i. Many different muster-rolls of the Argonauts – as Jason’s companions are called – have been compiled at various times; but the following names are those given by the most trustworthy authorities:
Acastus, son of King Pelias
Actor, son of Deion the Phocian
Admetus, prince of Pherae
Amphiaraus, the Argive seer
Great Ancaeus of Tegea, son of Poseidon
Little Ancaeus, the Lelegian of Samos
Argus the Thespian, builder of the Argo
Ascalaphus the Orchomenan, son of Ares
Asterius, son of Cometes, a Pelopian
Atalanta of Calydon, the virgin huntress
Augeias, son of King Phorbas of Elis
Butes of Athens, the bee-master
Caeneus the Lapith, who had once been a woman
Calais, the winged son of Boreas
Canthus the Euboean
Castor, the Spartan wrestler, one of the Dioscuri
Cepheus, son of Aleus the Arcadian
Coronus the Lapith, of Gyrton in Thessaly
Echion, son of Hermes, the herald
Erginus of Miletus
Euphemus of Taenarum, the swimmer
Euryalus, son of Mecisteus, one of the Epigoni
Eurydamas the Dolopian, from Lake Xynias
Heracles of Tiryns, the strongest man who ever lived, now a god
Hylas the Dryopian, squire to Heracles
Idas, son of Aphareus of Messene
Idmon the Argive, Apollo’s son
Iphicles, son of Thestius the Aetolian
Iphitus, brother of King Eurystheus of Mycenae
Jason, the captain of the expedition
Laertes, son of Acrisius the Argive
Lynceus, the look-out man, brother to Idas
Melampus of Pylus, son of Poseidon
Meleager of Calydon
Mopsus the Lapith
Nauplius the Argive, son of Poseidon, a noted navigator
Oïleus the Locrian, father of Ajax
Orpheus, the Thracian poet
Palaemon, son of Hephaestus, an Aetolian
Peleus the Myrmidon
Peneleos, son of Hippalcimus, the Boeotian
Periclymenus of Pylus, the shape-shifting son of Poseidon
Phalerus, the Athenian archer
Phanus, the Cretan son of Dionysus
Poeas, son of Thaumacus the Magnesian
Polydeuces, the Spartan boxer, one of the Dioscuri
Polyphemus, son of Elatus, the Arcadian
Staphylus, brother of Phanus
Tiphys, the helmsman, of Boeotian Siphae
Zetes, brother of Calais
– and never before or since was so gallant a ship’s company gathered together.7
j. The Argonauts are often known as Minyans, because they brought back the ghost of Phrixus, grandson of Minyas, and the fleece of his ram; and because many of them, including Jason himself, sprang from the blood of Minyas’s daughters. This Minyas, a son of Chryses, had migrated from Thessaly to Orchomenus in Boeotia, where he founded a kingdom, and was the first king ever to build a treasury.8
1. Scholiast on Homer’s Odyssey xii. 70; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 50. 1; Apollonius Rhodius: i. 232; Apollodorus: i. 9. 16; Scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius: i. 45; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 872.
2. Pindar: Pythian Odes iv. 198 ff. and Nemean Odes iii. 94 ff.; Homer: Iliad xvi. 143.
3. Apollonius Rhodius: i. 7; Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Pindar: Pythian Odes iv. 128 ff.
4. Apollonius Rhodius: i. 8–17; Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Pindar: loc. cit.; Hyginus: Fabula 13; Valerius Flaccus: i. 84.
5. Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Pindar: loc. cit.; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 40; Scholiast on Homer’s Odyssey xii. 70; Hesiod: Theogony 992 ff.
6. Pindar: loc. cit.; Valerius Flaccus: i. 39; Apollodorus: loc. cit.
7. Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Pindar: loc. cit.; Hyginus: Fabulae 12 and 14–23; Apollonius Rhodius: i. 20; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 40–9; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 175; Ovid: Metamorphoses vii. 1 ff.; Valerius Flaccus: Argonautica i. passim.
8. Apollonius Rhodius: i. 229; Pausanias: ix. 36. 3.
1. In Homer’s day, a ballad cycle about the Argo’s voyage to the land of Aeëtes (‘mighty’) was ‘on everyone’s lips’ (Odyssey xii. 40), and he places the Planctae – through which she had passed even before Odysseus did – near the Islands of the Sirens, and not far from Scylla and Charybdis. All these perils occur in the fuller accounts of the Argo’s return from Colchis.
