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Lecture 28

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Classical Mythology (LLT 121)

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Lecture 28 Good morning and welcome to LLT121 Classical Mythology, in which we are, today, taking up the careers of a number of lesser heroes, heroes who, for whatever reason, could not rise up to the level of Heracles or his washed out counter part from Athens, Theseus. The first hero going to take up today is Jason. The local hero of a city named Iolcus. interesting. Nobody in this room is currently named Jason, but we all know somebody who is. The kid who lives across the street from me is named Jason. a name that somebody actually has. What I understand, for the life of me, is why so popular. The Jason story starts out in the city of Iolcus where a King worry, not going to be on the gets married to this woman named Nephele. Nephele in ancient Greek means cloud. This young name is Cloud, more about which in a second. They have two kids, Phrixus and Helle, a boy named Phrixus and a girl named Helle. Well, Nephele has the two kids. She decides to go back to her previous career, which was being a cloud. Yes, that is right. She goes back to being a cloud. Cretheus gets married to Princess Ino of Thebes. now, you should know what the one primary distinguishing characteristic in Greek mythology is about the fine city of Thebes. The gods hate it. Nothing good ever happens at Thebes. Well, what happens. Ino says there is a plague coming to Thebes, to Iolcus. Since they have any nutrition bureau or farm bureau to help them out, they send off for the Delphic Oracle. Ino tampers with the Delphic Oracle. She fixes it so the Delphic Oracle says, have to kill Phrixus and So the poor king decides, right. I am going to kill Phrixus and when, much to surprise, this golden ram comes swooping down out of the sky. He picks up Phrixus and Helle and carries them away off to the east. Of the Rorschach map of ancient make it all the way out there. What happens is that Helle loses grip of the ram, falls into the ocean and dies right around the city of zantium. Forever after, the strait was called the Hellespont. Cute, people falling into the ocean all week. However, Phrixus makes it all the way out to the end of the world. This land, actually in the Black Sea, called Colchis. There in Colchis, the ram sets Phrixus down. King Aeetes, king of Colchis, sacrifices the ram to career hangs the fleece of the ram up on a tree in honor of Apollo. Aeetes is the son of no less a person than Helios, the sun god so he can get away with killing golden rams and stuff like that. Aeetes and his wife, Mrs. A, have a lovely daughter named Medea. meet her later. I pause for a question. Meanwhile, back in the city of Iolcus there is a question about the inheritance of the throne. Who should become the king? Should it be the older brother, Aeson, who is, after all, the legitimate king. He is the son of the king and the wife. Or should it be Pelias, who is the son of the wife and Poseidon. Poseidon is a very lusty, zesty god, Mike. He gets around. also a very popular second choice if you want to give yourself divine parentage. If you are not going to shoot for Zeus, Poseidon will do. In the best of all possible worlds, Aeson gets to be king. But in order to make this myth work better, Pelias becomes the king of Iolcus, forcing Aeson and his little ba boy, Jason to go into exile. We pause here. Jason learns how to be a hero while living in exile. He studies with the centaur, Chiron, the nice centaur. He learns to hunt and do math and stuff like that. It is really nice. Then one day, about seventeen or eighteen, perhaps. He decides that he really wants to be king of Iolcus. He knows just how going to go about it, too. He is going to come into the city of Iolcus, be admitted to the palace, and ask his Uncle Pelias, the king, if he can be king now, because really fair that he be the king. Scott, do you have a question about that? Does that sound like a sane way to operate? No, idiotic, as a matter of fact, but not very mature. This is what he claims to do. Yes, you have to remember that children growing up today have a lot more pressures on them today than they did when they were growing up in ancient Greece. So he was probably as naive as the day is long. At any rate, Jason is walking to the city of Iolcus. a stream he sees a little old lady. fallen down and she get up. Jason being the nice pleasant, young man that he is, kindly helps the little old lady up. that great? In the process he steps in some mud, which sucks the sandal off of his right food or left foot. Have any of you ever done that? Stick your foot in mud and have it pull your shoe off. If not try it sometime. I am not making this up. Tiny did young Jason realize but the old woman was Hera, queen of the gods. I know that our primary familiarity with Hera