The Voyage of the Argo

The man with one sandal

An oracle, a message from the gods, warns a man named Pelias to beware “a man with one sandal”. Then the hero Jason walks into the town of Iolcos wearing exactly one sandal. He is dressed in a leopard skin, and his hair is uncut.

The poet Pindar, who tells this scene in an ode, or song of praise, never says how the other sandal was lost. A later poet, Apollonius Rhodius, gives the answer in a different book of his own poem. Jason steps into the flooded river Anauros carrying an old woman and reaches the far bank with one sandal, the other lost in the mud. The old woman is the goddess Hera in disguise. Hera later tells the goddess Athena she has favoured Jason ever since.

So in Apollonius, this one act is where Hera’s protection begins. The lost sandal also makes Jason the very man the oracle told Pelias to fear.

The crew and the departure

Jason sails in the Argo with a crew of heroes, the Argonauts, to fetch the Golden Fleece from Colchis on the Black Sea. Apollonius lists the crew in a catalogue that opens “First now let us remember Orpheus” and runs to about 210 lines. It names more than 50 heroes.

Some modern scholars read this list as a deliberate echo of the catalogue of ships in the Iliad, the epic poem of Homer. In that reading, the list links the Argonauts to the Lapith generation before them and to the generation of the Trojan War after them.

The Argo puts out from the beach at Pagasae, below Mount Pelion. First Jason builds an altar to the god Apollo beside the sea and prays for the voyage. As the ship pulls away, Chiron comes down from the mountain to the shore to wave goodbye. His wife holds up the baby Achilles for Peleus to see.

Limnos, the first landing

The first landing of the crew is the island of Limnos. The women there have killed every man on the island. They take the crew as lovers, under their queen, Hypsipyle, and the Argonauts stay.

Heracles alone refuses to go ashore with them. He rebukes the others for staying so long to plough the soil of Limnos, when they should be sailing on.

The voyage continues to Colchis and the fleece. The sources then part ways over how the Argo came home.

The way home

Pindar has the crew haul the Argo overland for 12 days. They carry it from the Ocean across the “deserted back” of Libya to reach Lake Tritonis.

Apollonius sends the ship a different way. It goes north up the river Ister into the Adriatic Sea, then west by the Eridanus and the Rhône, before the Argonauts ever reach Libya.

Later ancient writers do not agree either. Apollodorus follows the river route of Apollonius. Timaeus and Scymnus of Chios have the Argonauts sail out by the Tanais into the northern ocean. Herodotus, Callimachus and Diodorus Siculus send the crew home by the way they came.

The oldest tellings

The ship was famous in poetry long before Apollonius. The Odyssey of Homer already calls the Argo “famed of all”. In it, Circe says Hera steered the ship through the Wandering Rocks because Jason was dear to her.

The ode of Pindar, his fourth Pythian ode of 462 BC, is the earliest surviving telling of any length. The four-book epic of Apollonius, written in Alexandria, is the fullest. The playwright Euripides opens his play Medea by wishing the pine of Pelion had never been cut down for the oars of the Argo.

Pindar did not tell the story in this ode, known as Pythian 4, for its own sake. His patron, Arcesilas IV, traced his family back to Euphemus, one of the Argonauts. The ode centres on a token Euphemus receives beside Lake Tritonis in Libya: a lump of earth, given by a god in human form. Medea prophesies that it will one day found Thera, and through Thera, Cyrene.