There are many individual moments throughout the poem, both larger and smaller, that recall moments in the Homeric epics. Apollonius can certainly be read as an extraordinary act of reception of Homeric epic, but he is not derivative (and here some prejudices of earlier scholarship on the Alexandrian poem continue to echo in modern criticism). His engagement with Homer is anything but one-sided: the Argonautica questions, furthers, enhances, alters its Homeric models; its reading next to Homer is at once an act of attraction and disjunction.
Modern criticism of the Argonautica has foundered on several of the poem’s novel features. One is of course the “difference” from Homer. Many of the standard features that the Homeric poems owe to an oral narrative tradition, formulaic epithets and repeated set scenes among others, are missing in Apollonius’ poem. As already observed, there is a distinctly different mechanism in the use of simile. The portrayal of the gods, and their appearance in the poem, is markedly different from Homer. In the Homeric poems the gods serve a variety of functions within the poem, as metaphor, as directional movement (the passage of a divine figure from Olympus to Earth and vice versa changes the scene of narrative focus), and in the Iliad in particular as lighter and deathless contrast to the grim realities of war on the battlefield. Generally gods in the Homeric poems interact with mortals in disguise, even in dream sequences. Appearances of the gods in the Argonautica are quite different, and consciously play on Homeric convention. The one extended scene on Olympus (the opening of Book 3), in some ways a reworking of several scenes from the Iliad and the Odyssey, is at the same time unlike any scene in Homer: Homeric Olympus does not allow for this kind of portrayal of domestic intimacy. There are two extraordinary moments in the poem when the heroes actually see the god Apollo as the god Apollo. And when gods intervene in the Apollonian narrative, as Athena does when holding back the Clashing Rocks, they do so as anthropomorphized divine forces.
A major problem for modern criticism of the poem is the portrayal of Jason. Admittedly our first encounters with Odysseus in the Odyssey (the hero on the beach weeping with longing for his homeland) and Achilles in the Iliad (the hero on the beach lamenting to his mother of his mistreatment by Agamemnon) are not high moments in epic heroism, but these moments fit within a code of epic-heroic expectations: the hero in isolation, the hero dishonored. Jason is more complex, and, quite arguably, more problematic. The Argonauts’ initial choice of Heracles to lead the expedition is only the first of a series of moments in which Jason’s leadership is cast in doubt either by other Argonauts or by the poet’s descriptive language. Jason is frequently characterized as amekanos, “resourceless,” “at a loss.” His first action in battle is to kill his host Cyzicus, king of the Doliones, albeit in error, but the action remains problematic. The hero who steps forward to fight the savage Amycus at the opening of Book 2 is not Jason but Polydeuces. Jason does succeed at the superhuman tasks assigned by the Colchian Aeëtes, but only through Medea’s magic. And, as already observed, Jason’s prancing about with the golden fleece is an odd reflection of traditional heroism.
To be sure, Jason has his defenders. Indeed, defenses of Jason are something of a small industry in Apollonian scholarship.1 And the argument can indeed be made that here, as with Aeneas (though in some ways differently), at issue is a more modern, more complex type of epic hero. Certainly there are some factors that set Jason rather apart from his Homeric predecessors. One is without doubt the role of Jason’s erotic appeal, already present in the Lemnian episode in Book 1, and at the center of the drama of Medea’s psychological struggle in Book 3 and the opening of Book 4.2 Only Paris in the Iliad is similarly characterized, but
he has a somewhat circumscribed role in that poem.3 Jason’s beauty is the object of an eroticized female gaze, and, particularly in the case of Medea, this leads to extensive internal psychological reaction.
Jason is also a different kind of leader, one whose diplomacy is called repeatedly into action. Here one reading of Jason would be not so much as a hero of traditional epic as a reflection of the needs, and realities, of a modern monarch. Apollonius is a court poet who composed his poetry at the court of one of the successor kings who followed Alexander’s campaigns, which transformed the ancient Mediterranean world into a series of competing dynastic monarchies. The Argonautica, and the figure of Jason himself, can be read against this immediate historical backdrop, and the relations of the male power figures in the poem can be understood in light of the political and military struggles of the Ptolemies, the Seleucids, the Antigonids, and other successor kings.
Similarly Medea’s character, and the dominant role that she takes in the last half of the poem, can be read against a recent history where powerful women, among them Olympias, Alexander’s mother, play central roles in the unfolding of political and dynastic (and even military) events that are far different from those of the archaic and classical periods. A recently discovered text from this period, a series of epigrams now attributed to Apollonius’ near contemporary poet Posidippus of Pella,4 is of particular interest here. The collection of hitherto almost entirely unknown short poems focuses largely on women in a variety of conquests, including as queens and subjects of victory celebrations. As several scholars have observed, Medea becomes a different sort of hero in the latter half of the poem. Whereas Jason’s psychological processes are rarely touched on, the inner workings of Medea’s mind, her dreams, her fears, her frightened inability to control her emotions, are all given considerable scope in the poem’s third and fourth books. A particularly revealing moment is her interchange with the enchantress Circe in the fourth book, where Medea and Circe communicate in their own language. This moment sets Medea in the role of Odysseus, who seeks Circe’s aid and whose particular relationship with Circe sets him apart from his followers. In the final combat with an otherworldly figure, the giant Talus, it is Medea whose magical knowledge is victorious, as is true with the dragon that guards the golden fleece, and of her “creation” of Jason as the hero who slays the earthborn men.
