They then proceeded onward along the coast of Thrace, up the Hellespont, to the southern coast of the Propontis, inhabited by the Doliones and their king Kyzikus. Here they were kindly entertained, but after their departure were driven back to the same spot by a storm; and as they landed in the dark, the inhabitants did not know them. A battle took place, in which the chief, Kyzikus, was killed by Jasôn; whereby much grief was occasioned as soon as the real facts became known. After Kyzikus had been interred with every demonstration of mourning and solemnity, the Argonauts proceeded along the coast of Mysia.[552] In this part of the voyage they left Hêraklês behind. For Hylas, his favorite youthful companion, had been stolen away by the nymphs of a fountain, and Hêraklês, wandering about in search of him, neglected to return. At last he sorrowfully retired, exacting hostages from the inhabitants of the neighboring town of Kius that they would persist in the search.[553]
They next stopped in the country of the Bebrykians, where the boxing contest took place between the king Amykus and the Argonaut Pollux:[554] they then proceeded onward to Bithynia, the residence of the blind prophet Phineus. His blindness had been inflicted by Poseidôn as a punishment for having communicated to Phryxus the way to Kolchis. The choice had been allowed to him between death and blindness, and he had preferred the latter.[555] He was also tormented by the harpies, winged monsters who came down from the clouds whenever his table was set, snatched the food from his lips and imparted to it a foul and unapproachable odor. In the midst of this misery, he hailed the Argonauts as his deliverers—his prophetic powers having enabled him to foresee their coming. The meal being prepared for him, the harpies approached as usual, but Zêtês and Kalaïs, the winged sons of Boreas, drove them away and pursued them. They put forth all their speed, and prayed to Zeus to be enabled to overtake the monsters; when Hermês appeared and directed them to desist, the harpies being forbidden further to molest Phineus,[556] and retiring again to their native cavern in Krête.[557]
Phineus, grateful for the relief afforded to him by the Argonauts, forewarned them of the dangers of their voyage and of the precautions necessary for their safety; and through his suggestions they were enabled to pass through the terrific rocks called Symplêgades. These were two rocks which alternately opened and shut, with a swift and violent collision, so that it was difficult even for a bird to fly through during the short interval. When the Argô arrived at the dangerous spot, Euphêmus let loose a dove. which flew through and just escaped with the loss of a few feathers of her tail. This was a signal to the Argonauts, according to the prediction of Phineus, that they might attempt the passage with confidence. Accordingly they rowed with all their might, and passed safely through: the closing rocks, held for a moment asunder by the powerful arms of Athênê just crushed the ornaments at the stern of their vessel. It had been decreed by the gods, that so soon as any ship once got through, the passage should forever afterwards be safe and easy to all. The rocks became fixed in their separate places, and never again closed.[558]
After again halting on the coast of the Mariandynians, where their steersman Tiphys died, as well as in the country of the Amazons, and after picking up the sons of Phryxus, who had been cast away by Poseidôn in their attempt to return from Kolchis to Greece, they arrived in safety at the river Phasis and the residence of Æêtês. In passing by Mount Caucasus, they saw the eagle which gnawed the liver of Prometheus nailed to the rock, and heard the groans of the sufferer himself. The sons of Phryxus were cordially welcomed by their mother Chalciopê.[559] Application was made to Æêtês, that he would grant to the Argonauts, heroes of divine parentage and sent forth by the mandate of the gods, possession of the golden fleece: their aid in return was proffered to him against any or all of his enemies. But the king was wroth, and peremptorily refused, except upon conditions which seemed impracticable.