3. The Colchian custom of wrapping corpses in hides and exposing them on the tops of willow-trees recalls the Parsee custom of leaving them on platforms for the vultures to eat, in order not to defile the sacred principle of fire, the Sun’s holy gift, by the act of cremation. Apollonius Rhodius mentions it, apparently to emphasize Pelias’s concern for Phrixus’s ghost: being a Greek, he could not consider it an adequate funeral rite. Aeëes’s fire-breathing bulls, again, recall those brazen ones in which prisoners were roasted alive by Phalaris of Agrigentum – a Rhodian colony – presumably in honour of their god Helius, whose symbol was a brazen bull (Pindar: Pythian Odes i. 185, with scholiast); but the sown men with whom Jason contended are inappropriate to the story. Though it was reasonable for Cadmus, a Canaanite stranger, to fight the Pelasgian autochthons when he invaded Boeotia (see 58. g), Jason as a native-born candidate for the kingship will rather have been set Kilhwych’s task of ploughing, sowing, and reaping a harvest in one day (see 148. 5) – a ritual act easily mimed at midsummer – then wrestled with a bull and fought the customary mock battle against men in beast-disguise. His winning of the golden fleece is paralleled by Heracles’s winning of the golden apples, which another unsleeping dragon guarded (see 133. a). At least four of Heracles’s Labours seem to have been imposed on him as a candidate for the kingship (see 123. 1; 124. 2; 127. 1 and 129. 1).
4. Jason and Heracles are, in fact, the same character so far as the marriage-task myth is concerned; and the First and Seventh Labours survive vestigially here in the killing of the Mariandynian Boar and the Cyzican Lion, with both of which Jason should have been credited. ‘Jason’ was, of course, a title of Heracles.
5. Medea’s Colchian crocus is the poisonous colchicum, or meadow-saffron, used by the ancients as the most reliable specific against gout, as it still remains. Its dangerous reputation contributed to Medea’s.
6. The Sauromatians were the mounted Scythian bowmen of the steppes (see 132. 6); no wondér Aeëtes laughed at the notion that Jason and his heavily armed infantry could subdue them.
153
THE MURDER OF APSYRTUS
MANY different accounts survive of the Argo’s return to Thessaly, though it is generally agreed that, following Phineus’s advice, the Argonauts sailed counter-sunwise around the Black Sea. Some say that when Aeëtes overtook them, near the mouth of the Danube, Medea killed her young half-brother Apsyrtus, whom she had brought aboard, and cut him into pieces, which she consigned one by one to the swift current. This cruel stratagem delayed the pursuit, because obliging Aeëtes to retrieve each piece in turn for subsequent burial at Tomi.1 The true name of Medea’s half-brother is said to have been Aegialeus; for ‘Apsyrtus’, meaning ‘swept down’, merely records what happened to his mangled limbs after he had died.2 Others place the crime at Aea itself, and say that Jason also killed Aeëtes.3
b. The most circumstantial and coherent account, however, is that Apsyrtus, sent by Aeëtes in pursuit of Jason, trapped the Argo at the mouth of the Danube, where the Argonauts agreed to set Medea ashore on a near-by island sacred to Artemis, leaving her in charge of a priestess for a few days; meanwhile a king of the Brygians would judge the case and decide whether she was to return home or follow Jason to Greece, and in whose possession the fleece should remain. But Medea sent a private message to Apsyrtus, pretending that she had been forcibly abducted, and begging him to rescue her. That night, when he visited the island and thereby broke the truce, Jason followed, lay in wait and struck him down from behind. He then cut off Apsyrtus’s extremities, and thrice licked up some of the fallen blood, which he spat out again each time, to prevent the ghost from pursuing him. As soon as Medea was once more aboard the Argo, the Argonauts attacked the leaderless Colchians, scattered their flotilla, and escaped.4
c. Some would have it that, after Apsyrtus’s murder, the Argo turned back and sailed up the Phasis into the Caspian Sea, and thence into the Indian Ocean, regaining the Mediterranean by way of Lake Tritonis.5 Others, that she sailed up the Danube and Save, and then down the Po, which joins the Save, into the Adriatic Sea;6 but was pursued by storms and driven around the whole coast of Italy, until she reached Circe’s island of Aeaea. Others again, that she sailed up the Danube, and then reached Circe’s island by way of the Po and the eddying pools where it is joined by the mighty Rhône.7
