Such is a brief outline of the Argonautic expedition, one of the most celebrated and widely-diffused among the ancient tales of Greece. Since so many able men have treated it as an undisputed reality, and even made it the pivot of systematic chronological calculations, I may here repeat the opinion long ago expressed by Heyne, and even indicated by Burmann, that the process of dissecting the story, in search of a basis of fact, is one altogether fruitless.[589] Not only are we unable to assign the date or identify the crew, or decipher the log-book, of the Argô, but we have no means of settling even the preliminary question, whether the voyage be matter of fact badly reported, or legend from the beginning. The widely-distant spots in which the monuments of the voyage were shown, no less than the incidents of the voyage itself, suggests no other parentage than epical fancy. The supernatural and the romantic not only constitute an inseparable portion of the narrative, but even embrace all the prominent and characteristic features; if they do not comprise the whole, and if there be intermingled along with them any sprinkling of historical or geographical fact,—a question to us indeterminable,—there is at least no solvent by which it can be disengaged, and no test by which it can be recognized. Wherever the Grecian mariner sailed, he carried his religious and patriotic mythes along with him. His fancy and his faith were alike full of the long wanderings of Jasôn, Odysseus, Perseus, Hêraklês, Dionysus, Triptolemus or Iô; it was pleasing to him in success, and consoling to him in difficulty, to believe that their journeys had brought them over the ground which he was himself traversing. There was no tale amidst the wide range of the Grecian epic more calculated to be popular with the seaman, than the history of the primæval ship Argô and her distinguished crew, comprising heroes from all parts of Greece, and especially the Tyndarids Kastôr and Pollux, the heavenly protectors invoked during storm and peril. He localized the legend anew wherever he went, often with some fresh circumstances suggested either by his own adventures or by the scene before him. He took a sort of religious possession of the spot, connecting it by a bond of faith with his native land, and erecting in it a temple or an altar with appropriate commemorative solemnities. The Jasonium thus established, and indeed every visible object called after the name of the hero, not only served to keep alive the legend of the Argô in the minds of future comers or inhabitants, but was accepted as an obvious and satisfactory proof that this marvellous vessel had actually touched there in her voyage.
The epic poets, building both on the general love of fabulous incident and on the easy faith of the people, dealt with distant and unknown space in the same manner as with past and unrecorded time. They created a mythical geography for the former, and a mythical history for the latter. But there was this material difference between the two: that while the unrecorded time was beyond the reach of verification, the unknown space gradually became trodden and examined. In proportion as authentic local knowledge was enlarged, it became necessary to modify the geography, or shift the scene of action, of the old mythes; and this perplexing problem was undertaken by some of the ablest historians and geographers of antiquity,—for it was painful to them to abandon any portion of the old epic, as if it were destitute of an ascertainable basis of truth.
Many of these fabulous localities are to be found in Homer and Hesiod, and the other Greek poets and logographers,—Erytheia, the garden of the Hesperides, the garden of Phœbus,[590] to which Boreas transported the Attic maiden Orithyia, the delicious country of the Hyperboreans, the Elysian plain,[591] the fleeting island of Æolus, Thrinakia, the country of the Æthiopians, the Læstrygones, the Kyklôpes, the Lotophagi, the Sirens, the Cimmerians and the Gorgons,[592] etc. These are places which (to use the expression of Pindar respecting the Hyperboreans) you cannot approach either by sea or by land:[593] the wings of the poet alone can carry you thither. They were not introduced into the Greek mind by incorrect geographical reports, but, on the contrary, had their origin in the legend, and passed from thence into the realities of geography,[594] which they contributed much to pervert and confuse. For the navigator or emigrant, starting with an unsuspicious faith in their real existence, looked out for them in his distant voyages, and constantly fancied that he had seen or heard of them, so as to be able to identify their exact situation. The most contradictory accounts indeed, as might be expected, were often given respecting the latitude and longitude of such fanciful spots, but this did not put an end to the general belief in their real existence.
