Jason was the prince of Iolcos in Thessaly, the leader of the Argonauts, and the hero of the quest for the Golden Fleece, one of the great hero cycles of Greek mythology. He was the son of Aeson, the rightful king of Iolcos, but his uncle Pelias had usurped the throne. To reclaim his birthright, Jason was sent on a seemingly impossible quest: to retrieve the Golden Fleece from the distant land of Colchis. With the help of the sorceress Medea, he succeeded, but his marriage to Medea ended in one of the most tragic tales in all of Greek myth. His story is told in the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes, the only surviving complete epic of the Greek tradition outside of Homer.
Jason is the leader of the Argonauts, the Greek hero who retrieved the Golden Fleece from Colchis, and the husband of the most dangerous woman in Greek myth, Medea. The standard source for the Argonaut story is Apollonius of Rhodes’ Argonautica (third century BCE), the only surviving complete Greek epic outside Homer; the older sources are the Catalogue of Women of Hesiod and Pindar’s fourth Pythian ode. This profile treats the Argonaut cycle, the figure of Medea, and the death of Jason in that order.
The Birth and Early Life of Jason
Jason was the son of Aeson, the rightful king of Iolcos in Thessaly. His mother, in most traditions, was Alcimede, though some sources name her Polymede or Amphinome. When Aeson’s half-brother Pelias usurped the throne, Aeson feared for the safety of his infant son.
To protect him, Alcimede sent the baby to be raised by the centaur Chiron on Mount Pelion. Chiron, the wisest and most just of the centaurs, raised many of the great heroes of Greek myth, including Achilles, Asclepius, and Theseus.
As a young man, Jason returned to Iolcos to claim his birthright. He arrived at a festival, wearing a single sandal (he had lost the other while helping the goddess Hera across a river, in disguise as an old woman). Pelias, who had received a prophecy that he would be overthrown by a man wearing only one sandal, immediately recognized the threat.
Pelias agreed to give up the throne if Jason would retrieve the Golden Fleece from Colchis. He expected the quest to be impossible, and Jason to die on the journey. Jason agreed.
The Assembly of the Argonauts
To undertake the quest, Jason assembled a crew of heroes from across the Greek world, known as the Argonauts, named for the ship they would sail on, the Argo. The Argo was a fifty-oared vessel, built with the help of Athena, and it had a talking prow in the form of a piece of oak from the oracle at Dodona, which could guide the heroes on their journey.
The Argonauts were a remarkable group of heroes:
- Heracles, the greatest of Greek heroes, who joined the quest but was left behind in Mysia when he went in search of his lost companion, Hylas
- Theseus, the founder-hero of Athens
- Orpheus, the legendary musician, who charmed the dangers they encountered
- Castor and Pollux, the Dioscuri, twin brothers from Sparta
- Tiphys, the helmsman
- Idmon, the seer
- Mopsus, another seer
- Meleager, the hunter of the Calydonian Boar
- Eurytion, in some traditions
- Menoetius, the father of Patroclus
- Peleus, the father of Achilles
- Telamon, the father of Ajax the Greater
- Eurystheus, in some traditions
The list of Argonauts varies, but the heroes came from across the Greek world, and their number is sometimes given as fifty or fifty-five.
The Voyage of the Argo
The voyage of the Argo is one of the great adventure stories of Greek myth. The Argonauts faced many dangers on their way to Colchis:
- Lemnos: They stopped on the island of Lemnos, which was inhabited only by women, after the women had killed their husbands. The Argonauts fathered children on the Lemnian women, and the legends of the Minyans are connected to this story.
- The Doliones and the Bebryces: They fought with the Doliones and the Bebryces, two peoples of the Hellespont.
- The Clashing Rocks (Symplegades): The Symplegades were two rocks that clashed together, crushing ships that tried to pass between them. The Argonauts released a dove, which flew through, and the rocks, having missed the dove, became fixed and stopped moving.
- The Stymphalian Birds: They encountered birds that had migrated from Stymphalus, and the sons of Phineus, who joined them, drove them away with bronze clappers.
- Phineus: They consulted the blind prophet Phineus, who had been punished by the gods for revealing too much of the future. He told them how to pass the Symplegades and warned them of the dangers ahead.
