Great Voyages: Jason and the Golden Fleece

okay thank you Steve does this sound good for everyone so where could we have the lights down also please thank you so we're going to be dealing with a maritime voyage and therefore I put the label or the title for the lecture with a watery sheen we've you've dealt with a few Greek heroes in the past and we will continue that this evening so I thought that I would say a few words by way of introduction about the hallmarks of a hero in ancient Greece so there are several standard features that you can usually find in all the heroic sagas travels far and wide which is certainly the case with Jason the hero as sexual athlete so they may be charming but they're not monogamous and they leave behind a string of women in all of these exotic ports of call that they visit in the course of their voyages killing monsters were some uninhabitable or unhospitable creature in the course of those travels and searching for some sort of treasure often gold in the course of those travels which often take them to the Gateway to the underworld or actually looking at the face of death fighting with the skeleton or an army of skeletons and all of these features will be characteristic of the voyages of Jason which I'll tell you about tonight in terms of our background were our sources for the myth of Jason we have to turn to several different literary accounts and I'll be focusing on two of them tonight Euripides Medea which was written in the late 5th century BC in Athens and Apollonius of Rhodes argonautica which was written in the late 3rd century BC Apollonius was the head librarian at the Library of Alexandria and the argonautica was his major work so first we start with the Golden Fleece which is the centerpiece of the story end of the journey and with this we go to central Greece to the kingdom of B OSHA and to yet another story of a wicked stepmother of which there are many in classical mythology so King Optimus was initially married to a woman named Nathalie who was a cloud NIM Nepos is Greek for cloud she had two children Crixus and LA and at a later point the king married another woman I know the proverbial wicked stepmother and she schemed to half Phrixus and Helle killed and so nefeli who was a cloud nymph and could do magic tricks at the drop of a hat decided to send a golden Ram capable of flying to rescue her children because otherwise I know was going to kill them so the golden Ram was conjured up moved toward the kingdom of B OSHA and picked up Phrixus and Helle a to take them far away from the wicked stepmother specifically across the Aegean Sea and to what is now Northwestern Turkey to the region that we would call the elefante and you see the Hellespont enlarged here on upper right this is the narrow strait about a kilometer and a half wide that separates the Gallipoli Peninsula the site of the 1915 war from Troy where I've had the good fortune of digging for 25 years as they moved through the Hellespont has I looked down and fell off the RAM which was admittedly not the most secure vehicle and you see that happening here so Phrixus is still fine hele is moving into the water and she drowned and as a consequence this strait of water was called the Hellespont literally the sea of hele she gave her name to it it's also of course called the Dardanelles and that's what you hear more frequently in the descriptions of the Gallipoli campaign but meanwhile the RAM is still fine and Crixus and the RAM go to the eastern side of the Black Sea to the kingdom of Colchis which is modern-day Georgia formerly Soviet Georgia on the eastern side of the Black Sea ruled by a king named iet s and once Phrixus and the RAM arrived there safely the RAM was sacrificed skinned the Golden Fleece because this was a golden Ram was then hung on a tree and guarded by a dragon that never slept and everyone for the moment lived happily except for hella who of course was dead although she had had a naming opportunity the helis okay now we go back to Greece to the kingdom of Yoko's in what is Thessaly and this would be just outside the modern city of volos you see it in upper left and to the kingdom of Ison whose half-brother Pelias to post him this is of course also a common feature in Greek political history in antiquity so Ison was king of the OL coast on Thessaly his half-brother Pelias to pose as him attempts to murder all of those relatives that he could find of Ison but Jason his son was moved out of the kingdom before Pelias could get to him he was then taken away sort of homeschooled I'll say more about that in a minute and stayed away from the kingdom until he became a young adult at which point he moved back to Yoko's and as he was crossing a stream on the way to Yoko's he had lost a sandal now this is critical because in the meantime Pelias had been told beware of the stranger who wears only one sandal I mean it was the Bronze Age there were probably a lot of people with no sandals or just one but nevertheless Jason had lost one as he was moving across the stream and he lost one because there was an woman who asked for his