At the beginning of Seneca's Medea (first century ad), before Medea has formulated her plans of revenge, she responds in a striking way to the Nurse's use of her name:

When Medea says fiam, ‘I shall become [Medea]’, she evidently considers herself somehow incomplete or insufficient but appears to expect a change in this situation. At the end of the play, Medea refers to this moment when she exclaims triumphantly: ‘What great deed could be dared by untrained hands, by the fury of a girl? Now I am Medea: my genius has grown through evils’ (908–10). Shortly before avenging herself on unfaithful Jason by murdering her own children, she indicates that she has completed her development and achieved a state sufficient to be termed ‘Medea’. But why is it that Medea must become Medea? And how does she move from the state in which she feels herself to be not-fully entitled to her name to one in which she believes herself to embody it? From one perspective, her words suggest Seneca's – and Medea's – meta- textual awareness; it is as if, as Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff has commented, Seneca's Medea has read Euripides’ tragedy and knows the predetermined aspect of her identity and is self-consciously moving towards a recognisable trajectory of character and plot.

However, there is also a sense in which it is the revenge process itself, and the reconfiguration of her character that this entails, which is crucial to the way that Medea becomes Medea in the final scene. This is evident in Medea's use of birth imagery. When Medea plans her revenge, the process is represented as transformative, enabling her not only to ‘give birth’ to infanticide but also to create her own identity, an innovative factor in Seneca's representation of Medea. Medea's emergence as an even more terrifying version than the Euripidean figure at the end of the play is thus predicated on her sense of revenge as a generative process, a description which complicates the ways in which she can be seen to appropriate martial, male gender roles.