Aeetes: the king of Colchis

Aeetes, whose name was also written Aeëtes and Aeeta, was the king of Colchis, a son of the sun god Helios and the father of the sorceress Medea. The Golden Fleece, the holy relic that would one day guard the wrist of Kratos, was first cut from its ram by Aeetes's own hand, and for a time no treasure in the Greek world was better kept than the fleece of Colchis. Then Jason and the Argonauts came for it, and everything the king had was taken from him at once.

A son of the sun#

Aeetes was born in Colchis to Helios, the god of the sun, and to Perse, whose name some records gave as Perseis. His sister was Circe, an enchantress whose name carried its own weight in the chronicles, and through his father he was kin to the Titans of the old order and to the Olympians who overthrew them. Yet for all the divinity on both sides of his birth, the record keepers of the Greek world set Aeetes down among the demigods rather than the gods, a king of men rather than a power of Olympus. His name itself was drawn from the old Greek word for the eagle.

His rule was bound to Colchis, the kingdom he held for the whole of his recorded life, and his loyalties were reckoned to two names: to Helios his father, and to Medea his daughter. Medea inherited the blood of the sun through him and sharpened it into sorcery as a priestess of Hecate. It was a bitter inheritance for the king, for the daughter he was loyal to would prove the instrument of his ruin.

The ram of Phrixus#

The treasure that made Colchis famous came to Aeetes as a gift. Hermes had given a winged golden ram, a beast capable of reason and speech, to the twins Phrixus and Helle, who rode it across the sea to escape their stepmother. Helle fell to her death on the crossing, and only Phrixus reached the far shore, landing in the city of King Aeetes. The king received the exhausted stranger with hospitality, and in gratitude Phrixus offered him the great ram itself.

Aeetes slaughtered the ram in tribute to Zeus and recovered its hide. The Golden Fleece that came from that sacrifice was a holy relic made in honor of the king of the gods, and it became a powerful and valuable artifact, the pride of Colchis. Aeetes did not leave such a prize to chance. The fleece was placed under the watch of a dragon that never slept, and while that guardian coiled about it, no thief in the Greek world could hope to carry it off.

The trials of Jason#

Jason arrived in Colchis to claim the fleece as his own, and Aeetes had no intention of surrendering it. The king promised to give the fleece away only if the stranger could perform certain tasks, and each task was built to kill him. First Jason had to yoke a team of fire breathing oxen with his own hands and plow a field behind them. Then he was made to sow the teeth of a dragon into the furrows, and the teeth sprouted into an army of warriors. Jason was quick thinking, and before the earthborn soldiers could fall upon him he threw a rock into their crowd. Unable to tell where the stone had come from, the warriors turned on one another and killed each other to the last man.

For the final trial, Aeetes set Jason against the sleepless dragon itself, the guardian of the fleece. One account held that Jason fought and killed the beast. Another told that Medea, who had fallen in love with the stranger and had done much to help him win the fleece, distilled a potion that lulled the sleepless guardian into slumber. However the dragon was overcome, the outcome was the same. Jason lifted the Golden Fleece from its keeping, and the treasure of Colchis left the king's hands. Jason himself would later say that he stole the fleece only after doing many favors for the king, a debt of labor that Aeetes had never intended anyone to survive.

The flight of the Argo#

Jason did not sail away with the fleece alone. Medea fled Colchis at his side, and Aeetes, robbed of his treasure and his daughter in a single night, pursued the Argo in his own ship. The chase might have ended in the king's favor, but Medea turned it aside with the cruelest stroke recorded of her. She killed her own brother, Absyrtus, dismembered him, and threw the pieces of his body into the sea. Aeetes paused to gather up the remains of his son, and while the king of Colchis drew the pieces of his child from the water, Jason and Medea escaped beyond his reach.

Nothing the king had lost ever came back to him. The fleece passed down the years from Jason's keeping until it reached Kratos on the Island of Creation, where the Spartan cut it from the jaws of the Mole Cerberus that had partly devoured the old Argonaut. It was there that Jason spoke the king's name again, confessing to Kratos how he had taken the golden fleece from Aeetes and fled Colchis with Medea. Of Aeetes himself the chronicles said no more. The last record placed him in Colchis, bereaved of both his children, and his fate remained unknown.