Paragraph on “How old is the story of Jason and the Golden Fleece?” complete paragraph for Class 9, Class 10, Class 11 and Class 12

How old is the story of Jason and the Golden Fleece?

About three thousand years ago, minstrels wandered in the beautiful land of Greece, telling wonderful tales of gods and men. At that time, the Greeks lived in huge fortified citadels built on the tops of hills. Each citadel had its own king, and he ruled the valleys around it, where olives and corn grew, and also the mountain slopes, where sheep grazed.

This was the period when the siege of Troy took place, and the kings were probably the same ones that we read about in The Iliad and The Odyssey which are books written by Homer between 700 BC and 600 BC – three or four hundred years after the fall of Troy.

At the time of the Trojan war, Mycenae was the most important citadel kingdom in Greece. Besides being farmers, the Myce-naeans were also traders and craftsmen. it They decorated their buildings with paintings and sculpture. They carved furniture, and made beautiful objects of gold and silver. Today we call this period of Greek history the Mycenaean Age.

The story of Jason and the quest of the Golden Fleece is one of the tales that the minstrels, who visited the halls of the citadel kings, told the assembled court. Jason set forth with some fifty of the chief heroes of Greece, the Argonauts, in the ship Argo to recover the Golden Fleece from the King of Colchis. Helped by the magic of the King’s daughter, Medea, he overcame great danger and eventually accomplished his task.

When Mycenae fell to the invading Dorians, many of the Mycenaeans fled to the islands of the Aegean Sea and the coast of Asia Minor. They took their stories with them —stories carried in the memory and handed down from one minstrel to another. Echoes of these stories also stayed in Greece itself and in time they became the background of most of the literature and art of the great flowering of Greek civilisation that took place in what we call the Classical Age, which reached its highest point between 500 BC-400 BC.