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heroes—including Heracles—who become known as the Argonauts, after their ship, the Argo (“Swift”). The largest vessel ever made, it is outfitted with a magical talking beam cut from Zeus’s sacred oak at Dodona and given to Jason by Athena. Sailing from Iolcus in Thessaly, the Argonauts reach Colchis, but only after surviving a series of dangerous adventures, including a battle with the Harpies, winged monsters with hooked beaks and claws that swoop down and take the food from the table of a king. The grateful king tells the Argonauts how to defeat the next danger, the “clashing rocks” that smash together to crush any ship entering the Black Sea. Sending a dove ahead of them as a decoy, the wily Argonauts pass safely through the deadly rocks by rowing hard as the dove flies through.

Before winning the Golden Fleece, Jason discovers that he has two more obstacles—he must yoke together a pair of fire-breathing oxen and plow a large field where armed warriors spring up out of the dragon’s teeth that have been sown there. The attractive Jason and his plight draw the attention of the king’s daughter, Medea, a sorceress who gives the Argonauts’ leader magic ointments to spread on his sword, shield, and body, which will protect him from the monstrous dragon guarding the fleece. When Jason’s mission has been accomplished, Medea sails home with him on the Argo. The fiendish Medea then does what few ordinary sisters will do—she cuts up her brother Aspyrtus into little pieces and scatters these in the water so that her father, who is in hot pursuit, must stop to recover his son’s body for proper burial.

But it was not to be happily ever after for these lovers.

When Jason unexpectedly returns with the fleece, King Pelias refuses to honor the bargain. Once again, it is Medea to the rescue. Pretending she has a magic charm to make the king young again, she tricks his daughters into killing him. Outraged at this “regicide,” the people of Iolcus force Jason and Medea to flee to Corinth, where they live happily for ten years and have two children. As fate would have it, though, the couple’s life unravels when Jason falls in love with the king of Corinth’s daughter. Not one to take such a betrayal lying down, Medea kills her two sons and flees to Athens, where she has a son named Medus with the king of Athens. Broken, sick, and old, Jason is sitting beneath the prow of the Argo, when a piece of it breaks off and kills him. Medea is later banished back to Colchis. But she lives on as a central character in the tragedies of the playwright Euripides.

MYTHIC VOICES

…Let no one think of me

As humble or weak or passive; let them understand

I am of a different kind: dangerous to my enemies,

Loyal to my friends. To such a life glory belongs.

—EURIPIDES, Medea (431 BCE)

Which Argonaut was a god of healing?

If you’ve ever been to a doctor’s office, a pharmacy, or a hospital, you’ve probably seen it and wondered—why is there a symbol of a double snake entwined around a staff? This emblem of the medical profession is actually a mistake of sorts, and originates with Asclepius, depicted by Homer as a tribal wound-healer, and also one of Jason’s Argonauts, who was no doubt brought along on the trip for his healing skills.*

Like Jason, Asclepius is raised by Chiron, the wise centaur. As a baby, Asclepius is sent to live with the mythical creature, after Asclepius’s divine father, Apollo, discovers that his lover, Coronis, had been unfaithful to him while pregnant with their child. Miffed at the betrayal, Apollo does what any jilted Greek god might do—he strikes this woman with a bolt of lightning. Before she dies, however, Apollo suffers remorse. As Ovid tells it:

But Phoebus flatly refused to allow the child of his loins

to crumble to ashes, cremated in the funeral pyre of its mother,

seizing the child from the womb, he bore it off to a cavern

where dwelt the double-formed Chiron, the Centaur…

Apollo rescues his unborn child, who goes on to become an important Greek god, revered as the inventor of medicine