The Argonauts Assemble

AFTER the death of King Cretheus the Aeolian, Pelias, son of Poseidon, already an old man, seized the Iolcan throne from his half-brother Aeson, the rightful heir. An oracle presently warning him that he would be killed by a descendant of Aeolus, Pelias put to death every prominent Aeolian he dared lay hands upon, except Aeson, whom he spared for his mother Tyro’s sake, but kept a prisoner in the palace; forcing him to renounce his inheritance.
b. Now, Aeson had married Polymele, also known as Amphinome, Perimede, Alcimede, Polymede, Polypheme, Scarphe, or Arne, who bore him one son, by name Diomedes. Pelias would have destroyed the child without mercy, had not Polymele summoned her kinswomen to weep over him, as though he were still-born, and then smuggled him out of the city to Mount Pelion; where Cheiron the Centaur reared him, as he did before, or afterwards, with Asclepius, Achilles, Aeneas, and other famous heroes.

c. A second oracle warned Pelias to beware a one-sandalled man and when, one day on the seashore, a group of his princely allies joined him in a solemn sacrifice to Poseidon, his eye fell upon a tall, long-haired Magnesian youth, dressed in a close-fitting leather tunic and a leopard-skin. He was armed with two broad-bladed spears, and wore only one sandal.
d. The other sandal he had lost in the muddy river Anaurus-which some miscall the Evenus, or Enipeus-by the contrivance of a crone who, standing on the farther bank, begged passers-by to carry her across. None took pity on her, until this young stranger courteously offered her his broad back; but he found himself staggering under the weight, since she was none other than the goddess Hera in disguise. Pelias had vexed Hera by withholding her customary sacrifices, and she was determined to punish him for this neglect.
e. When, therefore, Pelias asked the stranger roughly: ‘Who are you, and what is your father’s name?’, he replied that Cheiron, his foster-father, called him Jason, though he had formerly been known as Diomedes, son of Aeson. Pelias glared at him balefully.
’What would you do,’ he enquired suddenly, ‘if an oracle announced that one of your fellow-citizens were destined to kill you?’
‘I should send him to fetch the golden ram’s fleece from Colchis,’ Jason replied, not knowing that Hera had placed those words in his mouth. ‘And, pray, whom have I the honour of addressing?’
f. When Pelias revealed his identity, Jason was unabashed. He boldly claimed the throne usurped by Pelias, though not the flocks and herds which had gone with it; and since  he was strongly supported by his uncle Pheres, king of Pherae, and Amathaon, king of Pylus, who had come to take part in the sacrifice, Pelias feared to deny him his birthright. ‘But first,’ he insisted, ‘I require you to free our beloved country from a curse!’
g. Jason then learned that Pelias was being haunted by the ghost of Phrixus, who had fled from Orchomenus a generation before, riding on the back of a divine ram, to avoid being sacrificed. He took refuge in Colchis where, on his death, he was denied proper burial; and, according to the Delphic Oracle, the land of Iolcus, where many of Jason’s Minyan relatives were settled, would never prosper unless his ghost were brought home in a ship, together with the golden ram’s fleece. The fleece now hung from a tree in the grove of Colchian Ares, guarded night and day by an unsleeping dragon. Once this pious feat had been accomplished, Pelias declared, he would gladly resign the kingship, which was becoming burdensome for a man of his advanced years.
h. Jason could not deny Pelias this service, and therefore sent heralds to every court of Greece, calling for volunteers who would sail with him. He also prevailed upon Argus the Thespian to build him a fifty-oared ship; and this was done at Pagasae, with seasoned timber from Mount Pelion; after which Athene herself fitted an oracular beam into the Argo’s prow, cut from her father Zeus’s oak at Dodona.
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
Cotonus 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 Ismon 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 Oileus the Locrian, father of Ajax
Orpheus, the Thracian poet
Palaemon, son of Hephaestus, an Aetolian Peleus the Myrmidon
Peneleos, son of Hippalcimus, the Boeotian
Peridymenus 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.
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.

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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), 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. 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 BC.), 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 horseherds, 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; also to win a horn ofp!enty, 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), 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 sisters, 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, 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).
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), 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, 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), son of Phrixus, whom Apollonius Rhodius brings prominently into the story, 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 matrilineal 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 island 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’s land, the Clashing Rocks, Scylla and Charybdis, all lie close to Sicily, past which the Argo was then blown by the violent north- easter wind. ‘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. 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 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. Now, the Minyans’ supposed objective on their Adriatic voyage was not a golden, but, according to Simonides (quoted by scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius) 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 sheep-skin mask is killed and brought to life again by his companions, who are dressed in white fleeces (Annals of the British School at Athens). According to Dicearchus, 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-and that, according to Aristotle (Mirabilia), 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 Aeëtes’s father Helius lay in Colchis, 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, 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 BC.
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; Scholiast on Pindar’s Pythian Odes), a device also adopted during the Peloponnesian War by the Plataeans, to gain better purchase in the mud (Thucydides). 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 their 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.