Wishing, then, to attach Corinth to the Argonautic story, the genealogiser manages matters thus. Helios, the Sun, he says, had two sons by Antiope (daughter of the river god Asopus); the sons were Aloeus and Aietes. Homer does not borrow those facts from "Eumelus"; Homer tells a different story, but the historical effort of "Eumelus" constrains him to make his local nymph, Antiope, mother of Aietes. That is the basis of his forgery. Meanwhile Homer tells a contradictory story about this Antiope (Od. xi. 260). Her lover was not Helios, but Zeus. Her sons were not Aietes and Aloeus, but Amphion and Zethus. Homer is not borrowing from this genealogiser! The heroine Ephyre founded Ephyre. (She was daughter of Oceanus and Tethys, and wife of Epimetheus, or daughter of Epimetheus, an un-Homeric kind of person.) The river Asopus, father of Antiope (who was mother, says "Eumelus," by the Sun of Aloeus and Aietes), gave his name as "Asopia" to what was later Sicyon. The Sun gave to his son, Aloeus, "the land held by Asopus, to his son Aietes he gave Ephyre" (Corinth). Aietes goes to Colchis (a place necessarily unnamed by Homer, for it is at the extreme east of the Euxine); but previously had arranged that Bounos is to be regent of Ephyre till Aietes, or a descendant of his, returns and claims it.[14] Medea is to be that descendant.
So far we have Eumelian verse. How the story went on we learn from the prose version cited by Pausanias. Bounos died as king of Ephyre, and was succeeded by the nephew of Aietes (a son of his brother Aloeus), named Epopeus.[15] Epopeus was harsh to his son Marathon, and Marathon fled to Attica and founded the famous deme of Marathon. He had two sons, Sicyon, to whom, on the death of his own father, Epopeus, he gave Sicyon; while Ephyre he gave to his son Corinthus; hence Ephyre came to be called Corinth. When Corinthus died childless, the Corinthians sent to Colchis for Medea, in accordance with the entail made by Aietes (as "Eumelus" has told us in verse), when he left Ephyre for Colchis.[16] Nothing can be less Homeric.
The "Eumelus" of whom we have reports wrote pseudo-history in verse, for he has to make Medea survive Aietes, Bounos, Epopeus, Marathon, and Corinthus, and then, in the prime of beauty, succeed to the realm of Corinthus as Queen of Corinth. Leaving Corinth for Athens under a cloud, Medea gives Corinth to Sisyphus.[17]
"Eumelus," as Seeliger observes,[18] knows the Argo story in the common late expanded form, Colchis and all; but chooses to make Aietes, contrary to all other authorities, a king of Corinth. Attica, too, must needs attach herself to the story of Argo, by making Medea seduce King Aegeus, the father of Theseus, and try to poison Theseus himself: she also made Aegeus send him on the desperate adventure of fighting the Bull of Marathon.[19] This Bull of Marathon donne à penser. In one legend Aegeus, father of Theseus, sent Androgeos, son of Minos, to fight the bull, which killed him. It was therefore but tit-for-tat when Minos sent Athenian tributary boys and girls to fight his bull, the bullheaded Minotaur.[20]
"Eumelus," as far as our evidence goes, stands for the school who, for every town, supposed an eponymous person as founder, for Ephyre (Corinth) he gives the nymphe Ephyre. Now Homer does not work on these lines. When "Eumelus" had got his pseudo-history and false genealogies to his taste, he must have told at full length the tale of Argo, for we have five lines of his describing the terror caused in Aietes and the Colchians by the throwing of the weight by Jason among the armed brood born of the plain, which Jason ploughed with fire-breathing bulls.
