Legendary Passages #0075 -RELAUNCH- The Argonauts, from Diodorus. Welcome to Legendary Passages, a thrice weekly podcast about Greek and Roman classical mythology. My name is Joel; I have been doing this podcast for several years now. I have always loved science fiction and fantasy and comic-book super-heroes, as well as history and religion, so I searched far and wide for podcasts about the old Greek heroes. There were a few gems like 'Mythology Translated', and 'The Myths and History of Greece and Rome', but none that featured the ancient texts themselves, aside from LibriVox. The problem with reading classical mythology texts verbatim is that most of them are anthologies. Here's an overview of Theseus; Hercules performed his fourth labor here; the founder of this city was an Argonaut and sent his sons to the Trojan War, and so on. What we call mythology was their religion and common knowledge. Imagine future scholars coming across references to tooth fairies and easter bunnies, or Spider-Man or Darth Vader, and trying to figure out what the heck we were talking about. The contexts and the stories are all but lost. Now, the stories are what I am interested in. My hope is to reconstruct something resembling the lost epics by presenting every known version of specific adventures in a rough chronological order. Between the similarities and the differences between the texts, perhaps we can gleam a whisper of the histories that Greeks and Romans looked back on as the bedrock of their civilizations. These passages give us a window onto their culture, their own sense of history, and the beginnings of Western Civilization. Now, the original incarnation of this podcast began with the best of intentions. I was doing research for books I was going to write about the origins and adventures of Hercules and Theseus, and their going on the voyage of the Argonauts. I was trying to sync up the timelines for their adventures, but I couldn't keep all the details in my head. Hence, this podcast. We started off with the early adventures Hercules, then Theseus, then Minos and Crete. But then I went back to re-edit and 'improve' the original episodes, and added more stuff on Hercules, an overview of the Argonauts, more Theseus, lots and lots more Hercules.... and it all became a messy anthology, just like the original texts. So for the foreseeable future, instead of organizing stories in groups of six, we will hear more long-form story-based collections of twenty-five passages each, starting with this one. The episodes will still be less than fifteen minutes long, but I will try to put them out three times a week, ideally publishing twelve a month. The larger scope will give better sense of where we are going, and more incentive for me to put them out regularly. With the bigger format, I can now fit in actual drama and plays. I hope to recruit others to participate, otherwise I'm just talking to myself. I will also be redoing previous episodes, likely with breaks in different places, just to keep the overall narrative intact. For the next twenty-five episodes, we will journey with Jason and the Argonauts, steal Medea and the Golden Fleece, return home to a kingdom in crisis, reenact the tragedy of Medea in Corinth, and end up in Athens just in time for the next twenty-five episodes on Theseus. This passage explores the multiple origins of the Golden Fleece, reveals that murder and dark magic run in Medea's family, and shows just how Jason stole the fleece and why Medea was willing to help him do it. http://www.theoi.com/Text/DiodorusSiculus4C.html#6 The Argonauts, a Legendary Passage from, DIODORUS SICULUS, LIBRARY OF HISTORY, BOOK IV. Sections 45 - 48, trans. by C. H. OLDFATHER. [4.45.1] - [4.48.5] AEETES, HECATE AND CIRCE Since it is the task of history to inquire into the reasons for this slaying of strangers, we must discuss these reasons briefly, especially since the digression on this subject will be appropriate in connection with the deeds