Dear Kid,

Welcome to Part Two of Jason and the Golden Fleece. Here’s Part One.

But if you don’t feel like reading the brilliance that is Part One, I shall recap: Jason and his hero buddies set out in the ship the Argo to get the Golden Fleece. After many adventures (because you can’t really be a hero without Many Adventures) they landed in Colchis (which is where the fleece was). King Aeetes (yes, he still has an overabundance of vowels in his name) said But Of Course (cough, not, cough) Jason could have the fleece If Only he would do one teensy tiny favor for the King. Meanwhile, the King’s daughter (Medea, conveniently a sorceress) had fallen head over heels in love with Jason and decided to help him out.

Do I need to point out the old saying “Behind every Greek Hero is a stronger woman”? No? How about “Once you become the target of affection for a sorceress, you are going to be remembered in history for a LOT of reasons.”?

Back to our story.

The teeny tiny little bitty task Aeetes assigned to Jason was just to plow a handy field. Using two fire breathing bulls. Who had bronze feet and were Huge and Mean. And then Jason just had to sow the field with a bag of seeds conveniently provided by Aeetes.

Medea made a magic potion for Jason (more of a salve really, but I wanted to say “magic potion”) which made him fire-proof and bronze-feet-proof and which allowed Jason to harness the bulls without too much nonsense. Score: Jason: 1; Aeetes: 0.

Jason then took the seeds and began to sow them. Except that they weren’t seeds, they were dragon’s teeth. And when these particular dragon teeth were sown in this particular field under these particular conditions, they sprouted instantly into full-grown, fully armed warriors intent on killing Jason. Score: 1:1.

As Jason stood gaping at the warriors and Aeetes stood chuckling an evil laugh, Medea decided all this standing around was not helping her boyfriend. So she told him to throw a stone into the middle of the army. When the rock hit a soldier, he thought the soldier standing next to him had hit him. Since dragon-teeth soldiers are big on fighting and small on logic, in no time they all killed each other.

Aeetes had promised to give Jason the fleece but he was rather fond of the fleece and had absolutely no intention of parting with it. Cackling gleefully (because that’s what Kings do when they talk about their evil plans), he told Medea he wasn’t going to give Jason the fleece.

Medea had Other Thoughts. So she took Jason to the sacred grove where the fleece was nailed to a tree and guarded by a dragon. “Aaarrrrgh!” said the dragon. “Have some lovely sleeping potion,” said Medea. “OK” said the dragon and then “zzzzzz.” Jason took the fleece and headed home to Greece.

There were a bunch of adventures on the way, most of which involved Medea being smarter than Jason and pulling his posterior out of the proverbial fire.

And later rather than sooner, the crew ended up back home. Jason took back the throne, the townspeople decided they didn’t like Medea (what with her being a sorceress) and eventually tossed Jason and Medea out. J & M went to Corinth where Jason married the king’s daughter. (Yep, highly problematic.) So problematic it pissed off the gods (which you must never do) and really, really pissed off Medea which led to a lot of Greek drama and murder (is that redundant?). Very bloody.

And that, my darling, is why you must always be faithful to your wife.

Love, Mom