At the time of the Argonautica’s composition, the Ptolemaic Empire covered a vast geographical space, extending from the Cyreneica in the west (modern Libya) to Coele-Syria (modern Israel, Palestine, Lebanon) in the east, much of southern Asia Minor, and many Aegean islands.5 The Ptolemies were further major players in the political world of mainland Greece, where they served as a counterweight to Macedon. The new epigrams attributed to Posidippus include a number of poems dedicated to early Ptolemaic queens, several of which, poems that celebrate victory in horse racing at Nemea in the Peloponnese, attest to the actual presence of individual royal family members at the games. Apollonius’ Argonautica can be understood in one sense as a four-book travel narrative, one that takes its point of departure from a long-ago saga that told of a journey from Thessaly through the Propontis and around the Black Sea (an older trajectory). The poem then, in its long last book, brings the poem’s audience (the newer trajectory) along the Danube, then down the western Adriatic coast, back up the Adriatic to the Po in Italy, to the Rhône in France, to Libya (importantly, the setting of the prophetic oracle of Zeus-Ammon at the Oasis of Siwah, where Alexander had been proclaimed son of Zeus), to Crete, and thence back to the Greek mainland. Apollonius’ mapping of the Argonauts’ return brings the heroes of the Argo through areas that were relevant to the Ptolemaic Empire with its vast naval fleet, a different Greek world from that imagined in the ancient saga tradition.6 From the perspective of the ancient saga, this return involves a journey into the unknown. This journey may be in part a reflection of the expeditions that took place under the Ptolemies to Nubia, and particularly the Arabian Sea. The quest narrative of the original legend (a young prince is sent to the land of the Sun in search of a magical object, and is aided in that quest by a local princess) finds real-life parallel, as it were, in the early Ptolemaic quest for more widespread hegemony and control of the import of luxury goods.
While the Argonautica
is, on the one hand, an epic hexameter poem heavily imbued throughout by Homeric and Hesiodic tradition, it is, in other ways, quite new, and to a modern reader, particularly one coming to the poem without much experience of its earlier models, may read much more like Tolkien in poetic form than anything else. And this would perhaps be right. In its combination of the real and the fantastical, its engagement with traditions of medicine, astronomy, and science, its magical vessel that speaks and yet serves as the plaything of water nymphs, heroes that have wings, and a king whose grandfather is the center of the solar system, it is truly without exact parallel in previous or contemporary Greek literature. The Argonautica has its detractors, and has long had its detractors, but for those who admire the poem, even on multiple rereadings, it is an experience close to magical.
BENJAMIN ACOSTA-HUGHES
Notes
1.Clauss 1993 is an excellent and accessible study of this issue.
2.There are a number of studies on the role of Eros in the Argonautica. A particularly good one is the second chapter of Richard Hunter’s 1993 literary studies of the poem.
3.Here the portrayal of Paris in two poems of the Trojan cycle, the Cypria and the Little Iliad, may have been contributing factors to Apollonius’ portrayal. Neither poem, however, has survived.
4.These are available in English in the translation of F. Nisetich in Gutzwiller 2005.
5.On the Ptolemaic naval empire see now Bursalis, Stefanou, and Thompson 2013.
6.Thalmann 2011 is an excellent and proactively new study of the poem in these terms.
References Cited
Bursalis, Kostas, Mary Stefanou, and Dorothy J. Thompson, eds. The Ptolemies, the Sea and the Nile: Studies in Waterborne Power. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Clauss, James J. The Best of the Argonauts: The Redefinition of the Epic Hero in Book 1 of Apollonius’ Argonautica. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.
Gutzwiller, Kathryn, ed. The New Posidippus: A Hellenistic Poetry Book. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Hunter, Richard. The Argonautica of Apollonius: Literary Studies. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
———. The Shadow of Callimachus: Studies in the Reception of Hellenistic Poetry at Rome. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Leitao, David. The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor in Classical Greek Literature. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
Loraux, Nicole. Tragic Ways of Killing a Woman. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Unversity Press, 1987.
Meuli, Karl. Odysee und Argonautika: Untersuchungen zur griechischen Sagengeschichte und zum Epos. Berlin: Weidmann, 1921.
Mori, Anatole. The Politics of Apollonius Rhodius’ Argonautica. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Stephens, Susan A. Seeing Double: Intercultural Poetics in Ptolemaic Alexandria. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.
Thalmann, William G. Apollonius of Rhodes and the Spaces of Hellenism. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
A Note on the Text
and Translation
Based on the edition of Francis Vian and Émile Delage (published from 1974 to 1999), this is an unabridged English translation of Apollonius of Rhodes’ ancient Greek epic Argonautica (Jason and the Argonauts). My intention with this project was to create the most engaging and readable translation of the poem available.
