The Voyage of the Argonauts and the Golden Fleece

At a Glance

• Central figures: Jason, rightful heir to the throne of Iolcus; Medea, sorceress and daughter of King Aeëtes of Colchis; and the Argonauts, the crew of heroes who sailed with Jason aboard the Argo.
• Setting: Ancient Greece and the distant land of Colchis, beginning in Iolcus and ranging across the sea to the court of King Aeëtes, where the Golden Fleece hung in a sacred grove guarded by a sleepless dragon.
• The turn: In Colchis, Medea falls in love with Jason and uses her sorcery to help him complete Aeëtes’ impossible tasks and steal the Fleece - then flees her father’s kingdom with the Argonauts.
• The outcome: Jason returns to Iolcus with the Golden Fleece, but Pelias refuses to yield the throne; Medea tricks Pelias’s daughters into killing him. Jason’s later abandonment of Medea for another woman ends in the deaths of his new bride and his children, and Jason himself dies alone when a rotting timber of the Argo falls and strikes him.
• The legacy: The Argo’s voyage established a route through the Symplegades - the Clashing Rocks - that had never before been navigated; from the moment the ship passed through, the rocks parted and stood open for all travelers who followed.

Jason came to Iolcus wearing one sandal. He had lost the other crossing the river Anauros, where an old woman begged him to carry her across - and the old woman was Hera. Pelias, his uncle, saw Jason walk into the city and felt the blood go out of his face. A prophecy had warned him: beware the man with one sandal. He recovered quickly. He smiled. He asked Jason what he wanted.

What Jason wanted was the throne of his father Aeson, which Pelias had taken by force. Pelias listened, nodded, and made a counter-offer: the throne, yes - but first the Golden Fleece. Bring it from Colchis, from the grove of Ares, where it hung on an oak tree and a dragon that never slept coiled around the roots. Pelias expected Jason to die attempting it. Many men had.

The Argo and Her Crew

The ship was built by Argus, guided at every plank and oar-peg by grey-eyed Athena herself, and it was fitted with a beam of timber from the oracle-grove at Dodona that could speak prophecy. They named the vessel the Argo, and the men who sailed her the Argonauts.

Jason did not set out alone or with a modest crew. He sent word across Hellas, and Hellas answered. Heracles came, the strongest man alive, son of Zeus, who was between his labors and looking for something to do with his hands. Orpheus came, the Thracian singer, who could move stones with his lyre. Atalanta came, the huntress from Arcadia, as fast with a spear as any man aboard. The twins Castor and Pollux, sons of Zeus, came from Sparta. Meleager, who had killed the Calydonian boar, came. Theseus, the son of Aegeus, was aboard. Fifty-odd heroes in all, the finest Hellas had produced, jamming their oars into the sea and pulling in time.

Hera watched from Olympus. She had her own reasons to want Jason to succeed.

Phineus and the Clashing Rocks

The Argo moved east through the Propontis toward the Black Sea, stopping at Lemnos, where a society of women had killed their husbands and lived alone - the Argonauts stayed long enough to rest and take on supplies before Heracles grew impatient and drove them back to the oars.

The harder stop was the court of Phineus, a blind prophet cursed by Zeus for seeing too clearly into the future. His curse had a specific form: the Harpies, winged creatures with the faces of women and the bodies of birds, descended every time food was set before him and stripped the table bare, fouling what they could not carry. Phineus sat in front of empty plates and grew thin. When the Argonauts landed, two of their number - Zetes and Calais, sons of the North Wind, who had wings of their own - drove the Harpies off into the sky, where Iris the rainbow-goddess met them and promised that Phineus would be tormented no more.

Phineus ate. Then he told the Argonauts about the Symplegades.

The Clashing Rocks sat at the mouth of the Bosphorus, two enormous masses of stone that crashed together at intervals, grinding anything between them to splinters. No ship had passed. Phineus told them to release a dove first: if the dove made it through, row. Row hard. The Argonauts did as he said. The dove flew between the rocks and lost only the tip of its tail as the stones came together. The Argonauts took their oars in both hands and pulled. The rocks crashed behind them, shearing the stern-ornament of the Argo down to wood. They were through. The Symplegades, their purpose apparently served, came to rest and stayed apart. They have not closed since.

