In the beginning, the hero’s intelligence is intermittent and limited to his role as a slayer of monsters. But when he manages to break the frame of this role, without abandoning it, when he learns to be a traitor, a liar, a seducer, a traveler, a castaway, a narrator, then the hero becomes Odysseus, and then, to his first vocation of slaying everything, he can add a new one: understanding everything.
The Argonauts had just landed at Thynias, an uninhabited island off the Pontus. They were exhausted, having rowed nonstop for a day and two nights, sweating like oxen in the yoke. Now it was almost dawn. A figure appeared, a huge figure. Ringlets of blond hair dangled on his cheeks. Gripped in his left hand, a silver bow gleamed in the first light. Suddenly the sea grew wild, the earth shook, and angry waves crashed on the beach. That was the only sound. The Argonauts fell to the ground in helpless bewilderment, none of them daring to look the figure in the eyes as, ignoring them, he passed. Only when the god’s feet had left the island and begun to tread the air, suspended above the water, did they realize it was Apollo on his way to the Hyperboreans. The Argonauts kept their heads bowed. Finally Orpheus said: “It was Apollo of the Dawn, let us raise an altar to him on the beach.”
The Argonauts lay in ambush, invisible among the reeds. Jason was grim. He was strong, but strength lives in the fear of coming up against another and just slightly greater strength, which will destroy it. And perhaps he had finally found such an adversary, right here in Colchis: a sleepless monster keeping guard over the Golden Fleece where it hung from the branches of an oak tree. Jason knew that the moment had come when he must unleash the goddess in himself or die.
On high, in a bedroom in Olympus, Athena and Hera got together. They thought: where there’s a monster, there’s a woman, and where there’s a woman, there’s Aphrodite. They would go and see her, although it had been a long time. Aphrodite had just remade Hephaestus’s bed. He’d gone off to work far away, on a wandering island. In the half dark of the room, she was smoothing out her long hair with a golden comb. She shifted the cloak covering her shoulders so as to plait it in tresses. Then she started. Aphrodite didn’t have any woman friends; she was aware of spending most of her time with men. And she wasn’t used to getting visits from two powerful goddesses, who quite probably envied her, and certainly considered her incapable of understanding anything really important. She immediately guessed what they were after: they wanted her to send her son Eros off into the world yet again. For a moment she let her guard slip and started telling them the truth: that her son respected her even less than he did other women, because they were two of a kind, she and her son. In fact he laughed in her face; he wasn’t ashamed of anything with her. But as soon as she started talking about her own troubles, Athena and Hera exchanged an irritating look of complicity.
Enough of that then, Aphrodite thought, since nobody’s interested. Still, she wanted to show how efficient she could be this time. She caught up with Eros in Zeus’s orchard. The “ineffable rascal,” áphaton kakón, was playing dice with Ganymede, cheating and winning. Aphrodite knew that nothing grabbed his attention better than certain types of toys: golden dice, spinning tops, balls. This time she would bribe him with something that had been Zeus’s, something his nurse Adrasteia, one of the women of fate, had given him: a golden ball, with lots of circles etched into it and an enamel spiral that cut across them. When you threw it up in the air, it left a flaming wake. Describing the toy to Eros, she immediately saw that the boy would agree to the deaclass="underline" the golden ball in return for an arrow in Medea’s heart, right up to the feathers if possible. So Eros, the perennial, ruthless youthfulness of the world, he who strikes but is never stricken, once again came down from Olympus. He was already thinking of when he got back, of playing with the golden ball, crossed by that deep enamel spiral.
There is a misunderstanding between hero and princess that will go on and on repeating itself in relationships between men and women, at least for as long as the man thinks of himself as the hero and the woman as the princess, which is to say almost always. The night Jason turned up at the court in Colchis, Princess Medea dreamed that the hero had come not to kill the monster but to carry her off. Jason knew that, to beat the monster guarding the Golden Fleece, he must get Medea’s help. And, if the princess helped him, she would be carried off. It was a game of silences, of things understood but unspoken: both hero and princess wanted to make it look, he to her and she to herself, as if the slaying of the monster were only a pretext for her being carried off.
When Jason had taken the Golden Fleece and the Argo was sailing off toward Greece with Medea on board, it seemed as though the princess’s dream had come true. Right from the beginning Medea had thought of Jason as a nocturnal vision, when “creeping like a dream, her mind followed his marching footsteps.” So who remembered the monster now? But for the hero there is never just the one monster. Hence it cannot be forgotten. For every monster is the forerunner of the next. It is far more likely that it will be the princess who is forgotten. The identity of the monster is diffuse, it reappears and repeats itself in every fragment of monster; but each woman is a profile, and at any moment a new profile may blot out the earlier ones. So it is that stories of heroes and princesses tend to end badly. Perhaps in this regard, as in others, Theseus was the most clear-sighted and tactful of the heroes; at least he abandoned Ariadne on an island, before arriving home.
Gifts from the gods are poisoned, stamped with the ill-omened sign of the invisible become palpable. Passing from hand to hand, they ooze poison. Aphrodite’s necklace and Athena’s golden tunic, both given to Harmony on the occasion of her marriage to Cadmus, lead to a slaughter of heroes that will go on for two generations, from the expedition of the Seven against Thebes to the revenge killings of the Epigoni. It was the same with the sacred purple tunic Dionysus fell asleep in, his head resting on Ariadne’s fair breasts. The purple was bright on the sands of Naxos. But one day that fabric, drenched with happiness as it was, would become the banner of desertion, betrayal, murder. Yet the fragrance of Dionysus never left it, and the “sweet desire” to touch and stare at that tunic would never fade. The Charites had woven it for Dionysus; Dionysus had wrapped himself in it with Ariadne. Then he gave it to his son Thoas. Thoas gave it to his daughter Hypsipyle, who gave it to her lover Jason before he abandoned her. And the purple tunic of Dionysus was the gift Jason and Medea chose for Apsyrtus, Medea’s brother, when they decided to kill him.
It all happened without witnesses, on the dark little island in the Danube estuary where the Brygi had raised a temple to Artemis. There was no other trace of a human presence. Medea waited for her brother on the temple porch. Jason crouched in the darkness. Medea looked away and covered her eyes with a white veil as Jason struck Apsyrtus with the gesture of a butcher dispatching cattle. Apsyrtus fell to his knees like a huge-headed bull. Before dying, he scooped up some black blood in his hands and managed to smear it on his sister’s white veil. Jason went around the corpse, cutting off the hands, feet, and ears. The first fruits. Three times he licked the dead man’s blood and spat it into his mouth. Medea raised a torch, the sign agreed on with her lover’s friends.