The Golden Fleece

by Robert Graves

The Argo could at last turn her prow homeward. The wind was fair from the west as she sailed back along the southern coast of Sicily, but just as she cleared Cape Pachynon a most violent north-east wind came tearing down the Sicilian Sea. Nauplius advised Jason to let her run before it and take shelter in the harbour of Malta, which has good anchorage. Jason consented, but by some error Great Ancaeus steered too far to the east and passed Malta by in the failing light, Lynceus unluckily being asleep at that time. They drove on all night, through a sea of indescribable violence, fearing that every hour would be their last. The morning brought no relief but only increased anxiety. The Argo had sprung a leak from the strain of her terrible buffeting, and Argus called for ropes to frap her, which was done with great difficulty among the huge seas.

  Argus told Nauplius: ‘The leak is in the part of the ship which we repaired at Teos; the timber was not to my liking but there was none better to be had. We must run for the nearest shore and meanwhile bail for dear life, first casting overboard everything that is not necessary.’

  Jason gave the order to lighten ship, but nobody wished to throw rich armour or sacks of gold dust to the insatiable waves. As they hesitated, Augeas cried: ‘Come, comrades, let us heave the water-jars overboard. They are the objects of most weight!’ So this was done, but they kept a little fresh water for their needs stored in golden pitchers and silver jars.

  Those were terrible days and nights, for nobody slept a wink and the twelve Phaeacian bridesmaids were so dreadfully sea-sick that they begged their mistress to toss them overboard after the water-jars and so put an end to their miseries.

  At last someone remembered the Mysteries of Samothrace and suggested that the Triple Goddess should be called upon to abate the force of the wind. Mopsus thereupon attempted to invoke her in the manner that the Dactyls had taught them, but in the presence of so many uninitiated persons he could not recollect the correct formula of incantation, and neither could anyone else; it seemed that the Goddess had clouded their minds purposely.

  Jason then begged Medea to propitiate the Goddess, but Medea was herself prostrated with sea-sickness and could only groan for answer. So they drove on past the rocky island of Lampedusa, the shores of which shone white with tremendous sheets of spray, but Nauplius mistook it for Pantellaria, which lies a day’s sail away to the northward, and so was thrown out of his reckoning. Now heavier seas even than before broke over the Argo, rusting the weapons of the Argonauts, spoiling their clothes and forcing them to bail without ceasing until they thought that their backs would break with the strain.

  Meleager cried out early on the third morning: ‘Comrades, will any of you explain to me why this misery has come upon us? Since all the sins that each of us has committed openly have been purged by sacrifice and lustration, what cause or reason is there for this dangerous buffeting?’

  Castor fixed Idas with his eye, an eye no longer clear but dulled with weariness and reddened by salt spray. ‘There sits the culprit,’ he said ‘who insulted the nymphs of Cocalus and thereby vexed the Great One who rules the winds. Were our ship lightened of Idas she would soon float on an even keel, the torn seams would close, the winds would fall, and the kingfisher would skim merrily again across blue water.’

  Lynceus answered for his brother Idas, addressing Jason: ‘Jason, son of Aeson, did you hear what Castor said? Forgetful of the oath of loyalty which he swore to us all on the beach of Iolcos, and which he renewed on the island of Apollo when first we entered the Black Sea, this madman is openly plotting against the life of my brother Idas. He is attempting to convert his private rancour into public condemnation of the boldest man among you. Why should dear Idas be denied his innocent jests? Has he not earned the right to say whatever he pleases? When the prodigious boar killed Idmon by the reeds of the river Lycos and would have destroyed our whole ship’s company with the same bloody-stained lushes, who was it that drove a broad spear home and destroyed the pest? Answer me that, Peleus, you who stood in the greatest danger that morning! Or who was it, when we battled with the Bebrycians, who led the attack along the lip of the dell and, taking the enemy in flank, broke them in pieces? Answer me that, Great Ancaeus, you who followed two paces behind him. If the Argo must be lightened of any man, in sacrifice for the remainder, let it be the ungrateful and worthless Castor at whose heart envy gnaws as a rat gnaws at an old black leather bottle in a corner of the cellar.’