The Tasks of Aeëtes

Colchis was a kingdom at the eastern edge of the known world, where the river Phasis ran brown into the sea and the mountains pressed close against the coast. King Aeëtes received Jason in his hall and heard the request with a face as smooth as bronze. He did not say no. He said: of course - but first complete these tasks.

Jason had to yoke two fire-breathing bulls with hooves of bronze, plow a field with them, and sow the field with the teeth of a dragon. From those teeth, fully armed warriors would rise from the earth, and Jason would have to deal with them as well. Aeëtes watched Jason’s face while he listed the conditions and waited for him to flinch.

That night, Medea could not sleep. She was Aeëtes’ daughter, a priestess of Hecate, trained since childhood in pharmacy and sorcery. She had seen Jason arrive. Aphrodite, acting at Hera’s request, had seen to the rest. By dawn Medea had resolved to help him, though she knew what it would cost her.

She found Jason and gave him an ointment made from the sap of a flower that grew where Prometheus’s blood had dripped onto the Caucasian rock - the crocus of the Titans, the pharmakists called it. Rubbed over skin and armor, it would turn bronze edges and fire alike. She told him also what to do when the warriors rose: throw a stone into their midst, and they would turn on each other.

Jason went to the field at dawn. He yoked the bronze-hooved bulls. They breathed fire across his chest and he did not burn. He plowed. He sowed the dragon’s teeth. The warriors came up armed and shouting, and he threw the stone, and they fell on one another in the furrows until the field was quiet.

Aeëtes looked at the quiet field and hated Jason with everything in him. He had no intention of yielding the Fleece and began planning how to kill the Argonauts in the night.

Medea was faster. She led Jason to the sacred grove before Aeëtes could move, and she sang over the dragon that never slept - sang it into heaviness and then into stillness - until its great head drooped and its coils loosened around the roots of the oak. Jason lifted the Golden Fleece. It was heavier than he expected, and it lit the grove around him as he carried it out.

The Escape from Colchis

They ran for the Argo. Medea came with them - she had made her choice, and it could not be unmade. Aeëtes launched his fleet in pursuit, and Medea’s brother Absyrtus commanded it.

In the version the tragedians preferred to tell quietly, what followed was dark: Medea killed Absyrtus herself, and the body or parts of it were scattered across the water to slow the pursuing ships, since Aeëtes would not sail past his son’s remains without gathering them for burial. In other tellings, the Argonauts fought and defeated the Colchian fleet. The Argo escaped either way, but the act would require ritual purification before Jason and Medea could be welcomed anywhere in Greece.

Zeus saw what had been done. He sent storms.

Return to Iolcus

The return voyage was longer and stranger than the outward journey - the storms drove the Argo far off course, south toward Libya, up into the Adriatic, west past islands where the Sirens sang and Orpheus outsang them, his lyre cutting through their voices so the rowers kept their eyes forward. They passed Scylla and Charybdis. They came at last to Iolcus, and Jason carried the Golden Fleece up from the harbor to the palace.

Pelias refused to give up the throne.

Medea handled it. She went to Pelias’s daughters and demonstrated a rejuvenation: she cut an old ram to pieces, boiled the pieces in a cauldron with her herbs, and out stepped a young lamb. Pelias’s daughters were convinced. They cut their father apart and put him in the cauldron. Medea let the fire go out. There was no rejuvenation. Pelias was dead.

Jason at Corinth

The murder drove Jason and Medea from Iolcus. They went to Corinth, where they had children and years of quiet, and then Jason’s kleos - the hunger for glory, the drive to land well - led him to accept an offer of marriage from the Corinthian princess Glauce. A throne was attached. He told Medea it was a practical decision.

Medea sent the princess a gift: a dress and a crown soaked in such poison that fire sprang from them when Glauce put them on. Glauce died. Her father Creon, who ran into the room, died also. Then Medea killed the children she and Jason had together - so that no enemy would have them, she said, and so that Jason would have nothing left of the life he had chosen to throw away.

Jason had nothing. He walked back to the Argo, hauled up on shore now, rotting in the sun, and sat in its shadow. He was still sitting there when a piece of the stern, weakened by years of salt and weather, broke loose and fell and killed him.

The ship that had carried him to the fleece, through the Symplegades, to the end of the world and back - that was what finished him. Not a monster. Not a god. The Argo, coming apart from age, the way all things do.