Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/420

388 BOOK II. Ias6n and Medeia.

find here also, in the magic songs of the Seirens, and the wisdom of Kirke, in Skylla and Charybdis and the Phaiakian people. From the Seirens they are saved by the strains of Orpheus, strains even sweeter than theirs, which make the stuffing of the sailors' ears with wax a work of supererogation. It is useless to go into further detail. The accounts given of the cause of the voyage vary indefinitely in the different mythographers, each of whom sought to describe a journey through countries and by tracks least known to himself, and therefore the most mysterious. The geography, in short, of the Argonautic voyage is as much and as little worth investigating as the geography of the travels of 15 and the sons and daughters of her descendants Danaos and Aigyptos.

The prophecy uttered long ago to Pelias remained yet unfulfilled ; and when lason returned to lolkos, he found, like Odysseus on his return to Ithaka, according to some versions, that his father Aison was still living, although worn out with age. The wise woman Medeia is endowed with the powers of Asklepios by virtue of the magic robe bestowed on her by Helios himself, and these powers are exercised in making Aison young again. Pelias too, she says, shall recover all his ancient strength and vigour, if his daughters will cut up his limbs and boil them in a caldron ; but when they do her bidding, Medeia suffers the limbs to waste away without pronouncing the words which would have brought him to life again. Thus is lason, like Oidipous and Perseus, Cyrus and Romulus, one of the fatal children whose doom it is to slay their sires. The sequel of the myth of lason has few, if any, features peculiar to itself. lason can no more be con- stant to Medeia than Theseus to Ariadne or Phoibos to Koronis. At Corinth he sees the beautiful Glauke, another of the bright beings whose dwelling is in the morning or evening sky ; but the nuptials must be as fatal as those of lole and Herakles. The robe of Helios, which has been thus far only the golden fleece under another name, now assumes the deadly powers of the arrows of Herakles, Achilleus, or Philoktetes, and eats into the flesh of Glauke and her father Kreou, as the robe bathed in the blood of the Kentaur Nessos consumed the body of Herakles. In the murder of the children of lason by their mother Medeia we have only another version of the slaughter of Pelops by Tantalos, while the winged dragons which bear away her chariot are not the dragons of the night, like the snakes which seek to strangle the infant Herakles, but the keener-eyed serpents of the morning, which feed the babe lamos with honey in the violet beds. But this portion of the story may be told, and is told, in a hundred different ways. In one version she goes to Thebes, and there cures Herakles of his