The Greek Myths, Volume2

by Robert Graves

  l. Still others maintain that Jason and his companions explored the country about Colchian Aea, advancing as far as Media; that one of them, Armenus, a Thessalian from Lake Boebe, settled in Armenia, and gave his name to the entire country. This view they justify by pointing out that the heroic monuments in honour of Jason, which Armenus erected at the Caspian Gates, are much revered by the barbarians; and that the Armenians still wear the ancient Thessalian dress.15

  1. Apollonius Rhodius: iv. 1090–95; Homer: Odyssey xviii. 83 and xxi. 307, with scholiast.

  2. Strabo: i. 2. 39 and vii. 5. 5; Apollonius Rhodius: iv. 511 –21; Hyginus: Fabula 23; Apollodorus: i. 9.25; Callimachus, quoted by Strabo: i. 2. 39.

  3. Herodotus: i. 1.

  4. Pausanias: ix. 34. 2; Strabo: vi. 1. 1; Argonautica Orphica 1284; Homer: Odyssey xii. 1–200.

  5. Apollonius Rhodius: iv. 922–79; Argonautica Orphica 1270–97; Hyginus: Fabula 14.

  6. Apollonius Rhodius: iv. 1228–1460.

  7. Hyginus: loc. cit.; Apollonius Rhodius: iv. 1461–95; Valerius Flaccus: vi. 317 and vii. 422.

  8. Tzetzes: On Lycophron 881; Apollonius Rhodius: iv. 1518–36.

  9. Pindar: Pythian Odes iv. 17–39 and 255–61; Apollonius Rhodius: iv. 1537–1628; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 56. 6; Argonautica Orphica 1335–6; Herodotus: iv. 179.

  10. Apollodorus: i. 9. 26; Apollonius Rhodius: iv. 1639–93; Argonautica Orphica 1337–40; Lucian: On the Dance 49; Sophocles, quoted by scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius: iv. 1638.

  11. Apollonius Rhodius: iv. 1765–72; Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Argonautica Orphica 1344–8.

  12. Pindar: Pythian Odes iv. 252.

  13. Herodotus: iii. 127.

  14. Strabo: v. 2. 6 and vi. 1. 1; Apollodorus: i. 9. 24; Apollonius Rhodius: iv. 922 ff.

  15. Strabo: xi. 14. 12 and 13. 10.

  1. The myth of Metope, given in full neither by Homer nor by Apollonius Rhodius, recalls those of Arne (see 43. 2) and Antiope (see 76. b). She has, it seems, been deduced from an icon showing the Fate-goddess seated in a tomb; her quern being the world-mill around which, according to Varro’s Treatise on Rustic Affairs, the celestial system turns, and which appears both in the Norse Edda, worked by the giantesses Fenja and Menja, and in Judges, worked by the blinded Tyrian Sun-hero Samson. Demeter, goddess of corn-mills, was an underground deity.

  2. Herodotus’s account of Aeëtes’s embassy to Greece makes little sense, unless he held that the Argive princess Io did not flee to Colchis in a fit of madness, disguised as a heifer, and eventually become deified by the Egyptians as Isis (see 56. b), but was taken in a raid by the Colchians (whom he describes as relics of Pharaoh Sesostris’s army that invaded Asia) and sold into Egypt.

  3. The three Sirens – Homer makes them only two – were singing daughters of Earth, who beguiled sailors to the meadows of their island, where the bones of former victims lay mouldering in heaps (Odyssey xii. 39 ff. and 184 ff.). They were pictured as bird-women, and have much in common with the Birds of Rhiannon in Welsh myth, who mourned for Bran and other heroes; Rhiannon was a mare-headed Demeter. Siren-land is best understood as the sepulchral island which receives the dead king’s ghost, like Arthur’s Avalon (see 31. 2); the Sirens were both the priestesses who mourned for him, and the birds that haunted the island – servants of the Death-goddess. As such, they belonged to a pre-Olympian cult – which is why they are said to have been worsted in a contest with Zeus’s daughters, the Muses. Their home is variously given as the Sirenusian Islands off Paestum; Capri; and ‘close to Sicilian Cape Pelorus’ (Strabo: i. 2. 12). Pairs of Sirens were still carved on tombs in the time of Euripides (Helen 167), and their name is usually derived from seirazein, ‘to bind with a cord’; but if, as is more likely, it comes from the other seirazein which means ‘to dry up’, the two Sirens will have represented twin aspects of the goddess at midsummer when the Greek pastures dry up: Ante-vorta and Post-vorta – she who looks prophetically forward to the new king’s reign and she who mourns the old (see 170. 7). The mermaid type of Siren is post-Classical.