comes with her taking very nasty revenge on mortal women who, through no fault of their own, have engaged in a relationship of some sort with Zeus. Hera get even with Zeus, so she makes these poor women miserable. We think to ourselves, Hera. What a jerk. That Hera. What a cold, conniving you know true. You could have no worse enemy than hear. But, as Jason is going to find out, you can have no better friend than Hera, also. his kind and unselfish act of helping the little old lady who get up, Jason has got Hera on his side. Meanwhile, back at Iolcus, King Pelias receives an oracle. This one is unambiguous. Beware of the man with one sandal. Notice how artfully I worked it into the narrative there. So you can guess what happens. Young, nice, polite Jason shows up. He knocks on the door of the palace of Iolcus, asks to be taken into King Pelias. King Pelias could I be the king King Pelias looks down at feet and sees that one of his your low budget, low quality movie, has talked Arnold Schwartzeneggar into appearing. How long does Arnold appear in this movie? For about 30 seconds. Then what do you do with Arnold Schwartzeneggar? Kill him. Why do you kill him? Because cost too much. Moreover, going to show up Dolph Lundgrin. This is a Dolph Lundgrin movie, darn it. So you keep them in there as long as you can afford them, which is probably about 30 seconds. You keep Arnold in there. He says, my day. going to pump you Then he dies horribly. But, for better or worse, you can now say Dolph Lundgrin, big letters, Dolph Lundgrin, Arnold Schwartzeneggar, Jason and the Argonauts. If, while watching the movie, you know, Regina is sitting there with her tongue hanging down to the floor... You like Arnie? Sure, do. You say, wait a minute. But already paid your to see the movie, which is all I care about. To heck with art. Hera rounds up for Jason a crew of all sorts of people. Orpheus plays music. The winged brothers Calais and Zetes, sons of the north wind. They have wings on their back. They are really cool guys. recruited for the war effort. Castor and Pollex, the divine sons of Zeus and a swan. No Zeus was the swan. The woman was not a swan. I always wondered about that. They show up. Also the fathers of various Trojan War heroes, like Pelias who is a B movie hero who went on to be the father of Achilles. So on and so forth. And, in a cameo, appearance Heracles. How long mike do you say we keep Heracles in this myth? Thirty seconds before he starts showing up Jason, right? going to tell you about four stops. First of all there is the... and then that. Then the Phineus Island and Symplegades. Okay, very dynamic. Oh heck, I can wing this. The island of Lemnos is inhabited women, just women. All of the men have been driven away. They are women living without men. They are lonely. Our heroic heroes come stepping off the gangplank. They make the women happy. being facetious. This is part of the heroic ethos if you will, love them, leave them, get out. Jason and his Argonauts mingle in love with the various women on the island of Lemnos. That is basically thrown in there to handle point number six on the Herometer, love interest. The next stop is the island of Cios. At this point, Hercules is rowing in such a burly is, after all, he snaps an oar. They have to pull ashore on the island of Cios in order to find Hercules a new oar. While Hercules is looking for a sufficiently studly tree to provide him with an oar, he sends his close personal associate, Hylas, a young lad who is a good friend of Hercules. Yes, Hercules has an occasional boyfriend from time to time. That is all right. The Greeks were very tolerant of bisexuality. what happens. Hylas is a really nice looking young lad. He goes to fetch some water and while dipping in there to fetch the water, he is kidnapped water nymphs. What a horrible thing to have happen. Hercules is distraught. sad, really seriously bummed. He have an oar, if recall so he asks to be left alone on the island of Mysia to look for his close, young, associate Hylas. Thirty seconds, Mike, it. That is the end of Hercules in this legend. Stop number three is Phineus Island, the island inhabited this blind king the name of Phineus, who is a prophet. King Phineus has a problem. This is what King Phineus would look like today. He has harpies. What are harpies? As I read somewhere, they look like women, only worse. That is not exactly right. They have the heads of women. Actually, this is kind of a cute harpy. They have wings like a bird. What is their MO, their modus operandi? Do you know? They swoop down on your picnic table and they eat as much as they can. What they do not eat they befoul poopily. They dung on it. They fecatize it. I like that. This has been going on for years. Well, Jason sends the winged brothers, Calais and Zetes, to chase the harpies away, and they do. Phineus is so pleased that he prophesized, going to get there. Beware of the clashing