2. According to Hesiod, Jason, son of Aeson, after accomplishing many grievous tasks imposed by Pelias, married Aeëtes’s daughter who came with him to Iolcus, where ‘she was subject to him’ and bore his son Medeius, whom Cheiron educated. But Hesiod seems to have been misinformed: in heroic times no princess was brought to her husband’s home – he came to hers (see 137.4 and 160.3). Thus Jason either married Aeëtes’s daughter and settled at his court, or else he married Pelias’s daughter and settled at Iolcus. Eumelus (eighth century) reports that, when Corinthus died without issue, Medea successfully claimed the vacant throne of Corinth, being a daughter of Aeëtes who, not content with his heritage, had emigrated thence to Colchis; and that Jason, her husband, thereupon became king.
3. Neither Colchis, nor its capital of Aea, are mentioned in these early accounts, which describe Aeëtes as the son of Helius, and the brother of Aeaean Circe. Nor must it be supposed that the story known to Homer had much in common with the one told by Apollodorus and Apollonius Rhodius; the course, even, of the Argo’s outward voyage, let alone her homeward one, was not yet fixed by Herodotus’s time – for Pindar, in his Fourth Pythian Ode (462 B.C.), had presented a version very different from his.
4. The myth of Pelias and Diomedes – Jason’s original name – seems to have been about a prince exposed on a mountain, reared by horse-herds, and set seemingly impossible tasks by the king of a neighbouring city, not necessarily a usurper: such as the yoking of fire-breathing bulls, and the winning of a treasure guarded by a sea-monster–Jason, half-dead in the sea-monster’s maw, is the subject of Etruscan works of art. His reward will have been to marry the royal heiress. Similar myths are common in Celtic mythology – witness the labours imposed upon Kilhwych, the Mabinogion hero, when he wished to marry the sorceress Olwen – and apparently refer to ritual tests of a king’s courage before his coronation.
5. It is indeed from the Tale of Kilhwych and Olwen, and from the similar Tale of Peredur Son of Evrawc, also in the Mabinogion, that the most plausible guesses can be made at the nature of Diomedes’s tasks. Kilhwych, falling in love with Olwen, was ordered by her father to yoke a yellow and a brindled bull, to clear a hill of thorns and scrub, sow this with corn, and then harvest the grain in a single day (see 127. 1 and 152. 3); also to win a horn of plenty, and a magic Irish cauldron. Peredur, falling in love with an unknown maiden, had to kill a water-monster, called the Avanc, in a lake near the Mound of Mourning – Aeaea means ‘mourning’. On condition that he swore faith with her, she gave him a magic stone, which enabled him to defeat the Avanc, and win ‘all the gold a man might desire’. The maiden proved to be the Empress of Cristinobyl, a sorceress, who lived in great style ‘towards India’; and Peredur remained her lover for fourteen years. Since the only other Welsh hero to defeat an Avanc was Hu Gadarn the Mighty, ancestor of the Cymry, who by yoking two bulls to the monster, dragged it out of the Conwy River (Welsh Triads iii. 97), it seems likely that Jason also hauled his monster from the water, with the help of his fire-breathing team.
6. The Irish cauldron fetched by Kilhwych was apparently the one mentioned in the Tale of Peredur: a cauldron of regeneration, like that subsequently used by Medea – a giant had found it at the bottom of an Irish lake. Diomedes may have been required to fetch a similar one for Pelias. The scene of his labours will have been some ungeographical country ‘towards the rising sun’. No cornucopia is mentioned in the Argonaut legend, but Medea, for no clear reason, rejuvenates the nymph Macris and her siste
rs, formerly the nurses of Dionysus, when she meets them on Drepane, or Corcyra. Since Dionysus had much in common with the infant Zeus, whose nurse, the goat Amaltheia, provided the original cornucopia (see 7. b), Medea may have helped Diomedes to win another cornucopia from the nymphs by lending them her services. Heracles’s Labours (like those of Theseus and Orion) are best understood as marriage tasks and included ‘the breaking of the horns of both bulls’ (the Cretan and the Acheloan – see 134. 6).
7. This marriage-task myth, one version of which seems to have been current at Iolcus, with Pelias as villain, and another at Corinth, with Corinthus as villain, evidently became linked to the semi-historical legend of a Minyan sea expedition sent out from Iolcus by the Orchomenans. Orchomenus belonged to the ancient amphictyony, or league, of Calaureia (Strabo: viii. 6. 14), presided over by the Aeolian god Poseidon which included six seaside states of Argos and Attica; it was the only inland city of the seven and strategically placed between the Gulf of Corinth and the Thessalian Gulf. Its people, like Hesiod’s Boeotians, may have been farmers in the winter and sailors in the summer.
