T HE R AM The voyage of Jason’s ship Argo in the quest for the Golden Fleece involves backstory, backstory and more backstory. But it’s good, juicy backstory, so I hope you will dive in. A lot of names will come at you now like quills shot from a porcupine; but don’t worry, the important ones will stick.fn1 We can start with BISALTES, a founder hero of the Bisaltae peoples of Thrace. His mother was the primordial earth goddess Gaia and his father the sun Titan Heliosfn2. Bisaltes’ beautiful daughter THEOPHANE caught the eye of the sea god Poseidon, who snatched her up and took her to the island of Crinissa, where he turned himself into a ram and Theophane into a ewe. In the course of time she gave birth to a beautiful golden ram. Point One – there now existed in the world a beautiful golden ram, of immortal lineage. Ixion, a king of the Lapiths, had once dared to attempt to seduce Hera, the Queen of Heaven, at a banquet on Mount Olympusfn3. To expose his depravity Zeus entrapped Ixion by sending to him a living cloud in the exact likeness and form of Hera. The brutish Ixion had leapt all over this cloud, thinking it was the goddess herself. As a punishment for such blasphemous intent, Ixion was bound to a revolving wheel of fire and sent spinning across the heavens, and latterly down into the underworld to remain there for ever. The cloud took on the name NEPHELE and went on to marry King ATHAMAS of Boeotiafn4 by whom she had twins, a boy, PHRIXUS, and a girl, HELLE. Point Two – the twins Phrixus and Helle are born to Athamas of Boeotia. In time Nephele took her place back in the sky as a cloud and as a minor goddess of xenia, the highly prized principle of hospitality. Athamas looked to take a new wife and chose INO, one of the daughters of CADMUS, the founding King of Thebes.fn5 Ino installed herself in Athamas’s palace and, as second wives will, instituted a new regime to banish all memories of her predecessor. Ino came with a reputation as the most caring and nurturing of women – it was she who had suckled her sister Semele’s child by Zeus, the infant Dionysus. Her other sisters, AGAVE and AUTONOË, had rejected Semele and paid a terrible price when a grown Dionysus visited Thebes and sent them mad to tragic effect.fn6 But Ino had survived with her life and good name intact, and the world loved her for it. Inside, however, Ino was ambitious, relentless and cruel. She had taken an instant dislike to her stepchildren Phrixus and Helle and decided to get them out of the way. By Athamas she had her own sons, LEARCHUS and MELICERTES, and was determined they should rule Boeotia when Athamas died, not Phrixus and Helle. An archetype of the wicked stepmother that was to dominate myth, legend and fairy tale for ages to come, Ino hatched a formidably malicious and elaborate plan to destroy the twins. First she persuaded the women of Boeotia to ruin the seedcorn in the barns and silos by charring it, so that when their husbands went out to sow in the fields it would be unable to sprout. As she had hoped, the next year’s harvest failed and famine threatened the kingdom. ‘Let us send messengers to Delphi, dear husband,’ said Ino to Athamas, ‘and find out why this disaster has been visited on us and what we can do to set it right.’ ‘How wise you are, dear wife,’ said the besotted Athamas. But the messengers sent to Delphi were paid agents of Ino and the words they claimed now to bring back from the oracle were hers and hers alone. ‘My lord king,’ said the chief messenger, unfurling a roll of parchment, ‘hearken unto the words of Delphic Apollo. “To placate the gods for the sins of the city and the vanities of its citizens, your son Phrixus must be sacrificed.” ’ On hearing this Athamas let out a howl of anguish. He was too distressed to consider how uncharacteristically direct and unambiguous this pronouncement was from an oracle notorious for its equivocations and double meanings. Young Prince Phrixus stepped up. ‘If my life will save the lives of others, Father,’ he said in a clear, steady voice, ‘then I go happily to the sacrificial altar.’ His mother Nephele, high in her palace of clouds, heard this and made ready to intervene. Phrixus, head held aloft, was led to the great sacrificial stone that had stood in the town square for generations. Human sacrifice, especially involving the young, was now looked on as barbaric, an unwanted legacy from the days when gods and men were crueller. But gods and men never lose their cruelty and the stone remained, just in case. A royal guard stood high on a roof and began to pound his drum. If the youth was to die, better to make a good show of it. The women of Boeotia put scraps of linen to their eyes and made a great display of weeping. Children who had never known the privilege of witnessing a ritualistic killing of this kind pressed forward to get a better view. Athamas howled and beat his breast, but the townspeople had all had a surfeit of famine. The words of the oracle were clear and the sacrifice was required. The high priest, dressed all in white, stepped forward, a ceremonial knife of shining silver in his hand. ‘Who gives this child to the Lord Zeus?’ ‘No one, no one!’ wailed Athamas. ‘I give myself!’ said Phrixus stoutly. Young Helle, who had not let go of her brother’s hand from the moment he had volunteered himself for the sacrifice, now added her voice. ‘I die with my brother!’ Ino almost hugged herself. ‘Really, this is better than I dared hope!’ she thought. ‘No!’ cried Athamas. Strong hands took both children and laid them on the sacrificial slab. As the priest raised his knife and held it poised for the strike, a voice called down from the sky. ‘On his back, Phrixus! Quick, Helle! Hold tight!’ Down from the clouds flew a golden ram. It landed on the stone in front of Phrixus and Helle who, obeying the command of their mother, clutched at the thick fleece and fell forward onto the animal’s back. They were taken up into the air before the priest, their guards, Ino or anyone else had time to react.fn7 Phrixus and Helle gripped the golden fleece as the ram flew east over the narrow straits that separate Europe from Asia. Here a gust of wind and a sudden swift turn from the ram caused Helle to fall from the ram’s back. Phrixus cried out in vain for it to stop. He looked down in horror and saw his sister plummet to her death in the water of the straits, which the Greeks were to call in her honour ‘the Hellespont’ or Sea of Helle.fn8 A distraught Phrixus wept bitter tears into the fleece as the golden ram flew further east, towards the Propontis, or Sea of Marmara, and over the Bosporus until they saw the glittering waters of the great inland sea that we call today the Black Sea, but which for the Greeks presaged the outer limits of what was civilised and Grecian. Beyond its shores lay strangers, barbarians and the deranged denizens of the eastern edge of the world, so it was known to them as the Unfriendly Sea, the Hostile Sea, the Sea of Enmity.fn9 As they passed the Caucasus Mountains, Phrixus could make out the naked, sunburnt form of Prometheus manacled and spread out on the rock. The shadow of an eagle passed over it. Phrixus knew it was on its way to feast on Prometheus’s liver, a torture the Titan endured every day.fn10 On the far eastern shores of the Black Sea lay a kingdom of some wealth and size. This kingdom, which we would call today a province of the Republic of Georgia, was known in those days as Colchis. Its king was AEËTES, a son of Helios the sun Titan and an Oceanid called PERSEIS. He ruled from the capital, Aia. If Aeëtes was astonished to see a golden ram land in front of his palace and a youth step down off its back, he was too cautious and politic to say so. Mindful of the rules of hospitality, he invited Phrixus to dine with him. Phrixus, grateful for the honour, sacrificed the ram to Zeus and presented Aeëtes with its golden fleece. It seems hard on so amiable and obliging an animal, but with death came the ultimate compliment: Zeus, pleased with the sacrifice, raised the noble creature to the stars as Aries, the Ram. The GOLDEN FLEECE was a most precious gift. Aeëtes hung it on the branches of an oak that stood in a grove sacred to Ares, the god of war. Aeëtes had somewhere about the palace grounds a huge serpent,fn11 terrible to look at and endowed with the special gift of never closing its eyes. This was set to guard the oak and its valuable burden. At some point Phrixus married CHALCIOPE, one of Aeëtes’ daughters, and all was well in Colchis. Meanwhile, back in Boeotia, we left Athamas and Ino staring up at the sky as a golden ram, with Phrixus and Helle on board, disappeared into the clouds. It was not long before Athamas came to understand that the whole crop-failure/famine/oracle/human-sacrifice affair had been a ruse