Triumph of the Hero

By Tony Allan

and Piers Vitersky

Part 8

Jason and the Argonauts

Trials to win the Golden Fleece

            Jason and a party of the Argonauts went to the palace of Aeetes, king of Colchis and son of Helios the sun god. The first person to see them was Aeetes’s daughter Medea, who under a spell imposed by the goddess Aphrodite fell in love with Jason in an instant. Aeetes himself was alarmed by the Argonauts’ arrival because he thought that they had come to depose him, but he hid his hatred of them. When Jason asked to be allowed to take the golden fleece, Aeetes pretended to agree to the request, but said the hero must first pass a test – Jason would have to plough afield using two bulls given to him by Aeetes and then sow seed also provided by the king.

            Medea’s heart was ablaze with love for Jason, and secretly she revealed to him the hidden dangers in her father’s plans. The bulls, she said, had brazen hooves and breathed fire. The seeds were teeth of the dragon that Cadmus, founder of Thebes, had killed. She recalled how when Cadmus had sowed some of the teeth on Athena’s instructions, armed warriors had sprouted from the ground; he had thrown a stone amongst them that made them fight and kill one another. Medea gave Jason an ointment to protect him from the bulls and suggested he use a stone against the warriors.

            When it was time for the ordeal, Aeetes presented Jason with a plough of magically hardened metal and the fearsome oxen. The king had special powers over the animals and he himself ploughed the first furrow. Then he challenged the captain of the Argo to complete the ploughing.

            Jason threw off his saffron-coloured robe and, trusting to the gods, seized the handle of the plough. The oxen kicked him with their hooves and scorched him with their breath, but Medea’s ointment protected his skin. Aeetes cried out in astonishment as Jason forced the animals to submit to his will. As Jason ploughed, huge clods of earth split off with a terrible rasping noise. He scattered the dragon’s teeth into the furrows as he went, casting wary glances behind him in case they sprouted too quickly. But all went well, and it was not until he finished ploughing that he saw the first armed men rising out of the soil, bristling with swords and their armour glinting in the sunlight. Remembering Medea’s advice, Jason flung a boulder into their midst and the soldiers, suspecting each other of throwing the stone, began a fight to the death amongst themselves. Jason ran between the furrows with his sword and cut down the remaining soldiers where they sprouted.

            Aeetes retreated bitterly to his palace and sat up all night wondering how to destroy this troublesome stranger once and for all. Medea too felt distress – she was convinced that her love for Jason had already been found out. She crept to the Argonauts’ camp fire and begged them to hurry on to the dragon’s grove before Aeetes caught up with them. “I shall charm the dragon to sleep,” she said to Jason, “but may the gods remember your promise to marry me when I am far from my home with nobody to protect me.” Pushing aside the undergrowth, they came upon the remains of the altar on which Phrixus had sacrificed the golden ram. Nearby lay the dragon, gazing at them menacingly. Medea began to sing to it and sprinkled sleep potions on its eyes. As the dragon relaxed, Jason carefully lifted the golden fleece from where it hung on a massive oak tree.

            It was already daylight, and the Argonauts set out to sea without delay. No sooner had they pulled away from land than Aeetes appeared on the shore with a large army. Calling on Zeus to witness how he had been wronged, Aeetes set out in pursuit. But Hera sped the Argonauts onwards in her desire to bring Medea to Greece and there to use her as an instrument of revenge on Pelias.

            In some versions, Medea brought her baby brother Aspyrtos with her on the return voyage. As her father’s ship was drawing dangerously close, she cut the child into pieces, which she scattered, on the surface of the sea behind the ship. Her father was forced to stop to collect the remains so he could give his son a decent funeral, and this saved the Argo the chance to evade pursuit.

            The Argonauts went through many further trials on their return journey to Greece, including being chased around the island of Crete by the giant Talos. But finally one autumn evening, the ship drew in at the beach of Pagasae from which the Argonauts had set out so many adventures ago.

Medea’s revenge

            On the evening that they returned to Iolcus with the fleece, the news that greeted the Argonauts was terrible. A lone boatman reported that Aeson and Polymele, Jason’s parents, had been murdered by Pelias. Making the boatman promise to tell no one of the Argo’s arrival, the men sat down to plot a soldier’s revenge. But Medea promised them that she could single-handedly do away with Pelias, using her witch’s skills.

