The Argonauts, after entering the Black Sea, sailed due east, to the mouth of the river Phasis, now the Rione. Æetes, the king, promised to give Jason the fleece upon certain conditions. These he was enabled to fulfil by the aid of Medea, a sorceress, and daughter of Æetes. They then fled together to Greece. The route followed by the Argonauts upon their return is differently given by the various poets who have told the story and the commentators who have illustrated it. By one they are represented as sailing up some river across the continent to the Baltic, and thence homeward along the coasts of France and Spain, and through the Straits of Gibraltar. It is needless to say that there is no river which flows between the Euxine and the Baltic. Other tracks laid down are equally preposterous in the eyes of modern geography. Herodotus adopts the tradition that they returned by the same way they went,--the only way, indeed, they could have returned,--by water. The reader, in view of the romantic embellishments with which this story is loaded, and of the strong doubts resting upon it as an historical event, must choose, from among the various theories, we have given, the one he deems the most satisfactory. One generation after the date we have assigned to this expedition occurred the Trojan War. In the year 1194 B.C., all the Greek states, with Agamemnon at their head, united to revenge the insult offered to Menelaus, King of Sparta, by the Trojan prince Paris, who had carried off the king's wife Helen. During the interval the Greeks, if the Homeric account is to be believed, had made great advances in the arts of ship-building and navigation; for in a very short time eleven hundred and fifty ships were collected at Aulis, the general rendezvous. The Boeotians furnished fifty, and the other states contributed in proportion. Each of them contained one hundred and twenty warriors; they must therefore have been vessels of considerable magnitude. All the ships are described as having masts which could be taken down as occasion required. The sail could only be used when the wind was directly astern. The delicate art of sailing in the wind's eye, or of making to the north with a north wind, was not yet understood. The principal propelling power lay in the oars, which turned in leathern thongs as a key in its hole. Homer represents the ships to have been black, from the color of the pitch with which they were smeared. The sides near the prow were often painted red, whence vessels are sometimes called by the poets red-cheeked. On their arrival upon the Trojan coast, the Greeks drew their fleet up on the land and anchored them by means of large stones. They then surrounded them with fortifications, to protect them from the enemy.