In Search of the Argonauts

The Remarkable History of Jason and the Golden Fleece

Helen Lovatt

• Editorial: Bloomsbury Academic
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350115132
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: Greek Ancient History

Few classical stories are as exciting as that of Jason and the Golden Fleece. The legend of the boy, who discovers a new identity as son of a usurped king and leads a crew of demi-gods and famous heroes, has resonated through the ages, rumbling like the clashing rocks, which almost pulverised the Argo. The myth and its reception inspires endless engagements: while it tells of a quest to the ends of the earth, of the tyrants Pelias and Aetes, of dragons' teeth, of the loss of Hylas (beloved of Hercules) stolen away by nymphs, and of Jason's seduction of the powerful witch Medea (later betrayed for a more useful princess), it speaks to us of more: of gender and sexuality; of heroism and lost integrity; of powerful gods and terrifying monsters; of identity and otherness; of exploration and exploitation. The Argonauts are emblems of collective heroism, yet also of the emptiness of glory. From Pindar to J. W. Waterhouse, Apollonius of Rhodes to Ray Harryhausen, and Robert Graves to Mary Zimmerman, the Argonaut myth has produced later interpretations as rich, salty and complex as the ancient versions. Helen Lovatt here unravels, like untangled sea-kelp, the diverse strands of the narrative and its numerous and fascinating afterlives. Her book will prove both informative and endlessly entertaining to those who love classical literature and myth.

1

Back-stories and Beginnings

The Argonaut myth is a tale of searching: Jason and his crew of demi-gods and heroes seek the Golden Fleece. Often, they know only its location and not how to get there. Once they have found Colchis, they still need Medea’s help to find the Fleece itself. Even then, they must search for a way home, through the frozen north or the desert wastes of North Africa. This book tells the story of the Argonauts and of those who search for them. It shows how the myth acquires new meanings: the Fleece could represent gold itself, a guarantee of fertility or royal power, wealth and success in the Californian Gold Rush, even, recently, a database of genetic information.

Jason is famous for teaming up with the greatest heroes of Greece, sailing the Argo through the Clashing Rocks to Colchis on the Black Sea, fighting the bulls and Earthborn men with the help of Medea, witch and princess, stealing the Golden Fleece from its guardian dragon and absconding with princess and fleece back home to Greece. Jason is also famous for betrayal: he abandons Medea for a more convenient princess, and becomes the victim of her unspeakable revenge when she kills their sons. Perhaps the most influential text on the tradition of Jason is Euripides’ Medea. In this tragedy, first performed in 431 BCE at Athens, Jason is a cowardly rhetorician, untrustworthy and despicable. When the play begins, Medea’s nurse laments her terrible situation: Jason is preparing for his new marriage and Medea is about to be exiled along with her children by Creon, king of Corinth. Jason is the object of Medea’s irrational desire, the man for whom she gave up family, homeland, reputation, by helping him steal the fleece. When he finally comes on stage in person, his first speech at 446–64 does not present him in a sympathetic light. He blames Medea’s situation not on his own abandonment of her, but on her anger and dissenting speech. Medea replies by listing all her services to him: her help with the fire-breathing bulls; her personal slaughter of the guardian dragon; her abandonment of father and home; her murder of her brother, and later of his uncle, Pelias. Jason’s reply casts her speech as a storm to be battled (himself as the valiant sailor, 522–5) and attributes his success to Aphrodite and Eros, who made Medea help him. He claims that his marriage to a different woman is in her best interests. Medea is a rhetorician too, but most of what she claims is accepted as true by characters in the play, while Jason’s arguments induce incredulity. Characters other than Medea blame Jason for breaking his promises. Euripides’ Argonaut story is filtered through Medea’s outrage: the voyage is transgressive and destructive, and leads inevitably to murder and filicide.

Euripides’ Medea has so dominated the tradition of Jason and Medea that Jason remains in Medea’s shadow. There are excellent studies of the reception of Euripides’ Medea but few focusing on Jason.¹ This book redresses the balance: Jason’s masculinity needs critiquing as much as Medea’s subjugation and alienation. We may feel that heroes get all the attention, but in this case Medea has overshadowed Jason. The different Jasons with their reinterpretations of heroism and masculinity also hold valuable lessons about ways of being a man. One study that prioritized Jason is Colavito (2014), which gathers interesting material, but focuses primarily on the origins of the Argonaut myth and symbolic interpretations.² Here I foreground themes of gender, sexuality, Otherness, heroism and the supernatural, all of which are particularly susceptible to variation in different contexts.

This book takes as its focus the Argonautic expedition, not the events in Corinth afterwards, broadly beginning at the departure of the Argo and ending at its arrival back in Iolchos, using the framework of Apollonius’ third-century BCE epic poem, Argonautica, but not assuming it is the ‘standard version’. A key question for this book is how much Apollonius’ epic is central to this tradition. We will see the variety and complexity of the tradition in extant versions, both ancient and modern. Myth is polymorphous, and processes of reception and transmission only serve to increase its thousand shapes.

