After a perilous voyage, the heroes arrived at Colchis, and Jason made known their quest to the king Aeêtes. But they soon found that they had no hope of success. Aeêtes was false to them, made impossible conditions, and plotted against their life. Disaster seemed imminent, when there came a deliverance so glorious that it seemed like the interposition of a god. It was the quick wit of a girl, prompted by love. Medea, the young daughter of Aeêtes, had seen and loved the brave Greek prince whom her father now plotted to destroy. She was an ardent and impulsive creature; and she determined to save Jason. By the magic lore that she possessed, she secretly enabled him to overcome the fire-breathing oxen, and the earth-sown army that her father sent against him. Then, realizing too late that she had incurred the unpitying rage of her father, she fled at night from the palace, to take refuge with the Greek heroes.
She kissed her bed, and her hands on the walls with loving caress
Lingered; she kissed the posts of the doors; and one long tress
She severed, and left it her bower within, for her mother to be
A memorial of maidenhood’s days, and with passionate voice moaned she.[[30]]
Under cover of the darkness, she led Jason to the forest-precinct where the Fleece was hidden; and by her charms she lulled the sleepless dragon that guarded it. She even betrayed to him her brother Absyrtus, driven by the danger of a horrible death for herself, her lover and his comrades; and then, claiming from Jason a solemn oath of marriage when they should come to Hellas, she sailed with him on the Argo. Aeêtes pursued them in fierce wrath; and the gods, offended for the murder of Absyrtus, vexed them with storms. But at length they came to the island of Circe; and she, for the sake of her kinship with Medea, purified them of the murder of Absyrtus and set them on their way again. At Phæacia, where they were driven for harbourage, Aeêtes overtook them, threatening war with King Alcinous if he did not yield up his fugitive daughter. It was then that the great wise queen Arete pleaded for Medea in gentle charity:
“In madness she sinned at the first, when she gave him the charm that should tame
The bulls; and with wrong to amend that wrong,—Ay, oftimes the same
In our sinning we do!—she straightway essayed; and shrinking in fear
From her proud sire’s tyrannous wrath, she fled. Now the man, as I hear,