A Fleece of Gold; Five Lessons from the Fable of Jason and the Golden Fleece — Reading Notes

From Fable to Formula

Given structures his book around five chapter headings, each a phrase from a single sentence about Jason’s crew: “Jason and his men seized the favorable moment of the rebound, plied their oars with vigor, and passed through in safety.” The first chapter, “The Ruling Element,” takes “Jason and his men” as its text; the second, “The Golden Quality,” uses “They passed through.” This device turns a narrative moment into a moral template. The excerpts show that Given does not analyze the myth sequentially but atomizes it. Readers familiar with the original story will notice that the dragon, the ram’s flight, and the girl’s drowning are mentioned only in the introduction. The chapters themselves leap from the fable to modern examples—DeWitt Clinton, Robert Fulton, Elihu Burritt—treating the ancient tale as a springboard rather than a sustained reference.

The Self-Made Principle and Its Heroes

Given’s catalogue of exemplars is striking for its range and period flavor. He invokes “Herschel at the midnight hour, after playing his violin for a living,” “Elihu Burritt, working at the forge,” and later “Cyrus W. Field or Marconi, or Edison or Ericsson.” These figures illustrate what Given calls “this self-made principle”—the idea that opportunity is “hewn out of the very stumbling blocks which were in the way.” The language is consistently energetic: men “grapple with mathematics,” “master several languages,” and “wrought” their ideals “into reality.” The excerpts do not reveal whether Given ever returns to the Jason myth after the introduction, but the pattern is clear: each chapter likely pairs a phrase from the fable with a gallery of self-made men. The reader should expect a succession of biographical vignettes rather than literary analysis.

Opportunity as a Present-Tense Demand

One of the longest excerpted passages concerns the nature of opportunity. Given insists it “lives only in the present tense, it knows no to-morrows.” He quotes Pittacus of Mitylene—“Know thy opportunity”—and notes it was “inscribed in the temple of Apollo at Delphi.” The tone is urgent: “Eternal vigilance is the price we must pay.” Given contrasts the man who “grips” opportunities with the man “always waiting for something to turn up,” exemplified by Dickens’s Micawber. The prose is aphoristic and hortatory, aimed at young men who might let “their convictions die.” The reader should note that Given does not argue for reckless action; he emphasizes “wise discrimination” and “the intelligence with which we lay hold upon them.” The balance between seize-the-day energy and prudent judgment is a tension the book may explore further.

A Treasury of Untold Wealth

Given repeatedly uses metaphors of hidden treasure. “Every man is a treasury of untold wealth,” he writes, and “gold, silver, rubies, sapphires, and diamonds … become valuable to us only when we dig them out.” This imagery ties back to the golden fleece itself—a physical treasure that must be won through effort. The excerpts suggest that Given’s core argument is that each person contains latent talents that “opportunity is ever seeking to reveal.” The book’s title, A Fleece of Gold, thus refers not to the mythic object but to the reader’s own potential. The foreword reinforces this by calling the volume a help for those “who have small opportunities in the form of time and money.” The reader should approach the book as a motivational manual that uses the Jason story as a unifying metaphor, not as a work of classical scholarship.

Given’s method is additive: each chapter piles examples atop a single phrase from the fable. The reader will benefit most by treating the myth summary as a key to the book’s structure, then watching how Given translates each narrative beat into a life lesson. The excerpts end before the final chapter, “Ethics of Activity,” so the complete arc of the argument remains unknown. What is clear is that A Fleece of Gold belongs to the early-twentieth-century genre of success literature, earnest and example-rich, aimed at boys and young men with limited time and money.

Years spent shelving have taught me that A Fleece of Gold speaks most quietly to those who already sense its truth—that striving requires inner gold before outer gain. I often find it resting near What I Believe — Themes and Context, as if both remember that belief, not burning effort, is the thread that holds us steady.