0f all the world's great myths, the earliest is the tale of the hero's quest.
And one story has been told for more than 3,000 years.
The story of Jason and the Argonauts is a classic tale of the hero's quest,
an Ancient Greek ''Mission: Impossible''.
It's got all the ingredients of fairy tale, heroes and princesses, magic and dragons.
It's got a dark strain of tragedy at its heart.
It was also the story of a sea voyage, a journey into the unknown...
..to reach the land where the sun rises.
Jason's task, to paraphrase a modern version of the myth,
was to boldly go where man had never been before.
Stand fast! Hold your rank!
Like many Greek myths, the tale begins in bloodshed.
Jason's wicked uncle, Pelias, seizes the throne of Iolkos
and deposes the rightful king, Jason's father.
(WOMAN) Please...
Nephew!
To be secure, Pelias must kill Jason but the boy is whisked away.
For Jason, the gods plan a different destiny.
So, like Hamlet or ''The Lion King'' or Harry Potter,
the boy knows about death and loss.
He grows up here on Mount Pelion in central Greece,
a magic mountain.
(W0MAN) It's the summer resort of the gods.
The gods used to move from 0lympus and spend the summer on Pelion.
- Aesculapius, you call him? Asklepios. - The god of medicine, yes.
- He lived here. - Oh, wow.
It's the mountain of the centaurs,
especially the most important of them all, the centaur Cheiron.
- He was the one who taught Achilles. - Achilles, the hero of the Trojan War.
He was the teacher of Achilles.
Even today, when you talk to Greeks, the gods and heroes are real.
Many argue that these stories have some kind of historical basis
because they seem so rooted in real places, like Mount Pelion here.
But you have to remember with myths
that they mingle fantasy and fairy tale and real-life detail
in a completely haphazard and delightful way.
The story of Jason's like that.
It begins with a boy who has lost his mother and father
being brought up here on Mount Pelion by a kindly centaur,
half man, half horse.
From the very beginning we enter the world of magic.
In Greek myth, Cheiron the centaur was the first practitioner of medicine.
- Plenty of healing herbs here. - You can smell them everywhere, can't you?
And Jason's name, a Bronze Age name, means ''the healer''.
Wow! Look at that!
Isn't that amazing?
So this is the cave where Jason was brought up by Cheiron?
(SPEAKING IN GREEK)
In ancient times, tales were told of strange rituals up here,
how men came to the cave dressed in freshly killed rams' fleeces.
Some said human beings were sacrificed.
So, Stathis, in Ancient Greece,
there used to be a festival here every summer
where people came up to the cave
and dressed up in sheepskins and things like this.
Has any festival like this survived into modern times?
(SPEAKING IN GREEK)
- It was as recent as the turn of the century. - 100 years ago.
Amazing. You can imagine it, though, here, can't you?
So there's a first clue to the ancient beliefs from which Jason's tale is spun.
Like fairy tales, myths express our deepest thoughts, hopes and fears.
But in myths, especially Greek myths, the hero doesn't always live happily ever after.
At 20, Jason leaves Mount Pelion to claim his birthright,
his father's kingdom.
He loses a sandal carrying an old woman across a river.
She's his protectress, the goddess Hera, in disguise.
And then Jason heads down into the plain of Iolkos to his uncle's palace.
Though King Pelias sat upon the throne of Iolkos, he was uneasy.
A prophecy from the oracle at Delphi had warned him to beware a stranger
who would come wearing just one sandal.
So when Jason arrived and boldly claimed the throne,
the king was afraid.
The sacred law of hospitality forbade him from harming Jason directly,
but Pelias was cunning.
''Tell me, young man,'' he said to Jason,
''if you were me and you were faced with a challenger to your throne,
''what would you do?''
Jason replied, ''I would set him a task that none but the gods could hope to perform.''
''Very well, then,'' said Pelias.
''If you would wear my crown
''you must first bring me the Golden Fleece.''
But what was the Fleece?
Well, the Fleece came from a marvellous golden ram,
a gift of the king of the gods Zeus himself.
