Aeetes did not give a friendly welcome to the Argonauts and was prepared to let Jason take the fleece only if he first performed a series of impossible tasks. These were to yoke a pair of brazenfooted and fire-breathing bulls, the gift of Hephaestus to Aeetes, and with them to plow a large field and sow it in dragon's teeth from which armed men would spring up; he would then have to kill these. At this point the legend leaves the realm of saga and with the introduction of Aeetes' younger daughter, Medea, takes on an aura of magic more typical of folk tale. Through the agency of Hera and Aphrodite, Medea was made to fall in love with Jason; when therefore Chalciope, at the request of her son, Argus (who, as we have seen, had returned to Colchis with the Argonauts), approached Medea on Jason's behalf, she was more than willing to help him perform the tasks. She was herself priestess of Hecate and a witch, as skilled in magic as her aunt Circe; she therefore was able to give Jason (whom she met at the shrine of Hecate) a magic ointment that would protect him from harm by fire or iron for the space of a day. So he performed the allotted tasks; like Cadmus, he threw a stone among the armed men who sprang from the dragon's teeth to set them fighting one another, and so easily disposed of them. Even now Aeetes did not intend to hand over the fleece but rather was planning to destroy the Argonauts.

Medea therefore advised Jason to take the fleece himself and escape immediately; with her help he found the fleece, drugged its guardian serpent, and took possession of it. Then he and the Argonauts set sail, taking Medea with them; according to Apollodorus she brought her younger brother, Apsyrtus, with her and used him to delay the pursuit of Aeetes by cutting him up and throwing his limbs into the sea for Aeetes to collect piecemeal. But in other versions Apsyrtus is a grown man and leads the pursuers, being treacherously murdered by Jason in an ambush near the mouth of the Danube. We give here Ovid's account of Jason's adventures at Colchis and their sequel. The narrative begins the day after Medea's meeting with Jason at the shrine of Hecate (Metamorphoses 7. 100-158): The next dawn had put to flight the gleaming stars when the people assembled in Mars' sacred field and took their place on the higher ground. The king himself sat enthroned among his army, conspicuous by his purple robe and ivory scepter. The brazen-footed bulls puffed forth fire from their adamantine nostrils, and the grass burned at the touch of their breath. . . .

Yet Jason faced them; with threatening look they turned their awesome faces toward him as he came, their horns tipped with iron; with their cloven hooves they pounded the dusty earth and filled the place with their bellowing and clouds of smoke. The Argonauts were petrified with fear. On came Jason and felt not their fiery breath, so great was the power of [Medea's] drugs; he stroked their deep dewlaps with fearless hand and compelled them, driven beneath the yoke, to draw the plow's heavy weight and tear open the soil as yet unplowed. The Colchians were amazed, while the Argonauts shouted encouragement and strengthened Jason's spirits. Next he took the serpent's teeth in a bronze helmet and sowed them in the plowed field. The soil softened the seed, which had been smeared with strong poison, and the teeth grew and became new bodies. Just as a baby takes on human form in its mother's womb and inside its whole body grows in due proportion, only to issue into the outside world when it is fully formed, so, when the forms of men had been made in the womb of the pregnant earth, they rose from the mother-furrows, and, yet more miraculously, at their birth clashed their weapons.

When the Greeks saw these warriors preparing to hurl their sharp spears at the head of the young Thessalian, their eyes and spirits were lowered by fear. Medea, too, who had made him safe from attack, grew pale when she saw so many enemies attacking the solitary young hero . . . . . Jason threw a heavy rock into the middle of the enemy and turned their attack from himself to them: the earth-born brothers killed each other and fell in civil war. The Greeks applauded and eagerly embraced the victor. . . . It remained yet to put to sleep with drugs the wakeful serpent. It was the fearsome guardian of the golden tree, a monster with a crest, three tongues, and curved teeth. This serpent Aeson's heroic son fed with a soporific herb and repeated thrice a charm that brought peaceful sleep. . . . When sleep came upon those eyes that it had not visited before, Jason took the gold and, in the pride of his spoils, took her who had made possible his success, a second prize. Victorious he returned to the harbor of Iolcus with his wife.

THE RETURN OF THE ARGONAUTS

We have seen that up to this point the legend of the Argonauts falls into two clearly distinguished parts-the saga of their journey to Colchis and the events at Colchis where the magic of Medea is predominant. A third division of the legend concerns the return voyage; the variety of accounts, and the very confused geographical notions that they embody, have led many people to dismiss them as merely fanciful. But it has been shown that the northern routes do correspond to some extent with the great early trade routes between northern Europe and the Mediterranean (in particular the amber routes), while the places at which the Argonauts touched in the Mediterranean reflect the actual trade and colonization from the eighth century onward. It is impossible to arrive at a synthesis of the different versions, but it is reasonable to say that these versions reflect ancient commercial voyages (if not a single voyage) and that therefore they have some claim to be saga rather than folk tale. In the simplest account the Argonauts return by the way they came; the three other versions take them much farther afield. In the oldest surviving literary account (that of Pindar) they sailed eastward up the Phasis until they came to the River of Ocean, along which they sailed southward and westward to Africa; they then carried the Argo across north Africa for twelve days until they came to the Mediterranean, and so sailed home. The third version takes them up the Phasis and northward through Russia to the northern seas (either in the far north or the Gulf of Finland), then round the British Isles and back into the Mediterranean through the Pillars of Heracles. Finally there is the commonest version (that of Apollonius Rhodius), in which they sailed up the Ister (Danube) and crossed overland to the head of the Adriatic; here their way southward was blocked by the Colchians, and instead they sailed up the Eridanus (apparently this is the Po) and into the Rhone, down which they sailed to the Mediterranean.