d. Still others hold that the Argonauts rowed up the Don until they reached its source; then dragged the Argo to the headwaters of another river which runs north into the Gulf of Finland. Or that from the Danube they dragged her to the source of the river Elbe and, borne on its waters, reached Jutland. And that they then shaped a westerly course towards the Ocean, passing by Britain and Ireland, and reached Circe’s island after sailing between the Pillars of Heracles and along the coasts of Spain and Gaul.8
e. These are not, however, feasible routes. The truth is that the Argo returned by the Bosphorus, the way she had come, and passed through the Hellespont in safety, because the Trojans could no longer oppose her passage. For Heracles, on his return from Mysia, had collected a fleet of six ships [supplied by the Dolionians and their Percotean allies] and, sailing up the river Scamander under cover of darkness, surprised and destroyed the Trojan fleet. He then battered his way into Troy with his club, and demanded from King Laomedon the man-eating mares of King Diomedes, which he had left in his charge some years previously. When Laomedon denied any knowledge of these, Heracles killed him and all his sons, except the infant Podarces, or Priam, whom he appointed king in his stead.9
f. Jason and Medea were no longer aboard the Argo. Her oracular beam had spoken once more, refusing to carry either of them until they had been purified of murder, and from the mouth of the Danbue they had set out overland for Aeaea, the island home of Medea’s aunt Circe. This was not the Campanian Aeaea where Circe later went to live, but her former Istrian seat; and Medea led Jason there by the route down which the straw-wrapped gifts of the Hyperboreans are yearly brought to Delos. Circe, to whom they came as suppliants, grudgingly purified them with the blood of a young sow.10
g. Now, their Colchian pursuers had been warned not to come back without Medea and the fleece and, guessing that she had gone to Circe for purification, followed the Argo across the Aegean Sea, around the Peloponnese, and up the Illyrian coast, rightly concluding that Medea and Jason had arranged to be fetched from Aeaea.11
h. Some, however, say that Apsyrtus was still commanding the Colchian flotilla at this time, and that Medea trapped and murdered him in one of the Illyrian islands now called the Apsyrtides.12
1. Apollodorus: i. 9. 24; Pherecydes, quoted by scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius: iv. 223 and 228; Ovid: Tristia iii. 9; Stephanus of Byzantium sub Tomeus.
2. Cicero: On the Nature of the Gods iii. 19; Justin: xlii. 3; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 45.
3. Sophocles, quoted by scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius: iv. 228; Euripides: Medea 1334; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 48.
4. Apollonius Rhodius: iv. 212–502.
5. Pindar: Pythian Odes iv. 250 ff.; Mimnermus, quoted by Strabo: i. 2.40.
6. Apollodorus: i. 9.24; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 56.7–8.
7. Apollonius Rhodius: iv. 608–560.
8. Timaeus, quoted by Diodorus Siculus: iv. 56. 3; Argonautica Orphica 1030–1204.
9. Diodorus Siculus: iv. 48; Homer: Odyssey xii. 69 ff. and Iliad v. 638 ff.
10. Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Herodotus: iv. 33; Apollonius Rhodius: iv. 659–717.
11. Hyginus: Fabula 23; Apollodorus: loc. cit.
12. Strabo: vii. 5. 5.
1. The combination of the westerly with the easterly voyage passed muster until Greek geographical knowledge increased and it became impossible to reconcile the principal elements in the story: namely, the winning of the fleece from the Phasis, and the purification of Medea and Jason by Circe, who lived either in Istria or off the western coast of Italy. Yet, since no historian could afford to offend his public by rejecting the voyage as fabulous, the Argonauts were supposed, at f
irst, to have returned from the Black Sea by way of the Danube, the Save, and the Adriatic; then, when explorers found that the Save does not enter the Adriatic, a junction was presumed between the Danube and the Po, down which the Argo could have sailed; and when, later, the Danube proved to be navigable only up to the Iron Gates, and not to join the Po, she was held to have passed up the Phasis into the Caspian Sea, and thus into the Indian Ocean (where another Colchis stretched along the Malabar coast – Ptolemy Hephaestionos: viii. 1. 10), and back by way of the ‘Ocean Stream’ and Lake Tritonis.
