Jason

Jason was the son of Aeson, the rightful king of Iolcos, a city in the rich plains of Thessaly in northern Greece. Before Jason was grown, Aeson's half-brother Pelias seized the throne for himself, and Jason's mother, fearing for her baby's life, pretended the child had been born dead and smuggled him out of the city. She carried him up into the forests of Mount Pelion and entrusted him to Chiron, the wise and gentle centaur who had tutored the greatest heroes of the age. Chiron raised the boy as his own, teaching him music, medicine, hunting and the arts of war, and gave him the name Jason, the Healer, for the kindness of his nature. When the boy had grown into a young man, he came down from the mountain to reclaim his birthright. On the road he reached the river Anauros, swollen with winter rain, and there an old woman begged to be carried across. Jason lifted her onto his back and waded into the flood, and though the current tore one sandal from his foot, he set her safely on the far bank. The old woman was the goddess Hera, queen of heaven, in disguise, testing the kindness of mortals, and from that day she loved Jason and guided all his fortunes.

Jason walked on into Iolcos wearing a single sandal, which was unfortunate, for King Pelias had been warned by the oracle at Delphi to beware a one-sandalled man. When Jason strode into the king's sacrifice and claimed his father's throne, Pelias answered with a cunning trap. If Jason was truly a hero, he said, let him prove it by bringing home the Golden Fleece, the hide of a wondrous ram that the god Hermes had once sent to rescue two royal children, Phrixus and Helle, from their murderous stepmother. Helle had fallen from the ram's back into the strait that still bears her name, the Hellespont, but Phrixus had been carried far to the east, to the kingdom of Colchis at the end of the Black Sea, where he sacrificed the ram to Zeus and gave its fleece to King Aeetes, who hung it in a sacred grove of the war god Ares, guarded day and night by a dragon that never slept. Jason accepted the quest, and the goddess Athena herself helped the shipwright Argus build the vessel for it: the fifty-oared Argo, the first great ship of Greece, into whose prow was fitted a timber cut from the speaking oak of Dodona, so that the ship itself could utter the will of Zeus. Fifty heroes answered Jason's call. Heracles the strongest came, and Orpheus the musician, whose lyre could charm wild beasts and stones. Castor and Polydeuces came, the warrior twins; Peleus, who would father Achilles, and Telamon, who would father Ajax; Mopsus the seer; keen-eyed Lynceus, who could see through the earth; Zetes and Calais, the winged sons of the North Wind; and Tiphys the helmsman to steer them.

The voyage to Colchis carried the Argonauts through a chain of marvels and disasters. On the island of Lemnos, where the women had murdered every man, Queen Hypsipyle welcomed the crew into her palace, and Jason lingered long enough to father twin sons before Heracles shamed the heroes back to their benches. On the land of the Doliones the young King Cyzicus feasted them like brothers, but a storm drove the Argo back to shore in darkness, and neither side recognised the other; in the night battle Jason himself killed the king who had been his host, and the crew raised a mound of grief over the dead. In Mysia the expedition lost Heracles, when his beloved squire Hylas was drawn into a spring by a lovesick water nymph and Heracles refused to abandon the search. At the land of the Bebryces, the brutal King Amycus, who compelled every stranger to box with him to the death, was beaten by the fists of Polydeuces. At Salmydessus they found the blind prophet Phineus, whom the gods had cursed for revealing too much of the future: whenever food was set before him, the Harpies, shrieking bird-women of the storm winds, swooped down and snatched it away. Zetes and Calais rose on their wings and drove the Harpies to the ends of the earth, and in gratitude Phineus told Jason how to pass the Symplegades, the Clashing Rocks that ground ships to splinters at the gateway of the Black Sea. Release a dove, he said, and if it lives, row with all your strength. The dove slipped through with only its tail feathers lost, and the Argo, with Athena's hand upon her, passed with only the ornament of her stern sheared away; and from that hour the rocks stood still forever, for the gods had decreed they must stop once a ship had passed between them.

