Jason

• 1. Introduction

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  Jason, the Greek mythological hero at the center of one of antiquity's great adventure stories, arrives in the city of Iolcus wearing only one sandal. He lost the other crossing a river called Anauros while carrying an old woman on his back. The old woman was actually the goddess Hera in disguise, and she blessed him for his help. That missing sandal was all it took to set off a chain of events involving dragons, giants, a sorceress, and a golden fleece hung in a sacred grove. The questions worth asking are not just what happened on the voyage, but why a hero so celebrated by the gods could die alone and unhappy beneath the rotting hull of his own ship.

• 2. The Usurper and the Oracle

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  Pelias was the son of the sea god Poseidon and a mortal woman named Tyro, described in the sources as high-born Tyro, daughter of Salmoneus. His half-brother Aeson was the rightful king of Iolcus, but Pelias overthrew him, killing as many of Aeson's descendants as he could find. Why he spared Aeson himself is a question the sources leave unanswered.

  Aeson's wife Alcimede had a newborn son. She surrounded the infant with female attendants who wept loudly, convincing Pelias the child had been born dead. The baby was Jason. Alcimede then sent him away to be raised by the centaur Chiron, claiming she had been having an affair with the centaur all along.

  Pelias, uneasy on a throne he had seized by force, consulted an oracle. The warning he received was specific and strange: beware a man wearing only one sandal. Years later, Jason arrived in Iolcus during games Pelias was holding in honor of Poseidon. He had crossed the wintry Anauros helping Hera in her disguise and lost a sandal in the current. When he was announced as a man wearing only one sandal, Pelias recognized the threat at once.

  Pelias told Jason that to take the throne he must first retrieve the Golden Fleece. Jason accepted without hesitation. The fleece itself belonged to King Aeetes of Colchis, on the Black Sea coast of what is now Georgia, and the road there was far from simple.

• 3. The Crew of the Argo

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  Argus built the ship that gave the expedition its name. The Argonauts included Heracles, the seer Idmon, the helmsman Tiphys, the winged brothers Calais and Zetes, and Orpheus the musician. Atalanta was among them, as were the Dioscuri, Castor and Polydeuces. Peleus, who would later father Achilles, sailed with the crew as well.

  Their first major stop was the island of Lemnos in the north Aegean Sea. The women there had neglected the worship of Aphrodite, and the goddess punished them by making them so foul-smelling that their husbands sought concubines from the Thracian mainland instead. The spurned women killed every male on the island while the men slept. The king, Thoas, survived only because his daughter Hypsipyle put him to sea inside a sealed chest. The Argonauts stayed long enough that Jason fathered twins with Hypsipyle, who had become queen. Heracles eventually pressured the crew to leave, disgusted by what he saw as a distraction from the quest.

  Next came the land of the Doliones, whose king Cyzicus welcomed the Argonauts. He told them about the land beyond Bear Mountain but neglected to mention what lived there: the Gegeines, a tribe of six-armed Earthborn giants who wore leather loincloths. While most of the crew foraged for supplies, the Gegeines attacked the ship. Heracles, guarding it with a small group, killed most of them before Jason and the others returned.

  When the Argonauts sailed on, they lost their bearings in the darkness and landed again at the same place. The Doliones, taking them for enemies, attacked. The Argonauts killed many of them before dawn revealed the mistake. Among the dead was King Cyzicus himself. His wife killed herself when she learned what had happened. The Argonauts held a funeral for the king they had mistakenly slain and carried their grief with them into the next leg of the voyage.

• 4. The Road to Colchis

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  At the court of Phineus of Salmydessus in Thrace, Jason found a king reduced to skin and bones. Zeus had sent the harpies to steal the food set out for Phineus each day. Jason killed the harpies when they returned; in other tellings, Calais and Zetes drove them away. Phineus rewarded Jason with the location of Colchis and the secret for passing the Symplegades, the Clashing Rocks.

  The Symplegades were enormous cliff faces that slammed together to crush anything that tried to pass between them. Phineus told Jason to release a dove first. If the dove made it through, the crew should row with everything they had. Jason released the bird; it passed, losing only a few tail feathers. The Argonauts rowed hard and cleared the rocks with minor damage to the ship's stern. After that, the clashing rocks locked together forever, leaving the passage permanently open.

  In Colchis, King Aeetes set Jason three tasks as the price for the fleece. Aeetes had received the fleece from a man named Phrixus. Facing the tasks, Jason fell into despair. Hera had already arranged a solution: she persuaded Aphrodite to have her son Eros make Aeetes' daughter Medea fall in love with Jason. Medea was a sorceress and the granddaughter of the sun god Helios.

