The Argo’s Roll Call: Who Sailed for the Golden Fleece

Imagine the Argo’s crew laid out in a mosaic border: fifty-odd faces in fifty-odd small frames, each with a name in square letters beneath. Apollonius of Rhodes did something close to that in words. Before his epic Argonautica lets the ship leave harbour, it pauses for a long roll call of heroes, telling us where each came from and why he deserved a bench. The quest for the Golden Fleece is Jason’s story, but it is also the story of a crew, and it reads best when you know who was pulling the oars.

Calling the roll

The reason for the voyage is simple and unjust. Pelias, who had seized the throne of Iolcus in Thessaly, was warned to beware a man wearing one sandal. Jason, raised by the centaur Chiron, arrived one day having lost a sandal crossing a river, and Pelias sent him off to fetch the fleece of the golden ram that had once carried the boy Phrixus to Colchis, at the far eastern end of the Black Sea. No one expected him to return.

To go that far he needed the best men in Greece, and the ancient lists are a register of heroic families. Apollonius opens his catalogue with Orpheus, the singer, and goes on through dozens of names: Heracles and his young companion Hylas; the twins Castor and Polydeuces; Peleus, the future father of Achilles, and his brother Telamon; the seers Idmon and Mopsus; Zetes and Calais, the winged sons of the North Wind; Meleager of Calydon; Argus, who built the ship with Athena’s help; and Tiphys, the helmsman. When the crew chose a leader they first turned to Heracles, but he refused and told them to follow Jason, who had gathered them.

The lists never quite agree. Pindar, whose fourth Pythian ode of 462 BCE is the earliest extended telling to survive, names only a handful. Apollodorus’ list overlaps with Apollonius but adds some names and drops others; notably, it includes Atalanta, whom Apollonius says Jason turned away. The Latin compiler Hyginus offers yet another roster. The total usually comes out at about fifty, which suits a ship rowed by that many, but the names in the tiles shift from one floor to the next.

Every hand to an oar

What makes the crew more than a list is that almost every member earns his place. Lynceus, whose eyes could see even beneath the earth, keeps lookout. Polydeuces, the boxer, accepts the challenge of Amycus, the brutal king of the Bebryces, and kills him with his fists. At Salmydessus in Thrace the blind prophet Phineus is starving, his food snatched and fouled by the Harpies, until Zetes and Calais rise on their wings and chase them across the sea; in return Phineus tells the heroes how to get through the Clashing Rocks. There Euphemus, a son of Poseidon, releases a dove to test the passage, and the ship shoots through as the cliffs slam shut on the tip of its stern.

The crew also loses people. Heracles is left behind in Mysia while he searches the woods for Hylas, who has been pulled into a spring by a nymph who fell in love with him. Idmon the seer is killed by a boar, and Tiphys dies of sickness soon after; another Ancaeus takes the helm. On the way home Orpheus has to out-sing the Sirens so that the rowers will not steer toward them, and only Butes leaps overboard. The Argonautica is a story of teamwork in a very literal sense: it moves only when the oars do.

Three tasks in the field of Ares

At Colchis, King Aeetes, son of the Sun, had no intention of giving the fleece away. He set Jason a trial he claimed to perform himself: to yoke two bronze-hoofed bulls that breathed fire, plow the field of Ares with them, sow it with a serpent’s teeth, and cut down the armed men who would spring up from the furrows, all in a single day. The teeth, Apollonius says, came from the dragon Cadmus had killed at Thebes, given to Aeetes by Athena.

Jason could not have done it alone, and the crew could not help him. The help came from inside the palace. Hera and Athena persuaded Aphrodite to send Eros, whose arrow struck Medea, the king’s daughter and a priestess of Hecate. Apollonius gives her one of the great inner struggles in ancient poetry, torn between loyalty to her father and a desire she can barely name. She chose Jason. She gave him a salve made from a flower that had grown from the blood of Prometheus, which made his body proof against fire and bronze for a day, and she told him what to do when the earthborn warriors rose: throw a boulder among them. He did, and they killed each other fighting over it.

The fleece and its guardian

Even then Aeetes would not keep his word, and Medea, fearing for herself, fled to the Argo by night and led Jason to the grove of Ares, where the fleece hung on an oak, watched by a serpent that never slept. The ancient witnesses split over what happened next. Pindar, the oldest, says Jason killed the serpent by his skill, and gives an unforgettable picture of the beast:

It lay in a thicket, held fast in the savage jaws of a serpent that outdid in length and bulk a ship of fifty oars, a ship built by the blows of iron.

Pindar, Pythian 4 (our rendering)

Apollonius prefers a quieter victory. His Medea sings to the serpent and sprinkles its eyes with a potion from a sprig of juniper until its coils go slack, and Jason lifts the fleece down while it sleeps. An Athenian cup painted by Douris in the early fifth century BCE, now in the Vatican Museums, shows a version no surviving text tells: Jason hanging limp from the serpent’s jaws as it disgorges him, while Athena looks on and the fleece hangs on its tree. Perhaps the monster had swallowed him whole. Hyginus made this serpent another child of Typhon and Echidna, a sibling of Cerberus. Guardians run in that family.

The way home brought more trials. Apollonius has Jason kill Medea’s brother Apsyrtus in an ambush she arranges; Apollodorus tells a grimmer story in which Medea cuts up her young brother and scatters the pieces to delay her father’s pursuit. Off Crete the bronze giant Talos hurled rocks at the ship until Medea fixed him with her evil eye and he grazed his one vulnerable vein on a rock. Each episode belongs to a different member of the company, but the fleece reached Iolcus only because the crew, and one Colchian princess, kept the ship moving.