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Ben Affleck is receiving all the plaudits for his latest film, Argo, a diplomatic thriller set in 1979 Iran just after the Islamic Revolution. What about the original Argo though? No, not the preposterous and non-existent 1979 sci-fi Persian fantasy upon which the 2012 picture is based. I mean the Argo as it comes down to us through the pages of ancient history and more pertinently, Greek mythology. Jason and his Argonauts sailed across the Aegean Sea in the Argo from Iolcos to retrieve the Golden Fleece from the city of Colchis. They encountered fearsome mythical beasts along the way and get some assistance from such names as Hercules and Orpheus en route. Everyone loves a good adventure and, boy, did the Greeks know how to craft a story – one that would be enjoyed and studied by Classics students millennia later. The ship took its name from its builder, the shipwright, Argus. In 2008 the story inspired the building of a modern-day Argo which was sailed around a number of sites in the Aegean with links to the ancient world. And there’s one more way we can pay homage to our classical Greek heritage before we lay the subject to rest. Pause for a moment and consider how a traveller in the Argo becomes and Argonaut. The oldest surviving and probably most canonical provenance of the myth is from the Argonautica, an epic poem by Apollonius of Rhodes in the third century BC. Then wind forward over two thousand years to a day when the Cosmos would invite Cosmonauts up to it from the USSR and astronauts up to it from the USA. So if I drive a Vauxhall Corsa does that make me a Corsanaut? Corsa not! But how much we have to thank our ancestors for. More on Argo and Ben Affleck
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Ben Affleck, Argo, Hollywood, Iran, greek mythology,
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