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Week 3 - Book I 3. Jason and the Argonauts
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To the land of the PhaeaciansThe Argo sails through the sirens and survives Charybdis and Scylla, as well as the Wandering Rocks. They skirt around Thrinacia, which we are told hold the cattle of the Sun. More cattle. I believe Odysseus and his remaining crew will eventually suffer some problems there by eating Helios’ hecatomb. In Phaecia, to avoid the Colchians returning a virgin Medea to her father, Jason and Medea consummate their marriage. This seems a strange way to compensate the father for the dismemberment of his son.
Anaphe; Talos in Crete
I was not familiar with Talos. I discovered Talos was a giant bronze man, or in some stories, a bronze bull, who guarded the island of Crete by throwing stones at the ships of unwanted visitors. His origin is told in several conflicting stories. One states he was created by Hephaestus as a gift for Minos. Another story states he was the last surviving entity of the Brazen Race, the third of the five ages of man. Medea and possibly the Argonaut Poeas take advantage of his weak spot to kill him, which of course again is his heel. There was a pin in his heel that once removed by guile or skill caused his Ichor, or divine blood, to run out.
The return to Iolcos and murder of Pelias
After four months, they return to Ioclos and Pelias.
Wicked men who send heroes on their quests always believe that they are sending them to certain death. Wicked men never learn, for wicked men have no interest in myths, legends, and stories. If they had they would learn from them and triumph, so we must be glad of their ignorance and dullness of wits.Once again, it is Medea supplying dismemberment as the horrifying solution to a problem by tricking Pelias' own daughters into cutting him up and boiling him thinking it would restore his youth.
Fry, Stephen. Heroes: 2 (Stephen Fry's Greek Myths) (p. 235). Chronicle Books LLC. Kindle Edition.
The later history of Medea
Jason takes Creon’s daughter Glauce as his wife. Medea kills Glauce with poison and Creon as well for bonus points. Later she kills her own young children by Jason and flees to Athens and marries Aigeus and has another son Medos. Medea is forced to leave Athens with her son who is killed fighting against the Indians. Medea returns to Colchis and kills again. this time she kills her own usurper uncle, Perses, to restore her father Aietes to the throne.
My question about Medea, is there any significance to the Medea being the granddaughter of the Sun? as a footnotes reminds us, Aietes is a son of Helios; and Helios lends Medea his chariot to escape her crimes on at least one if not several occasions.
Cphe wrote: "Sheep aren't normally golden (at least to my knowledge)Is this another colour discrepancy i.e The Odyssey and " a wine dark sea"?"
Good question. But no, this is a miraculous flying sheep with real spun gold as its fleece, instead of wool -- or so the whole tradition holds. It was sent by Zeus, for whom it intermittently seems that all things are possible, except when it would interfere with the story.
Two "rationalizations" which were offered in the later stages omit the flying part, but insist on maintaining the gold in some way.
One, which as I recall was Hellenistic, was that the Colchians weighted down greasy fleeces in the riverbed, and took them out when they had collected gold dust washed down from the mountains.
This would be an inefficient, but labor-saving, device, and probably less destructive than the "panning for gold" of the California Gold Rush in the 1850s became when it reached an industrial level.
The implausible parts are: that this would work really well; that anyone would mount an expedition to bring back just one fleece; or that the Colchians would fail to remove the gold dust from the fleeces once they had collected them (so that carrying off a stack of them would hardly be worth the trouble. either).
The other "explanation" was that the "Golden Fleece" was really a sheepskin book of alchemy, i.e., for transmuting other metals into gold.
I think that this last belonged to the Byzantine period, or late antiquity at the earliest. Greek alchemy (centered in Egypt, so far as the evidence goes) definitely belonged to the Christian era, and it presumably took a while for it to become part of the general intellectual culture.
The mythological version seems to treat the economic value of the gold as secondary to the miraculous nature of the animal, so the quest of the Argonauts becomes the distant predecessor of Medieval relic-collecting -- sometimes involving out-right theft of the remains of saints and martyrs.
By Roman times, some Greek cities boasted of having relics from the Heroic Age, such as Agamemnon's scepter, so this is not a far-fetched comparison.*
*Examples, including the scepter -- or spear -- show up in the "Guide to Greece" (Hellados Periegesis) of Pausanias (lived c. 110 - c. 180 AD.), a major source of odd snippets of local mythology, and of quotations and summaries from lost epics.
