Argonautica

• 1. Introduction

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  Argonautica is a Greek epic poem that has survived complete from the Hellenistic age, written by Apollonius Rhodius in the 3rd century BC. Callimachus also wrote an epic called the Aetia, and much of it survives, but only through fragments. That leaves Apollonius's poem as the only Hellenistic epic to survive whole. At the heart of the poem is the bond between the hero Jason and Medea, a Colchian princess and sorceress. Apollonius seems to have been the first narrative poet to explore what has been called 'the pathology of love.' That romance later crossed into Rome: Varro Atacinus translated the poem, Valerius Flaccus imitated it, and it shaped Catullus and Ovid. Virgil then used it as a model for his own Roman epic, the Aeneid.

  Yet Jason's quest for the Golden Fleece in remote Colchis was already a familiar story to Hellenistic audiences. So why would a scholar-poet spend years retelling a myth everyone already knew? Part of the answer lies in where he worked: Alexandria, home to the great Library, in an era when poetry doubled as scholarship. Apollonius folded research on geography, ethnography, comparative religion and Homeric literature into a story everyone thought they already knew.

• 2. A Bold Experiment

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  Rhodes became Apollonius's home in exile, according to some accounts, after a hostile reception to his poem in Alexandria. As one of the major scholars of the Alexandrian period, he treated the poem as an adventure in itself. His attempt to rewrite Homeric epic aimed to satisfy the demanding tastes of his contemporaries. Fashionable taste at the time favored small, meticulous poems full of erudition and paradoxography, the study of marvels and oddities, exemplified by the work of Callimachus. In adapting epic to that audience, Apollonius went a long way toward inventing the romance novel. He introduced narrative techniques such as the interior monologue, letting the poet speak through a character's own thoughts and feelings. Modern reassessment of his work has produced a flood of new scholarship, competing for attention until the poem became a daunting task for scholars too.

  One description compares the struggle to sailing through the Clashing Rocks. Scholars barely cross one wave before the next shoves them back twice as far. There is no hope of pause once the flood of books is finally passed. Since scholarship runs through every layer of this poem, the debate starts with a single question: is Argonautica a 'Callimachean epic'?

• 3. The Voyage of the Argo

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  Pelias, king of Iolcus, once received a prophecy that a man wearing only one sandal would bring about his downfall. Jason fit that description after losing a sandal while crossing a swollen stream. Pelias then sent him on what was meant to be a fatal mission: retrieving the Golden Fleece from Colchis. A shipwright named Argus built the vessel, the Argo, working under instructions from the goddess Athena. When the crew gathered to choose a leader, they nominated Heracles, but Heracles insisted on Jason instead. At Lemnos, the Argonauts found an island of women ruled by Queen Hypsipyle, who had recently killed all the island's men. Hypsipyle fell for Jason as soon as she saw him. The crew settled in so long that Heracles finally had to shame them back onto the ship. Sailing on, they met the Doliones, a civilized people ruled by the newly wed king Cyzicus, near a land of six-armed savages called the Gegenees. Heracles killed the giants, but the Argonauts and the Doliones then fought each other in the dark, mistaking one another for enemies. Jason killed Cyzicus without knowing who he was, and the king's widow, Cleite, hanged herself in grief. In Mysia, a water nymph abducted Heracles's young companion Hylas while he filled a jug at her spring. Heracles stayed behind searching for him, and the ship sailed on without its strongest hero.

  Further along, the boxer-king Amycus demanded a match with every visitor to his shore, until the Argonaut Polydeukes killed him with a single blow. The blind prophet Phineus, tormented daily by harpies as punishment for revealing divine secrets, showed the Argonauts how to survive the Clashing Rocks. Zetes and Calais, the winged sons of the north wind, chased the harpies off in gratitude. Guided by Phineus's advice, the pilot Tiphys's skill, and help from Athena, the Argo passed safely through the Clashing Rocks and into the Black Sea. Along the way to Colchis, the crew lost the prophet Idmon to a wild boar and the helmsman Tiphys to sudden illness. As they neared Colchis, they watched the eagle of Zeus fly overhead toward the Caucasus mountains, where it fed on the liver of Prometheus. The Argo then entered the river Phasis and anchored quietly in a backwater, at the edge of Aeetes's kingdom.

• 4. Medea's Choice

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  Hera and Athena withdrew to a private room on Olympus to plot how to help Jason. They agreed that Aphrodite's help was needed, so Medea might fall for the young hero. Aphrodite found her son Eros sulking and bribed him with a golden, star-trailing ball to shoot Medea with his arrow. Eros crept in, crouched at Jason's feet, and fired; Medea's heart instantly flooded with the pain of love. Her father, King Aeetes, raged when his own grandsons asked him to hand the Golden Fleece to Jason. He set Jason a near-impossible bargain instead. Jason had to plow a field with fire-breathing oxen, sow it with dragon's teeth, then defeat the armed men who sprang from the ground.

  That night, torn between love and fear for her reputation, Medea considered poison from her own chest of drugs. She chose instead a charm that would protect Jason in his trial. The two met in secret outside a temple of Hecate, where Medea served as priestess, and she handed him the drug. She warned that if he forgot her kindness she would fly to Greece on the wind to confront him. Fortified by her magic, Jason wrestled the oxen and sowed the field with dragon's teeth. He then turned the earthborn soldiers against each other by throwing a single rock among them, a trick Medea had taught him. Aeetes, dumbfounded by Jason's success, returned to his palace already scheming how to deny him the reward he was owed.