These things, then, are what Greek literary tradition reports about a pseudo-historical genealogist, and teller of the tale of Argo with a purpose. That he ever mentioned Bellerophon we have no proof: Pausanias does not cite Eumelus for Bellerophon. Homer, as usual, omits the Märchen of the winged horse Pegasus, whereby, in later poems, Bellerophon accomplishes his feats. Pindar is copious about Pegasus: that noble animal. The peculiarly gifted horse, hard to bridle, is common property of "fairy tales." Usually some friendly person tells the adventurous lad to use a peculiar bridle without which the steed is untamable. The boy can always sell the horse, but keep the bridle; the purchaser returns the nag, and the hero keeps the money. In Pindar's Fourth Pythian Ode, Athene is the benevolent person of the Märchen. Bellerophon, wanting to break in Pegasus, sleeps in her temple; she presents him with the magical golden bit and head-stall. Dropping Pegasus, magical bridle and all, Homer only says that the gods "gave Bellerophon friendly convoy to Lycia."[21] Mr. Murray asks, "What blameless guiding of the gods led Bellerophon to Lycia?" Clearly he flew thither through upper air on Pegasus, like Commodore Trunnion leaping a sunken way on the road to the hymeneal altar, "to the unspeakable terror and amazement" of a waggoner below, says Smollett. But Homer is not Smollett, and does not send Bellerophon flying through air on a horse. Pindar saw no objections to the incident.[22]
Here we must try to explain a point on which Mr. Murray remarks, "There has been an extraordinary reluctance among scholars to ... admit the possibility of 'Homer,' as the phrase is, borrowing from the supposed later author 'Eumelus,' or even from 'Hesiod.'" The reluctance is natural and justifiable; because when we say "Eumelus" or "Hesiod," we mean just what we have received from antiquity under the names of these men. Their work, as it reaches us, is un-Homeric, is later, we say, than the Iliad. But if "Eumelus" be a mythical name for a supposed author of a body of Corinthian heroic poetry: if the Eumelian matter which we have received was not that, then we know nothing about that, and cannot say whether our Homer borrowed from some other Eumelian epê or not. Mr. Murray, as to Homer's debt to "Eumelus," writes: "If anything were needed to make it clearer still, it would be that the Verses of Eumelus are quoted as the earliest authority for the story of the Argo and Medea, and the composer of our Odyssey speaks of the Argo as a subject of which 'all minds are full'"[23] The reader naturally gathers that our Homer took his information about Argo from "Eumelus." We can only say, "not from the Eumelus known to us in Greek literary tradition." Thus Hesiod[24] tells of the birth of Circe and Aietes her brother (the father of Medea) in precisely the same terms as Homer does, and as Eumelus does not.[25] Both poets say that Helios, by Perses (Homer), or Perseis (Hesiod), a daughter of Oceanus, was the father of Circe and Aietes. Homer does not mention Medea, but Hesiod says that she was the daughter of Aietes. Now Eumelus, in what we have of him, says nothing of Circe, but makes Aietes the son of Helios and Antiope, not of Perses as in Homer. Manifestly, then, Homer did not take his version from this Eumelus; while, when Homer and Hesiod precisely agree, if either borrowed from the other, it were quite arbitrary to say that Homer borrowed from Hesiod, who knows Latium and Etruria.
Homer certainly did not borrow here from our Eumelus, for he differs from Eumelus; nor is Eumelus quoted, as far as I am aware, "as the earliest authority for" the story of Argo. The scholiast on Pindar, as I, for one, understand him, quotes Eumelus for something quite different, namely, for his peculiar account (adopted by Pindar when praising a Corinthian athlete) of Medea as rightful Queen of Corinth; a point on which no Greeks agreed with the patriotic chronicler, the Corinthian Eumelus, as Pausanias observes.
Homer knows about the ship Argo, and her escape from the clash of the Rocks Wandering, through the favour of Hera.[26] The dangers of these rocks are described by Circe to Odysseus, for he must pass by that perilous path of the sea; and Circe ought to know, for she is sister of King Aietes, from whose land Argo was sailing when she met the rocks. But where did Aietes dwell? On that point Homer says nothing and knew nothing.
It is manifest that Homer neither knows where Aiaie, the isle of Circe, is, nor where the home of King Aietes is. To him Aiaie is "an unsubstantial fairy place." In the Odyssey (xii. 3, 4), Circe's isle is "near the home and dancing-places of the Dawn, and the land of sunrising." You cannot go farther east in a black ship. But in Hesiod,[27] Circe's Aia must be in the west, for her sons by Odysseus (unheard of by Homer) rule over Latins and Tyrsenians. Later poets placed the Aia of Circe's brother, Aietes, in the east, in Colchis, at the eastern limit of the Euxine; and Circe's Aia they located in the west, at the promontory of Circeei in Italy. Homer himself shows no knowledge of Italy, on one side, or of the extremity of the Euxine on the other.[28] Even Mimnermus places the city of Aietes vaguely "at the limit of Oceanus."[29] By way of finding reason where there is none, Apollonius Rhodius explains that Circe originally lived in the Aia of the east, as in the Odyssey, but was transported by Helios to the Aia in the west.[30] Homer being so vague, we do not say he is borrowing from our Eumelus, who locates Aietes in Colchis, under Caucasus, which Homer, if pre-Ionian, never knew. Had Homer, or any of the supposed late contributors to the Iliad and Odyssey, lived in the eighth to seventh centuries, and studied our Eumelus, or even our Hesiod, the Iliad and Odyssey would have had much more extensive geographical knowledge than they possess. No one will say that our Homer borrows from a genealogiser like our Eumelus, when Eumelus does not even agree with Homer about the mother of Aietes.