86 pages • 2 hours read
Edith HamiltonMythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1942A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 2, Chapters 3-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: “Stories of Love and Adventure”
Chapter 3 Summary: “The Quest of the Golden Fleece”
The stories’ origins lie in the escape of Phrixus and his sister Helle from their father’s jealous second wife: Just as they were about to be sacrificed, a flying golden-fleeced ram grabbed them from the altar and flew them across the strait separating Europe from Asia. Helle fell off, but Phrixus made it to Colchis on the Black Sea where he became son-in-law to the local king Aeetes, sacrificed the golden fleece’s hide, and gifted it to the king.
Years later, king Pelias sent Jason on a quest to bring the fleece back to Greece. Jason called for the youth of Greece to join him on his quest, Hercules and Orpheus among them. With Hera as their patron, the heroes set sail in the Argo. They stopped in Lemnos, an island populated only by women. At their next stop, a water nymph kidnapped Hercules’s companion Hylas, and the hero remained behind searching for him. The Argonauts next freed the prophet Phineus from the harpies, and he advised them how to survive the Clashing Rocks. They passed the land of the Amazons without engaging the fierce daughters of Ares and the rock where Prometheus was chained, finally reaching Colchis.
On Olympus, Hera and Aphrodite plotted for Medea to fall in love with Jason and help him succeed on his quest. Secretly, Aeetes was angry at the Argonauts’ request for the Fleece, but the rules of hospitality forbade him from killing them. He set them an impossible task that Medea, using magic potions and inside information, helped Jason achieve. While Aeetes plotted more harm, Medea helped Jason secure the fleece and sails away with the Argonauts. Aeetes sent his son Apsyrtus in pursuit, but Medea (or alternately Jason) killed him. The Argonauts sailed on to face further trials. Back in Greece, Medea tricked Pelias’s daughters into killing him. Other stories about Medea include that she brought Jason’s father back to life and that she taught Jason the secret to eternal youth. Both her evil and good acts flowed from her love for him, but, ultimately, he betrayed her.
After Pelias’s death, Jason and Medea settled in Corinth and had two sons. Jason became engaged to the king of Corinth’s daughter, and her father declared that Medea and her sons must go into exile. Jason scolded her for having stoked the king’s fear, claiming her “uncontrolled spirit” had brought her exile on herself (172). Medea reminded him of all she had done for him, but he replied that it was Aphrodite, not Medea, who had saved him, and he had brought her to Greece, “a civilized country” (173). Feeling more alone than ever, she killed both the king’s daughter with a poisoned robe and her two sons with Jason to save them from a life of enslavement. As Jason arrived to kill her, Medea flew off “in a chariot drawn by dragons,” with Jason cursing her, “never himself” (174).
Chapter 4 Summary: “Four Great Adventures”
“Phaethon”
Son of a mortal woman, Clymene, and the Sun (Helios), Phaethon visited the god in his palace to confirm his parentage. The Sun swore by the river Styx to fulfill any wish the youth made. Immediately he asked to drive his father’s chariot, “giving light to the world” (176). Regretting his rash oath, the Sun warned Phaethon of the danger. The course was steep and difficult and the horses strong and reckless, but Phaethon would not be dissuaded, and the Sun was forced by his oath to give his son the reins. As the horses sped on, Phaethon lost control. Plunging from the heights, the horses “set the world on fire” (178). Mother Earth cried out to the gods on Olympus, and Jove struck Phaethon down with his thunderbolt, smashing the chariot and sending the horses into the sea. The river Eridanus quenched the flames, and the naiads, pitying Phaeton, buried him. The Heliades, meaning daughters of Helios, came to their brother’s grave to mourn him and were transformed into poplar trees, perpetually weeping.
“Pegasus and Bellerophon”
Bellerophon was the son of Eurynome, a mortal woman taught by Athena. His father was alternately Glaucus, a mortal king of Ephyre (the future Corinth) who angered the gods with impieties, or Poseidon. Hellenophone’s great desire was to possess Pegasus, “a marvelous horse which had sprung from the Gorgon’s blood when Perseus killed her” (180). Athena gifted him a golden bridle he used to tame the horse.
After Bellerophon accidentally killed his brother, he traveled to Argos to be purified by king Proteus. Proteus’s wife Anteia fell in love with Bellerophon and, after he rejected her, claimed to her husband that Bellerophon had wronged her. Unwilling to violate hospitality rules by killing him, Proteus asked Bellerophon to deliver a letter to the king of Lycia, but the king also was unwilling to kill his guest. Instead, he sent him on an impossible quest to kill the Chimaera, “a lion in front, a serpent behind, a goat in between” (183). With Pegasus, Bellerophon easily fulfilled the task. He returned to Proteus, who sent him on other dangerous quests until finally Bellerophon’s “courage and good fortune” won the king over (183).
