I'm reading Robert Graves' The Greek Myths. I am aware that his analysis has been met with criticism but I am finding his perspective unique. In the section on Jason, he mentions that since the myth of the Argonauts was written there has been conflict in how to reconcile the fact that they travel to the East (Colchis) but upon their return encounter beings and geography of the West (Sirens, Libya, etc.) and that to explain this, many have gone to extremes with very liberal theories as to how the Argo ends up near Italy.
Graves however says that the oldest Minyan version of the tale almost certainly had their destination and the court of Aeetes in the Adriatic, near the River Po. Homer, for instance, mentions the Argonauts, but never Colchis, and that it was only much later versions that specified a geographic location of the fleece (added to this that Colchis as a political entity only appears in records from the 8th century BC) and made that destination in what would have been the most extreme Eastern part of the world from a Greek perspective.
My question, finally, is: does anyone have knowledge of any scholarship or academic validation regarding this theory, that the oldest version of Jason's journey were to the coast of Italy?
Well, criticism is one word for it: I'd say the best approach to Graves is to be aware that he freely pretends that he's reproducing ancient material when he's making everything up. There was never such a thing as a 'Minyan version' of anything, for example, because 'Minyans' aren't real. Or the business of 'Colchis as a political entity only appears in records from the 8th century BC': this becomes less compelling once you remember that there are no Greek records of anything earlier than the 8th century BCE.
Anyway, the reason there are 'very liberal theories' is twofold. First, because mythical geography is not real-world geography. And second, because different ancient sources described several different routes for the Argonauts.
Perhaps it'll be simplest if I quote from Richard Hunter's commentary on Argonautica book 4, starting at page 8:
From an early date the Argonauts were brought back to Greece by circuitous and fantastic routes. Hesiod (fr. 241) apparently took them from Aia up the Phasis, and from there into the stream of Ocean in the extreme north, from where they voyaged west and south around the imagined land mass to Africa, where they then carried the Argo across the desert to Mediterranean ...
Two prose writers nearer in time to Ap[ollonius] opened new geographical possibilities which he was to exploit. Probably in the first half of the fourth century, in a work On Harbours, Timagetos described the Istros (Danube) as rising in the 'Celtic mountains' and splitting into two branches, one emptying into the Black Sea (presumably) on the NW coast, the other into the Mediterranean ... the scholia [on Apollonius] report that Timagetos brought the Argonauts into the Mediterranean through these two branches and claim that Ap. 'follows' him in this. ... What is certain is that [Timagetos believed] the Istros had a branch which emptied, not west of Italy, but rather on the north coast of the Adriatic ...
Diodorus Siculus ... reports that 'not a few both of the ancient historians and of those who came after, including Timaeus ... reported that the Argonauts sailed up the Tanais (Don) to its source and then dragged the Argo over land to another river which flowed into Ocean; they then sailed anticlockwise round Ocean and into the Mediterranean through the Pillars of Heracles at its western end.
The most familiar form of the story is the one in Apollonius, and that's the one Graves is discussing. Hunter gives this map, superimposed on real-world geography, to illustrate the conception of the Argonauts' route described by Apollonius. The idea of travelling between the Black Sea and the Adriatic by the river Danube was also used in Aeschylus' Prometheus unbound, a couple of centuries earlier, to transport Heracles from releasing Prometheus in the Caucasus to garden of the Hesperides in the western Mediterranean (Aeschylus fr. 197 Radt).
One important thing to realise about that map is that the east-west distance separating the Black Sea and the Adriatic is not how early Greek understood it. Multiple myths freely transpose things, or have shortcuts between, the Black Sea in the east and either the Adriatic or the Tyrrhenian in the west. The placement of Circe's island (which is important in Argonautica book 4) is a key example. Virtually all accounts of Odysseus' travels have him spending a lot of time on the west coast of Italy; yet at one point Homer's Odyssey refers to Circe's island being in the extreme east. We get a similar transposition in Apollonius, with Circe being simultaneously eastern and western.
The main lesson from this is that it's often a mistake to pin mythical conceptions of geography down to a single real-world referent. That's what Graves is doing when he tries to pin Colchis down. His idea is already ruled out by the earliest version of the Argonauts' route that we have, namely the Hesiodic one. Here's the actual text of the fragment, Hesiod fr. 241, which is a witness to Hesiod in a commentary on Apollonius:
... Hesiod, and Pindar's Pythians [4.25ff.], and Antimachus' Lyde [= fr. 65 Wyss], say that [the Argonauts] went on the Ocean to Africa, and lifted the Argo, and so arrived in our sea.
... Hesiod says they sailed away via the Phasis.
Hecataeus says ... [gap in text; we know from elsewhere that Hecataeus thought the Phasis flowed into the Ocean and that it was possible to get from there to the Ocean mouth of the Nile, which also supposedly had two mouths]
... but Artemidorus criticises him, reporting that the Phasis does not flow into the sea.
The Phasis is the Greek name for the Rioni, which flows out of the Caucasus into the Black Sea in Georgia. Whatever Graves thinks, the Greeks themselves certainly thought of the story as taking place in Georgia -- and had varying and incoherent ideas on how that related to the western Mediterranean. Apollonius' version is premised on the Danube having a second mouth in the Adriatic, and while that isn't true, it is unquestionable that it is what some people believed.
