Apsyrtus had been lured aboard the Argo by his elder sister, Medea, who then cold-bloodedly killed him, chopped his body to pieces and threw them in the sea, knowing that the shock and horror of the act would stop Aeetes from pursuing them. Her plan worked—Aeetes gave up the chase. But as he turned back, he cursed that his daughter would never find happiness with the man for whom she had betrayed her father and killed her brother.
The Argo arrived in Greece after a long and complex journey. Guided by Medea, instead of going through the Bosphorus, the ship sailed via a route known only to witches.
Grateful for Medea’s help and moved by her unconditional love, Jason agreed to marry her, thus returning to Greece, not just with the Fleece, but also with a witch for a wife.
In other versions of the tale, Apsyrtus pursues his sister and Jason on a ship and is killed in a fight with Jason. Atlanta is wounded in this fight and healed by Medea.
Having murdered her brother, Medea goes to her aunt, the witch Circe, who performs rituals to cleanse her of the violent act.
Medea
On returning to Iolcus, Jason gave Pelias the Golden Fleece, which the king accepted grudgingly.
The people of the city were fascinated by Medea. They watched how, with her magical herbs, she cured the sick, and made beautiful the ugly.
Pelias’s daughters saw how she cut up an old and sick goat, threw the pieces of its flesh in a cauldron full of herbs and brought it back to life as a young and healthy lamb. They watched her kill and restore to life Jason’s old father, Aeson.
‘I can do the same for your father,’ she whispered in their ears.
The daughters believed the witch and while their old father slept, they murdered him, cut his body into many pieces and threw them in Medea’s cauldron of herbs. Only this time, the meat cooked itself with the herbs and there was no sign of resurrection. Thus did Medea fool the girls and kill Pelias, the man who had sent her husband on a dangerous mission.
Medea had hoped that by killing Pelias she would make her husband king. But the people of Iolcus were not so forgiving. They drove the witch and her husband out of the city, and the couple took refuge in the city of Corinth.
In the medieval mythology of Nath yogis, the wandering hermits of India, there is the story of how Goraksha-nath uses his yogic powers to kill and bring back to life the son of his guru Matsyendra-nath by the Amazon queen Pramila. He does this to prove that life and death are delusions and to liberate his guru from the sexual snare of his wife.
In Hesiod’s Theogony, the marriage of Jason and Medea is listed as one of the marriages between mortals and immortals, suggesting that Medea is divine.
Medea is often linked to Hecate, the goddess of magic.
Medea embodies a woman who is both powerful and frightening. She is representative of the exotic Eastern woman for the Greeks who preferred their women more submissive.
Creusa
Medea was deliriously happy with Jason in Corinth, where she gave birth to two children. Jason, however, was not happy being a householder when he could have been a king. He felt frustrated and angry, until the king of Corinth made a proposal: ‘Marry my daughter, Creusa, and rule this land with her as your queen.’
Jason wondered what would happen to Medea, but the king told him that no one in Greece considered the eastern witch his wife; she could stay in Corinth as his concubine. This thought appealed to Jason but when he told Medea she was heartbroken. But witch that she was, she cold-bloodedly plotted her revenge.
She gifted Creusa a beautiful robe to wear on her wedding night. As soon as Jason’s new bride wore it she burst into flames. A horrified Jason and the king of Corinth rushed to Medea’s chambers to seize and punish her, only to find that she had killed her own children, and was flying away towards the sun on a chariot drawn by flying serpents.
An angry Jason chased after her, but he could only make it as far as the sea while Medea flew beyond the horizon. Frustrated, angry and miserable, a homeless, wifeless, childless Jason walked along the beach till he came upon the ruins of the Argo, decaying beside the sea. Jason rested in its shadow, recollecting his great adventures, and his tryst with Medea. As melancholy consumed him, the prow of the old rotting ship broke and fell on him, crushing him to death.
Like Jason, Ram of the Hindu epic Ramayana abandons his wife. But while Ram does it to uphold the family reputation, Jason does it for personal ambition. Ram never remarries while it is Jason’s desire to remarry that sparks the crisis. Both Jason and Ram die heartbroken: Jason for betraying his wife, and Ram for being unable to hold on to her.