assistance in crossing that stream this was in fact the goddess Hera in disguise and Jason helped her across the stream thereby earning or protection for the remainder of his journey so for the remainder of his life and until some murders later on but for a very long period of time she was one of his divine protect races so then he moves back into a Yoko's as a young adult confronts Pelias who sees that he only has one sandal and realizes that there's problem there are problems ahead Jason announces his lineage and insists on being crowned king of Yoko's Helia says okay but first I want you to go on a quest to get the golden fleece from Colchis from the eastern side of the Black Sea this is not something this is a standard trope in literature from start to finish I mean you can take it all the way up to the broomstick of the Wicked Witch of the West that Dorothy has to get in The Wizard of Oz these quests to get something that's seemingly unattainable so Jason agrees and begins to put together a crew that will go across the Aegean and the Black Sea to the kingdom of Colchis now before he goes or before I take you there I had mentioned that he was home-schooled and the person who homeschooled him was the Centaur Chiron half-man half-horse Chiron lived on and around Mount Pelion which is not far from Yoko's and he was a tutor to many of our most famous heroes some of whom I've written down here Asclepius the god of medicine Ajax and Gnaeus and Achilles the the great fighters in the Trojan War Theseus the great king of Athens Perseus who killed Medusa and sometimes Heracles so he was the mr. chips of his time this was the this was the highest level of education you could get so he was incredibly well prepared for the travels that lay ahead of him and I should say Yoko's was in fact a point of prominence in the late bronze age and let me say a word about chronology I'm speaking primarily about the 13th century I suppose tonight the bronze age is the period that coincides roughly with the time between 3,000 and 1000 BC and we're dealing with the end of that period the 13th century BC Jason and his crew on the Argo will be one generation earlier than the heroes who fought in the Trojan War so if you were to chart it on a temporal map it would be the late 13th century BC and in the late 13th century BC there was in fact a palace just outside Yoko's you see it here that goes by the name of Domini here there have been discoveries of Linear B which was the Mycenaean script of the Late Bronze Age as well as at fellows tomb the circular tomb that was probably intended for one of the rulers of this area it clearly was a center of political power and so it's not surprising that they would choose this as the location for Jason rather than some area that was not one of the critical points of Mycenaean power in the Late Bronze Age so in assembling the ship he builds what would later be called the Argo this is simply a greek derived from the Greek word for swift Argos so the the Swift boat which it would need to be because it's covering such a large territory the Argo which you see under construction here in this Roman relief would be built by a man aptly named Argos and would be done under the protection of Athena Athena is a common divine protector for the great heroes so you think of Odysseus about whom you will have heard last month where Heracles many of them AB Athena as their protectress and Jason had to divine protect versus Athena just because she's always standing by to help a Greek hero and hero because Jason had carried her over the stream just outside Yoko's and so these the stern of the ship of the Argo would have the image of Hira you see she's still watching us you can see her eyes moving now the people who were on that ship were phenomenal as a cast of characters in that many of them were the sons of gods so Heracles and Pollux the sons of Zeus castor and Pollux you know of in that they are also known as the die Oscar II so of course they have a major temple in the Roman Forum Orpheus was the son of Apollo these were all the greatest men of their time banding together to go with Jason on his voyage to the eastern part of the Black Sea and this voyage would take them from Yoko's up through the North Aegean through the Hellespont into the Sea of Marmara up through the Bosphorus and then along the southern side of the Black Sea which coincides with the northern coast of Asia Minor up to Colchis which again would coincide with modern-day Georgia now no boats could fly this route during the Late Bronze Age it wouldn't have been possible before the eighth century BC and I'll say more about that later but the story is set in the Late Bronze Age the boat that they would have had to have built would have been a 50-word boat so 25 oars on each side and over 80 feet long this was actually built a few years ago were rebuilt using Bronze Age techniques and I'll say more about that in a minute the journey in question occupied about 1500 miles from Yoko's to Colchis and then of course a long journey of return and I'll take you to some of the ports of call as Jason