The Death of Pelias

About The Death of Pelias

The death of Pelias, king of Iolcus in Thessaly, is a myth of deception, sorcery, and revenge orchestrated by Medea, the Colchian sorceress who returned to Greece with Jason after the quest for the Golden Fleece. Medea tricks Pelias's own daughters into killing their father by demonstrating a fraudulent rejuvenation ritual: she cuts an old ram into pieces, boils the pieces in a cauldron with magic herbs, and produces a young lamb — persuading the daughters that the same process will restore their aging father to youth. When the daughters butcher Pelias and boil his remains, Medea deliberately withholds the herbs, and Pelias dies in agony.

The myth is preserved in Pseudo-Apollodorus's Bibliotheca (1.9.27), Diodorus Siculus's Bibliotheca Historica (4.51-52, 1st century BCE), and Ovid's Metamorphoses (Book 7, 8 CE), with additional references in Pausanias and mythographic scholia. The earliest literary treatment was Euripides's lost tragedy Peliades (c. 455 BCE), which reportedly dramatized Medea's manipulation of the daughters and may have been the young playwright's first produced work.

Pelias's death is the consequence of a chain of events he himself set in motion. Pelias had seized the throne of Iolcus from his half-brother Aeson, Jason's father, and an oracle warned him to beware a man wearing one sandal. When Jason arrived at Iolcus with a single sandal — having lost the other helping an old woman (the disguised Hera) across a river — Pelias recognized the threat and dispatched Jason on the quest for the Golden Fleece, expecting him to die. Jason returned alive, with both the Fleece and Medea, and Pelias's doom was sealed.

Medea's motivation for killing Pelias was twofold. She acted on behalf of Jason, whose inheritance Pelias had stolen and whose father Aeson had suffered under Pelias's rule (Aeson was dead or imprisoned, depending on the source). She also acted on behalf of Hera, who bore a grudge against Pelias for failing to honor her cult. The death of Pelias was therefore both personal vengeance (Medea avenging Jason's family) and divine vengeance (Hera punishing a negligent worshipper), with Medea as the instrument of both.

The most psychologically complex element of the myth is the role of Pelias's daughters. They are not villains but victims of deception — loving daughters who believe they are restoring their father's youth and instead become his murderers. Their grief when they realize the truth is the myth's emotional center. Medea's cruelty lies not in killing Pelias directly but in making his daughters the instruments of his death, converting their love into the mechanism of his destruction.

Before the fatal deception, Medea had demonstrated genuine rejuvenation magic. She had restored Jason's father Aeson to youth (the rejuvenation of Aeson) using the same cauldron-and-herbs method, proving that the process could work. This prior success made the daughters' trust in Medea's offer rational rather than foolish — they had seen the magic work. Medea's deception consisted not in claiming powers she lacked but in choosing not to exercise powers she possessed. The distinction is morally significant: Medea is not a charlatan but a genuine sorceress who deliberately misapplies her authentic capabilities, making her betrayal of the daughters' trust more devastating than simple fraud would have been.

The Story

The narrative of Pelias's death begins with the return of the Argonauts from Colchis. Jason has accomplished the impossible: he has retrieved the Golden Fleece, survived the fire-breathing bulls, the Spartoi (warriors grown from dragon's teeth), and the sleepless dragon guarding the Fleece in the grove of Ares. He brings with him Medea, granddaughter of Helios the sun-god, whose magic made each of these feats possible.

Upon returning to Iolcus, Jason discovers that Pelias has not honored his promise to surrender the throne. In some sources, Pelias has killed Aeson, Jason's father, or driven him to suicide. In Apollodorus's version, Aeson is already dead when Jason returns, and Jason's mother has also perished. Pelias, having expected Jason to die in Colchis, is dismayed but not willing to yield power. The political situation is a stalemate: Jason has the Fleece (the condition Pelias set for the throne's return) but lacks the military force to compel obedience.

Medea offers to solve the problem through her own methods. Her plan requires no army and no confrontation — only deception. She approaches Pelias's daughters, who are concerned about their father's advancing age and deteriorating health. Medea presents herself as a sorceress who can reverse aging, and she offers to demonstrate.

