Publisher's Synopsis
Jason is given the opportunity of relating the story of his great adventure with his friends, the Argonauts, in which they sail from their homes in Greece to the edge of the known world in the good ship Argo to bring back the Golden Fleece to Jason's wicked uncle, king Pelias. Schooldays in a cave on the side of a mountain with a headmaster who is half horse and half man; The wedding there of Jason's schoolfriend to a sea-nymph goddess in the company of twelve gods and goddesses and many other strange mystical creatures; How Jason helps a hag cross a raging torrent and then finds she is really a goddess who sets him an almost impossible task; How Jason sails with a band of heroes on board the good ship Argo on a hazardous voyage in the course of which they stay on an island inhabited by nobody but women, battle with six-armed monsters, and are attacked by birds who aim dagger-like feathers at them; How Jason falls in love with a witch who helps him fight with fire-breathing bulls and warriors who spring from the ground when he sows it with dragon's teeth; Jason learns how the witch persuades King Pelias' daughters to hack their father to pieces and boil him in a pot; How Jason ends up in the Elysian fields and decides to involve you in his adventure over three thousand years later. "A very readable account of his epic adventure, confirming my own account in most details. However, he seems incapable of writing a simple hexameter..." -- Apollonius Rhodius. It is interesting that Jason's account agrees in the main with numerous but sometimes fragmentary ancient sources (mainly Pindar and Apollodorus) for his schooldays, with Apollonius's Argonautica for the journey of the Argo and with Ovid's Metamorphoses for part of what happened afterwards. Jason speaks for himself, and how he did this you will discover in due course. At the end of the book there is a glossary which contains an annotated list of the names of the original fifty-five Argonauts in alphabetical order. The story is divided into sixty-one short chapters, suitable for bedtime reading to and by children aged 10 to 100.
