The Story of the Symplegades

At a Glance

Central figures: Jason, leader of the Argonauts on the quest for the Golden Fleece; the blind prophet Phineus, who reveals how to survive the rocks; and the crew of the Argo, including Heracles, Orpheus, Atalanta, and Castor and Pollux.
Setting: The entrance to the Bosporus strait, the narrow passage between the Aegean Sea and the Black Sea; from the Argonautica, the Greek epic of Jason’s voyage to Colchis.
The turn: Phineus instructs Jason to release a dove before attempting the passage - if the bird makes it through, the crew must row immediately in its wake.
The outcome: The Argo passes safely, its stern barely grazed by the closing rocks; the Symplegades, having failed to crush a ship, become fixed and immobile forever after.
The legacy: The passage through the Symplegades opened the route to the Black Sea for all sailors who followed - and the rocks that once destroyed every vessel that approached them never moved again.

The Symplegades, the Clashing Rocks, stood at the narrowest point of the passage between the Aegean and the Black Sea - two enormous, jagged masses that would smash together without warning, destroying anything that tried to pass between them. No ship had ever made it through intact. Sailors who had seen the rocks from a distance, who had watched the spray burst upward when the faces collided, understood the passage for what it was: not a challenge, but a death sentence. Jason and the Argonauts, midway through their voyage to Colchis in search of the Golden Fleece, had no choice but to attempt it anyway.

The Heroes Aboard the Argo

The ship itself was not ordinary. The Argo had been built with timber from the speaking oaks of Dodona, and her crew was the greatest assembly of heroes Greece had ever put to sea. Heracles was aboard, and Orpheus, whose lyre could calm the water when the storms turned bad. Atalanta was there, and the twins Castor and Pollux. Jason had gathered them for a single purpose: to reach Colchis, recover the Golden Fleece - the shimmering pelt of a divine ram, hung in a sacred grove and guarded by a dragon that never slept - and return with it to Iolcus, the throne of which was his by right.

The voyage from Iolcus to the Black Sea was not a single passage through open water. It was a series of obstacles, each more brutal than the last. The Symplegades waited at the threshold.

Phineus and the Harpies

Before they reached the rocks, the Argonauts put ashore at the land of a blind prophet named Phineus. He was old, and half-starved, and the reason for his condition was immediately visible: whenever a meal was set before him, the Harpies descended - filthy, screeching, winged creatures - and snatched the food away, fouling whatever they left behind. Phineus had been reduced to eating scraps, and those few scraps contaminated. The Argonauts drove the Harpies off, and in return Phineus offered them something worth more than the hospitality he could no longer provide.

He told them about the Symplegades. Not in vague warnings, the way sailors spoke of the rocks around campfires, but precisely, practically: what the rocks did, when they moved, and what the one method was of surviving the passage.

The Release of the Dove

The advice was this: take a dove and release it at the mouth of the strait. Watch it fly. The rocks, as they always do, will move to crush it. If the bird gets through - even clipped, even barely - then row. Row with everything the crew has, the moment the rocks begin to part again, and do not slow.

If the dove does not make it through, turn back.

Jason anchored the Argo at the entrance to the Bosporus and held the bird in both hands for a moment before releasing it. The dove climbed, leveled off, and flew directly between the two faces of rock. The Symplegades slammed together. The sound was enormous. Then the rocks drew apart again, grinding, and the crew saw the bird come out the other side - missing the tips of its tail feathers, nothing more.

Jason gave the order.

The Passage

The Argonauts threw themselves onto the oars. Orpheus set the rhythm on his lyre and the crew locked into it, pulling in time, the Argo accelerating across the gray water toward the gap between the rocks. The Symplegades had already begun to move again - the faces drawing together, slowly at first and then faster.

The ship shot through.

The rocks closed behind them. The stern of the Argo caught the impact - a graze, an instant of contact, enough to shear wood from the tail of the ship. But the hull held. The oars were still in the water. The crew was alive.

They came out into the Black Sea with the sound of the rocks still resonating behind them, the echo carrying across the water long after the strait had dropped below the horizon.

The Rocks Go Still

The Symplegades did not move again. There is a specific condition in the myth: the rocks would only remain a living danger as long as they had never failed to destroy a vessel. The Argo had passed through. That had never happened before. The two great masses settled into place at the entrance of the strait, fixed at last, and became what they still are in the geography of the story - visible landmarks, a memorial to the one crew that found the angle, the timing, and the nerve to row hard enough.

The Golden Fleece still waited at Colchis, coiled around by its sleepless dragon, and Jason still had that problem ahead of him. But the worst bottleneck on the voyage was behind them now, and the sea opened up beyond the straits, cold and wide and passable.