In the present advanced state of geographical knowledge, the story of that man who after reading Gulliver’s Travels went to look in his map for Lilliput, appears an absurdity. But those who fixed the exact locality of the floating island of Æolus or the rocks of the Sirens did much the same,[595] and, with their ignorance of geography and imperfect appreciation of historical evidence, the error was hardly to be avoided. The ancient belief which fixed the Sirens on the islands of Sirenusæ off the coast of Naples—the Kyklôpes, Erytheia, and the Læstrygones in Sicily—the Lotophagi on the island of Mêninx[596] near the Lesser Syrtis—the Phæakians at Korkyra—and the goddess Circê at the promontory of Circeium—took its rise at a time when these regions were first Hellenized and comparatively little visited. Once embodied in the local legends, and attested by visible monuments and ceremonies, it continued for a long time unassailed; and Thucydidês seems to adopt it, in reference to Korkyra and Sicily before the Hellenic colonization, as matter of fact generally unquestionable,[597] though little avouched as to details. But when geographical knowledge became extended, and the criticism upon the ancient epic was more or less systematized by the literary men of Alexandria and Pergamus, it appeared to many of them impossible that Odysseus could have seen so many wonders, or undergone such monstrous dangers, within limits so narrow, and in the familiar track between the Nile and the Tiber. The scene of his weather-driven course was then shifted further westward. Many convincing evidences were discovered, especially by Asklepiadês of Myrlea, of his having visited various places in Ibêria:[598] several critics imagined that he had wandered about in the Atlantic Ocean outside of the Strait of Gibraltar,[599] and they recognized a section of Lotophagi on the coast of Mauritania, over and above those who dwelt on the island of Mêninx.[600] On the other hand, Eratosthenês and Apollodôrus treated the places visited by Odysseus as altogether unreal, for which scepticism they incurred much reproach.[601]
The fabulous island of Erytheia,—the residence of the three headed Geryôn with his magnificent herd of oxen, under the custody of the two-headed dog Orthrus, and described by Hesiod, like the garden of the Hesperides, as extra-terrestrial, on the farther side of the circumfluous ocean;—this island was supposed by the interpreters of Stesichorus the poet to be named by him off the south-western region of Spain called Tartêssus, and in the immediate vicinity of Gadês. But the historian Hekatæus, in his anxiety to historicize the old fable, took upon himself to remove Erytheia from Spain nearer home to Epirus. He thought it incredible that Hêraklês should have traversed Europe from east to west, for the purpose of bringing the cattle of Geryôn to Eurystheus at Mykênæ, and he pronounced Geryôn to have been a king of Epirus, near the Gulf of Ambrakia. The oxen reared in that neighborhood were proverbially magnificent, and to get them even from thence and bring them to Mykênæ (he contended) was no inconsiderable task. Arrian, who cites this passage from Hekatæus, concurs in the same view,—an illustration of the license with which ancient authors fitted on their fabulous geographical names to the real earth, and brought down the ethereal matter of legend to the lower atmosphere of history.[602]
Both the track and the terminus of the Argonautic voyage appear in the most ancient epic as little within the conditions of reality, as the speaking timbers or the semi-divine crew of the vessel. In the Odyssey, Æêtês and Circê (Hesiod names Mêdea also) are brother and sister, offspring of Hêlios. The Ææan island, adjoining the circumfluous ocean, “where the house and dancing-ground of Eôs are situated, and where Hêlios rises,” is both the residence of Circê and of Æêtês, inasmuch as Odysseus, in returning from the former, follows the same course as the Argô had previously taken in returning from the latter.[603] Even in the conception of Mimnermus, about 600 B. C., Æa still retained its fabulous attributes in conjunction with the ocean and Hêlios, without having been yet identified with any known portion of the solid earth;[604] and it was justly remarked by Dêmêtrius of Skêpsis in antiquity[605] (though Strabo vainly tries to refute him), that neither Homer nor Mimnermus designates Kolchis either as the residence of Æêtês, or as the terminus of the Argonautic voyage. Hesiod carried the returning Argonauts through the river Phasis into the ocean. But some of the poems ascribed to Eumêlus were the first which mentioned Æêtês and Kolchis, and interwove both of them into the Corinthian mythical genealogy.[606] These poems seem to have been composed subsequent to the foundation of Sinopê, and to the commencement of Grecian settlement on the Borysthenês, between the years 600 and 500 B. C. The Greek mariners who explored and colonized the southern coast of the Euxine, found at the extremity of their voyage the river Phasis and its barbarous inhabitants: it was the easternmost point which Grecian navigation (previous to the time of Alexander the Great) ever attained, and it was within sight of the impassable barrier of Caucasus.[607] They believed, not unnaturally, that they had here found “the house of Eôs (the morning) and the rising place of the sun,” and that the river Phasis, if they could follow it to its unknown beginning, would conduct them to the circumfluous ocean. They gave to the spot the name of Æa, and the fabulous and real title gradually became associated together into one compound appellation,—the Kolchian Æa, or Æa of Kolchis.[608] While Kolchis was thus entered on the map as a fit representative for the Homeric “house of the morning,” the narrow strait of the Thracian Bosporus attracted to itself the poetical fancy of the Symplêgades, or colliding rocks, through which the heaven-protected Argô had been the first to pass. The powerful Greek cities of Kyzikus, Hêrakleia and Sinopê, each fertile in local legends, still farther contributed to give this direction to the voyage; so that in the time of Hekatæus it had become the established belief that the Argô had started from Iôlkos and gone to Kolchis.
