b. Meanwhile, at the council of war held in the backwater, Jason proposed going with Phrixus’s sons to the near-by city of Colchian Aea, where Aeëtes ruled, and demanding the fleece as a favour; only if this were denied would they resort to guile or force. All welcomed his suggestion, and Augeias, Aeëtes’s half-brother, joined the party. They approached Aea by way of Circe’s riverside cemetery, where male corpses wrapped in untanned ox-hides were exposed on the tops of willow-trees for birds to eat-the Colchians bury only female corpses. Aea shone splendidly down on them from a hill, sacred to Helius, Aeëtes’s father, who stabled his white horses there. Hephaestus had built the royal palace in gratitude for Helius’s rescue of him when overwhelmed by the Giants during their assault on Olympus.
c. King Aeëtes’s first wife, the Caucasian nymph Asterodeia, mother of Chalciope, Phrixus’s widow, and of Medea, Hecate’s witch-priestess, was dead some years before this; and his second wife, Eidyia, had now borne him a son, Apsyrtus.
d. As Jason and his companions approached the palace, they were met first by Chalciope, who was surprised to see Cytisorus and her other three sons returning so soon and, when she heard their story, showered thanks on Jason for his rescue of them. Next came Aeëtes, accompanied by Eidyia and showing great displeasure-for Laomedon had undertaken to prevent all Greeks from entering the Black Sea-and asked Aegeus, his favourite grandson, to explain the intrusion. Aegeus replied that Jason, to whom he and his brothers owed their lives, had come to fetch away the golden fleece in accordance with an oracle. Seeing that Aeëtes’s face wore a look of fury, he added at once: ‘In return for which favour, these noble Greeks will gladly subject the Sauromatians to your Majesty’s rule.’ Aeëtes gave a contemptuous laugh, then ordered Jason-and Augeias, whom he would not deign to acknowledge as his brother-to return whence they came, before he had their tongues cut out and their hands lopped off.
e. At this point, the princess Medea emerged from the palace, when Jason answered gently and courteously, Aeëtes, ashamed of himself, undertook to yield the fleece, though on seemingly impossible terms. Jason must yoke two fire-breathing brazen-hoofed bulls, creations of Hephaestus; plough the Field of Ares to extent of four plough gates; and then sow it with the serpent’s teeth given him by Athene, a few left over from Cadmus’s sowing at Thebes. Jason stood stupefied, wondering how to perform these unheard-of feats, but Eros aimed one of his arrows at Medea, and drove it into her heart, up to the feathers.
f. Chalciope, visiting Medea’s bedroom that evening, to help on behalf of Cytisorus and his brothers, found that she had fallen head over heels in love with Jason. When Chalciope offered herself to go-between, Medea eagerly undertook to help him yoke the breathing bulls and win the fleece; making it her sole condition that should sail back in the Argo as his wife.
g. Jason was summoned, and swore by all the gods of Olympus to keep faith with Medea for ever. She offered him a flask of lotion, blood-red juice of the two-sulked, saffron- coloured Caucasian crocus, which would protect him against the bulls’ fiery breath; this potent first sprang from the blood of the tortured Prometheus. Jason gratefully accepted the flask and, after a libation of honey, unstoppered it bathed his body, spear and shield in the contents. He was thus able to subdue the bulls and harness them to a plough with an yoke. All day he ploughed, and at nightfall sowed the teeth, which armed men immediately sprouted. He provoked these to fight one against another, as Cadmus had done on a similar occasion, throwing a stone quoits into their midst; then despatched the survivors.
h. King Aeëtes, however, had no intention of parting with his fleece, and shamelessly repudiated his bargain. He threatened to burn the Argo, which was now moored off Aea, and massacre her crew; Medea, in whom he had unwisely confided, led Jason and a part of Argonauts to the precinct of Ares, some six miles away. There fleece hung, guarded by a loathsome and immortal dragon of a million coils, larger than the Argo herself, and born from the blood of the monster Typhon, destroyed by Zeus. She soothed the hissing dragon with incantations and then, using freshly-cut sprigs of juniper, sprinkled soporific drops on his eyelids. Jason stealthily unfastened the fleece from the oak-tree, and together they hurried down to the beach where the Argo lay.
i. An alarm had already been raised by the priests of Ares and, in a running fight, the Colchians wounded Iphitus, Meleager, Argus, Atalanta, and Jason. Yet all of them contrived to scramble aboard the waiting Argo, which was rowed off in great haste, pursued by Aeëtes’s galleys. Iphitus alone succumbed to his wounds; Medea soon healed the others with ruineraries of her own invention.
j. Now, the Sauromatians whom Jason had undertaken to conquer were descendants of three shiploads of Amazons captured by Heracles during his Ninth Labour; they broke their fetters and killed the sailors set as guards over them, but knowing nothing of seamanship, drifted across to the Cimmerian Bosphorus, where they landed at Crenmi in the country of the free Scythians. There they captured a herd of wild horses, mounted them and began to ravage the land. Presently the Scythians, discovering from some corpses which fell into their hands that the invaders were women, sent out a band of young men to offer the Amazons love rather than battle. This did not prove difficult, but the Amazons consented to marry them only if they would move to the eastern bank of the river Tanais; where their descendants, the Sauromatians, still live and preserve certain Amazon customs, such as that every girl must have killed a man in battle before she can find a husband.
***
1. This part of the legend embodies the primitive myth of the tasks imposed on Diomedes by the king whose daughter he wished to marry.2. Aphrodite’s love charm, carefully described by Theocritus, was used throughout Greece, including Socrates’s circle (Xenophon: Memorabilia). Because the wryneck builds in willows, hisses like a snake and lays white eggs, it has always been sacred to the moon; Io (‘moon’) sent it as her messenger to amorous Zeus. One of its popular names in Europe is ‘cuckoo’s mate’, and the cuckoo appears in the story of how Zeus courted the Moon-goddess Hera. Fire-kindling by friction was sympathetic magic to cause love as the English word punk means both tinder and a harlot. Eros with torch and arrows is post-Homeric but, by the time of Apollonius Rhodius, his naughty behaviour and Aphrodite’s despair had become literary joke which Apuleius took one stage further in Cupid and Psyche.
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 deface 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. Aeëtes’s fire-breathing bulls, again, recall, those brazen one in which prisoners were roasted alive by Philtres of Argumentum-Rhodium colony-presumably in honour of their god Helius, whose symbol was a brazen bull (Pander: Python Odes), 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 Bogotá, Jason as a native-born candidate for the kingship will rather have been set Colwich’s task of ploughing, sowing, and reaping a harvest in one day-a ritual act easily mimed at midsummer-then wrestle with a bull and fought the customary mock battle against men in beast disguise. His winning of the golden fleece is paralleled by Heracles winning of the golden apples, which another unsleeping dragon guarded. At least four of Heracles’s Labours seem to have been imposed on him as a candidate for the kingship.
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 vestigial 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 colchicines, or meadow saffron, used by the ancients as the most reliable specific against gout, still remains. Its dangerous reputation contributed to Medea’s.
6. The Sauromatians were the mounted Scythian bowmen of the steppes; no wonder Aeëtes laughed at the notion that Jason and his heavily armed infantry could subdue them.
Comments
Post a Comment