Jason and the Golden Fleece: The Voyage of the Argo

The myth of Jason and the Golden Fleece is one of the oldest and most complex hero narratives in Greek mythology, a quest story that spans the known world, assembles the greatest heroes of a generation aboard a single ship, and turns on the fateful love between a young hero and a foreign sorceress. It is also one of the tradition's most morally troubled stories: Jason is a hero whose success depends almost entirely on others, a woman who loves him, gods who favor him, and companions far braver and more capable than himself.

The Argo, the ship that carried Jason and his crew of Argonauts to Colchis and back, was in Greek tradition the first great ocean-going vessel, a ship so legendary that Zeus placed it among the stars as the constellation Argo. The voyage it undertook mapped the edges of the known Greek world and beyond, and the stories generated along the way became a vast mythological archipelago of their own.

But the myth's most enduring element is not the voyage itself, it is the figure of Medea: princess, priestess of Hecate, sorceress of terrifying power, and a woman whose love for Jason leads her to murder her brother, betray her father, and eventually, in Euripides' devastating tragedy, to kill her own children. The Golden Fleece myth is also, inescapably, the story of what men do with the women who save them.

The Golden Fleece was the skin of a divine golden ram, a gift from the god Hermes to the royal house of Boeotia. When the king's children Phrixus and Helle were endangered by their scheming stepmother, the ram appeared and carried them away through the sky toward safety in the east. Helle fell from the ram's back into the strait that would thereafter bear her name, the Hellespont ("Helle's Sea"). Phrixus arrived safely at Colchis, at the far eastern shore of the Black Sea, where he was welcomed by King Aeetes. He sacrificed the ram to Zeus and gave Aeetes its golden fleece, which was hung in a sacred grove and guarded day and night by a serpent that never slept.

The Usurpation of Pelias

Jason was the rightful heir to the throne of Iolcos in Thessaly. His father Aeson had been deposed by his half-brother Pelias, who had usurped the kingdom and imprisoned Aeson. To protect the infant Jason, his family smuggled him out and gave him to the Centaur Chiron on Mount Pelion, who raised and educated him.

When Jason came of age and traveled to Iolcos to claim his birthright, he arrived at the court of Pelias wearing one sandal, he had lost the other crossing a river while helping an old woman (who was in fact Hera in disguise, testing his character). Pelias had been warned by an oracle to beware a man wearing one sandal. Deeply alarmed but unable to kill his young kinsman publicly, Pelias devised a scheme: he challenged Jason to prove his worthiness for the throne by fetching the Golden Fleece from Colchis, a mission that Pelias was confident would kill him.

Jason assembled the greatest heroes of the age for the expedition. The ship Argo was designed by the craftsman Argus (with Athena's help), built from timber that included a speaking beam of divine oak from Zeus's sacred grove at Dodona, and was the finest vessel ever constructed. Its crew, the Argonauts, included:

• Heracles, the greatest of all heroes, who joined the voyage but left it early
• Orpheus, the supreme musician, whose songs could charm the winds and waters
• Castor and Pollux (the Dioscuri), the divine twins, sons of Zeus
• Atalanta, in some versions, the only woman aboard, a huntress of unsurpassed skill
• Calais and Zetes, winged sons of the North Wind
• Peleus, father of Achilles
• Admetus, king of Pherae, whose story of dying and being rescued by his wife Alcestis is a separate myth
• Meleager, hero of the Calydonian Boar Hunt

Adventures on the Way to Colchis

The outward voyage was itself a series of extraordinary adventures. On Lemnos, the Argonauts found the island inhabited only by women, who had killed all their men after Aphrodite had cursed them with a foul smell for neglecting her worship. Jason and his crew spent time there, with Jason lying with the queen Hypsipyle, before Heracles drove them back to sea.

At the land of the Bebryces, King Amycus challenged all comers to a boxing match to the death. The Argonaut Pollux accepted and killed him. At Salmydessus in Thrace, they encountered the blind prophet Phineus, tormented by Harpies, winged creatures who stole or fouled his food. The winged Argonauts Calais and Zetes drove the Harpies away; in gratitude, Phineus revealed how to pass the Symplegades, the Clashing Rocks.