makes his way to Colchis because of course it's an odyssey that means you never go in a straight line you have a number of pit stops with adventures at each of those stops so the first of the most interesting ports of call was the Greek island of Lemnos in the northern Aegean this was one of the more interesting voyages in that women of Lemnos were among our most interesting characters in the saga according to a variety of stories the women of Lemnos had neglected the worship of Aphrodite goddess of love and so she had made them smell bad she had given them a foul odor which could not be showered off it was simply there and the husbands of the women of Lemnos consequently looked toward other pastures for a night on the town going in particular to Thrace and taking the women of Thrace as they are concubines as their sexual partners as a result the women of Lemnos angered not just by the foul odor but by their philandering husbands killed all of their philandering husbands competi this becomes an island of women and here come the Argonauts this gives us our opportunity for some sexual athletics which as I mentioned is a standard feature of a heroic saga Heracles according to his story allegedly slept with fifty women in one night this is yes it's a story it didn't actually happen but it's a way of emphasizing the sexual athletic qualities of the hero and we see that in spades with the Argonauts who spend some time on Lemnos obviously not bothered by the odor the ancients did not like to depict this but it was a love it was a favorite theme in the Renaissance and the Baroque period since its Baroque they put in angels but these are there were no angels these were the the Argonauts who were obviously tired from their labors and the women of Lemnos and eventually the Argonauts realized that their tarrying too long and they have to leave as they do and they leave without having been killed by the women of Lemnos now Lemnos was quite a major center of political and economic power in the third and second millennium BC so during the early Bronze Age and the middle Bronze Age not so much the Late Bronze Age some of you have been to Lemnos you've been to the side of Holyoke knee which is one of our great sites of the mid third millennium BC 2500 2400 BC in this site or at this site has been found to treasure more or less analogous to the so called treasure of Priam that was found just across the way at Troy so it was a city of great prominence of great prosperity at least through about 1600 when the site goes out of use where it's destroyed burns down so here too we have a site an actual site that's incorporated into the saga and it would have had some historical validity okay then they will move through as you see the Dardanelles or the elefante and make their way into the Sea of Marmara which is the body of water through which one has to go on the way to the Black Sea so they've gone through the north aegean through the Dardanelles here into the Sea of Marmara they will still have to go through the Bosphorus and then into the Black Sea up here this will give them an opportunity to kill some monsters which is a standard feature again of the hero so they encounter a race of giants with six arms whom they dispatch and they encounter an inhospitable king who will not let anyone partake of his water the water in his kingdom unless they beat him in a boxing match this gives the heroes an opportunity to display their athletic skills so in track and field not just in the bedroom they can perform well in the gymnasium as well as with the women of Lemnos and so you see Pollux here punching a punching bag as he gets ready for his boxing match with the king whom he defeats and they then get the water and continue on their voyage to the northern side of the Black Sea where they encounter the harpies a group of bird women so with the heads of women the bodies of birds and these harpies I put in as much Ray Harryhausen as I could this was the the animator for the sword and sandal films of the 50s and 60s this kingdom to which there were this region to which the Argonauts came was the the region of a seer a prophet named Phineas whom you see here in the vase painting Phineas had reportedly foretold the future for mankind and as a result Zeus blinded him and the other punishment was that when food was brought to him the harpies would swoop in and take the food away before he could eat it so you see he shown here is blind here are the harpies taking away the food and the man obviously was miserable and starving and so the Argonauts come along and essentially drive away the harpies they don't kill them they just drive them away and Phineas in return tells them how to make their way through the Bosphorus which is an incredibly treacherous area through which to travel and that would be their next port of call so to go through the Bosphorus and as many of you know the Bosphorus is the narrow strait that divides Istanbul this is an aerial view of the Bosphorus so here's the Sea of Marmara here is the Black Sea and here is Istanbul on either side so Byzantium is the original