The Last Song of Orpheus

13

It was not so much in our seizing of the Fleece but in our homeward journey to Hellas that we felt the full weight of the test that the gods had devised for us. Nothing we had suffered on the outward trip, however grueling it had seemed at the time, appeared in hindsight to have offered any real difficulty at all when placed against what we had to contend with on the voyage home.

You may think that all we had to do was reverse our track and sail back through now-familiar waters, down the Euxine to the Bosphorus, down the Bosphorus to the Hellespont, and quickly onward by way of the ports we had visited on the way out to our starting-point at Pasagae. But that was not to be. The seer Phineus had advised us to take another route, going counterclockwise around the upper end of the Euxine and down a large unknown westward-flowing river that we would eventually come to, and thence onward by a roundabout course into our native seas. For the current and the winds would be against us if we attempted to sail southward through the Euxine, he warned us, and, what was even worse, all the nations that dwelled along that route were subject in one way or another to King Aietes of Colchis. The enraged Aietes was sure to send out messengers to them, ordering them to intercept us and take us, along with his traitorous daughter and our stolen booty, back to Aea.

In fact Aietes, driven not merely to rage but almost to madness when the news of the theft of the Fleece was brought to him, lost no time sending a fleet out in pursuit of us, an armada of many swift warships headed by his son the prince Apsyrtus, Medea’s half-brother. While we were groping our way slowly and uncertainly westward through the upper waters of the Euxine, with our helmsman Ancaeus hard pressed to navigate in a sea where neither he nor any of the rest of us had had any experience, the fleet of Apsyrtus, traveling in its home territory, was making haste to overtake us. Hardly had we reached the entrance to that great river of which Phineus had told us but we saw his ships coming up to surround us. There were Colchian vessels all about us, fifteen or perhaps twenty of them, blocking our access to the river and cutting off our access to the sea as well. We stood on the verge of a one-sided battle, the slaughter of many men, unburied ghosts left to wander in these strange seas. Surely that was not what the gods had had in mind when they sent us on this journey; but wherever we looked we could see the spears of Apsyrtus’ multitude of warriors bristling in the sun.

Here Jason demonstrated what manner of man he was, and then Medea showed what sort of woman she was, and Apsyrtus revealed his nature as well, and the gods who have made us all surely took pleasure in watching them work out the destinies that had been designed for them. I knew, after a fashion, what was about to happen, but I could not have intervened. The tragedy had to occur. It is always my fate to be a spectator at such events as the one that would now entwine these three people and send them all spinning off to different, but terrible, destinies.

Jason, ever cautious and prudent to a fault, sent word to Apsyrtus that he had an offer to make, and asked for a brief truce while he prepared his message. To this Apsyrtus, young and naive, unwisely agreed. Then Jason called us together and told us of the compromise that he planned to offer the Colchian prince. The Fleece, Jason was going to say, unquestionably belonged to him: King Aietes had promised it to him if he performed certain tasks, the tasks had been performed, and he meant to hold the king to his pledge. But Medea was a different matter. Jason appeared to regard her as a negotiable commodity. He planned to tell Absyrtus that he was willing to put her ashore on a nearby island where there was a shrine of Artemis, and would leave it up to the ruler of that island to decide whether she should be turned over to her brother or allowed to go on to Hellas with him.

Why Jason believed that Apsyrtus, however callow he might be, should have accepted any such offer, is nothing that I will ever understand. Plainly Aietes had charged him with regaining the Fleece, and he could not trade it away. But that Medea would lightly go along with the thing that Jason was suggesting was even less likely. Another woman, I suppose, might have heard Jason’s words without demur, thinking that it was her role as a woman to accept in placid fashion whatever fate might befall her. But Medea, that dark and ruthless woman, surely would not permit herself to be trifled with this way. Nor did she.

Angrily, her eyes ablaze with green fire, she drew Jason aside and reminded him of the oath he had sworn to take her to wife. Did he now mean to break that oath? Was he so meek and fearful that he was ready now to hand her over to her brother with nothing more than a shrug, merely to save his own neck, if some local king should rule that he must do so? She would set fire to the Argo with her own hands before she permitted that, and would call down such vengeful curses on Jason and all his kind for generations to come that he would bemoan the day he had ever been born.

She was a frightening woman when angered, was Medea. And the savage words that she spat at him left the heroic Jason well and truly frightened.