In older versions of the story, the Corinthians kill Medea’s children after her escape. The wilful killing of her children seems to be the invention of the playwright Euripides in the fifth century BCE.
In some tales, after leaving Corinth, Medea goes to Thebes, cures Heracles of his madness that made him kill Iphitus, and is given refuge until the residents drive her away, Heracles’ protests notwithstanding. She then takes refuge in Athens where she marries Aegeus. Unfortunately for her, Aegeus’s son Theseus comes back and claims the throne she hoped would go to her children. Thus rejected by the Greeks, she returns to Colchis.
Medea’s story makes us wonder about justice and revenge in an unjust society. It also reveals the tension and discomfort that follow powerful foreign women.
Eventually the Argo was turned by the Olympians into the constellation of Argo Navis found in the southern hemisphere. In the eighteenth century, this rather large constellation identified by the ancient Greeks was split into three: the keel, the deck and the sails.
Orpheus
Amongst the Argonauts who accompanied Jason to Colchis was Orpheus, the son of Apollo and a Muse. He could play the lyre and sing songs that could move rocks, and make animals weep and trees dance. After his return from Colchis, he fell in love with and married Eurydice.
Orpheus and Eurydice lived together happily until a satyr tried to rape Eurydice and she died during the attack. Heartbroken, Orpheus sang tragic songs that filled the Olympians with such melancholy that they begged him to stop. They told him to go to the land of the dead and convince Hades to let Eurydice return to the land of the living.
Moved by his music, Hades granted Orpheus’s wish, but had one condition: ‘Her ghost will follow you but you must not turn back to look upon it until you reach the land of the living.’
Orpheus agreed but in his anxiety, just before they reached the land of the living, he turned around to check if Eurydice was truly following him or if Hades was fooling him. Instantly, the ghost of Eurydice disappeared, returning to the land of the dead, and Orpheus came back alone.
Orpheus lost all interest in love after this. The Maenads, worshippers of Dionysus, invited him to join them, but he refused. Angry that he preferred music and men to them, they attacked him with sticks and stones, but the sticks and stones, enchanted by his music, refused to hurt him. So the women tore at him with their bare hands and ripped him to shreds. His head floated downstream, singing songs of his beloved Eurydice.
The theme of not looking back is found in other mythologies as well: the Biblical story of Lot’s wife turning back to see the burning Sodom and thus turning into a pillar of salt, and the Odia folk tale of Sakshi Gopal where Krishna turns into stone when a young devotee turns around to check if Krishna, who is supposed to act as witness in a case against him, is still following him.
Orphism believed in the divinity and immortality of the soul and the mortality of the flesh that had to suffer the material world. It promoted asceticism and is said to have been inspired by Indic monastic traditions such as Jainism that possibly reached Greece 2500 years ago. This belief in rebirth, known as metempsychosis, was very different from traditional Greek beliefs. In time it came to be closely associated with Dionysian mysteries, for Orpheus, like Dionysus, did encounter the dead and come back to the land of the living.
According to the Greek poet Phanocles, who lived in the third
century BCE, Orpheus joined the Argonauts as he was in love with Calais, the son of the wind god Boreas.
The River Helicon sank underground when the women who had killed Orpheus tried to wash their bloodstained hands in its waters.
Orpheus’s lyre was turned into a constellation.
Bellerophon
Like Orpheus and Jason, most Argonauts lived unhappy lives on their return, perhaps suffering on account of Medea’s rage. So it was with Bellerophon.
Soon after his return, Bellerophon accidentally killed his brother and so turned to Proteus, king of Tiryns, to cleanse him of the crime. Proteus did so and invited the Argonaut to stay in his palace and tell him tales of his adventures.
Unfortunately, the king’s wife fell in love with Bellerophon and invited him to her bed. When Bellerophon refused, she accused him of rape. Proteus could not hurt the man who was a guest in his house, so he sent Bellerophon to his father-in-law, King Iobates, with a sealed letter containing orders to kill him.