8. The supposed object of the expedition was to recover a sacred fleece, which had been carried away ‘to the land of Aeëtes’ by King Phrixus, a grandson of Minyas, when about to be sacrificed on Mount Laphystium (see 70. d), and to escort Phrixus’s ghost home to Orchomenus. Its leader will have been a Minyan – which Diomedes son of Aeson was not – perhaps Cytisorus (Herodotus: vii. 197), son of Phrixus, whom Apollonius Rhodius brings prominently into the story (see 151. f and 152. b), and who won the surname Jason (‘healer’) at Orchomenus when he checked the drought and plague caused by Phrixus’s escape. Nevertheless, Diomedes was a Minyan on his mother’s side; and descent is likely to have been matrilinear both at Orchomenus and Pelasgian Iolcus.
9. In this Minyan legend, the land of Aeëtes cannot have lain at the other end of the Black Sea; all the early evidence points to the head of the Adriatic. The Argonauts are believed to have navigated the river Po, near the mouth of which, across the Gulf, lay Circe’s Island of Aeaea, now called Lussin; and to have been trapped by Aeëtes’s Colchians at the mouth of the Ister – not the Danube but, as Diodorus Siculus suggests, the small river Istrus, which gives Istria its name. Medea then killed her brother Apsyrtus, who was buried in the neighbouring Apsyrtides; and when she and Jason took refuge with Alcinous, King of Drepane (Corcyra), a few days’ sail to the southward, the Colchians, cheated of their vengeance, feared to incur Aeëtes’s anger by returning empty-handed and therefore built the city of Pola on the Istrian mainland. Moreover, Siren-land, the Clashing Rocks, Scylla and Charybdis, all lie close to Sicily, past which the Argo was then blown by the violent north-easter.
‘Colchis’ may, in fact, be an error for ‘Colicaria’ on the Lower Po, not far from Mantua, apparently a station on the Amber Route; since Helius’s daughters, who wept amber tears, are brought into the story as soon as the Argo enters the Po (see 42. d). Amber was sacred to the Sun, and Electra (‘amber’), the island at which the Argo is said to have touched, will hardly have been Samothrace, as the scholiasts believe; but ‘the land of Aeëtes’, a trading post at the terminus of the Amber Route – perhaps Corinthian, because Aeëtes had brought his Sun cult from Corinth, but perhaps Pelasgian, because according to Dionysius’s Description of the Earth (i. 18) a Pelasgian colony, originating from Dodona, once maintained a powerful fleet at one of the mouths of the Po.
10. To the ungeographical myth of Diomedes, now combined with the legend of a Minyan voyage to the land of Aeëtes, a third element was added: the tradition of an early piratical raid along the southern coast of the Black Sea, made at the orders of another Minyan king. The sixth city of Troy, by its command of the Hellespont, enjoyed a monopoly of the Black Sea trade, which this raid will have been planned to challenge (see 137. 1). Now, the Minyans’ supposed objective on their Adriatic voyage was not a golden, but, according to Simonides (quoted by scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius: iv. 77) a purple, fleece which the First Vatican Mythographer describes as that ‘in which Zeus used to ascend to Heaven’. In other words, it was a black fleece worn in a royal rain-making rite, like the one still performed every May Day on the summit of Mount Pelion: where an old man in a black sheepskin mask is killed and brought to life again by his companions, who are dressed in white fleeces (Annals of the British School at Athens xvi. 244–9, 1909–16). According to Dicearchus (ii. 8), this rite was performed in Classical times under the auspices of Zeus Actaeus, or Acraeus (‘of the summit’). Originally the man in the black sheepskin mask will have been the king, Zeus’s representative, who was sacrificed at the close of his reign. The use of the same ceremony on Mount Pelion as on Mount Laphystium will account for the combining of the two Iolcan traditions, namely the myth of Diomedes and the legend of the Black Sea raid, with the tradition of a Minyan voyage to undo the mischief caused by Phrixus.
11. Yet the Minyans’ commission will hardly have been to bring back the lost Laphystian fleece, which was easily replaced: they are far more likely to have gone in search of amber, with which to propitiate the injured deity, the Mountain-goddess. It should be remembered that the Minyans held ‘Sandy Pylus’ on the western coast of the Peloponnese – captured from the Lelegians by Neleus with the help of Iolcan Pelasgians (see 94. c) – and that, according to Aristotle (Mirabilia 82), the Pylians brought amber from the mouth of the Po. On the site of this Pylus (now the village of Kakovatos) huge quantities of amber have recently been unearthed.
