Jason and the Argonauts (25 page)

510 (405)
is dead, the locals will be far less keen

to take his side in this dispute about you.

Then I, for one, would hardly shrink from fighting

the Colchians, if they obstruct our passage.”

So Jason said in an attempt to calm her,

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but her reply was still more devastating:

“You listen now. Our shameless actions drive us

to still more shameless actions. It was I

who took the first false step. Once I was duped

by my obsession, higher powers forced me

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to execute the evil scheme I plotted.

Tonight your comrades' part will be to fend off

Colchian spears in battle. Mine will be

to place Absyrtus safely in your hands.

I see, yes, you must welcome him to parley

525 (417)
with splendid gifts, so that I can persuade

the heralds heading back to him to make him

come all alone to listen to my plan.

Then, if the deed is pleasing to you, kill him

and start a battle with the Colchian soldiers.

I don't care.”

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So they together wove

a mighty web of ruin for Absyrtus.

They sent him many friendship-gifts, including

the sacred raiment of Hypsipyle,

a crimson gown. The Graces had themselves

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made it by their own hands for Dionysus

on Dia. He bestowed it on his son,

Thoas, and he in turn upon his daughter,

Hypsipyle, who offered it to Jason

to take away, a finely woven guest-gift,

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along with many other treasures. Neither

by ogling nor fondling this garment

could you fulfill your sweet desire for it.

The fabric still exhaled ambrosia essence

from the night when the Nysaean king,

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tipsy with wine and nectar, lay upon it

to fondle Ariadne's gorgeous breasts—

this is the girl whom Theseus abandoned

on seagirt Dia after she eloped

from Knossos with him.

Once the plan was set,

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Medea issued orders to the heralds—

they were to tell Absyrtus to arrive

after she reached the temple of the goddess

in keeping with the treaty and as soon as

the deepest darkness of the night had come,

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so that they could devise a scheme by which

she would retrieve the mighty golden fleece

and bring it home to King Aeëtes' palace

(she had alleged it was the sons of Phrixus

who dragged her off and gave her to the strangers

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as spoils of war). Making such false excuses,

she scattered on the airy breezes drugs

potent enough to lure a savage creature

down a precipitous cliff, even a creature

that happened to be very far away.

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Wretched Eros, great abomination,

great bane of humankind, from you arise

murderous feuds and groans and lamentations

and countless other miseries besides.

Great god, may you arise and shoot your arrows

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against the offspring of my enemies

just as you shot Medea's insides full

of cursed spite. How cruelly did she slaughter

Absyrtus, her own brother, when he came

to meet her? That's the next part of my song.

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After the heroes put the girl ashore,

according to the treaty, on the Isle

of Artemis, the parties separated

and beached their vessels on opposing shores,

and Jason chose an ambush to await

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Absyrtus first and his companions later.

The fatal promises deceived Absyrtus,

and he went sailing right away across the river

and landed in the darkest hour of night

upon the sacred isle. He started forth,

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without a guard, to learn his sister's mind

through conversation,
as a little boy

dares sailing on a runoff-swollen torrent

not even adults would attempt. He hoped

that she would plot with him against the strangers.

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As they were settling the details, Jason

vaulted out of the leafy ambuscade,

a naked sword-blade hefted in his hand.

The girl was quick to turn her eyes away

and veil them, so that she would not behold

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the coming deathblow and her brother's blood.

Think of a butcher slaughtering a bull,

a giant, big-horned bull—yes, that's the way

that Jason struck the man. He had been lurking

beside the temple that the Brygians

600 (470)
who live upon the mainland opposite

had built for Artemis. Knees buckling,

Absyrtus crumpled in the temple's forecourt.

A hero gasping out his life, he caught,

in both his hands, the crimson geyser streaming

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out of the wound and
smeared his sister's mantle

and silver veil as she recoiled from him.

A dauntless Fury watched it all, sidelong

and without sympathy—a putrid deed.

The son of Aeson, then, the hero, hacked off

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the corpse's limbs, three times imbibed its blood

and spat the taint out through his teeth three times,

as is the proper way for murderers

to purge perfidious assassination.

He stashed the sagging carcass in the earth,

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and to this day the bones are lying there

among a people known as the “Absyrtians.”

As soon as his companions saw before them

the glimmer of the torch the girl had raised

to signal them to come, they rowed the
Argo

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up alongside the Colchian ship and started

massacring all the men aboard it

as hawks descend upon a flock of doves,

or savage lions, when they reach the fold,

pounce on a teeming flock of huddled sheep.

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They overwhelmed them like a conflagration,

slaughtered them—none of them escaped destruction.

Jason returned at last to join the battle,

but his companions needed no assistance;

rather, they had been worrying for him.

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When they were done, they all sat down to form

some prudent plan about their journey home.

Medea joined in the deliberations,

but Peleus was first to speak his mind:

“I say that right now while the night remains

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we climb aboard and row in the direction

opposite to the one that they are watching.

At dawn, when they discover what has happened,

I doubt that anyone among them urging

further pursuit of us will win support.