Iobates put aside the letter and invited Bellerophon to dine with him and tell him tales of the Argonaut expedition. When he opened the sealed letter nine days later he was shocked. He too could not kill a guest as per the laws of hospitality. But he came up with a clever plan. He challenged Bellerophon to overpower the Chimera, a fire-breathing monster with the head of a goat, the body of a lion and the tail of a serpent.
The oracles told Bellerophon that he would not be able to kill the Chimera until he rode above it on the flying horse, Pegasus. Athena gave Bellerophon a golden bridle with which he could capture Pegasus when he came to drink water from a mountain spring.
Riding Pegasus, Bellerophon travelled through the sky and reached the countryside ravaged by the Chimera. He threw a block of lead into the monster’s mouth. The fire that the Chimera breathed out melted the lead, and the monster choked to death. A triumphant Bellerophon returned to a hero’s welcome. Iobates gave him his daughter as his wife and half his kingdom.
But Bellerophon was consumed by pride and decided, after his many adventures, that, like Heracles, he too deserved a place with the gods. And so he rode towards Olympus on Pegasus, angering Zeus who hurled his thunderbolt, causing Pegasus to bolt; Bellerophon tumbled towards the earth. He spent the rest of his life as a blind, crippled hermit, shunning human contact: another Argonaut with a miserable end.
In Hindu mythology, the monstrous are not to be killed but to be venerated. The Odia Mahabharata speaks of how the archer Arjuna is at first frightened but then awestruck by Navagunjara, a creature that is a composite of nine beasts: rooster, peacock, lion, serpent, bull, tiger, deer, elephant and human. What in Greek mythology is chaotic becomes a mystery in Hindu mythology, an order beyond the comprehension of the human mind.
In Hindu mythology, the flying horse is called Ucchaishrava. It emerges from the ocean of milk. In Greek mythology, Pegasus is created from the blood of Medusa.
Taking care of guests is a key virtue in the eyes of Zeus. Those who treat guests poorly suffer his wrath.
Bellerophon’s desire to rise to Olympus is a case of hubris, excessive pride that makes a hero forget his place in the cosmos, forcing Zeus to act against him.
Chimera today means a fantastic idea that can be imagined but not realized.
In the Middle Ages, especially after the Rennaissance, it was Perseus, and not Bellerophon, who was depicted riding Pegasus and attacking the sea monster who threatens Andromeda. This image later metamorphosed into that of St George killing the dragon (the Devil) to save the damsel in distress (the Church). It symbolized the concept of Chaoskampf or the conquest of chaos by the colonizer, the scientist and the missionary in order to bring order to the newly discovered savage worlds of America, Africa and Asia.
Book Six
Helen
‘Did Zeus ever father a mortal daughter?’ asked the gymnosophist.
‘Only one, Helen, born when Zeus took the form of a swan and seduced Leda, princess of Sparta. But maybe her real mother was Nemesis, the goddess of retribution, who bore this child to show humans their place in the world. She caused the first war between Europe and Asia.’
‘A fight that you carry forward.’
‘I will end all fights. I will bring peace.’
The gymnosophist did not argue. He was more eager to hear the story of Helen and the war she sparked.
Tantalus
The story of Helen must begin with Tantalus, king of Lydia, in Asia, and great-grandfather of her husband, Menelaus. Tantalus was cursed by the Olympians. His son, Pelops, was cursed by a mortal. Pelops cursed Laius, of the House of Thebes, which resulted in the Theban tragedies. All these curses perhaps planted the seed of the terrible Trojan War.
Once, Zeus invited Tantalus to eat with the gods. But the mortal misbehaved and stole ambrosia to distribute it amongst humans. To make amends with the angry Olympians, Tantalus invited them to his house for a meal. But his desire for mischief got the better of him. He served the Olympians human flesh, that of his own son, Pelops, because he wanted to check if they were really gods: if they could distinguish human flesh from animal flesh and bring the dead back to life.
The gods smelt the food and turned away in disgust, unamused. Only Demeter ate what she was served, distracted as she was by the loss of her daughter Persephone in winter.
