Analysis
The chief characteristics of Alexandrianism, of which Callimachus was the leading proponent, were refinement in diction, precision of form and meter, erudition which often degenerated into pedantry and obscurity, and avoidance of the commonplace in subject, sentiment, and allusion. Apollonius Rhodius shares some of these traits, and he seems to have written the Argonautica out of bravado, to show that he could indeed write an epic poem. The influence of the age, however, was too strong. Instead of a unified epic, there is merely a series of episodes. In the four books of his Argonautica, Apollonius tells of the quest for the Golden Fleece and especially of Jason and Medea. The same story was known to Homer and certainly belonged in the repertory of old epic. It provided a splendid source of thrilling adventures and opportunities for excursions into the unknown, a literary device that varied the more straightforward episodes of epic. It demanded, however, a heroic sense of human worth and of perilous action, and this was precisely what Apollonius lacked. His Jason is the faintest of phantoms; he could hardly be otherwise, inasmuch as Apollonius lived in the metropolitan society of Alexandria and had little idea of how to depict a hero. There were other defects as well. Apollonius never forgot that he was an antiquarian and therefore he liberally garnished his poem with tidbits of erudite information. This is deadly not only to the flow of the narrative but also to the actual poetry. The delight in learning for its own sake was an especially Alexandrian characteristic. Literary allusions seeped into Alexandrian poetry without poets quite noticing how cumbersome and distracting they were. Apollonius must have thought such allusions gave richness and dignity to his story, but ultimately, they make it tedious and pedantic.
Argonautica
Not until the Hellenistic age and Apollonius’s Argonautica was there a complete epic presentation of the Thessalian or Argonautic cycle of legends, among the oldest in Greek mythology. Poetry in all its forms had time and again turned to the legend of the Argonauts and the local history of the many places connected with it. Thus, Apollonius was faced with a rich tradition with many partly contradictory variants.
Apollonius’s composition exhibits a systematic arrangement of the subject matter. The first two books describe the voyage to the land of Colchis, the third relates the adventures leading to the winning of the Golden Fleece, while the fourth tells of the dangers of the flight and the return home. The stress on details, however, is variously distributed; there are rapid transitions, but there are also passages over which Apollonius had lingered lovingly, typical of the rejection of symmetry and the tendency to variety found elsewhere in Alexandrian poetry.
Book 1
While a proem with prayer formula is merely indicated at the beginning of book 1 and much of the preceding history is saved for later, the introductory passage offers an elaborate catalog of the Argonauts, geographically arranged in the manner of a circumnavigation and leading from the north of Greece to the east and west and then back to the north. The catalog tradition of ancient epic served as its model. The scenes of departure in Iolcus and on the beach at Pagasae are spun out in detail. Then follows the long series of stopping places and adventures on the way out, along the usual route to Colchis. For the voyage up to the treacherous passage through the Symplegades, which are thought to be at the entrance to the Pontus, the tradition had a number of effective, ready-made episodes upon which Apollonius elaborated...
(This entire section contains 2275 words.)
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successfully. First is the landing in Lemnos, where the women, under a curse of Aphrodite, have killed their husbands. Now, however, they are glad to entertain the Argonauts. The result is a delectable sojourn from which Heracles has to call his companions to action. That is followed by the initiation into the mysteries at Samothrace and the adventures in Cyzicus. Here the Argonauts give the Doliones effective help against evil giants only to become involved, through a misunderstanding, in a bitterly regretted nocturnal battle with their friends.
The next stop on the coast of Propontis provides the setting for the Hylas episode. When Apollonius tells how the beautiful youth Hylas is dragged down into a pool by a nymph who has fallen in love with him, he does it very well, since his dramatic economy avoids any kind of false pathos, and the reader witnesses the nymph’s ruthless determination as she puts her arms around the boy who is stooping to get water. Heracles seeks Hylas in the woods and the Argonauts continue their voyage without him, since the sea-god Glaucus announces that the hero is destined to perform other deeds. This device eliminates from the narrative the greatest of the champions, beside whom the heroic Jason would pale by comparison.
