Jason

The man Pelias recognises by one bare foot

Jason loses a sandal while fording the river Anaurus and walks into Iolcos with one bare foot. Pelias sees him and remembers the oracle that warned of a man wearing only one sandal. The king has tried to secure his rule by removing the family that could challenge it; the sign tells him that the threat has arrived anyway.

Jason has grown up out of sight in Chiron’s cave on Pelion. Pindar lets him say that the Centaur gave him the name Jason, while ancient scholarship glosses it as healer or atoner and preserves an earlier name, Diomedes. He returns wearing Magnesian dress and a leopard skin, carrying two spears. Pelias responds by sending him after the Golden Fleece, a task designed to transfer the danger far from Iolcos.

Medea, and the two endings at Corinth

Jason returns from Colchis with Medea, the sorceress whose spells have won him the Fleece, and the pair come first to Iolcos, where Smith’s Dictionary records that Medea avenges Jason’s family by tricking Pelias’s own daughters into cutting their father into pieces and boiling him, on the promise it will restore his youth. It does not, and Pelias’s son Acastus drives Jason and Medea from the city. The common account settles them next at Corinth, and it is there that the ancient sources stop agreeing.

Euripides’ Medea, staged in 431 BC and the telling most readers already know, has Jason abandon Medea for a marriage to Glauce, and has Medea kill their two sons with her own hand before escaping to Athens: “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, writing from Corinth itself centuries later, gives an entirely different account: a tomb beside the city’s Odeion held the bones of Medea’s sons, Mermerus and Pheres, said to have been stoned to death by the Corinthians themselves over the poisoned gifts sent to Glauce, and the city was afterward required to hold yearly sacrifices at an oracle’s command once the children’s deaths began killing Corinthian infants in turn. Pausanias adds two further variants from epic poetry now lost: the Naupactia has Jason move his household to Corcyra after Pelias’s death, with Mermerus killed while out hunting on the mainland facing the island, and Eumelus has the Corinthians invite Medea from Iolcos to inherit the throne as her father Aeetes’s heir, with Jason ruling only through her, until she was found hiding each child in Hera’s sanctuary in the belief that this would make it immortal.

How his own story ends

Jason’s death is no more settled than his sons’. Smith’s Dictionary sets out two competing traditions: that he took his own life from grief, following Diodorus, or that he died when the rotting stern of the beached Argo collapsed on him as he lay resting beneath it — a spot he is said to have chosen on Medea’s own advice.

What outlived him

Strabo, writing before the mid-first century, reports that the expedition of Jason left “Jasonian monuments” still standing across Media and Armenia in his own day, some of them built by the rulers of those countries, and names one instance directly: a temple of Jason at Abdera, on the Thracian coast, raised by the Macedonian general Parmenion. Smith’s Dictionary adds, citing the same passage of Strabo, that Jason “was worshipped as a hero in several parts of the ancient world,” and that his marriage to Medea was carved on the chest of Cypselus, an offering Pausanias saw at Olympia.