Jason

Jason is sent for the Golden Fleece by a usurping uncle who expects the errand to kill him. He has a ship built, the Argo, and assembles a crew that reads like a catalogue of the previous generation of heroes: Heracles for a while, Orpheus to keep the rowing in time and to out-sing the Sirens, Castor and Pollux, Atalanta in some versions, and a long list of names whose local traditions the poets were tying together.

The voyage is a sequence of set pieces, and the geography is a map of the edge of the known world as it looked to early Greek sailors of the Black Sea: clashing rocks that crush ships between them, a blind seer tormented by Harpies, a king with a savage boxing habit, women who have killed all their men. It is the oldest of the Greek quest narratives and probably older than the Trojan material, and Homer refers to it as a story his audience already knows.

At Colchis, at the far eastern end of the sea, the king sets three impossible tasks. Jason performs all three and none of them by his own resources: Medea, the king's daughter, a priestess of Hecate and granddaughter of the Sun, gives him a drug against fire, tells him how to defeat the sown men, and finally puts the sleepless serpent to sleep herself.

Nothing Jason achieves is achieved by Jason. The fleece is won by Medea, the escape is managed by Medea, and the usurping uncle at home is disposed of by Medea, who persuades his daughters that they can rejuvenate their father by cutting him up and boiling him. Ancient audiences noticed. He is a hero whose defining characteristic is that he is helped, and the tradition is unusually unkind to him about it.

The ending is the reason the story survives. Established at Corinth, he sets Medea aside to marry a local princess, on the argument that the match is good for their children. In Euripides' version she kills the princess, kills her own two sons to leave him with nothing, and departs in a chariot sent by her grandfather the Sun, above him, safe, while he is left in the street. Whether Euripides invented the murder of the children or found it in local tradition is argued; either way it is the version that took.

Jason dies obscurely, killed by a beam falling from the rotting hull of the Argo while sitting under it. The Greeks liked that ending for him. A man who won everything through an oath he then broke is finished off by the wreck of the thing that carried him, and the poets did not have to add a word of judgement.