page_title: Pelias
section_title: Death of Pelias
hierarchical_section_title: Pelias / Mythology / Death of Pelias
context_page_description: Pelias was king of Iolcus in Greek mythology. The son of Tyro and the god Poseidon, he was the one who sent Jason on the quest for the Golden Fleece.
context_section_description: During Jason's absence, Pelias thought the Argo had sunk, and this was what he told Aeson and Promachus, who committed suicide by drinking poison. However, it is unknown but possible that the two were both killed directly by Pelias.  
  When Jason and Medea returned, Pelias still refused to give up his throne. Medea conspired to have Pelias' own daughters (the Peliades) kill him. She told them she could turn an old ram into a young ram by cutting up the old ram and boiling it. During the demonstration, a live, young ram jumped out of the pot.  Excited, the girls cut their father into pieces and threw them into a pot, in the expectation that he would emerge rejuvenated. Pelias, of course, did not survive. 
  As he was now an accessory to a terrible crime, Jason was still not made king. Pelias' son Acastus later banished Jason and Medea, to Corinth, and so reclaimed the kingdom. 
  An alternate telling of the story has Medea slitting the throat of Jason's father Aeson, who she then really does revive as a much younger man; Pelias' daughters then slit their father's throat after she promises to do the same for him, and she merely breaks her word and leaves him dead.
caption: Pelias sends forth Jason, in an 1879 illustration from Stories from the Greek Tragedians by Alfred Church.
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