Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

Medea, torn between filial duty and the love Aphrodite had kindled, met Jason in secret (often by Chalciope’s urging or at Hecate’s shrine). She gave him a protective drug (promethean or Hecatean charm) to anoint his body and weapons, so that the bulls’ fire and bronze hoofs could not harm him for a day. She taught him to throw a stone among the earthborn warriors so that they would fight each other while he cut them down. Jason swore to make her his wife and take her to Greece. At dawn he yoked the fire-breathing bulls, ploughed the field, sowed the teeth, and destroyed the sprung warriors as instructed. Aeetes, stunned and treacherous, still planned to burn the Argo and kill the crew rather than yield the fleece. Medea fled to the heroes by night, warned them, and led Jason to the grove. There a sleepless dragon guarded the fleece on an oak. In Apollonius, Medea lulls the dragon with drugs and song while Jason lifts the fleece; in Apollodorus, Jason kills the dragon with Medea’s help (drugs or her guidance). They carried the fleece to the Argo and put to sea at once, Medea aboard as guide and bride-to-be. Pindar condenses the same magical success under Aphrodite’s patronage. Euripides’s Medea later reminds Jason that she saved him from the bulls and the dragon—claiming, in tragic rhetoric, that she herself slew the serpent—binding the Colchian aid to the later Corinthian catastrophe.