The Golden Fleece Read online

  The marriage was celebrated with great splendour, and upon Ino’s insistence the Horse men were invited down from their mountain caves to join in the festivities. When they arrived, brimming cups of Lemnian wine were dispensed to them. The Centaurs honour a Thessalian hero, named Sabazius, as the inventor of barley-ale, their ritual drink, which causes great jollity at first and then sends the worshippers fast asleep. They now assumed this unfamiliar liquor, wine, to be a sort of ale, seeing that it was of a pale golden colour, though of a sharper scent than ale and not needing to be drunk through straws, as they drank ale, since it had no mash floating thickly about in it. They tossed the wine off unsuspectingly, crying out ‘Io Sabazius, Io, Io!’; found that it tasted sweet and called for more. But instead of sending them to sleep the wine presently inflamed them, so that they bucked about uncontrollably, rolling their eyes and whinnying for lust. The Fish nymphs felt the pangs of pity, and suddenly quitting the sober Minyans, who had mixed their wine with four parts of water, darted out into the woods and there companied with the Centaurs in love.

  This capricious behaviour vexed the Minyan husbands, who pursued their wives and killed a dozen Centaurs with their bronze swords. The next day Athamas led an attack on the Centaurs’ mountain fastness. They with-stood him as best they could with their pine-wood spears and with boulders sent toppling down the mountain-side; but he defeated and drove them away to the northward. To discourage their return he removed from her shrine the mare-headed image of the White Goddess and, taking it down to Iolcos to the Fish College, daringly rededicated the shrine on Pelion to Zeus the Ram, or Rain-Making Zeus. For a time he broke the spirit of the Centaurs; but Ino, by the hand of one of her nymphs, secretly conveyed the mare-headed image to a cave in a wooded valley half-way to Mount Ossa, where the Centaurs reassembled and prayed to her for revenge.

  King Athamas was unaware that Ino had restored the image to the Centaurs; otherwise he would have addressed her even more insolently than he did. ‘Wife,’ he said, ‘I have banished your horsey lovers from Mount Pelion, because they profaned our bridal night. If any of them, seeking out the image of the Goddess, dares to descend again into the meadows of Iolcos he will be destroyed without pity. Mount Pelion has now become the abode of our Aeolian God, Zeus; it is worthier of him than Mount Laphystios, which by comparison is inconsiderable in height.’

  ‘Be careful what you say, husband,’ replied Ino, ‘if husband I must call you. How will the Goddess regard your driving her down from Pelion? And how do you suppose that the barley will grow, if the Horse men are not present at the sowing festival to company with me and my Fish women in the sight of the White Goddess?’

  Athamas laughed and replied: ‘The Goddess will not grudge Pelion to her son. And now that each of your women has a husband from among my followers, and you have me, what more can you desire? We are all tall, sturdy men, immeasurably superior in every way to those mad and naked Centaurs; and we shall be pleased to company with you in the fields at the sowing festival if the itch customarily takes you at that season.’

  Ino asked: ‘Are you so ignorant as to believe that our Goddess will allow us to accept the embraces of your Ram men on so holy an occasion as that? She will never bless the barley if we do so. No, no! We are content to be your wives for the better part of the year, but if our affairs are to prosper we must company not only with the Centaurs in the sowing season, but with the visiting Satyr Goat men at the ceremony of caprification, when we ripen the figs by the stinging of the gall-insect; and with lovers from other fraternities upon such appropriate occasions as may from time to time be revealed to me by the Goddess.’

  Athamas answered: ‘Are you so ignorant as to believe that any right-minded Greek would allow his wife to enjoy the embraces of another man, either at the sowing festival or at any other? Your chatter is nonsensical. Figs ripen by themselves without artificial aid, as may be observed in deserted orchards where the ceremony has been omitted. And what need of women have we Minyans, even for the sowing of our barley? The hero Triptolemus demonstrated that men can sow barley as successfully as women.’

  ‘He did so by gracious permission of the Goddess,’ said Ino, ‘whose luminary, the Moon, is the power that makes all seeds grow and all fruits ripen.’

