O, pankakiste!

      I’ve been wanting to cover Jason for a really long time. Jason gets a bad rap these days, as well he should. I’d love to see The Toast do a “dirtbags” write-up of him. The basics of his story are well known; Euripides’ play Medea is for the most part one big shouting match between Jason and Medea, an ugly breakup scene where the former lovers snipe at each other and argue about who was worse to whom, so Medea is quick to hurl all of Jason’s offenses in his face. To hit the highlights: Jason travels from Greece to the ass-end of the world essentially because someone dared him to; the gods curse Medea (who lives in Ass-End-of-the-World-ville) to fall hopelessly in love with this dubious hero. In the course of winning Jason’s affections Medea ensures that she’ll never be able to go home again, but Jason offers to take her back to his home and protect her. They marry and have a few kids, but Medea is a foreigner, and the Greeks refuse to accept her or recognize the marriage--so a few years on, a king (in a deliberate slight against Medea) offers to let Jason marry his daughter. Suddenly Jason can’t abandon Medea fast enough. When Medea confronts Jason--this is the big shouting match that the audience of Medea gets to listen in on--she tears him apart for going back on his promises to protect her, for abandoning his wife and children in a hostile land, for prompting her to do all the horrible things (burglary, murder, dismemberment) that made her a wanted criminal in her hometown. Everyone hates her in Greece, so she can’t exactly open a Domino’s franchise or go on welfare like an accepted member of society; she has nowhere to go and no way to support herself. Jason, who is much less anxious about the future than Medea, defends himself with a number of questionable arguments, including, ‘Hey, it’s not MY fault you did all those horrible things,’ and (in a classic colonialist argument) ‘But you should be glad you made it to Greece, because you got to enjoy all the benefits of real civilization!’ As you may realize, my sympathies have always been with Medea, and I love the ending, where she remorselessly slays the patriarchy one by one, ascends onto her dragon chariot, and soars off to a grander destiny.

      Anyway, Euripides’ Medea doesn’t present a terribly sympathetic Jason; right at the beginning Medea calls him “pankakistos” (the worst of all, the worst man imaginable), and his characterization easily lives up to that. It’s easy to trash him in an article like this. But Euripides isn’t the only one who writes about Jason, and I thought before I wrote about him I should give Apollonius’ Argonautica a really thorough examination.

      The Argonautica is an epic about the voyage of the Argo, a magic ship in Greek myth (in the Argonautica, the Argo is a speaking character, although she doesn’t speak much--her big line, near the end of the epic, is to announce that Zeus is angry). Jason (something of an aimless youth, and much younger than I expected--when the story opens, he’s just beginning to show a beard) is sent on an errand to the middle of nowhere to recover a certain treasure for no very good reason. Uncertain of what dangers lay in store, and doubtful of his ability to complete the challenge alone, Jason assembles a team of adventurers to help him, each of whom has a specific talent--there’s the one who can run really fast, the one who can see really far, the twins who can fly, the one who can navigate perfectly, and a pile of others; the opening of the epic has a LONG expository section describing what’s so great about each individual. Jason himself is kind of glossed over in this section; his exceptional qualities are unspecified--or, one may suspect, nonexistent. Throughout the work, he’s referred to most commonly as “amechanos” (which means “ineffective” or “useless”), as well as “meleos” and “anenytos,” which have similar meanings--although he is specified to be quite pretty. He’s a delegator. When a challenge arises, he always gets one of his talented underlings to deal with it, and Medea becomes his most powerful underling of all--she has magic powers, and, afflicted as she is with a preternatural love, she’s willing to do anything Jason asks. So she lies, she steals, she murders her brother, she dismembers his body; she’s determined to marry Jason and that means that his mission must succeed at all costs.

      The Argonautica story stops once they arrive back in Jason’s hometown, so we never see how Jason rewards Medea for helping him, whether he will unceremoniously toss her aside as soon as the prospect of wealth and influence appears. Still, the Argonautica was written long after Euripides’ Medea, and given that background it almost seems like the author was trying to make Jason look bad. When Jason and Medea start plotting how to commit their crimes and how to get away scot-free, Jason makes a series of extravagant promises to Medea--promises that the reader knows that Jason is destined to break in Euripides’ version. For someone who knows Euripides, the Argonautica Jason comes off looking untrustworthy and worthless. There’s also a rather emasculating simile applied to Jason after he steals the treasure he wanted: the narrator says that Jason is as excited to get the Golden Fleece as a girl trying on a new dress--bear in mind that making slights against a man’s masculinity is rather a big deal in the author’s time. Reading the Argonautica, you can get the sense that the author doesn’t respect his own protagonist and is just sort of putting up with him. Maybe he was more interested in writing about Medea’s awesome powers, and he resented having to include Jason alongside. Maybe he felt that Medea was such a forceful and awe-inspiring personality that no man could make a conventional marriage with her. (In the afterlife she was supposed to have married Achilles, one of the most forceful--and, in my opinion, implacably petty--personalities in all of Greek myth; I’m glad I never had to sit next to them at an afterlife dinner party.) For whatever reason, Jason certainly comes off poorly throughout the epic. I still would recommend reading the Argonautica--there are some marvelous settings and some spectacular events--but read it for the journey, not for the hero.