![]() His uncle Pelias had seized his father’s kingdom, and Jason was borne away to the mountains by night and given, wrapped in a purple robe, to Chiron, the Centaur. Jason, son of Aeson, King of Iôlcos, in Thessaly, began his life in exile. He takes them almost for granted, and pierces through them to the sheer tragedy that lies below. Our poet knows the wildness and the beauty but it is not these qualities that he specially seeks. The wildness and beauty of the Argo legend run through all Greek literature, from the mass of Corinthian lays older than our present Iliad, which later writers vaguely associate with the name of Eumêlus, to the Fourth Pythian Ode of Pindar and the beautiful Argonautica of Apollonius Rhodius. ![]() ![]() For all but the very highest of romances are apt to have just one flaw somewhere, and in the story of Jason and Medea the flaw was of a fatal kind. It deals, so to speak, not with the romance itself, but with the end of the romance, a thing which is so terribly often the reverse of romantic. ![]() The Medea, in spite of its background of wonder and enchantment, is not a romantic play but a tragedy of character and situation. ![]()
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