name it subsequently has changed to Constantinople and then to Istanbul three names for one city and this was an area of crashing rocks so as one would try to make one's way through the Straits especially toward the end the rocks would come together and would destroy the ships what Phineas had told Jason was to release a dove the Dove would then go through the Bosphorus the ship the rocks would come together and then would draw a part and as they drew a part the Argo could go through the Bosphorus without losing any of the crew which in fact is what happened and the rock stopped moving at that point although it was and is still a dangerous area through which to travel or can be for those who were piloting boats in some of the versions Athena actually helped keep the rocks at bay in the 1963 jason and the argonauts film Poseidon himself comes out of the sea to keep the rocks at bay that's an addition by Hollywood not attested in the ancient accounts but it was nevertheless treacherous and he makes his way through and then he has a fairly uneventful sail along the southern coast of the Black Sea to Colchis to modern Georgia now we've already visited Colchis because that's where the Golden Fleece of the RAM has ended up as a consequence of crixus sacrifice this was a very exotic place this was the end of the world as far as the Greeks were concerned it was ruled by I ETS who may or may not have looked like Frank Langella I pulled as much from Hollywood as I could and if you were to have gone to that area in antiquity you would have noticed how idiosyncratic how in a sense isolation isolationist it was the language that was spoken there belongs to the cart valley and language group which is very much unto itself it's not an indo-european language it's its own thing with in the Caucasus related to no other languages so it was a region apart and as I say viewed by the Greeks as the end of the world ie ETS was the son of Helios Helios the Sun God and that's going to come into play at a later point because it meant that the descendants of ie ETS were the descendants of the Sun God but staying with this exotic the exotic persona of the region I just wanted to reinforce its exoticness by saying this was the area where the Greeks thought prometheus had been chained to Iraq and the eagle of Zeus was charged with eating his liver every day and then at night it would grow back the eagle would return and continue eating the the punishment of Prometheus for having brought fire to humankind so the whole place is viewed as a kind of mysterious region and this was true as well for the daughter of King I et's named Medea now Medea were a woman like Medea shows up in western literature continually and has shown up continually throughout the last two and a half millennia she is the the archetypical matahari character very exotic very seductive very mysterious capable of great passion and of steering the euro away from his true path so you see her in two manifestations maria callas here just because i like it and this is from the Pasolini film and from the 1963 film Medea would end up being Jason's agent of salvation in addition to the two goddesses in that Hira jason's protector asked Aphrodite to have her son eros shoot Medea with an arrow so the Medea would fall in love with Jason and would help him through the treacherous trials that lay in store for him as he attempted to get the Golden Fleece let me just say another word about madea's family ants one was pacified one was Circe pacify you may remember is the woman who mated with a bull on a beach in Crete and gave birth to the minute our part bull part human and so you see pacify hear nursing the minute hour you see the Bulls head and the human body so an unusual woman admittedly and her aunt was Circe with whom Odysseus came into contact he will have heard all about Circe last month she was a witch who turned Odysseus's crew into pigs as you see in this red figure vase painting so the whole family was idiosyncratic and mysterious at the main point that I want to make and the entire area in antiquity as well as now is associated Gold with wealth with prosperity and if you were to excavate in Georgia especially if you were to excavate Advani chances are good that you would find quite a bit of gold if you were excavating an Acropolis group of graves there is of course gold in the Caucasus it was mined and so it's not surprising to find a great deal of gold jewelry in this area especially in the tombs what I'm showing you here is from Vani different pieces of jewelry from graves a pani most of these date between the 4th and the 2nd centuries BC so to the so-called Hellenistic period but you can find it for the centuries preceding the Hellenistic period and of course the centuries following it and this gold of course is associated with the fleece of the RAM which is where the story started and as you remember that golden fleece has been hung in a tree where it is guarded by a drag guarded by a dragon it's a snake here in the vase painting but it was a dragon and most of the literary accounts and the dragon never