The Art of Alleviating Pain in Greek Mythology

In Reply:

“our portion, all of misery, given by Zeus that we may live in song for men to come” (5)

We thank Drs. Machinis and Fountas for their comments to our article (7). The extensive body of Greek mythology covers many myths, and these are useful in orientating our instincts to finding new ways of thinking, interpreting, and searching clues of the contemporaneous philosophy. Machinis and Fountas have summarized, in a very beautiful way, the myth of Jason and Arganout and Medeia. These kinds of myths are the examples with which we can share these feelings. Medeia spread a cream onto the body of the Jason, with whom she was in love, to enable him to take the Golden Fleece from the dragon. The contents of the cream, as well as the true reasons for spreading the cream, are unknown because many of the available sources provide different knowledge deduced from rumors which spread from one language to others. There is also some information, according to which, the reason for the spreading of the cream by Medeia was to protect Jason and his sword from iron and fire (2, 3, 6), to protect Jason against the badness and to protect him while making him invincible (4), or to make him immortal for 1 day (1). In the sources cited by Machinis and Fountas, we are provided with a new perspective. But, because the examples we drew upon in our article are from different sources, there was not a place in our article to include the myth of Jason and Medeia. We are sure that the Greek mythology still has many things to tell us through researchers such as Drs. Machinis and Fountas. We thank them again for their contribution.