What did the Argonauts seek in Colchis

Abstract

As an archaeologist seeking to interpret a myth, I too, like the Argonauts, am sailing in difficult and possibly dangerous waters, but like them I accept the challenge, I have my motives. For, like G. S. Kirk, I believe that myths 'retain elements from a period many generations earlier than their first recording' and that they offer 'a cause or explanation of something in the real world'.1 Thus I see the tale of the Golden Fleece and the Voyage of the Argonauts as aetiological myths, and here I take issue with Kirk who maintains that they 'do not explain or offer a cause for anything, unless perhaps for the feeling enchantress like Medea'.2 It is my contention that archaeological evidence shows that these Greek myths are not, after all, 'silent about the inventions of many human functions and social institutions'3 but rather, as Mircea Eliade has suggested 'reproduce the creative era, the time before history when things were developed and set in order'.4 Familiar as the myth of the Voyage of the Argonauts is, I should like to recall certain points, pertinent to the subject of this paper. First and foremost is the land of Colchis which, according to descriptions in the ancient sources, lies at the easternmost edge of the Euxine, or the Black Sea as it is otherwise known, south of Caucasus. It corresponds to the former Soviet Republic of Georgia, a fertile country with clement climate and crops in abundance: today's visitor sees all around him vegetable gardens, citrus trees, vines, apple and pear orchards, figs and persimmons, even tea plantations. This land, the Far East of the ancient Greeks, was known to the people of the Aegean from earliest times. It was to a crag on Mt. Caucasus that Zeus chained the benefactor of mankind, Prometheus, for no other reason than that he had stolen fire from Olympus and brought it back to earth, an act described by the English Classical scholar George Thomson as 'one of the most revolutionary steps in the progress of material technique'.5 It was for this revolutionary feat that Prometheus was condemned by almighty Zeus to perpetual torture: an eagle consumed his liver by day and this was restored each night. It was from the blood of Prometheus that the two-pistilled Caucasian crocus sprang, the juice of which was a salve against burns.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 29 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.