Pelias gave them decent burial and congratulated himself that they had died by their own hands, not by his. He burned his bloody robe and purified himself in the shrine of Poseidon, where the priests laid only a light penance upon him.
Chapter Thirteen
To Lemnos, by Way of Athos
The Argonauts spent a day and a night at Castanthaea, passing the time pleasantly in fishing, hunting, and games, but did not wander far from the ship lest the wind should suddenly change and allow them to resume their voyage. Comfort-loving Augeas of Elis, who had blistered hands and sore buttocks from rowing, urged that for the rest of the voyage oars should be used only in an extremity; and that no day’s course should be made longer than was pleasant. Tiphys and Argus shook their heads at this, and old Nauplius said: ‘Colchis is very far away, King Augeas, and we must be back before the summer is over if we wish to avoid shipwreck on this same rocky coast.’
The shepherds did not venture to return. When finally the time came to weigh anchor, Jason left behind a picture, drawn skilfully by Iphitus of Phocis, to explain matters to them. The picture, done in charcoal on a smooth rock, showed an enormous Hercules, with club and lion pelt, carrying off twelve small sheep – they had eaten at least twelve – and Jason, with a horse’s mane and body spotted like a leopard, graciously leaving in the shepherds’ cave a fine bronze spear, in payment of the debt, and a small jar of wine. The Argo was shown at anchor in the background, and the Argonauts were represented by the various beasts and birds which were their badges. However, this picture proved unintelligible to the returning shepherds, who quitted their pastures in terror, convinced that some frightful curse was hanging over their heads. The spear and the wine-jar remained in the cave untouched for a year or more.
In the early morning of the second day a brisk breeze came up from the south-west and Tiphys advised Jason to let it bear them along the coast as far as the vale of Tempe, sacred to Apollo, where the river Peneus reaches the sea. Jason agreed. All went aboard again, shoved the ship off with their poles, hoisted the sail, and were soon fairly on their way. The waves slapped roughly against the ship’s side and made several of them retch or vomit.
The coast was high and steep-to. Soon Ossa’s cone-shaped summit towered over them to landward and they passed the settlement of Eurymenae, where the inhabitants ran to arms in fear of a hostile landing, but then waved in farewell when they found themselves mistaken. After the Argo had rounded the promontory of Ossa the coast began to wear an inhospitable look, and Tiphys told of ships that he had seen wrecked on those rocks by furious north-eastern gales. But after a while the mountain range trended away, and left between it and the sea a narrow belt of low land, fronted by a sandy beach, which gave them comfort.
At noon they made the mouth of the Peneus, a river of which Jason knew the headwaters only, but which is the noblest in Greece and with its many tributaries waters the whole of fertile Thessaly. They were about to disembark, since Idmon, Iphitus, Orpheus, Mopsus, and others were set upon visiting Apollo’s shrine of Tempe, to take part there in a holy mouse-feast, when suddenly the wind veered about and blew off-shore. Then Argus and Tiphys pressed Jason to take advantage of this breeze, a gift of his ancestor Aeolus, and run due east for the Thracian promontories. He consented. Behind them, further up the coast, enormous Olympus showed a wide surface of pale, naked rock; capped in snow as usual, and with its precipitous sides streaked with dark wooded ravines.
‘I know how the Gods and Goddesses spend their time up yonder,’ said Idas in solemn tones.
‘How do they spend it?’ asked Coronus of Gyrton, the simple-minded Lapith.
‘Playing at snowballs!’ Idas cried, roaring with laughter at his own wit. His companions frowned at him for his levity. The majesty of Olympus, seen from a distance of even ten miles, awed their souls.
They ate a meal of goat-cheese and barley-cake, washed down with wine, and passed the time by asking one another riddles. This riddle was asked by Admetus: ‘I never lived until I died in honour of the sister of my master’s servant; now I go piously with my master in search of my glorious ancestor.’ Atalanta guessed the answer: it was the cap of Admetus, which was made from the pelts of lambs cast by the pregnant ewes sacrificed by him to Artemis. For Artemis was sister to Apollo, the former servant of Admetus; and now the cap was going with Admetus in search of the Golden Fleece.