slept and so Jason had to get the golden fleece away from the dragon without obviously being killed by the dragon and this is where Medea comes in to help Jason now before he goes to get the fleece he he announces to ie T's that he is there for the fleece and I ETS will say to Jason ok but there are a series of tests that you have to perform in order to gain access to the fleece in order to get the fleece and leave safely this too is a standard feature of these heroic sagas that the hero has to prove his worth he has done it on the voyage but now he actually has to do with in the kingdom of Colchis before we go into Jason's feats that ieds asked him to perform I just wanted to say one more word about the golden fleece why do we have something like a golden fleece in the story of Jason and particularly in Georgia even in antiquity the geographer strabo speculated that it was real to searching for or harvesting for gold from the rivers of the Caucasus which of course contained gold and there are a number of rivers in Western Asia Minor that also contained gold so if you were panning or searching for gold from the rivers you would take a sheepskin you would move it back and forth in the waters the gold would adhere to the fibers of the sheepskin and over time the sheepskin would acquire a golden Sheen because you had been using it to pull gold from the river so this practice of gold prospecting using a sheepskin may have been the origin of the story of the golden fleece and that's what you see people in Georgia this is actually formerly Soviet Georgia doing that with the sheepskin in the river looking for gold so it's still done in the same way in which it was done in antiquity but the feasts that Jason has to perform before he gets to that golden fleece one involved plowing a field with fire-breathing oxen so he was able to do this go through the field with the fire-breathing oxen in front of him because Medea had given him an ointment that protected him from the fire he was also charged with taking dragon's teeth here we've got an actual dragon planting them in the ground and then from the dragon's teeth came skeletons who would fight Jason and he had to defeat all of the skeletons so this too was I mentioned as a standard component of these heroic sagas the hero coming face to face with death or with a symbol of death and so you can do it too I just wanted you to feel heroic so you're now coming face to face with death this is Ray Harry Alvin from the 1963 jason and the argonauts okay we can put him to the side so he was warned by Madea that these skeletons would be difficult to conquer and so what he should do is to throw a stone in the middle of the skeleton is they wouldn't know where the stone had come from they would fight each other and kill each other which is exactly what happened he then had to subdue the dragon overcome the dragon that guarded the Golden Fleece now this is a variant of the story as you see Jason is not so doing the dragon the dragon is subduing Jason Jason has been swallowed by the dragon the dragon having considered it regurgitates Jason and you see him on the way out of the Dragons now as Athena comes by and says how's it going so this is not a standard feature of the saga in the saga the versions of the saga that we have Jason is able to defeat the dragon because Medea has given him a sleeping potion a sort of proto ambien and the dragon takes it and falls asleep so he's able to get the Golden Fleece once he goes back to the kingdom of I ETS and says I have the Golden Fleece iet s of course is not about to let him leave with the Golden Fleece and they chase Jason and the Argonauts with Medea in tow Jason has promised Medea that he will remain faithful to her forever you know which a hero you know never trust a hero who says that to you because there are sexual athletes it's not in their their being as you as I said at the beginning they're raised to be charming not monogamous but Medea is in love with the man so she agrees to help him get away she kills her brother chops the brother up into little pieces and then drops them periodically as they go away so that the Colchians have to stop periodically to gather up the pieces because they want to reconstitute the body at some point that slows them down and Jason Medea and the Argonauts are able to get away now where they go after this depends on what version of the story you read this is the version that Pindar wrote about in the fifth century and that Timaeus of Tower Mina which is a city to which you've many of you have traveled in northeastern Sicily this is about 300 BC they thought that he went north to I was going to say to Ukraine or Russia but let's just say north through Europe into the Baltic Sea to the North Sea around through the Pillars of Hercules so this of Gibraltar and then slowly back along the west coast of Italy and back to Yoko's Apollonius of Rhodes has him go back across the Black Sea into the Danube River from the Danube into the Adriatic Sea through part of Europe and then again back along the western coast of Sicily briefly to Cyrene II and then