The Golden Fleece

by Robert Graves

  The weather was clear, the winds light, and nothing remarkable occurred to the Argonauts in these familiar waters. To be brief, they struggled up the coast of Illyria, checked by contrary winds, until on the sixty-first day after their departure from the mouth of the Danube they came in sight of Aeaea, the city of Circe, which lies on a rocky phallus-shaped island, twenty miles to the south-west of the Istrian port of Pola. It is named Aeaea because the hyacinth flower, which grows there in profusion, has this name, signifying lamentation, inscribed upon its petals by the Triple Goddess herself.

  To their joy the Argonauts found Jason, Medea, Atalanta, Meleager, and Melanion already arrived at Aeaea after a most swift and laborious journey, and with the Fleece still safely in their possession. Thus the reunited company of Argonauts now numbered thirty-three (not including Medea), despite the loss of Iphitus, Orpheus, Calaïs, and Zetes.

  Falcon-nosed, falcon-eyed old Circe, with the jutting chin and the bowed back, had greeted Jason’s party with no friendly smile when they crossed over to her island in a fishing-boat from Pola; for the visit had been heralded for her on the previous night by a dream concerned with a cataract of blood. Yet the laws of hospitality forced her to admit them into Aeaea. She had come down to the sea-shore in her linen nightdress to bathe herself in salt water, and since they were the first people whom she met after she had done, she told them without any preliminary greeting that a bloody cataract had been washing over the walls and floors of her house, and that a sudden fire had burst out in her medicine closet which she had quickly extinguished with the blood.

  They said nothing in reply but followed the dripping Priestess into the palace. She walked backwards, beckoning them on with her finger. When she offered them polished bronze chairs to sit upon, only Meleager accepted the courtesy and, thanking her on behalf of them all, told her his name and parentage; the others shook their heads and made for her hearth, where they sat down in the dust to show that they were homicides and suppliants, and spilt dust on their heads and smeared their faces with charcoal. Not once had they raised their eyes to her face since their arrival. Circe saw that Jason had lodged his sword in the cracks of the hearth, and Atalanta her javelin. Indeed, they were no ordinary homicides: Atalanta had killed her royal host Aeëtes at the head of his own stairway, and Jason had treacherously murdered Apsyrtus, his host’s son, after concluding a treaty with him.

  Warned by her dream that, unless she performed the purification that they demanded, all her medicinal herbs, roots, barks, and earths would lose their virtue, Circe at once prepared a sacrifice to the ghosts of the murdered men, though she did not as yet know their names; and Meleager advised her to address them as ‘the two royal firs of the East’ – for the fir is the alpha of the magical tree-alphabet.

  She clapped her hands for four sucking pigs, the throats of which she cut as soon as they were brought in; then she duly sprinkled the blood on the hands of the four suppliants. Atalanta and Medea were escorted by Circe’s Falcon maidens to the women’s bath-chamber, where they were washed in nine changes of water; and the bloody off-scourings were conveyed outside to a hole in the ground where aggrieved ghosts were customarily summoned to drink. Circe’s Pig men similarly escorted Jason and Melanion to the men’s bath-chamber and purified them in the same laborious way. Meanwhile Circe herself was offering libations to the murdered men, and burning unleavened cakes of atonement on the hearth.

  When the ceremony was completed, Circe went over to the suppliants, who were crouched around the hearth again, raised them up by the hands and led them courteously to the chairs that they had refused before; and they sat down.

  She sat facing them on another chair and asked Medea: ‘Who can you be, my dear, who resemble so wonderfully the girl that I once was? The amber colour of your eyes is found only among the royal children of Ephyra. And how have you come here with an escort of bald-headed Scythian priests along the rugged course of the river Save? And who is the maiden huntress, your female companion in mischief? And who are your two male companions in mischief, the one so dark both in hair and complexion, the other so fair? And who are these two royal Alphas to whose murders you have been accessory?’

  Medea revealed herself to Circe and confessed everything without concealment. She ended by saying: ‘And indeed I came at your own summons, Aunt, as you very well know.’

  Circe had loathed her brother Aeëtes as the cause of her banishment from Ephyra. She embraced Medea and cried: ‘Dear child, you have done excellently well! And I should have been glad of your coming, even without the news that you bring, which makes the air taste like honey. For I summoned you on an important business concerned with our mistress Brimo.’