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Like any
people orphaned of a leader,

they will be rent by nasty factions. Then,

after their forces are divided, we shall find

safe passage when we come back later on.”

So he proposed, and all the young men cheered

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the words of Peleus. They leapt aboard

without delay and labored at the oars

relentlessly until they reached the farthest

island in the chain, divine Electris,

right next to the Eridanus' mouth.

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Soon as the Colchians saw their leader dead,

they swore to hunt the
Argo
and the Minyans

across the whole wide Cronian Sea. But Hera

checked them with horrifying lightning flashes.

Finally, then, since they had come to loathe

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their homes in the Cytaean land and dread

Aeëtes' savage temper, they divided

and sailed to settlements by separate routes.

Some landed on the very islands where

the heroes had been beached. They live there yet

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under the name they took from Prince Absyrtus.

Others settled near the deep and brackish

Illyrian River, where Harmonia

and old King Cadmus share a common tomb.

(Thus they were neighbors to the Encheleians.)

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Still others settled in the mountain chain

known as “Ceraunian” (or “Thundering”),

because the thunderbolts of Cronian Zeus

frightened them from the island opposite.

Once their homeward journey seemed secure,

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the heroes coasted back and bound the hawsers

to the Hyllaean land. The islands here

are packed in tight and jut so from the mainland

that it is hard for helmsmen to avoid them.

The local tribesmen, though, were kind. They helped

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the heroes navigate the strait and earned

a tripod of Apollo in return.

You see, when Jason went to holy Pytho

to ask about the quest, Apollo gave him

two tripods to be kept aboard the ship

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throughout the journey he would undergo.

According to the oracle, no hostile

forces would ever occupy a land

that kept one of these sacred tripods in it.

Thus, even to this day, the tripod stands

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close to the friendly citadel of Hyllus,

but underground, so that it will remain

forever out of sight.

The heroes, though,

did not find Hyllus still among the living—

Hyllus, whom shapely Melita had borne

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to Heracles among the Phaeacians.

Heracles, you see, had come to visit

Nausithoös' court and Macris, nurse

of Dionysus, to expunge the ghastly

murder of his own children from his hands.

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And there it was he coveted and conquered

the daughter of the river god Aegaeus,

the water spirit Melita, who bore

Hyllus the Strong.

When Hyllus came of age,

he chafed beneath Nausithoös' rule

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and wished no longer to reside beneath it.

So, after gathering from among the natives

a crew of Phaeacian journeymen,

he sailed into the Cronian Sea. (In fact,

the hero-king Nausithoös had helped him

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outfit the voyage.) Hyllus settled here,

and the Mentores killed him as he fought

to keep
a grazing herd of cattle from them.

Come, tell me, goddesses, how is it that,

beyond the Adriatic Sea, off near

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Ausonia and the Ligystian islands

known as the Stoechades, such mighty

proof of the
Argo
's route can still be found?

What great necessity, what wants and needs,

drove them so far abroad? What winds conveyed them?

715
After the brutal slaughter of Absyrtus,

Zeus himself, the King of the Immortals,

succumbed to wrath against the perpetrators.

He ruled that they must purge themselves of bloodguilt

under the guidance of Aeaean Circe

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and then endure ten thousand miseries

before returning home. None of the heroes

knew of this verdict, no, they simply left

Hyllaea and went speeding on their way.

Soon they had left all the Liburnian islands,

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one by one, behind them in their wake,

Issa, Dysceladus, fair Pityeia—

islands that lately had been full of Colchians.

Then they passed Corcyra where Poseidon

settled the fair-haired daughter of Asopus,

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Corcyra, far, far from the land of Phlius

from which the god had snatched her up in love.

Sailors who see it from the sea, all wooded

and somber, call it Dark Corcyra.

Next,

cheered by a balmy breeze, they passed Melita,

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sheer Cerossus, then, much farther on,

Nymphaea where the
queen Calypso lived,

Atlas' daughter. They would soon have seen

the misty mountains of Ceraunia,

but Hera turned her thoughts toward Zeus' verdict

740
and heavy penalty. To force the heroes

onto the necessary course, she roused

storm winds, which fastened on the ship and pushed it

back to the rocky island of Electris.

Next thing they knew, as they were dashing backward,

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one of the
Argo
's beams, the one Athena

had chopped out of an oak tree in Dodona

and fitted as the
Argo
's keel, emitted

a human voice, a warning. Holy dread

possessed them when they heard the voice proclaiming

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Zeus' terms—to wit, that they would never

survive the long sea paths and fierce sea squalls

unless the goddess Circe washed away

their cruel assassination of Absyrtus.

What's more, it told the brothers Polydeuces

755
and Castor to beseech the gods to grant

safe passage into the Ausonian Sea

where they must stop and visit Circe, daughter

of Helius and Persa. So the
Argo

cried through the night. Tyndareus' sons

760
arose and raised their hands to the immortals,

praying,
Please, may all this come to pass,

though grief had gripped the other Minyan heroes.

The ship dashed onward under sail and reached

the halfway point on the Eridanus

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where
Phaëthon, chest smitten by a flashing

lightning bolt, fell, half-incinerated,