Medea

Medea wins the Golden Fleece for Jason. He yokes the bulls, defeats the earthborn warriors and approaches the serpent guarding the fleece, but each success depends on her knowledge. Apollonius also begins that alliance with an assault on her freedom: gods arrange the passion that turns her against her father’s house.

Why did Medea side with Jason?

Hera and Athena know that Jason cannot complete Aeetes’s trials unaided. They ask Aphrodite to send Eros against Medea, and the god shoots her as Jason enters. Desire arrives as an external wound. Apollonius then follows Medea through arguments with herself as she considers family loyalty, shame, death and the stranger’s danger.

Divine coercion does not make her passive. Medea decides what Jason needs and makes him swear that he will marry her. She gives him a drug to anoint his body, shield and spear, protecting him for one day from fire and iron. She tells him that when the armed men spring from the dragon’s teeth, he must throw a stone among them. Unable to identify the attacker, they turn their weapons on one another.

Apollodorus compresses the same exchange: Jason swears to marry Medea, who supplies the protective drug and explains the stratagem. Both sources make the result plain. Jason performs the public feats, but Medea designs the conditions in which he can survive them.

How does the fleece leave Colchis?

Aeetes does not surrender the fleece after Jason completes the tasks. Medea leads Jason to it and overcomes its guardian. In Apollodorus, she drugs the serpent that never sleeps; Jason takes the fleece, and the pair reach the Argo by night. Her departure is therefore inseparable from the theft she makes possible.

The flight brings the death of her brother Apsyrtus, but the sources refuse a single account. Apollodorus makes him a child whom Medea takes aboard and kills, cutting the body apart so that Aeetes must stop to gather it. In Apollonius, Apsyrtus is an adult commander pursuing the Argo. Medea draws him into a trap during negotiations, Jason kills him, and Medea turns her face away as the blow falls.

The difference changes more than the brother’s age. One account assigns the killing and dismemberment directly to Medea; the other makes her the planner and witness of Jason’s ambush. Neither permits the escape to be described as a rescue without cost.

What happens when the Argo reaches Crete?

Near the end of the return voyage, Talos prevents the exhausted Argonauts from landing on Crete. The bronze guardian circles the island and throws rocks at approaching ships. The crew cannot overcome him by ordinary force.

Medea takes control. In Apollonius, she invokes destructive spirits and fixes Talos with a hostile gaze. He grazes the single vulnerable vein at his ankle, the preserving fluid runs from it, and he falls. The action binds her to the Cretan coast not as Jason’s assistant but as the power on which the whole crew now depends.

Apollodorus preserves several alternatives. Medea may drive Talos mad with drugs, deceive him with a promise of immortality and remove the nail sealing his vein, or stand apart while Poeas shoots the ankle. The variants agree only on the weakness and the fall.

Medea’s place in the voyage is thus never adequately described by the passion imposed on her. Eros directs her towards Jason, but it is Medea who reads each danger, supplies the means of escape and decides how far she will go. By Crete, the stranger once judged useful in Colchis has become the Argonauts’ decisive protector—and a danger their enemies cannot withstand.