Argo

Also Known As: Greek Argo, from Argos, the name of her builder; the adjective argos also carries the sense of swift and of bright or gleaming, and later writers played on both
Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Greek Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Mythological Objects
Mythical Attributes: A fifty-oared ship carrying a beam of prophetic oak from the sanctuary of Zeus at Dodona, set into her stem, which spoke aloud with a human voice.
Role in Mythos: She carried Jason and the assembled heroes of Greece from Thessaly to Colchis and home again by a route no one had sailed, and she argued with her crew along the way.
Relation to Humans: Mortals built her, rowed her, and once carried her bodily across a desert on their shoulders when there was no water under her. She also had opinions about who was fit to sail in her, and in one telling she killed the man who commissioned her.

The pines came down off Mount Pelion still smelling of resin, and by the time Argus had finished with them they had become something no shipwright could quite account for. Fifty oars. A hull light enough that fifty men could later lift it clear of the ground, and strong enough to take seas nobody in Greece had names for yet. Athena stood over the work. Apollonius says she laid the keel-props herself and taught the shipwright how to measure with the rule, which is the sort of detail that sounds like flattery until you remember what the ship went on to do.

There were two men called Argus in the ancient accounts and the sources never settled which one built her. Apollonius makes him Argus son of Arestor, a Greek craftsman who came down to the beach at Pagasae with the rest. Apollodorus makes him Argus son of Phrixus, born in Colchis, grandson of the king whose fleece the voyage was going to steal. Both agree on the rest of the sentence: he built a ship of fifty oars by Athena’s counsel, and it was named after him.

The strange thing went in last. Athena brought a beam from the oracular oak of Zeus at Dodona, where priests read the future in the noise of leaves, and set it into the middle of the stem. Apollodorus puts it at the prow and calls it a speaking timber. Apollonius calls it a divine beam. Either way, a working piece of the ship’s structure was also a piece of a functioning oracle, and it was load-bearing in both senses.

Getting her into the water took the whole crew. They dug the trench deeper in front of the stem, laid polished rollers in the furrow, and tipped her down onto them. The rollers groaned under the keel and dark smoke rose off them where the wood chafed, and the harbour at Pagasae gave out a strange cry as she went. Then Heracles came aboard and the keel sank noticeably deeper, which everyone noticed and nobody said anything about at the time.

That detail turned into a story of its own. Pherecydes held that the Argo was left at Aphetae in Thessaly with Heracles standing on the beach, because the ship had announced in a human voice that she could not carry his weight. Other writers put him in Mysia instead, looking for a drowned boy. Apollodorus lists all the versions without choosing, which is what an honest compiler does when the record refuses to agree with itself.

The voice came properly into its own on the way home. After the murder of Apsyrtus the Argonauts were driven back onto the rocky isle of Electra by storm winds, and out of the dark, in the middle of their course, the beam of the hollow ship spoke. It told them of the wrath of Zeus. It told them they would not escape the endless sea or the tempests until Circe had purged the blood off them, and it instructed Castor and Polydeuces on which gods to pray to. Deadly fear seized the crew as they listened. They were being lectured by their own woodwork, and they obeyed.

Her strangest hour came in Libya. A north wind carried her onto the shoals of Syrtis where the tide went out and left her sitting on hoary sand with no sea in reach, and the heroes lay down among the dunes expecting to die there. Three goddesses of the country told them what to do. They put the ship on their shoulders and walked, carrying her and everything in her across the desert for twelve days and twelve nights before they found water again. Apollonius declines to describe the pain of it and simply says nobody could tell it.

What she could do followed from what she was. She was fast, she was seaworthy past anything then afloat, she could be portaged by her own crew when the sea failed, and she could tell her people what was coming and what it would cost. What she could not do followed from the same fact. She was wood. Divinely built, divinely advised, and still wood, subject to salt and worm and time like every other hull ever laid down.

Diodorus has Jason bring her at last to the Isthmus of the Peloponnese, sacrifice to Poseidon, and dedicate the ship to the god. Then she sat. Years passed and the timbers went. According to Staphylos, quoted in the ancient commentary on Euripides’ Medea, Medea urged Jason to lie down and sleep under the Argo’s stern when the ship was on the verge of falling apart from age, and the stern came down on him and he died. Not the prow, and not an accident. The ship he had commanded finished him while he slept in her shade, at his wife’s suggestion.

Hyginus gives her the better ending. She was set among the stars, and only half of her is up there: the forepart, from the stern to the mast, sailing across the southern sky with the rest of her hull missing. Astronomers eventually broke the constellation into a keel, a stern and a set of sails, which is the only time in the history of the sky that a ship has been dismantled for being too large.

Frequently Asked Questions

What was the Argo?

The Argo was the ship that carried Jason and the Argonauts from Thessaly to Colchis to fetch the Golden Fleece. She was a pentekonter, an open galley with fifty oars, built of pine from Mount Pelion. Her defining feature was a beam of oak from the oracle of Zeus at Dodona, fitted into her stem, which could speak.

Who built the Argo?

A shipwright named Argus built her under the guidance of Athena, and the ship was named after him. The ancient sources disagree about which Argus: Apollonius of Rhodes makes him Argus son of Arestor, while Apollodorus makes him Argus son of Phrixus, who was born in Colchis. Apollonius adds that Athena laid the keel-props herself and taught the builder how to measure with the rule.

Could the Argo really talk?

Yes, through a single prophetic timber. Athena took a beam from the sacred oak of Zeus at Dodona and set it into the middle of the ship’s stem, and that beam spoke aloud with a human voice. Its most famous speech came after the murder of Apsyrtus, when it warned the crew of the wrath of Zeus and told them they had to be purified by Circe before they could get home.

How did Jason die?

In the version credited to the historian Staphylos, Medea persuaded Jason to sleep beneath the stern of the Argo when the ship was already rotting with age, and the stern fell on him and killed him. The account is preserved in the ancient commentary attached to Euripides’ Medea. Diodorus says Jason had earlier dedicated the ship to Poseidon at the Isthmus, which is why she was sitting there to fall on him.

Is the Argo a constellation?

Yes. Hyginus records that the ship was placed among the stars after the voyage, and notes that only half of her is visible there, the forepart running from the stern to the mast. The constellation was later divided by astronomers into three separate ones representing the keel, the stern and the sails.