By Nephele, Athamas of Boeotia begot a son, Phrixus, and a daughter, Helle. When Athamas took a second wife, Ino, she plotted against Nephele's children: she persuaded the women to parch the seed-corn, so that the earth yielded no crop, and then bribed the messengers sent to Delphi to report that the dearth would cease only if Phrixus were sacrificed to Zeus. Forced by the people of the land, Athamas brought his son to the altar.2Pseudo-Apollodorus — Bibliotheca 1.9.1⚖Told differently in other tellings — change the lens on the card

Hyginus' Astronomica tells the flight differently: Phrixus son of Athamas was the object not of a stepmother's grain-plot but of a false accusation. Cretheus' wife Demodice — others name her Biadice — was moved by the youth's beauty, and when she could win no favour from him, charged him before Cretheus with assault. Cretheus, deeply in love with his wife, persuaded Athamas to put Phrixus to death; and so the boy was driven to the ram and the sea.3Hyginus — Astronomica 2.20.2⚖Told differently in other tellings — change the lens on the card

Nephele caught up her two children and gave them a ram with a golden fleece, which she had received from Hermes; borne through the sky upon its back they crossed land and sea. But over the strait that lies between Sigeum and the Chersonese, Helle slipped from the ram into the deep and was drowned, and the sea was thereafter called the Hellespont after her, while Phrixus rode on alone.4Pseudo-Apollodorus · Apollonius of Rhodes — Bibliotheca 1.9.1; Argonautica 1.247, 2.1140–1145

Apollodorus and Apollonius hold that the marvel came from Hermes — Nephele had the golden-fleeced ram of the god, and Argus tells how the ram, which Hermes had made all gold, bore Phrixus to Aea.5Pseudo-Apollodorus · Apollonius of Rhodes — Bibliotheca 1.9.1; Argonautica 2.1140–1145⚖Told differently in other tellings — change the lens on the card

By Hyginus' account the ram was no god-wrought wonder but the offspring of Neptune and Theophane; at the bidding of his mother Nephele, Phrixus rode it to Colchis and sacrificed it to Mars, placing its gilded fleece in the god's temple.6Hyginus — Fabulae 3⚖Told differently in other tellings — change the lens on the card

Phrixus came to the Colchians, whose king was Aeetes, son of the Sun; Aeetes received him and gave him his daughter Chalciope in marriage, and by her Phrixus had sons — Argus, Melas, Phrontis, and Cytisorus. He sacrificed the golden-fleeced ram to Zeus the god of Escape and gave the fleece to Aeetes, who nailed it to an oak in a grove of Ares — there to be guarded until Jason came for it.7Pseudo-Apollodorus — Bibliotheca 1.9.1; 1.9.16

Apollonius keeps the marriage and the altar in the heroic frame: at Aeetes' table the king greets the wanderers as 'sons of my daughter and of Phrixus,' and on the Colchian shore stands the base of the altar which the Aeolid Phrixus once set up to Zeus, aider of fugitives, when he sacrificed the golden wonder at the bidding of Hermes, who had met him graciously on the way.8Apollonius of Rhodes — Argonautica 3.299–304; 4.109–121

Pausanias saw the hero in stone on the Athenian Acropolis: a statue of Phrixus, son of Athamas, carried ashore to the Colchians by the ram, having sacrificed the animal — to some god or other, he reckons, presumably the one the Orchomenians call Laphystius — with the thighs cut out in the Greek manner and watched as they burn.9Pausanias — Description of Greece 1.24.2