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Jason and the Quest for the Golden Fleece
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Pelias persuades Jason to build the Argo and depart on his formidable quest to bring back the Golden Fleece from Colchis. From A Universal History, manuscript, Acre, c.1285
Copyright © The British Library Board
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At the prompting of his uncle Pelias, King of Iolcus in Thessaly, Jason, son of Aeson, led a large company of Greek heroes on a long voyage in the Argo to Colchis on the eastern shores of the Black Sea. His seemingly impossible task, which Pelias hoped would lead to Jason's death and the end of Jason's claims to his crown, was to remove the golden fleece of a ram from the keeping of dragon which never slept. The fleece had been placed there by Phrixus, son of Athamas, after he and his sister Helle were enabled by the ram to escape from their murderous step-mother Ino, and he was carried to safety through the sky from Thessaly to Colchis.
On his voyage Jason and his companions, the Argonauts, encountered many trials of their determination to reach their goal. At Colchis Jason successfully performed further tasks set him by Aetes, King of Colchis, and gained possession of the fleece. Soon after his triumphant return to Greece, however, his invaluable helper and companion, Aetes's daughter Medea, had brought the hero's life to a tragic end.
The origins and popularity of the story of Jason lie in the Greek oral tradition of verse composition out of which Homer's epics the Iliad and Odyssey grew. Yet it is the epic poem, the Argonautica, by the third-century scholar-poet Apollonius of Rhodes, and the dependent account in the Metamorphoses by the Roman poet Ovid that assured Jason and his quest of a persistent place in the legacy of classical Greece. In The Mythical Quest illuminated manuscripts, engravings, paintings and illustrated children's books combine to retell Jason's quest for adventure and heroic achievement.
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