I might be a bit of a Grecophile. But it runs in the family. When we bought a new canoe, my son suggested we name it the Argo, after the sturdy ship that carried Jason and the Argonauts on their mythical quest for the Golden Fleece. We readily adopted his idea, and the Argo has - like its namesake - proved to be a worthy craft. With this precedent established, when we acquired another canoe, it too received a Greek name: the Zephyr after the Greek god of the western wind. So, what's in a name? When I started planning this tour, I thought I would call it Greek Odyssey, a reference to Homer's famous epic poem about the voyage of Odysseus on his 10-year journey home from the war in ancient Troy. Odysseus was the clever fellow who came up with the plan to use a wooden horse with soldiers hidden inside to defeat the Trojans. Furthermore, the term odyssey has in our day come to mean any spiritual or intellectual journey, which I hoped this trip would be for its participants. But using the name odyssey had two drawbacks. First, every tour operator and his brother seems to have a tour named Greek Odyssey. This tour is very different from theirs, so it needed a distinctive name. Second, Homer's Odyssey did not turn out well for its participants; all ships and crew members perished with the exception of Odysseus. Not a particularly inspiring precedent.
The Argonauts were named after their ship because it was instrumental to the success of their mission. Not only was the Argo built stout enough to withstand her many ordeals at sea and bear her sailors safely home, the Argo actually spoke to her crew during an especially desperate situation and offered a solution. That's my kind of boat, and certainly one sufficiently inspiring to name a Greek tour after. When I looked up argosy in the dictionary, I learned that it can mean a large ship, fleet of ships, or a rich source of desirable items. I hope our trip will prove to be a similar source for those who choose to make the journey. In addition to a sturdy red canoe, I have another personal connection to the term argosy. While I was growing up, my father subscribed to the now defunct men's adventure magazine, Argosy. After his brush with history at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, his life was spent in central Ohio and did not appear to hold many adventures, but he found a source of adventure in the pages of Argosy. Thus has our tour become a Greek Argosy, named after a noble vessel and a source of good things, particularly agreeable adventure. |
Contrast
the unhappy fate of Odysseus's men with that of the Argonauts,
who surmounted many obstacles on their voyage to the ends of
the earth and successfully returned home to Greece with their
prize, the Golden Fleece: the magical head and hide of a ram,
a gift of the gods. Our term astronauts, by the way, comes from
Argonauts.