Apollonius of Rhodes

• 1. Introduction

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  Apollonius of Rhodes wrote one of the most durable epic poems of the ancient world, and almost nothing is known about him. His name appears in four sources from antiquity, and those sources contradict each other on nearly every point. The date of his birth goes unrecorded. Whether he ever set foot on the island whose name he carries is a matter of scholarly debate. Even the story of a famous feud that shaped his career may have been largely invented. What survives with certainty is the Argonautica, an epic poem about Jason, Medea, and the quest for the Golden Fleece, written during the first half of the 3rd century BC. It is one of the very few epic poems from the ancient world that still exists in complete form. It gave Ptolemaic Egypt something scholars have called a "cultural mnemonic", a national archive of images. It handed the Latin poets Virgil and Gaius Valerius Flaccus a model they would carry into their own work. And for centuries after his death, Apollonius was dismissed as a mere imitator of Homer. Recent scholarship has started to tell a different story.

• 2. A Life in Fragments

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  Four sources piece together what we know of Apollonius's life. Two are texts called the Life of Apollonius, preserved in the scholia on his work. A third is the Suda, a 10th-century encyclopaedia. A fourth is a 2nd-century BC papyrus, P.Oxy. 1241, which lists several heads of the Library of Alexandria. The reports from all of these are scanty and often contradict each other.

  His father's name comes down to us as either Silleus or Illeus. Both names are extremely rare, and scholars suspect they may derive from the Greek word for "lampoon", which would suggest the detail was borrowed from a comic source. Ancient biographers regularly accepted or misread the testimony of comic poets. His mother is named "Rhode" in the second Life, but Rhodē simply means "Rhodian woman", which makes it almost certainly a back-formation from his epithet rather than an actual name.

  The sources disagree about where he came from. The Lives, the Suda, and the geographer Strabo say Alexandria. Athenaeus and Aelian say Naucratis, a city roughly 70 km south of Alexandria along the Nile. His association with Rhodes is no clearer. The epithet "Rhodian" might reflect a period he spent there, or it might simply record the fact that he once wrote a poem about the island.

  According to P.Oxy. 1241, Apollonius held the position of head of the Library of Alexandria and was succeeded by Eratosthenes. That succession must have happened after 247/246 BC, the year Ptolemy III Euergetes came to power. Ptolemy III was probably tutored by Apollonius, and it was Ptolemy III who appointed Eratosthenes. The papyrus's chronology is muddled in places, listing Apollonius under Ptolemy I Soter, who died in 283 BC, rather than under Ptolemy III. Part of the confusion may stem from another Alexandrian librarian named Apollonius, known as "The Eidographer", who succeeded Aristophanes of Byzantium.

• 3. The Callimachus Question

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  One of the most discussed topics in the study of Apollonius is his relationship with Callimachus, another poet and librarian at Alexandria. The Lives and the Suda agree that Apollonius studied under Callimachus. The second Life describes Callimachus as his instructor in rhetoric, though scholars note the terminology is anachronistic. In ancient biographical writing, "pupil" and "student" were often figures of speech for literary influence rather than descriptions of a formal education.

  An elegiac epigram preserved in the Palatine Anthology, attributed to "Apollonius the grammarian", blames Callimachus for an unstated offense and mocks both him and his most famous poem, the Aetia. Callimachus, in turn, wrote a poem called Ibis, described by ancient sources as a polemic. Some of those sources identified Apollonius as the target. These references have fed what one scholar called "a romantic vision of scholarly warfare in which Apollonius was finally driven out of Alexandria by a triumphant Callimachus".

  The actual evidence is far thinner. Both of the Lives stress the friendship between the two poets. The second Life says they were buried together. Callimachus's Ibis was deliberately obscure, and many modern scholars now believe the target was never meant to be identified. The epigram in the Palatine Anthology was attributed to "Apollonius the Grammarian", not necessarily Apollonius of Rhodes. Most specialists in Hellenistic literature now consider the feud to have been enormously sensationalised, if it happened at all.

  The sensational story of exile and triumphant return served a practical purpose for ancient readers. Vitae A and B record that Apollonius moved to Rhodes because his work was poorly received in Alexandria, then rewrote the Argonautica there with such skill that he returned in triumph and received a place in the library. Scholars now generally believe this story was invented to explain why ancient manuscripts of the Argonautica contain variant readings, which indicate a second edition of the poem existed.

