Jason

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Jason is the hero of one of the oldest stories in Greek myth: the prince who gathered a crew of heroes, sailed the ship Argo to the far edge of the known world, and brought back the Golden Fleece. He is named already in Homer, and the voyage was old when the surviving versions were written; the fullest account, the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes, dates only from the third century BCE, by which time the tale had been retold for centuries.

The outline is constant across the tellings. Jason, son of Aeson, is cheated of his kingdom of Iolcus by his uncle Pelias, who sends him after the fleece of a golden ram — kept in distant Colchis, hung on a tree, guarded by a sleepless dragon — on the understanding that he will not return. He does return. The voyage out is an episodic catalogue of dangers passed: the clashing rocks, the harpies, the bronze giant Talos. The fleece itself is won only with the help of Medea, the Colchian king’s daughter, a sorceress who falls in love with Jason and turns her powers to his cause — and whose later story, when he abandons her, becomes the bleakest in the tradition. Jason is in this respect an unusual hero: much of what he accomplishes is done for him or to him, by gods, by Medea, by the strength of his crew. The figure who gives the Argonautica its name is often its most passive presence.

That ambiguity did little to dim the myth’s afterlife, and one strand of it matters here. Later readers, working in the long tradition that treated pagan fable as veiled philosophy, took the quest for the Golden Fleece as an image of the alchemical work — the fleece standing for the secret of transmutation, the voyage for the stages of the process, the guardian dragon for the obstacle the adept must overcome. The reading is not native to the myth; it is the kind of allegorical recovery that flourished from late antiquity through the Renaissance, when alchemists routinely found their own pursuit prefigured in older texts. Whether any ancient teller meant the fleece so is doubtful, and the question is more about how the alchemists read than about what the Greeks intended. The association nonetheless became durable enough that “the Golden Fleece” served as a recognised byword for the alchemical secret.

What the early sources offer is not a moral hero but a successful one, carried by the help of others toward a prize whose later meanings would far outrun the story that first held it. The ship was eventually set among the stars; the fleece passed into a second life as a symbol of something its first tellers could not have foreseen.

→ Related: Medea