The demonstration is a masterpiece of persuasive magic. In Ovid's Metamorphoses (7.297-349), Medea takes an old ram — decrepit, its wool matted, its legs weak — and butchers it before the daughters' eyes. She cuts the animal into pieces, places the pieces in a bronze cauldron filled with water and specific herbs, and speaks incantations over the boiling mixture. From the cauldron emerges a young lamb, bounding and bleating — the ram's age reversed, its vitality restored. The daughters are astonished and convinced.

Apolodorus (Bibliotheca 1.9.27) provides a slightly different version of the demonstration, but the essential elements are consistent: a live demonstration of rejuvenation magic, performed on an animal, that persuades the daughters to apply the same process to their father. The demonstration's success is the key to the deception — without it, the daughters would never have agreed to butcher Pelias.

The daughters bring Medea to their father's chamber. Medea instructs them to cut Pelias's body into pieces and place the pieces in the cauldron she has prepared — but this time, she has not added the magic herbs. She may have substituted inert materials for the active ingredients, or she may simply have omitted them. The daughters, trusting the demonstration's results, take up their blades and cut their father apart.

Diodorus Siculus (4.51-52) emphasizes the daughters' emotional state during the act. They weep as they cut, each stroke of the blade accompanied by grief and the hope that the suffering is temporary — that their father will emerge from the cauldron young and whole. The detail is critical to the myth's moral architecture: the daughters are not cold-blooded killers but loving children deceived into committing the most intimate form of violence. Their tears during the butchery represent the myth's emotional core.

When the pieces are placed in the cauldron and the water boils, nothing happens. No young Pelias emerges. The daughters realize, with horror, that they have been deceived — that their father is dead, killed by their own hands at a sorceress's instruction. The grief that follows is not merely the loss of a father but the permanent self-knowledge that they are his killers — a psychological burden from which the mythic tradition offers no release.

Medea does not remain to witness the consequences. She and Jason flee Iolcus, either immediately after the murder or shortly afterward, traveling to Corinth, where the next chapter of their story — Jason's betrayal of Medea and her catastrophic revenge — will unfold. The death of Pelias achieves its immediate goal (removing Jason's enemy from power) but produces no lasting benefit: Jason does not become king of Iolcus. Pelias's son Acastus inherits the throne and exiles Jason and Medea, pursuing them with hostility.

The aftermath at Iolcus was further dramatized in lost works. Euripides's Peliades (c. 455 BCE) reportedly dealt with the aftermath of the murder, and the topic was treated by other tragedians whose works survive only in fragments. Acastus's hostility toward Jason and Medea became a recurring element in the later Argonautic tradition, eventually contributing to Jason's exile in Corinth and the events that Euripides dramatized in his surviving Medea (431 BCE).

Some traditions record that Pelias's body was given funeral rites that included athletic games — the funeral games of Pelias, which were depicted in early Greek art (notably the Chest of Cypselus, described by Pausanias) and were among the earliest mythological events to receive extensive visual representation. The games provided an ironic coda to Pelias's story: the king who sent Jason on a death-mission was honored in death by the very heroic community his schemes had assembled.

Symbolism

The cauldron of rejuvenation symbolizes the promise of transformation through destruction — the idea that something can be broken apart and reassembled in a better form. The demonstration with the ram proves that the symbol can be realized: destruction genuinely produces renewal. The failure with Pelias proves that the same process, without its essential ingredient (divine magic or genuine intent), produces only death. The cauldron is therefore a symbol of conditional transformation: the process works only when the presiding intelligence is genuine, and deception converts the same process from miraculous to murderous.

Medea's deliberate withholding of the herbs symbolizes the difference between knowledge and will. Medea possesses the power to rejuvenate — she proved this with Aeson and with the ram. Her choice not to exercise this power with Pelias is a decision, not an incapacity. The symbolism highlights the moral dimension of magical power: the same abilities can save or destroy, depending on the intent of the practitioner. Medea's sorcery is morally neutral; her choices are not.

The daughters' loving participation in their father's murder symbolizes the weaponization of affection. Their love for Pelias — their desire to restore his youth, to give him more years of life — is precisely what Medea exploits. The symbolism argues that love, when manipulated, can be made to serve destruction: the strongest bonds between people become the most effective instruments of harm when turned against their natural direction.

Pelias's death by his own family's hands echoes the pattern of his own crimes. He seized the throne from his half-brother's family; he is destroyed by his own children's hands. The symmetry symbolizes the Greek concept of reciprocal justice: the harm you inflict returns in a form that mirrors it. Pelias disrupted a family to gain power; his own family, disrupted by deception, destroys him.