  ‘It was unnecessary to ask her permission,’ said Athamas. ‘The Goddess has no true power over grain or fruits of any sort. All that is necessary is that the barley-corns should be planted carefully while the strength of the sun is languishing, in the furrows of a well-ploughed field, and then harrowed over with a thorn-harrow, and then rained upon in due season. Zeus will supply the rain at my intercession and the revived Sun will genially ripen the ears. The Moon is cold and dead: she has no creative virtue at all.’

  ‘And what of the holy dew?’ asked Ino. ‘I suppose that the dew is also a gift of the Sun?’

  ‘At least it is no gift of the Moon,’ he answered, ‘who often does not rise before the grass is hoary with dew.’

  ‘I wonder,’ said Ino, ‘that you dare speak in this way of the Goddess; as I wonder that without asking my leave you have removed her venerable white image from its shrine and replaced it with the image of her adopted son. A terrible fate is in store for you, Athamas, if you do not mend your ways before another day passes and do not approach the Goddess as a penitent. If the sowing of Triptolemus was rewarded with a good harvest, you may be sure that this was because he had first gained the Goddess’s favour by his humility, and because he did not omit any of the usual love-ceremonies at the sowing. Besides, it is untrue that figs ripen in deserted orchards without caprification. There is a complete register of fig-trees in this country, and each tree is tended by one of my nymphs, however lonely or remote its place of growth may be.

  ‘I am not accustomed to be ruled by women,’ Athamas answered passionately. ‘My Boeotian wife, Nephele, who waits for me at Orchomenos, has learned by experience to avoid my displeasure and to busy herself with her own affairs, leaving me to mine. I would be a fool indeed if I visited the shrine where you are Chief Priestess, and asked you (of all women) to intercede with her for my pardon.’

  Ino pretended to be overawed by Athamas’s male violence. Caressing his head and stroking his beard, she cried: ‘Forgive me, husband, for confessing my religious scruples. I will obey you in all things. But grant me this, that your followers will themselves sow the barley, in the manner of Triptolemus, without the help of my women. We all fear the anger of our Goddess if we plant the barley without the customary fertility rites, for which the loving company of the Centaurs seems to us essential.’

  She thus placated Athamas. He had insufficient respect for the Goddess and trusted rather in the power of Zeus, who in his former name of Dios had been the chief deity of his tribe when first they came down into Thessaly. To the newly dedicated shrine of Rain-Making Zeus on Pelion he transferred a particularly holy object from Mount Laphystios. This was the figure of the Ram God, carved from an oak root, over which was hooked a great ram’s fleece, dyed with sea-purple to match the colour of those rain-clouds which it could magically conjure up even at the height of summer. Because of the saying ‘rain is gold,’ and also because of the golden pollen which colours the fleeces of the sheep on Ida, where Zeus is said to have been reared by shepherds, a precious fringe had been sewn along the edges of the fleece, of thinly drawn gold wire arranged in locks like wool, so that it became known as the Golden Fleece. Huge, curling golden horns were attached to the head of the Fleece, which fitted over the wooden stump of the image’s head. This Golden Fleece was wonderful to look at, and never failed to draw down rain, whenever the appropriate sacrifice was made to the God. The priests declared that Zeus levitated the image on such occasions: it rose they said, on the smoke of the sacrifice through the smoke-hole in the roof of the shrine, and presently descended again, wringing wet with the first drops of rain.

  At Iolcos the harvest was brought in and the season of autumn sowing approached. Ino waited for a sign from the
White Goddess, who presently appeared again to her in a dream and said: ‘Ino, you have done well, but you shall do better. Take all the seed-barley from the jars where it is stored in my sacred precinct, and secretly distribute it among the women of Phthiotis. Order them to parch it in front of their domestic fires, each of them two or three harvest-baskets full, but not to let any of the men know what is being done, under pain of my deathly displeasure.’

  Ino in the dream trembled and asked: ‘Mother, can you ask me to do this? Will not the fire destroy the life in the sacred seed?’

  The Goddess replied: ‘Do it, nevertheless. At the same time poison the water of the Minyan sheep-troughs with agaric and spotted hemlock. My son Zeus has robbed me of my home on Pelion and I will punish him by destroying his herds.’

