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Liber X · Greek Mythology

Liber X · Greek Mythology · Chapter II: Heroes & Their Quests

Jason and the Argonauts: The Golden Fleece, Medea and the Argo

Jason and the Argonauts explained: the quest for the Golden Fleece, the voyage of the Argo, Medea's magic, the tragedy at Corinth and the ancient sources.

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Jason was the Greek hero who led the Argonauts, a band of heroes sailing in the ship Argo, to Colchis at the eastern end of the Black Sea to bring back the Golden Fleece. He succeeded only with the help of Medea, the Colchian king's daughter and a powerful sorceress, who later followed him to Greece; their marriage ended in betrayal and, in the best-known version, in Medea's murder of her own children. The story is told most fully in the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes and in Euripides' tragedy Medea.

Jason, Pelias and the Origin of the Golden Fleece§

Jason (Greek Iason) belonged to the royal house of Iolcus, a harbour town on the Gulf of Pagasae in Thessaly. His father Aeson was the rightful king, but Aeson's half-brother Pelias, a son of Poseidon, seized power. Fearing for the boy, Jason's parents sent him secretly to be raised by the wise centaur Chiron (see Centaurs, Satyrs and Nymphs) on Mount Pelion, the same teacher who later trained Achilles.

Pelias had been warned by an oracle to beware of a man wearing a single sandal. Coming to claim his inheritance, the grown Jason lost a sandal crossing the river Anaurus, in several versions while carrying an old woman who was Hera in disguise; from then on Hera was his patron. Pelias recognised the man of the prophecy and sent him on what was meant to be an impossible task: to fetch the Golden Fleece.

The fleece had its own history. Athamas, king of Orchomenus in Boeotia, had two children, Phrixus and Helle, by the cloud goddess Nephele. Their stepmother Ino plotted to have Phrixus sacrificed, and the children escaped on a flying ram with a golden fleece. Helle fell into the strait that was named after her, the Hellespont, but Phrixus reached Colchis, where King Aeetes, a son of Helios, received him. Phrixus sacrificed the ram to Zeus and gave the fleece to Aeetes, who hung it on an oak in a grove of Ares, guarded by a serpent that never slept.

The Argo and Its Crew of Heroes§

The ship was built by Argos, whose name it bore, with Athena's help, and a timber from the oracular oak of Zeus at Dodona set in its prow let the ship itself speak. Lists of the crew grew longer over time, since many Greek families wanted an ancestor aboard, but the core company was famous:

  • Heracles, the strongest of all, who left the expedition early in most versions (see Heracles and the Twelve Labours).
  • Orpheus, whose singing kept time for the rowers and later drowned out the Sirens.
  • Castor and Polydeuces, the Dioscuri, and Zetes and Calais, the winged sons of the North Wind.
  • Peleus, father of Achilles, and his brother Telamon, father of Ajax.
  • Tiphys the helmsman, the sharp-sighted Lynceus, and the seers Idmon and Mopsus.

Apollodorus includes the huntress Atalanta; Apollonius explicitly says Jason refused to take her. Theseus is sometimes added, though Apollonius keeps him in the Underworld at the time (see Theseus and the Minotaur).

The Voyage to Colchis§

The outward journey is a chain of episodes, most of them set along the coasts of the Hellespont, the Sea of Marmara and the southern Black Sea. On Lemnos they found an island of women who had killed their men, and Jason fathered children with Queen Hypsipyle. At Cyzicus a night storm drove them back to the friendly Doliones, whom they fought as strangers, killing their young king. In Mysia, Heracles' companion Hylas was drawn into a spring by a water nymph, and while Heracles searched for him the ship sailed on without them.

Among the Bebrycians, Polydeuces killed the brutal king Amycus in a boxing match. In Thrace they found the blind prophet Phineus, whose food was snatched and fouled by the Harpies; the sons of the North Wind drove the monsters away, and in gratitude Phineus told the heroes how to pass the Clashing Rocks (Symplegades) at the entrance to the Black Sea. On his advice they released a dove; it flew through, losing a tail feather, and the Argo followed as the rocks drew back, losing only the tip of its stern.

Medea and the Trials at Colchis§

Aeetes had no intention of giving up the fleece. He set Jason a trial: to yoke two bronze-footed, fire-breathing bulls, plough the field of Ares with them, sow it with serpent's teeth (left over, in some accounts, from the dragon killed by Cadmus at Thebes) and defeat the armed men who would spring from the soil.

Here the story turns to Medea, Aeetes' daughter, a priestess of Hecate and expert in drugs (pharmaka). At Hera's request Aphrodite sent Eros to make her love Jason, and the third book of Apollonius' Argonautica traces her struggle between loyalty and passion with a psychological depth new in Greek epic. She gave Jason an ointment, prepared from a plant said to have grown from the blood of Prometheus, that made him proof against fire and iron for a day. Jason yoked the bulls, sowed the teeth and, when the earthborn warriors rose, threw a boulder among them so that they turned on each other.