The ram had flown east to the land where the sun rises
and there, the king, a son of the sun god, had sacrificed it,
and hung the Fleece in a sacred tree guarded by a dragon,
a wondrous portent in a land no human had ever seen.
Greek tradition set the tale of Jason in the age of heroes,
the time of the Trojan War,
what we call the Mycenaean Age.
0f course, it sounds like a fairy tale,
but Troy was a fairy tale till archaeologists dug it up.
Wow!
And in 2001 came another amazing discovery,
the Bronze Age palace of Jason's Iolkos,
frozen in the moment of its final destruction.
(WOMAN SPEAKING GREEK)
For Dr Adrimi-Sismani, the fruit of a lifetime's quest.
And these are new? They haven't been used?
(DR ADRIMI-SISMANI SPEAKING GREEK)
(MICHAEL) Oh, yes. (LAUGHS)
So this is a room in the Mycenaean palace of Iolkos,
next to the kitchen block,
destroyed - nobody's sure what the reason would be - towards 1200BC,
so after the time, the legendary time.
But the marks of the catastrophe everywhere.
A shelf or something like this has fallen down, with these unused pieces of pottery around it.
So this is the actual destruction debris
of the last Mycenaean palace of Iolkos,
in the position where it fell, 3,000 or more years ago.
It's staggering, isn't it?
So the key question, could this be the palace Jason knew?
Is this the place remembered in the poetic tradition?
But despite such a wonderful find,
when dealing with myths, historians always have to be cautious.
Dr Sismani is saying, ''As an archaeologist,
''I can't say this is the palace of Jason until I find his name inscribed here
''but what I can say is that this was the great centre of Mycenaean power at this time.''
So the tale has a place and a time.
In the late Bronze Age, around 1400BC,
Iolkos was the northernmost Greek kingdom, a seafaring place since prehistory.
If there ever was such an adventure, it surely began here.
But to go to the end of the earth, you need a boat,
and not just any boat.
This is going to be a 50-oared, Mycenaean boat,
a reconstruction of the Argo made from wood from Mount Pelion.
Its name, Argo, means ''swift''.
The Greeks say it was the first boat to have a name
and a personality.
So why are you putting water on the wood?
Because we have to keep it wet... to take the right shape.
Ah, so it enables you to bend the wood? Right, yeah, yeah.
Just look at it. Great pieces of tree just bent like...
And this technique of taking three pieces of a tree and putting them together,
- this is an ancient technique? - Yes.
It's absolutely mind-blowing.
It's so primitive. You put three trees together and sail to the Black Sea.
- So could you sail this to the Black Sea? - Yes, yes.
- To the Pontus - To the Pontus. It is very strong.
When they built the Argo, they put a piece of wood in from Dodona, the magic wood.
- Which is it? - The magic wood is this. The wood who speaks.
- Yeah, yeah. - Yes?
This is oak, the magic oak, from Dodona.
(MICHAEL) This is the magic oak from Dodona.
(CAR HORNS BEEPING)
All Jason needed now was a crew. But not just any crew.
He didn't wander around Volos looking for deckhands.
The legend as it's come down to us is a roll call of every great name from the age of heroes,
the most famous crew that ever was.
This is the monument to the Argo and its crew.
And here's the crew, all the most famous heroes in Greece.
Hercules, Heracles, Orpheus,
Castor, they're all here.
Polidefkis...
Theseus! (LAUGHS)
They're like the Magnificent Seven,
every one has their great talent or quality.
And down here, Atalanta, the great runner,
the only female member of the crew.
The legend says that Jason sailed from Greece to Colchis, today's Georgia.
To the earliest poets the Black Sea was part of the Great 0cean circling the earth.
It was, literally, a voyage to the edge of the world.
At the start of the journey, Jason is young, inexperienced in the ways of men
and as Mount Pelion fades into the distance, he bursts into tears.
There's something strangely unheroic about Jason.
Things seem to happen to him by chance.
If you think of the other Greek heroes: Achilles's great quality is killing people
without thinking.
Odysseus: wiliness and cunning, always two steps ahead of everybody else.
They're the kind of models by which young men should live their lives
and define themselves as men; Jason's different.
Jason's not macho, he's not a killer.