  What business this was she revealed to Medea alone. But it is known that she entrusted to her certain presents for delivery to the Chief Nymph of Cocalus at Agrigentum in Sicily: namely, a bronze tripod, an amber necklace of phalluses, and a sealed chest. Jason, not wishing to cross Circe in any way, undertook to sail the Argo there as soon as possible, though Sicily lay far out of his course to the westward. Medea presented Circe with an axe of green jade, one touch of which would cure a man of the kidney pain, and a number of rare Caucasian drugs and simples, of which she stood in need, and which later she used to great effect; Circe gladly resigned to Medea all her rights at Ephyra, since she was childless and did not intend ever to revisit the isthmus.

  Circe’s Court was constantly visited by secret adherents of the old religion, especially by leaders of the beast and bird fraternities. She was the last surviving priestess, except for those living in distant Gaul, and the island of the Hyperboreans, and Ireland, who was capable of performing the painful ceremonies by which a leader was endowed with the supernatural powers demanded by his rank and was enabled at will to assume at pleasure the shape of his sacred animal.

  While the Argonauts remained at Aeaea they were forbidden to wound or kill any creature that they encountered, of whatever sort: for if a wolf howled on the hill, it was likely to be a were-wolf; if a bear burst into the dining-hall and snatched up a honey-cake from the table, it was certainly a were-bear. Lizards, magpies, and such-like, even scorpions, beetles, and ants – all must be respected. Circe’s male assistants in her responsible and complicated work were Pig men, the Goddess Brimo’s own, whose company all men avoided; even the youngest of them had white hair and white eyebrows, and their eyes were red as Death. Some of them were Greeks, but others were Neurians, Gauls, and Celtiberians. The ordinary tasks of the palace were performed by the Falcon maidens who were native Istrians. There were also several indeterminate creatures wandering tamely about the palace, the sight of which filled the Argonauts with dread – a two-headed red calf, a striped horse, a cock with four legs, and an animal that seemed to be a white ass but had a sharp horn protruding from the centre of its forehead. And on a well-shaved lawn in the innermost courtyard screamed and strutted a glistening Indian peacock – the scrannel-voiced bird, with a hundred eyes in his tail, most esteemed by the Goddess. Circe consulted him in all her most vexatious difficulties.

  Circe took a strong fancy to Periclymenus the wizard, who, having been born in an eclipse, had magical powers which she envied. She tried to induce him to remain with her but he would not desert his shipmates, and longed to be home at Sandy Pylos. She grew angry and told him: ‘As you wish. But I warrant you will not long enjoy your estate. For I see death coming to you from the bow of one of these same shipmates.’

  It was from Circe that Meleager obtained a secret potion that would make Atalanta yield to him in love, when the time should be ripe for him to administer it. His one fear was that Atalanta preferred Melanion to him, for Melanion was wonderfully attentive to her; and during their long, rough, hurried journey from the Danube mouth to Aeaea, by canoe, sailboat, mule-back, litter, and chariot, it was Melanion who had been the true leader of the expedition, and the spokesman at the Court of the Scythian King and at every other Court or tribal meeting-place: for Jason, as befitted a ho
micide, kept as silent as possible. Only the oath of loyalty that Meleager had sworn to his fellow-Argonauts restrained him from killing Melanion; but jealousy gnawed at his heart night and day.

  As for the Fleece, it had now been washed in two of the seven prescribed rivers: in the Danube that empties into the Black Sea, and in the cold rushing Turros that empties into the Adriatic.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  The Argo is Again Overtaken

  Down the Adriatic Sea with a fair wind sailed the Argo, making as many as seventy miles in a single day and fifty on the succeeding night. She seemed like a jaded jennet, that, returning from a long journey with the polished mule-cart behind her, realizes suddenly that she is close to her master’s home, pricks up her ears and breaks into a smart trot, straining at the halter. Six days and nights only brought her to Corfu, the sickle-shaped land of the Phaeacians. There, Jason, standing in need of water and fresh provisions, decided to put in at the city of Corcyra, which lies surrounded with pine-woods in the lower curve of the sickle, and pay his respects to King Alcinoüs and Queen Arete. Alcinoüs was a maternal kinsman of Sisyphus the Corinthian. He had emigrated to Corfu when the Achaeans abolished the worship of the hero Asopus, to whom his mother Corcyra had been Priestess. After marrying Arete, Queen of the Phaeacians, a tribe that had been driven to Corfu from the mainland by the Cyclops clan, Alcinoüs had founded this city and named it Corcyra in his mother’s honour.

