Argonautica

“ And if she escapes safe with her wings between the rocks to the open sea, then no more do ye refrain from the path, but grip your oars well in your hands and cleave the sea’s narrow strait, for the light of safety will be not so much in prayer as in strength of hands. Wherefore let all else go and labour boldly with might and main, but ere then implore the gods as ye will, I forbid you not. But if she flies onward and perishes midway, then do ye turn back; for it is better to yield to the immortals. For ye could not escape an evil doom from the rocks, not even if Argo were of iron. ”

“ Now for all the women to tend kine, to don armour of bronze, and to cleave with the plough-share the wheat-bearing fields, was easier than the works of Athena, with which they were busied aforetime. Yet for all that did they often gaze over the broad sea, in grievous fear against the Thracians' coming. So when they saw Argo being rowed near the island, straightway crowding in multitude from the gates of Myrine and clad in their harness of war, they poured forth to the beach like ravening Thyiades ”

“ But let us contrive some other device to help us, if ye intend to land, bearing in mind the injunction of Phineus. For not even could Heracles, when he came to Arcadia, drive away with bow and arrow the birds that swam on the Stymphalian lake. I saw it myself. But he shook in his hand a rattle of bronze and made a loud clatter as he stood upon a lofty peak, and the birds fled far off, screeching in bewildered fear. ”

“ But to them appeared Glaucus from the depths of the sea, the wise interpreter of divine Nereus, and raising aloft his shaggy head and chest from his waist below, with sturdy hand he seized the ship’s keel, and then cried to the eager crew:
“Why against the counsel of mighty Zeus do ye purpose to lead bold Heracles to the city of Aeetes? At Argos it is his fate to labour for insolent Eurystheus and to accomplish full twelve toils and dwell with the immortals, if so be that he bring to fulfilment a few more yet ”

“ Therefore we will believe—why should we not?—of these same Argonauts of old, that they too were noble men, who planned and did a noble deed; and that therefore their fame has lived, and been told in story and in song, mixed up, no doubt, with dreams and fables, and yet true and right at heart. So we will honour these old Argonauts, and listen to their story as it stands; and we will try to be like them, each of us in our place; for each of us has a Golden Fleece to seek, and a wild sea to sail over ere we reach it, and dragons to fight ere it be ours. ”

“ And quickly they sighted and sailed past his shrine and the broad banks of the river and the plain, and deep-flowing Calpe, and all the windless night and the day they bent to their tireless oars. And even as ploughing oxen toil as they cleave the moist earth, and sweat streams in abundance from flank and neck; and from beneath the yoke their eyes roll askance, while the breath ever rushes from their mouths in hot gasps; and all day long they toil, planting their hoofs deep in the ground; like them the heroes kept dragging their oars through the sea. ”

“ And as when abundant snow has fallen on the earth and the storm blasts have dispersed the wintry clouds under the murky night, and all the hosts of the stars appear shining through the gloom; so did those warriors shine springing up above the earth. ”

“ She thought of all the delightful things that are among the living, she thought of her joyous playmates, as a maiden will; and the sun grew sweeter than ever to behold, seeing that in truth her soul yearned for all. And she put the casket again from off her knees, all changed by the prompting of Hera, and no more did she waver in purpose; but longed for the rising dawn to appear quickly, that she might give him the charms to work the spell as she had promised, and meet him face to face. ”

“ And as when bees hum round fair lilies pouring forth from their hive in the rock, and all around the dewy meadow rejoices, and they gather the sweet fruit, flitting from one to another; even so the women eagerly poured forth clustering round the men with loud lament, and greeted each one with hands and voice, praying the blessed gods to grant him a safe return. ”

“ Lest a God or a man might meet him and wrest from his hands the spoil.
Dawn over the earth was spread, and now those twain returned
To their company. Marvelled the youths to behold how the great Fleece burned
A splendour as lightning of Zeus. Upsprang they, for eager-keen
Was each man to touch the glory, and clasp it his hands between.
But the son of Aison withheld them: a mantle thereover he threw
New-woven, to hide it. To Argo’s stern the maiden he drew,
And he seated her there ”