Here the speaking oak of the Argo told them of the wrath of Zeus at the murder of Apsyrtus; if they did not wish to wander interminably they must go to Circe in Aeaea and be purified by her. Aeaea here is located on the coast of Italy; after the purification by Circe, they sailed past the dangers that were later to menace Odysseus-the Planctae, Scylla and Charybdis, the Sirens-and came to Corcyra, the land of the Phaeacians, where Jason and Medea were married. Here they were driven southward to Libya and stranded on the shoals of the Syrtes; they carried the Argo on their shoulders to Lake Tritonis (again, a twelve-day journey), past the garden of the Hesperides (where lay the dragon Ladon, lately killed by Heracles). On the way they lost Mopsus, killed by a snake bite. From the lake they made their way back to the Mediterranean guided by the sea-god Triton. One adventure remained on the voyage back to Thessaly; the island of Crete was guarded by the bronze giant, Talus, who walked around it three times a day and kept strangers from landing by throwing rocks at them. His life depended on a membrane (or bronze nail) that closed the entrance to a vein above one ankle; if this was opened, the ichor (the divine equivalent of human blood) would flow out and he would die. And this came to pass-either because Medea drugged him and removed the nail, or because he was shot in the ankle by Poeas, or because he grazed his ankle on a rock and broke the membrane. Finally the Argonauts sailed home, stopping only to get water at Aegina. With their arrival at Iolcus their legend, strictly speaking, comes to an end (as does the epic of Apollonius Rhodius); there is no tradition of the later history of the fleece itself, except that Jason did hand it over to Pelias. As for the Argo, Jason dedicated it to Poseidon at the Isthmus; years later, while he was resting under the ship (which was propped up on dry land), he was struck on the head and killed by a piece of timber that fell from its stern.

JASON AND MEDEA IN GREECE

We may here relate something of the sequel to the Argonauts' expedition. At Iolcus, Pelias showed no intention of standing by his part of the agreement with Jason and (in one version) had already driven Jason's parents to suicide. In the best-known story, however, Medea used her magic arts first to rejuvenate Aeson by cutting him up and boiling him in a cauldron, along with certain herbs; she further demonstrated the efficacy of her method by turning an old ram into a lamb. Persuaded by these examples, the daughters of Pelias attempted to rejuvenate their father in -the same way; since Medea failed to give them the magic herbs, the experiment led only to his death. Thus Jason was revenged on Pelias, but he did not gain the throne of Iolcus, for, being defiled by the murder of Pelias, he and Medea were driven out of the city by Acastus, son of Pelias. They came to Corinth, and here, some years later, Jason divorced Medea and married Glauce, the daughter of Creon, king of Corinth. In revenge, Medea sent by the hand of her two children a robe and a crown as wedding gifts to Glauce; the magic ointment with which Medea had smeared them burned Glauce and Creon to death. After this Medea killed her two children as a final act of vengeance against Jason, and escaped to Athens in a chariot drawn by winged dragons, which her grandfather, Helius, provided. Jason lived on in misery at Corinth;

Medea was given asylum at Athens by King Aegeus, by whom she became the mother of Medus. Later she nearly caused Aegeus to poison his son Theseus; failing in her plot, she fled from Athens to Persia, where Medus established the kingdom of Media. Medea herself eventually returned to Colchis, and the rest of her legend is lost in the ingenious fancies of individual authors. The saga of Jason and the Argonauts has been filtered through literary interpretations perhaps more than any other. In the twentieth century we are still likely to see the legend through the eyes of the Victorians, thanks to the narrative brilliance of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Tanglewood Tales (1851) and Charles Kingsley's The Heroes (1855). These versions were written with a strong moral bias toward courage and adventure, but they are also, as Michael Grant has happily described them, "brisk, antiseptic narratives . . . jolly good hero-worshipping yarns, without esoteric overtones or significances. This approach unfortunately loses sight of the significance of the saga as a Greek traditional tale. Jason's legend is better seen as a Quest, on Propp's model, and this will make many of the folk tale elements fall into a coherent structure.

At the same time, much of the saga goes back to the earliest stages of Greek mythology, not least to the figure of Medea, whose status as the granddaughter of the Sun must once have been more important than her functions as a magician. By far the most powerful interpretation of her part in the saga is the tragedy Medea by Euripides, produced at Athens in 431 B.C. While Euripides concentrates upon the psychology of Medea and explores the tensions in her relations with Jason, he also ends the play with Medea leaving Corinth in a chariot drawn through the air by winged serpents and sent by her grandfather, the Sun. Medea is older (in terms of the development of the myth) and grander than the romantic heroine of Apollonius and Valerius Flaccus. She and many of the leading characters in the saga have attributes that point to elements in the myth that are both earlier and more significant than the quasi-historical tale of adventure that it has become.