The Voyage of the Argo

Jason carries a stranger through the flood

Jason steps into the flooded Anauros carrying an old woman and reaches the far bank with one sandal. His passenger is Hera in disguise. Apollonius makes that act the origin of her protection, and the lost sandal turns Jason into the man an oracle has warned Pelias to fear.

The ship is older in poetry than this explanation. Homer’s Odyssey already calls the Argo “famed of all” and has Circe credit Hera with steering it through the Wandering Rocks because Jason was dear to her. Pindar’s fourth Pythian ode of 462 BC is the earliest surviving extended telling; Apollonius’s four-book Alexandrian epic is the fullest. Euripides opens Medea by wishing the pine of Pelion had never been cut for the Argo’s oars.

Pindar’s telling, and what it serves

Pythian 4 is not told for its own sake. Pindar’s patron, Arcesilas IV, traced his line to Euphemus, one of the Argonauts, and the ode turns on a token Euphemus receives beside Lake Tritonis in Libya: a clod of earth from a god in human form, which Medea prophesies will one day found Thera, and through Thera, Cyrene. Pindar also has an oracle warn Pelias to beware “a man with one sandal,” and has Jason walk into Iolcos wearing exactly one, dressed in a leopard skin with his hair uncut. The ode never says how the other sandal was lost.

What Apollonius adds

Apollonius answers that question in a different book of his own poem. Hera tells Athena she has favoured Jason ever since he carried her, disguised as an old woman, across the flooded river Anauros. The sandal comes off in the mud on the far bank. His catalogue of the crew, which opens “First now let us remember Orpheus” and runs some 210 lines, names more than 50 heroes; one study of the passage reads it as deliberately recalling Homer’s catalogue of ships in the Iliad, binding the Argonauts to the Lapith generation before them and the Trojan War generation after.

Where the sources disagree on the way home

Pindar has the crew haul the Argo overland for 12 days, from the Ocean across Libya’s “deserted back,” to reach Lake Tritonis. Apollonius sends the ship a different way entirely: north up the river Ister into the Adriatic, then west by the Eridanus and the Rhône, before the Argonauts ever reach Libya at all. Later ancient writers do not agree either: Apollodorus follows Apollonius’s river route, Timaeus and Scymnus of Chios have the Argonauts sail out by the Tanais into the northern ocean, and Herodotus, Callimachus and Diodorus Siculus simply send the crew home by the way they had come.

What stands at the departure

Before the Argo puts out from the beach at Pagasae, below Pelion, Apollonius has Jason raise a seaside altar to Apollo and pray for the voyage. As the ship pulls away, Chiron comes down from the mountain to the shore to wave farewell, his wife holding the infant Achilles up for Peleus to see. The crew’s first landfall is Limnos, where the women have killed every man on the island. Heracles alone refuses to go ashore, and rebukes the others for staying so long to plough Limnos’s soil instead of sailing on.

The route home remains irreconcilable, but every version needs the departure. At Pagasae, altar, shoreline and felled Pelion pine turn a catalogue of heroes into a ship under way. Chiron raises his hand; the oars take the crew beyond the mountain.