Hercules, My Shipmate

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Summary: Fun, informative and fast read
Review: If you are able to put this book down, you are not a lover of Greek myth or a cracking good story. Robert Graves has woven together myth, humor and storytelling mastery to give us one of his all time best reads.

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Summary: Wonderfully erudite hist. novel; gives the old Greeks life.
Review: If you like Greek myth, adventure and the classics, you can't fail to love this book. Graves, a renowned poet and classicist (and rather eccentric iconoclast) here retells the myth of Jason and the Argonauts, bringing these rather rambunctious fellows to life in a manner which is surprising, yet wholly consistent with the original material. Putting his own gloss on the mythic times celebrated afterwards in classical Greece and Rome, Graves posits a culture of ancient origin in the Mediteranean, totemic and cult-like, onto which the pantheon of the sky gods of the invading Greek tribes was subsequently grafted. To Graves, the myths handed down to the classical writers (and which they preserved and elaborated on and then handed on to us) reflected the clash of these two religious views. The mythic creatures we came to know as centaurs, nymphs, etc., would have been people not unlike ourselves, but affiliated with one or another of the ancient cults (rooted in belief in the divinity of the ancient "triple goddess"). Like primitive tribesmen in many societies, these folk built their lives around their ritualistic practices and fetishes. The centaurs are called such, for instance, because they lived in fraternal clans in semi-primitive conditions revering the centaur totem and mating with this or that college of nymphs, as the need arises and in accordance with the ritualistic requirements of the times. The institution of marriage (considered an affront to the "triple goddess") is brought in by the sky peoples from the north -- those who would later bcome the Greeks known to classical antiquity, after these had supplanted and absorbed the older peoples they found in the territory they conquered. So this tale is set in the time when the two peoples were first encountering one another and is presented as a conflict which grew out of the tension between the differing religious views and backgrounds. In this context, the story tracks Jason as he raises a crew to reclaim a fleece trimmed with gold which was sacred to the new god Zeus, but which had apparently been spirited away by adherents of the triple goddess. Jason, rather unprepossessing as a hero though a remarkably handsome fellow, pulls into his orbit many of the great heroes and most accomplished adventurers of his day, including the mighty Hercules -- a rather likeable, if brutish, lout who gets by on his prodigious strength and amazing good luck. But Hercules doesn't make it through the entire voyage (his attention span is not overly long). He becomes sidetracked in a search for Hylas, his adopted son (taken after he killed the boy's parents), when Hylas makes his getaway. (Hercules seems to have had a more than fatherly interest in the boy, which doesn't sit well with Hylas when he discovers the beauteous possibilities to be had in a local college of nymphs.) But the Argonauts press on, without Hercules (in fact they have conspired to abandon him in order to save themselves from his clumsy and dangerous excesses), and navigate the Black Sea to the land of Colchis where the fleece is kept. There they engage in all the appropriate deceptions in order to steal the prize from under the unwitting eyes of the Colchians (aided by the Colchian king's daughter Medea who is quite smitten with the handsome, if inconstant, Jason). The rest of the tale recounts their escape and the killings they must involve themselves in to make good their theft and the ritualized atonements they must make thereafter. Graves manages to convey a sense of the magical and mysterious without resort to the clumsy mythological creatures of ancient Greek tale, by relying on the mystic elements of the ancient religions his characters practiced (whether of the old or new variety). No one gets turned into a beast except metaphorically, and perhaps in spirit, and the biggest monster seems to be an overlarge Python which the Colchians kept to guard their purloined fleece -- or perhaps it is Hercules himself. Even the Hellenes are presented in a fetchingly realistic manner when we see these blonde, blue-eyed men painting their bodies and doing a sort of war dancing on the beach, before they embark on the first leg of their journey, or when we watch them posturing and posing like so many primitives in the flush of battle. Women get treated rather well in this context since the older society is matriarchal in nature and dominated by various powerful priestesses and nymphs. The tale is driven as much by the interplay of the many fascinating characters (Orpheus the clever musician and adept of the triple goddess, Atalanta the virgin warrior and her various suitors, on board the Argo and off) as by the adventure of the quest itself. And the end takes the surviving players through to their respective fates, always consistent with the characters they have shown themselves in the course of their adventures to be. It may seem overly long to the contemporary reader in some parts and somewhat episodic, but it takes us back to a time which may really have been and gives us a slant on things which we don't ordinarily get from a straight reading of the classics. -- Stuart W. Mirsky ([e-mail]

Rating:
Summary: One of the best in mythology
Review: When i was in Cuba around the year 1982, i read this book in the Spanish language(i didn't know English at that time); as part of a course of preparation for my Law carrer, i still remember vividly the passages of this unforgetable vogage. It was the content, not the material of the book what impressed me. In my opinion if i read it now i will find it more interesting. In other words, if we take serious all this adventures our values will be the first things in every time in our lives.