That is stop number four. The clashing rocks are two rocks that go crash. Jason sails straight through them. I mean, because, really, if going to be any kind of heroic legend at all, got to have a difficult entry into the magic never, never land where you go meet interesting people and kill them. You for example, just stride in through the door and say, They make it through the clashing rocks and they make it to the city of Colchis where King Aeetes reins. Regina, your question. Of course it does. Have you ever watched a sitcom, a brand new, innovative sitcom on television? Three minutes into the thing you say, seen this before. I know these No they are not the Stymphalian birds. Although we could probably use the Stymphalian birds, because this is a pretty movie. You make a good point, Regina, that the plots, the monsters and that sort of thing are pretty much recycled from one to another. Except for when got a B movie hero like Jason, his big deal, okay? If you are looking, for example, at the career of a U. Senator or a state governor or something like that, who has worked his or her way up through elected political offices, being elected alderman or dogcatcher looks like pretty small potatoes. But if only wanted to be an alderman or the dogcatcher and you get elected, a pretty big deal. Okay, fine. Jared. He had harpies. Okay, when Jason and his manly men walk off the SS Argo to get the golden fleece, Jason, being the polite young man that he is, introduces himself to King Aeetes and says, Aeetes, your kingliness, could I please have the golden Aeetes says, something in pieces of the late Apsyrtus to put together, hopefully, enough of him to bury. This is what Medea is willing to do for her husband. We go on. They return to the city of Iolcus, where Jason comes up, knocks on the door of the royal palace, asks for King Pelias and says, it is, Uncle King Pelias. Now can I be the Jason has no idea what to do next. not tremendously bright. like me. not tremendously bright, either, but married to somebody who is. Medea has a plan. She is, after all, a sorceress. What she does is she puts this boiling cauldron of water in front of King Pelias and his daughters, heats it up, puts in a special mix of twelve special herbs and spices, tosses it in there and then puts this horny old ram and tosses it into the cauldron. She leaves them in there for about three minutes and out comes a little lamb. Baa, baa, baa. Whoa, cool. pop in the old thing and it comes out fresh, new and is right King Pelias. Would you like to hop in, King King Pelias hops in and what does he get? He gets boiled. He is dead. Jason and Medea incur miasma. They leave home without it. They go to the award winning city of Corinth to be purified. King Creon purifies Jason of his miasma, but, for better or worse, they for whatever, reason ever go back to Iolcus. Jason and Medea wind up living in Corinth. They have a couple of kids whose names may as well be Jason junior and Jason the third. They are a couple of boys. One day King Creon summons Jason to the palace. Jason, you know Mrs. Creon and I have been trying for years to have a son to be king. We can only have our daughter Creusa. It is sad. We let a girl be king. At this point let me mention that Creusa looks suspiciously like, oh, I know. Who would you say? Wynona Ryder? Cindy Crawford? Cameron Diaz. I know whom. You care. Okay, so she looks like Wynona Ryder. What I would like you to do, Jason, is marry her. Then you can be the king. There is a problem. Jason is already married, but maybe not a fanatic about it. Besides, Medea is not as young as she used to be. You know. probably follows him or nags him because he like to watch Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman on Saturday night or something. Jason gets a clue. He thinks, this sounds like a good idea. I get to marry Wynona Ryder and I get to be the Only one problem, Mark. Yeah. His wife might not be so happy. This is the plot of award winning play, the Medea. It begins with this scene, this notion, that Jason has just found out that he can marry the princess of Corinth, but he has to figure out a way of making it sound right to Medea. He comes up to Medea and says, I got a little proposition for you. Medea, been a really good wife for me. You know our kids are really great. What I would like to do is divorce you and marry the princess so our two boys can be princes and I can be king. have the satisfaction of knowing that our boys are going to be This does not sound like a really winning proposition, does it? Remember that Medea means thinking person (female) in ancient Greek. That is why we get all the more frightened when Medea says, Medea goes into her hope chest and says, you please give this garment, this little robe to wear, to your new wife. I saved it in my hope chest all these years. I brought it from my homeland that never going to see again that I gave up and murdered my little