Was the Golden Fleece an Airplane?

I’m in the mood to complain some more about ancient astronaut writers’ slipshod scholarship. Today, let’s think about Erich von Däniken’s claim that the Golden Ram of Greek mythology, the flying creature who rescued Phrixus and Helle from their murderous stepmother and whose fur later became the Golden Fleece, was an airplane. Von Däniken makes the claim in Odyssey of the Gods (1999, English trans. 2000):

The greatest ship of the time [the Argo] is supposed to have been built, and sons of gods and kings to have freely offered their services, in the quest of a ridiculous bit of fur? [...] No, definitely not, for the Golden Fleece was a very particular skin with astonishing properties. It could fly! [...] So the Golden Fleece was some kind of flying machine that had once belonged the god Hermes. [...] Sometime or other, many millennia ago, an alien crew landed upon earth. Our forefathers[' ...] simple minds must have regarded the aliens as 'gods'--although we all know their aren't any gods.

Erich von Däniken, The Odyssey of the Gods: The Alien History of Ancient Greece, trans. Matthew Barton(Shaftsbury: Element Books, 2000), 5, 27.

Would it surprise you that ol’ von Däniken was copying an earlier writer? Of course it doesn’t. In this case, he’s copying Robert Charroux, who made the same claim almost 30 years earlier:

An important detail is that the golden fleece was that of a flying ram, traditionally identified with a flying machine used by Initiators. This particular relic, which no doubt was the wreck of an airship, was to be located in Georgia.

Robert Charroux, The Mysterious Unknown, trans. Olga Sieveking (London: Neville Spearman, 1972), 210.

More interesting is the fact that Charroux wasn’t the first to suggest this, either. An Afrocentrist named Drusilla Dunjee Houston asserted the Fleece was an airplane in 1926 and claimed the Ethiopians built it! 

[We will discuss the] "Wonderful Ethiopians," who produced fadeless colors that have held their hues for thousands of years, who drilled through solid rock and were masters of many other lost arts and who many scientists believe must have understood electricity, who made metal figures that could move and speak and may have invented flying machines, for the "flying horse Pegasus" and the "ram of the golden fleece" may not have been mere fairy tales. [...] We seek for the place and the race that could have given the world the art of welding iron. The trail reveals that the land of the "Golden Fleece" and the garden of the "Golden Apples of Hesperides" were but centers of the ancient race, that as Cushite Ethiopians had extended themselves over the world.

Drusilla Dunjee Houston, Wonderful Ethiopians of the Cushite Empire (Oklahoma City: Universal Publishing, 1926), 4-6.

Now this is all well and good, but it rests on the assumption that the Golden Ram actually flew. But that is only one variant of the story. In the oldest known versions of the story, the ram is swimming, not flying. The swimming ram appears on the oldest Greek vases to depict the tale, from the fifth century BCE, predating our written sources. (A few older versions are known, but they are in too poor a condition to determine flight.) The literary warrant for flight dates back perhaps to the second century BCE and Callimachus, though the oldest extant text is that of Apollodorus, which, in its entirety states that “borne through the sky by the ram they [Phrixus and Helle] crossed land and sea” (1.9.1). Eratosthenes, by contrast, talks of a swimming ram. (Apollodorus’ version is the basis for modern myth manuals, which is where ancient astronaut writers get their information, not from primary sources.)

Ancient relief carving of Phrixus holding onto (not riding) the Ram as it swims through (or flies just above) the sea, indicated by the fish.

Since ancient astronaut writers counsel us to take ancient texts literally, we have a problem: the Ram both flew and swam according to the ancient texts, which, of course, cannot err. Worse, the ancients weren’t entirely comfortable with this whole “Ram” thing, either. Palaephatus (Myth 15), a euhemerist, said that “Ram” was merely the name of a person who built a ship to haul Phrixus and Helle away, and “Fleece” was the name of a golden statue in the ship’s cargo! Diodorus (4.47) instead states that the “Flying Ram” was really a ship whose prow was carved in the likeness of a ram, which Tacitus (Annals 4.34.4) also considered a likely explanation. Diodorus further preserves an alternate version whereby the Golden Fleece is rather grimly supposed to be the gilded skin flayed from the corpse of Phrixus’ executed tutor, a man named Mr. Ram (Greek: Krios, Latinized as Crius—an actual ancient first name):

And much like to this story, is what they say concerning Phryxus: for they say that he sailed in a ship, upon whose fore-deck was carved the head of a ram, and that Helle by leaning too much forward over the sides of the ship to vomit, fell over-board into the sea. Others say, that about the time that Phryxus with his schoolmaster was taken by Aeetes, the Scythian king, the father-in-law of Aeetes, came to Colchis, and fell in love with the boy, and upon that account he was bestowed by Aeetes upon the Scythian, who loved him as his own child, and adopted him as his heir and successor to the kingdom. But that the school-master whose name was Crius, was sacrificed to the gods, and his skin, according to the custom, was fastened to the walls of the temple. (Library, 4.47)

Well, that’s quite the quandary for ancient astronaut writers. I’m glad I don’t have to try to explain why we should accept one sentence from one writer against all the other writers’ texts and all the artists’ vases depicting a swimming ram.