12. On the easterly voyage this fleece became ‘golden’, because Diomedes’s feat of winning the sea-monster treasure had to be included; and because, as Strabo points out, the Argonauts who broke into the Black Sea went in search of alluvial gold from the Colchian Phasis (now the Rion), collected by the natives in fleeces laid on the river bed. Nor was it only the confusion of Colchis with Colicaria, of Aea (‘earth’) with Aeaea (‘wailing’), and of the Pelionian black fleece with the Laphystian, that made these different traditions coalesce. The dawn palace of Aeëes’s father Helius lay in Colchis (see 42. a), the most easterly country known to Homer; and Jasonica, shrines of Heracles the Healer, were reported from the Eastern Gulf of the Black Sea, where the Aeolians had established trading posts. According to some authorities, Heracles led the Black Sea expedition. Moreover, since Homer had mentioned Jason only as the father of Euneus, who provided the Greeks with wine during the siege of Troy (see 162. i), and since Lemnos lay east of Thessaly, the Argo was also thought to have headed east. The Wandering, or Clashing, Rocks, which Homer placed in Sicilian waters, have thus been transferred to the Bosphorus.
13. Every city needed a representative Argonaut to justify its trading rights in the Black Sea, and travelling minstrels were willing enough to introduce another name or two into this composite ballad cycle. Several nominal rolls of Argonauts therefore survive, all irreconcilable, but for the most part based on the theory that they used a fifty-oared vessel – not, indeed, an impossibility in Mycenaean times; Tzetzes alone gives a hundred names. Yet not even the most hardened sceptic seems to have doubted that the legend was in the main historical, or that the voyage took place before the Trojan War, sometime in the thirteenth century B.C.
14. Jason’s single sandal proved him to be a fighting man. Aetolian warriors were famous for their habit of campaigning with only the left foot shod (Macrobius: v. 18–21; Scholiast on Pindar’s Pythian Odes iv. 133), a device also adopted during the Peloponnesian War by the Plataeans, to gain better purchase in the mud (Thucydides: iii. 22). Why the foot on the shield side, rather than the weapon side, remained shod, may have been because it was advanced in a hand-to-hand struggle, and could be used for kicking an opponent in the groin. Thus the left was the hostile foot, and never set on the threshold of a friend’s house; the tradition survives in modern Europe, where soldiers invariably march off to war with the left foot foremost.
15. Hera’s quarrel with Pelias, over the withholding of her sacrifice, suggests tension
between a Poseidon-worshipping Achaean dynasty at Iolcus and the goddess-worshipping Aeolo-Magnesians, their subjects.
149
THE LEMNIAN WOMEN AND KING CYZICUS
HERACLES, after capturing the Erymanthian Boar, appeared suddenly at Pagasae, and was invited by a unanimous vote to captain the Argo; but generously agreed to serve under Jason who, though a novice, had planned and proclaimed the expedition. Accordingly, when the ship had been launched, and lots drawn for the benches, two oarsmen to each bench, it was Jason who sacrificed a yoke of oxen to Apollo of Embarkations. As the smoke of his sacrifice rose propitiously to heaven in dark, swirling columns, the Argonauts sat down to their farewell banquet, at which Orpheus with his lyre appeased certain drunken brawls. Sailing thence by the first light of dawn, they shaped a course for Lemnos.1
b. About a year before this, the Lemnian men had quarrelled with their wives, complaining that they stank, and made concubines of Thracian girls captured on raids. In revenge, the Lemnian women murdered them all without pity, old and young alike, except King Thoas, whose life his daughter Hypsipyle secretly spared, setting him adrift in an oarless boat. Now, when the Argo hove in sight and the Lemnian women mistook her for an enemy ship from Thrace, they donned their dead husbands’ armour and ran boldly shoreward, to repel the threatened attack. The eloquent Echion, however, landing staff in hand as Jason’s herald, soon set their minds at rest; and Hysipyle called a council at which she proposed to send a gift of food and wine to the Argonauts, but not to admit them into her city of Myrine, for fear of being charged with the massacre. Polyxo, Hypsipyle’s aged nurse, then rose to plead that, without men, the Lemnian race must presently become extinct. ‘The wisest course’, she said, ‘would be to offer yourselves in love to those well-born adventurers, and thus not only place our island under strong protection, but breed a new and stalwart stock.’
c. This disinterested advice was loudly acclaimed, and the Argonauts were welcomed to Myrine. Hypsipyle did not, of course, tell Jason the whole truth but, stammering and blushing, explained that after much ill-treatment at the hands of their husbands, her companions had risen in arms and forced them to emigrate. The vacant throne of Lemnos, she said, was now his for the asking. Jason, although gratefully accepting her offer, declared that before settling in fertile Lemnos he must complete his quest of the Golden Fleece. Nevertheless, Hypsipyle soon persuaded the Argonauts to postpone their departure; for each adventurer was surrounded by numerous young women, all itching to bed with him.2 Hypsipyle claimed Jason for herself, and royally she entertained him; it was then that he begot Euneus, and his twin Nebrophonus, whom some call Deiphilus, or Thoas the Younger. Euneus eventually became king of Lemnos and supplied the Greeks with wine during the Trojan War.