“ The elegant little bark which thus plays with the current is no work of human hands, but a child of Nature: it is the Argonaut, whose tribes, decked in a thousand brilliant shades of colour, are wanderers of the night in innumerable swarms on the ocean's surface.
The marine shell which Linnæus called the Argonaut enjoyed great renown among the ancient Greeks and Romans. It was the subject of graceful legends; it had inspired great poets; it occupied the attention of Aristotle, who called it the Nautilus and Nauticos, and of Pliny, who called it Pompylius. ”

“ The Argonautic expedition has been the admired subject of the Greek and Roman poets from Orpheus, or rather from Onomacritus, who lived in the times of Pisistratus, to those of our author's imitators, who lived in the decline of the Roman empire. To weigh the merits of these ancient poets in the just scale of criticism, and to appropriate to each his due share of praise, is a task too arduous and assuming for an humble editor to engage in. ”

“ THE ARGONAUTIC LEGEND
he legend of the Argonauts relates to the story of a band of heroes who sailed from Thessaly to Æa, the region of the Sun-god on the remotest shore of the Black Sea, in quest of a Golden Fleece. The ship Argo bore the heroes, under the command of Jason, to whom the task had been assigned by his uncle Pelias. Pelias was the usurper of his nephew's throne; and for Jason, on his coming to man's estate, he devised the perilous adventure of fetching the golden fleece of the Speaking Ram which many years before had carried Phrixus to Æa, or Colchis. ”

“ THE ARGONAUTS. Contemporary with the reign of Minos occurred the expedition of the Argonauts. Jason, the son of the king of Iolchos in Thessaly, was at the head of this expedition. Its object was to fetch the golden fleece, which was hung up in a grove sacred to Mars, in the kingdom of Colchis, at the eastern extremity of the Euxine sea. He enlisted in this enterprise all the most gallant spirits existing in the country, and among the rest Hercules, Theseus, Orpheus and Amphion. ”

“ Night came, and the heroes slept upon the deck of Argo. Many things came back to them in their dreams or through their half-sleep: they thought of the Lemnian maidens they had parted from; of the Clashing Rocks they had passed between; of the look in the eyes of Heracles as he raised his face to the high, black peak of Caucasus. They slept, and they thought they saw before them THE GOLDEN FLEECE; darkness surrounded it; it seemed to the dreaming Argonauts that the darkness was the magic power that King Æetes possessed. ”

“ The relief of the Argonauts, when at last they reach haven after their fearful passage of the Symplegades, is like that of Theseus and Hercules, when they have forced a way through the gates of hell to the light of day once more. [511] Most remarkable of all is the strange accumulation of similes that describe the meeting of Jason and Medea. Medea is going through the silent night chanting a song of magic, whereat all nature trembles. ”

“ Ceased with the dawn: and they met full soon, those companies twain.
Then Argus first found voice, and to Argo’s crew spake he:
‘We beseech you by All-beholder Zeus, whosoever ye be
Of men, to have mercy and succour us now in our helplessness;
For buffeted long have we been on the sea by the rough winds’ stress,
Till sundered and shattered the beams of our crazy galley were.
By your knees we entreat you then, if ye haply will hearken our prayer,
To cover our nakedness now, and to take us whither ye go:
As youths taking pity on youths, compassionate ye our woe! ”

“ O may Pallas Athene guard us all, and bring us out of this land of sands and stone where are the deadly serpents that have come from the drops of blood that fell from the Gorgon's head!
They turned away from the Garden of the Daughters of the Evening Land. The Argonauts turned from where the giant shape of Atlas stood against the sky and they went toward the Tritonian Lake. But not all of them reached the Argo. On his way back to the ship, Nauplius, the helmsman, met his death.
A sluggish serpent was in his way—it was not a serpent that would strike at one who turned from it. ”