  Lynceus and Idas reached for their weapons, as also did Castor and Pollux, and all four struggled to come to grips; but the vessel was tossing and pitching so violently that they could not stand upright. The rest of the Argonauts tugged them back by their tunic tails, and disarmed them. However, Pollux managed to come near enough to Idas to deal him a heavy blow on the jaw. Idas, spitting out a broken tooth and a mouthful of blood, said: Pollux when this voyage is over, my broken tooth will demand a whole jawful of vengeance!’

  Argus, his face glowing with rage, shouted: ‘The voyage will end here and now, dolts and imbeciles, if you do not at once resume your bailing. The leak has gained two fingers’ depth on us since this insane quarrel began.’

  Then Meleager said: ‘Blame me, Argus. It was my fault not to have spoken plainly. I had no intention whatsoever of rousing discord between these proud pairs of brothers. I was about to raise another question altogether, namely, whether the storm and the leak might not both have been provoked by some error on the part of Atalanta of Calydon. At Agrigentum, when we went ashore, I watched her going apart into the bushes with Melanion…’

  Argus thrust a brass bowl into Meleager’s hand and screamed at him: ‘Bail, man, bail, and hold your accursed tongue if you ever wish to see dry land again!’

  But Atalanta came to sit beside Meleager and said in a subdued voice: ‘Dearest Meleager, let me confess that I love only you, though you weary me by your importunity and by your groundless jealousy against honest Melanion. I see your distress and will not punish you further. Come, dear one, smile at me and we will bail together in alternation!’

  Meleager began to weep and implored her pardon, which she sweetly granted. They bailed together, knee to knee, he scooping while she flung away water, he flinging away water while she scooped. Then there was peace in the Argo again, broken, to the general surprise, by Ascalaphus, son of Ares, as he sang in a deep, very true voice:

  Last night I heard my Thracian Father speak,

  ‘Warriors, doff your helmets!

  The Argo has a leak, a list, a leak,

  Warriors, doff your helmets!

  ‘Fear neither bloody axe nor sword nor mace,

  Warriors, doff your helmets!

  The cold green water gains on you apace,

  Warriors, doff your helmets!

  ‘Not goblets now, for yellow Lemnian wine,

  Warriors, doff your helmets!

  But handy scoops for bailing out the brine,

  Warriors, doff your helmets!’

  These three verses, and others in the same strain, encouraged the Argonauts to persist with their bailing; the tune was of the sort that runs in the head and cannot easily be expelled. Soon they had the water under control again. Argus found the leak and plugged it with strips of waxed cloth, and gave them hope of coming safely to land, if only the wind would abate a little.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  The Argonauts Abandon Hope

  Between midnight and dawn on the third night of their distress, the ninth since their departure from Corcyra, Lynceus, on watch in the bows, cried ‘Breakers ahead!’ shouting loudly so that his voice should not be snatched away by the wind. Then simple-minded Coronus of Gyrton spoke from his seat near the stern: ‘I fear, comrades, that the time has come when we must say a sorrowful farewell to one another, with mutual forgiveness for any injuries or insults of which we may yet nurse the hateful memory in our hearts. Let us recall only the exploits that we have performed in common; for though we may perish now, nobody can deny that we have succeeded in our extraordinary quest and have earned glory tha
t will be long in fading. Yet, alas, Idmon and Tiphys and Iphitus and Calaïs and Zetes, our comrades who have fallen by the way, will be counted luckier than we. Whereas we burned their bones piously and performed exact funeral rites for them, our own bodies will feed the crabs that crawl sideways upon the desert shore of Africa; and what will become of our ghosts, who knows?’