He did what he could to pacify her, vowing that he wanted above all else to live with her as man and wife. But he tried to persuade her that he had no choice but to offer Apsyrtus at least a portion of what he had come here to take. There was no way that Medea could remain with him, he said: either she went peacefully, or Apsyrtus would seize her by force. Jason pointed to the vast armada confronting them, and Apsyrtus’ great horde of warriors. Any battle between the men of Colchis and the Argonauts could end only in the total destruction of Jason and all his shipmates, and in the end Apsyrtus would regain not only the Fleece but Medea herself, whom he would take back to Aea to face the dreadful wrath of her royal father.

“It will not happen that way,” Medea said coolly. And she told Jason of the strategem that she intended to follow. She would send a messenger to her brother, informing him that she had been abducted by Jason against her will and yearned to be rescued and restored to her native city and her beloved father. “If you will go to your sister secretly by night on shore,” the messenger was to tell Apsyrtus, “she will surrender both herself and the Fleece to you, and you will return in triumph to your father with them both, having lost not so much as a single man of your force.”

“And if he does come, what then?” asked Jason.

“You will be waiting in hiding for him, and you will kill him,” said Medea, with not the slightest quaver of emotion in her voice. “When they learn of his death his men will be thrown into confusion, and we will be able to escape and go safely onward together to your country.”

And so it occurred, and all the dark things that were to happen afterward as well, for the gods had designed all this to occur in just such a way. And what the gods design for us must of necessity come to pass.

I know that philosophers will arise in years to come who will claim that we and we alone are masters of our fates, shaping all events of our lives by our own decisions. They are undoubtedly sincere in this belief; but what chagrin they would feel, if only they understood that the very ideas they espouse were put into their minds by Father Zeus, as part of his great plan for the cosmos and all creatures that dwell within it?

So the foolish Apsyrtus went unescorted to the temple of Artemis on shore, where Medea had said she would be waiting for him with the Golden Fleece. She came forth to meet him in the darkness; but as brother and sister stood there quietly talking, Jason emerged from his hiding place behind the temple and struck Apsyrtus dead with his sword. His spurting blood threw a crimson stain over the silvery veil Medea had donned. But grim Medea, unmoved, took the sword from Jason, cut the dead man’s body in pieces, and cast his sundered limbs into the sea, where the Colchians would find them drifting in the morning; and she and Jason returned in silence to the Argo.

As Medea had foreseen, the Colchians lost all heart after the death of their prince. Fearing the fury of Aietes if they returned empty-handed to Aea, they set sail for the farther shores of the Euxine and built new settlements there for themselves and never were heard from again. We, meanwhile, entered the great river unhindered and traveled onward toward the west.

But the gods in their mysterious wisdom often lead us into preordained inevitable sin and then implacably demand atonement. Hera still looked kindly on her beloved Jason, but Zeus, who had never shown any friendship for Jason, was of another mind entirely. And so, the goddess aiding us as best she could but the angry father-god insisting that a proper price be paid for the crime that had made possible our escape, the rest of our journey was one torment after another, by way of punishment for Medea’s crime and Jason’s acquiescence in it, until Medea was deemed cleansed of her brother’s blood.

We sailed up that uncharted westward-flowing river through bitter lands of ice and snow, shivering in northern gales that slowed the very course of our blood. The oarsmen’s hands froze as they gripped the oars. Storms assailed us and came close to shattering our mast. Huge deadly floating masses of ice came drifting all about us, jutting up far above us and making every day seem like a running of the Clashing Rocks. We grew gaunt and weak with hunger, but Ancaeus did wondrous deeds at the helm and I beat time for the weary men with whatever energy remained in me, and we managed to go on.

Deep in the heart of the continent we found at last another mighty river, likewise unknown then to any Hellene mariner, that rose somewhere at the world’s end and flowed southward into our own broad-breasted ocean. When we emerged finally into a place of warmer weather, new storms caught us and spun us around, driving us northward again past the coast of what we surmised was Italy. We fought our way south once more, entering at last into the Tyrrhenian Sea that we knew would take us back to the Hellene lands, only to find ourselves confronted by the isle where the Sirens dwelled, those seductive singers who are put there to lure mariners to their destruction. “There is no other way for us,” said Ancaeus, “but to go past their shore. But who can resist the Sirens’ song?”

Well, I had sung three-headed Cerberus into pleasant slumber, and I had soothed the serpent guardian of the Fleece the same way, and now I took lyre in hand to get us past this peril as well, for I knew that other tasks awaited me beyond this voyage and we were not destined to end our days here.

These Sirens are my cousins, daughters of my mother’s sister Terpsichore the muse. Their voices are clear and beautiful, and when travelworn seamen pass their island they sing out in chorus, beckoning them ashore to supposed delights, but actually intending their deaths. They offer soft bosoms and a warm resting-place to weary travelers, and few can say no to them.