“ As the old be left by the young: and he passed on afar, and was gone.
So when he had left the streets of the city builded fair,
To the beach Pagasaean he came, and his comrades hailed him there
In a throng abiding beside the Argo ship as she lay
By the river’s mouth, and overagainst her gathered they. {320}
And they looked, and behold, Adrastus and Argus hasting amain
Thitherward from the city, and sorely they marvelled, beholding the twain
Despite the purpose of Pelias thitherward hurrying fast.
On his shoulders a bull’s hide Argus the son of Arestor had cast,
Great, dark with the fell ”

“ The Argonauts also were carried past in safety, because the music of Orpheus had a stronger spell, seeing which the sirens threw themselves into the sea and were turned into rocks. By the Latin poets they are represented with wings, and in art as birds, with the faces of young women. ”

“ Then the Argonauts came out into the open sea—the Black Sea. No Greek had ever crossed it, and even the heroes, for all their courage, feared "that dreadful sea and its rocks and shoals and fogs and bitter freezing storms," and they trembled as they saw it "stretching out before them without a shore, as far as the eye could see."
Wearily they sailed on past the coast of Asia; they passed Sinope and the cities of the Amazons, the warlike women of the east, until at last they saw the "white snow peaks hanging glittering sharp and bright above the clouds. ”

“ For upon that mountain the Titan god was held, his limbs bound upon the hard rocks by fetters of bronze. Even as the Argonauts looked toward the mountain a great shadow fell upon their ship, and looking up they saw a monstrous bird flying. The beat of the bird's wings filled out the sail and drove the Argo swiftly onward. "It is the bird sent by Zeus," Orpheus said. "It is the vulture that every day devours the liver of the Titan god." They cowered down on the ship as they heard that word—all the Argonauts save Heracles ”

“ The course of the Argonauts from Greece to Colchis, necessarily lay between 39 and 45 degrees of north latitude. It will be evident to any person acquainted with astronomy, that within these latitudes no star of the first magnitude, or such as would attract observation, especially in those times, could be visible. But, what is still more decisive against the whole of Sir Isaac Newton's hypothesis, he takes for granted that the sphere was invented by the Argonauts: if this indeed could be proved, it would be easy to fix the era of the Argonautic expedition ”

“ The “golden fleece,” for which the Argonauts went in search, tells of a treasure that had been lost. “Jason,” the great captain, tells of Him who recovered it from the Serpent, which guarded it with ever-watchful eye, when none else was able to approach it. And thus, through the fables and myths of the Greeks, we can see the light primeval shine; and this light, once seen, lights up this Sign and its constellations, so that their teaching cannot be misunderstood.
Aratus sings of Argo:—
“Stern-foremost hauled ”

“ So the queen beheld them, and heard them foretell that her baby should live no longer than a brand that was then burning on the hearth. Horror inspired the mother. Quick as a thought she seized the brand, put out the flame, and laid it by in some safe and secret place where no harm could touch it. So the child gathered strength and grew up to manhood.
He was a mighty hunter, and the other heroes came gladly to bear him company. Many of the Argonauts were there,—Jason, Theseus, Nestor, even Atalanta, that valorous maiden who had joined the rowers of the Argo, a beloved charge of Diana. ”

“ IX. THE LEMNIAN MAIDENS
And now the Argonauts were no longer on a ship that was being dashed on by the sea and beaten upon by the winds. They had houses to live in; they had honey-tasting things to eat, and when they went through the island each man might have with him one of the maidens of Lemnos. It was a change that was welcome to the wearied voyagers.
They helped the women in the work of the fields; they hunted the beasts with them, and over and over again they were surprised at how skillfully the women had ordered all affairs. ”

“ Old and charming as is the story of the Argonauts, it is made up of travellers' tales, probably told to the Greeks by the Phoenicians of their adventures on unknown seas.
The wanderings of Ulysses by the old Greek poet Homer shows us that, though they seldom ventured beyond the Mediterranean Sea, yet the Greeks were dimly conscious of an outer world beyond the recognised limits. They still dreamt that the earth was flat, and that the ocean stream flowed for ever round and round it. There were no maps or charts to guide the intrepid mariners who embarked on unknown waters. ”