Argonauts’ return journey in the <i> Orphic Argonautica</i>: from the Phasis to the Tanais
Lines 1036-1058 of the Orphic Argonautica are studied in the article in the context of the tradition of the Argonauts’ return journeys from Aeaetes’ kingdom. The author arrives at the conclusion that the navigation of the Argonauts in the Phasis in this poem goes back to an archaic source (probably the Orphic Argonautica of 6 BC) where this river served the Argonauts as a way of escape to the Ocean in the east, while in the preceding part of the narration the poet followed Apollonius’ Argonautica and in the subsequent part he drew upon the tradition going back to Timaeus, according to which the Argonauts sailed up the Tanais to the northern Ocean. This is why in the presentation of the Phasis in OA the traits of the two rivers - the archaic Phasis and the Apollonius’ Phasis - are combined. The particularities of the archaic Phasis may be detected in the following features: 1) its banks are inhabited by the tribes of Cercetae and Sindoi; 2) it is connected with both the Cimmerius Bosporus and the Maeotian lake (by the branch called Saranges); 3) the Caucasus is situated on the Phasis and Erytheia is described as a valley or a gorge nearby where the Phasis flows; 4) the latter may be interpreted as a goal of Hercules’ trip to the East in the myth about Hercules and the cattle of Geryon, which undergoes a remarkable geographical expansion during the Archaic age when it began to include Italy, Thrace up to the Hellespont, and even Scythia (the mention of Hercules’ crossing of the Cimmerian Bosporus on a bull at OA 1056-58 also points to this tradition). This interpretation of Caucasian Erytheia on the Phasis would agree with the role of archaic Phasis as the channel connected to the Ocean in the east and symmetrical to the Pillars of Hercules in the west. These facts allow the author to hypothesize that the archaic Phasis was the river Kuban, to which many other data point independently.