Before it was a quest it was a crew list. The oldest surviving reference to the ship is a single line in the Odyssey calling the Argo "of concern to all men" — thrown out as common knowledge, with no explanation, which means the story was already old when Homer's audience heard it. What we have of it now is mostly one Hellenistic poem, written in Alexandria in the third century BCE by a scholar-librarian, and it is one of the strangest and most modern-feeling epics in Greek.
Why he had to go
Pelias had taken the throne of Iolcus from his half-brother Aeson, and had been warned by an oracle to beware a man wearing one sandal. Jason, Aeson's son, was raised out of reach by the centaur Chiron and came back to claim his inheritance as a young man; at a river crossing he carried an old woman over and lost a sandal in the mud, and the old woman was Hera, who had her own reasons for wanting Pelias destroyed.
Pelias, faced with a one-sandalled nephew in his hall, did not refuse him. He agreed the throne was his — after one errand. There was a fleece in Colchis at the eastern end of the Black Sea, the hide of a golden ram that had once carried a boy called Phrixus out of Greece, and a cousin's ghost required its return.
The ship and the men aboard her
Argus built her, with Athena's help, and set into the prow a beam cut from the prophetic oaks at Dodona, so that the ship could speak when it had something to say.
The catalogue of the crew is the part ancient audiences came for, and no two sources give the same list, because every Greek city wanted an ancestor on that deck. The reliably present include Heracles; Orpheus, who came as the timekeeper for the rowers; Castor and Polydeuces; Zetes and Calais, sons of the north wind, who could fly; Peleus and Telamon; Tiphys at the steering oar; the sharp-eyed Lynceus; the seer Idmon, who came knowing he would die on the voyage; and Meleager. Apollonius has Atalanta turned away at the beach — Jason declines to take a woman on a ship full of men — while other traditions put her aboard and let her draw first blood at the Calydonian hunt afterwards.
Out through the Bosporus
The voyage east is a sequence of ways a crew can go wrong.
On Lemnos they found an island of women who had, the year before, murdered every man on it. They stayed a year. Apollonius makes this a genuinely uncomfortable idyll and has Heracles finally shout the crew back to the ship.
At Cyzicus they were entertained generously, sailed at night, were blown back to the same shore in the dark, and fought a battle with their own hosts without recognising them. Jason killed the king who had feasted him. There is no lesson attached; it simply happens, and the funeral takes days.
At Mysia the boy Hylas went for water and was pulled into the spring by the nymphs who lived in it, and Heracles went into the woods after him bellowing his name and did not come back. The Argo sailed without him. Ancient readers argued about whether this was necessary — Apollonius has a sea-god turn up to say it was fated — and the honest answer is structural: the strongest man in Greek myth cannot be on a ship whose plot requires cleverness.
At Bebrycia a king named Amycus made all visitors box him and had never lost. Polydeuces boxed him and killed him, in a scene written with real technical attention to footwork.
At Salmydessus they found the blind prophet Phineus, starved to a skeleton because whenever food was set before him the Harpies fouled and stole it. The winged sons of the north wind chased the creatures off and a rainbow goddess stopped the pursuit with an oath that they would not return. Phineus, fed at last, told them the route — and, crucially, told them the trick for the rocks.
The rocks, the bulls, and the teeth
The Symplegades stood at the entrance to the Black Sea and clashed together on anything passing between. Phineus's instruction was to send a dove through first and watch. The dove lost its tail feathers. They rowed on the rebound, with Athena's hand at the stern, and the rocks caught the very tip of the ship's ornament. After that the rocks stood still forever, which is the sort of one-use-only obstacle that later fantasy has never bettered.
In Colchis, King Aeetes heard the request and set terms that were meant to be fatal: yoke two bronze-hoofed bulls that breathed fire, plough a field with them, sow it with a dragon's teeth, and deal with what came up.
His daughter Medea — priestess of Hecate, and struck by the most closely observed attack of adolescent infatuation in ancient literature, three hundred lines of a girl talking herself in and out of betraying her father — gave Jason an ointment made from a plant that grew where Prometheus's blood had fallen. It made him fireproof and unbreakable for a day. He yoked the bulls, ploughed, sowed, and when the armed men came up out of the furrows he threw a boulder into the middle of them and they killed each other.
Aeetes had no intention of handing over the fleece. So Medea took Jason to the grove at night, sang the sleepless serpent to sleep, and let him lift the hide off the oak. Then she left with him.