  Echion went ashore at dawn and congratulated Alcinoüs upon being the first Greek ruler to hear a wonderful piece of news. The famous Argonauts had safely accomplished their divine and much-heralded mission: after passing through many desperate hazards they had come to Colchian Aea at last, and there had persuaded King Aeëtes to yield the Fleece to them; sailing home in glory, and circumnavigating Greece, they had been purified in Aeaea – one or two of them – of a little blood that they had been forced to shed by the way. It now only remained for them to restore the Fleece to Laphystian Zeus, on whose account they had suffered terrible things. Moreover, Echion told Alcinoüs, Medea, the daughter of Aeëtes, was aboard, come to Greece to claim her Corinthian patrimony.

  It may well be imagined what haste Alcinoüs made to entertain his visitors worthily. They were soon seated at dinner on throne-like chairs, well-bathed and anointed, their heads garlanded with myrtle, their knees spread over with warm embroidered shawls. The walls of the hall were painted sea-blue, and fish were swimming here and there, singly or in schools, of a hundred distinguishable varieties; and dolphins dived among them, blowing bubbles, to the life; and shells were painted on the sea-floor. Behind each chair stood a pedestal surmounted by the life-sized statue of a boy in painted wood, and dressed entirely in cloth of gold. When evening came, a lighted torch was set in the hand of each golden boy, all about the table. On either side of the door crouched sacred bronze dogs of Lemnian make, between which it was dangerous for wrong-doers to pass; so that the rear entrance was the more frequented by far. The palace was, indeed, one of the richest and best appointed in Greece, because the Phaeacians were seamen by trade and the chief carriers of the Adriatic Sea.

  Jason spoke privately with Alcinoüs, whose garments were stiff with gold thread, confiding a difficulty to him: at Colchis, inspired by the Goddess Athena or some other deity, he had informed King Aeëtes that the Corinthians, because of a murrain and floods and a plague of serpents, had invited him either to return and rule over them or to send one of his children to do so. Medea had come in response to this fictitious invitation, and he was now in honour bound to set her upon the throne of Ephyra; to which she was the legitimate heiress since her father, her brother Apsyrtus, and her aunt Circe had all resigned their rights to her.

  Alcinoüs smiled benignly on hearing Jason’s story and offered to do all in his power to aid him; he would even, if necessary, send a ship-load or two of armed men to Ephyra to enforce Medea’s claims.

  Jason thanked him heartily, and undertook in return to see that the worship of the hero Asopus was restored by Medea, whom he proposed to marry so soon as ever he had restored the Fleece to the Laphystian Ram. However, respecting his host’s sensibilities as a Corinthian, Jason let him believe that Aeëtes and Apsyrtus were still alive, and made no mention of the Danubian journey either.

  The banquet continued all day in friendship and jollity, and might well have continued all night, had it not been that, as darkness began to fall, a prolonged commotion was heard outside, and a servant ran in with a disquieting report. A fleet of eight foreign war-galleys had put into the harbour, Aethiopians by the look of them; the crews had disembarked with their weapons in their hands, formed themselves into several compact columns, and were now closing in upon the palace.

  Alcinoüs was not perturbed, because, as he said to Jason whom he pressed to continue with the banquet: ‘I have never done the Aethiopians any harm, so far as I know, and they have the reputation of being a just and peaceable nation.’ But Jason sweated with fear: he guessed that the Colchian fleet had caught up with him again and that Aras the High Admiral would not be easily fooled a second time.

  Aras entered as his own herald, being the only Colchian who could speak Greek. He used no eloquence, but spoke tersely and simply as an Admiral should:

  ‘Majesty, I am Aras, High Admiral of the Colchian fleet. Three months ago I sailed from Aea on the Phasis river, which lies from here some two thousand miles to the eastward. My master for thirty years was King Aeëtes the Greek. He has now been treacherously murdered by his own fellow-countrymen.’

