Ere Jason, afire for their helping, came: no need of his aid
Had they; nay rather for him by this were their hearts afraid.
Thereafter they sat them down to devise for their voyaging
Deep counsel; and, yet as they mused, stole into the midst of the ring
The maiden. And Peleus resolved him the first, and he spake the thing:
“Now call I upon you to enter up into the ship, and to row
Cleaving your sea-path onward, while yet it is night, and the foe
Tarry; for when with the dawn they shall see and be ware of their plight,
There is no man, I trust me, who, bidding them follow the track of your flight,
Shall win them to hearken a word; but, as folk of their king bereft,
With grievous dissension shall these, and with faction, asunder be cleft.
Wherefore our path henceforward—when sundered our foemen are
Each from his fellow—to Hellas home shall be easier far.”
He spake, and the young men praised the counsel of Aiakus’ child;
And they entered the ship with haste, and they grasped the oars, and they toiled
Without rest, till they won by the sacred isle of Elektra—the same
Of the eyots is highest—and so to the river Eridanus came.
Now the Kolchians, so soon as the doom of their murdered king they knew,
Eager were they for Argo to search and her Minyan crew
Through all the Kronian Sea: but Hêrê held them back
By terrible lightnings that flashed evermore from the cloudy rack,
That they shuddered at last when they thought on their homes in Kytaia-land,
And quailed for Aiêtes’ wrath, and a king’s avenging hand.
So went they ashore, and abiding homes in the land they made
Far-scattered; for some set foot on the selfsame isles where stayed
The heroes;—the name of Absyrtus yet do the islanders bear;—
By the river Illyrican’s darkling depths did others rear
A tower-girt burg where the tomb of Harmonia and Kadmus doth stand:
With Enchelean men do they dwell: and some in the mountain-land
Amidst of the ridges abide which the Crests of Thunder they call
Since the day when crashed the thunders of Zeus their souls to appal,
That they crossed not over the flood to the isle, on the heroes to fall.
Now these, when they weened that the home-return’s grim peril was past,
Who had gotten so far on now, made Argo’s hawsers fast
To the strand Hyllaian; for thick in the river the eyots lie,
And a troublous track they make it for them that would voyage thereby.
And the folk Hyllaian devised not their hurt, as in that past day:
Nay, rather they did their endeavour to help them forth on their way.
And they won for their guerdon the mighty tripod Apollo gave.
For tripods twain had Phoebus bestowed, far over the wave
To be borne in the Quest of Aison’s son, when to Pytho’s shrine
He wended, to ask touching this same voyage the purpose divine.
And this was their weird, that in whatso land those tripods were placed,
That land no foes breaking in thereupon should prevail to waste.
Wherefore in that land yet by Hyllê’s pleasant town
That tripod abideth, hidden beneath the earth deep down,
That the talisman so may continue of men unseen for aye.
Howbeit their king no longer alive in the land found they,
Even Hyllus, whom Melitê lovely-faced unto Herakles bare
In Phaeacia-land; for of old to the halls did the hero fare
Of Nausithous and Makris, the nurse of the God Dionysus: defiled
With the blood of his children, he came to be cleansed. There saw he the child
Of Aigaius the river, even the Naiad Melitê:
And he loved her, and humbled the maid, and Hyllus the strong bare she
In Phaeacia-land. And he dwelt in Nausithous’ halls awhile,
Being yet but a little one: but he left thereafter the isle.
For, as waxed within him his might, he brooked no longer to stay
At a king’s beck there in the island that owned Nausithous’ sway.
But he fared to the Kronian Sea, and a host of her sons forth led
From Phaeacia-land: yea, also the king his journeying sped,
The hero Nausithous. There did he stablish his home, and was slain
Defending his kine from the Mentors, the rovers of the main.
Now, Goddesses, tell how Argo’s wondrous ensign came
Without this sea, by Ausonia-land, and the isles men name
The “Long Row,” lone sea-cradles that nurse a Ligurian seed—
How stood clear forth mid-sea—what strong constraint, what need
Thitherward led her, what breezes they were that wafted her speed.
’Twas, I ween, when Absyrtus had fallen in mighty overthrow,
That the wrath of Zeus, the King of the Gods, for their deed was aglow.
Yet he ordained the transgressors to cleanse them of murder’s stain
By the counsels of Circê, and so, after measureless travail and pain,
Home to return; yet this of the princes did no man know.
But they sped, when the land Hyllaian sank on the sea-marge low,
Afar; and they left behind them the isles that were thronged erewhile
With the Kolchians, isle Liburnian ranged in the sea after isle,
Issa, Dyskeladus, then Pityeia’s lovely shore.
So passed they these, and overagainst Kerkyra they bore.
There was it Poseidon caused Asôpus’ daughter to rest,
When by reason of love he wafted Kerkyra the beautiful-tressed
From the land of Phlius afar: and mariners marking it swell
Blackening up from the sea, while all about it fell
The folds of its darkling forests, named it Kerkyra the Black.
Thence sped they by Melitê, glad for the breeze blowing soft on their track.
By Kerôsus the steep, and, far in the offing and faint as it showed,
By Nymphaia they fleeted, the isle where the Lady Kalypso abode,
The daughter of Atlas: and misty and doubtful appeared to their ken
The Crests of Thunder. And known unto Hêrê even then
Were the counsels of Zeus concerning these, and his mighty wrath.
Yet devised she how that great voyage should prosper, and full in their path
Uproused she against them the storm-winds, which caught them, and backward swept
To Elektra’s rocky isle. But, from surge unto surge as they leapt,
Suddenly heard they a beam with a man’s voice cry unto them
Out of the hollow ship, the which in the midst of the stem
Athênê had set—it was hewn from an oak in Dodona that grew;
And deadliest fear laid hold upon them as