  4. Helius’s herd consisted of three hundred and fifty head, the gift of his mother, the Moon-goddess (see 42. 1 and 170. 10). Several colonies from Corinth and Rhodes, where his sky-bull was worshipped, had been planted in Sicily. Odysseus knew Helius as ‘Hyperion’ (see 170. u).

  5. Lake Tritonis, once an enormous inland sea that had overwhelmed the lands of the neolithic Atlantians, has been slowly shrinking ever since, and though still of respectable size in Classical times – the geographer Scylax reckoned it at some nine hundred square miles – is now reduced to a line of salt marshes (see 39. 6). Neith, the skin-clad Triple-goddess of Libya, anticipated Athene with her aegis (see 8. 1).

  6. Mopsus, whose death by snake-bite in the heel was a common one (see 106. g; 117. c and 168. e) appears also in the myth of Derceto (see 89. 2), the Philistine Dictynna. Another Mopsus, Teiresias’s grandson, survived the Trojan War (see 169. c).

  7. Caphaurus is an odd name for a Libyan – caphaura being the Arabic for ‘camphor’, which does not grow in Libya – but the mythographers had a poor sense of geography.

  8. Talos the bronze man is a composite character: partly sky-bull, partly sacred king with a vulnerable heel, partly a demonstration of the cire-perdue method of bronze casting (see 92. 8).

  9. The water-sacrifice at Anaphe recalls that offered by the Jews on the Day of Willows, the climax of their festival of Tabernacles, when water was brought up in solemn procession from the Pool of Siloam; the Aeginetan water-race will have been part of a similar ceremony. Tabernacles began as an autumn fertility feast and, according to the Talmud, the Pharisees found it difficult to curb the traditional ‘lightheadedness’ of the women.

  10. ‘Pebbles of variegated form’, iron crystals, are still found on the shores of Elba.

  11. Thetis guided the Argo through the Planctae at the entrance to the Straits of Messina, as Athene guided her through the Planctae at the entrance to the Bosphorus. Odysseus avoided them by choosing the passage between Scylla and Charybdis (see 170. t). The western Planctae are the volcanic Lipari Islands.

  12. Armenia, meaning Ar-Minni, ‘the high land of Minni’ – Minni is summoned by Jeremiah (li. 27) to war against Babylon – has no historical connexion with Armenus of Lake Boebe. But Minni is apparently the Minyas whom Josephus mentions (Antiquities i. 1. 6) when describing Noah’s Flood: and the name of the Thessalian Minyas, ancestor of the Minyans, offered a plausible link between Armenia and Thessaly.

  155

  THE DEATH OF PELIAS

  ONE autumn evening, the Argonauts regained the well-remembered beach of Pagasae, but found no one there to greet them. Indeed, it was rumoured in Thessaly that all were dead; Pelias had therefore been emboldened to kill Jason’s parents, Aeson and Polymele, and an infant son, Promachus, born to them since the departure of the Argo. Aeson, however, asked permission to take his own life and, his plea being granted, drank bull’s blood and thus expired; whereupon Polymele killed herself with a dagger or, some say, a rope, after cursing Pelias, who mercilessly dashed out Promachus’s brains on the palace floor.1

  b. Jason, hearing this doleful story from a solitary boatman, forbade him to spread the news of the Argo’s homecoming, and summoned a council of war. All his comrades were of the opinion that Pelias deserved death, but when Jason demanded an immediate assault on Iolcus, Acastus remarked that he could hardly be expected to oppose his father; and the others thought it wiser to disperse, each to his own home and there, if necessary, raise contingents for a war on Jason’s behalf. Iolcus, indeed, seemed too strongly garrisoned to be stormed by a company so small as theirs.

  c. Medea, however, spoke up and undertook to reduce the city singlehanded. She instructed the Argonauts to conceal their ship, and themselves, on some wooded and secluded beach within sight of Iolcus. When they saw a torch waved from the palace roof, this would mean that Pelias was dead, the gates open, and the city theirs for the taking.

  d. During
her visit to Anaphe, Medea had found a hollow image of Artemis and brought it aboard the Argo. She now dressed her twelve Phaeacian bond-maidens in strange disguises and led them, each in turn carrying the image, towards Iolcus. On reaching the city gates Medea, who had given herself the appearance of a wrinkled crone, ordered the sentinels to let her pass. She cried in a shrill voice that the goddess Artemis had come from the foggy land of the Hyperboreans, in a chariot drawn by flying serpents, to bring good fortune to Iolcus. The startled sentinels dared not disobey, and Medea with her bond-maidens, raging through the streets like maenads, roused the inhabitants to a religious frenzy.

