There have been more devastating demolition jobs wreaked upon a man’s character by playwrights, but surely none is older than that done by the Athenian Euripides to Jason, leader of the Argonauts.
“You are diseased!” rails Medea, after being discarded for a ‘safer’ Corinthian princess. “A coward!”
Such is its power that, despite Medea hoodwinking everybody whilst she plots her revenge, and even committing the unthinkable act of murdering her two sons by Jason, the play continues to divide sympathies. Recent feminist retellings of Greek myths have helped raise the profile of Classical Studies and has raised a mirror to the plight of women in patriarchal ancient societies. Euripides’ Medea might have been based upon some earlier strand of myth but it was designed to win a major dramatic competition, the City Dionysia in Athens. It failed to do that (was Jason’s character too close to the bone: cold-hearted, mid-fifth century BC Athenian politics made incarnate?) but was way ahead of its time in giving a voice to women in a male-dominated world. Perspective, however, is all. The Bronze Age was a fascinating, often brutal and terrifying world, particularly for travellers. Jason – whoever he might have been – belonged to this world, which was already regarded as ancient by a citizen of Classical Athens.
In short, Jason needed rehabilitation. When starting Argo in 2018, I made the early decision to dispense with gods and monsters because I wanted to get beneath the surface of the myth to a plausible reality. In not trying to ‘Harryhausen’ the story, this raised a lot of intriguing questions. How might the world beyond their own shores look to thirteenth-century BC Achaeans, venturing further than anybody before them? Why would anybody want to risk their lives to sail to the ends of the earth to retrieve an object for which there was no proof even of its existence? How could an inexperienced twenty-year-old expect to lead a band of seasoned warriors and heroes? Was it even possible to row 1500 miles through the Hellespont and across the entire length of the Black Sea without Poseidon holding apart the Clashing Rocks?
The explorer Tim Severin provided a conclusive answer to the last. In 1984, he followed in Jason’s wake in a reconstructed Bronze Age galley and completed the journey in a few months and with only 20 men, only some of whom were accomplished oarsmen. With a captain’s keen eye, he began to observe certain things that offered tantalising explanations for events that were, perhaps, later mythologised in the Jason narrative: a colony of large, aggressive seabirds occupying the beetling cliffs at the entrance to the Black Sea, exactly where blind old Phineus was said to have been tormented by Harpies. A sword dance, still performed on the Kapidag peninsula, where the Argonauts fought and defeated the Doliones, their guest friends of the previous evening, in the confusion of a dark, stormy night. There were many other echoes of myth. One of the highlights of the writing journey was to correspond with several of Severin’s latter-day Argonauts and for the books’ realism to earn their approval (‘although we kept the bilges much cleaner’, said one).
Back in 1994, when I was a callow seventeen-year-old, I was very fortunate to row on the reconstructed Athenian warship, the trireme Olympias, in sea trials around the island of Poros. Blistered and peppered with mosquito bites, I developed a real fascination with the realities of ancient sea-faring. Argo, Jason, and Hades are in many ways the fruit of these interests, nurtured by some of the best teachers and university lecturers in the business.
I absolutely loved writing this trilogy, and I feel a little bereft now that the final book, Hades has been published. I’ve been very fortunate to visit some of the venues encountered in this series and those I haven’t I’ll miss exploring in my head. I’m delighted and grateful readers can explore them, too.