            She instructed them to conceal the boat and wait in hiding. They were to watch for a blazing torch on the roof of the palace in Iolcus, which would be a sign to attack the city. Then she cast a spell that transformed her into a wrinkled crone. She dressed her twelve maidservants in strange costumes and led them in procession towards Iolcus, carrying a statue of the goddess Artemis. When they reached the gates, she called out to the sentries: “The goddess Artemis has come to you from the foggy lands of the far north, riding in a chariot pulled by flying serpents. Let her in, so that she may bring good fortune to your city!” The sentries willingly let them in and the women raced through the streets, shrieking and tearing their hair. Their behaviour roused the population of Iolcus to a frenzy of religious fervour.

            Medea made her way to Pelias’s chambers and told him that his son Acastus had died with the other Argonauts in a shipwreck off Libya. Then she said that the goddess Artemis had decided to restore him to youth so that he could beget another son to replace Acastus. As a demonstration, she undid that spell that had made her appear old and stood before him in all her radiant beauty. To convince him still further, she cut up an old ram and boiled it in a cauldron of magical herbs, pulling out a young lamb that she had hidden. In one version of the myth, Medea also used this boiling treatment to bring Jason’s father Aeson back to life and to make him young again.

            King Pelias willingly consented to be dismembered and could if it meant recovering his youth. So Medea charmed him to sleep and instructed his daughters to cut him up – just as she had cut up the ram – and boil the pieces. But unlike the ram, the king failed to benefit from the treatment and instead died in agonizing death. To add insult to injury, while the cauldron was cooking, Medea led his daughters up to the palace roof and persuaded them to perform a rite to the moon with waving torches. The waiting Argonauts saw the signal and rushed into the city, taking it without resistance. But Jason could not accept the throne of Iolcus and passed it to Acastus, who had sailed with him on the Argo – perhaps fearing that Acastus, who was Pelias’s son, would avenge his father’s death. Jason and Medea went into exile, and after much wandering they settled in Corinth. Medea through her father’s side, was entitled to the rulership of Corinth, so when the throne fell vacant, she claimed it for Jason.

Jason betrays his wife

            Jason and Medea could not live happily together. Jason was unable to forget his wife’s long record of murder and sorcery, and when the Theban king, Creon. Offered him the hand of the princess Glauce in marriage, he agreed and told Medea that he intended to divorce her. She was furious. Angrily, she reminded Jason of the solemn oath to her that he had made in Colchis, and pointed out that he had relied on her help to win both the golden fleece and the throne of Corinth.

            When Jason refused to change his mind she pretended to go along with his plan, but plotted revenge. She sent Glauce a wedding gift of a gold crown and a white robe that were bewitched. When the unsuspecting princess put on the robe she was seized by a consuming fire that ate searingly into her flesh and then spread through the crowd of wedding guests, killing every one of them except for Jason himself.

            At this point, some say, the god Zeus was impressed with Medea’s courage and fell in love with her, but she rejected him. Hera, his wife, was so pleased by this that she promised to make Medea’s children immortal if the queen left them in her temple. Medea did so, escaping from Corinth with the help of her grandfather, Helios the sun god, who lent her his chariot. She fled to Athens, where King Aegeus offered her sanctuary. Medea was still an attractive woman and Aegeus later married her.

            But the angry population broke into Hera’s temple and killed the children. In later years, the Corinthians were so ashamed of their behaviour that they bribed the playwright Euripides with fifteen talents of silver to write a play in which Medea murders her own children.

            As for Jason, his end was pathetic and inglorious. In breaking his oath of fidelity to Medea he had broken his faith with the gods in whose name he had sworn. Some ancient authors claim that he died in Corinth, either by his own hand or murdered by the vengeful Medea. Others say that he wandered from city to city as a beggar, and as an old man sat down sorrowfully under the hulk of the Argo where it had been beached at Corinth. The prow, which had rotted away through years of neglect, fell off the ship and killed him.

CAPTIONS:

Triumph of the Hero, p. 45:

Medea, driven mad by Jason’s betrayal, put one of their sons to the sword, in a Greek vase painting of c.320BC. In some versions of the myth her sons were killed by Corinthians.

Page 42:

Talos, a bronze giant who attacked the Argonauts when they tried to land on Crete, falls under Medea’s spell in this detail from a painted Greek vase of c400BC. Medea gave Talos a sleeping fraught; as he slumbered she pulled from his ankle a bronze nail that held in his lifeblood, and he bled to death.