brother for You know that a guy has got to be pretty dumb if been married maybe 20 years and he fall for a guilt trip, right? No, this guy is an idiot. what he does. He takes the garment and he is walking away from Medea. I think it was going to be that He sidles off, right? The next thing we know, we go back, we see the wedding. We see Medea kind of standing out on her front porch. The door is shut and the kids are nowhere to be seen. A messenger comes roaring in from the wedding. boy. Jason is mad. Jason is The princess put on the robe that Medea had sent along. She immediately started to burn. The king of Corinth Creon saw his daughter burning so he tried to throw himself on her to try and stamp out the flames. gone, too. How ghoulish you all are. Jason is coming and mad. Jason comes roaring up on his chariot. You killed Creon. You messed up my wedding. You messed up our plans. taking the boys and getting out of here. Where are the Medea says, boys are in the house. You can go in and get Jason goes into the house, screams, and comes running out screaming because Medea has killed them. Jason just kind of goes berserk because, you know, killing him would have been too easy and too quick. He suffer enough if she killed him. She has killed the two children, which means never going to reproduce, because think about it for a second. The two kids he already has are dead, and what female in her right mind is going to want anything to do with Jason after this? To those of you who say, really horrible to kill your I agree. very grateful that my parents never killed me, even once. Remember Medea is the granddaughter of the sun god, so he sends a chariot down to pick her got her off to Athens. that neat? Where she becomes the wife of King Aegeus and the stepmother of guess whom? Theseus. Remember we can hardly have a myth without Theseus. end comes in a very subtly satisfying way. Jason spends the rest of his days just hanging around his dry docked ship the SS Argo and reminiscing about the way things used to be. As many old duffers do. If you ever talk to somebody who is really old like me. I do. terrible. I have freshman honors students and I tell them about what it was like when I was in high school. They identify with it. They just sit there listening to me thinking, is he Jason just sits around in the Argo and talks about and thinks about all of his great expeditions and stuff like that. One day a rotting timber falls off and conks him of Dictys, which means fishnet in ancient Greek. The fisherman finds the box and opens it up. god. a woman in here with a little ba. going to bring it to my brother, King King Polydectes goes, a gorgeous looking young woman and a little ba. She seems kind of attached to the ba, so I kill him. But I am interested in For years, King Polydectes has the lovely young woman, and Perseus, the little ba, on his island. She marry him. She want anything to do with him. She really has had a pretty rough life as it is. She wants to be left alone. Young Perseus grows up on this island, too. He has no father figure. When he asks mom who is my dad? What does mom tell him, Heather? Zeus, right? yeah, I have a whole bunch of friends whose parents are Zeus. You expect me to go tell people that my dad is Of course, we know his dad is Zeus. One day when Perseus is about 15 or 16 Polydectes finally hits on a scheme to get Perseus out of town so that he can marry or do something with He decides to have a party for all the young men on the island. The price of admission is a horse. A horse is very expensive to this day. A horse, to an ancient Greek kid, is the equivalent of a BMW, a brand new Beamer, and not those entry level Beamers, either. a four door leather interior Beamer. That is the price of admission to this dance. Perseus was one of the kids, maybe you were one of these kids growing up, too, who go to the dance. He never went to the dances. They stood around outside the door and smoked cigarettes and drank Mad Dog and snickered at the people who went. horse, the price of admission is a horse. I could just as well go back and bring the head of The door opens up. King Polydectes pokes his head out. heard that Perseus. I challenge you. Why you go back and bring back the head of Perseus goes gulp. Okay. What do we estimate chance of bringing back the head of that horrible monster with the snaky hair whose head turns people to stone. What are his chances of coming back in one piece, Mitch? Okay, so going to look at it from that way. Of course going to do it. He has done if every semester since I started teaching this class, as a matter of fact. Never is, Mark. tried. the same token about 15 years old. He is supposed to go to Baghdad and, armed with his bare hands, beat the tar out of Sadam Hussein and bring back his mustache. Well, you get the picture. Stay tuned for our next exciting episode of the adventures of Perseus. been a good class. catch you later.