  The first task was to yoke a pair of fire-breathing oxen called the Khalkotauroi and plow a field. Medea gave Jason an ointment that shielded him from the flames. The second task was to sow dragon's teeth into the plowed field; the teeth sprouted into armed warriors called spartoi. Medea had warned Jason this would happen and told him what to do. He threw a rock into the crowd of warriors, who could not find where it came from and turned on each other until they were all dead. The third task was to take the fleece from its guardian, a dragon that never slept. Medea gave Jason a potion distilled from herbs; he sprayed the dragon, which fell asleep. Jason took the fleece and left with Medea at his side.

• 5. Homeward, Blood and Storms

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  Aeetes chased the Argo as it fled with his daughter and the fleece. Medea killed her own brother Apsyrtus and threw pieces of his body into the sea. Aeetes stopped to gather them, and the Argo escaped. A different version of events holds that Medea lured Apsyrtus into a trap and that Jason killed him, cutting off his fingers and toes and burying the rest. In both tellings the result was the same: they got away.

  Zeus was not pleased. He sent storms against the Argo as punishment for the killing of Medea's brother. The ship itself then spoke, instructing the crew to seek purification from Circe, a nymph living on the island of Aeaea. After that ritual cleansing, they sailed on.

  Chiron, who had raised Jason, had told him that without Orpheus the crew could never survive the Sirens. The Sirens lived on three rocky islands called Sirenum scopuli and sang songs so beautiful that sailors steered toward them and wrecked their ships. When Orpheus heard the Sirens, he drew his lyre and played music louder and more beautiful than theirs, drowning them out.

  The last great obstacle on the return was Talos, a bronze man who guarded the island of Crete. He hurled huge stones at the Argo, preventing it from landing. Talos had a single vessel carrying ichor running from his neck to his ankle, sealed by one bronze nail. Medea cast a spell on him and removed the nail. Talos bled to death, and the Argo sailed on. During the voyage, Medea also prophesied to Euphemus, the helmsman, that one day he would rule Cyrene; the sources record this came true through his descendant Battus.

• 6. Medea's Revenge

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  Back in Iolcus, Jason celebrated his return with the Golden Fleece. His father Aeson was too old and frail to join the celebration. Medea withdrew the blood from Aeson's body, infused it with herbs, and returned it to his veins, restoring his strength. The daughters of Pelias saw this and begged Medea to do the same for their father. Medea demonstrated the process on the oldest ram in the flock; she cut it to pieces, boiled it in a cauldron, and the lamb that leapt out was young and vigorous. The daughters of Pelias then cut their own father apart and placed him in the cauldron. Medea did not add the herbs. Pelias died.

  Acastus, Pelias' son, drove Jason and Medea into exile for the murder. They settled in Corinth. In time, Jason arranged to marry Creusa, a daughter of the king of Corinth, for political advantage. When Medea confronted him, Jason told her it was not she he should thank for his success but Aphrodite, who had made Medea love him in the first place.

  Medea sent Creusa a dress as a wedding gift. The dress stuck to Creusa's body and burned her to death when she put it on. Creusa's father Creon burned to death beside her as he tried to save her. Medea then killed the two sons she had borne to Jason, fearing they would be murdered or enslaved because of what she had done. She fled to Athens in a chariot sent by her grandfather Helios, leaving Jason to learn what had happened after she was already gone.

  The scholar Bernard Knox observed that Medea's final scene closely mirrors the endings of other plays by Euripides in which a god appears: she interrupts human violence, justifies her revenge as a response to disrespect, gives orders for the burial of the dead, prophesies, and announces the founding of a cult. The chariot sent by Helios, Knox suggests, signals that the gods had not abandoned her.

• 7. The End of the Hero

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  Jason did not remain exiled from power forever. He and Peleus, the father of Achilles, later attacked Acastus together and defeated him, returning the throne of Iolcus to Jason. His son Thessalus then became king in his place.

  For breaking his vow to love Medea forever, Hera withdrew her protection. Jason died lonely and unhappy. He was resting in the shadow of the rotting Argo when the ship's stern fell on him and killed him.

  The story did not end with his death. Apollonius of Rhodes wrote the definitive version, the Argonautica, in Alexandria in the late 3rd century BC. Gaius Valerius Flaccus produced a Latin Argonautica in eight books in the late 1st century AD; that poem breaks off with Medea asking to join the homeward voyage, and no one is certain whether the end was lost or never written. A third ancient version, the Argonautica Orphica, centers the role of Orpheus. Euripides told Medea's revenge in his tragedy Medea. Dante placed Jason in the Eighth Circle of Hell, in the first ditch of Bolgia 1, condemned to march forever while devils whipped him; Dante classed him among the panderers and seducers. William Morris wrote an English epic on Jason's life and death, published in 1867. Padraic Colum adapted the story for children in 1921, illustrated by Willy Pogany. The 1963 film Jason and the Argonauts and a television miniseries in 2000 carry the same name, proof that the one-sandaled hero has never fully left the cultural stage.