob the old man's limbs of life.
251When she had appeased them with prayers and long murmuring, she ordered Aeson's worn-out body to be brought out into the open air, and, having loosed him into deep sleep by a spell, she stretched him out like a dead man on a bed of herbs. 255She bids the son of Aeson go far from here, the attendants far from here, and warns them to remove profane eyes from her mysteries. 257As bidden, they scatter. 257Medea, with streaming hair, in the manner of the Bacchantes, circles the blazing altars, and dips many-cleft torches in the black trench of blood, and lights them, thus dyed, on the twin altars, and three times purifies the old man with fire, three times with water, three times with sulphur.
262Meanwhile the potent drug in the bronze pot set on the fire boils and leaps and whitens with swelling foam. 264In it she boils roots cut in a Haemonian valley, and seeds and flowers and dark juices. 266She adds stones sought from the farthest east, and sands which the ebbing sea of Ocean has washed; she adds too hoarfrost gathered under the all-night moon, and the ill-famed wings of a screech owl along with its very flesh, and the entrails of a shape-shifting werewolf, which was wont to change its beast's face into a man's; 271nor were there lacking to these the thin scaly skin of a Cinyphian water-snake and the liver of a long-lived stag; 273to which she adds besides the beak and head of a crow that had lived through nine generations.
275When with these and a thousand other nameless things the barbarian woman had prepared her design, greater than mortal, she stirred everything together with a branch of gentle olive long since dried up, and mixed the bottom with the top. 279Look, the old stick, turned in the hot pot, first becomes green, and in no long time puts on leaves, and suddenly is laden with heavy olives. 282But wherever the fire threw foam from the hollow pot and hot drops fell onto the ground, the earth grows springlike, and flowers and soft pasture spring up. 285As soon as Medea saw this, she drew her sword and opened the old man's throat, and, letting the old blood run out, fills him with the juices.
287When Aeson had drunk them in, taken either through his mouth or through his wound, his beard and hair, putting off their whiteness, swiftly took on a black colour; his leanness is driven off and flees, pallor and decay depart, the hollow wrinkles are filled out with added flesh, and his limbs grow lusty. 292Aeson marvels, and remembers that he was like this forty years before. 294Liber had seen from on high the miracle of so great a wonder, and, reminded that his nurses could have their youthful years restored to them, receives this gift from the Colchian woman.