There are a couple of good translations available from the Internet Archive. The more interesting may be J.G. Frazer's version, with a commentary based on his own travels in pre-industrial Greece (when physical conditions weren't too different from those in the Roman Empire).
The old Loeb Classical Library W. H. S. Jones (et al.) translation, is also to be found on the Internet Archive. This is less entertaining than Frazer, but it is easier to keep track of what Pausanias himself says. It is very inexpensive in a Kindle edition, the Delphi Classics Complete Works of Pausanias.
There is a modern translation-in-progress by Gregory Nagy (https://chs.harvard.edu/CHS/article/d...), which is based on the Loeb translation.
Peter Levi's 1971 (with revisions 1979) two-volume translation for the Penguin Classics is slightly abridged (e.g., it cuts the long list of Spartan kings about whom nothing else is known), and the books are rearranged in a more "logical" order, which makes finding references harder. I also think that the many line drawings by John Newberry are no longer as clearly reproduced as in the early printings. But it is definitely a good alternative if you want to spend the money.
If there are some bits of gold mining reality or alchemy represented by the golden fleece, what might the other elements of the story represent?1. Fire breathing bronze-footed bulls.
2. Jason yoking these bulls.
3. The potion given to him by Medea.
4. The armed men springing up from dragons teeth.
5. dragon's teeth.
6. The stones Jason disrupted the armed men with.
7. Drugging the guardian dragon and stealing the golden fleece by night.
David wrote: "If there are some bits of gold mining reality or alchemy represented by the golden fleece, what might the other elements of the story represent?1. Fire breathing bronze-footed bulls.
2. Jason yoki..."
There was already a vogue for finding allegorical (moral or physical) explanations for the divine myths before Plato's time, and "rational" and "historical" transformations of heroic myth may already be found in Herodotus.
However, only Homer seems to have gotten a detailed, line-by-line, or episode-by-episode -- at least as far as the surviving evidence goes. Other myths were usually reduced to their major elements, e.g., the "rational" versions of the Golden Fleece itself. But Diodorus Siculus "explained" some of Herakles' labors as feats of civil engineering.
Dumezil had to pick and choose from this version of Herakles when he used Diodorus' "biography" to work out the theme of "the three sins of the warrior," although I think he made his case.
Of the episodes with Jason and Medea you listed, the last would probably have been explained by drugging the fierce, but human, guardians, in order to steal the alchemical formula -- but I don't know that it ever was.
Is there any more significance to the story pattern of the hero (Jason in this case) being helped by the King’s daughter (Meda in this story) and falling in love? It seems to show up a bit in Greek Mythology (Theseus and Ariadne being another example).
Mike wrote: "Is there any more significance to the story pattern of the hero (Jason in this case) being helped by the King’s daughter (Meda in this story) and falling in love? It seems to show up a bit in Greek..."The resemblances are closer than that. Ariadne betrays her father, King Minos, by giving him the clue to the labyrinth, and also helps him kill the Minotaur, who is in fact her half-brother. Theseus abandons Ariadne, as Jason, eventually, in some version, abandons Medea, although in the case of Ariadne it was disputed whether Dionysus had claimed her from Theseus, or only came across her later. (In the first case, Theseus was not being a cad -- he was being sensible, since contending with gods over love affairs seldom worked out well for any of the mortals.)
We don't have a full-blown Theseus epic detailing how Ariadne came to fall in love with the Athenian prince. For Medea, we have the "Argonautica" of Apollonius of Rhodes, an Alexandrian poet, whose version Apollodorus mostly follows. In that treatment of Medea, her falling in love with Jason was orchestrated by a group of goddesses, directed by Hera and carried through by Aphrodite. Presumably this excuses some of her later behavior, as she is not acting entirely of her own volition, but that is a frequent problem in figuring out the ethics of Greek epics.
By the way, in Apollonius of Rhodes' treatment, Jason is a fairly lackluster character, and really needs the help of favorably-inclined goddesses on several occasions. It is also interesting that Jason is a favorite, or at least a protege, of Hera, who winds up in role more commonly associated with Athena.
Apollonius took good care to get Herakles off the Argo as soon as possible, although he was included in the company according to, apparently, everyone -- there seem to have been versions in which Jason played second-fiddle to him throughout, completely changing the story while preserving the main events. But having him interact well with Hera would have been a strain on the story, anyway, as we will see when we come to his story in due course.