The flight from Iolcus after the murder symbolizes the transience of vengeance's rewards. Medea and Jason achieve their immediate goal but gain nothing lasting from it. The symbolism suggests that revenge — however justified, however cleverly executed — produces only displacement, not resolution. The cycle of harm continues: Pelias's death leads to exile, exile leads to Corinth, and Corinth leads to the catastrophe of Medea's final revenge.

The transformation of the domestic space into a slaughter-site — the father's chamber becoming the killing floor — inverts the symbolism of the home as a place of safety. The intimacy of the setting (a father's bedchamber, daughters attending him) makes the violence more disturbing than battlefield killing because it violates the domestic compact that family members do not harm each other within the home.

Cultural Context

The death of Pelias occupies a transitional position in the Argonautic cycle, marking the end of the quest phase and the beginning of the exile phase that leads to Corinth and the events of Euripides's Medea. The myth connects the heroic adventure of the Golden Fleece to the domestic tragedy of Jason and Medea's marriage, demonstrating how the violence of the quest generates further violence in its aftermath.

Medea's use of the cauldron for both genuine rejuvenation (Aeson) and fraudulent destruction (Pelias) reflects the Greek ambivalence about pharmakon — a word that meant both medicine and poison, both remedy and harm. The cauldron is a pharmakon in its full dual sense: the same instrument heals and kills, depending on the practitioner's intent. This ambivalence was central to Greek thought about power, technology, and knowledge — every capability that could save could also destroy.

The role of Pelias's daughters as unwitting killers tapped into Greek anxieties about the vulnerability of women to deception. In the patriarchal framework of Greek society, daughters' loyalty to their fathers was among the strongest bonds, and Medea's exploitation of this loyalty represented a particularly insidious form of manipulation. The myth served as a cautionary narrative about the dangers of trusting foreign sorcerers — a xenophobic element that reinforced Greek suspicion of Colchian (barbarian) magic.

Euripides's lost Peliades (c. 455 BCE) was reportedly his first produced play, suggesting that the death of Pelias was considered suitable material for a debut production. The play's existence demonstrates that the myth was actively engaged by Athenian tragic drama in the 5th century BCE, not merely preserved in mythographic compilations. The loss of this play is significant for the study of Euripides's development: his earliest treatment of Medea predates the surviving Medea by nearly a quarter century.

The funeral games of Pelias, depicted in early Greek art, connected the myth to the institution of athletic competition. The games were a standard element of heroic funeral practice (compare the games for Patroclus in Iliad 23), and their association with Pelias's death gave the myth a social dimension: the king's death was commemorated by the same heroic community whose quest he had commissioned.

Hera's role as the divine sponsor of Pelias's destruction reflects the goddess's capacity for sustained vengeance — a quality she shared with other Olympian deities but exercised with particular persistence. Hera's grudge against Pelias (for neglecting her cult) demonstrates the Greek principle that divine favor requires active maintenance: gods who were not worshipped could become dangerous enemies, and neglect of a god's cult was treated as a form of impiety equivalent to active insult.

The political consequences of Pelias's death — Acastus inherits the throne, Jason and Medea are exiled — reflect the mythic tradition's understanding that violence, even justified violence, produces further instability. Jason's quest was supposed to restore order by recovering the Fleece and reclaiming the throne; instead, the violence required to remove Pelias (a murder orchestrated by a foreign sorceress) delegitimizes Jason's claim and drives him into exile. The myth illustrates the law of unintended consequences in political violence.

Cross-Tradition Parallels

The death of Pelias turns on a structural tension found nowhere else in mythology with such precision: a sorcerer who possesses genuine power and chooses to withhold it, converting authentic capability into the instrument of deception. The cauldron that rejuvenated Aeson could have rejuvenated Pelias — its failure was a decision, not a limitation. Every tradition that engages this archetype must answer what that decision reveals about power, intention, and the moral status of an act that uses true things to accomplish false purposes.