For his audacity, Tantalus was condemned and cast deep into Tartarus, where Zeus made him stand waist-deep in a freshwater lake, under a tree branch laden with succulent fruits. Every time a thirsty Tantalus bent down to drink the water, it receded from him. Every time a hungry Tantalus stretched his arms to eat the fruit, the branch withdrew from him. Thus he suffered eternal thirst and hunger for killing his own son, and worse, for daring to test the gods.
The gods resurrected Pelops, the son of Tantalus. His missing shoulder bone, eaten by Demeter, was replaced by one made of ivory.
The Buddha said, ‘Desire is the cause of suffering.’ Tantalus embodies desire that is never fulfilled, an eternal hunger. The word ‘tantalizing’ comes from Tantalus’s story. As long as we are tantalized, we are spellbound and heartbroken by the material world.
Tantalus’s punishment indicates the Greek disgust with the practice of cannibalism. Human sacrifice was why Zeus caused the flood that wiped out humanity. The story also shows the Olympian rage at being doubted, and not being recognized by mortals.
Lydia, like Troy, is located in Asia, in the region now known as Turkey.
Pelops
Pelops, son of Tantalus, grew up to be a handsome youth, and Poseidon claimed him as his lover, as Zeus had claimed Ganymede of Troy long ago.
However, as Zeus would not let any son of Tantalus into Olympus, Poseidon had to let the lad return home. As a sign of his love, the sea god gave Pelops horses that could run on water as well as on land.
Pelops learned that King Oenomaus of Pisa had organized a chariot race. The winner would marry the king’s beautiful daughter, Hippodamia, and inherit his throne; the losers would be beheaded. The contestants had to race Oenomaus himself, but it was an unfair race, for the king’s horses were a gift from the war god Ares and assured him victory. Oenomaus did not want his daughter to marry anyone because he himself was in love with her, and because it had been foretold that he would perish at the hands of his son-in-law.
When Pelops came to Pisa, he found the severed heads of the princess’s previous suitors hanging on the gate and suddenly became insecure, despite having the horses of Poseidon. But then Hippodamia fell in love with him as soon as she saw him and was eager to assure his victory. Together, the two hatched a plan: they spoke to the royal stable-keeper, Myrtilus, and offered him Hippodamia’s virginity if he helped Pelops win.
Myrtilus, a son of Hermes, who had always loved the princess secretly, could not believe his luck and agreed. He replaced the bronze pins in the wheels of the royal chariot with ones made of beeswax. As a result, the royal chariot fell apart in the middle of the race; Oenomaus fell to the ground, and his
head dashed against rocks by the roadside, causing his death.
On the day of their wedding, Myrtilus reminded Pelops and Hippodamia of their promise. In response, Pelops caught hold of Myrtilus and hurled him off a cliff.
As he was falling to his death, a betrayed Myrtilus invoked the Olympians and cursed Pelops that all his descendants would have unfaithful spouses. It was this curse that caused Helen to leave her husband, grandson of Pelops, and elope to Troy with Paris.
To purify himself from the pollution that followed the killings of Oenomaus and Myrtilus, and to honour the memory of the dead suitors of Hippodamia so cruelly killed by Oenomaus, Pelops revived the chariot games that had long ago been established by the Olympians to mark their victory over the Titans. These were the Olympic Games. After the re-establishment of the games, Pisa came to be known as Olympia, and the island on which it stood came to be known as Peloponnese, the island of Pelops.
Many Hindus take tales of Hindu mythology literally and so believe that ancient Indians could transplant human heads for animal ones. Likewise, if one takes Greek mythology literally, the story of a shoulder bone being created out of ivory to replace Pelops’s lost body part suggests a knowledge of implant surgery. In the tale of the Trojan War, victory eludes the Greeks until they fetch the bones of Pelops—probably this ivory implant—from Pisa.
The land controlled by Pisa was called Pisatis which included Olympia where the Olympic Games were held. Pelops renamed the old games as the ‘Olympic’ Games. Heracles introduced new sports like boxing and wrestling. Ancient written sources record the year 776 BC as the year when the Games began, or at least the year when records of Olympic victors began to be kept.