  Ino obeyed the Goddess faithfully, though with some disquiet of heart. The women carried out the tasks assigned to them, and not unwillingly, because they hated their Minyan conquerors. The Minyans did not suspect, when their sheep died, that it was these women who had poisoned them, but complained among themselves against Athamas. Since their law forbade the eating of any beast that had died except by ritual slaughter, they were forced to eat more bread than was their custom, and whatever game they could hunt down in the forests; but they did not excel in hunting.

  Ino said to Athamas: ‘I hope, husband, that you will have good luck with your sowing. Here is the barley-seed, stored in these jars. Look and smell how excellently dry it is: mildewed seed, as perhaps you know, does not raise plentiful crops.’

  The moon was on the wane; yet Minyan men, with Athamas at their head, sowed the seed in the furrows of ploughed earth. They did so without any ceremony or prayer, while Ino’s nymphs watched from a distance and laughed silently together. It happened to be an unusually dry season, and when the barley did not show green above the soil at the expected time, Athamas with a few companions ascended the mountain, and invoked Rain-Making Zeus. This they did with rain-rattles and bull-roarers, and with the sacrifice of a black ram, burning the sacred thigh-bones rolled in fat and merrily eating every morsel of the carcase.

  That same evening a pleasant shower of rain fell. ‘It will bring up the barley, wife, never fear,’ said Athamas to Ino.

  Ten days went by and still there was no glint of green in the fields. Ino told Athamas: ‘The shower which Zeus sent was insufficient. It did not sink far enough into the soil. You planted the seed too deep, I fear. You must invoke Zeus again; and why not send to the Thracian shrine of your ancestor Aeolus for a few puffs of the rain-bringing northeastern wind?’

  Athamas, growing anxious, again ascended Pelion. This time he propitiated the God with a sacrifice of fifty white rams and one black one, burning them to cinders on pine-wood bonfires, and not himself eating anything, to demonstrate his humility of heart; he whirled the bull-roarer and rattled the rain-gourd until his arms ached. Zeus that night duly thundered and lightened, and a deluge of rain fell, so that Athamas and his people were nearly smothered by it on their return to Iolcos. The Anauros brook rose in a sudden flood and washed away the foot-bridge by which they had crossed, so that they had to wait for the waters to subside before they could regain the city.

  A week later the fields, though thick with weeds which the rain brought up, did not show a single barley-blade. Ino said to Athamas: ‘Since you have persuaded me that the omission of the fertility rites of which I spoke cannot have caused a failure of the crops, I must conclude that Zeus has sent the wrong sort of rain. If by the next new moon no barley is showing, some of us must die of starvation. It is too late to sow another crop, most of your flocks are dead, and your men have made greedy inroads on our stores of grain. As for the fish, they have all deserted the gulf since the arrival of your Minyans, as was only to be expected: they regard our College as desecrated.’

  At Ino’s instigation her nymphs, who had pretended the greatest reverence for their husbands, now prompted them to demand from Athamas the performance of a third and final sacrifice. For the Minyans believed that if Zeus were unwilling to send rain when offered a single ram, or even when offered fifty, this was a sign that he greedily demanded something better still – the sacrifice of the Ram Priest’s own children. The husbands agreed with the women that this sacrifice must now be made, and they came in a crowd to Athamas one day as he stood gloomily poking his staff into the unfruitful earth of a barley-field. The eldest among them said: ‘Athamas, we pity you, but we call on you to perform your duty without flinching. Sacrifice your son Phrixus and your daughter Helle to Father Zeus, and the divine rain that must then fall will awaken the barley-seed and save our lives.’

