The following heroic compression of Apollonius' The Voyage of Argo will utilize un-translated names for heroes, other terrestrial beings and topographic features. The meanings of these names will be published in the glossary accompanying the print edition.
THE VOYAGE OF ARGO
Moved by the God of Song
I recall the fifty heroes or olden time who sailed excellent Argo through the Narrows into the Black Sea, between the Cyanean Rocks in search of the Fleece of Gold. [1]
*****
The Oracle of the Shining One warned King Pelius of a plot,
Of the cunning of a one-sandaled man.
Of this King Pelius was reminded when he gave a feast to honor Poseidon,
Sea-Lord, Horse-Breaker,
Whose mortal bastard Pelius was born.
Whence trod Jason to his hall, [2]
Golden mane unshorn,
Crossing in winter, unsandaled by the river Anauras,
Come to honor Poseidon,
Affirming the king's dark fate.
Pelius, death-cursed, though god-born,
Commanded Jason upon the most perilous of prize-seeking,
To brave ship-swallowing seas, never to know home again.
Notes
1. A fleece is an unfinished woolen cloak
link › en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fleece
2. The Hellenic age of heroes and kings, was suffused in the midst of antiquity by a thousand years before Apollonius's time and more closely resembled the world of Beowulf—with heroes clad in hide and fur—than that of Socrates and Aristotle, with petty kings being in fact chieftains residing in fire-lit halls behind cyclopean walls.
By the Wine Dark Sea
link › jameslafond.blogspot.com