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Lecture 28

Course: Classical Mythology (LLT 121)

67 Documents

Students shared 67 documents in this course

University: Missouri State University

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Lecture 28

Good morning and welcome to LLT121 Classical Mythology, in which we

are, today, taking up the careers of a number of lesser heroes, heroes who, for

whatever reason, could not rise up to the level of Heracles or his washed out

counter part from Athens, Theseus. The first hero we’re going to take up today is

Jason. The local hero of a city named Iolcus. It’s interesting. Nobody in this room

is currently named Jason, but we all know somebody who is. The kid who lives

across the street from me is named Jason. It’s a name that somebody actually has.

What I don’t understand, for the life of me, is why it’s so popular. The Jason story

starts out in the city of Iolcus where a King Cretheus—don’t worry, he’s not

going to be on the test—he gets married to this woman named Nephele. Nephele

in ancient Greek means cloud. This young woman’s name is Cloud, more about

which in a second. They have two kids, Phrixus and Helle, a boy named Phrixus

and a girl named Helle. Well, Nephele has the two kids. She decides to go back to

her previous career, which was being a cloud. Yes, that is right. She goes back to

being a cloud. Cretheus gets married to Princess Ino of Thebes. By now, you

should know what the one primary distinguishing characteristic in Greek

mythology is about the fine city of Thebes. The gods hate it. Nothing good ever

happens at Thebes.

Well, here’s what happens. Ino says there is a plague coming to Thebes, to

Iolcus. Since they don’t have any nutrition bureau or farm bureau to help them

out, they send off for the Delphic Oracle. Ino tampers with the Delphic Oracle.

She fixes it so the Delphic Oracle says, “You have to kill Phrixus and Helle.” So

the poor king decides, “All right. I am going to kill Phrixus and Helle,” when,

much to everybody’s surprise, this golden ram comes swooping down out of the

sky. He picks up Phrixus and Helle and carries them away off to the east. Of

course—here’s the Rorschach map of ancient Greece—they don’t make it all the

way out there. What happens is that Helle loses grip of the ram, falls into the

ocean and dies right around the city of Byzantium. Forever after, the strait was

called the Hellespont. Cute, people falling into the ocean all week. However,

Phrixus makes it all the way out to the end of the world. This land, actually it’s in

the Black Sea, called Colchis. There in Colchis, the ram sets Phrixus down. King

Aeetes, king of Colchis, sacrifices the ram to Apollo—good career move—and

hangs the fleece of the ram up on a tree in honor of Apollo. Aeetes is the son of

no less a person than Helios, the sun god so he can get away with killing golden

rams and stuff like that. Aeetes and his wife, Mrs. A, have a lovely daughter

named Medea. We’ll meet her later.

I pause for a question. Meanwhile, back in the city of Iolcus there is a

question about the inheritance of the throne. Who should become the king?

Lecture 28

Classical Mythology (LLT 121)

Missouri State University

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Lecture 28

Course: Classical Mythology (LLT 121)

University: Missouri State University

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