Jason and the Argonauts

Jason's claim was the throne of Iolcus, taken by his uncle Pelias. An oracle had warned Pelias about a man wearing one sandal, and when Jason arrived having lost one crossing a river, the king improvised: fetch the Golden Fleece from Colchis, and the kingdom is yours. It was meant to be a death sentence dressed as a condition.

So Jason did something no Greek hero had done before — he recruited. The Argo carried between forty and fifty of the best in Greece, and the roster is a who's who: Heracles, Orpheus, the healer Asclepius, Castor and Pollux, Zetes and Calais the wind-sons, Peleus who would father Achilles, and in many versions Atalanta. The ship itself was built with a beam from Zeus's oracular oak at Dodona, so the Argo could speak.

The voyage is a sequence of set pieces that later writers mined for centuries: the women of Lemnos, the loss of Hylas, the freeing of Phineus from the Harpies, and the Clashing Rocks, which they passed by releasing a dove first and rowing through in the moment the rocks recoiled.

At Colchis the quest becomes Medea's story. Jason completes impossible tasks only because she supplies the answers, and the Fleece is taken past the sleepless dragon only because she drugs it. What she gives up to do it, and what Jason does to her afterwards, is the part the adventure story tends to leave out.

The Argo was eventually beached and dedicated to Poseidon. Jason, by then friendless, was sleeping beneath it when the rotting prow came down and killed him — the ship that made him doing the last thing it ever did.