again to Yoko's so that is confused but ultimately he makes it back to yo coast and he says to Pelias I've got the Golden Fleece so you see Pelias seated here Jason is here he's got the Golden Fleece in his hand victory crowns him because he's been triumphant Medea is by his side because that's where she will stay until an unfortunate turn of events a little later on in the story and Pelias refuses to turn over the rulership of a yo coast to Jason at this point Medea enters the picture again taking a ram so Rams appear periodically throughout this this one isn't golden but taking a ram an ancient ram cutting it up putting it in a pot with some magic herbs boiling it and then a young Ram comes out of the pot and she does this for the daughters of Pelias and says you know your father's sort of long in the tooth and maybe you want a younger father you saw what I just did with this Ram it's an easy solution take your father kill him chop him up into pieces put him in the pot I'll put in some magic herbs and a young Pelias will come out of the pot and they say okay let's do that so they kill their father chop him up into pieces put him in the pot and Medea and Jason say goodbye he's gone Pelias is gone but because Jason and Medea have killed the king of Yoko's they are banished from the area and they go to Corinth so we're still in Greece and in Corinth Jason decides that a marriage with Creusa the daughter of King Creon of Corinth would be a good political move because then once Creon died he Jason would become king of Corinth and Medea said excuse me didn't you promise the dela Titu me forever and he said I have to think about my career and so Medea is a woman wronged you know it's sort of like fatal attraction so what she does is to give a wedding present to Cruces second century Roman sarcophagus and the cloak that she gives her as a wedding present is coated with a poison that causes her to catch fire and so she's gone as in most stories is her father Creon and then that's not enough of a revenge on Jason she decides to kill the children that she has had with Jason this is a famous wall painting from a house in Pompeii the house of the Diaspora you see Medea here at the moment just before she kills the children who were playing here on what looks to be an altar which is appropriate because they're about to be sacrificed as Jason comes into the room you see she's drawing a sword from the scabbard and she will kill them after this she calls upon her grandfather who was the Sun God who sends a solar chariot drawn by dragons so lots of dragons lots of rams all through this story and sails away from from corinth leaving jason to mourn the death of his sons and you see in this face painting the sons are here dead on the altar the blood streaming down the sides so she's killed Jason's fiancee and she's killed the sons that she had with Jason and Jason will die a broken man in many of the versions that we have he goes to sleep under the Argo which is by now an old rotting ship and the Argo falls apart and collapses on his head and he dies and ignominious end normally the heroes don't end quite that way but that nevertheless is the end of the story there are various versions of what happens to Madea in some versions she goes to Athens in other versions she goes all the way back to Central Asia to the region of modern-day Iran and serves as the founder of the Medes the people who preceded the Persians so Medea founds the Medes and then come the Persians but there are various stories about what happened to her okay where's this all coming from the story of Jason and the Golden Fleece how is it that this has been constructed could this have happened in the Late Bronze Age no there's no evidence that any ships from the Aegean made it through the Dardanelles the Sea of Marmara and the Bosphorus into the Black Sea prior to the 8th century BC so it looks as if the Black Sea was closed to Aegean traffic during the Bronze Age but what we do have in the 8th century BC is a major Age of Exploration we have colonists and traders literally going throughout the Mediterranean and the Black Sea so everywhere you see a red mark is an area where the Greeks have settled founding new colonies or establishing trading centres and as you see that encompasses the entire Black Sea it encompasses all of the Aegean the Mediterranean as far west as Spain so within the context of this Age of Exploration a broader expansive view of their world that we start getting the elaboration of these travel myths and travel literature such as you find with the Odyssey or the story of Jason and the Argonauts you look at where Jason went you look at where Odysseus went that's exactly where the traders and the colonists of the 8th century BC are going so the literature and the myths are responding to this new age of exploration we can see the same phenomenon in more recent times if you think of the first journey that you heard about in this lecture series the journey of Magellan or for that matter the journeys of Vasco da Gama or Balboa or Christopher Columbus or any of them in the 16th century