Meleager asked another riddle: ‘I never stay long among my own people. I do not know my strength. I knock men down like rotten trees. I spent my childhood among strangers. When did I ever miss my mark with an arrow? I dare to go alone among a company of enemies; nobody prevents me, because all fear me.’
‘Hercules,’ everyone shouted at once.
‘No,’ said Meleager. ‘Guess again!’ When at last they gave up guessing he told them: ‘It is Atalanta. For she does not know the strength of her beauty, how it knocks men down like rotten trees. She spent her childhood among the priestesses of Artemis on Mount Aracynthos, just as Hercules did among strangers in Cadmean Thebes and like him she is seldom among her own people. Who ever saw her miss her mark with an arrow? Now she has dared to come among this company of men, who are the natural enemies of women; and none prevents her.’
It grew dark but still the ship drove on, the progress that she made being noiseless as a dream, and when Tiphys grew weary of guiding her, Little Ancaeus took the helm. He kept the Pole Star over his left shoulder for mile after mile, while Tiphys slept and so did all the other Argonauts but Orpheus. Then Orpheus sang a song for Little Ancaeus alone, of such piercing sweetness that he could not restrain his tears. Ever afterwards at night, during any silent watch when the stars were clear, the words and melody ran in his head:
She tells her love while half asleep,
In the dark hours,
With half-words whispered low:
As Earth stirs in her winter sleep
And puts out grass and flowers
Despite the snow,
Despite the falling snow.
Ancaeus knew the name of the woman in the song: it was Eurydice, the lovely wife of Orpheus, who had accidentally trodden upon a serpent and been stung by it. Not all the glorious music that poured from his Hyperborean lyre could save her; and in anguish he had cast the dust of Greece from his sandals and journeyed to Egypt. But, returning as suddenly as he went, he had lived ever since in self-imposed exile among the savage Ciconians and was their law-giver, arbiter, and beloved friend.
Orpheus softly thrummed the melody for some time after he had ceased singing. Ancaeus as he glanced to port to make sure that he was keeping a straight course saw, as he thought, the dark heads of men swimming alongside. Looking to starboard he saw several more. He grew frightened and whispered: ‘Hist, Orpheus; ghosts are following us!’ But Orpheus told him not to be afraid: those were seals drawn from far and near by the power of his music.
Presently Ancaeus heard Orpheus heave a deep sigh and asked him: ‘Orpheus, why do you sigh?’
Orpheus answered: ‘I sigh for weariness.’
‘Sleep, then,’ said Ancaeus, ‘and I will keep the watch alone. Sleep and rest well.’
Orpheus thanked him but said: ‘No, dear Lelegian, mine is not the weariness that can be cured by sleep; only perfect rest will cure it.’
Ancaeus asked: ‘Since to rest well is to sleep, but to rest perfectly is to die, do you then desire death, Orpheus?’
Orpheus answered: ‘Not even death. We are all caught on a wheel, from which there is no release but by grace of the Mother. We are whirled up into life, the light of day, and carried down again into death, the darkness of night; but then another day dawns red and we reappear, we are reborn. And a man is not reborn in his accustomed body but in that of a bird, beast, butterfly, bat, or creeping thing, according to the judgement passed upon him below. Death is no release from the wheel, Ancaeus, unless the Mother should intervene. I sigh for perfect rest, to be taken at last into her benign keeping.’
As daw
n brightened, they saw what appeared to be an island ahead of them. Orpheus knew it for Pallene, at that time named Phlegra, the nearest and most fertile of the three peninsulas of Paeonia, and was pleased that they had kept dead on their course. Orpheus and Little Ancaeus waked Tiphys, who took his trick at the helm again, and Tiphys waked Jason to watch with him. Then, as these four breakfasted together on barley-bread and cheese and wine, the sun rose most beautifully out of the sea, gilding the fleecy clouds that raced overhead through a blue sky. The wind freshened. They steered close inshore, not fearing shoals or rocks, and observed several excellent herds of cattle and sheep grazing unattended close to the sea.