  e. Awakened from sleep, Pelias inquired in terror what the goddess required of him. Medea answered that Artemis was about to acknowledge his piety by rejuvenating him, and thus allowing him to beget heirs in place of the unfilial Acastus, who had lately died in a shipwreck off the Libyan coast. Pelias doubted this promise, until Medea, by removing the illusion of old age that she had cast about herself, turned young again before his very eyes. ‘Such is the power of Artemis!’ she cried. He then watched while she cut a bleary-eyed old ram into thirteen pieces and boiled them in a cauldron. Using Colchian spells, which he mistook for Hyperborean ones, and solemnly conjuring Artemis to assist her, Medea then pretended to rejuvenate the dead ram – for a frisky lamb was hidden, with other magical gear, inside the goddess’s hollow image. Pelias, now wholly deceived, consented to lie on a couch, where Medea soon charmed him to sleep. She then commanded his daughters, Alcestis, Evadne, and Amphinome, to cut him up, just as they had seen her do with the ram, and boil the pieces in the same cauldron.

  f. Alcestis piously refused to shed her father’s blood in however good a cause; but Medea, by giving further proof of her magic powers, persuaded Evadne and Amphinome to wield their knives with resolution. When the deed was done, she led them up to the roof, each carrying a torch, and explained that they must invoke the Moon while the cauldron was coming to a boil. From their ambush, the Argonauts saw the distant gleam of torches and, welcoming the signal, rushed into Iolcus, where they met with no opposition.

  g. Jason, however, fearing Acastus’s vengeance, resigned the kingdom to him, neither did he dispute the sentence of banishment passed on him by the Iolcan Council: for he hoped to sit upon a richer throne elsewhere.2

  h. Some deny that Aeson was forced to take his own life, and declare that, on the contrary, Medea, after first draining the effete blood from his body, restored his youth by a magic elixir, as she had also restored Macris and her sister-nymphs on Corcyra; and presented him, stalwart and vigorous, to Pelias at the palace gates. Having thus persuaded Pelias to undergo the same treatment, she deceived him by omitting the appropriate spells, so that he died miserably.3

  i. At Pelias’s funeral games, celebrated the following day, Euphemus won the two-horse chariot race; Polydeuces, the boxing contest; Meleager, the javelin throw; Peleus, the wrestling match; Zetes, the shorter foot race, and his brother Calais (or, some say, Iphiclus) the longer one; and Heracles, now returned from his visit to the Hesperides, the all-in fighting. But during the four-horse chariot race, which Heracles’s charioteer Iolaus won, Glaucus, son of Sisyphus, was devoured by his horses which the goddess Aphrodite had maddened with hippomanes.4

  j. As for Pelias’s daughters: Alcestis married Admetus of Pherae, to whom she had long been affianced; Evadne and Amphinome were banished by Acastus to Mantinea in Arcadia where, after purification, they succeeded in making honourable marriages.5

  1. Diodorus Siculus: iv. 50. 1; Apollodorus: i. 9. 16 and 27; Valerius Flaccus: i. 777 ff.

  2. Apollodorus: i. 9. 27; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 51. 1–53. 1; Pausanias: viii. 11. 2; Plautus: Pseudolus iii. 868 ff.; Cicero: On Old Age xxiii. 83; Ovid: Metamorphoses vii. 297–349; Hyginus: Fabula 24.

  3. Hypothesis to Euripides’s Medea; Scholiast on Euripides’s Knights 1321; Ovid: Metamorphoses vii. 251–94.

  4. Pausanias: v. 17.9; Hyginus: Fabula 278.

  5. Diodorus Siculus: iv. 53.2; Hyginus: Fabula 24; Pausanias: viii. 11. 2.

  1. The Cretans and Mycenaeans used bull’s blood, plentifully diluted with water, as a magic to fertilize crops and trees; only the priestess of Mother Earth could drink it pure without being poisoned (see 51. 4).

  2. Classical mythographers find it hard to decide how far Medea was an illusionist or cheat, and how far her magic was genuine. Cauldrons of regeneration are common in Celtic myth (see 148. 5–6); hence. Medea pretends to be a Hyperborean, that may mean a British, goddess. The underlying religious theory seems to have been that at midsummer the sacred king, wearing a black ram’s mask, was slaughtered on a mountain top and his pieces stewed into a soup, for the priestesses to eat; his spirit would then pass into one of them, to be born again as a child in the next lambing season. Phrixus’s avoidance of this fate had been the original cause of the Argonauts’ expedition (see 70. 2 and 148. g).