[560] Hêphæstos had given him two ferocious and untamable bulls, with brazen feet, which breathed fire from their nostrils: Jasôn was invited, as a proof both of his illustrious descent and of the sanction of the gods to his voyage, to harness these animals to the yoke, so as to plough a large field and sow it with dragon’s teeth.[561] Perilous as the condition was, each one of the heroes volunteered to make the attempt. Idmôn especially encouraged Jasôn to undertake it,[562] and the goddesses Hêrê and Aphroditê made straight the way for him.[563] Mêdea, the daughter of Æêtês and Eidyia, having seen the youthful hero in his interview with her father, had conceived towards him a passion which disposed her to employ every means for his salvation and success. She had received from Hekatê preëminent magical powers, and she prepared for Jasôn the powerful Prometheian unguent, extracted from an herb which had grown where the blood of Promêtheus dropped. The body of Jasôn having been thus pre-medicated, became invulnerable[564] either by fire or by warlike weapons. He undertook the enterprise, yoked the bulls without suffering injury, and ploughed the field: when he had sown the dragon’s teeth, armed men sprung out of the furrows. But he had been forewarned by Mêdea to cast a vast rock into the midst of them, upon which they began to fight with each other, so that he was easily enabled to subdue them all.[565]
The task prescribed had thus been triumphantly performed. Yet Æêtês not only refused to hand over the golden fleece, but even took measures for secretly destroying the Argonauts and burning their vessel. He designed to murder them during the night after a festal banquet; but Aphroditê, watchful for the safety of Jasôn,[566] inspired the Kolchian king at the critical moment with an irresistible inclination for his nuptial bed. While he slept, the wise Idmôn counselled the Argonauts to make their escape, and Mêdea agreed to accompany them.[567] She lulled to sleep by a magic potion the dragon who guarded the golden fleece, placed that much-desired prize on board the vessel, and accompanied Jasôn with his companions in their flight, carrying along with her the young Apsyrtus, her brother.[568]
Æêtês, profoundly exasperated at the flight of the Argonauts with his daughter, assembled his forces forthwith, and put to sea in pursuit of them. So energetic were his efforts that he shortly overtook the retreating vessel, when the Argonauts again owed their safety to the stratagem of Mêdea. She killed her brother Apsyrtus, cut his body in pieces and strewed the limbs round about in the sea. Æêtês on reaching the spot found these sorrowful traces of his murdered son; but while he tarried to collect the scattered fragments, and bestow upon the body an honorable interment, the Argonauts escaped.[569] The spot on which the unfortunate Apsyrtus was cut up received the name of Tomi.[570] This fratricide of Mêdea, however, so deeply provoked the indignation of Zeus, that he condemned the Argô and her crew to a trying voyage, full of hardship and privation, before she was permitted to reach home. The returning heroes traversed an immeasurable length both of sea and of river: first up the river Phasis into the ocean which flows round the earth—then following the course of that circumfluous stream until its junction with the Nile,[571] they came down the Nile into Egypt, from whence they carried the Argô on their shoulders by a fatiguing land-journey to the lake Tritônis in Libya. Here they were rescued from the extremity of want and exhaustion by the kindness of the local god Tritôn, who treated them hospitably, and even presented to Euphêmus a clod of earth, as a symbolical promise that his descendants should one day found a city on the Libyan shore. The promise was amply redeemed by the flourishing and powerful city of Kyrênê,[572] whose princes the Battiads boasted themselves as lineal descendants of Euphêmus.