I can't resist mentioning here the 1963 "Jason and the Argonauts," with splendid stop-motion animation by the great Ray Harryhausen. It omitted some episodes,a and switched the order of others, but usually for good dramatic reasons, instead of whimsy (as in Disney adaptations of too many books).It is most famous for the sword-fight with skeletons (instead of fully formed warriors, just to make it more interesting), but an academic critic has called attention to Harryhausen's ability to create sympathy for the giant bronze Talos, despite his immobile features and threatening role.
Harryhausen's fighting skeletons have been classed by some as one of the greatest moments in animation, for its dramatic effectiveness as well as sheer technical difficulty. They were repeated in a television movie (2000), which had the advantage of (then) advanced technology, but, like the rest of it, in my opinion, this failed to match the older version. Or maybe I'm biased by long exposure to the 1963 movie (despite usually seeing it in truncated versions).
(For one thing, in 1963 we were left with Jason and Medea's future left open, and rather ominously open at that. The 2000 version ends with them, against the myth, as the happily married king and queen of Iolcus, with a happily-ever-after implication which is all wrong for anyone who knows Greek tragedies.)
Mike wrote: "Is there any more significance to the story pattern of the hero (Jason in this case) being helped by the King’s daughter (Meda in this story) and falling in love? It seems to show up a bit in Greek..."The foreign hero being helped by an insider is definitely an ancient motif, but I’m not sure that I can agree with the characterization of Medea and Jason as “falling in love.” I noted while reading that Apollodorus doesn’t give a reason for Medea falling so madly in love with Jason that she is willing to betray her father and people and murder her brother. This seems an oversight.
I’m most familiar with the story from the epic poem Argonautika by Apollonius of Rhodes, in which Medea falls in love with Jason because she is struck with an arrow, sent by Eros at the instruction of his mother, Aphrodite. This is the only explanation for Medea’s love for the fairly unheroic Jason. (After all, Jason only triumphed due to the considerable help of Medea in betraying her family. He basically follows Medea’s instructions to the letter. Heroic?)
I also noted that in Apollonius’ version- though left out of the Library- Heracles is initially voted unanimously as the leader of the Argonauts. It’s only after Heracles declines that they settle on Jason. It really made me think about the roles of Medea and Jason in the myth.
For the more poetically-minded members, do you see any merit in the argument that Medea is the real driver of the Argonauts success out of her own ambition? Suddenly betraying her family, some to death, would be the type of behavior that Greeks would attribute to barbarians, but her behavior suggests to me that maybe Medea had been unsatisfied with Colchis and wanted more. She just needed an opportunity.
The cunning and skills used by Medea to help Jason succeed were apparently far greater than anyone else’s, but she was not in charge in Colchis. When Medea sees the first ship, Argo, and a way to finally leave, she basically makes a marriage alliance with Jason in the usual royal manner. This way of thinking would also support her extreme behavior at her being cast aside by Jason years later because she is “just a barbarian,” after all she did to gain her rightful queenly status.
David wrote: "My question about Medea, is there any significance to the Medea being the granddaughter of the Sun? as a footnotes reminds us, Aietes is a son of Helios; and Helios lends Medea his chariot to escape her crimes on at least one if not several occasions...."An important aspect of Medea's career and characterization is that she came to be seen as the niece of Circe, the sorceress/nymph of the the "Odyssey," another child of Helios. Circe had a mythology separate from the story of Odysseus, in which she is vindictive, which may have played its share in darkening the view of Medea. Circe clearly favors Medea over Aietes, which suggests some bad feeling in the family. In Apollonius of Rhodes, we have a whole series of adventures or characters likewise "borrowed" from the Odyssey -- unless, as some have held, they were part of the story of the Argonauts to begin with, and were secondarily transferred to Odysseus.
By the way, it looks to me as if Medea may have been passing on to Jason charms and potions used by her father when he impressed his subjects by yoking the fire-breathing bronze* bulls, etc.
*Another digression, of interest also with Talos:
The bulls are sometimes described in older English sources as "brazen," but ancient Greek didn't systematically distinguish copper and copper compounds (neither did Biblical Hebrew), and in English "brass" and "bronze" were synonyms until quite recently (e.g., they, and copper, are still the same in the KJV: see Deut. 8:9, "out of whose hills thou mayest dig brass.").
