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Cook, Arthur B.
Zeus: a study in ancient religion (Band 1): Zeus god of the bright sky — Cambridge, 1914

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https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.14695#0318

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Medeia

245

words, Medeia changed her own looks from those of an old woman
to those of a maid, and further by means of her enchantments
caused the alleged serpents to appear in visible form. The king,
convinced of her powers, bade his daughters do whatever she com-
manded. Medeia came by night to the palace and ordered them
to boil the body of their sleeping father in a caldron. When they
demurred, she took an old ram, bred in the house, cut it limb from
limb, boiled its body, and by her magic art produced out of the
caldron the figure of a lamb. The maidens, thus persuaded, slew
their father, whom Medeia cut up and boiled. She then sent them
up to the palace-roof with torches, saying that she must offer a
prayer to Selene. The torches served as a fire-signal to the Argo-
nauts, who were lying in wait outside .the city. They at once
attacked it, overcame all resistance, and secured the palace. In
this romantic narrative Diodoros is following the Argonautai or
Argonautika of Dionysios Skytobrachion, an Alexandrine gram-
marian of the second century B.C.1 The snaky chariot is here that
of Artemis the moon-goddess, as on a copper coin of Aureliopolis
in Lydia, struck under Commodus, which shows Artemis with a
crescent moon on her head in a chariot drawn by two serpents2.
But Artemis, thinly disguised as Hekate3, is in this story made the
mother of Medeia and daughter of Helios. The serpent-chariot,
therefore, may have been either solar or lunar in its origin.

Ovid, after recounting the murder of Pelias, adds that Medeia
would have had to pay the penalty of her crime, had she not forth-
with mounted into the air on her winged snakes4 and made her
way by a devious track to Corinth. His version of her escape
seems modelled on the common account of her disappearance from
Corinth, not without some admixture of Triptolemos' tour.

As to what happened at Corinth, various tales were told5.
According to our oldest authority, Eumelos6, whose Korinthiaka
was composed about 740 B.C., Helios had by Antiope two sons,
Aloeus and Aietes: Helios gave Arkadia to the former, Corinth to

1 Pauly—Wissowa Real-Enc. v. 929 ff.

2 Rasche Lex. Num. i. 1350, viii. 7x3, Head Hist, num.'1 p. 659.

3 Diod. 4. 45 E/c dr^i'.. .tpiXoKvvTjyov.. AvOpdoirovs clvtl tQv dijpLwv KaraTo^etieLV ...ZireiT
'Apre/xidos iepbv idpyaafxev^v /ecu tovs narawXeovTas ^evovs dveadcu rrj detp Karadei^acrav £tt'
ih/xoT7]TL dLovo/AacrdrjvaL. Medeia herself was said to have founded a sanctuary of Artemis
on one of the islands in the Adriatic, whither Iason had sailed vid the river Istros !
(Aristot. mir. ausc. 105).

4 Ov. met. 7. 350 f. quod nisi pennatis serpentibus isset in auras | non exempla foret
poenae. fugit alta etc.

5 These are collected and discussed by K. Seeliger in Roscher Lex. Myth. ii. 2492 ff.

6 Eumel. frag. 2, 3, 4 Kinkel.
 
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