Jason and the Golden Fleece

At a Glance

• Central figures: Jason, son of Aeson and rightful prince of Iolcus, and Medea, sorceress daughter of King Aeëtes of Colchis - along with the Argonauts, the crew of heroes who sailed with Jason aboard the Argo.
• Setting: Ancient Greece and the distant land of Colchis, beginning at the court of the usurper king Pelias in Iolcus.
• The turn: Medea, struck by love for Jason, betrays her father and uses her powers to help Jason complete the impossible tasks set by King Aeëtes and claim the Golden Fleece.
• The outcome: Jason retrieves the Fleece but never reclaims his throne; he abandons Medea in Corinth, she kills their children and his new bride in revenge, and Jason dies alone when the rotting hull of the Argo collapses on him.
• The legacy: The Argo herself - the ship whose name the crew carried as the Argonauts - endures as the emblem of the quest, and Jason’s ruin stands as the consequence that outlasted every prize he won.

Jason was the son of Aeson, the true king of Iolcus, but Aeson did not hold his throne. His half-brother Pelias had taken it, and Pelias knew what the oracles said: a man with one sandal would be his destruction. When Jason arrived at court, he was wearing one sandal - he had lost the other helping an old woman across a river, and the old woman was Hera. Pelias looked at the sandal and did not reach for a weapon. He reached for a different solution.

He sent Jason to Colchis to retrieve the Golden Fleece.

The Fleece hung in a sacred grove at the edge of the known world, shorn from the wool of a golden ram and guarded by a dragon that did not sleep. It was a symbol of kingship and divine favor, and Pelias had no intention of ever giving Jason his throne in exchange for it. The task was not a bargain. It was a sentence.

The Argo Sets Sail

Jason did not go alone. He gathered the best of Greece - Heracles, whose strength needed no introduction; Orpheus, whose lyre could quiet anything that breathed; the twin horsemen Castor and Pollux; the navigator Tiphys; and others whose names filled out the crew of the Argo, the great ship built for the voyage. Together they were the Argonauts, and they rowed out of Iolcus into waters that had no reliable maps.

Their first port was Lemnos, an island where the men had all been killed. The women of Lemnos, led by their queen Hypsipyle, had murdered their husbands for taking foreign lovers, and now the island had no men at all. The Argonauts were welcomed without reservation. They stayed. Eventually they left.

Phineas and the Clashing Rocks

The hardest passage lay ahead: the Symplegades, two vast rocks that slammed together whenever anything tried to pass between them. No ship had come through intact. But before the Argonauts reached them, they found the prophet Phineas - blind, starving, tormented by Harpies that descended on every meal he tried to eat and fouled or stole whatever they did not devour outright.

The Argonauts drove the Harpies off. In return, Phineas told them how to run the Symplegades. Release a dove first, he said. Watch what happens to its tail feathers when the rocks close. Then row.

They released the dove. The rocks crashed together and clipped its tail feathers - nothing more. The Argonauts pulled at the oars with everything they had, and the Argo shot through the gap as the rocks slammed shut behind her, grazing the stern. After that, the Symplegades stood apart and never moved again.

King Aeëtes and the Impossible Tasks

Colchis was ruled by Aeëtes, and Aeëtes had no intention of parting with the Fleece. He set Jason three tasks - tasks designed to kill him cleanly, without obligating the king to any direct murder. Jason was to yoke two fire-breathing bronze-hooved bulls, plow a field with them, and plant it with the teeth of a dragon. The teeth would not grow into grain. They would grow into armed warriors.

Jason said he would do it.

That night, Medea came to him. She was Aeëtes’ daughter and a sorceress of uncommon power, and the goddess Aphrodite had seen to it that she loved Jason on sight. Medea gave him an ointment that made him proof against the bulls’ fire, and she told him what to do when the warriors rose from the earth: throw a stone among them and they would turn on one another. She asked one thing in return. Take me with you when you go.

Jason swore it by every god he could name.

The Dragon and the Fleece

The next morning he yoked the bulls. The fire rolled off him. He plowed the field. He planted the teeth, and when the warriors erupted from the soil in their bronze armor, he threw a stone into their midst and watched them hack each other apart. Aeëtes saw this and understood that his daughter had interfered. He began to plan, and his planning was the kind that ends in fire and blood.

That night, Jason and Medea went to the grove. The dragon that guarded the Fleece coiled through the branches of the tree where the Fleece hung, its eyes open, its body never still. Medea sang to it - charms, old words, the kind of sound that bypasses the mind and goes straight to the nerves - and the dragon’s eyes closed for the first time in its existence. Jason lifted the Golden Fleece from the tree. They ran for the Argo.

The Flight from Colchis

Aeëtes came after them with the Colchian fleet. Medea’s solution was without mercy. She killed her own brother Absyrtus and scattered his body in pieces across the sea, forcing her father’s ships to slow and pull the remains from the water for proper burial. The Argonauts rowed. By the time Aeëtes had gathered what was left of his son, the Argo was far ahead.

The homeward voyage was not easy. They navigated past the Sirens - Orpheus’s lyre loud enough to cover the Sirens’ song - and survived an encounter with the bronze giant Talos, who patrolled the shores of Crete until Medea found the vein in his ankle. They came home.

What the Fleece Could Not Buy

Jason laid the Golden Fleece at Pelias’s feet. Pelias refused to give up the throne.

Medea handled it. She went to Pelias’s daughters and told them she could restore a man’s youth by cutting him into pieces and boiling the parts in a magical preparation - she demonstrated on a ram, which came out of the pot as a lamb. The daughters believed her. They cut their father apart and boiled him. The potion failed. Pelias was dead, but Jason gained nothing from it except exile. He and Medea fled to Corinth.

In Corinth, Jason decided to advance himself by marrying the king’s daughter. He set Medea aside. Medea, who had killed her brother for him, who had crossed the world for him, who had burned every life she’d known down to the ground for him.

She sent Jason’s new bride a robe soaked in poison. She killed their children. She left.

Jason wandered after that, carrying the Fleece’s fame and none of its promise. The Argo was beached and rotting. One day, according to those who told the story until its end, the hull gave way and its timbers fell on him, and that was how it finished - a hero of Greece, crushed under the wreck of his own glory.