It was wonderful.
In the myth of Jason and the Argonauts, Jason doesn’t slay the Hydra. The Hydra belongs to one of the myths about Herakles. Jason does have to overcome the dragon that guards the Golden Fleece, but he never gets the chance. Medea sings the dragon to sleep so Jason can take the Fleece from the branches of the tree that the dragon is guarding.
Before this, however, Jason does have to deal with an army of men who spring up out of the ground, but it’s nothing like the movie version. When he asks King Aetes for the Fleece, the king tells him he must first yoke two fire-breathing bulls to a plow, till a field, and plant the furrows with dragon’s teeth. Sowing the teeth does cause a host of armed men to leap out of the earth, spoiling for a fight, but they’re not skeletons and they don’t get into a scary, thrilling battle with Jason and his men. Instead, heeding Medea’s advice, Jason throws a big stone into the midst of the dragon’s-teeth men as soon as they emerge from the ground. This makes them turn on one another, fighting among themselves until all are dead.
Was Harryhausen’s Jason and the Argonauts true to the myth? Not entirely. Did that matter to me and all the other people who were entertained by the movie over the years? No. And why should it? Sticking to the facts is important in many aspects of our lives, but myths aren’t facts. If truth be told—and it should be—wildly differing variations on the same story do exist in Greek mythology. There are at least three separate versions of Jason’s story, all of which disagree about who was and wasn’t a member of the Argo’s crew.
Helen’s own story isn’t immune to this. The best-known version has her carried off to Troy by Paris. Her husband, Menelaus, seeks help from his brother, Agamemnon of Mykenae, in getting her back. A huge Greek army is raised, but contrary winds prevent it from setting sail for Troy. To appease the angry god who sent the wind, Agamemnon sacrifices his own daughter, Iphigenia. The Greeks reach Troy and fight a war that lasts ten years. In the end they are triumphant and Helen is carried back to Sparta.
But that’s not the only way the story goes. Some versions have Helen running away with Paris voluntarily. Some say that Iphigenia, who died in order to buy the Greeks a favorable wind, was not the daughter of Agamemnon and Helen’s sister, Clytemnestra, but was actually the child of Theseus and Helen herself, born while Helen was his captive in Athens. As for Iphigenia herself, in one version of her story, she dies on the altar, but in another, the goddess Artemis replaces her with a deer and whisks her away to serve as her priestess in the far northern land of the Taurean tribe. Some accounts of Helen’s adventures report that she never even reached Troy. When Paris’s ship landed in Egypt, the Pharaoh found out that the Trojan prince had abducted another king’s wife. He did not approve and forced Paris to leave Helen behind to await the eventual arrival of her husband. Unfortunately, no one got the message to Menelaus, and the Trojan War went on with a phantom Helen, sent by the gods, as the prize.
So perhaps my story of Helen’s life before Troy doesn’t recount the myths exactly as we know them, but at least I’m in good company. And who’s to say it couldn’t have happened this way? Remember, myths aren’t history, and even the “truth” of history depends on who’s telling the story.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nebula Award winner STHER FRIESNER is the author of thirty-one novels and over 150 short stories, including “Thunderbolt” in Random House’s Young Warriors anthology, which led to her first novel about Helen, Nobody’s Princess. She is also the editor of seven popular anthologies. Her work has been published in the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, Germany, Russia, France, Poland, and Italy. She is also a published poet and a playwright and once wrote an advice column, “Ask Auntie Esther.” Her articles on fiction writing have appeared in Writer’s Market and other Writer’s Digest books.
Besides winning two Nebula Awards in succession for Best Short Story (1995 and 1996), she was a Nebula finalist three times, as well as a Hugo finalist. She received the Skylark Award from NESFA and the award for Most Promising New Fantasy Writer of 1986 from Romantic Times.
Ms. Friesner’s latest publications include the novel Temping Fate; a short story collection, Death and the Librarian and Other Stories; and Turn the Other Chick, fifth in the popular Chicks in Chainmail series, which she created and edits. She is currently working on a young adult novel about the great beauty Nefertiti, which carries on in the spirit of her Helen of Troy books.
Educated at Vassar College, receiving a BA in both Spanish and drama, she went on to receive her MA and PhD in Spanish from Yale University, where she taught for a number of years. She is married and the mother of two, harbors cats, and lives in Connecticut.