  However, Periclymenus the wizard rose up, supporting himself by gripping the gunwale with his left hand, and stretching his right hand into the air thus confidently addressed his father, the God Poseidon: ‘Father, whatever other deities may rule the waters of the Black Sea, or the waters about Samothrace, assuredly it is you who rule here. Do you not remember the three men, honoured by you with the name of sons, who, in the spring of this very year, offered you an extraordinary holocaust of twenty unblemished red bulls in the land of the Bebrycians? These same three men are aboard this ship. Preserve them, I beseech you, together with all their companions, and bring them safe to land. In so doing you will confer a benefit upon your elder brother, All-powerful Zeus, whose Golden Fleece lies safely folded in the locker under the helmsman’s seat of this ship. If the Argo goes down and the Fleece with it, Father, you will not be able to plead ignorance of the accident. The Thunderer will be angry and demand compensation, urging that the Fleece was won back for him by us with incredible labour and hazard. Here is a gift for you, Father, my own gift, this handsome Thessalian bit and bridle that I won from Castor the Spartan at a game of dice; for you first taught me to rattle the dice-box so that the dice would obey me and fall how I please. Accept this gift and use it to curb your green insensate steeds so they may not cast us in wreckage on Africa’s pitiless coast. I give, that you may give in return.’

  Then someone cried out ‘O!’ and pointed astern with his finger. For the God seemed to despise the gift of his son Periclymenus and to be bent on their destruction. A most prodigious wave, a wave of waves, that rose above the others as the snowy ridge of a mountain overhangs a green valley, came rolling towards them at frightful speed. It caught the Argo upon its shoulder and rushed onward with her. The Argonauts heard the sucking, grinding noise of shingle and expected instantly to be dashed beam-on against an iron-bound shore; yet when the wave broke with a booming noise and shot them forward in a white smother of foam they felt no shock at all.

  The Argo slowly lost way: it was as though the fingers of a divine hand caught and checked her to a dead stop. To all the Argonauts the same thought came: ‘We are dead. This is how it is to be dead.’

  On that strange thought they fell peacefully asleep, so utterly wearied were they, none of them expecting ever again to look upon the rutilant wheel of the Sun.

  However, as Dawn swiftly drew the curtain of darkness with her red fingers, the cry of a gull wakened Little Ancaeus, who bestirred himself, climbed upon the gunwale and looked about him. The Argo lay on an even keel, safely cushioned in a great mass of seaweed, not having lost so much as a fragment of her stern ornament. Before rousing his comrades to tell them the news, Ancaeus took soundings and found her afloat in a few feet of water but out of reach of the waves, which were still breaking with violence a couple of bowshots astern.

  At first nobody could understand what had happened. Nevertheless, Periclymenus, rubbing the sleep from his eyes, arose and gave mumbled thanks to his father for this miraculous rescue. Soon afterwards the wind began to die in a series of fretful blasts. As the sun rose higher, a dead calm succeeded the storm, though the sea still hissed like an angry goose in the ears of the Argonauts. When they recovered from their bewilderment and eagerly looked about them, they saw that the wave had borne the Argo over a succession of reefs, any one of which would have cracked her like a rotten hazel nut, and flung her finally over a broad high beach into an inland lake filled with seaweed, its shores hoary with salt.

  Someone began to laugh at the drollness of the accident, and soon the whole ship was in a roar. But old Nauplius checked them. ‘Comrades,’ he said, ‘this is no laughing matter. The wave that flung us here has been drawn back into the bosom of the deep, and though we might perhaps with great labour in a month’s time cut a channel through the beach back into the sea, we should never be able to lift the Argo over those reefs which stretch back row upon row, like benches in a crowded hall, for the better part of a mile. The Argo is caught here, a stranded whale, and here her carcase must lie and rot, and we with her; unless perhaps the lake communicates with the sea in some way not yet apparent to us.’

  The lake stretched inland as far as the southern horizon and for a great distance to the eastward, but the strand which divided it from the sea to the eastward gradually widened to a great stony plain; while to westward, not far off, it was bounded by a long line of sand-hills.

  Jason asked Nauplius: ‘Where are we? What lake is this?’

  Nauplius answered: ‘I cannot say for certain, never having been here before. A large lake lies inland from Hadrumeton, near which, by my reckoning, we now are; but I have been told that it lies many miles distant from the sea, so that I am perplexed. Let us try at once to shift the ship into deeper water, and sail across the lake. It may be that we shall find a river running out of it into the sea.’

