Medea In Exile

MEDEA fled first to Heracles at Thebes, where he had promised to shelter her should Jason ever prove unfaithful, and cured him of the madness that had made him kill his children; nevertheless, the Thebans would not permit her to take up residence among them because Creon, whom she had murdered, was their King. So she went to Athens, and King Aegeus  was glad to marry her. Next, banished from Athens for her attempted poisoning of Theseus, she sailed to Italy and taught the Marrubians the art of snake-charming; they still worship her as the goddess Angitia. After a brief visit to Thessaly, where she unsuccessfully competed with Thetis in a beauty contest judged by Idomeneus the Cretan, she married an Asian king whose name has not survived but who is said to have been Medeius’s true father.
b. Hearing, finally, that Aeëtes’s Colchian throne had been usurped by her uncle Perses, Medea went to Colchis with Medeius, who killed Perses, set Aeëtes on his throne again, and enlarged the kingdom of Colchis to include Media. Some pretend that she was by that time reconciled to Jason, and took him with her to Colchis; but the history of Medea has, of course, been embellished and distorted by the extravagant fancies of many tragic dramatists. The truth is that Jason, having forfeited the favour of the gods, whose names he had taken in vain when he broke faith with Medea, wandered homeless from city to city, hated of men. In old age he came once more to Corinth, and sat down in the shadow of the Argo, remembering his past glories, and grieving for the disasters that had overwhelmed him. He was about to hang himself from the prow, when it suddenly toppled forward and killed him. Poseidon then placed the image of the Argo’s stem, which was innocent of homicide, among the stars.
c. Medea never died, but became an immortal and reigned in the Elysian Fields where some say that she, rather than Helen, married Achilles.
d. As for Athamas, whose failure to sacrifice Phrixus had been the cause of the Argonauts’ expedition, he was on the point of being himself sacrificed at Orchomenus, as the sin-offering demanded by the Oracle of Laphystian Zeus, when his grandson Cytisorus returned from Aeaca and rescued him. This vexed Zeus, who decreed that, henceforth, the eldest son of the Athamantids must avoid the Council Hall in perpetuity, on pain of death; a decree which has been observed ever since.
e. The homecomings of the Argonauts yield many tales; but that of Great Ancaeus, the helmsman, is the most instructive. Having survived so many hardships and perils, he returned to his palace at Tegea, where a seer had once warned him that he would never taste the wine of a vineyard which he had planted some years previously. On the day of his arrival, Ancaeus was informed that his steward had harvested the first grapes, and that the wine awaited him. He therefore filled a winecup, set it to his lips and, calling the seer, reproached him for prophesying falsely. The seer answered: ‘Sire, there is many a slip ‘twixt the cup and the lip!’, and at that instant Ancaeus’s servants ran up, shouting: ‘My lord, a wild boar! It is ravaging your vineyard!’ He set down the untasted cup, grasped his boar-spear, and hurried out; but the boar lay concealed behind a bush and, charging, killed him.

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1. An Attic cult of Demeter as Earth-goddess has given rise to the story of Medea’s stay at Athens. Similar cults account for her visits to Thebes, Thessaly, and Asia Minor; but the Marrubians may emigrated to Italy from Libya, where the Psyllians were adept in the art of snake-charming (Pliny: Natural History). Medea’s reign in the Elysian fields is understandable: as the goddess who presided over cauldron of regeneration, she could offer heroes the chance of another life on earth. Helen (‘moon’) will have been one of her titles.
2. In the heroic age, it seems, the king of Orchomenus, when his reign ended, was led for sacrifice to the top of Mount Laphystium. This king was also a priest of Laphystian Zeus, an office hereditary in the matrilineal Minyan clan; and at the time of the Persian Wars, according to Herodotus, the clan chief was still expected to attend the Council Hall when summoned for sacrifice. No one, however, forced him to obey the summons, and he seems from Herodotus’s account to have been represented by a surrogate except on occasions of national disaster, such as plague or drought, when he would feel obliged to attend in person. The deaths of Jason and Ancaeus are moral tales, emphasizing dangers of excessive fame, prosperity, or pride. But Ancaeus dies royally in his own city, from the gash of a boar’s tusk; whereas Jason like Bellerophon and Oedipus, wanders from city to city, hated of men, and is eventually killed by accident. In the Isthmus where Jason had reigned, the custom was for the royal pharmacos to be thrown over the cliff, but rescued from the sea by a waiting boat and banished to the life of an anonymous beggar, taking his ill-luck with him.
3. Sir Isaac Newton was the first, so far as I know, to point out the connection between the Zodiac and the Argo’s voyage; and the leger may well have been influenced at Alexandria by the Zodiacal Signs: the Ram of Phrixus, the Bulls of Aeëtes, the Dioscuri as the Heavenly Twins, Rhea’s Lion, the Scales of Alcinous, the Water-carriers of Aeginetan Heracles as Bowman, Medea as Virgin, and the Goat, symbol of lecher to record the love-making on Lemnos. When the Egyptian Zodiacal Signs are used, the missing elements appear: Serpent for Scorpion; and Scarab, symbol of regeneration, for Crab.