JASON ([Greek: Iasôn]), in Greek legend, son of Aeson, king of Iolcus in Thessaly. He was the leader of the Argonautic expedition (see ARGONAUTS). After he returned from it he lived at Corinth with his wife Medea (q.v.) for many years. At last he put away Medea, in order to marry Glauce (or Creusa), daughter of the Corinthian king Creon. To avenge herself, Medea presented the new bride with a robe and head-dress, by whose magic properties the wearer was burnt to death, and slew her children by Jason with her own hand. A later story represents Jason as reconciled to Medea (Justin, xlii. 2). His death was said to have been due to suicide through grief, caused by Medea's vengeance (Diod. Sic. iv. 55); or he was crushed by the fall of the poop of the ship "Argo," under which, on the advice of Medea, he had laid himself down to sleep (argument of Euripides' _Medea_). The name (more correctly Iason) means "healer," and Jason is possibly a local hero of Iolcus to whom healing powers were attributed. The ancients regarded him as the oldest navigator, and the patron of navigation. By the moderns he has been variously explained as a solar deity; a god of summer; a god of storm; a god of rain, who carries off the rain-giving cloud (the golden fleece) to refresh the earth after a long period of drought. Some regard the legend as a chthonian myth, Aea (Colchis) being the under-world in the Aeolic religious system from which Jason liberates himself and his betrothed; others, in view of certain resemblances between the story of Jason and that of Cadmus (the ploughing of the field, the sowing of the dragon's teeth, the fight with the Sparti, who are finally set fighting with one another by a stone hurled into their midst), associate both with Demeter the corn-goddess, and refer certain episodes to practices in use at country festivals, e.g. the stone throwing, which, like the [Greek: ballêtys] at the Eleusinia and the [Greek: lithobolia] at Troezen (Pausanias ii. 30, 4 with Frazer's note) was probably intended to secure a good harvest by driving away the evil spirits of unfruitfulness. See articles by C. Seeliger in Roscher's _Lexikon der Mythologie_ and by F. Durrbach in Daremberg and Saglio's _Dictionnaire des antiquités_; H. D. Müller, _Mythologie der griechischen Stämme_ (1861), ii. 328, who explains the name Jason as "wanderer"; W. Mannhardt, _Mythologische Forschungen_ (1884), pp. 75, 130; O. Crusius, _Beiträge zur griechischen Mythologie una Religionsgeschichte_ (Leipzig, 1886).