And he's receptive to the power of women.
In fact, Jason's relations with women will be his fate.
As with other great heroes in the world's myths, Gilgamesh, King Arthur, even James Bond,
he achieves his quest only with the help of a divine woman.
And so the journey, as some ancient writers understood it,
was also an inward voyage,
a tale of initiation.
And Jason's first test was on the island of Lemnos.
As they approached the island,
the Argonauts realised that a host of warriors had come out to meet them.
To their surprise, though, they soon discovered that the warriors were women.
Their queen, Hypsipyle, was the first to speak,
blushing in a most unwarlike fashion.
''Stranger,'' she said to Jason, ''do not be afraid.
''We are unprotected. We have lost all our men.''
She told how the women of Lemnos had been cursed by the goddess of love,
and how, as a result, their men had abandoned them for other women,
and left the island.
''So,'' she continued, ''we invite you all to stay here with us
''and if the prospect pleases you,
''to come to our beds.''
0f course, it sounds like another fairy story,
but the tale of the Lemnian women was already well-known to Homer in the 8th century BC.
The place where it happened, Bronze Age Lemnos, was the earliest town in Europe
and, strangely enough, it imported metals from the Black Sea coast,
on the way to Colchis, the land of the Golden Fleece.
Astonishing to think that Poliochni was founded in the fifth millennium BC,
before the Pyramids, before Stonehenge.
The most advanced Neolithic culture on the Aegean,
on a volcanic island, it was a metalworking place.
Homer calls it ''smoke-shrouded Lemnos''.
And it lasts all the way through to the Trojan War, so this was the Lemnos of the Greek myths.
This was the town that the Argonauts came to in the story
and the place where the Lemnian women received them.
But the Lemnian women, don't forget, had been cursed by the goddess of love.
She'd given them a stink so foul that they repelled all men.
And where did that weird tale come from?
Well, the women in Bronze Age Lemnos were skilled in dying cloth.
They used a dye made from the glands of a sea snail mixed with human urine.
It produces the richest colour and the worst stink on earth.
A clue to a Bronze Age reality behind the tale?
By making love to the women, the Argonauts broke the curse.
- (MICHAEL) You are all the children of... - The Argonauts, yes!
But the women of Lemnos had a dark secret.
What they hadn't told Jason was that they'd murdered all their men,
got them drunk, stuffed them in sacks and thrown them into the sea.
Ah! So this is the cliff?
- Oui! - The place where they threw them off.
- Petassos: ''petaxa'' in Greek. Petaxa. - Throw.
Wow. So the name of the cliff preserves the legend. ''Petaxa'' is to throw in Greek.
This, in the legend, is the place
where the Lemnian women threw them off the cliff into the sea.
As so often in Greek myths,
the fairy tale turns out to be strange and cruel.
Queen Hypsipyle feel in love with Jason and asked him to stay and see his sons grow up.
But Jason was a hero on a quest and he had to go on.
We've had high winds for two days and we couldn't get off the island
but the ferry's finally arrived.
In the Bronze Age,
the name of the month of May, Ploistio, meant the time when sailing began.
In winter, it was best to stay in harbour.
Even today, few Greeks, unless they have to,
venture out of season across the wine-dark sea.
Jason's quest, I'm sure, was a summer voyage.
He wouldn't risk the wrath of Poseidon, the god of the sea.
But as insurance, Jason landed at the island of Samothrace,
home of the mysterious Great Gods, to get their magic protection
before passing beyond the limits of the known.
To reach the Black Sea, the Argonauts needed to navigate the currents
pouring out of the Great 0cean through the Bosphorus.
We're arriving in Istanbul, once Constantinople, greatest city in the world.
Istanbul has always been the crossroads between Europe and Asia.
It was founded by the Greeks around 700BC.
In one version of the legend, it was Jason who built the first shrine on this spot,
the beginning of one of the great colonisations in history,
which opened up the Black Sea and southern Russia to Greek civilization.
So this was built in the middle of the 6th century
and for nearly 1,000 years was the main church of the Greek Orthodox world,
the centre of the Greek Christian world that succeeded the world of the Ancients.
