Aeetes, however, went back on his word and refused to give up the Golden Fleece. Instead, he planned to burn the Argo and kill its crew. Medea saved Jason again, leading him by night to the sacred grove where the fleece hung on a tree, protected by a giant dragon or serpent. She lulled the monster to sleep with her charms and drugs, allowing Jason to take the fleece. She then boarded the Argo with him, accompanied by her young brother Apsyrtus. According to Apollodorus, when Aeetes pursued the ship, Medea committed her first murder, chopping her brother into pieces and throwing them into the sea. Aeetes was forced to delay his pursuit while he collected the pieces of his son’s body in order to give him a proper burial.
As a result, Medea escaped on the Argo with Jason and the Golden Fleece.
Left: Medea, by English painter Frederick Sandys (1829—1904), depicts the sorceress concocting a magic potion, with the Argonauts’ ship and the grove where the Golden Fleece hung in the background.
Below: Jason Swearing Eternal Affection to Medea by French painter Jean-Franyois de Troy (1679—1752). Jason agreed to marry Medea in return for her assistance in his quest for the Golden Fleece.
The king of the gods, Zeus, sent a storm in punishment for the killing of Apsyrtus, and the Argo took shelter at the island of the sorceress Circe, Medea’s aunt, who cleansed her niece and Jason, absolving them of blame for the murder. They continued to the island of Scheria, where Queen Arete married them, and then to Crete, where they were prevented from landing by a bronze giant, Talos, who protected the island by ceaselessly running around it. A nail in one of Talos’s ankles kept all the ichor, or divine blood, in his body, without which he would die. Medea killed the giant by means of her magic, which caused the nail to come free.
When Jason returned home to lolcus in Greece, he delivered the fleece to his uncle Pelias, who had usurped the throne ofJason’s father, Aeson, and, according to Apollodorus, driven Aeson himself to suicide. When Pelias refused to give up the throne, Medea tried to help Jason by persuading Pelias’s daughters that she was capable of turning their father back into a vigorous young man. To demonstrate, she killed and chopped up an aged ram and threw it into a boiling cauldron of water with magical herbs. A young lamb leaped out of the pot. The daughters then killed their father and threw his body into the cauldron. For Pelias, however, there was no magical
Medea the Monster
For the Greeks, Medea represented one of the most frightening monsters of all: a powerful woman. She was intelligent, dangerous, and determined and refused to conform to the ideal of loyalty expected of women toward their male family members. She chose her own husband instead of allowing her father to arrange her marriage; she also betrayed her father, murdered her brother and her husband's uncle, and tried to kill her stepson. When her husband discarded her, she destroyed his life by killing his new wife and father-in-law, and, in the most common version of the story, she murdered her own sons, too. The play Medea, by Greek dramatist Euripides (c. 486-c. 406 BCE), portrays Medea sympathetically, outcast and powerless in Corinth following her divorce. However, Euripides never lets us forget that Medea is a monster.
Reprieve. The people of lolcus blamed Jason and Medea for Pelias’s death. Pelias’s son Acastus took the throne and forced Jason and Medea to flee to Corinth.
World History