• 4. Scholar at the Library

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  Apollonius stood among the foremost Homeric scholars of the Alexandrian period. He wrote what scholars consider the first scholarly monograph on Homer produced in that era, taking a critical stance toward the editions of the Iliad and Odyssey that his predecessor at the library, Zenodotus, had published.

  His scholarly interests ranged beyond Homer. He produced prose works on the archaic poet Archilochus and on problems in Hesiod. He is also considered one of the most significant authors on geography of his period, though his approach differed sharply from that of Eratosthenes, his successor at the library and a radical critic of Homer's geographical claims. Where Eratosthenes moved away from mythical geography, Apollonius set out to integrate new scientific understanding of the physical world with the mythical geography of tradition.

  The Argonautica itself grew partly from these scholarly pursuits. It has been described by critics as "a kind of poetic dictionary of Homer", and it was written in part as an experimental means of communicating Apollonius's own Homeric research while also addressing philosophical themes in verse. The geographic knowledge being accumulated in his era, represented by figures such as Timosthenes, a Ptolemaic admiral and prolific author, fed directly into the epic. In that sense the Argonautica functioned as a didactic epic on geography, while remaining fully operational as poetry.

  His other poems dealt in part with the origins and foundations of cities of interest to the Ptolemaic court, including Alexandria and Cnidus. These foundation poems, known as ktiseis, connected Apollonius's scholarly interests in geography and myth to the political priorities of his patrons.

• 5. The Argonautica

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  The Argonautica departs from the Homeric tradition in ways that Apollonius made deliberate. The poem runs to fewer than 6,000 lines across four books, a fraction of the Iliad's more than 16,000. Apollonius may have shaped this brevity under the influence of Callimachus's preference for shorter forms, or under Aristotle's argument in the Poetics that poems should be on a smaller scale than the old epics and answer in length to a group of tragedies presented at a single sitting.

  Jason, the protagonist, is deliberately weaker and more human than a Homeric hero. The gods are relatively distant and inactive through much of the narrative, reflecting the Hellenistic tendency to rationalise and allegorise religion. The poem digresses frequently into local custom, aetiology, and the origins of place names, all popular subjects in Hellenistic poetry. Apollonius also tends to select the less disturbing versions of myths. In his telling, Medea merely watches the murder of Apsyrtus rather than committing it herself. Heterosexual loves such as Jason's receive more emphasis than homosexual relationships such as the love between Heracles and Hylas, another tendency of Hellenistic literature.

  Many critics, from antiquity to the present, have considered the third book, centered on the love of Medea and Jason, the finest and most memorable section of the poem. Some ancient critics found the poem mediocre overall. Opinion has shifted considerably in recent decades. Scholarly studies appear regularly, the poem's shaping influence on Virgil is now well recognised, and any serious account of the history of epic poetry now gives the Argonautica substantial attention.

• 6. The Foundation Poems

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  Beyond the Argonautica, Apollonius wrote a group of poems dealing with the mythical origins of cities, a form the Greeks called ktiseis, or foundation poems. Only fragments survive. Each poem carries the title of a place, and each fragment reveals something about how Apollonius worked.

  The Founding of Alexandria survives as only a title and a marginal note in a manuscript of the unrelated author Nicander. That note records the poem's claim that all biting creatures originated from the blood of the Gorgon. The Founding of Cnidus is preserved through an entry by Stephanus of Byzantium, who quotes Apollonius to explain how a place in Thrace got its name: Heracles, after throwing a man named Adramyles in wrestling, cooled his sweat there. The Founding of Naucratis survives through six and a bit hexameters quoted by Athenaeus, concerning the god Apollo's abduction of Ocyrhoe and the punishment of a fisherman named Pompilus who tried to protect her and was turned into the fish that bears his name.

  The Founding of Lesbos survives in twenty-one hexameters quoted by Parthenius. It deals with the Lesbian princess Pisidice, who opened her city's gates to Achilles, the man she loved, betraying her countrymen and her parents. Her reward was death by stoning at the hands of the Argives. Scholars have noted that Pisidice's viewpoint shapes the poem, and that, as in the Argonautica, Apollonius used epic material as a lens for examining female experience.

  The Founding of Caunus presents a particular puzzle. Two references in Parthenius's Love Stories seem to give conflicting accounts of the poem's subject matter, suggesting a loose and episodic structure rather than a unified narrative. Scholars have wondered whether that episodic quality also characterised his other foundation poems, especially since the unity of the Argonautica itself remains a live question in criticism.