and you look at the kind of literature that written after that brought a broadening of spatial horizons you can pinpoint something like shakespeare's the tempest or Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine or the great travel literature the great travel novels of the 18th century Candide or Gulliver's Travels or Robinson Caruso they're all responding to this age of exploration in the 16th and 17th century and jason and the argonauts and the odyssey the the voyages of Heracles these are all responding to that Age of Exploration that occurred much much earlier in the 8th century BC now I mentioned that the Black Sea appears to have been closed to maritime traffic from the Aegean in the Bronze Age how do I know that we have worked at Roy now for 25 years you're seeing the Aegean here the Dardanelles or Alice font Sea of Marmara Black Sea Colchis or Georgia would be over here and my colleague manfred had the theory that Troy became wealthy because so many ships were going to the Black Sea from the Aegean in the Bronze Age and they were docking at Troy because it's so hard to get through the Hellespont and then they would make their way through after having paid in essence taxes maybe taxes in kind but taxes to the Trojans we couldn't find any evidence at Troy that there was a Gian Black Sea traffic in the Bronze Age and therefore my colleague manfred said well i'm going to go to georgia just like Jason and dig there and see if I can find any evidence for Mycenaean trade during the Late Bronze Age there wasn't any none of the archaeologists who have dug around the perimeter of the Black Sea can find anything that dates before the 8th century BC in terms of goods from the Aegean so it looks as if this was a route that was closed probably because the boats simply weren't good enough to make their way through these very strong currents and extraordinarily strong winds until the 8th century BC so Troy plays a role in this as well what about Medea well MIDI is a character that shows up in a lot of literature as I mentioned you look at literature over the course of nearly three millennia and there's a madea liked figure in the Roman period as the Romans were excoriating Cleopatra for deterring Marc Anthony and Caesar from their appointed tasks they often said Cleopatra is a new Medea she's doing to Caesar and Mark Antony exactly what Medea did to Jason and this would be a light motif in Western literature throughout the rest of this time now what about the Argo and the Black Sea I should have said with the Black Sea the Black Sea is a relatively recent term it first is attested around 1400 AD so at the beginning of the Ottoman Empire and it wouldn't become common until 1700 BC so with the title that's really been in operation only for a few centuries earlier than that the Black Sea was called the hospital a hospitable sea Pontus Nuuk sinus and one of the reasons it became hospitable is because the Greek colonists moved into that area and in more recent times cruise navigators explorers have had it in their minds to test whether or not the black sea remains hospitable in boats that they would build that would mimic the construction technique and the size of the Argo and so Tim Severn who was an explorer par excellence built a replica of what he thought the Argo looked like in 1984 and with a motley crew actually sailed from Volos in Thessaly to Georgia on the eastern side of the Black Sea successfully and nearly 25 years later the 27 representatives of the European Union came together in a ship that mimicked the construction technique and size of the Argo and they too sailed on an elaborate journey although in this case from Volos to Venice rather than to Colchis but the boat the Argo had developed into a symbol fraternal relationships and so this was one way of emphasizing the fraternity of the states of the European Union simply plucking an element from the story of jason and the argonauts any of these cities that had some claim to the story of jason and the argonauts used it in their public relations campaign their touristic marketing and so it's no surprise that Volos near the harbour has a replica in miniature of the Argo with an inscription of the naming the participants in the voyage of Jason the identities of the Argonauts if you were to go to Georgia you would find Medea standing atop one of the principal buildings in Batumi it's a more anorexic looking Medea than you've been accustomed to seeing but as you see she's still holding the Golden Fleece so they're adhering to these components of the ancient story as a way of increasing their own status and their touristic marketability and we even find this in some far-flung areas as I mentioned according to Apollonius Jason had sailed west through the Danube through what would now be Slovenia into the Adriatic Sea and so if you were to go to Ljubljana the capital of Slovenia you would see a copy in bronze of the dragon that Jason allegedly slayed when he was moving through Slovenia so the dragons are not restricted to Colchis there are dragons sprinkled throughout the story one of which