Jason

Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Greek Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Heroes and Mortals
Mythical Attributes: Jason’s gift is not strength but the power to draw the greatest heroes and the sorceress Medea to his cause, winning through their aid what he could never manage alone.
Role in Mythos: He is the mortal captain of the Argonauts, sent to fetch the Golden Fleece from distant Colchis in order to reclaim the stolen throne of Iolcus.
Relation to Humans: Jason is himself a mortal prince rather than a god, a leader other mortals followed to the edge of the world and back. His story reads as a warning as much as an adventure, since the man who owed everything to others ruined himself the moment he betrayed the woman who had saved him.

The river was in spate when the young man came down to the ford, and an old woman stood waiting on the bank, too frail to cross the brown water on her own. He lifted her onto his back and waded in. The current dragged at his legs and sucked one sandal off his foot into the mud, and he climbed the far bank with a soaked crone on his shoulders and a single sandal, not knowing he had just carried the queen of the gods and lost the thing that would nearly get him killed. Hera stepped down, restored to herself or not, the tellers disagree, and marked him as her own. The young man was Jason, and he was on his way to claim a throne that had been taken from his family.

The throne of Iolcus belonged by right to his father Aeson, but Aeson’s half-brother Pelias had seized it and, in some versions, cut down the rest of the line to keep it. An oracle had warned Pelias to beware a man wearing one sandal. So when Jason walked into the city half-shod, the king already knew him for what he was, the way a man knows a debt has finally come due. Pelias smiled and named a price for the crown. Bring back the Golden Fleece from Colchis, at the far eastern edge of the world, and Iolcus is yours.

The Fleece was the hide of a flying golden ram, hung in a grove sacred to Ares and watched over by a serpent that never slept. Getting there meant a ship, and the ship was the Argo, built by a man named Argus with a beam of talking oak from Dodona set into her prow. Getting there also meant a crew, and here Jason showed the one thing he was genuinely good at. He gathered the greatest heroes in Greece and got them to follow him. Heracles came. Orpheus came and brought his lyre. Castor and Pollux, Peleus, Atalanta, the sons of the North Wind, fifty of them or thereabouts, the roll of names shifting with every poet who counted it.

The stories are oddly quiet about what Jason looked like, which for the hero of one of the longest surviving Greek epics is a strange gap. Fair-haired, young, handsome enough for a witch-princess to throw over her own family, and that is about all anyone commits to. What the poets describe instead is the quality that carried him, and it was not muscle. He was the captain who could not lift the heaviest thing in the room but could talk the people who could into lifting it for him. He wins by having the right friends and the right woman at the right moment. It is a real talent and a brittle one.

The outward voyage is a chain of trials. On Bear Mountain the six-armed earthborn giants came down on the crew in the dark and were hacked apart. The blind old prophet Phineus, starved by the Harpies that fouled his every meal, was freed when the winged sons of Boreas drove the creatures off, and in gratitude he told the Argonauts how to slip past the Clashing Rocks that ground ships to splinters between them. They loosed a dove to test the gap, watched the rocks snap shut on its tail feathers, and rowed through in the instant the stone drew back.

At Colchis the Fleece’s owner, King Aeetes, agreed to hand it over on terms he expected to be fatal. Yoke a pair of bulls with bronze hooves and breath of fire, plough a field with them, and sow it with a dragon’s teeth. Jason could not have done it. What saved him was the king’s own daughter. Medea, a priestess of Hecate and a sorceress of terrifying range, had been struck with love for him through the scheming of Hera and Aphrodite, and she came to him in the night with an ointment that made his skin proof against fire and iron for a single day. He yoked the bulls. He ploughed the field. When the sown teeth sprang up out of the furrows as armed men, he did as she had told him and threw a stone into their midst, and they turned on one another and fell in the confusion.

Aeetes had no intention of surrendering the Fleece whatever the tasks proved. So Medea led Jason to the sleepless serpent in the dark and sang it down, or drugged it, until its coils went slack, and Jason lifted the golden hide from the oak and ran for the ship with her beside him. To slow her father’s pursuit she committed the first of the acts that would come to define her. She had brought her young brother Apsyrtus along, and she killed him and scattered his pieces in the sea, so that Aeetes would have to stop and gather them for burial. The blunt version is simpler than the poetry around it: she murdered a child to buy the Argonauts a head start.

The return was longer and stranger than the going. Off Crete the bronze giant Talos wheeled down to the shore to sink them under thrown boulders, and Medea worked loose the single bronze pin at his ankle that held in the divine ichor, and the great automaton bled out and toppled. Home at last in Iolcus, Jason found that Pelias meant no more to keep his bargain than Aeetes had. Medea settled that too. She convinced the king’s own daughters that she could make an old man young again by cutting him up and boiling him with herbs, proved it on a ram that sprang from the cauldron as a lamb, and let the daughters do the rest to their father. There was no lamb the second time.

For all of it, Jason ends badly, and he ends badly by his own doing. Driven out of Iolcus for Pelias’s death, he and Medea settled in Corinth, where after years and two sons he set her aside to marry Glauce, the young daughter of the local king, a match that offered a crown and left the foreign witch who had won him everything with nothing. Medea’s revenge was total. She sent the bride a gown and coronet soaked in poison that burned Glauce and her father to death when she put them on, then killed her own children by Jason and was gone, carried off in a chariot drawn by dragons. Jason had built his entire life on the help of others, on Hera’s favour and a crew of heroes and above all on Medea, and once he had thrown the last of it away there was nothing left for him to draw on. He died old and friendless, dozing in the shade of the beached and rotting Argo, when the decaying stern of the ship that had made his name broke loose and fell on him. The oracle had warned Pelias about a man with one sandal. No one had thought to warn Jason about himself.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Jason in Greek mythology?

Jason is the Greek hero who led the Argonauts on the quest for the Golden Fleece. A prince of Iolcus whose throne had been usurped by his uncle Pelias, he assembled a crew of the greatest heroes in Greece and sailed the ship Argo to the far land of Colchis to win back his kingdom.

How did Jason get the Golden Fleece?

Jason won the Golden Fleece with the help of Medea, the sorceress daughter of King Aeetes of Colchis. She gave him an ointment that made him fireproof so he could yoke fire-breathing bulls and defeat the armed men that sprang from sown dragon’s teeth, then charmed the sleepless serpent guarding the Fleece so Jason could take it from the sacred oak.

Who was Medea and why was she important to Jason?

Medea was a priestess of Hecate and a powerful sorceress who fell in love with Jason and betrayed her own father to help him seize the Golden Fleece. She saved his life during his tasks in Colchis, killed the bronze giant Talos, and disposed of Pelias for him, making her the true engine of nearly every success Jason is credited with.

How did Jason die?

Jason died old, alone, and unremarkably, killed when the rotting stern of his own ship, the Argo, fell on him as he slept beneath it. After abandoning Medea to marry the princess Glauce in Corinth, he lost her aid and protection, and the hero who had depended on others for everything ended his life with nothing.

What was the ship Jason sailed called?

Jason’s ship was the Argo, from which his crew took the name Argonauts. It was built by a shipwright named Argus and had a beam of prophetic talking oak from the sacred grove of Dodona set into its prow, and it carried the heroes to Colchis and back on the quest for the Golden Fleece.