Argonautica

The only entirely surviving Hellenistic epic (though Callimachus' Aetia is substantially extant through fragments), the Argonautica tells the myth of the voyage of Jason and the Argonauts to retrieve the Golden Fleece from remote Colchis.

Their heroic adventures and Jason's relationship with the Colchian princess/sorceress Medea were already well known to Hellenistic audiences, which enabled Apollonius to go beyond a simple narrative, giving it a scholarly emphasis suitable to the times.

[3] His Argonautica had a profound impact on Latin poetry: it was translated by Varro Atacinus and imitated by Valerius Flaccus, it influenced Catullus and Ovid, and it provided Virgil with a model for his Roman epic, the Aeneid.

[4] The Argonautica was an adventure for the poet, one of the major scholars of the Alexandrian period – it was a bold experiment in re-writing Homeric epic in a way that would meet the demanding tastes of his contemporaries.

In adapting the epic genre to this audience, Apollonius went a long way towards inventing the romance novel,[5] including narrative techniques like the "interior monologue", whereby the author identifies with a character's thoughts and feelings.

The first trace of the common tradition that Jason was sent to fetch the golden fleece from Aea, the city of Aeëtes, in the eastern boundaries of the earth, occurs in Mimnermus (Strabo, Geography, 1.2.40), a contemporary of Solon; but the most ancient detailed account of the expedition of the Argonauts which is extant, is that of Pindar (Pythian Odes iv.

The first major port they reach is Lemnos, where the women, led by their Queen Hypsipyle, have recently murdered all their menfolk, including husbands, sons, brothers and fathers.

The Argonauts reach a gulf in the Propontis, home to the Bebrycians, whose king Amycus demands a boxing match with the champion of these "sea-wanderers" (Ancient Greek: ἁλίπλαγκτοι).

His powers of prophecy are so great that Zeus has punished him for giving away divine secrets, afflicting him with extreme old age, blindness and daily visits from the harpies.

Zetes and Calais, sons of the north wind, duly chase the pests away, and the blind old man gratefully reveals the safest route to Colchis and how best to sail past the Clashing Rocks.

Passing through the Clashing Rocks (thanks to the advice of Phineus, the pilot skills of Tiphys, and the aid of Athena), they enter the Black Sea and arrive at a deserted island, Thynias, where they observe Apollo flying overhead on his way north to visit the Hyperboreans.

Hera, an experienced mother, advises her to avoid quarrels with the boy and Aphrodite subsequently buys his support with the gift of a fabulous ball, composed of gold and intricately fashioned so as to leave a trail like a falling star when thrown at the sky.

He sets off for the ship to inform his crew and Medea's thoughts flutter at his departing heels (νόος ... ἑρπύζων πεπότητο μετ' ἴχνια), torn between love and anguish.

Jason solemnly pledges to marry her, she puts the snake to sleep with a spell and then the hero takes the Fleece back to the Argo, exulting in its sheen like a young girl who has caught moonbeams in the folds of her gown.

A gale blows them back north and they enter the river Eridanus (Po), whose different branches eventually bring them into The Sardinian Sea (Gulf of Lyons), on the western side of Ausonia (Italy).

The goddess advises the nymph that her infant son Achilles is destined to marry Medea in the Elysian fields and then she sends her on an errand to secure the Argo's passage south.

Meanwhile, they lose another two comrades, Mopsus and Canthus, one dying from snake bite, the other from a wound inflicted by a local shepherd belonging to the ancestral family of the native Garamantes and Nasamones.

Shortly afterwards, Triton reveals a route from the lake to the open sea and entrusts Euphemus with a magical clod of earth that is destined to become the island of Thera, from which Libya would later be settled by Greek colonists.

The story ends with a visit to the island of Anaphe, where the Argonauts institute rites in honour of Apollo, and Aegina (not far from Jason's home), where they establish a festival competition, fetching water and racing one another with full amphorae on their shoulders.

The Argonautica is notable too for the high number of verses and phrases imitating Homer, and for the way it reproduces linguistic peculiarities of old epic, in syntax, metre, vocabulary and grammar.

When Jason first meets Hypsipyle in Book 1, he wears a cloak made for him by Athena, embroidered with various scenes alluding to tragic women that Homer's Odysseus met in Hades (Odyssey 11.225–380).

[16] Cultured Alexandrians considered themselves heirs of a long literary tradition and this is evoked when Apollonius crowds his poem with as much research material as he could borrow from mythical, historiographical and ethnographic sources.

[26] Jason's character traits are more characteristic of the genre of realism than epic, in that he was, in the words of J. F. Carspecken: chosen leader because his superior declines the honour, subordinate to his comrades, except once, in every trial of strength, skill or courage, a great warrior only with the help of magical charms, jealous of honour but incapable of asserting it, passive in the face of crisis, timid and confused before trouble, tearful at insult, easily despondent, gracefully treacherous in his dealings with the love-sick Medea...[nb 9]This hostile view can be extended to the whole crew: the Bebrycian episode, where Polydeuces beats the native king to death, and where the Argonauts turn piratical, may be understood as the start of their moral decline, which intensifies and culminates in the murder of Medea's brother.

In this world, people are alienated from each other and from their environment, as symbolized by the Libyan desert, where the Argonauts scatter so as to die privately: "effort no longer has the power to transform, and weakness is as influential as strength.

Homer's gods also are more like people than divinities but Apollonius provides them with a liveliness, an orderliness and a degree of banality that evoke domesticity in Alexandrian high society.

[45] Voyage narratives don't fit in well with Aristotelian notions of dramatic unity, or, as one modern scholar recently put it: "It is precisely this inherent inconsequentiality, the episodic partition imposed by the very nature of travel, which can be seen at the heart of the Western tradition of romance, as opposed to the harsh teleologies of epic.

"[50] Any apparent weaknesses in characterization can also be explained in the Ptolemaic setting – the story isn't really about Jason or about any of the Argonauts, as individuals, but about their historic role in establishing a Greek destiny in Libya.

The stranding of the Argonauts on the Libyan coast, their carrying of Argo across the desert and the deaths there of Mopsus and Canthus give a Greek perspective to this Egyptian symbolism, with the Golden Fleece figuring as a solar emblem.

Thus the action of the Argonautica can seem highly organized, as an attempt to soften the boundaries between Alexandria's indigenous ethnic population and its immigrant Greeks, by means of a shared mythology and worldview.

Altars that Medea set up in a local temple of Apollo still receive annual sacrifices to the nymphs who attended her wedding, and to the Fates (associated with births and marriages).