  ‘Murdered,’ cried Alcinoüs. ‘Oh, my lord, I am grieved to hear of it! He and I were boys together at Ephyra.’ He turned enquiringly to Jason, who said nothing, but stared impassively back; and then to Medea, who began to weep silently.

  ‘These honoured guests of mine,’ said Alcinoüs, ‘have not mentioned the sad event, though they come directly from Colchis themselves; no doubt Aeëtes died shortly after their departure from Aea?’

  ‘Four hours after,’ Aras replied. ‘My Sovereign succumbed to a wound that one of them had inflicted with a javelin, and I have come to fetch the whole ship-load of them back to justice. These criminals, Majesty, who are now imposing upon your hospitality, came to Colchis under the cloak of friendship and the pretence of pious duty. No sooner had they arrived than their leader Jason persuaded the only surviving daughter of King Aeëtes, the Princess Medea yonder, to steal the Golden Fleece of Zeus from the shrine of the hero Prometheus, and run off with him. To create a diversion, under cover of which they might escape, they then committed an act of sacrilege: they gelded and yoked the holy bull images of the Taurians that stand in the inner hall of the royal palace.’

  ‘Pray wait a moment,’ said Alcinoüs. ‘Tell me, first, what lien or claim had the hero Prometheus upon the Golden Fleece of Zeus?’

  ‘That is no concern of mine, Majesty,’ said Aras. ‘The Fleece has been in the possession of Prometheus for a generation or more.’

  ‘Yet it is a question that affects the justice of the case,’ said Alcinoüs. ‘You must appreciate this: that if my guests went to Colchis on behalf of Father Zeus to recover stolen property, and if King Aeëtes refused to restore this property to them, they were entitled to use force – or so at least they are at liberty to plead now that they are back in Greece, where the law of Zeus runs. And answer me this: how came the bull images of the Taurians to be placed in the royal palace of Aea? Do you Colchians not worship Mithras, the Bull’s ancient enemy?’

  Aras answered: ‘Aeëtes contracted an alliance with the savage Taurians and married their king’s daughter; it was she who insisted that the bull images should be installed there for her private worship, and that of her suite.’

  Alcinoüs said: ‘On the face of it, this mutilation of the bulls seems to be a grievance of the Taurians rather than of the Colchians. And I observe by your demeanour that you do not love either the Taurians or their god.’

  Aras continued: ‘I was sent in pursuit of the pirate
s, and at the Long Beach overtook Prince Apsyrtus, the only son of Aeëtes, who had sailed ahead of me. I duly saluted him as King. There he and I joined forces and nearly captured the pirate in the neighbourhood of Sinope; but she eluded us and made off to the north-westward. King Apsyrtus sailed in pursuit; but sent me down to Troy with a squadron of eight ships to guard against her possible escape through the Hellespont; this he did because there is no convenient port at the head of the Bosphorus, or below; and because the Trojans are our allies. I had been anchored in the Scamander river, off Troy, for some days when the presence of the pirate was reported to me by smoke signals from the head of the Hellespont. I sailed out, boarded and searched her, but found nothing of any consequence aboard – neither the Golden Fleece, nor the Princess Medea, nor the maiden huntress Atalanta who struck the blow of which King Aeëtes died, nor Jason the captain. Echion, their herald, lyingly informed me that King Apsyrtus had overtaken the ship at the mouth of the Danube and after a short conflict had overpowered the crew. He had exacted summary vengeance on Atalanta and Jason, Echion said, and had sailed home to Colchis with Medea and the Fleece. But I was later informed of the truth by the grim and bleeding apparition of my murdered King.’

  Echion rose and said to King Alcinoüs: ‘Majesty, I protest. The Colchian may well have seen an apparition, but he is making a wilfully false declaration about my words to him. I said nothing of the sort, as any man among us will bear witness on oath. If, when he searched our vessel in broad daylight, the Gods blinded his eyes by putting a magical mist over the persons for whom he was searching and over the Fleece, what fault of mine was that? I resent his accusations!’ He sat down again.