Golden Fleece

The story of the fleece begins with a stepmother's hatred in the city of Orchomenus in Boeotia. King Athamas had put aside his first wife, the cloud-nymph Nephele, to marry Ino, daughter of Cadmus of Thebes, and Ino could not bear the sight of Nephele's children, the boy Phrixus and the girl Helle. She persuaded the women of the city to roast the seed corn before sowing, so that nothing sprouted and famine gripped the land. When the king sent to Delphi to ask the oracle's counsel, Ino bribed the messengers to bring back a lying answer: the earth would bear again only if Athamas sacrificed his own son. The king, weeping, led Phrixus to the altar and raised the knife. At that instant the cloud-nymph's prayer was answered. Hermes had given Nephele a marvellous ram with a fleece of pure gold, a creature that could fly through the air and speak with a human voice, and now the ram swept down, lifted Phrixus and Helle onto its broad golden back, and sprang into the sky, leaving the knife to fall empty and the city to reckon with its crime.

The ram flew east across the Aegean and out over the narrow strait that divides Europe from Asia. There Helle, faint or careless or reaching too far, lost her grip and plunged into the sea below, and the Greeks named those waters the Hellespont, the Sea of Helle, in her memory. Phrixus clung on and was carried far beyond the known world, down the length of the Black Sea to Colchis, a rich kingdom at the foot of the Caucasus where the River Phasis runs to the sea. King Aeetes, son of the sun god Helios, received the boy kindly and in time gave him his daughter Chalciope for a wife. The ram, its journey done, was sacrificed to Zeus Phyxios, the God of Flight, and Phrixus gave its wondrous fleece to the king in thanks. Aeetes hung the golden hide in a sacred grove of Ares, where a monstrous serpent, born of Typhon and Echidna in some accounts, coiled around the tree and never closed its eyes. An oracle had warned the king that his throne and his life were bound to the fleece: while it hung in the grove, Colchis would stand. The ram itself was honoured in heaven, set among the stars as the constellation Aries.

For a generation the fleece hung in its grove, half legend and half rumour, until a one-sandalled stranger walked into the sacrifice of King Pelias of Iolcos. Pelias had stolen his throne from his half-brother Aeson, and when Aeson's son Jason came to claim his birthright, the king answered with a trap dressed as a challenge. If Jason was the hero he claimed to be, let him sail to Colchis and bring home the Golden Fleece, and with it the soul of old Phrixus, who cried out in his grave for a Greek ship to fetch his treasure home. No Greek vessel had ever returned from the Black Sea, and Pelias sent the boy out expecting never to see him again. But the goddess Athena helped the shipwright Argus build the fifty-oared Argo, with a speaking timber from the oak of Dodona in her prow, and fifty heroes came aboard: Heracles, Orpheus, the twins Castor and Polydeuces, and the fathers of Achilles and Ajax. No other object in Greek myth ever gathered a generation like that. The fleece did not merely tempt one hero. It summoned them all.

When the Argo finally reached Colchis, Aeetes would not give up the treasure on which his throne was prophesied to stand. He set Jason three feats instead: to yoke two bronze-hoofed bulls that breathed fire, to plough the field of Ares with them, and to sow the furrows with dragon's teeth. Jason survived the trial only through the sorcery of the king's daughter Medea, who had been struck by the arrow of Eros and loved the stranger more than her father or her throne. Aeetes still refused to hand over the fleece and plotted to burn the Argo in the night, so Medea led Jason in darkness to the grove of Ares, where the fleece hung among the branches like a sunrise caught in the oak. The sleepless serpent reared up to meet them, vast and gleaming, but Medea sang to it, calling on the powers of night and the witch-goddess Hecate, and sprinkled a sprig of juniper dipped in a sleeping draught across its eyes. The great head sank coil by coil to the earth. Jason lifted the Golden Fleece from the tree, and it was heavy as the hide of a yearling calf and so bright that its light played over his cheeks and brow like flame as he carried it through the dark to the waiting ship.

The fleece went home the long way around the world. It rode in the Argo through the Clashing Rocks and past the Sirens, between the monster Scylla and the whirlpool Charybdis, and when the crew were cornered at last by a Colchian fleet on the island of the Phaeacians, it was spread upon the floor of the cave of Macris as a marriage bed, so that Jason and Medea could be wed that very night and the king could rule, as he did, that a wife could not be torn from her husband. When Jason finally reached Iolcos he laid the fleece before Pelias, the task fulfiled and the bargain called in. The usurper kept his throne anyway, and met his end in Medea's cauldron soon after. What became of the fleece itself, the old stories do not agree: some say Jason dedicated it to Zeus Phyxios in the temple at Orchomenus, where the crime of Athamas had first set it flying; others that it passed into the keeping of the gods, the debt of Phrixus paid and the treasure of Colchis lifted out of mortal quarrels for ever.

The Greeks understood the fleece as a sign of kingship itself, the visible luck of a ruler, which was why Aeetes' life was bound to it and why Pelias could demand it as the price of a throne. Others have looked east for its shadow in the real world. The geographer Strabo records that the rivers of Colchis ran rich with gold dust washed down from the Caucasus, and that the people there stretched fleeces across wooden frames in the mountain streams so the wool caught the gold, a sheepskin thick with dust that a stranger from across the sea might well remember as a ram's hide of pure gold. In heaven the ram kept its place as Aries, the sign of the returning sun, and on earth the fleece became the oldest shorthand there is for the quest: the shining thing at the far edge of the map that a man must be half mad to go after. When Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, founded an order of knighthood in 1430 he named it the Order of the Golden Fleece, and its knights still wear the ram's hide on a chain of flint and fire. From the altar at Orchomenus to the oak of Colchis, from the Argo's prow to the courts of Europe, the golden skin remains what it always was: proof that the most precious thing in the world is the one someone swore you could never have.