2. The feasibility of this third route, too, being presently denied, mythographers suggested that the Argo had sailed up the Don, presumed to have its source in the Gulf of Finland, from which she could circumnavigate Europe, and return to Greece through the Straits of Gibraltar. Or somehow to have reached the Elbe by way of the Danube and a long portage, then sailed down to its mouth and so home, coasting past Ireland and Spain. Diodorus Siculus, who had the sense to see that the Argo could have returned only through the Bosphorus, as she came, discussed this problem most realistically, and made the illuminating point that the Ister (now the Danube) was often confused with the Istrus, a trifling stream which entered the Adriatic near Trieste. Indeed, even in the time of Augustus, the geographer Pomponius Mela could report (ii. 3. 13 and 4.4) that the western branch of the Danube ‘flows into the Adriatic with a turbulence and violence equal to that of the Po’. The seizure of the fleece, the Colchians’ pursuit, and the death of Apsyrtus, will all have originally taken place in the northern Adriatic. Ovid preferred to believe that Apsyrtus had been murdered at the mouth of the Danube and buried at Tomi: because that was his own destined death-place.
3. Aeaea (see 170. i-l and 5) is said to have belonged to Chryses, father of Minyas, and great-grandfather of Phrixus; and Chryses means ‘golden’. It may well have been his spirit, rather than that of Phrixus, which the Minyans were ordered to appease when they fetched the fleece. According to Strabo, Phrixus enjoyed a hero-shrine in Moschia on the Black Sea, ‘where a ram is never sacrificed’; this will, however, have been a late foundation, prompted by the fame of the Argo’s voyage – thus the Romans also built temples to Greek heroes and heroines fictitiously introduced into their national history.
4. The name ‘Apsyrtus’, which commemorates the sweeping of his remains downstream, was perhaps a local title of Orpheus after his dismemberment by the Maenads (see 28. d).
5. Valerius Flaccus and Diodorus Siculus both record that Heracles sacked Troy on the outward, not the homeward, voyage; but this seems to be a mistake.
154
THE ARGO RETURNS TO GREECE
ARRIVED at Corcyra, which was then named Drepane, the Colchians found the Argo beached opposite the islet of Macris; her crew were joyfully celebrating the successful outcome of their expedition. The Colchian leader now visited King Alcinous and Queen Arete, demanding on Aeëtes’s behalf the surrender of Medea and the fleece. Arete, to whom Medea had appealed for protection, kept Alcinous awake that night by complaining of the ill-treatment to which fathers too often subject their errant daughters: for instance, of Nycteus’s cruelty to Antiope, and of Acrisius’s to Danaë. ‘Even now,’ she said, ‘that poor princess Metope languishes in an Epeirot dungeon, at the orders of her ogreish father, King Echetus! She has been blinded with brazen spikes, and set to grind iron barley-corns in a heavy quern: “When they are flour, I will restore your sight,” he taunts the poor girl. Aeëtes is capable of treating this charming Medea with equal barbarity, if you give him the chance.’1
b. Arete finally prevailed upon Alcinous to tell her what judgement he would deliver next morning, namely: ‘If Medea is still a virgin, she shall return to Colchis; if not, she is at liberty to stay with Jason.’ Leaving him sound asleep, Arete sent her herald to warn Jason what he must expect; and he married Medea without delay in the Cave of Macris, the daughter of Aristaeus and sometime Dionysus’s nurse. The Argonauts celebrated the wedding with a sumptuous banquet and spread the golden fleece over the bridal couch. Judgement was duly delivered in the morning, Jason claimed Medea as his wife, and the Colchians could neither implement Aeëtes’s orders nor, for fear of his wrath, return home. Some therefore settled in Corcyra, and others occupied those Illyrian islands, not far from Circe’s Aeaea, which are now called the Apsyrtides; and afterwards built the city of Pola on the Istrian mainland.2
c. When, a year or two later, Aeëtes heard of these happenings, he nearly died of rage and sent a herald to Greece demanding the person of Medea and requital for the injuries done him; but was informed that no requital had yet been made for Io’s abduction by men of Aeëtes’s race (though the truth was that she fled because a gadfly pursued her) and none should therefore be given for the voluntary departure of Medea.3
d. Jason now needed only to double Cape Malea, and return with the fleece to Iolcus. He cruised in safety past the Islands of the Sirens, where the ravishing strains of these bird-women were countered by the even lovelier strains of Orpheus’s lyre. Butes alone sprang overboard in an attempt to swim ashore, but Aphrodite rescued him; she took him to Mount Eryx by way of Lilybaeum, and there made him her lover. Some say that the Sirens, who had already lost their wings as a result of an unsuccessful singing contest with the Muses, sponsored by Hera, committed suicide because of their failure to outcharm Orpheus; yet they were still on their island when Odysseus came by a generation later.4
