turned their weapons one against the other, till they all perished. After this he went to the dragon and by means of enchanted herbs, and a draught which Medea had given him he lulled the monster to sleep, and obtained the golden fleece, and immediately set sail with Medea. He was soon pursued by Absyrtus the king’s son, who came up to them, and was seized and murdered by Jason and Medea. The mangled limbs of Absyrtus were strewed in the way through which Æetes was to pass, that his further pursuit might be stopped. After the murder of Absyrtus, they entered the Palus Mæotis, and by pursuing their course towards the left, according to the foolish account of poets who were ignorant of geography, they came to the island Peucestes, and to that of Circe. Here Circe informed Jason that the cause of all his calamities arose from the murder of Absyrtus, of which she refused to expiate him. Soon after, they entered the Mediterranean by the columns of Hercules, and passed the straits of Charybdis and Scylla, where they must have perished, had not Tethys the mistress of Peleus, one of the Argonauts, delivered them. They were preserved from the Sirens by the eloquence of Orpheus, and arrived in the island of the Phæacians, where they met the enemy’s fleet, which had continued their pursuit by a different course. It was therefore resolved that Medea should be restored, if she had not been actually married to Jason; but the wife of Alcinous the king of the country, being appointed umpire between the Colchians and Argonauts, had the marriage privately consummated by night, and declared that the claims of Æetes to Medea were now void. From Phæacia the Argonauts came to the bay of Ambracia, whence they were driven by a storm upon the coast of Africa, and, after many disasters, at last came in sight of the promontory of Melea in the Peloponnesus, where Jason was purified of the murder of Absyrtus, and soon after arrived safe in Thessaly. The impracticability of such a voyage is well known. Apollonius Rhodius gives another account, equally improbable. He says that they sailed from the Euxine up one of the mouths of the Danube, and that Absyrtus pursued them by entering another mouth of the river. After they had continued their voyage for some leagues, the waters decreased, and they were obliged to carry the ship Argo across the country to the Adriatic, upwards of 150 miles. Here they met with Absyrtus, who had pursued the same measures, and conveyed his ships in like manner over the land. Absyrtus was immediately put to death; and soon after the beam of Dodona [_See:_ Argo] gave an oracle, that Jason should never return home if he was not previously purified of the murder. Upon this they sailed to the island of Æa, where Circe, who was the sister of Æetes, expiated him without knowing who he was. There is a third tradition, which maintains that