A historian tries to explain the golden fleece. In his version Hecate is a queen who discovered aconite, Circe and Medea are her daughters, and the dragon guarding the fleece was a man named Dracon.
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Diodorus set out to write the history of the whole world in forty books, from the age of the gods down to his own day. Book IV covers the Greek heroes, and he treats their myths as garbled history. In Colchis, Hecate poisons her own father to take his throne, Circe outdoes her mother in drugs, and Medea learns everything they know and uses it to rescue the strangers her father means to kill. The press starts with the Argonauts' arrival in Colchis. Nothing is readable here yet; support it and it will be.
Diodorus came from Agyrium in Sicily and worked in Rome and Egypt. He says he spent thirty years on the Library, and he finished it around 30 BC. Fifteen of its forty books survive whole. He worked from older historians, many of them now lost, so his pages keep stories found nowhere else.
Diodorus explains the fleece as a real treasure kept in a walled precinct of the Sun beside the sea, watched by guards from the Crimea, the Taurians, whose name the poets turned into bulls. The man in charge of the guard was called Dracon, and the poets turned him into a dragon.
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