The Russian military mythology of Catherine’s first war with the Turks actively appropriated another imperial paradigm taken from Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue. There Virgil not only describes the Golden Age, but also prophesies future wars, new Argonauts, and an inevitable navy campaign to destroy a new Troy:
“Then shall a second Tiphys be, and a second Argo to sail with chosen heroes: new wars too shall arise, and again a mighty Achilles be sent to Troy.” 54
These puzzling lines refer to the Ancient Greek myth about the ship built with the help of the Goddess Pallas Athena and called the “Argo.” It also mentions the shipman Tiphys who navigates the ship and possesses supernatural talents. The Argonauts and their leader Jason set off for Colchis (lands on the Black Sea) in search of the Golden Fleece. Among other adventures, the Argonauts raze Troy, long before Achilles. In European history, this ancient myth was recurrently perceived as a symbolic narrative devising a military campaign against an Oriental country, most of all, as a mystical prediction of the Crusades against the Ottoman Porte, the main enemy of Europe throughout the centuries. 55
An entire system of mythological analogies promoted the concept of the European emperor as a Christian hero, a super warrior who defeated the Muslims, and therefore, belonged to the ancestors of some ancient God or Goddess. In 1430, Duke Philip III of Burgundy even founded the Order of the Golden Fleece. The House of Habsburg used the image of the Golden Fleece as a royal attribute of sovereignty. Despite some controversy over the Pagan symbolism, the emblem became a sign of authority and victorious glory in military conquests. The Argonauts’ myth in particular became an important framework for promoting the colonial symbolism and naval victories of European powers.
54 Virgil’s Works: The Aeneid, Eclogues, 275.
55 Marie Tanner, The Last Descendant of Aeneas, 6.
In Russia, Pindar’s well-known odes and translations of Virgil served as sources of Argonaut metaphors. Mikhail Lomonosov, Pindar’s translator and a lyric heir to the European ode56 was the first to show favor to such mythology. He introduced the metaphor in one of his first odes to Catherine, devoted to the celebration of the New Year of 1764. Taking into account the recent establishment of the Committee of the Russian Fleet, Lomonosov urges the naval forces to seize the Golden Fleece:
Urania looks at the midnight country:
“Here, from the slopes of ice and snow, Russia strives to obtain the Golden Fleece And reaches the gates of the dawn <…>”57
He appropriates a sublime metaphor of power in order to describe his commercial program of developing the Far East (“the gates of the dawn”) and its seas.
A few years later, the war with the Porte, naval expeditions and battles, as well as the Greek environment of the war, all combined to increase the use of the Argonaut myth in Russian lyrics tremendously. Thus, Mikhail Kheraskov writes in his Ode to the Russian warriors, in February 1769:
Not for your Golden Fleece, Not for poor Andromeda,
Oh Russians! The war is imminent, And victories are coming;
Let antiquity sing tales!
It is not pride that calls you to battle,
We ought to defend and rescue our neighbors. 58
Vasilii Maikov, in his Ode to her highness on the glorious victory over the Turkish fleet in the Laborno bay near the town of Chesma (1770), compares Aleksei Orlov, the commander of the navy, with Jason who stole the Golden Fleece:
56 Stella P. Revard, Pindar and the Renaissance Hymn-Ode: 1450– 1700 (Tempe, 2001).
57 M. V. Lomonosov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 8, 797– 798.
58 M. M. Kheraskov, Izbrannye proizvedeniia, 68.
181 T h e W a r i n G r e e k G a r b
Are they same glorious heroes Who came to destroy Troy?
Is it brave Jason
Who stole the Golden Fleece? <…>
Their glory is over, like a dream!59
However, the Russian poets invert this paradigm: they provide Jason and the Argonauts with negative connotations.
Russian warriors do not steal anything; to the contrary, they go to fight in order to restore justice and order. An enlightened perception enables Petrov to construct an image of the Russian fighters as the new Argonauts, through a comparison to the mythical ones. He writes in his Ode on the victories of the Russian fleet <…> near Khios, 1770:
We ought to bring our law to the barbarians, Fighting with an elite army, like daring Jason.
He went abroad to steal the Golden Fleece,
You are coming to shake up the brandisher of the law, To save the Fatherland,
And to defend Greece.60
Petrov does not merely decorate his ode with the Golden Fleece metaphor, he inverses it, while appealing to history.
According to his interpretation, the Turks violated the Christian
“law” of Byzantium: they denied the Greeks their Christianity. The Russian army, as the new Argonauts, must restore law and history.
This ode reflects a major change in interpreting an ancient imperial symbolism. The Russian fighters prove to be the bearers of an enlightened imperialism, and their victories surpass old European deeds by virtue of their ideological fairness. The concept was meant to stress the prophetic, missionary task of Catherine’s expansionism.
It also presented the war as the just conclusion of the longstanding European struggle against the Ottomans in which Russia took in her hands the lance that had fallen from the old empires’ grasp.
59 Ibid, 210.
60 V. Petrov, Oda na pobedy rossiiskogo flota, 10.