devised in the evil mind of his wife. In a frenzy, he lashed out and killed his son by her, Learchus.fn12 Ino fled with their other boy, Melicertes. But Athamas cornered them and, in her despair, Ino threw herself and Melicertes over the cliffs and into the sea. Dionysus, ever mindful of his foster mother’s kindness to him, did not let her drown, but instead transformed her into the immortal LEUCOTHEA, the ‘white goddess’ of the sea.fn13 Melicertes became PALAEMON, a dolphin-riding deity and guardian of ships. Athamas’s life had not been a happy onefn14, but we can see how it led indirectly, through Nephele’s intercession to save their twins, to the hanging of the Golden Fleece on the oak in the Grove of Ares in Colchis on the far shores of the Black, Unfriendly Sea, also called the Euxine Sea. I should say that all of the above is really backstory to the main backstory – whose narrative strands I will now try to separate here. Even setting aside the marriages of Athamas, his family was notorious. He had three quarrelsome and villainous brothers. One brother, Sisyphus, was soon to be doomed to push his boulder uphill for eternity as punishment for his many crimes and blasphemiesfn15. Another brother, SALMONEUS, tried to pass himself off as a god of thunder and storms and was blasted to atoms by Zeus for his impertinence. Just to make matters even more complicated, Salmoneus’s daughter TYRO married and had children by each of her uncles: with Athamas himself, with Sisyphus and with CRETHEUS, the third brother. Tyro’s eldest son by Cretheus was AESON, but she also had two sons by Poseidon – Pelias and Neleus.fn16 I pause to remind you that I am aware of how complicated and forgettable such divagations into the family tree may be, but they are relevant to the main line of our story. You mustn’t feel obliged to memorise these names and relationships. It is enough to get a sense of what all this portends. Cretheus ruled over IOLCOS, a city in Aeolia, the north-eastern region of mainland Greece that included Larissa and Pherae. Therefore Aeson, his son by his niece Tyro, was the rightful heir and would succeed to the throne when Cretheus died. But Aeson’s half-brothers, Pelias and Neleus, believed that they, as sons of Tyro and the great Olympian god Poseidon, had a claim not just to Iolcos but to all of greater Aeolia. Accordingly, the moment Cretheus died they besieged Iolcos. Aeson and his wife ALCIMEDEfn17, fearing that the city was lost, managed to smuggle out their firstborn child, JASON. Alcimede was friendly with the centaur CHIRON, and it was he who received and raised the boy. Shortly after, Pelias broke into the city and slaughtered every man, woman or child connected by blood to the throne, all but Aeson and Alcimede whom he threw in prison. While in captivity the couple had another son, PROMACHUS. It is worth mentioning too that Pelias’s and Neleus’s mother Tyro had been mistreated by SIDERO, Cretheus’s second wife. Pelias and Neleus ran Sidero down to a temple, in whose precincts they killed her. This proved to be a disastrous mistake, for the temple was dedicated to Hera. The Queen of Heaven, outraged at such desecration, swore instant enmity against these two sons of Poseidon. Of all the gods to make an enemy of, Hera was the most dangerous and implacable. So there we have it. A GOLDEN FLEECE far to the east. IOLCOS and Aeolia in the grip of the tyrannical and murderous Pelias, who rules the region cruelly but with a resolute grip that no rebel can hope to loosen. In fact, as we find today, rebellions from the outside nearly always fail: familial quarrelling, dynastic feuding, party disunity, the palace coup and the stab in the back … these are what dislodge regimes and topple tyrants. Pelias knows this and is haunted by just enough suspicion and despotic paranoia to consult an oracle on the security of his throne. ‘One of your own blood will end the life of Pelias. Beware the man who comes from the country wearing but one sandal.’ Was that two people or one? If a man of his own blood would kill him, who could this single-sandaled rustic be? Did they know each other? Were they both blood relations? Were they one and the same? Why couldn’t oracles ever be straight? It really was too tiresome. Meanwhile, on the slopes of Mount Pelion, towering over Iolcos, the rightful heir to the city – Jason – is being tutored by the wise and clever Chiron.
