After the events that occur in the play Medea, who becomes King of Corinth after Creon and Glauce are dead?

Question

Is it Jason?

Answer 1

Information about kings of Corinth is very confusing perhaps because poets were even less consistent than normal when dealing with Corinth.

Now, no Corinthian leaders are listed in the “Iliad” in the Trojan war, where Corinth is merely one of the cities whose forces are under the command of Agamemnon. So we might consider even Creon to be either an appointee of the King of Mycenae or a rebel against the King of Mycenae.

In some other accounts, such as the account of Eumelus, Medea becomes Queen of Corinth because she is daughter of Aeetes, the first king of Corinth.

See Pausanias 2:3:11 for this version:

“Through her [Media] Jason was king in Corinth, and Medea, as her children were born, carried each to the sanctuary of Hera and concealed them, doing so in the belief that so they would be immortal. At last she learned that her hopes were vain, and at the same time she was detected by Jason. When she begged for pardon he refused it, and sailed away to Iolcus. For these reasons Medea too departed, and handed over the kingdom to Sisyphus.”

Thereupon Pausanias goes through the normal genealogy of Sisyphus. through his son Glaucus, and through Glaucus’ son Bellerophantes (the hero connected with Pegasus) whose true father was the god Poseidon. Well Sisyphus must have flourished about a generation before the Trojan war, if he is the true father of Odysseus, as he is named in many sources. Pausanias then starts another line of kings through a supposed Ornytion son of Sisyphus who is father of Kng Thoas, the father of King Damophon, the father of King  Propodas, the father of King Doridas and King Hyanthidas, co-kings of Corinth who were replaced after a war of conquest by the Dorians King Aletes, the son of Hippotas, the son of Phylas, the son of Antiochus, the son of Heracles.

This of course is in total contradiction to the “Iliad” where Sisyphus is the great-great-grandfather of Sarpedon whom Diomedes battles. Sarpedon descends from Sisyphos through Glaukos and Bellerophontes. And indeed, Sisyphus is usually named as the first king of Corinth, not placed just previous to the Trojan war.

Apparently if we are to keep all this information, we must assume two separate Kings of Corinth named Sisyphus who are sometimes confused with one another, and take it that the famous trickster was the second of the two (or that both were famous tricksters?).

Or we could take it that this man who cheated death was extremely long-lived, was a great lord in Corinth, and only became king after the departure of Medea near the end of his second life. And we must ignore the fact that no ancient source mentions this.

We will probably need two Ornytions, as Pausanias also mentions a Corinthian named Ornytion who flourished in earlier times who was the father of Phocus, and he once calls this Ornytion the son of Sisyphus.

And don’t ask for any definitive answer as to where King Polybos of Corinth in the Oedipus story fits in.