The Argonauts' Quest
At a Glance
- Central figures: Jason, prince of Iolcus and leader of the expedition; Medea, sorceress and daughter of King Aeëtes of Colchis; and the Argonauts, an assembly of Greece’s greatest heroes including Heracles, Orpheus, Atalanta, Castor and Pollux, Meleager, and Theseus.
- Setting: Ancient Greece and the distant land of Colchis, ranging across unknown seas, the island of Lemnos, the realm of the blind prophet Phineus, and the Symplegades - the Clashing Rocks.
- The turn: King Pelias of Iolcus, unwilling to surrender the throne he usurped from Jason’s father Aeson, sends Jason after the Golden Fleece - a relic guarded by a sleepless dragon in a sacred grove in Colchis - expecting him to die in the attempt.
- The outcome: Jason and Medea steal the Golden Fleece and flee Colchis; Medea kills Pelias through trickery; Jason and Medea are exiled, and Jason never secures his throne or a lasting peace.
- The legacy: The Golden Fleece, once hung in the sacred grove of Colchis, passed out of that land and out of history; what remained was the Argo’s voyage itself - the first great sea journey of the Greek heroic age - and the ruin it made of Jason’s life.
The ram came from the gods. It had golden fleece and it could fly, and it carried the prince Phrixus and his sister Helle out of Boeotia when they were about to be sacrificed. Helle fell into the strait that afterward bore her name. Phrixus survived, reached Colchis, and sacrificed the ram in gratitude. He hung the fleece in a sacred grove, where it glowed among the dark trees, guarded by a dragon that did not sleep. That was how the Golden Fleece came to be in Colchis - not as treasure seized in war, but as a votive offering from a boy who owed his life to it. It stayed there, untouched, until Pelias of Iolcus decided it was the perfect object to kill his nephew over.
The Usurper’s Bargain
Pelias had taken the throne of Iolcus from his brother Aeson, Jason’s father. Jason grew up knowing this. When he came of age and returned to claim what was his, he arrived at his uncle’s court wearing one sandal - he had lost the other crossing a river - and Pelias, who had been warned to fear a one-sandaled man, looked at his nephew and made the only calculation that mattered to him: how to send this young man away and be certain he never came back.
The Golden Fleece was the answer. Pelias agreed to give up the throne on one condition - Jason must travel to Colchis, at the far edge of the known world, and bring back the fleece. No one had done it. Many had died trying. Pelias was counting on those odds. Jason accepted without hesitation.
The Argo and Her Crew
The ship was built by Argus, with Athena guiding the work, and it was the finest vessel Greece had ever put to sea. Jason called it the Argo, and the men who sailed in it took that name for their own - the Argonauts. He gathered the best available: Heracles, strongest of all men, fresh from his own impossible labors; Orpheus, whose lyre could quiet storms and charm living things into stillness; Atalanta, the huntress from Arcadia, faster and deadlier than most of the men aboard; the twins Castor and Pollux, sons of Zeus; Meleager, who had taken the Calydonian Boar; Theseus, who would later go to Crete and its labyrinth. They were not a band of soldiers. They were something stranger and more dangerous - a collection of figures each of whom could anchor a myth on their own, all rowing the same boat toward the same impossible goal.
They set out from Iolcus and met the sea.
Lemnos, Phineus, and the Clashing Rocks
Their first landfall was Lemnos, an island where the women had killed their husbands and lived without men. The Argonauts stayed long enough to resupply, formed alliances, and moved on. The story does not linger there.
What lingers is Phineus. The blind prophet was being punished by the gods - every meal he sat down to eat was fouled or stolen by the Harpies, those winged creatures sent to torment him. The Argonauts drove the Harpies off, and in exchange Phineus gave them the intelligence they needed to survive what lay ahead. The most dangerous passage on the route to Colchis was the Symplegades - two enormous rocks that stood at the entrance to a narrow strait and smashed together whenever a ship tried to pass. Every vessel that had attempted it had been crushed.
Phineus told them what to do. Release a dove first. Watch whether it makes it through. If it does, row with everything you have the moment the rocks begin to pull apart.
They released the dove. The rocks slammed shut, clipping the tail feathers. Then the rocks pulled back, and the Argonauts drove their oars into the water and ran the gap. The Argo’s stern was grazed, her wood splintered at the rear, but she came through. Behind them the rocks shuddered and went still - as though whatever force had animated them was spent. Sailors who came after would find them frozen in place, the passage open.
Aeëtes’s Conditions
Colchis was real. The palace of Aeëtes was real, and Aeëtes himself was no literary tyrant but a specific and calculating king who had no intention of handing over a sacred relic to a Greek stranger who showed up with a crew of heroes and asked nicely. He offered Jason a deal, the same way Pelias had offered Jason a deal: complete a set of tasks, and the fleece is yours.
The tasks: yoke a pair of fire-breathing bronze bulls. Plow a field with them. Sow that field with the teeth of a dragon. Then defeat the armed warriors who would rise from those teeth.
Jason had no way to do this. The bulls would burn him before he got close enough to put a yoke on them, and an army rising from the ground had no apparent solution. What he had, without knowing it yet, was Medea.
Medea’s Magic
Medea was Aeëtes’s daughter, a priestess of Hecate, a sorceress of real power. She looked at Jason and she loved him - the myths disagree on how much Aphrodite had to do with this, but the love was there and it was strong enough to make her choose against her father and her country. She came to Jason secretly. She gave him a potion that would make him immune to the bulls’ fire for a single day, and she told him what to do with the dragon’s teeth warriors: throw a stone into their midst. They would turn on one another, unable to find the source of the attack, and cut each other down.
It worked exactly as she described. The bulls could not burn him. The warriors killed each other. Aeëtes, watching his challenge nullified, knew his daughter had helped this foreigner, and he began planning to take back by treachery what he had lost by agreement.
Medea moved first. She led Jason to the sacred grove at night and sang to the unsleeping dragon until it closed its eyes. Jason took the fleece from the tree. They ran for the Argo together, Aeëtes’s soldiers behind them, and the ship got out before the harbor could be sealed.
The Return and What Followed
The voyage home was longer and harder than the voyage out. Zeus was angry at the manner of their leaving - not the theft precisely, but the killing that accompanied the flight, and the gods withheld favorable winds and sent the crew off course through unfamiliar waters. They passed through the country of the Sirens and survived, partly because Orpheus played his lyre loudly enough that the crew heard music instead of those other voices. They navigated more strange coastlines, faced more divine displeasure, and eventually the Argo came home to Iolcus.
Jason presented Pelias with the Golden Fleece. Pelias declined to honor the bargain.
Medea, who had already abandoned her country and her father for this man, devised a plan. She convinced Pelias’s daughters that she could restore youth to the old - she demonstrated by cutting up an aged ram and boiling it in a cauldron with certain herbs, and a young lamb leaped out. The daughters, wanting their father restored, cut Pelias apart and put him in the cauldron. No young man emerged.
The city turned against Jason and Medea for this. They were exiled from Iolcus and went to Corinth, where after some years Jason left Medea to marry a Corinthian princess. Medea killed the princess and killed her own children by Jason before she left. Jason - who had crossed the Clashing Rocks, taken the Golden Fleece from under the eyes of a dragon, and brought home the most powerful sorceress in the world as his wife - died old and alone near the rotting hull of the Argo, struck by a falling timber from the ship’s decay.
The fleece is not mentioned again. It had served its purpose, which was to set everything in motion and ruin the man who retrieved it.