The way back, and the killing of her brother
Her brother Apsyrtus pursued them, and how he died is the single sharpest divergence in the whole cycle.
In the older version, followed by Apollodorus, he is a child whom Medea has brought aboard, and she cuts him into pieces and drops them over the side one by one, because Aeetes must stop to gather his son's body for burial. In Apollonius he is a grown man commanding the pursuing fleet, and Medea lures him to a parley on an island where Jason murders him at the altar — a treachery, but a different order of horror, and the crime for which the pair must afterwards be purified by Circe.
The return route is a scandal in itself. No two ancient authorities agree, because no ancient authority could get a ship from the Black Sea to Greece the long way without inventing geography. Apollonius sends them up the Danube, through an impossible river connection into the Adriatic, up the Po, along the Rhône, out into the western Mediterranean past the Sirens — whom Orpheus drowns out by playing louder — through Scylla and the whirlpool, and down to Crete, where the bronze giant Talos patrols the coast throwing rocks and is killed by Medea, who fixes him with her eyes until he grazes the single vein in his ankle and bleeds out molten.
What happened when they got home
Pelias had not expected them. Medea removed him with a demonstration: she cut up an old ram, boiled it with herbs, and produced a lamb, then invited his daughters to do the same for their father. They did. The daughters get the guilt and Medea gets the throne — and then they are driven out of Iolcus anyway, and end up in Corinth, where the marriage collapses and Euripides takes over.
Jason's own end is small and appropriate. Old, unmarried, unwanted, he was sitting in the shade of the beached Argo when the rotting prow came down and killed him.
Sources, and how much of this is Apollonius
- Pindar's fourth Pythian, of 462 BCE, is the oldest extended treatment we have — a commissioned victory ode for the king of Cyrene, which uses the story to flatter a colonial dynasty and puts a prophecy in Medea's mouth about the founding of Libya. It is the story used as political credentials.
- Apollonius of Rhodes' Argonautica, third century BCE, is the only complete narrative from antiquity. It is a deliberately unheroic epic: its Jason is indecisive, its emotional centre is a young woman's psychology, and its author was head of the greatest library in the world and could not stop putting footnotes into hexameters.
- Apollodorus compiles the older variants, including the ones Apollonius rejected.
- Valerius Flaccus wrote a Latin version under the Flavians, unfinished. Euripides' Medea covers what came after, and is a different kind of masterpiece.
The story is plainly older than all of them. Its shape — a ship of named heroes, a distant king, an impossible task, a princess who betrays her father for a stranger — belongs to a very widespread folk pattern, and its geography records real Greek trade and colonisation in the Black Sea from the eighth century BCE onward.
Was there a fleece?
Strabo passes on the most persuasive suggestion anyone has made: in Colchis — the region of modern western Georgia — gold was recovered from mountain streams by pegging fleeces in the current to catch the particles, after which the wool was hung to dry, glittering. Georgian archaeologists have reported both the technique and abundant local goldwork. This does not prove the story grew from the practice, and it would explain only the object, not the voyage. It is the rare rationalisation that is neither silly nor provable.
The fleece itself has its own tangled prehistory involving a boy, a girl who fell into the strait afterwards named the Hellespont, and a ram sent by a cloud-goddess to save them from being sacrificed by a stepmother — a story most retellings skip because it makes the object into a memorial of a child's death rather than a treasure.
Loose ends readers ask about
Is Jason a hero at all? Ancient readers were divided, and Apollonius's portrait is unmistakably cool: he wins by other people's help every single time — Hera's, Athena's, Orpheus's, and above all Medea's — and his one solo achievement is a boulder throw. Modern criticism generally reads this as intentional, an epic about a leader who manages rather than fights.
Do the Symplegades correspond to anything real? The Bosporus is a narrow, current-driven channel that early oared ships found genuinely dangerous, and Greek sailors placed the rocks at its northern mouth. The clashing is myth; the difficulty of the passage is not.
Were the Argonauts a fixed group? No. Rosters range from about forty to over fifty and are demonstrably political — cities and families added ancestors over centuries. Anyone offering a definitive crew list is reporting one source's list.
What happens to the fleece afterwards? Ancient authors lose interest in it almost immediately; some say it was hung in a temple at Orchomenus. The object that motivates the entire voyage has essentially no afterlife inside the myth, which tells you what kind of story it really is.
Related: Medea's later life in Corinth, the twelve labours that cost the expedition its strongest man, and the Greek tradition in overview.