Medea

Why Medea helped Jason

Medea was a daughter of Aeetes, king of Colchis. The hero Jason came to Colchis for the Golden Fleece, and Aeetes set him trials to earn it. Jason yoked the bulls, defeated the warriors who sprang from the earth and approached the serpent guarding the fleece. Every one of those successes depended on Medea’s knowledge.

In the poet Apollonius of Rhodes, her help begins with an attack on her freedom. The goddesses Hera and Athena know that Jason cannot finish the trials alone. They ask the goddess Aphrodite to send her son Eros against Medea. Eros shoots her as Jason enters. Her desire arrives like a wound from outside. The gods arrange the passion that turns her against her father’s house.

Apollonius then follows Medea as she argues with herself. She weighs loyalty to her family, shame, death and the danger the stranger faces.

The trials in Colchis

The gods have forced her love, but that does not make her passive. Medea decides what Jason needs. She makes him swear that he will marry her.

She gives him a drug to rub on his body, shield and spear. It protects him for one day from fire and iron. She also tells him what to do when armed men spring up from the dragon’s teeth. He must throw a stone among them. The warriors cannot tell who threw it, so they turn their weapons on one another.

The ancient writer Apollodorus tells the same exchange more briefly. Jason swears to marry Medea, and she gives him the drug and explains the trick. Both writers make the result clear. Jason performs the public feats, but Medea creates the conditions in which he can survive them.

Taking the fleece

Aeetes does not hand over 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 two reach his ship, the Argo, by night. Medea leaves Colchis through the theft she has made possible.

The escape brings the death of her brother Apsyrtus, and the sources give two accounts that cannot both be true. In Apollodorus, Apsyrtus is a child. Medea takes him aboard and kills him, then cuts up the body so that Aeetes must stop to gather the pieces. In Apollonius, Apsyrtus is a grown commander chasing the Argo. Medea lures him into a trap during talks, Jason kills him, and Medea turns her face away as the blow falls.

The difference goes beyond the brother’s age. In one account Medea herself kills and cuts up the body. In the other she plans Jason’s ambush and watches it. Neither lets the escape count as a rescue without cost.

Talos at Crete

Near the end of the voyage home, Talos stops the exhausted Argonauts, the crew of the Argo, from landing on Crete. He is a bronze guardian who circles the island and throws rocks at ships that come near. The crew cannot beat him by force.

Medea takes charge. In Apollonius, she calls on destructive spirits and fixes Talos with a hostile stare. He grazes the one weak vein at his ankle. The fluid that keeps him alive runs out of it, and he falls. On the Cretan coast Medea is not Jason’s helper. She is the power the whole crew now depends on.

Medea’s part in the voyage

Apollodorus gives several other versions. Medea may drive Talos mad with drugs. She may trick him with a promise that he will live forever and pull out the nail that seals his vein. Or she may stand back while Poeas, one of the crew, shoots him in the ankle. The versions agree only on the weak spot and the fall.

The passion forced on Medea never fully explains her part in the voyage. Eros turns her towards Jason. Yet it is Medea who reads each danger, provides the means of escape and decides how far she will go. In Colchis she began as a stranger the Argonauts found useful. By the time they reach Crete she is their strongest protector, and a danger their enemies cannot stand against.