In the winter streams of the Caucasus, a fleece laid against the current does a curious thing — gold dust snags in the wool, and when the skin is pulled dripping from the water and hung to dry, it is filled with gleaming gold. The Greek geographer Strabo wrote it down two thousand years ago: "Gold is carried down by the mountain-torrents and barbarians obtain it by means of perforated troughs and fleecy skins." Geography (11.2.19). And then he writes something tantalizing: "this is the origin of the myth of the golden fleece."

The myth of Jason and the golden fleece. Jason, rightful heir to the Greek throne of Iolcos, was sent by his uncle Pelias on an errand designed to kill him: sail east across the Black Sea to Colchis and fetch the fleece of a golden ram guarded by a sleepless dragon. The fleece was that of the winged ram Chrysomallos who had carried a different prince, Phrixus, of Boeotia in mainland Greece, to safety in Colchis, on the west coast of the modern day country of Georgia; the people of Colchis hung the golden fleece in a grove dedicated to Ares, god of war, and guarded by the dragon. Jason commissioned a ship, the Argo, and recruited a legendary crew, the Argonauts, who included Hercules; Orpheus; Peleus, father of Achilles; and Laertes, father of Odysseus. Their adventures seeking, winning, and returning with the golden fleece, and with Medea, sorceress and princess of Colchis, who made the taking of the fleece possible, are recounted in Pindar's Fourth Pythian Ode (c. 462 B.C.) and by Apollonius of Rhodes in the Argonautica a few generations later.

Strabo's take on the golden fleece. The fleece in the fable, by Strabo's reading, is golden because it caught gold — and Jason's quest represents the bringing of both gold and sheep husbandry to Greece. Strabo was not alone in describing the practice. Two centuries later, Appian of Alexandria, narrating Pompey's campaign in his Mithridatic Wars (§103), recorded the same craft in different words: locals, he wrote, "put sheepskins with shaggy fleece into the stream" to "collect the floating particles." Avtandil Okrostsvaridze, a Georgian geologist at Ilia State University in Tbilisi, documented the technique surviving into the early 21st century in Svaneti, in the upper Caucasus — whole sheepskins pegged into streambeds a hundred meters downstream of gold-bearing rock.

From Greek myths to European knights. Whatever the myth's meaning, the link between fleece and gold outlived the ancient Greeks. For two millennia after Strabo, European sovereigns returned to the sheepskin as one of their highest emblems. On January 10, 1430, at Bruges, Philip the Good of Burgundy founded the Order of the Golden Fleece to mark his wedding to Isabella of Portugal. The imagery was dual: the classical golden fleece of Jason, representing rulership and wealth; and the fleece from Judges 6:36–40 representing a heavenly mandate. The order passed to the Habsburgs through the 1477 marriage of Mary of Burgundy to Maximilian; after the War of the Spanish Succession it split into Spanish Bourbon and Austrian Habsburg branches, both still active today.

Back to the flock. The sheep is the first of our symbols, and the myth of Jason, the Argonauts, and the golden fleece is its oldest cultural anchor. Today, wool outerwear like our Cavalry Cloak (100% Merino lined in silk with three gilded fireman clasps) carries forward the association between sheep, their fleeces, and garments that make you feel warm, secure, just a little bit regal, and connected to a centuries long history of art and artisanship.