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Greek Legends

Jason: The Leader of the Argonauts

Jason, heir to the throne of Iolcus, led the Argonauts on the quest for the Golden Fleece — and won it with the help of the sorceress Medea.

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Jason is one of the great questing heroes of Greek mythology, and one of the most troubling. His voyage on the ship Argo with a crew of the finest heroes of his generation, in search of the Golden Fleece, is among the oldest adventure stories in the Western world; Homer already knew it as “the Argo, famous to all.” Yet Jason himself is a strangely uncertain hero. He succeeds less through his own strength than through the help of goddesses and, above all, of the Colchian princess Medea. And his story ends not in triumph but in betrayal, murder, and a lonely death.

The Usurped Kingdom

Jason was the son of Aeson, rightful king of Iolcus in Thessaly. Aeson’s half-brother Pelias seized the throne and killed or imprisoned the royal family. Jason’s mother, fearing for her newborn son, pretended that he had died at birth and secretly sent him to be raised by the centaur Chiron on Mount Pelion — the same wise teacher who would later educate Achilles. Chiron gave the boy the name Jason (Iasōn), which the ancients connected with healing.

Pelias, meanwhile, had received an oracle: he should beware of a man wearing only one sandal.

The Man With One Sandal

When Jason reached manhood, he set out for Iolcus to reclaim his birthright. On the way he came to the flooded River Anaurus, where an old woman asked to be carried across. Jason lifted her on his back and waded through the torrent, losing one sandal in the mud. The old woman was the goddess Hera in disguise, and from that moment she became Jason’s protector. Hera had her own reason to hate Pelias: he had neglected her worship and killed his stepmother at Hera’s altar.

Jason arrived in Iolcus during a festival, wearing one sandal. Pelias recognized the man of the oracle at once. When Jason boldly demanded the throne, Pelias did not refuse outright. Instead he agreed to hand over the kingdom — if Jason would first bring back the Golden Fleece from Colchis, a kingdom at the far eastern end of the Black Sea. Pelias expected him never to return.

The Golden Fleece

The fleece belonged to a golden, winged ram sent by the gods to rescue two children, Phrixus and Helle, from their stepmother’s plot to have them sacrificed. The ram flew east with the children on its back. Helle fell into the strait that separates Europe from Asia, which was named the Hellespont (“Helle’s sea”) after her. Phrixus reached Colchis safely, where King Aeëtes, son of the sun-god Helios, welcomed him. Phrixus sacrificed the ram to Zeus and gave its golden fleece to Aeëtes, who hung it on an oak tree in a grove sacred to Ares, guarded by a serpent that never slept.

The Argo and the Argonauts

Jason had the shipwright Argus build the Argo, with Athena’s guidance. Into its prow Athena fitted a timber from the sacred oak of Dodona, which could speak and prophesy. Then Jason called for heroes, and the greatest of the age answered. The lists differ between sources, but the crew usually included:

  • Heracles, the strongest man alive
  • Orpheus, the musician whose song could charm stones
  • Castor and Polydeuces (Pollux), the Dioscuri
  • Peleus, future father of Achilles
  • Zetes and Calais, the winged sons of the North Wind
  • Atalanta, the huntress, in some versions
  • Lynceus, whose eyes could see through the earth
  • Meleager, the hero of the Calydonian boar hunt

The full voyage — the women of Lemnos, the loss of Heracles, the blind prophet Phineus and the Harpies, the Clashing Rocks, and the tasks in Colchis — is told in The Quest for the Golden Fleece.

Medea

In Colchis, King Aeëtes agreed to give up the fleece only if Jason completed impossible tasks: yoke two fire-breathing bronze bulls, plough a field, sow it with dragon’s teeth, and defeat the armed warriors who would spring up from them. Jason could not have succeeded alone. Hera and Aphrodite arranged for Aeëtes’s daughter Medea, a priestess of Hecate and a powerful sorceress, to fall in love with him. She gave him an ointment that made him proof against fire and iron and told him how to defeat the earth-born warriors. She then lulled the serpent to sleep so that Jason could take the fleece.

Medea abandoned her family and fled with Jason. According to the most brutal version of the myth, she killed her own younger brother Apsyrtus and scattered his body in the sea, so that Aeëtes would be delayed gathering the pieces. The story of her love, her magic, and the terrible end of the marriage is told in Jason and Medea.

Return to Iolcus

The Argonauts’ journey home was even longer and stranger than the outward voyage. They sailed up the Danube, across to the Adriatic, through the lands of the enchantress Circe (Medea’s aunt), past the Sirens — whom Orpheus drowned out with his own singing — through the wandering rocks, and to North Africa, where they carried the Argo overland across the Libyan desert. Off Crete, Medea destroyed the bronze giant Talos by pulling the single nail that sealed his one vein.

Back in Iolcus, Jason found that Pelias had forced his father Aeson to commit suicide. Medea took revenge. She demonstrated her magic to Pelias’s daughters by cutting up an old ram, boiling it in a cauldron with herbs, and producing a young lamb. The daughters, hoping to restore their father’s youth, cut up Pelias and boiled him. There were no herbs this time. The people of Iolcus, horrified, drove Jason and Medea out.

Corinth and the Betrayal

Jason and Medea settled in Corinth and had children. After some years, Jason, seeking security and status, abandoned Medea to marry Glauce (also called Creusa), daughter of King Creon of Corinth. Medea’s revenge, immortalized in Euripides’s tragedy Medea (431 BCE), was catastrophic: she sent the bride a poisoned robe and crown that burned her and her father to death, and then killed her own children by Jason. She escaped in a chariot drawn by dragons, sent by her grandfather Helios.

The Death of Jason

Jason’s end was pitiful. Having lost the favour of Hera by breaking his oath to Medea, he wandered from city to city. At last, an old man, he came back to the rotting hulk of the Argo, beached at Corinth, and sat in its shade. A piece of the decaying stern fell on him and killed him. The hero who had once commanded the finest crew in Greece died alone, struck down by his own ship.

Sources of the Myth

The earliest detailed surviving account is Pindar’s Fourth Pythian Ode (462 BCE). The fullest is the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes (third century BCE), a learned Hellenistic epic in four books, which portrays Jason as an anxious, all-too-human leader and gives Medea a psychologically subtle inner life. The Roman poet Valerius Flaccus wrote a Latin Argonautica, and Ovid tells parts of the story in the Metamorphoses and the Heroides.

Symbolism and Legacy

The story of the Argonauts has been read as a memory of early Greek voyages into the Black Sea, where gold was reportedly collected by placing sheepskins in mountain streams to trap particles of gold dust — a possible origin for the Golden Fleece. It is also the archetype of the quest narrative: a band of heroes with special skills, a dangerous journey, trials, a treasure, and a perilous return.

Jason himself is the model of a hero whose success depends on others, and whose failure to keep faith destroys him. The 1963 film Jason and the Argonauts, with Ray Harryhausen’s famous stop-motion skeletons, brought the story to modern audiences, and Medea remains one of the most frequently performed roles in world theatre.

Last reviewed: September 2026.