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. 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. Others place the crime at Aea itself, and say that Jason also killed Aeëtes.
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.
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. Others, that she sailed up the Danube and Save, and then down the Po, which joins the Save, into the Adriatic Sea; 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 is joined by the mighty Rhone.
d. Still others hold that the Argonauts rowed reached its source; then dragged the Argo to the headwaters 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.
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.
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 Danube they had set out overland for Aeaea, the island home of Medea’s aunt: Circe. This was not the Campanian Acaca 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.
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.
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.
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1. The combination of the westerly with the easterly voyage passed accepted until Greek geographical knowledge increased and it became 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 first, 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 said to have passed up the Phasis into the Caspian Sea, and thus into the Indian Ocean (where another Colchis stretched along the Malabar coast -Hephaestionos), 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 take its source in the Gulf of Finland, from which she could circumnavigate Europe, and return to Greece through the Straits of Gibraltar. Told 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 the 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 that the western branch of the Danube ‘flows into the a turbulence and violence equal to that of the Po.’ The seizure of fleece, the Colchians’ pursuit, and the death of Apsyrtus, will originally taken place in the northern Adriatic. Ovid preferred to believe that Apsyrtus had been murdered at the mouth of the Danube and at Tomi because that was his own destined death-place.
3. Aeaea is said to have belonged to father of Minyas, and great-grandfather of Phrixus; and Chryses ‘golden’. It may well have been his spirit, rather than that which the Minyans were ordered to appease when they fleece. According to Strabo, Phrixus enjoyed the Black Sea, ‘where a ram is never sacrificed’; this been a late foundation, prompted by the fame of the Argo’s voyage thus the Romans also built temples to Greek heroes and heroines piously introduced into their national history.
4. The name ‘Apsyrtus’, which commemorates the remains downstream, was perhaps a local title of Orpheus after dismemberment by the Maenads.
5. Valerius Flaccus and Diodorus Siculus both record that sacked Troy on the outward, not the homeward, voyage; to be a mistake.
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