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Medea and the golden fleece

by Eugenia Salza Prina Ricotti

Priestess of Hecates, this disquieting goddess, was Medea, one of the most tragic and upsetting figure of the Greek literature. The story of Medea and Jason began when Jason and his companions, the Argonauts, decided to steel the golden fleece and, starting from Greece, directed their boat to the Colchis shores. Many were the hardships that they had to meet in this enterprise and among the others there was the fact that the so much desired prize was strictly guarded by two monsters. It was evident that before they could succeed in getting it, they had to destroy them. One of these dangerous wards was a big serpent full of powerful venom, the other was a dragon, a horrible creature that, as all the dragons we find in the legends, threw flames from its nostrils and burned to death anyone who tried to come near the fleece. The feat presented itself as impossible and Jason never could have achieved it if Aphrodites, the love goddess, hadn’t taken him under her wings. She well knew that to succeed in returning safe and sound the young man needed something stronger than his sword and that only Medea could give him this special something.
But to persuade this girl to help Jason it was necessary that she should lose her head for him. To sum it up it was necessary to enchant the enchantress, and who could do it better than Aphrodites who, when she wanted to, for this kind of spells was much better than Hecates the pale goddess of the night: thus the beautiful divinity made a love wheel and gave it to Jason teaching him how to use it. Pindar describe this wheels in one of this odes:
“ From the height of Olympus, the goddess of Cyprus fixed on an unbreakable wheel a wryneck with its beautiful many colored feathers and tied it to the wheel’s four sides. Thus for the first time men knew the bird of obsession.”
and with it also the obsession, a love obsession that and not only pushed Medea to help her handsome enemy, but also to elope with him. And all this because the wheel was turning taking away the lovers’ hearts and because the wryneck, the obsession bird that got its name by the mobility of its head and that could turn it in all the directions, a strange bird that created the whirlpool in which the peoples mind got lost.
Lynx was the Greek name of the wryneck and when he was tied to the wheel he became closely associated to it. This was so true that in the ancient times the word lynx not only indicated the bird but also the whole wheel-bird and once that those two were joined this thing the Rhombos assumed the value of a ”Magic ring”.
The Rhombos of Aphrodites turned for Medea and she lost her head for Jason, the hero of Corinth.


Bibliography
J. de la GENIERE, Une roue à oiseaux du cabinet des médalilles in Révue d'études anciens 60, 1958, pp. 27-35
PINDARO, Odi IV
TEOCRITO, Farmakeutriai