  At first Athamas refused to listen to them. When they threatened him with violence he agreed to sacrifice the children only if the Oracle at Delphi so ordered; Delphi then being for the Greeks the chief court of appeal in sacred matters. The Oracle was managed by a priestess of the White Goddess; originally she had received oracular inspiration from a sacred python, the ghost of the dead hero Dionysus, who was in the Goddess’s closest confidence and whose navel-string and jaw-bone were laid on a table in his shrine behind a hedge of spears. But this python, when the Greeks first came down from Thessaly, was said to have made some slighting remarks about their new God, Apollo the Archer. Apollo, formerly a Mouse demon from the island of Delos, with the power of raising and allaying pestilence, had been taken as a god by Henetian colonists to Tempe in Thessaly, where the Aeolians were saved from plague by him. The archers of Apollo, when they heard that Dionysus had denied their God’s divinity and had asserted ‘I will swallow down that little mouse’, marched furiously to Delphi from their valley home in Tempe, entered the enclosure of Dionysus and knocked three times on the door of the round white tomb. Out darted the python in a rage and the archers transfixed it with arrows. They then burned the navel-string and jaw-bone of Dionysus on a fire made of the sacred spear-shafts; and fled back to Tempe. To expiate his crime, Apollo consented, though unwillingly, to become bondman to the White Goddess and, entering the empty tomb at Delphi, to undertake the work formerly done by Dionysus; and he founded the Pythian Games in memory of the python. It was no longer, therefore, from the serpent’s intelligent writhings that the priestess read and disclosed the past or future, though she was still known as the Pythoness. Instead, she chewed leaves of laurel, the tree sacred to Apollo, which induced in her a prophetic intoxication. Shiploads of young laurel trees from Tempe were brought to Delphi and planted about the shrine so that presently their branches met and formed a dense shade. The place was still named Pytho, or the Navel Sanctuary, but Apollo’s priests explained that it had its name from the central position that it occupied in Greece; the memory of Dionysus lapsed, and was not revived for a long time.

  Athamas expected a favourable reply from the Pythoness, because, as he said, ‘Apollo will sympathize with me in my predicament: he will understand that the Goddess is the cause of my trouble – she refuses obstinately to let the seed grow. Despite his pretended loyalty to her, he will find some means of absolving me from my cruel obligations; he owes much to us Aeolians. Why should I sacrifice my children to Zeus merely because his Mother is behaving with her usual female perversity?’

  Ino sent to Delphi too, by the hand of a Boeotian shepherd who knew the shortest tracks across the rugged mountains and thorny valleys, and warned the Pythoness that Athamas had not only behaved very disrespectfully to the Goddess, to whom both Apollo and she owed allegiance, but had refused to placate Zeus in the customary way, and that his obstinacy threatened to bring boundless misery on his own tribe and on the Centaurs too. Therefore when Athamas arrived and tried to propitiate Apollo with the offering of a golden tripod, the Pythoness refused it; she ordered him to sacrifice his two children on Mount Pelion to Rain-Making Zeus, and without delay.

  By the same shepherd, her emissary, Ino was informed of Apollo’s answer in good time, four or five days before her husband’s return.

  Chapter Two

  The Loss
of the Fleece

  Ino sent for Helle, and warned her that Athamas intended to take her life. ‘Daughter,’ she asked, ‘how do you like this? Why should your father barbarously sacrifice you and your dear brother Phrixus, in the bloom of life, merely because Apollo so orders it? Apollo is an intruder on Mount Parnassus, a Delian waif who was picked up by your tribe in an unlucky hour long after the decease of your great ancestor Aeolus. Not one trustworthy oracle has come from the Navel Shrine since the python of Dionysus was impiously killed by him. Apollo is not in the Goddess’s confidence, as he pretends to be, and gives out guesses and equivocations instead of the truth.’

  Helle, trembling and weeping, answered: ‘Apollo fears Zeus, and so do my brother Phrixus and myself. Die we must, Holy One.’

  Ino answered: ‘If the sacrifice were necessary, why did not Zeus himself order it? Consider, Daughter, how your father came to make this cruel decision. First, he insulted the White Goddess, who is the Sovereign Deity alike of Phthiotis and Magnesia, by trying to deprive my Iolcan Fish nymphs of their sacred autumn tryst with the Centaur Horse men. She was naturally vexed and put it into the hearts of the Horse men to disturb the wedding that he and his Minyans forced upon us. In revenge, your father cast her roughly out of her shrine, which he rededicated to her greedy son Zeus. This was to meddle in divine matters, which no mortal has any right to do. The Goddess was then more vexed than ever and began poisoning his flocks, and when all love-ceremonies were omitted at the sowing of barley she refrained from fertilizing the seed, so that no amount of rain that Zeus may send will ever make it grow. Zeus himself has not commanded this cruel sacrifice of Phrixus and yourself; for it is not his wrath that starves the fields, but his Mother’s.’