The Symplegades were two massive rocks at the entrance to the Black Sea that clashed together, crushing any ship that tried to pass between them. Following Phineus's advice, Jason released a dove; the rocks clashed on the dove's tail feathers, and as they rebounded, the Argo rowed through at full speed. The ship lost only part of its stern ornament. From that moment, the rocks became fixed and never moved again, it had been prophesied that they would be stilled once a ship passed through.

Heracles left the expedition at this point, having gone ashore on the coast of Mysia to search for his companion Hylas, who had been drawn into a spring by water nymphs. The Argonauts could not wait, and the greatest hero among them was left behind.

The Argonauts arrived at Colchis, where King Aeetes ruled. Aeetes had no intention of giving up the Golden Fleece, but he could not refuse the quest outright without dishonoring the laws of hospitality. Instead, he set Jason three apparently impossible tasks.

The Three Tasks

Aeetes told Jason he could have the Fleece if he could: (1) yoke two fire-breathing bronze bulls and plow a field with them; (2) sow the field with the teeth of the dragon slain by Cadmus at Thebes, from which armed warriors would spring; and (3) defeat those warriors. All three tasks were to be completed in a single day. They were designed to be fatal.

Medea

Aeetes' daughter Medea was a priestess of Hecate and a sorceress of extraordinary power. When she saw Jason, Aphrodite (at Hera's behest) sent her son Eros to shoot Medea with an arrow of irresistible love. Medea was instantly and hopelessly in love with Jason, and her love placed her in an impossible position: loyalty to her father and country, or betrayal of everything for a foreign stranger.

Medea chose Jason. She met him secretly and gave him an ointment made from the plant that had sprung from the blood of Prometheus, rubbed on his body and weapons, it would make him invulnerable to fire and iron for a single day. She also told him how to defeat the earth-born warriors: throw a stone among them and they would turn on each other.

Jason's Success

Armed with Medea's gifts, Jason performed all three tasks. He yoked the fire-breathing bulls without being burned and plowed the field. He sowed the dragon's teeth. When the armed warriors sprang up, he threw a stone among them; they fought each other to the last man. The tasks were complete.

Aeetes had no intention of honoring his agreement. He planned to kill the Argonauts that night and burn the Argo. Medea discovered the plot and went to Jason again, offering to put the guardian serpent to sleep with her drugs and lead him to the Fleece. Jason and Medea went to the sacred grove at night; Medea chanted her spells and dripped soporific herbs on the serpent's eyes, sending it to sleep. Jason took the Golden Fleece.

The Escape

The Argonauts fled with Jason and Medea aboard. Aeetes pursued with a fleet. To delay him, Medea committed an act of terrible calculated cruelty: she murdered her brother Absyrtus (who had come aboard either as a hostage or, in some versions, as a pursuing officer), dismembered his body, and scattered the pieces behind the ship. Aeetes was forced to stop to collect his son's remains for burial, and the Argo escaped.

The gods were horrified by the killing of Absyrtus. The Argo's divine speaking beam told Jason and the crew they must be purified by the sorceress Circe before the gods would allow them safe passage. Circe, who was Medea's aunt, performed the ritual of purification but then sent them away, horrified by Medea's crime.

The return journey was as eventful as the outward voyage. The Argonauts passed by the island of the Sirens, who lured sailors to their deaths with their irresistible song. Orpheus saved them by playing his lyre and singing so beautifully that the Argonauts could hear only his music.

They navigated past Scylla and Charybdis with the help of the sea-nymph Thetis and her sisters, summoned by Poseidon. They passed through many other adventures and misadventures before finally reaching Iolcos.

The Death of Pelias

On returning to Iolcos, Jason found that Pelias had forced his father Aeson to kill himself during their absence (or had him killed). Medea took revenge. She demonstrated her powers to Pelias's daughters by rejuvenating an old ram, cutting it up, boiling it in her cauldron with magical herbs, and producing a living young lamb. The daughters, convinced, cut up their aged father and boiled him, expecting to restore his youth. Medea provided no herbs; Pelias died.

