Jason

A child hidden from Pelias

Jason was the son of Aeson, the rightful king of Iolcos. Pelias had taken the throne and tried to make his rule safe by removing the family that could challenge it. An oracle, a message from the gods, marked Jason as the man who would one day cost Pelias his throne. The child was saved and raised out of sight in the cave of Chiron, a centaur, on Mount Pelion. An oracle also warned Pelias to beware a man wearing only one sandal.

The poet Pindar has Jason say that the centaur gave him the name Jason. Later ancient scholars explained the name as “healer” or “atoner”. They also kept an earlier name for him, Diomedes, which Chiron is said to have replaced.

The man with one sandal

When Jason was grown, he came down from the mountain to Iolcos. On the way he crossed the river Anaurus and lost a sandal in the current. He walked into the city with one bare foot, wearing Magnesian dress and a leopard skin and carrying two spears.

Pelias saw him and remembered the warning. He had tried to remove every threat to his rule, and now the sign told him that the threat had come anyway. So he sent Jason after the Golden Fleece, which lay in Colchis. The task was meant to take the danger far away from Iolcos.

Jason sailed on the Argo with his crew, the Argonauts. In Colchis he met Medea, a sorceress, and her spells won him the Fleece.

Medea, Iolcos and Corinth

Jason came home with Medea, and the pair went first to Iolcos. There Medea avenged Jason’s family by tricking the daughters of Pelias. She told them that if they cut their father into pieces and boiled him, he would become young again. They did as she said, and it did not work.

Acastus, the son of Pelias, then drove Jason and Medea out of the city. The usual account settles them next at Corinth. From that point on, the ancient sources stop agreeing.

The best-known version is the play Medea by the playwright Euripides, staged in 431 BC. In it Jason leaves Medea for a royal marriage to Glauce. Medea kills her two sons with her own hand and escapes to Athens. Before she acts, she says:

“I know well what pain I am about to undergo, but my wrath overbears my calculation, wrath that brings mortal men their gravest hurt.”

Pausanias: the Corinthians kill them

The Greek traveller Pausanias, writing at Corinth centuries later, gives a different account. A tomb beside the Odeion, the city’s hall for music, held the bones of Medea’s sons, Mermerus and Pheres. The Corinthians themselves were said to have stoned the boys to death over the poisoned gifts sent to Glauce. After that, the children’s deaths began killing Corinthian babies. An oracle then ordered the city to hold sacrifices every year.

Pausanias adds two more versions from early poems that are now lost. In the Naupactia, Jason moves his household to Corcyra after Pelias dies, and Mermerus is killed while hunting on the mainland opposite the island. In the poet Eumelus, the Corinthians invite Medea from Iolcos to rule them as the heir of her father, Aeetes, and Jason rules only through her. Then she is found hiding each of her children in the sanctuary of the goddess Hera, a place sacred to her, in the belief that this would make the child immortal.

His death and his memory

The sources are no more settled on Jason’s death than on his sons’. There are two traditions. In one, following the historian Diodorus, he took his own life from grief. In the other he was resting beneath the beached Argo when its rotting stern fell on him and killed him. He is said to have chosen that spot on Medea’s own advice.

The geographer Strabo, writing before the mid-first century, says Jason’s voyage left “Jasonian monuments” still standing across Media and Armenia in his day. Some had been built by the rulers of those countries. Strabo names one: a temple of Jason at Abdera, on the coast of Thrace, built by the Macedonian general Parmenion. Jason was worshipped as a hero in several parts of the ancient world. His marriage to Medea was also carved on the chest of Cypselus, an offering that Pausanias saw at Olympia.