Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

When Jason returned to Iolcus with Medea and the fleece, Aeson still lived in some strands—aged, frail, and unable to enjoy his son’s triumph. Jason asked Medea to shorten his own life to add years to his father’s; she refused that bargain and promised instead to restore Aeson by her art, if only the Night-gods and Hecate aided her. Under the full moon she went out unbound, hair loose, and drew herbs, roots, and sands from Thessaly and beyond—drugs of life, not of death. She built altars to Hecate and Youth (Hebe), dug trenches, sacrificed black sheep, and steeped a brew in a bronze cauldron with stones from the farthest East and West, hoar-frost, screech-owl flesh, the liver of a long-lived stag, and a thousand nameless things. She cut the old man’s throat to let the aged blood out, then poured the seething liquor into his wounds and body. Color returned; hair darkened; Aeson’s flesh filled; he woke as a man of forty years. The same drugs, dripped on dry twigs, made them leaf again—proof for the household. Ovid’s Medea then turns this true miracle into the bait for Pelias’s daughters: she will seem to do for their father what she has done for Aeson, and will withhold the life-giving herbs. That sequel belongs to 074; this entry stops at Aeson’s successful renewal—the classical showcase of Medea as restorer before she becomes destroyer. Because the continuous scenic narrative is Ovidian, the file is labeled **Roman transmission** of a motif Greek handbooks and art already knew in briefer form.