Jason and the Argonauts: On the way to Colchis
This is part two of the Jason myth, where Jason and his amazingly epic team of Greek heroes set sail to Colchis, the home of the Golden Fleece.
Their first stop was the Isle of Lemnos, which is off the west coast of modern day Turkey. The people of the island were all women who had killed their husbands. Basically, these women didn’t worship Aphrodite, which made her angry. She punished the women by making them smell so bad that their husbands would not go near them. All of the husbands instead took Thracian concubines, which understandably made the women of Lemnos pretty pissed off. They then killed all of the men on the island when they were asleep. The only man who survived this was the king of Lemnos, Thoas, whose daughter Hypsipyle put him in a sealed chest and then launched that chest into the sea. Hypsipyle then ruled Lemnos as queen for a while, and they lived peacefully without men.
When the Argonauts visited Lemnos, they basically had a big sex party, to such an extent that they created a new people: the Minyans. Jason even fathered twins with Hypsipyle. For some reason, Heracles thought all of this free lovin’ was pretty gross and pressured the Argonauts to go back to doing their actual quest. It’s kind of strange since Heracles had a lot of affairs in other stories he was in, but anyway
Next they went to the seaside kingdom of the Doliones, ruled by Cyzicus, who was a really great host. Unfortunately, the land was also home to the Gegenees, six-armed giants. Here it gets a bit hard to say what happened. According to some sources, they accidentally leave Heracles there fighting the giants by himself and must return for him, and other sources say that the giants raided the Argo and Heracles was the one guarding the ship at the time. In any case, after they fight the giants they leave the island. At night they get confused and land on the same island, and this time due to the darkness the Doliones attack. The Argonauts fight them, killing king Cyzicus, whose wife then commits suicide. When dawn breaks, the Argonauts realize their fuckup and hold a funeral.
Next the Argonauts met Phineus, the blind king of Salmydessus in Thrace. Because he was blind, harpies stole his food and he was left emaciated. The Boreads, the winged brothers I mentioned in my last post, chased the harpies away as far as some islands in the Ionian sea, at which point Iris appeared and stopped the brothers from killing the harpies, as both the harpies and the blindness were some divine punishment on Phineus. Iris swore an oath on the Styx that the harpies would never bother Phineus again, and the brothers returned to the party. Phineus then gave the Argonauts directions on how to reach Colchis, home of the Golden Fleece. He also told them how to pass the Symplegades, the clashing rocks of Odyssey fame: rocky cliffs that crushed between them anything that tried to pass. Phineus told them to release a dove through the rocks. If the dove was squished, they were doomed to fail, but if the dove passed, then they could pass safely through if they rowed as strongly as they could.
When the Argo reached the Symplegades, they released the dove. It lost only a few tail feathers as the rocks came together. Hence, the Argonauts rowed through and safely made it to the other side. From there, they sailed to Colchis, ruled by Aeëtes.
In my next post I will continue the story of Jason and the Fleece, but I will be focusing on Aeëtes’ daughter, Medea. She’s more honestly more interesting to me, and (spoiler alert!) she’s treated pretty badly.