Medea then led him at night to the grove, lulled the serpent with a song and a sprinkled potion, and Jason took the fleece. An Attic cup of the early fifth century BCE in the Vatican shows a different version, told by no surviving text: the serpent disgorges Jason while Athena looks on. Medea's role made her the most famous witch of Greek literature; her methods and her patron goddess are a recurring point of reference in the history of ancient magic and in the later spells of the Greek Magical Papyri.

The Return Voyage and the Death of Apsyrtus§

The fugitives were pursued by the Colchians under Medea's brother Apsyrtus. In the version used by Apollodorus, Apsyrtus was a small child whom Medea had taken aboard; she killed him and scattered his limbs on the sea so that Aeetes would stop to gather them. In Apollonius he is a grown man, lured to a meeting by Medea and killed by Jason, a crime for which the couple had to be purified by Medea's aunt, the enchantress Circe.

The route home varied most, as each age adjusted it to its own geography. Pindar has the Argonauts sail into the outer Ocean, then carry their ship overland across Libya. Apollonius sends them up the Danube, into the Adriatic, up the Po and the Rhône, past the Sirens and Scylla and Charybdis, to the island of the Phaeacians, where Jason and Medea were married. A storm drove them to the shallows of Libya, where they carried the Argo through the desert for twelve days. Off Crete the bronze giant Talos tried to keep them from landing, and Medea brought him down by her baleful gaze and spells. The Odyssey already knows that the Argo passed the Wandering Rocks with Hera's help, which suggests a lost Argonaut epic older than Homer's poem.

Medea at Iolcus and Corinth§

Back at Iolcus, Medea took revenge on Pelias. She persuaded his daughters that she could make their old father young by cutting him up and boiling him with herbs, as she had demonstrated with an old ram, and they killed him. In Ovid's Metamorphoses (book 7) she had already rejuvenated Jason's father Aeson by a night-time ritual to Hecate. Pelias' son drove the couple out, and they settled in Corinth.

What happened at Corinth was fixed for later ages by Euripides' Medea (431 BCE). Jason abandons Medea to marry the daughter of the Corinthian king Creon. Medea sends the bride a poisoned robe and crown that burn her and her father to death, kills her own two sons to wound Jason most deeply, and escapes in the chariot of her grandfather Helios to Athens, where King Aegeus has promised her refuge. Ancient commentators record earlier versions in which the Corinthians killed the children, or Medea caused their death while trying to make them immortal; whether Euripides first made her a deliberate child-killer is debated. She was later claimed as the ancestor of the Medes.

Ancient Texts, History and Legacy of the Argonaut Myth§

The earliest complete account is Pindar's fourth Pythian Ode (462 BCE). The great surviving epic is the four-book Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes, a scholar-poet of Hellenistic Alexandria (third century BCE); the Latin Argonautica of Valerius Flaccus (first century CE) breaks off unfinished. Seneca wrote a Latin Medea.

Did the story preserve a memory of real voyages? The geographer Strabo linked it to the gold of Colchis (western Georgia) where fleeces were laid in mountain streams to catch gold dust. In 1984 the explorer Tim Severin sailed a reconstructed galley from Greece to Georgia. Such explanations remain speculative.

The legend's afterlife includes the Burgundian Order of the Golden Fleece (1430), Cherubini's opera Médée (1797), William Morris's The Life and Death of Jason (1867) and Ray Harryhausen's film Jason and the Argonauts (1963). The dragon's teeth also tie Jason's saga to Oedipus and the house of Thebes.

Frequently asked questions§

What was the Golden Fleece?§

It was the fleece of a flying golden ram that had carried Phrixus to Colchis to save him from being sacrificed. Phrixus sacrificed the ram to Zeus and gave its fleece to King Aeetes, who hung it in a grove of Ares guarded by a sleepless serpent.

Who helped Jason win the Golden Fleece?§

Above all Medea, daughter of King Aeetes, who gave him a protective ointment for the fire-breathing bulls and charmed the serpent guarding the fleece. The goddesses Hera and Athena also protected the expedition, and the seer Phineus told the Argonauts how to pass the Clashing Rocks.

Why did Medea kill her children?§

In Euripides' Medea she kills them to punish Jason, who has abandoned her to marry the daughter of the king of Corinth. Earlier versions recorded by ancient commentators blamed the Corinthians for the children's deaths, so the deliberate killing may be Euripides' own emphasis.

How did Jason die?§

The most common tradition says that the old hero was killed when a rotten timber of the beached Argo fell on him, an inglorious end that Euripides foretells at the close of Medea.

Sources and further reading§