What sleepless dragon guarded the Golden Fleece in Colchis?
Answer
Colchian dragon
What sleepless dragon guarded the Golden Fleece in Colchis? The Colchian dragon guarded the fleece in a sacred grove.
In the Argonaut myth, King Aeetes of Colchis placed the Golden Fleece under the protection of a huge dragon that never slept. Its task was to prevent Jason and the Argonauts from taking the fleece after Jason completed the king’s dangerous tasks.
Jason succeeded with help from Medea, Aeetes’ daughter and a skilled practitioner of magic. In Apollonius Rhodius’s Argonautica, Medea used enchantments to lull the dragon, allowing Jason to remove the fleece from the grove of Ares. The dragon is often called the Colchian dragon because ancient sources do not give it a widely established personal name.
It is easy to confuse this creature with Ladon, another famous Greek dragon who guarded the golden apples of the Hesperides. Python guarded Delphi, while the Hydra was a many-headed serpent defeated by Heracles. Those creatures belong to different myths and do not guard the Golden Fleece.