Black Gate

After the invocation of the Muse of Love that I discussed two weeks ago, the Argonautica launches into what is, quite honestly, one of my favorite scenes in all of ancient literature.

Apollonius gives us a conference among the gods to discuss our heroes’ fates. Homer has done the same on multiple occasions, but here, the conference is between two of Olympus’s leading goddesses, Hera and Athena.

Much as in the Odyssey, Athena is here fulfilling her role as the tutor of young heroes. She supports Jason in his quest much as she did (will) Odysseus. Hera also now stakes her interest in the outcome of the Argonaut’s quest: She really doesn’t like Pelias and wants to see him destroyed.

Together they decide that the best way for everyone to get what they want out of this is for Medea, the daughter of Aeetes, to fall in love with Jason. Not a little schoolgirl crush, either. No, this has to be a big whammy of a love, so much so that she is willing to betray her father and her people in order to assist Jason in his quest .

There’s just one problem: Athena’s a virgin and Hera is married. They know nothing about falling in love.

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Have you ever sat down to read a book and hit a stretch in which it seems really obvious that the writer is writing because… well, they have to? That something is eventually going to happen, but it can’t happen just yet because word count? Or, in all fairness to authors, because it just isn’t time yet, because time has to pass between events. Emotional distance has to be gained or events will appear too closely related if they are too closely linked in the text.

It happens around page 150 in most genre novels, or right around episodes 16-18 in a 22 episode TV series. And let’s be kind to filler: not every piece of a story can move the overall arc forward (although it’s great when it does). It can be an excellent opportunity for character growth and for world-building. It can provide needed relief from a heavy plotlines. And it can just let the writer(s) play, with occasionally great storytelling popping up. “Hush” in Buffy is a great example, as is “Big Block of Cheese Day” on West Wing or “Houses of the Holy” on Supernatural.

And sometimes you just get… Book 2 of the Argonautica. Feel free to disagree with me if you’ve read it (and I expect to see a good many comments arguing with me!) (or a loud chirping chorus of crickets. Yeah, it’ll probably be crickets), but between the action in Book 1 and Book 3’s massive operatic scope, Book 2 is just… there.

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As the Argonauts come closer to their destination, Apollonius finds himself with a problem that is familiar to many a DM: he has one character that significantly outclasses the other players. I refer, of course, to Heracles. A good adventure relies on tension and tension requires the possibility of real danger. A character that can Herc-smash every obstacle that stands in the party’s way is frustrating to both the writer and the audience.

In other scenarios, you can kill this guy off. But when your over-powered character is a well-known minor god with a well-established canon, you’re in a bit of a bind. So Apollonious does the next best thing and ushers Heracles off-stage by means of a side-quest. As mentioned before, Heracles is travelling on the Argo with Hylas, a boy who acts as his bow-carrier. At a stop for supplies, Hylas takes a jug and goes to fetch water. At the spring, his beauty attracts the attention of the nymphs, who seize him and pull him into their pool.

When Hylas fails to return, Heracles goes looking for him and, in the process, misses the boat. When the other Argonauts notice his absence, they accuse Jason of ditching Heracles on purpose and demand that they turn around to fetch him. This is when a sea god appears (yes, it is a literal deus ex machina) and informs them that Heracles has a destiny that does not include the quest for the Golden Fleece and that it is against the will of Zeus that they turn around.

Take THAT, character with suspiciously lucky dice.

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Previously on Ancient Worlds: We’ve been discussing Apollonius of Rhodes’ Argonautica, which tells the story of Jason and the Argonauts, well known from many a late night creature feature.

After Heracles convinces his fellow Argonauts that the encircling Lemnian peril is too perilous, they sail on and the Argo makes its way through the Hellespont. There they find an island populated by “Earth-born monsters” with six arms each.

This is a recurring theme in Greek myth. Not just monsters, of course, although the Greeks love a good monster. (AND WHO DOESN’T?) The most terrifying and most anthropomorphic tend to be Earth-born, that is, creatures that spring up out of the earth.

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Okay, we’ve got a boat. We’ve got a team. We’ve got a team leader. We’ve got a mission. So off we go! Straight to the…

Oh. No. Not straight there. There and back again is insufficient material for epic poetry, and if you’re writing about the first great sea voyage, there had better be more than one interesting destination.

First stop: THE ISLAND OF WOMEN.

Many of Odysseus’s adventures were thinly veiled fantasies of sexual prowess, but Apollonious isn’t even playing around here. The first stop the Argonauts make is the island of Lemnos.

Which is populated entirely with women who haven’t seen a man in years.

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So you’ve been given an impossible task by a king, primarily for the purpose of getting rid of you. What do you do first?

Well, to be honest, I would move to a new kingdom, but that’s why I’m not a Greek hero.

Jason, on the other hand, set out to assemble a team of the greatest heroes Greece had to offer. Not all of these are memorable: if you’ve heard of Phlias of Araethyrea, for example, you’re a bigger mythology geek than I am.

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Question: What do the Maltese Falcon, a suitcase full of money, a crystal skull, and a cow shaped silver creamer all have in common?

Answer: They’re MacGuffins.

MacGuffins are ubiquitous to storytelling, especially in genre fiction. They’re That Thing that Our Guys need to get before Their Guys do. The Rambaldi device / relic of George Washington / critical data file… it doesn’t matter what it is, it’s entire purpose is to give the story, well, purpose. We don’t care why the jewel thief is after this particular necklace, we just care that he is. The chase itself is the story.

While the term was popularized by Alfred Hitchcock (and may have been coined by one of his writers), the MacGuffin is an ancient plot device. And its earliest example in Western Literature is, to my knowledge, the Golden Fleece.

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Before we go any further in the discussion of the origins of fantasy and science fiction in ancient literature, I wanted to address a basic question:

Did the Greeks believe any of this was true?

When we sit down to read a work of fantasy, we are very aware of reading about a constructed space. We know we are temporarily inhabiting an imagined world, and much of our delight comes from that work of imagination. Our appreciation of any verisimilitude comes attached to that sense of creation: it is exciting to us that the work we are reading is believable even though it is pretend.

(This is, of course, what non-geeks often don’t understand about those of us of the geekly persuasion. How, they wonder, can you spend so much time arguing over the minutiae and plot holes of a story in which a basic premise is “we live in space and , even more unbelievably, do without money”? The answer is that even a pretend world needs internal consistency, and we argue because tolerances on that consistency vary. I can’t stop tearing my hair out at the messed up timeline of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, my husband thinks this is hilarious, I love him anyway.)

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Even among the gods, Athena is an extraordinary figure. She is born fully formed and fully armed out of her father’s head. As one of the virgin goddesses she is almost completely independent of masculine control, which is always astonishing in the Greek world.

She reflects a fascinating series of attitudes. As the goddess of wisdom, she and Aphrodite are completely foreign to each other, so much so that in one poem, when Athena is Aphrodite’s house she is literally unable to speak. (Wisdom and desire are completely incompatible with each other, you see.)

As the goddess of war, she is contrasted with Ares. Where Ares is the god of the warrior, the rage and chaos of war, Athena is the goddess of strategy and tactics.

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