Jason, Medea and the Price of the Golden Fleece

The dove lost its tail feathers. That was the price Phineus had told the Argonauts to expect: release a bird ahead of the ship at the mouth of the Black Sea, and if it got through the Clashing Rocks, row after it with everything you have. The rocks slammed together and clipped the dove’s tail; they swung apart, the oarsmen heaved, a wave flung the Argo back, and only a shove from Athena’s hand sent her through as the cliffs met again behind, shearing the ornament from her stern. From that day, Apollonius of Rhodes tells us, the rocks stood fixed. The way to Colchis was open, and the real difficulties could begin.

A fleece, a sandal and a ship

The fleece came from a rescue. Phrixus and Helle, children of the Boeotian king Athamas, were about to be sacrificed through their stepmother’s plotting when a golden ram carried them off through the air. Helle fell into the strait that took her name, the Hellespont; Phrixus reached Colchis at the far eastern end of the Black Sea, sacrificed the ram and gave its fleece to King Aeetes, son of the Sun, who hung it on an oak in a grove of Ares under the guard of a serpent that never slept.

Jason’s claim to Iolcus in Thessaly was better than his uncle’s. Pelias, who held the throne, had been warned by an oracle to beware a man wearing one sandal, and Pindar, in his fourth Pythian ode, brings that man into the marketplace in a leopard skin, his long hair loose down his back, one foot bare. The other sandal, Apollonius explains, was lost in the flooded river Anaurus when Jason carried an old woman across, and the old woman was Hera in disguise. She would remain his patron to the end. Pelias, playing for time, sent the young claimant to fetch the fleece.

The ship was built by Argus with Athena’s help, and the goddess fitted into her a beam cut from the speaking oak of Zeus at Dodona. Homer already calls the Argo “known to all”. Her crew was a roll-call of the generation before Troy: Heracles, Orpheus, the twins Castor and Polydeuces, Zetes and Calais the winged sons of the North Wind, Peleus, Telamon, Tiphys at the steering oar and, if Apollodorus is right, Atalanta.

The voyage out

The outward journey reads like a series of tests, most of them about what guests and hosts owe one another. On Lemnos the Argonauts found a city of women who had killed their husbands, and lingered as their lovers until Heracles shamed them back to the oars. At Cyzicus they were feasted by a young king, sailed away, were blown back in the dark and killed their host in a night battle in which neither side recognised the other. In Mysia the boy Hylas, sent to fetch water, was drawn down into a spring by its nymph, and Heracles, searching for him, was left behind to return to his labours. Among the Bebryces, Polydeuces boxed King Amycus to death. On the Thracian shore they found the blind prophet Phineus starving, his meals snatched and fouled by the Harpies; the sons of the North Wind chased the creatures off, and in return he told them how to pass the rocks.

Beyond them came the long haul along the southern shore of the Black Sea: the deaths of the seer Idmon and the helmsman Tiphys, an island where the birds of Ares shed feathers sharp as arrows, and at last the mouth of the river Phasis, where they rowed upstream and hid the ship in a shaded backwater.

Medea’s bargain

King Aeetes did not refuse the fleece outright; he set a price designed to kill. Jason must yoke two bronze-footed, fire-breathing bulls, plough the field of Ares, sow it with serpent’s teeth, and cut down the armed men who would spring from the furrows – all in a single day.

Help came from the gods by way of a girl. In the third book of Apollonius, Hera and Athena call on Aphrodite, and Eros shoots an arrow into the heart of Medea, the king’s daughter and a priestess of Hecate. What follows is one of the great studies of a divided mind: Medea lies awake torn between shame, fear of her father and longing for the stranger, then goes out at dawn to meet him at Hecate’s shrine. She brings a salve from a flower that sprang where the ichor of Prometheus dripped on the slopes of the Caucasus. Smeared on his body and weapons, it will make Jason proof against fire and bronze for a day. When the earthborn warriors rise, he is to throw a boulder among them, and they will turn on each other.

What she asks in return is simple and enormous. Apollonius has her beg Jason to remember her when he is home; he answers with a promise of marriage and honour in Greece. Apollodorus makes it more like a contract: she would help only if he swore to make her his wife and take her with him. Jason swore. He yoked the bulls, sowed the teeth, threw the stone and watched the crop of men cut itself down. When Aeetes went back on his word, Medea led him by night to the grove, sang the serpent to sleep and sprinkled its eyes with a juniper sprig dipped in her drugs while Jason lifted the fleece from the oak.

That is Apollonius’s version, not the only one. Pindar has Jason kill the serpent himself by cunning. Euripides lets Medea give her own account, years later, to the husband who has abandoned her:

I saved you – every Greek who boarded the Argo with you knows it – when you were sent to master the fire-breathing bulls with the yoke and sow the deadly field. And the serpent that coiled round the golden fleece, unsleeping, I killed it, and raised for you the light of rescue.

Euripides, Medea (our rendering)

What the fleece cost

Every telling agrees that the bargain bound Medea far more tightly than Jason. To slow her father’s pursuit, her brother Apsyrtus had to die. Apollonius has Jason ambush him at a temple on an island while Medea lures him there; Apollodorus, darker still, has Medea herself cut him to pieces aboard ship and scatter them on the sea, so that Aeetes would stop to gather the limbs. On the island of the Phaeacians, where King Alcinous ruled that she would be handed back to the Colchians unless she was already a wife, the pair married in haste in a sacred cave. On Crete, Medea brought down the bronze giant Talos with the power of her gaze.

Back in Iolcus she tricked the daughters of Pelias into cutting up and boiling their father, promising to make him young. Then, in Corinth, Jason decided that a royal marriage suited him better. Euripides’ tragedy begins at that point, with Medea reminding him of every term she had kept, and ends with her escaping in the chariot of the Sun after killing his new bride and her own children. Her last word to him is a prophecy: he will die struck on the head by a timber from the rotting Argo.

So the ship that carried Jason to glory finishes his story. A promise sworn at Hecate’s shrine, by a man who needed help, was worth everything to the woman who heard it and very little to the man who made it.