Æêtês, profoundly exasperated at the flight of the Argonauts with his daughter, assembled his forces forthwith, and put to sea in pursuit of them. So energetic were his efforts that he shortly overtook the retreating vessel, when the Argonauts again owed their safety to the stratagem of Mêdea. She killed her brother Apsyrtus, cut his body in pieces and strewed the limbs round about in the sea. Æêtês on reaching the spot found these sorrowful traces of his murdered son; but while he tarried to collect the scattered fragments, and bestow upon the body an honorable interment, the Argonauts escaped.[569] The spot on which the unfortunate Apsyrtus was cut up received the name of Tomi.[570] This fratricide of Mêdea, however, so deeply provoked the indignation of Zeus, that he condemned the Argô and her crew to a trying voyage, full of hardship and privation, before she was permitted to reach home. The returning heroes traversed an immeasurable length both of sea and of river: first up the river Phasis into the ocean which flows round the earth—then following the course of that circumfluous stream until its junction with the Nile,[571] they came down the Nile into Egypt, from whence they carried the Argô on their shoulders by a fatiguing land-journey to the lake Tritônis in Libya. Here they were rescued from the extremity of want and exhaustion by the kindness of the local god Tritôn, who treated them hospitably, and even presented to Euphêmus a clod of earth, as a symbolical promise that his descendants should one day found a city on the Libyan shore. The promise was amply redeemed by the flourishing and powerful city of Kyrênê,[572] whose princes the Battiads boasted themselves as lineal descendants of Euphêmus. [569] This is the story of Apollodôrus (i. 9, 24), who seems to follow Pherekydês (Fr. 73, Didot). Apollônius (iv. 225-480) and Valerius Flaccus (viii. 262 _seq._) give totally different circumstances respecting the death of Apsyrtus; but the narrative of Pherekydês seems the oldest: so revolting a story as that of the cutting up of the little boy cannot have been imagined in later times. Sophoklês composed two tragedies on the adventures of Jasôn and Mêdea, both lost—the Κολχίδες and the Σκύθαι. In the former he represented the murder of the child Apsyrtus as having taken place in the house of Æêtês: in the latter he introduced the mitigating circumstance, that Apsyrtus was the son of Æêtês by a different mother from Mêdea (Schol. Apollôn Rhod. iv. 223). [570] Apollodôr. i. 9, 24, τὸν τόπον προσηγόρευσε Τόμους. Ovid. Trist. iii. 9. The story that Apsyrtus was cut in pieces, is the etymological legend explanatory of the name Tomi.