Absyrtus
Absyrtos (also Absyrtus , Apsyrt , Apsyrtides , Apsyrtos ; Greek Ἄψυρτος or Ἄξυρτος ) is a figure from the Greek Argonaut legend .
He was the son of King Aeetes of Colchis ; There are different statements about his mother - the nymphs Asterodeia , Eurylyte , the nereid Neaira or Hecate are called. He had two half-sisters, Chalkiope and Medea .
There are two versions of his death, each of which has several variants by different authors. Medea had helped Jason and the Argonauts get the Golden Fleece and fled with them. In the better-known version of Ovid , Medea took her brother, who was still a child, with her on the run. To stop King Aietes and the persecutors, she killed and dismembered her brother and scattered the pieces. Aietes collected the body parts of his son in order to be able to bury him. This delay enabled the Argonauts to escape. In variants of this version, Absyrtos is later thrown by the Argo into the sea or into the Phasis, today's Rioni River , in order to stop the pursuers.
In the second, earlier version of Apollonios of Rhodes , Absyrtos was already a man who was sent by his father with a fleet to bring back the Golden Fleece - or in a variant Medea. After a long persecution, Absyrtos caught up with the Argonauts at the mouth of the Ister (today's Danube ), which according to the ideas of the time was a connection to the Adriatic . Medea tricked her brother into negotiating and Jason killed him in ambush. According to legend, the corpse was washed up on the beach of an archipelago - the apsyrtids named after him with the main island of Cres off Croatia . According to another reading he was killed or buried there; Another variant reports that the Kolchians settled there, who did not dare to return to Colchis after an unsuccessful mission.
literature
- Benjamin Hederich : Absyrtus. In: Thorough mythological lexicon. Gleditsch, Leipzig 1770 (available online at textlog.org , accessed on January 23, 2011)
- Wilhelm Heinrich Roscher, Konrad Seeliger : Absyrtos . In: Wilhelm Heinrich Roscher (Hrsg.): Detailed lexicon of Greek and Roman mythology . Volume 1,1, Leipzig 1886, column 3 f. ( Digitized version ).
- Konrad Wernicke : Apsyrtos 1 . In: Paulys Realencyclopadie der classischen Antiquity Science (RE). Volume II, 1, Stuttgart 1895, Col. 284-286.
- Michael Grant , John Hazel: Lexicon of ancient myths and figures in one volume. Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, Munich 1986 (4th edition), p. 60.
Web links
- Absyrtos in the Greek Myth Index (English)
- The death of Apsyrtos with Gustav Schwab in The most beautiful sagas of classical antiquity , Part I, Book II: The Argonauts, pursued, escaped with Medea (accessed on January 23, 2011)