Given its large cast of characters and vast geographic scope, Jason and the Argonauts is rich in proper nouns. I opted for the Latin spellings of Greek names because they look less foreign to the reader and are more likely to be recognized. Thus, Zeus’ father is “Cronus” and not “Kronos,” and Aphrodite is given the title “Cypris” instead of “Kypris” so that her connection to the island Cyprus would be clear. I translated Greek names that end in the letter eta with the Latin a (“Athena” instead of “Athene” and “Zona” instead of “Zone,” for example) to clarify their syllable counts. I did, however, allow for exceptions where the names are standard in English with an e ending: Alcimede, Antiope, Aphrodite, Arete, Ariadne, Chalciope, Circe, Cleite, Cyrene, Dicte, Hecate, Helle, Hypsipyle, and Terpsichore. I include diaeresis () in some names, again to assist with pronunciation and clarify syllable counts: Aeëtes, Alcinoös, Calaïs, Danaë, Laocoön, Nausithoös, Peirithoös, and Phaëthon.
In the lengthy roster of heroes (Book 1, lines 35–322), the names of the Argonauts are presented in boldface to make them stand out from the names of their fathers, grandfathers, mothers, home cities, and homelands. Furthermore, whereas editions of the Greek original present the reader with thousand-plus-line columns of text broken only at the ends of books, this translation takes the editorial license of breaking up the text into stanzas, easily digestible units of sense. I have also inserted, I hope unobtrusively, in-text translations of Greek words and word roots in the few cases where they are essential to understanding the surrounding passage. Line numbers are provided every five lines, and every fifteen lines line numbers for the Greek original are provided in parentheses to facilitate cross-reference. In short, I have done all that I could to make this translation as reader- and scholar-friendly as possible.
I have felt for years that Jason and the Argonauts needed a verse translation in which the poetic rhythms reinforce syntactic units, as do the rhythms of the original, and in which the electricity of language we expect in poetry is sustained. I hope I have achieved these goals. My models were the great blank verse epics of the English language: John Milton’s Paradise Lost and Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. Iambic pentameter has the advantage of being familiar to the English ear, as dactylic hexameter, the meter of the original, was to the ancient Greek one. Given the longer lines of the original and the compression of ancient Greek, my translation averages fifteen lines for every twelve of the Greek.
Again and again in Jason and the Argonauts, poetry works magic and effects rapture. For example, Apollonius informs us that, while Zethus, one of the founders of Thebes, struggled under the rock he was lugging to build the city walls, his brother Amphion “simply strolled along behind him / and strummed his golden lyre, and a boulder / twice as gigantic followed in his footsteps” (Book 1, 994–96). The mythic father of poets, Orpheus, is, in fact, one of the Argonauts, and we are told that he could “soften stubborn / mountain boulders and reverse a river’s / current with the seduction of his songs” (Book 1, 39–41). The effect of his music on humans and animals is mesmerizing. We learn that, when Orpheus strummed his lyre from the deck of the Argo, “fish both big and small came leaping out of / the sea to revel in the vessel’s wake” (Book 1, 774–75). At the conclusion of his song to the Argonauts around the campfire, we find the following description:
So Orpheus intoned, then hushed his lyre
at the same time as his ambrosial voice.
Though he had ceased, each of his comrades still
leaned forward longingly, their ears intent,
their bodies motionless with ecstasy.
(Book 1, 696–700)
John Milton was so smitten with this passage that he all but translated it for Paradise Lost:
The Angel ended, and in Adam’s Ear
So Charming left his voice, that he a while
Thought him still speaking, still stood fixt to hear.
(Book VIII, 1–3)
Apollonius is himself subject to the same rapt amazement. In what is, perhaps, his most emotional insertion of himself into the epic, he expresses awe at the fact that his character Medea is able to cast a spell that brings down bronze giant Talus:
Father Zeus, profound astonishment
has stormed my mind—to think that death can come
not only through disease and injury,
but people can undo us from afar,
just as that man, though made of bronze, surrendered
and fell
down underneath the far-flung onslaught
of that ingenious conjurer, Medea.
(Book 4, 2158–64)
Thus I found justification for a verse translation of the epic within the epic itself—a prose version would have captured the meaning but left out the magic. Though Orpheus, Medea, and Apollonius himself are stiff competition, I can console myself with the knowledge that I did my best to make my translation a tribute to their powers.
In addition to being thoroughly endearing, Apollonius’ voice is elastic—it rises to Homeric heights, slips into the “storybook” tone of fairy tale and indulges in genealogical, mythological, and geographic asides, to which it enjoys calling attention (“wait, why have I digressed so widely, talking / about Aethalides?”, Book 1, 874–75). Furthermore, though he was head librarian at the Great Library of Alexandria, Apollonius is no mere pedant. He is as much a psychological realist as Henry James when it comes to matters of love and sex (“devastating / affection crept up over him, because / she was a maiden, crying,” Book 3, 1391–93), and his characters, especially the females, are capable of operatic pathos. Take, for example, Medea’s contemplation of suicide as she decides whether to help Jason win the contest of the bulls:
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