  3. Medea’s serpent-drawn chariot – serpents are underworld creatures – had wings because she was both earth-goddess and moon-goddess. She appears in triad here as Persephone-Demeter-Hecate: the three daughters of Pelias dismembering their father. The theory that the Sun-king marries the Moon-queen, who then graciously invites him to mount her chariot (see 24. m), changed as the patriarchal system hardened: by Classical times, the serpent-chariot was Helius’s undisputed property, and in the later myth of Medea and Theseus (see 154. d) he lent it to his grand-daughter Medea only because she stood in peril of death (see 156. d). The Indian Earth-goddess of the Ramayana also rides in a serpent-chariot.

  4. Callimachus seems to credit the huntress Cyrene with winning the foot race at Pelias’s funeral games (see 82. a).

  156

  MEDEA AT EPHYRA

  JASON first visited Boeotian Orchomenus, where he hung up the golden fleece in the temple of Laphystian Zeus; next, he beached the Argo on the Isthmus of Corinth, and there dedicated her to Poseidon.

  b. Now, Medea was the only surviving child of Aeëtes, the rightful king of Corinth, who when he emigrated to Colchis had left behind as his regent a certain Bunus. The throne having fallen vacant, by the death without issue of the usurper Corinthus, son of Marathon (who styled himself ‘Son of Zeus’), Medea claimed it, and the Corinthians accepted Jason as their king. But, after reigning for ten prosperous and happy years, he came to suspect that Medea had secured his succession by poisoning Corinthus; and proposed to divorce her in favour of Glauce the Theban, daughter of King Creon.

  c. Medea, while not denying her crime, held Jason to the oath which he had sworn at Aea in the name of all the gods, and when he protested that a forced oath was invalid, pointed out that he also owed the throne of Corinth to her. He answered: ‘True, but the Corinthians have learned to have more respect for me than for you.’ Since he continued obdurate Medea, feigning submission, sent Glauce a wedding gift by the hands of the royal princes – for she had borne Jason seven sons and seven daughters – namely, a golden crown and a long white robe. No sooner had Glauce put them on, than unquenchable flames shot up, and consumed not only her – although she plunged headlong into the palace fountain – but King Creon, a crowd of other distinguished Theban guests, and everyone else assembled in the palace, except Jason; who escaped by leaping from an upper window.

  d. At this point Zeus, greatly admiring Medea’s spirit, fell in love with her, but she repulsed all his advances. Hera was grateful: ‘I will make your children immortal,’ said she, ‘if you lay them on the sacrificial altar in my temple.’ Medea did so; and then fled in a chariot drawn by winged serpents, a loan from her grandfather Helius, after bequeathing the kingdom to Sisyphus.1

  e. The name of only one of Medea’s daughters by Jason is remembered: Eriopis. Her eldest son, Medeius, or Polyxenus, who was being educated by Cheiron on Mount Pelion, afterwards ruled the country of Media; but Medeius’s father is sometimes called Aegeus.2 The other sons were Mermerus, Pheres, or Thessalus, Alcimedes, Tisander, and Argus; all of whom the Corinthians, e
nraged by the murder of Glauce and Creon, seized and stoned to death. For this crime they have ever since made expiation: seven girls and seven boys, wearing black garments and with their heads shaven, spend a whole year in the temple of Hera on the Heights, where the murder was committed.3 By order of the Delphic Oracle, the dead children’s corpses were buried in the Temple, their souls, however, became immortal, as Hera had promised. There are those who charge Jason with condoning this murder, but explain that he was vexed beyond endurance by Medea’s ambition on behalf of his children.4

  f. Others again, misled by the dramatist Euripides, whom the Corinthians bribed with fifteen talents of silver to absolve them of guilt, pretend that Medea killed two of her own children;5 and that the remainder perished in the palace which she had set on fire – except Thessalus, who escaped and later reigned over Iolcus, giving his name to all Thessaly; and Pheres, whose son Mermerus inherited Medea’s skill as a poisoner.6

  1. Eumelus: Fragments 2–4; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 54; Apollodorus: i. 9. 16; Ovid: Metamorphoses vii. 391–401; Ptolemy Hephaestionos ii.; Apuleius: Golden Ass i. 10; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 175; Euripides: Medea.

  2. Hesiod: Theogony 981 ff.; Pausanias: ii. 3. 7 and iii. 3. 7; Hyginus: Fabulae 24 and 27.

  3. Apollodorus: i. 9. 28; Pausanias: ii. 3. 6; Aelian: Varia Historia v. 21; Scholiast on Euripides’s Medea 9 and 264; Philostratus: Heroica xx. 24.