Phrixus, son of Athamus and Nephele, along with his twin Helle, were hated by their stepmother, Ino. Ino hatched a devious plot to get rid of the twins, roasting all the town's crop seeds so they would not grow. The local farmers, frightened of famine, asked a nearby oracle for assistance. Ino bribed the men sent to the oracle to lie and tell the others that the oracle required the sacrifice of Phrixus. Before he was killed though, Phrixus and Helle were rescued by a flying golden ram sent by Nephele, their natural mother. Helle fell off the ram and died, but Phrixus survived all the way to Colchis, where King Aeetes took him in and treated him kindly, giving Phrixus his daughter, Chalciope, in marriage. In gratitude, Phrixus gave the king the golden fleece of the ram, which Aeetes hung in a tree in his kingdom.
Jason later ran off with both Medea and the golden fleece.
by means of a false oracle, to offer Phrixus as a sacrifice, as the only means of alleviating a famine which she herself had caused by ordering the grain to be secretly roasted before it was sown.
Phrixus, however, reached the other side in safety, and proceeding by land to Aea in Colchis on the farther shore of the Euxine Sea, sacrificed the ram, and hung up its fleece in the grove of Ares, where it was guarded by a sleepless dragon.
Forchhammer saw in it an old nature symbolism; Jason, the god of healing and fruitfulness, brought the fleece - the fertilizing rain-cloud - to the western land that was parched by the heat of the sun.
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