  Weary and hungry as they were, the Argonauts reversed their oars in the oar-holes, stripped off their wet garments, retaining only their breeches, then clambered out and began to push the ship through the clogging weed. After a few paces she grounded on a sand-bank. They fetched her back and started her on another tack, but almost at once she grounded again. The weed made it impossible for Nauplius to judge where the water would be deep and where shallow. He therefore urged that they should abandon their random efforts and post themselves about the Argo at intervals in all directions so that he could see, by the depth in which they were standing, where the water was deepest. They did so, and he was able to mark out a crooked channel with oars; after which he recalled them all and they pushed the Argo along the channel, the keel often scraping the sandy bottom. But by the time that the sun was high in the heavens they had not progressed more than two hundred paces and were quite worn out.

  Jason reviewed the stores of wine and water. Of water he found somewhat more than a gallon and of wine less than half a gallon, to quench the thirst of thirty-two men and fourteen women. When he broke the news to the Argonauts they all fell silent for a while. Nauplius said: ‘It will be two months or more before even a drop of rain falls in this desert. Unless we can find a way out from the lake we shall soon all be either dead of thirst or mad from drinking salt water.’

  At this Erginus of Miletos turned to Augeas of Elis and cried: ‘Upon you, gold-greedy Augeas, our dying curse will be fixed, and whether you live or die our ghosts shall not cease to torment you for all eternity. Why did you counsel us to heave the water-jars overboard and hoard these useless sacks of treasure? I was a fool to re-embark in the Argo once I had set foot again, in the course of our voyage from the Hellespont, upon the flag-stones of my own lovely city of Miletos. Why did I not sham sick, as resourceful Orpheus did, and so escape from your disastrous company, madman of Elis? Never again, I fear, shall I plough with my wooden plough, or harrow with my thorn-harrow, the fertile barley-fields beside winding Meander, where the good black earth contains no stones big enough even for sling-shot and the grasshopper sings all summer long. But some god blinded us all; we should have known better than to listen to you, you tadpole, after the humiliation which your sloth brought upon us in the Crane Lake.’

  Augeas answered with spirit: ‘You call me madman, I call you a fool, a fool in a striped cloak. How was I to know where your father Poseidon would jokingly toss us? I merely voiced the general opinion of the crew that it was foolish to jettison treasure of which we might stand in need. Had we been cast away on any ordinary shore we could have purchased as much food and water as we pleased with half a handful of gold dust. And why do you fix the blame on me? Jason is our captain. If he had ordered us to jettison the treasure, I should have been the first t
o obey him. Furthermore, we are not dead yet. It is possible that our gold and silver may yet be of service to us. In fact, I am certain that they will; my honest heart assures me that this is not the end.’

  Autolycus said quickly: ‘Prove your confidence in your honest heart, dear Augeas, by selling me your day’s ration of wine and water for half a handful of gold dust. I am a willing buyer.’

  ‘That is a fair enough offer,’ said Echion the herald, ‘and I will pay you the same price for tomorrow’s ration.’

  Augeas was constrained to strike hands on the bargain, but bitterly he regretted it before the day was out; for though they were well enough provisioned with barley-bread and dried meats and honey and pickles and such-like, whatever food they ate without drinking stuck in their dry throats. Of olive oil only a small jar remained, and of dolphin oil nothing at all.

  The sun was insufferably hot, and the lake water, being sticky with salt, dried on their bodies with a white scurf. About noon a hot wind swept the desert and they saw the red sand-ghosts dancing in giddy spirals; Idas went out against the sand-ghosts with his spear, but they fled from him, until he ran laughing back to the camp in triumph; then they pursued him menacingly, towering high above him.

  Sand in plenty was blown into the Argonauts’ food as they tried to eat, and gritted upon their teeth; but the twelve Phaeacian girls did not share in the meal. They lay crowded in a sobbing mass around the supine form of Medea, who had doctored herself with a soporific drug. She was breathing heavily and uttering now and then a slight moan; and once she cried out in a passionate whisper: ‘Forgive me, Prometheus, forgive me! Love and necessity compelled me. One day I will make restitution!’

  Not greatly refreshed by their midday rest, the Argonauts continued to push the Argo through the weed and eased her forward another two hundred paces, along the western shore; a long wide sand-bank to port prevented them from steering into the middle of the lake. Everyone grew gloomy and quarrelsome, with the single exception of Mopsus the Lapith, who was talkative, cheerful, and gay. When Nauplius suggested that the ship should be lightened of as much gear as possible, it was Mopsus who carried out the task.