‘Do not let us disembark yet,’ said Tiphys; ‘there will be as good booty further on. Let our fellows sleep. Sleeping men are not hungry men.’ They ran on, and the sun warmed the sleepers and disinclined them to awake. They sailed along the sole of Pallene’s foot and sighted the mountains and wooded peninsula of Sithonia, which ends in a conical hill named Goat Hill. Little Ancaeus and Orpheus were now asleep, but Jason waked the others for breakfast, and watched the third peninsula, that of Acte, loom up to the north-east. Acte is rugged and broken with ravines, and at the foot rises Mount Athos, a great white cone skirted with dark forest. Here they decided to land for water and for the pleasure of walking on dry land, but could not spend long ashore, because weather-wise Coronus, looking at the sky, foretold that the wind would not hold much longer.
The Argonauts were still in holiday mood, careless of what trials and dangers might lie ahead of them. Jason set them a contest, with a jar of wine for a prize: who could bring back the largest living thing to him before the shadow of a stick, that he set up, travelled from one mark to another. The company scattered, and just before the shadow touched the mark Jason blew on a conch and recalled them. Some of them expected that within so short a space of time nobody would have found anything of great size, and therefore exhibited proudly, one, a young sea-bird that he had robbed from its nest on a cliff; another, a mouse that he had trodden upon but not killed; another, a small crab from the beach. But Atalanta had run down a hare, which they were measuring and weighing against a fine fish hooked by Melampus, when a great roaring was heard from over the hill and they saw Hercules, too late for the prize, stalking down the mountain with a half-grown bear struggling in his arms.
Hercules was displeased to find that the contest was already closed. When he had beaten out the creature’s brains against the side of the ship, he showed his displeasure by eating the tenderer parts, raw, without offering a morsel to anyone but Hylas. He tossed what was left of the carcase into the sea as they sailed on.
The wind did not fail until dusk. The sail was then lowered and out came the oars; they had a long pull that night before heaving-to for a few hours’ sleep. Not long after dawn on the next morning they made Lemnos, a somewhat bleak-looking island of no great elevation. Myrine the principal city, was easy to find, as they rowed in from the west; Tiphys steered for the conspicuous white shrine of Hephaestus, situated on a promontory. This promontory jutted out from the mainland between two bays; Myrine lay, facing north and south, on the narrow isthmus linking the promontory to the land. Tiphys chose the southern bay, which offers a broad sandy beach in the angle nearest to the town and is protected from storms by shoals which break the force of the waves. As they came swinging in towards the city, keeping good time despite the fast stroke set by Hercules, Jason gave them the order to ship their oars. They did so, and the Argo continued to rush forward under the motion that they had given her, while they put on their helmets, strung their bows, and seized their spears or javelins. As the ship headed for the shallow water, gradually losing way, out from the whitewashed houses streamed a company of armed Lemnians to oppose their landing.
Jason said to the Argonauts: ‘In the name of all the Gods and Goddesses, I implore you to make no hostile sign. Let them attack us first if they will. Echion, Echion, put on heraldic robe and crown, take the olive wand in your hand and assure these Lemnians that our intentions are peaceable.’
Echion put on his splendid insignia, girded up his robe, and, leaping into the water to his knees, waded ashore with olive wand uplifted.
Suddenly Lynceus cried out: ‘By the Lynx’s pads and tail! I swear that they are all women!’
Eurydamas the Dolopian echoed: ‘Mares, foals, and stallions! Not men but women!’
Then Hercules roared: ‘Ho, ho! Are the Amazons come to Lemnos?’
The others all exclaimed variously at the strangeness of the sight.
This is the story of the Lemnian women. Originally, the Triple Goddess was devoutly worshipped by the Lemnians, and there were colleges of nymphs and a Maia, or Chief Priestess, who ruled the whole island from her house in the hills above Myrine; but no institution of marriage. Then the new Olympian religion came to disturb the island. The men grew ambitious to be fathers and husbands and thus to have dominion over the nymphs; but the Chief Priestess threatened them with terrible punishment unless they continued in the old ways. They pretended compliance, but not long afterwards sailed off secretly all together in their fishing-boats and made a sudden descent at evening on the coast of Thrace. It was a day when they knew that the young girls of the district would be gathered together on a small island near the coast, sacrificing to a local hero, with no men anywhere near. They surprised these girls, carried them off, and made them their wives. The affair was so dexterously managed that the Thracians concluded that their women had been devoured by sea-monsters, or carried off by Harpies, or engulfed by quicksands.
