But AEetes still refused to fetch the fleece, plotting secretly to burn the Argo and kill the heroic Argonauts.  Medea came to their succor, and by her black art lulled to sleep the dragon which guarded the fleece.  They seized the pelt, boarded the Argo, and sailed away, taking Medea with them.  When her father followed in pursuit, in the madness of her love for Jason she slew her brother whom she had with her, and strewed the fragments of his body upon the wave.  The king stopped to recover them and give them burial, and thus the Argonauts escaped.  But the anger of the gods at this horrible murder led the voyagers in expiation a wearisome way homeward.  For they sailed through the waters of the Adriatic, the Nile, the circumfluous stream of the earth, passed Scylla and Charybdis and the Island of the Sun, to Crete and AEgina and many lands, before the Argo rode once more in Thessalian waters.

The legend is one of the oldest and most familiar tales of Greece.  Whether it is all poetic myth, or had a certain foundation in fact, it is impossible now to say.  The date, the geography, the heroes, are mythical; and as in the Homeric poems, the supernatural and seeming historical are so blended that the union is indissoluble by any analysis yet found.  The theme has touched the imagination of poets from the time of Apollonius Rhodius, who wrote the ‘Argonautica’ and went to Alexandria B.C. 194 to take care of the great library there, to William Morris, who published his ‘Life and Death of Jason’ in 1867.  Mr. Morris’s version of the contest of Orpheus with the Sirens is given to illustrate the reality of the old legends to the Greeks themselves.  Jason’s later life, his putting away of Medea, his marriage with Glauce, and the revenge of the deserted princess, furnish the story of the greatest of the plays of Euripides.

THE VICTORY OF ORPHEUS

From ‘The Life and Death of Jason’

The Sirens: 
Oh, happy seafarers are ye,
And surely all your ills are past,
And toil upon the land and sea,
Since ye are brought to us at last.

To you the fashion of the world,
Wide lands laid waste, fair cities burned,
And plagues, and kings from kingdoms hurled,
Are naught, since hither ye have turned.

For as upon this beach we stand,
And o’er our heads the sea-fowl flit,
Our eyes behold a glorious land,
And soon shall ye be kings of it.

Orpheus: 
A little more, a little more,
O carriers of the Golden Fleece,
A little labor with the oar,
Before we reach the land of Greece.

E’en now perchance faint rumors reach
Men’s ears of this our victory,
And draw them down unto the beach
To gaze across the empty sea.

But since the longed-for day is nigh,
And scarce a god could stay us now,
Why do ye hang your heads and sigh,
And still go slower and more slow?

The Sirens: 
Ah, had ye chanced to reach the home
Your fond desires were set upon,
Into what troubles had ye come! 
What barren victory had ye won!