e. The Argonauts then sailed in fine weather along the coast of Eastern Sicily, where they watched the matchless white herds of Helius grazing on the shore, but refrained from stealing any of them.5 Suddenly they were struck by a frightful North Wind which, in nine days’ time, drove them to the uttermost parts of Libya; there, an enormous wave swept the Argo over the perilous rocks which line the coast and retreated, leaving her high and dry a mile or more inland. A lifeless desert stretched as far as the eye could see, and the Argonauts had already prepared themselves for death, when the Triple-goddess Libya, clad in goat skins, appeared to Jason in a dream and gave him reassurance. At this, they took heart, and [setting the Argo on rollers] moved her by the force of their shoulders to the salt Lake Tritonis, which lay several miles off, a task that occupied twelve days. All would have died of thirst, but for a spring which Heracles, on his way to fetch the golden apples of the Hesperides, had recently caused to gush from the ground.6
f. Canthus was now killed by Caphaurus, a Garamantian shepherd whose flocks he was driving off, but his comrades avenged him.7 And hardly had the two corpses been buried than Mopsus trod upon a Libyan serpent which bit him in the heel; a thick mist spread over his eyes, his hair fell out, and he died in agony. The Argonauts, after giving him a hero’s burial, once more began to despair, being unable to find any outlet to the Lake.8
g. Jason, however, before he embarked on this voyage, had consulted the Pythoness at Delphi who gave him two massive brazen tripods, with one of which Orpheus now advised him to propitiate the deities of the land. When he did so, the god Triton appeared and took up the tripod without so much as a word of thanks, but Euphemus barred his way and asked him politely: ‘Pray, my lord, will you kindly direct us to the Mediterranean Sea?’ For answer, Triton merely pointed towards the Tacapae river but, as an afterthought, handed him a clod of earth, which gave his descendants sovereignty over Libya to this day. Euphemus acknowledged the gift with the sacrifice of a sheep, and Triton consented to draw the Argo along by her keel, until once more she entered the Mediterranean Sea, predicting, as he went, that when the descendant of a certain Argonaut should seize and carry off the brazen tripod from his temple, a hundred Greek cities would rise around Lake Tritonis. The Libyan troglodytes, overhearing these words, at once hid the tripod in the sand; and the prophecy has not yet been fulfilled.9
h. Heading northward, the Argonauts reached Crete, where they were prevented from landing by Talos the bronze sentinel, a creation of Hephaestus, who pelted the Argo with rocks, as was his custom. Medea called sweetly to thi
s monster, promising to make him immortal if he drank a certain magic potion; but it was a sleeping draught and, while he slept, she removed the bronze nail which stoppered the single vein running from his neck to his ankles. Out rushed the divine ichor, a colourless liquid serving him for blood, and he died. Some, however, say that, bewitched by Medea’s eyes, Talos staggered about, grazed his heel against a rock, and bled to death. Others, that Poeas shot him in the heel with an arrow.10
i. On the following night, the Argo was caught in a storm from the south, but Jason invoked Apollo, who sent a flash of light, revealing to starboard the island of Anaphe, one of the Sporades, where Ancaeus managed to beach the ship. In gratitude, Jason raised an altar to Apollo; and Medea’s twelve Phaeacian bond-maidens, given her by Queen Arete, laughed merrily when, for lack of a victim, he and his comrades poured water libations upon the burning brands of the sacrifice. The Argonauts taunted them in reply, and tussled amorously with them – a custom which survives to this day at the Autumn Festival of Anaphe.
j. Sailing to Aegina, they held a contest: as to who could first draw a pitcher of water and carry it back to the ship; a race still run by the Aeginetans. From Aegina it was a simple voyage to Iolcus, such as scores of ships make every year, and they made it in fair weather without danger.11
k. Some minstrels arrange these events in a different order: they say that the Argonauts repopulated Lemnos on the homeward journey, not as they were sailing for Colchis;12 others, that their visit to Libya took place before the voyage to Aea began, when Jason went in the Argo to consult the Delphic Oracle and was driven off his course by a sudden storm.13 Others again hold that they cruised down the western coast of Italy and named a harbour in the island of Elba, where they landed, ‘Argous’ after the Argo, and that when they scraped off their sweat on the beach, it turned into pebbles of variegated forms. Further, that they founded the temple of Argive Hera at Leucania; that, like Odysseus, they sailed between Scylla and Charybdis; and that Thetis with her Nereids guided them past the flame-spouting Planctae, or Wandering Rocks, which are now firmly anchored to the sea-bed.14