But in the myth, all that is a dream of the future.
For Jason, the straits of the Bosphorus were guarded by terrifying obstacles
that crushed all ships trying to pass, the Clashing Rocks.
0nly man knew the secret of how to sail through, Phineus the seer,
who'd been blinded by the gods for telling too much of the future.
''Listen, Jason,'' said Phineus,
''about your destiny I can only reveal what the gods permit,
''for Zeus, the king of the gods, wills it that humanity shall never see all of heaven's design.
''But for the Clashing Rocks, as you approach the cliffs, release a dove to fly on ahead.
''The Rocks will clash shut. As they reopen, you must seize your chance
''and row through with all your might.
''But, sir,'' said Jason,
''will we get safely back to Greece? That's what we want to know.
''My son,'' said the old man,
''I can say no more.
''But remember this: your best ally is Aphrodite, the goddess of love.
''The success of your quest depends on her.
''Ask me no more.''
So Jason was the first sailor to pass the straits into the new world of the Black Sea.
(FOGHORN BLASTS)
So once the Argo whooshed through between the Clashing Rocks,
they stayed open forever.
That's them, according to the story,
the landmark at the end of the Bosphorus.
And ahead of them, for the first time for any Greek, according to the legend,
there was open sea, a bare horizon.
''GloryI Your fire inflames men's souls, '' says a Roman poem on Jason.
''You are the siren song that drives men to risk their all. ''
But are they heroes or mere dreamers?
(W0MAN) The Golden Fleece is a present, first of all, of God to the Greeks.
It is a way of travelling to this new world...
..which is rich in metals and in the knowledge of working the metals.
So you think they got into the Black Sea
even in the late Bronze Age, the age of heroes?
- Of course. - That's the root of the story.
Is there a real journey behind it at some point?
Hundreds of journeys, hundreds of journeys,
during the late prehistoric, the late Bronze Age,
trying to get through the Bosphorus, into the Black Sea,
because this was the richest part of the world.
So it's a kind of El Dorado for these early peoples.
And all these sagas, and all these tales, and all these poems,
and all these tragedies, and all this money, richness, wealth...
They're wealthy people, wealthy people.
I think that finally became one story: Jason.
Jason's journey along the Black Sea coast is a mix of real geography and fantasy.
The Argonauts pass Amazons and fight off arrow-shooting birds.
But on the way, you can still find traces of what seems like a real voyage.
At one point, Jason lands in what sounds like an ancient industrial estate...
the land of the Iron People.
This is where experimental archaeology comes in.
OK.
I've brought with me a magnet.
(LAUGHS)
Isn't that great?
(LAUGHS)
There you are. They did work iron here.
In fact, the old metalworkings are everywhere in the back of these hills.
Many people think that this part of the story doesn't come from the Bronze Age,
of course, but from the Iron Age.
It just goes to show how many layers go into a legend.
That night, we camped at a place the Turks still call Cape Jason, just as the ancients did.
The locals have a great twist to the story.
This, they say, is as far as Jason got
because the Argo sank here and Jason and his brothers settled down and married local girls.
(SPEAKING TURKISH)
There were three Ancient Greek brothers
who were called Yason, which is Jason,
Giresun and Samsun.
And Yason stayed here, Giresun... Am I right?
- Yes. - Samsun at the city of Samsun.
So the local legend is a tale of colonisation. Isn't that interesting? Amazing.
Civilizations rise and fall, religions change, but not the human imagination,
which hands on the gifts of the past, almost like a genetic code.
In the abandoned Greek monastery of Soumela, there's a sacred cave.
Come and look at this.
Isn't that sensational?
Here you can see the Christian world which overpainted Jason's pagan universe.
But they still share the same myths, the divine woman, the supernatural powers
and the heroes.
You can see Jonah and the whale looking very like Jason being delivered from the dragon.
The hero's task is still to enter the realm of death.
The saints, the heroes...
And by his courage and steadfastness gain everlasting fame.
It makes you realise that all the great myths of humanity, the story of Jason included,
are really about the conflict between good and evil, and facing death.
(BELLOWING, CROWD SHOUTING)
Just get ready to run if they come this way, OK?