• 5. Flight, Blood, and Marriage

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  Medea fled Colchis barefoot in the night, slipping through palace doors that opened by magic, after her father discovered her treason. She and Jason stole the Golden Fleece by putting its guardian serpent to sleep with a spell, and Jason pledged to marry her. Two Colchian fleets gave chase. One sailed through the now-motionless Clashing Rocks, while the other, led by Medea's half-brother Apsyrtus, followed the Argo up the river Ister. Cornered on the Brygean Islands, Medea lured Apsyrtus into a trap, and Jason killed him, dismembering the body to avoid the vengeance of the Erinyes. An angry Zeus punished the murder by condemning the Argonauts to wander further before they could sail home. The enchantress Circe, encountered on the western coast of Ausonia, absolved the couple of their blood-guilt.

  Sailing on, the Argonauts passed the Sirens safely, though Butes fell overboard and was rescued by Aphrodite, who settled him in Sicily. They also survived the Wandering Rocks with help from the Nereids before reaching Drepane, the island of Corfu. There, King Alcinous planned to hand Medea over to the pursuing Colchians unless she was already married, so his wife Arete tipped off the couple. Jason and Medea married in a sacred cave on Drepane, their bridal bed draped with the Golden Fleece itself. A storm later drove the Argonauts south to the Syrtes, a vast sandbank off Libya, where they resigned themselves to dying apart from one another. Three local nymphs then gave them mysterious instructions, which Peleus interpreted: the crew would have to carry the Argo across the desert on their shoulders. Twelve days later they reached Lake Triton and the garden of the Hesperides. They learned Heracles had raided the garden just the day before and had already vanished. The crew lost two more comrades there, Mopsus to a snake bite and Canthus to a wound from a local shepherd. The sea god Triton then showed them a route to open water. He also gave Euphemus a magical clod of earth, destined to become the island of Thera. From Thera, Greek colonists would later settle Libya, a detail Apollonius ties to the world of his own Ptolemaic Alexandria.

• 6. Heroes Without Heroism

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  The German classicist H. Fränkel once pointed to Jason's frequent moods of despair, summed up in a single Greek word, amēchania, meaning helplessness. By contrast, Fränkel saw the bullying Argonaut Idas as an ugly holdover of the old-fashioned warrior type. It looks as if Apollonius meant to mark traditional heroism as obsolete in the Hellenistic world. The critic J. F. Carspecken described Jason as chosen leader only because his superior declined the honor. Carspecken called him brave only with the help of magic charms, timid before trouble, and "gracefully treacherous in his dealings with the love-sick Medea." That hostile reading extends to the whole crew, accused of turning piratical during the outward voyage before their decline culminates in the murder of Medea's own brother. Medea herself seems to shift from a likeable heroine in Book 3 to what one view calls a frightful witch by Book 4.

  D. A. Van Krevelen went further still, dismissing every character except Medea as flimsy and uninteresting. Even Medea's two roles sit awkwardly together: romantic heroine on one hand, sorceress skilled in drugs on the other. Heracles fares little better in this reading, coming across as something of a buffoon, his relationship with Hylas handled only obliquely and with humor. Even the gods seem domesticated: Apollonius gives them the liveliness, orderliness, and banality of Alexandrian high society rather than remote divine grandeur. The doomed seers Mopsus and Idmon may double as stand-ins for the poet himself, much as Homer once used his own singers.

• 7. Alexandria's Hidden Order

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  Ancient sources describe a bitter literary feud between Apollonius and Callimachus, though modern scholars mostly dismiss those accounts as unreliable. Callimachus wrote his own book of aitia, the mythical origins of everyday things, and one survey counts eighty such origin-stories tucked inside Argonautica. Yet the poem runs to fewer than 6,000 lines across four books, far shorter than Homer's Iliad, which runs past 15,000. That brevity may echo Callimachus's taste for short poems, or Aristotle's call for works sized to match four tragedies performed in a single sitting. One single line, numbered 1.1309, quotes a phrase from Callimachus's Aetia word for word. Scholars still debate exactly when the poem first appeared. One option is during the reign of Ptolemy II Philadelphus, 283-246 BC, or a generation later. An astronomical analysis by the scholar Jackie Murray instead points to the year 238 BC. That would place its publication under Ptolemy III Euergetes, who ruled 246-221 BC, matching most ancient sources.

  Apollonius drew on Homer, Hesiod, and Pindar, reworking a story already centuries old by his own time. The Odyssey already noted that the Argo was the only ship ever to pass between the whirling rocks. Hesiod's Theogony has Jason fetching Medea at the command of his uncle Pelias, and names their son Medeius, raised by the centaur Cheiron. The earliest trace of the familiar Golden Fleece tradition appears in the poet Mimnermus, a contemporary of Solon. Pindar's Pythian Four offers the oldest detailed surviving account of the whole expedition.

  Despite its fragmented, episode-by-episode structure, the poet himself dominates the telling: seventy-one percent of Argonautica's verses are spoken in his own voice. That compares with fifty-five percent in the Iliad and just thirty-three percent in the Odyssey. Much of that apparent patchwork gains unity from one place: Ptolemaic Alexandria, founded only about sixty years before Apollonius wrote. Roughly half of the city's Greek population had arrived by way of the older colony of Cyrene. The poem's closing cluster of origin-stories ties together three places: Thera, the mother city of Cyrene. It also ties in Aegina, home of the exiled Argonauts Peleus and Telamon, and Anaphe, where Callimachus's own Aetia begins its own Argonaut tale. Herodotus had already written that Egyptians once colonized Colchis. The Colchian fleets that settle around Greece in Book 4 may reverse that old migration, foreshadowing Greek settlement of Egypt itself.