Welsh — Ceridwen's Cauldron (Hanes Taliesin, c. 9th century CE)

Ceridwen brews a cauldron of awen — poetic inspiration — intended for her son, requiring a year and a day of preparation. Her servant Gwion Bach accidentally receives the gift when three drops splash onto his thumb, flees through metamorphoses, and is eventually reborn as the poet Taliesin. Ceridwen's cauldron is authentic power that escapes her control despite genuine intent. Medea's cauldron at Pelias's death is authentic power deliberately withheld — the same vessel that worked for Aeson produces only death for Pelias because Medea chose to omit the essential ingredient. Celtic tradition produces a cauldron whose power overflows the practitioner's control; Greek tradition produces a cauldron whose power is controlled with surgical precision for revenge. The difference is whether magic escapes its maker or obeys her.

Hindu — The Ashvins and the Sage Chyavana (Rigveda 1.116.10, c. 1500–1200 BCE; Mahabharata, Vana Parva 122-125)

The twin divine physicians led the aged sage Chyavana into a sacred pool; he emerged fully young, his form reversed by genuine divine medicine. The Rigveda is the earliest witness: "Ye made Cyavana, though grown old, young again" (1.116.10). Where Medea demonstrated rejuvenation with a ram and then deliberately withheld the process from Pelias, the Ashvins demonstrated restoration with no option of fraudulent substitution — their divine medicine was a positive power without a hidden reverse gear. Medea's rejuvenation ability included the ability to not-rejuvenate; the Ashvins' did not. The Vedic tradition treats aging as a condition that genuine medicine reverses without moral qualification; the Greek myth uses the same premise to stage a fraud made possible precisely because the reversal is genuine.

Mesopotamian — Gilgamesh and the Plant Stolen by a Serpent (Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablet XI, Standard Babylonian c. 1200 BCE)

Gilgamesh acquires the plant of rejuvenation from the bottom of the sea and loses it to a serpent that steals it while he sleeps beside a pool. The plant was genuine; the loss was real; the consequence was permanent. The structural parallel with Pelias's death is the genuine rejuvenation object and its failure to produce the intended result. But the mechanisms of failure are opposite: Gilgamesh's plant fails through random theft, beyond anyone's intent; Pelias's cauldron fails through deliberate, intelligent withholding. Mesopotamian tradition encodes the tragedy of rejuvenation as accident and bad luck. Greek-Argonautic tradition encodes it as malicious design. What if immortality could have been yours and was simply stolen by chance? What if the rejuvenation you were promised was never intended for you at all? The two traditions give opposite answers to the same loss.

Irish — The Cauldron of Rebirth (Mabinogi, Welsh; Cath Maige Tuired, Old Irish, c. 9th-10th century CE)

The Welsh Mabinogi includes the Cauldron of Rebirth, which restores slain warriors to life but renders them mute. The Dagda's cauldron in Irish tradition never leaves the hungry unsatisfied, giving automatically to all who deserve. Where Medea's cauldron is conditioned entirely on the sorcerer's intent, the Dagda's cauldron is conditioned on the recipient's merit. The Cauldron of Rebirth's limitation — the restored warriors lose their speech — represents a different kind of withheld magic: it reverses death but cannot restore the full human being. All three traditions locate the cauldron's limitation differently: in the recipient's desert (Irish), in the nature of death itself (Welsh), or in the practitioner's deliberate choice (Greek). The Greek cauldron's limitation is the only one that could have been removed by a different decision.

Modern Influence

The death of Pelias has exercised influence on Western culture primarily through its association with Medea — a figure adapted across every literary period from Greek tragedy to modern fiction — and through the specific images of the rejuvenation cauldron and the weaponized filial love that the myth introduced.

In literature, Medea's manipulation of Pelias's daughters has been treated by writers from Euripides (whose lost Peliades was reportedly his first play) to modern novelists. The specific scenario — a sorcerer demonstrating a miraculous process, then deliberately failing to replicate it for a victim — has influenced narratives of confidence trickery and fraudulent medicine. The death of Pelias is, in structural terms, a con artist's tale: the mark (the daughters) is convinced by a genuine demonstration, then the con artist (Medea) switches the product.

In opera, the death of Pelias has been incorporated into numerous musical treatments of the Medea story. Luigi Cherubini's Medee (1797), the defining operatic treatment of the Medea myth, includes references to the Pelias episode as part of Medea's history of magical violence.

