The main thing I want you to remember upfront is that as the Argonauts landed in Colchis last time, they had with them four brothers – the grandsons of King Aeëtes, and sons of Phrixus, the hero who’d found the Golden Fleece in the first place. So if that sounds just a bit confusing, don’t worry – because we’ll be in Colchis, in the court of King Aeëtes, for a while today. Phrixus married the princess Chalcioppe, and with her had four sons – the same four sons Jason and his Argonauts picked up near the end of the previous show. This King was called Aeëtes, and we’ll be hearing a lot about him today. Why would Phrixus bring the precious Golden Fleece to Colchis and leave it there? Phrixus did so because he fell in love with one of the daughters of the King of Colchis.

Phrixus was the man who’d taken the Fleece to Colchis. Phrixus was the hero who’d originally found the Golden Fleece. These brothers were the four sons of a man named Phrixus. And they’ve brought with them four brothers – brothers whom they’ve recently picked up. So the Argonauts have just landed in Colchis. As I said last time, to the Hellenistic Greek imagination, the lush stream valleys, river lands and forests of Colchis were a place of legend – a place where the sun slept before coming up in the morning. Colchis, the southwestern part of modern day Georgia, is where the easternmost waters of the Black Sea meet the slopes of the Caucasus Mountains. The Argonauts, just a few pages ago, have landed in an exotic eastern territory called Colchis. And that takes us to more recent history – history that you need to know about for the sake of today’s episode. The Argonauts were nearly crushed to death between a pair of clashing rocks. They helped a poor old prophet named Phineas, who was plagued by harpies. They accidentally killed a promising young king on the island of the Doliones. They slept with women on the all female island of Lemnos. In the previous episode, we joined Jason and the Argonauts for the first thousand miles of their quest to the northeast. The problem for Pelias was that a large and formidable crew enlisted with Jason, and Jason also got hold of a peerless ship called the Argo, after which the Argonauts are named. The countryside here is the setting of much of the second half of Apollonius' poem. In the unlikely event that the Argonautica has any basis in fact, Jason and his crew might have sailed inland on one of the forks of this river. The Kintrishi River at the coastal village of Kobuleti in modern day Georgia, with the Caucasus range in the background. Jason’s father’s throne was usurped by a half divine king named Pelias, and Pelias, because he was convinced by a prophecy that Jason would kill him, sent Jason on a quest so dangerous, and so impossible, that wicked King Pelias assumed that it would be the end of Jason.

Handsome young Jason is the rightful heir to a kingdom called Iolcus, a city on the Greek mainland about a hundred miles north northeast of Athens. In this show, we’ll cover Books 3-4 of this great epic, books dominated by the legendary sorceress, Medea. If you’re just jumping in, it’ll be a lot clearer if you start in Episode 38, so you can hear the back story of how and why the Jason and the Argonauts made their eastern journey into the far reaches of the Black Sea.

This is the second of two episodes we’re doing on the later Ancient Greek epic Jason and the Argonauts, written by the poet Apollonius of Rhodes in the mid-200s BCE in the city of Alexandria, Egypt. Hello, and welcome to Literature and History. Medea and the Argonauts Apollonius' Argonautica, Books 3-4

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