- (SNORTING) - (COMMENTARY OVER PA)
Just before the Georgian border, I stumbled on a bull festival straight out of Jason's world.
(BELLOWING)
You think of all those Greek myths, like Zeus takes the form of a bull to seduce Europa,
it's the bull that comes out of the sea to father the Minotaur,
the bull-headed monster of the labyrinth...
There's something about dreams here.
Jason doesn't know it yet but that's one of the tests that lies ahead.
And so we enter Georgia, ancient Colchis, the land of the Golden Fleece.
Georgia has a wonderfully rich history.
For centuries, it's been a bridge between East and West,
and that bridge was first created by the Ancient Greeks,
who began to found colonies here after 600BC,
as they saw it, following in the footsteps of the Argonauts.
(COCKEREL CROWS)
(MICHAEL SPEAKS IN GREEK)
And the Greeks are still here.
This is Michael's mum and the children are preparing pictures for us.
You're not going to believe this. Look at this!
(CONVERSATION IN GREEK)
Look at this!
- Do they know any of the people? - I know all of them.
- No! - It is my father.
(SPEAKING IN GREEK)
The faces of the people!
The lyre player could almost be 0rpheus.
There's Atalanta, the runner, and there's young Jason himself,
big-boned, open face.
- Fantastic! - (SPEAKING IN GREEK)
- Yamas! Yamas! - Yamas!
After sweeping along the coast of Colchis, the Argo entered the mouth of the River Phasis.
In early Greek myth, this was the edge of the world.
You see the surf line there, which is the waves meeting the river as it pours out,
we've got to get through that.
Today, the Phasis is called the Rhion.
We've struck...we've struck land already.
He's just walking across the estuary now
to see whether there's anywhere where the water's deep enough for us to get in.
Ancient heroes may have sailed into the Phasis but of course people don't do that today.
The port's the other side.
- (SPEAKING IN GREEK) - No problem. Fantastic.
Can you remember the way out? (LAUGHING) Yeah?
Now, strange as it may seem,
the Argonauts had got all the way to Colchis
without stopping to think how they would get hold of the Fleece.
So they held a council of war.
Some of the heroes favoured using force but Jason suggested a more subtle tack.
''My friends,'' he said, ''you stay on board while I go and parley with their king.
''I'll see if he's arrogant and confident in his power
''or if he's friendly, maybe we can strike a bargain.
''In exchange for the Fleece, the heroes of Greece could offer to vanquish his enemies.''
(THUNDER RUMBLING)
To the Ancient Greeks, Colchis was a sinister, alien land,
ruled by a cruel king, Aietes, whose power depended on keeping the Golden Fleece.
They called his city Aia
and they placed it somewhere in the waterways and lakes behind the coast.
But was it a real city?
Needless to say, archaeologists have combed this part of Georgia
looking for the city of the sun god.
In the 1870s came rumours of fabulous finds near the town of Vani.
After every torrential rain, out of the hillside were washed gold ornaments,
jewels, rings and necklaces.
''The whole hill,'' said one of the newspapers, ''is full of gold.''
The gold of Colchis even drew the legendary excavator of Troy, Heinrich Schliemann,
the man who found the Jewels of Helen and the Mask of Agamemnon.
Perhaps Schliemann hoped to find the Golden Fleece itself.
Modern archaeologists have found much more gold at Vani
and a walled, native Colchian city.
What have you got here? Do you know yet?
Its heyday was from 600BC, long after the Bronze Age,
but just the time when the Greeks were planting colonies here,
when the myth had become fixed in Georgia.
Do you think there could possibly have been an expedition here, to this place,
in the Bronze Age, to Colchis?
Maybe in the myth, some memory preserved about the first explorers of the Black Sea area,
and this connects with the period of Greek colonisation.
In 8th century, when literally was fixed, this myth of Argonauts or the Golden Fleece country,
it was Colchis where it stopped - this myth stopped in Colchis.
And out of this Colchis is this country of original gold,
the El Dorado for the Ancient Greeks.
- Fantastic. - It's actually rich in gold.
- True, it actually was rich in gold. - Rich in gold, yeah, wow.