Previous academic study of the Argonaut myth has focused on ancient versions, such as Dräger (1993) and Moreau (1994), both important but granted a mixed scholarly reception.³ More useful is Gantz (1993) on evidence for the early myth and Fowler (2000) on mythography. On later material, the afterlife of the myth in more recent cultures, secondary literature is patchy to non-existent: Zissos has studied the reception of Valerius Flaccus and Dominguez’s The Medieval Argonautica.⁴ Versions which had literary or artistic prestige, such as Lefèvre and Grillparzer, Pasolini or Waterhouse, Robert Graves or Christa Wolf gain some attention, especially if mainly about Medea.⁵ Children’s literature is a growth area in Classical Reception scholarship, but there is very little specifically on children’s Argonauts.⁶ Greek myth in film and television attracts scholars, but less to the Argonaut films, even the best known.⁷ In our search, we will often explore uncharted territory.

This book focuses primarily on complete, stand-alone versions of the Argonaut story. In recent years loose adaptations, prequels, sequels, paraquels and mash-ups have predominated, reflecting the ways that popular culture tropes itself as myth and interacts with myth.⁸ This material will form the basis of a separate, future project, so will receive less attention here. The Argonaut story also features frequently in collections or anthologies of Greek myth, but as they are not the main focus, I will refer to them only when necessary to understand the patterns of the tradition. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, I have mainly prioritized Anglophone versions, for reasons of space and practicality, and because they are often widely disseminated elsewhere (as with the 1963 film).⁹ A much bigger project would be to study the myth in different national and linguistic traditions. The broad scope of this project inevitably means that this is a ‘big picture’ analysis: this first journey scopes the landscape and explores future possibilities for trade and settlement. There is much room for future research into individual versions or groups of versions, but this search charts the routes for later voyages. Without a sense of how the wider tradition fits together, it is hard to contextualize individual versions. Within these limitations, this book outlines the development of the Argonaut myth from its beginnings to the present day.¹⁰

In this introduction, I give a brief overview, set up definitions of myth and reception and their interactions, introduce the eight landmark versions which we revisit throughout the search, discuss how they each begin the story, and introduce the dramatis personae, as the Argonauts assemble. First, I summarize early literary evidence for the myth.

The shape of the Argonaut tradition

The Argo was already famous by the time of the Homeric Odyssey.¹¹ When Circe advises Odysseus to avoid the Planctae (‘wandering rocks’) in favour of Scylla and Charybdis, she mentions the Argo:

One sea-borne ship alone has sailed through there,

Argo well-known among all (pasi melousa), sailing from Aeetes;

even her the swift wave would have thrown against the great rocks,

if Hera had not sent her through, since Jason was dear to her.

Od. 12.69–72

The Argo is ‘well-known’: to a Homeric audience the Argonaut tale is old. Scholars have long felt that the Argonaut story was a source for the Odyssey, an oral epic tradition lying behind myriads of later journey tales.¹² Martin West (2005: 39) calls this ‘one of the most certain results of Homeric scholarship’, and suggests that the Clashing Rocks, Circe, the Sirens, and the Laestrygonians (based on the Earthborn giants at Cyzicus) all derive from the Argonautic tradition. In Homer, the Argo myth already involves a journey to Aeetes’ country and back, the hero Jason and Hera’s sponsorship. Other early sources include Hesiod’s Theogony 992–1002, which summarizes the story: Pelias sends Jason to the court of Aeetes; he returns with Medea to Iolchos, where their son was educated by Chiron. Other early evidence is preserved by the first-century BCE geographer Strabo, such as a few lines of the seventh-century BCE poet Mimnermos: ‘Mimnermos says: “Never would Jason himself have brought back the great fleece from Aea, accomplishing his mind-racking journey and fulfilling the difficult task for insolent Pelias, nor would they have come even to the fair stream of Oceanus …” and further on he says: “To the city of Aeëtes, where the rays of the swift Sun lie in a chamber of gold beside the lips of Oceanus, where glorious Jason went.” ’ (1.2.40) These fragments show Jason’s reliance on unspecified help and suggest that the story already held its familiar shape well before the Homeric poems took their current form.

Early Argonaut epic poems included the mid-sixth-century Corinthiaca of Eumelos, which introduced Corinthian material, and the Carmen Naupactium, or Naupactia, possibly by Carcinus, also probably Corinthian, and a 6,500 line poem on the building of the Argo and the journey to Colchis, ascribed to a poet called Epimenides, mentioned by the ancient commentators (scholia) on Apollonius. None of these early poems survives. Our first continuous and complete narrative of the Argonautic expedition dates from the Hellenistic period, centuries later: Apollonius Rhodius’ Argonautica, a four-book epic poem from about the mid-third century BCE.¹³ Since Apollonius comes after Euripides, and engages closely with his Medea, later traditions are irrevocably Euripidean...

Índice

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Dedication
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Versions, Texts and Abbreviations
• 1 Back-stories and Beginnings
• 2 Femininity and Sexuality
• 3 Masculinity and Leadership
• 4 Entertainment and the Marvellous
• 5 Ethnicity and Otherness
• 6 Heroism and Betrayal
• 7 Quest and Fleece
• 8 Findings and Endings
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Copyright