In visual art, the death of Pelias was depicted on numerous Greek vases (6th-4th centuries BCE), with the cauldron scene — daughters cutting their father while Medea watches — providing dramatic pictorial material. The image of loving daughters performing horrific violence on their father, guided by a foreign sorceress, was visually powerful and morally disturbing, making it suitable for the public contexts (symposia, temple dedications) in which decorated pottery circulated.

In psychology, the myth has been analyzed as a narrative about the manipulation of attachment bonds. Medea's exploitation of the daughters' love for their father — converting their desire to help into the instrument of destruction — anticipates modern discussions of how emotional bonds can be weaponized by manipulative individuals. The myth provides a classical archetype for the phenomenon of "using someone's love against them."

In discussions of medical ethics, the rejuvenation cauldron has been invoked as an early narrative about the promise and peril of transformative medicine. The cauldron promises to reverse aging — a goal that modern biomedical research actively pursues. The myth's warning — that the process can be fraudulent, that trust in a practitioner's claims can lead to destruction — has been cited in discussions of quack medicine, unproven therapies, and the vulnerability of patients who trust practitioners with unverified claims.

The phrase "thrown into the cauldron" or "put through the cauldron" has become a colloquial expression in some European languages for an ordeal that is supposed to transform or improve but may instead destroy. The Pelias myth is the source of this idiom, though its direct connection to the Greek original is often forgotten.

Primary Sources

Bibliotheca by Pseudo-Apollodorus (1.9.27, 1st–2nd century CE) provides the most complete mythographic account of the death of Pelias. Apollodorus describes Medea's approach to Pelias's daughters, her demonstration of the rejuvenation process on an old ram (produced as a lamb from the cauldron), the daughters' trust in the process, their killing of their father, and the failure of the magic because Medea deliberately withheld the herbs. Apollodorus also records that Medea and Jason fled Iolcus after the murder and traveled to Corinth. Robin Hard's Oxford World's Classics translation (1997) is the standard edition; the James George Frazer Loeb (1921) is the scholarly text.

Bibliotheca Historica by Diodorus Siculus (c. 60–30 BCE), Book 4.51–52, provides the most emotionally detailed account of the daughters' state during the killing. Diodorus describes how the daughters wept as they cut their father apart, each blow accompanied by grief and hope that his suffering was temporary. He also specifies that Medea had left the palace before the daughters realized the deception, heightening the horror of their discovery. The C.H. Oldfather Loeb Classical Library edition (1935) covers this section.

Metamorphoses by Ovid (c. 2–8 CE), Book 7, lines 297–349, narrates the rejuvenation of Aeson as Medea's prior genuine use of cauldron magic — the positive precedent that made the daughters' trust in Medea rational. Lines 297–349 describe Medea's incantations, herb-gathering, and the cauldron procedure that restored Aeson to youth. Ovid does not narrate Pelias's death in the Metamorphoses with equal detail, but this passage establishes the authentic capability Medea chose not to exercise. The Charles Martin W.W. Norton translation (2004) is standard.

Medea by Euripides (431 BCE) does not narrate the death of Pelias, which occurred before the play's action begins, but references it as established background. Euripides's Medea confirms the tradition that Medea killed Pelias as part of the Argonautic aftermath and that this murder led to exile from Iolcus. The play's first produced version (431 BCE) establishes that Pelias's death was well-known to Athenian audiences by the mid-5th century. The David Kovacs Loeb Classical Library edition (1994) is the standard text.

Peliades by Euripides (c. 455 BCE, lost) was reportedly Euripides's debut production, dramatizing Medea's manipulation of Pelias's daughters and its aftermath. The play survives only in fragments and scholia references. Its identification as Euripides's first play makes it significant for establishing that the myth was already suitable for Athenian tragic treatment before the surviving Medea. Fragments are collected in the Loeb Euripides fragment volume.

Argonautica by Apollonius of Rhodes (c. 270–245 BCE) provides context for the entire Pelias narrative: his seizure of Jason's throne, his dispatch of Jason on the quest, and the conditions of Jason's return. Book 1.5–17 establishes Pelias as the antagonist who set the quest in motion. The William H. Race Loeb (2008) is the standard edition.

Significance

The death of Pelias holds significance as the narrative hinge between the Argonautic quest and the Medea tragedy — the event that connects Jason's heroic adventure to the domestic catastrophe that defines Medea's place in Western literature.