Who were Argonauts? They were good, well-organised band of robbers.
A band of robbers? A simple act of piracy?
Could that be the truth behind Jason's quest?
- Quite a nice town, isn't it? - Yes.
A Roman writer says that in his day the descendants of King Aietes still ruled here
and mined gold in Svani, today's Svaneti.
- This is Richard. - Richard! I'm Michael. Very nice to meet you.
Svaneti is a wild valley in the Caucasus.
Days before we arrived, it was still closed to outsiders
and we could only go there with the protection of local families.
We've been given a few rules. If you look the men too long in the eye, it's a threat.
Don't look at the women at all. And never show fear.
Heracles no doubt said the same thing to Jason.
(MAN SPEAKING GEORGIAN)
This is the place where, in my opinion, Argonauts turned to that side
because at that time, the roads were different
and this was the main caravan road which would go to Mestia and everywhere.
- Across the Caucasus? - Across the Caucasus.
Up here, the Greek writer Strabo offers another explanation of the legend.
He says they panned for gold using fleeces.
You create a wooden box, you put branches in at the bottom,
and when you put the fleece in, you put the whole thing into the water
so the water rushes through it like a sluice.
This is the gold, top quality.
- We call it ''baja holor''. - ''Baja holor''.
(SPEAKING IN GEORGIAN)
- (TRANSLATOR) It's from this river, yes. - Another clue to add to the myth.
Thank you. Thank you very much.
Hello. Nice to meet you.
Hello, hello.
(LAUGHS) Hi, hello, hello.
- Hi. - (MAN) Drink? Vodka?
- Oh, not yet! - (LAUGHTER)
Bit early in the day for that.
- What's brought the soldiers up here? - It's internal troops.
It's basically police. They came to guard you.
Oh, thank you very much. Thank you.
There was potential trouble on the road yesterday
and potential trouble here can rapidly turn to AK-47s being fired
and after centuries of blood feud, it's best to send the police in!
Hello. Hi, guys. Hello.
Here, you can still get a sense of the Colchis portrayed by the Greek and Roman writers.
This tower's fantastic, isn't it?
These towers have been built since ancient times for defence against their neighbours,
against blood feuds carried on for generations.
To the Ancient Greeks, this was the very image of the Barbarian.
In a society like that, loyalty to the clan is paramount.
Hospitality is a sacred duty but also a way of showing your power and influence.
Women are zealously guarded, the men rule
and daughters must obey their fathers absolutely, especially in matters of marriage.
(MAN SINGING CHANT-LIKE MEL0DY)
(CH0IR 0F MEN SINGING IN CL0SE HARM0NY)
Svaneti is so isolated that although they're Christian,
songs and beliefs still survive from the pagan past.
Songs like this, an ancient hymn in praise of the sun god,
the sort of thing Jason might have heard.
(APPLAUSE)
(MICHAEL) Bravo!
That night, the Argonauts were invited by King Aietes to a banquet.
As the drink flowed, Jason calmly asked the king for the Fleece.
The king reacted with murderous fury.
Wow! Yes!
But remember, the success of Jason's mission will depend on the goddess of love.
(SPEAKING GEORGIAN)
(MICHAEL) The whole story changes in tone, it becomes a different story,
it becomes almost... a Greek clash with the Other,
a clash of cultures.
And a new character appears who will take the story over,
a character who will turn out to be
one of the greatest characters in all of myth and literature,
the daughter of the King of Colchis, Medea.
Now, an oracle had foretold that if King Aietes were to lose the Fleece,
he should forfeit his throne.
He wanted to kill Jason then and there but he could not break the law of hospitality.
So he too set Jason a task that none but the gods could hope to fulfil.
''In my meadow, I have two fire-breathing bulls,'' he said.
''Yoke them, plough the field, sow it with dragon's teeth
''and then defeat the army that will spring from the ground.
''Do this and I'll give you the Fleece.''
The king thought the tasks impossible,
but Aphrodite, the goddess of love, had done her sweet work.
She made the king's daughter Medea fall in love with Jason.