Æêtês thus received his home from the legendary faith and fancy of the eastern Greek navigators: his sister Circê, originally his fellow-resident, was localized by the western. The Hesiodic and other poems, giving expression to the imaginative impulses of the inhabitants of Cumæ and other early Grecian settlers in Italy and Sicily,[609] had referred the wanderings of Odysseus to the western or Tyrrhenian sea, and had planted the Cyclôpes, the Læstrygones, the floating island of Æolus, the Lotophagi, the Phæacians, etc., about the coast of Sicily, Italy, Libya, and Korkyra. In this way the Ææan island,—the residence of Circê, and the extreme point of the wanderings of Odysseus, from whence he passes only to the ocean and into Hadês—came to be placed in the far west, while the Æa of Æêtês was in the far east,—not unlike our East and West Indies. The Homeric brother and sister were separated and sent to opposite extremities of the Grecian terrestrial horizon.[610]
The track from Iôlkos to Kolchis, however, though plausible as far as it went, did not realize all the conditions of the genuine fabulous voyage: it did not explain the evidences of the visit of these maritime heroes which were to be found in Libya, in Krêtê in Anaphê, in Korkyra, in the Adriatic Gulf, in Italy and in Æthalia. It became necessary to devise another route for them in their return, and the Hesiodic narrative was (as I have before observed), that they came back by the circumfluous ocean; first going up the river Phasis into the circumfluous ocean; following that deep and gentle stream until they entered the Nile, and came down its course to the coast of Libya. This seems also to have been the belief of Hekatæus.[611] But presently several Greeks (and Herodotus among them) began to discard the idea of a circumfluous ocean-stream, which had pervaded their old geographical and astronomical fables, and which explained the supposed easy communication between one extremity of the earth and another. Another idea was then started for the returning voyage of the Argonauts. It was supposed that the river Ister, or Danube, flowing from the Rhipæan mountains in the north-west of Europe, divided itself into two branches, one of which fell into the Euxine Sea, and the other into the Adriatic.
The Argonauts, fleeing from the pursuit of Æêtês, had been obliged to abandon their regular course homeward, and had gone from the Euxine Sea up the Ister; then passing down the other branch of that river, they had entered into the Adriatic, the Kolchian pursuers following them. Such is the story given by Apollônius Rhodius from Timagêtus, and accepted even by so able a geographer as Eratosthenês—who preceded him by one generation, and who, though sceptical in regard to the localities visited by Odysseus, seems to have been a firm believer in the reality of the Argonautic voyage.[612] Other historians again, among whom was Timæus, though they considered the ocean as an outer sea, and no longer admitted the existence of the old Homeric ocean-stream, yet imagined a story for the return-voyage of the Argonauts somewhat resembling the old tale of Hesiod and Hekatæus. They alleged that the Argô, after entering into the Palus Mæotis, had followed the upward course of the river Tanais; that she had then been carried overland and launched in a river which had its mouth in the ocean or great outer sea. When in the ocean, she had coasted along the north and west of Europe until she reached Gadês and the Strait of Gibraltar, where she entered into the Mediterranean, and there visited the many places specified in the fable. Of this long voyage, in the outer sea to the north and west of Europe, many traces were affirmed to exist along the coast of the ocean.[613] There was again a third version, according to which the Argonauts came back as they went, through the Thracian Bosporus and the Hellespont. In this way geographical plausibility was indeed maintained, but a large portion of the fabulous matter was thrown overboard.[614]
Such were the various attempts made to reconcile the Argonautic legend with enlarged geographical knowledge and improved historical criticism. The problem remained unsolved, but the faith in the legend did not the less continue. It was a faith originally generated at a time when the unassisted narrative of the inspired poet sufficed for the conviction of his hearers; it consecrated one among the capital exploits of that heroic and superhuman race, whom the Greek was accustomed at once to look back upon as his ancestors and to worship conjointly with his gods: it lay too deep in his mind either to require historical evidence for its support, or to be overthrown by geographical difficulties as they were then appreciated. Supposed traces of the past event, either preserved in the names of places, or embodied in standing religious customs with their explanatory comments, served as sufficient authentication in the eyes of the curious inquirer. And even men trained in a more severe school of criticism contented themselves with eliminating the palpable contradictions and softening down the supernatural and romantic events, so as to produce an Argonautic expedition of their own invention as the true and accredited history. Strabo, though he can neither overlook nor explain the geographical impossibilities of the narrative, supposes himself to have discovered the basis of actual fact, which the original poets had embellished or exaggerated. The golden fleece was typical of the great wealth of Kolchis, arising from gold-dust washed down by the rivers; and the voyage of Jasôn was in reality an expedition at the head of a considerable army, with which he plundered this wealthy country and made extensive conquests in the interior.[615] Strabo has nowhere laid down what he supposes to have been the exact measure and direction of Jasôn’s march, but he must have regarded it as very long, since he classes Jasôn with Dionysus and Hêraklês, and emphatically characterizes all the three as having traversed wider spaces of ground than any moderns could equal.[616] Such was the compromise which a mind like that of Strabo made with the ancient legends. He shaped or cut them down to the level of his own credence, and in this waste of historical criticism, without any positive evidence, he took to himself the credit of greater penetration than the literal believers, while he escaped the necessity of breaking formally with the bygone heroic world.