Refreshed by the hospitality of Tritôn, the Argonauts found themselves again on the waters of the Mediterranean in their way homeward. But before they arrived at Iôlkos they visited Circê, at the island of Ææa, where Mêdea was purified for the murder of Apsyrtus: they also stopped at Korkyra, then called Drepanê, where Alkinous received and protected them. The cave in that island where the marriage of Mêdea with Jasôn was consummated, was still shown in the time of the historian Timæus, as well as the altars to Apollo which she had erected, and the rites and sacrifices which she had first instituted.[573] After leaving Korkyra, the Argô was overtaken by a perilous storm near the island of Thêra. The heroes were saved from imminent peril by the supernatural aid of Apollo, who, shooting from his golden bow an arrow which pierced the waves like a track of light, caused a new island suddenly to spring up in their track and present to them a port of refuge. The island was called Anaphê; and the grateful Argonauts established upon it an altar and sacrifices in honor of Apollo Æglêtês, which were ever afterwards continued, and traced back by the inhabitants to this originating adventure.[574]
On approaching the coast of Krête, the Argonauts were prevented from landing by Talôs, a man of brass, fabricated by Hêphæstos, and presented by him to Minôs for the protection of the island.[575] This vigilant sentinel hurled against the approaching vessel fragments of rock, and menaced the heroes with destruction. But Mêdea deceived him by a stratagem and killed him; detecting and assailing the one vulnerable point in his body. The Argonauts were thus enabled to land and refresh themselves. They next proceeded onward to Ægina, where however they again experienced resistance before they could obtain water—then along the coast of Eubœa and Locris back to Iôlkos in the gulf of Pagasæ, the place from whence they had started. The proceedings of Pelias during their absence, and the signal revenge taken upon him by Mêdea after their return, have already been narrated in a preceding section.[576] The ship Argô herself, in which the chosen heroes of Greece had performed so long a voyage and braved so many dangers, was consecrated by Jasôn to Poseidôn at the isthmus of Corinth. According to another account, she was translated to the stars by Athênê, and became a constellation.[577]
Traces of the presence of the Argonauts were found not only in the regions which lay between Iôlkos and Kolchis, but also in the western portion of the Grecian world—distributed more or less over all the spots visited by Grecian mariners or settled by Grecian colonists, and scarcely less numerous than the wanderings of the dispersed Greeks and Trojans after the capture of Troy. The number of Jasonia, or temples for the heroic worship of Jasôn, was very great, from Abdêra in Thrace,[578] eastward along the coast of the Euxine, to Armenia and Media. The Argonauts had left their anchoring-stone on the coast of Bebrykia, near Kyzikus, and there it was preserved during the historical ages in the temple of the Jasonian Athênê.[579] They had founded the great temple of the Idæan mother on the mountain Dindymon, near Kyzikus, and the Hieron of Zeus Urios on the Asiatic point at the mouth of the Euxine, near which was also the harbor of Phryxus.[580] Idmôn, the prophet of the expedition, who was believed to have died of a wound by a wild boar on the Mariandynian coast, was worshipped by the inhabitants of the Pontic Hêrakleia with great solemnity, as their Heros Poliuchus, and that too by the special direction of the Delphian god. Autolykus, another companion of Jasôn, was worshipped as Œkist by the inhabitants of Sinopê. Moreover, the historians of Hêrakleia pointed out a temple of Hekatê in the neighboring country of Paphlagonia, first erected by Mêdea;[581] and the important town of Pantikapæon, on the European side of the Cimmerian Bosporus, ascribed its first settlement to a son of Æêtês.[582] When the returning ten thousand Greeks sailed along the coast, called the Jasonian shore, from Sinopê to Hêrakleia, they were told that the grandson of Æêtês was reigning king of the territory at the mouth of the Phasis, and the anchoring-places where the Argô had stopped were specially pointed out to them.[583] In the lofty regions of the Moschi, near Kolchis, stood the temple of Leukothea, founded by Phryxus, which remained both rich and respected down to the times of the kings of Pontus, and where it was an inviolable rule not to offer up a ram.[584] The town of Dioskurias, north of the river Phasis, was believed to have been hallowed by the presence of Kastôr and Pollux in the Argô, and to have received from them its appellation.[585] Even the interior of Mêdea and Armenia was full of memorials of Jasôn and Mêdea and their son Mêdus, or of Armenus the son of Jasôn, from whom the Greeks deduced not only the name and foundation of the Medes and Armenians, but also the great operation of cutting a channel through the mountains for the efflux of the river Araxes, which they compared to that of the Peneius in Thessaly.[586] And the Roman general Pompey, after having completed the conquest and expulsion of Mithridatês, made long marches through Kolchis into the regions of Caucasus, for the express purpose of contemplating the spots which had been ennobled by the exploits of the Argonauts, the Dioskuri and Hêraklês.[587]
In the west, memorials either of the Argonauts or of the pursuing Kolchians were pointed out in Korkyra, in Krête, in Epirus near the Akrokeraunian mountains, in the islands called Apsyrtides near the Illyrian coast, at the bay of Caieta as well as at Poseidônia on the southern coast of Italy, in the island of Æthalia or Elba, and in Libya.[588]