That night, Medea visited him and gave him a magic ointment
that made him impervious to the fire of the bulls and the swords of the earth-born men.
In return, Jason promised to be her husband and to take her back to Greece.
As with all great myths, there are many strands to this tale
and many meanings.
The last stage of our journey here in Georgia was to find the Fleece itself.
Up in the remote region of Peshavi, you can still visit the sacred grove.
Here they still sacrifice the ram and show the fleece
and you can meet Medea's descendants, the women oracles.
They're Christians today but they did these things in the age of heroes.
And after the sacrifice, they eat the flesh and drink to life.
(MICHAEL) Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you.
They do vegetarian too!
Thank you, thank you.
Jason and Medea enter the sacred grove.
Medea has prepared a magic potion from her herbs
which she anoints on the eyes of the serpent to make it sleep
and Jason takes the Fleece from the tree.
In some versions, he kills the serpent,
but in one ancient version he seems to have been swallowed by it
and he's only regurgitated and brought back to life by the intervention of the goddess.
Maybe that's a clue to the original story.
Perhaps, in origin, it's a kind of initiation story,
in which the young hero undertakes an impossible quest,
enters the realm of death and is redeemed only by the divine woman herself,
whose lover he must become.
So with the Golden Fleece in his hands, Jason swears by the everlasting gods
he will be true to Medea forever.
Wah!
The ancient storytellers told many versions of Jason's return to Greece.
Some took the Argo round the eastern part of the world
and up through the deserts of Africa.
0thers, through the frozen wastes of the Arctic, past Britain
and through the Pillars of Hercules.
Apollonius says they went up the Danube
and carried the Argo through central Europe to the Mediterranean.
But all agree that they arrived here at the island of Anafe,
which Apollo made rise up to save them from a last storm.
And there, you might have thought, the story ended.
Jason and Medea go back to Greece, swear undying love,
and live happily ever after.
But Greek myths are not like that.
It's given to few mortals to live happily ever after.
Human beings can be almost children of the gods,
they can fulfil every oracle, protected by the queen of the gods herself,
but if you overstep the mark, if you fail to show due reverence,
both to the gods and to your fellow human beings,
if you break your most solemn vows,
then fate will catch up with you
and your true destiny will be revealed.
So Jason returned to Iolkos
with the Golden Fleece and his bride, Medea.
His wicked uncle, King Pelias, was astonished to see him
but Medea used her magic to destroy Pelias.
She persuaded his daughters that they could rejuvenate him if they chopped him up
and boiled him in a cauldron.
So Pelias died, Jason was made king and the oracle was fulfilled.
For a while, they prospered and Medea had three sons.
But the people of Iolkos were afraid of Medea and her witchcraft
and, in the end, they drove Jason and his family into exile.
They came south to Corinth.
This is where the story enters the most cruel and dark side of human nature.
It's the bit they never tell in the Hollywood and TV versions,
but it's what makes it a great Greek myth, rather than just a fairy tale.
Here in Corinth, the famous Jason was made king.
He was offered a beautiful young princess as a wife and he accepted
and broke his solemn promise to Medea.
Now, of course, Medea was a larger-than-life character,
she had gods among her ancestors as well as humans
and her passions were correspondingly extreme.
In revenge for what her husband had done,
she murdered their children.
Medea's crime, you might think, is a pure creation of the poets.
And so it is, except for a strange discovery in a lonely bay
just over the water from Corinth.
The ancients connected those events with a headland
where there was a temple to Hera, the queen of the gods,
a temple dedicated by Medea herself.
And the tomb of the murdered children and a weird statue of a frightening woman,
simply known as The Terror.
And Medea's punishment?
She was immortal and the gods protect their own.
They took her back to Mount 0lympus and gave her a new husband,
the great Achilles himself, a true hero.
And as for Jason, well, he ends the story as he began it,
alone in the world with one sandal.
And he wanders back to Iolkos, to the thing that made his fame,
his old boat, the Argo itself,
whose rotting hulk was now lying on display by the seashore.
And sitting weeping in its shadow,
the magic beam, the speaking prow, crashes down on his head and kills him.
Made by the gods, destroyed by the gods,
his destiny had been fulfilled.