The Lemnian men settled down with their wives at Myrine and let the Lemnian women know that they needed them no longer, for their new wives would sow the corn and caprify the figs and look after them well. They embraced the new Olympian religion and, being artificers, put themselves under the patronage of the Smith God Hephaestus – Hephaestus who had hitherto been regarded as a local hero, not a God, but now was deified as son of Hera and Zeus. His hero-shrine, which Tiphys had seen on the promontory, was rededicated as a temple; sacrifices were offered to him on a lofty altar, not on a low hearth; male priests displaced the college of nymphs.
Only one man, the war-king Thoäs, brother of the Chief Priestess, refused to join the renegades; and the Chief Priestess sent him to warn them of the anger of the Triple Goddess. They pelted him with filth and sent him back, with the message: ‘Lemnian women, you have a foul stench. But these Thracian girls are like roses.’
A great festival was to be celebrated at Myrine in honour of the Olympians. When the festival day came, the Chief Priestess sent out spies, who reported towards evening that the men were already lying about in the market-place, dead drunken. So it was that the women, having maddened themselves by chewing ivy leaves and dancing naked in the moonlight, ran down at dawn to Myrine and killed all the men without exception, and all the Thracian women too. As for the children, they spared the girls, but cut the throats of all the boys, sacrificing them to the Maiden Goddess Persephone, lest they might attempt acts of vengeance in later years. All this was done in an ecstasy of religion, and the ancient forms of worship were restored to the shrine on the promontory.
In the morning the women grew frightened at what they had done, but could not call back to life the dead men, some of whom had been their brothers, some their sons, some their lovers. They gave them decent burial and purified themselves from guilt as best they could. The Goddess uttered an oracle, taking all the blame on her own head, and ordering them to be merry and perform a dance of victory, which they did. Then all cheerfully undertook the work usually performed by men, except the glazing of pots and the forging of weapons and instruments, which they did not understand, and contrived to catch enough fish for their needs, and to guide the ploughs and break the clods. They also exercised themselves with spear and sword for fear of a hostile landing by the Thracians.
The Chief Priestess’s daughter, the Cuckoo Nymph Hypsipyle, had executed the whole plot under her mo
ther’s directions; she had also contrived to conceal Thoäs during the massacre, because he was her mother’s brother and well disposed to the Goddess. Afterwards she set him adrift in a boat without oars, not wishing to kill him outright, but dared not tell the women what she had done, because of a unanimous vote that had been cast against the sparing of any man whatsoever. Hypsipyle was a dark-eyed, handsome woman, and the other women had a great regard for her. For some months before the arrival of the Argo she had been increasingly disturbed for the future of the island; because all the women had an ill-disguised craving for the sight and smell of man. For want of lovers, they were falling into unnatural passions for one another, and longing for children and behaving in a restless and hysterical manner. Hypsipyle was also anxious for the harvest, the barley not having been fertilized by the customary act of love with the Lemnian men. She could get no further guidance from her holy mother, who had been struck down with paralysis and could not speak: an event of very ill omen. However, the Goddess in a dream advised Hypsipyle to remain patient, since all would be well.
When the Argo was first sighted, Hypsipyle naturally concluded her to be a Thracian ship and sounded the call to arms; but as soon as she saw the Ram’s head, emblem of the Minyans, she felt somewhat reassured.
Chapter Fourteen
The Women’s Island
Hypsipyle received Echion in what had been the men’s council-chamber. He allowed her to believe that the Argo was bound for Thrace on a trading voyage, and told her that Jason the Minyan, her captain, wished to put in at Myrine merely for food, drink, and recreation. Hypsipyle asked under whose auspices the voyage had been undertaken. He told her: ‘Of Zeus, of Poseidon, of Apollo, of Athena, of Artemis.’ When she replied ‘It is well’, but in rather a cold voice, he was shrewd enough to add: ‘More than all these, the Triple Goddess favours us.’ At these words he saw her face light up with pleasure.
The Golden Fleece Page 16