Pelias's son Acastus drove Jason and Medea out of Iolcos for the murder. They settled in Corinth, where they lived for some years and had children.

Jason's Betrayal and Medea's Revenge

In Corinth, Jason decided to advance his position by abandoning Medea and marrying the daughter of the Corinthian king Creon, Glauce (or Creusa). He justified this betrayal with legalistic reasoning: Medea was a foreigner, their marriage was not valid under Greek law, and he was acting in her and their children's best interests.

Medea's revenge, as told in Euripides' tragedy, was total. She sent Glauce a wedding gift, a beautiful dress and crown soaked in poison. Glauce put them on and died in agony; when her father Creon tried to embrace her, the poison killed him too. Then, in the most shocking act of the myth, Medea killed her own children by Jason, to deprive him of them and to prevent others from killing them in revenge. She escaped in a chariot drawn by dragons sent by her grandfather Helios.

The myth of Jason and the Golden Fleece is rich with themes that span from the heroic ideal to the moral complexities of love, betrayal, and cultural encounter.

The Problematic Hero

Jason is one of Greek mythology's most deliberately unheroic heroes. He is young, attractive, and royal, but he wins the Fleece not through his own valor but through Medea's magic, Hera's patronage, and the collective strength of his extraordinary crew. Ancient audiences would have found this troubling, and many scholars see the myth as a deliberate interrogation of the heroic ideal. The world's greatest heroes travel with Jason; Jason himself is the least remarkable among them.

The Power and Danger of Love

Medea is the myth's true protagonist. Her love for Jason drives her to treason, fratricide, and eventually filicide, and yet the myth positions each act as a logical consequence of the one before. Euripides in particular uses Medea's story to explore the terrifying power of passionate love when it curdles into betrayal: what Medea does is monstrous, but the myth asks us to understand, if not excuse, how she arrived at it.

The Foreigner and the Outsider

Medea is throughout a foreigner, a Colchian, a barbarian by Greek standards, a woman of dark magic in a world that distrusts such things. Her arc is the arc of the outsider who sacrifices everything for acceptance in a culture that never fully offers it, and who is destroyed by that culture's indifference to her sacrifice. This gives the myth a social and political dimension that has made it as resonant today as in antiquity.

The Ethics of Assistance

The myth persistently raises the question of what is owed to those who help us. Medea helps Jason at an extraordinary personal cost. Jason's abandonment of her is not just selfish, it is a violation of charis, the principle of reciprocal obligation that underpins Greek social ethics. The catastrophe that follows is the consequence of Jason's failure to honor that obligation.

The myth of Jason and the Golden Fleece is one of the most extensively documented in the ancient world, with sources ranging from early lyric poetry to the most complete surviving Greek prose epic.

Apollonius of Rhodes, Argonautica

The Argonautica (3rd century BCE) is the fullest and most literary treatment of the myth, the only complete surviving Hellenistic epic, written by the poet Apollonius of Rhodes for the court at Alexandria. It covers the entire voyage in four books, with extraordinary attention to geography, psychology, and the figure of Medea. Book 3, which describes Medea's falling in love and her agonized deliberation, is a masterpiece of psychological writing that influenced Virgil's portrayal of Dido in the Aeneid.

Pindar's Pythian Ode 4

Pindar's Pythian Ode 4 (474 BCE) is the earliest extended narrative treatment of the myth and one of the longest of Pindar's surviving odes. It focuses on the prophecy and commission of the quest and provides a significantly different emphasis from Apollonius, more interested in the political and theological dimensions than in the romantic ones.

Euripides' Medea

Euripides' Medea (431 BCE) is the definitive treatment of the myth's aftermath, Medea's abandonment by Jason and her terrible revenge. It is one of the surviving masterpieces of ancient tragedy and arguably the most influential single engagement with the myth in the ancient world. Euripides may have invented (or at least popularized) the detail of Medea killing her own children, earlier traditions had the Corinthians kill them.

Apollodorus and Diodorus

The mythographer Apollodorus and the historian Diodorus Siculus both provide systematic prose summaries of the entire myth, drawing on the earlier poetic traditions and filling in details not found in the major literary treatments.