The myth's treatment of Medea as both avenger and deceiver establishes the moral complexity that makes her one of mythology's most enduring figures. She avenges legitimate grievances (Pelias's usurpation of Jason's throne, his mistreatment of Jason's family) through illegitimate means (fraud, manipulation of innocent women, the exploitation of filial love). The significance lies in the refusal to simplify: Medea is neither purely villainous nor purely justified, and the myth's power derives from maintaining both dimensions simultaneously.

The daughters' role as unwitting instruments of their father's death gives the myth its particular emotional weight. Their grief upon discovering the deception — the permanent knowledge that they killed their own father with their own hands — represents a form of psychological destruction that exceeds the physical violence. The significance for Greek moral thought is the demonstration that good intentions do not prevent catastrophic outcomes when the actor operates on false information.

The cauldron's dual nature (genuine rejuvenation for Aeson, fraudulent destruction for Pelias) gives the myth significance for understanding the Greek concept of pharmakon. The same instrument, the same process, the same practitioner can produce healing or harm depending on intent. The significance extends to Greek thought about technology and knowledge more broadly: every powerful tool is morally ambiguous, and the distinction between its beneficial and destructive uses lies in the practitioner's will, not in the tool itself.

For the Argonautic cycle, Pelias's death closes the revenge arc but opens the exile arc. The significance of this narrative structure is that it demonstrates the futility of revenge as a resolution: killing Pelias does not restore Jason to his throne but produces exile to Corinth, where worse things await. The myth contributes to a broader Greek literary tradition (visible in the Oresteia and other revenge cycles) that treats vengeance as generative of further violence rather than as a terminal act.

The loss of Euripides's Peliades makes the myth significant for the study of Athenian tragedy. If the Peliades was indeed Euripides's debut production, then the death of Pelias was the subject through which one of Western literature's greatest dramatists first addressed his audience — a beginning that anticipates the themes of deception, maternal violence, and the consequences of magic that would define his career.

Connections

Medea — The orchestrator of Pelias's death, whose magical deception is the myth's central action.

Pelias — The victim whose own schemes (sending Jason to die in Colchis) created the conditions for his destruction.

Jason — Whose return from Colchis with Medea set the revenge in motion.

The Golden Fleece — The quest object whose successful retrieval made Pelias's death politically necessary.

Aeson — Whose suffering under Pelias motivated Medea's revenge.

The Rejuvenation of Aeson — The genuine magical precedent that made the daughters' trust in Medea rational.

Acastus — Pelias's son whose inheritance of the throne and exile of Jason and Medea demonstrate that the murder solved nothing.

Jason and Medea at Corinth — The next chapter, in which exile from Iolcus leads to the events of Euripides's Medea.

Hera — The divine force behind the revenge, whose grudge against Pelias provided the theological framework for his destruction.

The Argonauts — The heroic crew whose return from Colchis made possible the confrontation between Jason and Pelias.

Iolcus — The city whose throne Pelias seized and from which Jason and Medea were exiled after the murder. The city's dynastic history — from Aeson's legitimate rule through Pelias's usurpation to Acastus's inheritance — demonstrates the instability that violence produces in royal succession.

The Argonautica — The literary tradition that narrates the quest Pelias commissioned as a death-sentence, connecting the myth to the broader epic tradition of heroic voyages.

Colchis — The distant kingdom from which Medea came, whose magical traditions gave her the powers she deployed against Pelias. The connection between Colchian sorcery and Thessalian politics demonstrates the Argonautic voyage's consequences for both ends of the journey.

Jason and the One Sandal — The oracle-fulfilling arrival at Iolcus that started the entire chain of events, from Pelias's dispatch of Jason on the quest to Medea's eventual revenge.

Jason and the Fire-Breathing Bulls — One of the Colchian tasks that Medea's magic enabled Jason to survive, demonstrating the same powers she would later deploy against Pelias — but in service of heroic success rather than vengeful destruction.

Helios — Medea's divine grandfather, whose lineage gave her the supernatural abilities that made the Pelias deception possible. The solar divine connection established Medea as a figure of cosmic authority whose sorcery derived from the highest stratum of divine genealogy.

The Golden Fleece — The quest object that Pelias used as bait for Jason's expected death. The Fleece's successful retrieval inverted Pelias's calculation: the mission designed to destroy Jason instead equipped him with the ally who would destroy Pelias.

Further Reading