Its authorship is uncertain: most ancient writers simply refer to "the author of the Naupactia".
The 2nd-century AD travelogue writer Pausanias, who in his work refers to the poem on several occasions, records that most people in his time considered that it was by an anonymous Milesian poet, but he himself judges that it was most likely by Carcinus of Naupactus; Pausanias' reasoning is open to doubt.
These two facts combined suggest similarities with the pseudo-Hesiodic poem the Catalogue of Women.
More than half of the surviving fragments are devoted to the heroic story of the Argonauts: it is likely that this occupied a large proportion of the poem, and probably influenced later poetic accounts of the story such as Pindar's fourth Pythian ode, and the best-known version, Apollonius' Argonautica.
One fragment recounts the tale of how Artemis revives her dead devotee, Hippolytus, and turns him into a god named Virbius.