Modern brass is an alloy of copper and zinc, but the ancients didn't recognize zinc as a metal distinct from tin. The Greeks and Romans may have produced limited quantities of true brass by smelting zinc ores directly with copper, knowing only that it gave them a particular result, but not why.
Whereas tin, from an early date, became available in readily recognizable ingot form, from sources scattered around the Mediterranean and as far away as the British Isles (where it could be obtained as relatively pure metal from surface deposits).
Limits on the availability of tin made it a "strategic material" during the Bronze Age, (remembered in the Homeric formula for weapons, "pitiless bronze"), and bronze remained critical for many items long after iron weapons had come into common use. Mainly tools, but it took the Greek iron-smiths some time to make iron body-armor of any use, so bronze retained that function longer than one might of expected.
Further digression:
Zinc has some modern medical uses, including the main active ingredient in calamine lotion, based on zinc oxide and a small amount of ferric oxide, and in some sun-blocks, which rely more on mechanical protection from UV than on chemical compounds. It is also claimed to protect against, or shorten, colds, if ingested: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zinc_an...
David wrote: "We are given a list of the Argonauts. It consistently surprises me that with all the names that get tossed out, they seem to show up somewhere else with very little waste. If I am not mistaken more than a few of these names will appear again in the Trojan War...."The original company of Argonauts may have been made up of local characters, Minyans from the area around Iolcus, possibly with a few better-known heroes thrown in. But this wouldn't have been satisfactory -- who are these people? -- when the story began to circulate among Greeks generally. And Homer mentions it as a well-known event, so that spread probably took place fairly early.
Since the voyage was known to be from before the Trojan War, one dodge for story-tellers in need of a catalogue of Argonauts (apparently a feature of epic song), even if only a few had a distinct place in the story, was to include the fathers of some of the heroes of the Trojan War.
This worked fairly well, with no more than the usual strains when anyone tried to work out a systematic chronology. It seems to have been applied to the Calydonian Boar Hunt as well.
(I think I went into this much before, in an earlier thread.)
However, Apollonius of Rhodes, in our fullest account of the voyage (the next-best is an allusive poem by Pindar) got a bit carried away. One of his Argonauts is Peleus, the father of Achilles, which is fair enough.
But he did not resist the temptation to have Thetis rise from the waves to display the infant Achilles to his father. Since Achilles was still in his (physically precocious) teens when the war began, this puts the voyage and the war uncomfortably close together, and crowds many events of the Heroic Age into a very short span of time.
Of course, if the Argo was the first true sea-going ship, the lack of experience would account for the difficulties the Greeks encountered when trying to sail to Troy, including landing at the wrong place.
However, assembling a fleet of the proverbial "thousand ships" so soon after they were invented would indeed have been an epic feat. (Where did they get the skilled craftsmen necessary? And men who had any idea of how to steer, or even the best way to row?)
Oh well, Apollonius had not set out to write a "history" of the Heroic Age, but only to compose an epic in a pastiche of Homeric language.
Ian wrote: "I can't resist mentioning here the 1963 "Jason and the Argonauts," with splendid stop-motion animation by the great Ray Harryhausen."I have to agree that movie is a great one that I need to watch again, but it brings up an important point. Why are so many of the Greek gods and heroes, unlike their Hollywood depictions, deeply flawed or have such dismal or tragic ends?
Heracles kills his wife and children in a rage. Hephaestus is a lame god. It is said, elsewhere, that Jason dies in his old age when 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.
With certain modern religions there seems to be a fanatical insistence on perfection that is missing on purpose from the Greek gods and heroes.
David wrote: "With certain modern religions there seems to be a fanatical insistence on perfection that is missing on purpose from the Greek gods and heroes....."I tend to blame Plato and Aristotle, who held up perfect beings -- perfection including omnipotence -- as the only ones worth worshiping. To them, the real gods could have no failings, or they were not gods. How radical this is has become difficult to appreciate, because it has permeated Western, including Islamic, thought to a remarkable degree.
Creation and the Persistence of Evil: The Jewish Drama of Divine Omnipotence by John D. Levenson has this as one of its themes, confronting medieval Jewish (and Christian) theology with the Biblical texts.