Bellerophon’s death came about when he tried to fly Pegasus up to Olympus to join the gods. The horse refused and threw Bellerophon off, after which he “wandered alone” until his death (183). Pegasus moved into the stalls of Olympus and was responsible for bringing Zeus his thunder and lightning.
“Otus and Ephialtes”
Otus and Ephialtes were Giants and brothers. Homer describes them as handsome while Virgil references “their mad ambition” (184). Their father was Poseidon, and they determined to prove their superiority to the gods. They imprisoned Ares and threatened to climb up to Olympus. Zeus prepared to strike them down with his trusty thunderbolt, but Poseidon begged him to spare them, promising to keep them under control. The brothers turned their attention to abducting the goddesses Otus Hera and Ephialtes Artemis, with whom he was in love. They began by searching for Artemis. Aware of their plan, she lured them into a forest on the island of Naxos in pursuit of a beautiful hind. After separating to increase their chance of finding her, they found themselves on opposite sides of an open glade, the hind between them. At the moment each threw his spear, the hind disappeared, and the spears struck the brothers dead.
“Daedalus”
Architect Daedalus had created the Labyrinth that imprisoned the Minotaur in Crete. After Ariadne revealed the escape route to Theseus, Cretan king Minos realized the information must have come from Daedalus and imprisoned him and his son Icarus. Daedalus built them wings to escape with, but while flying away, Icarus, ignoring his father’s instructions, flew too high. His wings fell off, and he plunged to his death in the sea below while Daedalus landed safely in Sicily, where he was welcomed by the king. Minos devised a puzzle to expose Daedalus’s whereabouts, but when he travelled to Sicily to capture him, the Sicilian king protected Daedalus and killed Minos in battle.
Part 2, Chapters 3-4 Analysis
For the “adventure” myths, Hamilton draws on sources from Archaic and Classical Greece as well as from the Roman Empire. Ovid provides the myth of Phaethon and is a source for the Daedalus myth, which is also included in Apollodorus’s likely second century AD anthology The Library of Greek Mythology. Though Hamilton does not favor Apollodorus, whose text seems to have been a reference book and was composed in prose, she opted to include his version in this instance, claiming Ovid’s version “shows him at his worst, sentimental and exclamatory” (186, italics in original). Parts of the Bellerophon myth appear in Hesiod (Bellerophon and the Chimaera) and Homer (the hero’s “sad end”) as well as in Pindar (179). Homer’s Odyssey and Virgil both touch on the Otus and Ephialtes myth, but only Apollodorus offers a full account, characteristic of his purpose.
The cobbling together of this vast array of sources and contexts into relatively straightforward chronological “adventure” narratives speaks to Hamilton’s thematic concerns. What prompts the particular variants, why they are composed “sentimentally” or drily, how they are slotted into larger narratives—all these recede for Hamilton to organize the myths into a coherent framework that reflects, in some larger sense, what were seen as Western cultural values in Hamilton’s time: progress, rationality, a human-centered view of the world.
The longest story in this section is that of Jason and his quest for the Golden Fleece. The quest is the subject of Apollonius of Rhodes’s third century BC Alexandrian epic. Apollonius is believed to have played on Euripides’ fifth century tragedy Medea, which describes the last days of Jason and Medea’s marriage in Corinth: Jason had married the local princess, and a heartbroken Medea sought revenge. In Apollonius’s hands, Medea transforms from a young woman in love, willing to do anything to ensure Jason’s success, to a desperate and frightened woman who wields tremendous power and the capacity for terrifying rage. His characterization of Medea has been said to anticipate Euripides’ shocking filicide element, which Apollonius’s audience is assumed to have been aware of.
Though this story appears under the banner of “adventure” myths, Hamilton incorporates features of Euripides’ Medea to conclude the story of Jason. She may also be responding to Seneca’s first century AD play of the same name, though Hamilton does not cite him as a source. Seneca’s Medea has been alternately celebrated or criticized for being more audacious, bold, and unapologetic. Euripides’ characterization of her has been called more sympathetic, in that she confronts Jason about the ways he has hurt her and provoked her to desperation. Debate was a deep cultural value of fifth century Athens, and Euripides’ play offers Jason’s and Medea’s competing perspectives and arguments in defense of their actions. Ultimately, it is for the audience to decide which character they find most sympathetic, though the outcome will not change. For Hamilton, however, what concerns her is recording the story itself, and she seems to come down solidly on the side of Medea, characterizing her murder of her sons to prevent them from being enslaved in a sympathetic light. In the Greek view, Medea can be understood as both deeply vulnerable, as a woman in love and a woman exiled alone, and deeply powerful in that by killing Jason’s sons and his bride, she ensures his family line ends with him, effectively obliterating him from memory.