In Colchis, King Aeetes received the strangers with cold ceremony and colder intent. But Jason had protectors in heaven. Hera and Athena persuaded Aphrodite to send her son Eros into the palace, and the little archer's arrow struck the heart of the king's daughter Medea: priestess of the witch-goddess Hecate, granddaughter of the sun god Helios, niece of the enchantress Circe, and the most dangerous woman in the world. Aeetes agreed to surrender the fleece if Jason could perform three feats: yoke two bronze-hoofed bulls that breathed fire, plough the field of Ares with them, and sow the furrows with dragon's teeth. Jason despaired, but Medea, sick with love, came to him by night with an ointment made from the flower that sprang where the blood of the chained Titan Prometheus had dripped upon the earth. Anointed with it, his skin turned proof against fire and iron for a single day. He yoked the bulls though their breath scorched the air, ploughed the field, and when armed warriors sprang up from the sown teeth, he threw a great stone among them unseen, and the earthborn soldiers, each believing his neighbour had struck him, turned their spears on one another until none were left alive.

Aeetes never meant to honour the bargain and plotted to burn the Argo that night, but Medea led Jason through the dark to the grove of Ares, where the fleece hung glowing like a sunrise caught in the branches. The serpent that guarded it, vast and sleepless, reared to strike, but Medea sang it into slumber with incantations and a sprig of juniper dipped in a sleeping draught, and Jason lifted the Golden Fleece from the tree. They ran for the ship with the Colchian fleet in pursuit, and Medea had taken her young brother Apsyrtus with her; in the darkest telling of the tale, she cut him apart and cast the pieces into the sea, knowing that Aeetes must slow his pursuit to gather the limbs of his son for burial. The horror of that deed stained the voyage home. The speaking prow of the Argo itself groaned aloud and declared that Zeus was angry, and that Jason and Medea could not come home until they had been purified by Circe on her island of Aeaea, far to the west. So the heroes went the long way around the world, up strange rivers and down into the western sea. They passed the Sirens, whose song lured sailors to their deaths, and Orpheus struck his lyre and sang louder than they did. They threaded the channel between the monster Scylla and the whirlpool Charybdis, where the sea goddess Thetis and her Nereid sisters caught the ship and passed her hand to hand through the breakers, for Hera had asked it. On the island of the Phaeacians a second Colchian fleet caught up with them and demanded Medea back, but King Alcinous ruled that a wife could not be parted from her husband, and that very night Jason and Medea were wed in a sea-cave, with the Golden Fleece itself spread beneath them for a marriage bed. Blown south to the deserts of Libya, the crew carried the Argo on their shoulders for twelve days across the burning sand until the sea god Triton showed them the channel to the Mediterranean. And off Crete they faced Talos, the last survivor of the bronze race of men, who circled the island three times a day hurling boulders at any ship that came near. Medea fixed him with her eyes and called up the spirits of death, and the giant stumbled and tore his ankle on a sharp rock, and the divine ichor ran from the wound like molten lead until he fell with a crash like a felled pine.

When Jason came home to Iolcos at last, the quest was complete but the war for the throne was not. Pelias refused to yield, and Medea dealt with him in her own fashion. Appearing as an old woman, she persuaded his daughters that her magic could restore youth, cut an aged ram to pieces and brought it leaping from her cauldron as a lamb; then she let the daughters do the same to their father, only this time her cauldron held nothing but water. The horror of the murder drove Jason and Medea into exile, and they came at last to Corinth, where for ten years they lived with their two young sons. Then Jason, ambitious or weary, put Medea aside to marry Glauce, the daughter of King Creon of Corinth, trading the witch who had given him everything for a princess who could give him a throne. Medea's answer is the subject of Euripides' great tragedy. She sent the bride a wedding gift of a robe and golden crown steeped in poison, and when Glauce put them on she burned to death in her bridal finery, her father dying in her arms as he tried to tear the fire from her flesh. Then Medea killed the two sons she had borne Jason, so that nothing of him should survive, and escaped to Athens in a flying chariot drawn by dragons, sent by her grandfather the sun. Jason lived on in Corinth, dishonoured and alone. His death came from the very thing that had made him famous: years later, sitting to rest in the shade of the old Argo where it lay rotting on the beach, the great stern of the ship broke and fell, and crushed the leader of the Argonauts beneath it. Some say the gods had turned their faces from him for his broken oaths; others remember that Hera loved him still, and set his ship among the stars, where the constellation Argo Navis sailed the southern sky.