lived in Slovenia so Slovenia as well is trumpeting their connection to one of the greatest heroes of classical mythology and this notion of a woman who would kill her sons or wound her children as a way of getting back at her husband has developed into a complex that psychologists would call the Medina complex and there are in fact a number of examples of this of women who will hurt their children as a way of getting revenge on their husbands and Medea has been used as the name of this complex because she's the most powerful Eve occasion of that sentiment the story is one that can be adapted to almost any time or place so the most recent version of that adaptation of which I know is the recent Broadway musical marie-christine you see Audra McDonald here one of the great Broadway stars what the writers of the musical did was to update the Medea story to New Orleans in the 1890s making Medea a mixed-race woman and Jason a sea captain who comes to New Orleans in the 1890s falls in love with Medea and says want to go for a ride takes her on the boat they sail up the eastern part of the United States happy as clams then he goes to Chicago with her decides he wants to run for political office and that a marriage with the daughter of one of the political bosses of Chicago would be a more appropriate match for him if he wants to rise to the top quickly and so he spurns Madea just as the original Jason does and she murders their children you can adapt this story to almost any time or place and let's think again about the core elements you've got a hero who travels far and wide he's a sexual athlete the women with whom he's involved are often fighting each other everyone's wearing exotic costumes and they're looking for gold we have this all over the place but concentrated in the stories of James Bond where you have basically a man who is the spitting image of Odysseus and Jason he's travelling far and wide he's an Istanbul up here as you see that's the Blue Mosque he is a sexual athlete I don't have to expand on that the women are dressed exotically just like Medea they're fighting each other just as Medea and Creusa did and they're going after gold as you see in the original film so a lot of these elements that we associate with Greek heroic sagas are still very much in front of us although we don't recognize it I mean you could even say this about the die-hard films what happens in the first diehard you have a man okay he's not a sexual athlete but you have a man who goes to an area in this case a skyscraper he encounters monsters whom he slays and as he's slaying the monsters he does it with one goal to get home to his wife he's travelling far and wide that's of course from the bottom of the skyscraper to the top but nevertheless it's quite a distance it's in essence the elements of the Odyssey simply concentrated in one place and adapted for a modern audience so these stories that we get in ancient Greek mythology are really timeless and that's the way I want to end this lecture although on the surface of it it seems as if this is just a simple story of a man and his crew who travel from Greece to Georgia in search of some gold it's really part of a kind of timeless tradition I suppose in part because it's such a powerful Eve occasion of the human condition exploring the relationships between men and women and especially the passions that are associated with love and hate and exploring the narrow line that lies between love and hate exploring the uneasy interface of East and West and the combats that often develop as a consequence of that uneasy interaction of east and west and perhaps most of all exploring the thirst for adventure with the promise of treasure or gold that still lies within all of us thank you for listening to me tonight thank you for your support of the museum Oh

Channel: Penn Museum

Views: 70,577

Rating: 4.7722626 out of 5

Keywords: The Golden Fleece (Short Story), University Of Pennsylvania Museum Of Archaeology And Anthropology (Museum), Penn Museum, Philadelphia Museums, Philadelphia Museum, Brian Rose, Great Voyages, Golden Fleece, Jason, Argonauts, Black Sea, Colchis, Greek, exploration, ancient, Bronze Age, Iron Age

Id: ruQoOiQygGY

Length: 48min 16sec (2896 seconds)

Published: Tue May 13 2014

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Brian Rose, James B. Pritchard Professor of Classical Archaeology, University of Pennsylvania. Searching for the Golden Fleece with Jason and the Argonauts One of the most captivating voyages in Classical literature involved the travels of the Greek hero Jason to the Black Sea, where he searched for the golden fleece of a winged ram that was the prized possession of the kingdom of Colchis (modern Georgia). The narrative components of the voyage provide us with an unusually rich depiction of early Greek attitudes toward women, especially from exotic foreign lands, as well as geographic exploration and ancient sources of gold. Dr. Rose discusses Jason's journeys, and also examines how Greek seafaring in the late Bronze and early Iron Ages relates to Jason's maritime adventures.