The Voyage of Argo by Apollonius of Rhodes

Author:Apollonius of Rhodes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group USA, Inc.
Published: 2010-10-25T00:00:00+00:00

BOOK FOUR

HOMEWARD BOUND

Now tell us, Muse, in your own heavenly tongue how the Colchian maiden schemed and suffered. Speak, Daughter of Zeus; for here your poet falters and the words fail to come. What drove her to desert her home? Was it the frenzy of a star-crossed love? Or must we call it panic?

ALL night Aeetes sat in his palace with his Colchian noblemen planning a treacherous stroke against the Argonauts. He was consumed with rage at the lamentable outcome of the test, and by no means satisfied that his daughters had not had a hand in the affair.

Meanwhile the goddess Here filled Medea’s heart with agonizing fears. She trembled like a slender fawn caught in a woodland thicket and terrified by the baying of the hounds. She realized at once that her father could not fail to know what she had done for Jason, and that she would soon be called on to pay the price in full. She also feared the maids who had seen something of their secret meeting. Her eyes burnt and there was a fearful roaring in her ears. Often in her acute distress she groaned, she clutched her throat, she tore her hair. Indeed she would have taken poison then and there and died before her time, frustrating the designs of Here, had not the goddess put it in her troubled mind that she might flee with Phrixus’ sons. This thought stilled her fluttering heart and fortitude returned. She cleared her lap of deadly drugs and poured them all back into their box. She kissed her bed; she kissed the posts on either side of the folding doors; she stroked the walls of her room. Then, tearing off one of her long tresses, she left it there for her mother in memory of her girlhood and said her sad goodbye:

‘Mother, I go, leaving this lock here in my stead. Farewell; for I am going far away. Farewell Chalciope; farewell my home and all it holds. Oh, Jason, you should never have come here! I wish the sea had been the end of you.’

With that and shedding many tears she went, much as a newly captured girl, torn from her own land by the fortune of war, makes off from some rich house before she is inured to work and schooled in the miseries of servitude under the cruel eye of a mistress. The slave-girl slinks away; but the beautiful Medea sped through the palace, and for her the very doors responding to her hasty incantations swung open of their own accord. She ran barefoot down narrow alleys, holding her mantle over her forehead with her left hand to hide her face, and with the other lifting up the hem of her skirt. Swiftly and fearfully she passed across the great city by a secret way, and so beyond the walls, unrecognized by any of the watch, who had not even seen her in her flight. From there she meant to reach the temple.* She

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