But I know a little about the art of song myself; and as the Sirens began their lovely song, I cut across it with a rousing chanty of my own that entirely canceled out their alluring harmonies, breaking over them and engulfing them in robust manly rhythms. I sang to the oarsmen of all that we had endured, and all that we had achieved, and of how close we were now to home and the glory that awaited us upon our return. My song lifted their spirits, and, exhausted and famished though they were, they pulled hard at their oars, and the Sirens were powerless to make themselves heard above my voice and the steady thrumming of my lyre. Only one of our number, young Butes of Iolcus, was able to tune his ear to their song instead of mine, and leaped overboard and swam on toward shore, where those devilish sisters pounced upon him in the surf.

To Sicily then we came, King Alcinous’ realm. There we were met with a welcoming feast. But even as we rejoiced in this comfort after our hard voyage, dark sails appeared off shore: yet another fleet of Colchis, sent out by Aietes to rove the seas in search of Medea and the Fleece. Of course they could not attack us while we were Alcinous’ guests; but the Colchian envoy who went before the king accused us of theft and worse, and asked Alcinous to turn over to them all that we had stolen from their king. And Alcinous, fearing to make an enemy of Aietes and unwilling also to bring the wrath of thundering Zeus upon himself, showed a willingness to do so.

Jason was unable to refute these accusations, and was helpless and baffled here. But Medea stood up boldly before the king and begged for mercy from him, pleading with him not to separate her from Jason, whom the gods had destined for her as her mate. Surely, she said, her father, who had never loved her and now looked upon her as a traitor, would put her to death if she were brought back to Colchis. Did Alcinous, that wise and generous king, mean to send a guest of his household to such a death?

Alcinous was moved by her tender words, just as Jason, earlier, had been swayed by her angry ones. The king declared that if she was still a virgin, he would indeed send her back to Aietes, for Aietes had a father’s right to her and Jason had none at all. But if Medea and Jason were married, he would not come between a husband and his wife. That night we poured the wine and honey for the gods, and sacrificed the sheep, and built a wedding bed for Jason and Medea with the Golden Fleece spread upon it as a coverlet; and so, in haste, their marriage was consummated in this foreign land instead of in Jason’s father’s house in Iolcus, as he had intended. It may have been a happy night for them but there would be little happiness for these two in the years ahead.

Concerning the remainder of our long time of tribulations I will be brief. When we left Sicily we were caught by a northerly gale and blown toward sun-parched Africa, into the Gulf of Libya, where our ship was caught by one of the wild tides of that place and carried far up onto the desert shore. Ancaeus the helmsman gave way to grief at this; for not only were we beached, but he knew that when the tide returned it would sweep us just as irresistibly out upon the rocky shoals that rose everywhere in this desolate place, and our hull would be shattered beyond hope of repair. So there was no alternative for us but to take the terrible weight of the Argo upon our backs, lifting the ship and hauling it across the desert, day after brutal day, an effort that very nearly was beyond our ability. At last, just as we were coming to the last of our endurance, we reached navigable waters beyond. No suffering in all the time since we had first set out was equal to the suffering that this portage imposed on us; and we were weeping tears of blood by the time we staggered at last to the brink of a brackish lake and put the Argo’s keel into water once more.

To the open sea we sailed, and thence to Crete, and by one way and another we made our way homeward. You will know that Jason took the Fleece and his bride to Pasagae, where there was great rejoicing. Even King Pelias, he who had sent Jason on the long quest, pretended to be pleased at his return with the Fleece. Old Aeson, Jason’s father, had died during his absence. Medea, who by then was with child by Jason, charmed Pelias into believing that she could through her witchcraft make him young again, but that monstrous woman gave him poison instead of some magic elixir, so that he perished in a terrible way and Jason became king in Iolcus. After which, as you know, he strayed from Medea in his affections, embracing Glauce, the daughter of the Theban king; but fierce vengeful Medea slew not only Glauce but her own two young children, leaving only their corpses for Jason, and fled from Thessaly to many other dark exploits elsewhere, of which I need not sing here. And the last years of splendid Jason were blackened by grief and shame.

As for me, I left the Argo in the Peloponnese and undertook a pilgrimage to Hades’ gate at Tainaron, that place where I had parted forever from my Eurydice. A commandment had been laid upon me to offer up a ceremony of thanksgiving there to the gods for my safe return, which I duly performed, asking no questions. And then finally I went back to Thrace, where the gods meant me to resume my responsibilities as a teacher and a leader, and eventually to meet my doom.