For orthodox Muslims, for a clear example, the Prophet Muhammed was miraculously prevented from committing sins -- which makes his (traditional) actions the model for human behavior.
This attitude is generalized, and causes serious problems when Muslims encounter, for example, the Hebrew Bible's presentation of a flawed Prophet, Moses. They conclude that the Torah text must be corrupt, as Muhammed claimed.
David wrote: "Why are so many of the Greek gods and heroes, unlike their Hollywood depictions, deeply flawed or have such dismal or tragic ends?"I think this is more a reflection of America, Hollywood and Christianity than the Greeks. The “old gods” whether they be Greco-Roman, Norse, Celtic, etc. tended to be a way of understanding the world around them and respecting that natural world as divine, with Gaia or Earth, as a deity creating all other things. Christianity collided with that didactic tradition of myths pretty hard with it's single, all-powerful god that doesn’t need to explain the natural world, but instead promises a supernatural one.
I don’t think this was so bad in Europe, which still remembered the traditions of their own old gods and the value of mythology for didactic purposes. Grimm’s fairy tales were pretty harsh from what I remember compared to their Americanized Disney counterparts.
Maybe it was the rise of literacy and new readers combined with Puritanism, then a rise of an uneducated audience with Hollywood, who could not tolerate less-than-happy endings or flawed humanity.
In any case, in my experience, the old gods from ancient times (and also gods in tribal societies to the present day) reflect the state of the natural world and the fickleness/cruelty of the world around them. The gods are powerful, like forces of nature, but like nature, they were often perceived as angry or indifferent to humanity.
As for the failures of Greek heroes, they were, after all, only human. In a warrior culture, violent madness can be expected to some degree and needed to be explained.
**The above should be taken as intended; just throwing out my thinking on the subject.
For those of you who beforehand had gone beyond Apollodorus in Greek literature, and those who are thinking of doing so, a Kindle edition of a relevant book is now (for the moment, anyway) FREE: https://www.amazon.com/Interpreting-G...Interpreting Greek Tragedy: Myth, Poetry, Text by Charles Segal.
Amazon's listing gives the publication date as 2019, but that appears to be for the Kindle edition: it was first published in 1986, and is a collection of articles from the previous couple of decades, illustrating, among other things, how different modes of criticism yield different (sometimes complementary) results.
It runs to 415 pages, and not all of it is likely to be equally interesting to any particular reader, but it is a responsible piece of work by a professional classicist, aimed in part at general readers -- and for now the price is right for taking a look before deciding whether to read it.
Classics and the Western Canon
Books mentioned in this topic
Interpreting Greek Tragedy: Myth, Poetry, Text (other topics)Creation and the Persistence of Evil: The Jewish Drama of Divine Omnipotence (other topics)
Complete Works (other topics)
An oracle warns Pelias to beware of the man with one sandal. Jason, his step-great nephew, is wearing that sandal and is ordered to fetch the golden fleece. A ship, the Argo is built to be sailed by the finest men in Greece, to be known as the Argonauts.
Catalogue of the Argonauts
We are given a list of the Argonauts. It consistently surprises me that with all the names that get tossed out, they seem to show up somewhere else with very little waste. If I am not mistaken more than a few of these names will appear again in the Trojan War.
The women of Lemnos; in the land of the Doliones
Hypsiplye of Lemnos will bear Jason two sons. The then land at Doliones and are welcomed. The depart Doliones but are blown back by a storm and mistakenly attacked in the dark but it is a sad victory.
The loss of Hylas and abandonment of Heracles
Hylas is taken by nymphs as he gets water for the ship. The Argos sets back out to sea, abandoning Polyphemos and Heracles in their search for Hylas.
Polydeuces and Amycos; Phineus and the Harpies; the Clashing Rocks
Polydeuces kills Amycos in a boxing match. The Argonauts rid Phineus of his Harpy problem and Phineus advised the Argonauts on the route they needed to take and advice on getting through the clashing rocks.
Jason, Medea, and the seizure of the fleece
Medea helps Jason obtain the fleece in exchange for Jason accepting her as his wife.
The murder of Apsyrtos and journey to Circe
Medea uses her own brother, Apsyrtos, as chum to compel her father to fall behind in the chase to recover the floating body parts of his son for proper burial. The gods are angered by this blood-murder and the ship suggests visiting Circe for purification.