- The Sirens: The Sirens were a danger, but Orpheus out-sang them, and they flung themselves into the sea in despair.
The Arrival in Colchis
The Argonauts arrived in Colchis, on the eastern shore of the Black Sea, ruled by King Aeetes, the son of Helios. The Golden Fleece, the golden wool of a sacred ram, hung in a grove sacred to Ares, guarded by a dragon that never slept.
King Aeetes agreed to give Jason the Golden Fleece only if he could perform several impossible tasks: yoke a pair of fire-breathing bulls, plow a field with them, plant the teeth of a dragon, and defeat the armed men who would spring up from the teeth.
Jason, discouraged, was helped by Hera, who had taken a personal interest in his success. Hera persuaded Aphrodite to make Aeetes’s daughter, the sorceress Medea, fall in love with Jason. Medea agreed to help him in exchange for his love.
Medea gave Jason a magic ointment that protected him from the bulls’ fire and made him invincible for a day. He yoked the bulls, plowed the field, sowed the teeth, and defeated the earth-born warriors (with Medea’s help, since he had to throw a stone among them to make them fight each other). But King Aeetes, furious, refused to give up the Fleece and plotted to kill the Argonauts.
The Theft of the Golden Fleece
Jason and Medea decided to steal the Golden Fleece. Medea used her magic to put the dragon that guarded it to sleep, and Jason took the Fleece and fled with Medea. Aeetes pursued them, but Medea killed her own brother Apsyrtus and scattered his limbs in the sea, forcing Aeetes to stop to collect them for proper burial. The Argonauts escaped.
The journey home was long and difficult. The Argonauts faced many more dangers, and they were purified of the murder of Apsyrtus by Circe, the sorceress, before returning to Iolcos.
The Return to Iolcos
When Jason returned to Iolcos, he found that Pelias had killed his father Aeson and his mother Alcimede. The hero Medea, in one of the most terrible of Greek myths, took a terrible revenge. She told Pelias’s daughters that she could restore their father’s youth by cutting him up and boiling him. They did so, but Medea did not restore him. Pelias was dead, and his son Acastus became king, expelling Jason and Medea from Iolcos.
Jason and Medea fled to Corinth, where they lived for ten years and had two sons. According to Euripides’s play Medea, Jason then decided to marry Glauce, the daughter of King Creon of Corinth, to advance his political career. Medea, in her rage, killed Glauce and Creon, and then killed her own children to punish Jason. She escaped to Athens in a chariot drawn by winged serpents, given to her by her grandfather Helios, and married King Aegeus of Athens.
The Death of Jason
After Medea’s departure, Jason’s life continued to decline. He lost his political standing in Corinth, and he became a wandering, broken man. According to one tradition, he returned to the Argo, the ship that had carried him on his quest, but the ship had rotted and was a ruin. As he lay down to rest beneath its remains, a beam from the ship fell on him, killing him.
The death of Jason is one of the saddest in Greek myth. The man who had won the Golden Fleece, who had sailed with Heracles and Orpheus, who had been loved by the most powerful sorceress in the world, died as a lonely old man, killed by a rotting ship.
The Legacy of Jason
Jason is the hero of the 1963 film Jason and the Argonauts, the central character of Mary Renault’s The Voyage of the Argo (1999), and a recurring figure in the Percy Jackson series. The Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes is the only surviving complete Greek epic outside Homer, and Apollonius is the source of much of the modern image of the quest narrative. For the broader modern reception, see our guide to Greek mythology in modern culture.
A Note on Reading This Profile
A note on reading this profile. The Argonaut story is in the Greek tradition, and the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes (third century BCE) is the standard surviving Greek epic outside Homer. The standard scholarly reading is that the Argonautica is the model for the modern quest narrative (Tolkien, Lewis, the Star Wars franchise), and the reader who wants the modern treatment should consult Charles Rowan Beye’s The Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Argonautica (2014). The Medea of the Argonautica is a different Medea from the Medea of Euripides’ Medea (431 BCE); the Argonautica’s Medea is younger, more hesitant, and more sympathetic.