Book 2
The story continues without a stop from book 1 to book 2, which begins with Pollux’s boxing match with Amycus, a barbarian king. In Bithynia, the Argonauts come upon the blind king Phineus, who, in deep misery, is doing penance for some ancient offense. The winged sons of Boreas liberate him from the Harpies, the predatory storm spirits who rob him of every meal or defile it. As a reward, Phineus gives the Argonauts good advice for the rest of their voyage. The compositional significance of this preview is that it sums up the various minor episodes of the second half of the voyage. The passage through the Symplegades after a pigeon’s test flight is depicted with dramatic power. Thereafter, the only sojourn worthy of mention is that on the island of Ares. There the Argonauts drive out the Stymphalian birds, and there they meet the sons of Phrixus. Their mother is Chalciope, Aeetes’ daughter and the sister of Medea. Medea will play a significant role in the events in Colchis, thus the meeting in the island of Ares provides a dramatic link between the description of the voyage and the winning of the Golden Fleece.
Book 3
Book 3 starts with a new proem and portrays the events in Colchis by means of a technique which often resolves the action into parallel strands. Medea’s decisive intervention is first motivated in a scene in which the goddesses Hera and Athena enjoin Aphrodite to have Eros do his work. Independent from this motivation, however, Medea’s awakening love, her hard struggle between loyalty to her father’s house and passion for the handsome stranger, is presented as a drama full of tension with the girl’s soul as the stage. Apollonius is at his best when he writes of love. What engages all his powers is not Jason’s love for Medea (on which he leaves the reader uninstructed) but Medea’s love for Jason, and it is this which makes book 3 of the Argonautica shine more brightly than the other three. Medea is still a girl, and she falls passionately in love at first sight. When she first sees Jason, he seems to her like Sirius rising from the ocean, and Apollonius, not without echoes of Sappho, describes how a mist covers Medea’s eyes, her cheeks burn like fire, her knees are too weak to move, and she feels rooted to the earth. When, a little later, Medea helps him in his ordeals to win the Fleece, the light playing on his yellow hair makes her willing to tear the life out of her breast for him, and her heart melts like dew on roses in the morning. When their love is fulfilled, Medea is entirely absorbed in him, but when he plans to return to Greece and in his callous indifference is ready to leave her behind, the fierce side of her nature emerges, and she bursts into bitter remonstrances, chiding him for his ingratitude. If he really intends to desert her, she invokes disaster and vengeance on him and prays that the Furies will make him homeless. In this part of his poem, Apollonius tells one of the first surviving love stories in the world.
Alongside this love story runs a subplot concerning Chalciope, which leads to her intervention and to the decisive talk between the two sisters, Chalciope and Medea. The composition of book 3 is particularly careful. Developing in several stages, it progresses to the meeting of Medea and Jason, when he receives the magic ointment.
Book 4
Book 4, which begins with a brief invocation to the Muse, presents Apolonius with his most exciting challenge, to which he rises admirably. After receiving the magic ointment from Medea, Jason must yoke fire-breathing bulls, sow dragon’s teeth, and destroy the armed men who spring out of them. Jason falls on the men like a shooting star, and the furrows are as filled with blood as runnels are with water. Apollonius presents the weird scene very vividly, capturing even the brilliant light shining from the armor and weapons. This struggle bears no resemblance to a Homeric battle, but, in its unearthly strangeness, it is convincing and complete. Apollonius glories in strangeness for its own sake, and it is this quality that makes him a pioneer of that kind of poetry which deals with remote and unfamiliar themes. The rest of book 4 describes the homeward voyage, two high points being the murder of Absyrtus, who has gone in pursuit of his sister Medea, and the marriage of Jason and Medea in the land of the Phaeacians. One of the most enchanting aspects of mythic geography is the way the return of the Argonauts was modified as the knowledge of foreign countries and seas increased, newly discovered facts and ancient mythic elements forming various and often grotesque combinations. After a series of less-than-dangerous adventures, the Argonauts return to Colchis.
Apollonius’s epic has numerous qualities which depend largely on the literary and historical background of the work. Some readers find it pedantic, unpoetic, or dry, while others—and especially in recent times—are able to appreciate the truly poetical qualities of the Argonautica. In the first place, it should be clearly understood that the intellectual world in which this epic originated was separated from that of Homer by an immeasurable distance. When older poets molded the history of the heroic past for their people, they claimed that their verses imbued true events with splendor and permanence. In these events the gods were active everywhere; they were great spirits, inspiring faith and helpfully allying themselves with man or wrathfully striking out at him. By Apollonius’s time, the living belief had become mythology or was proceeding toward this condition. Hardly anything can be said about Apolonius’s personal religious feelings, but his attitude to tradition cannot have been very different from that of Callimachus. Apollonius’s stylos was guided both by an erudite interest in mythical tradition and by a delight in the unfading beauty of its creations. Both can be discerned in his verse.
Comparisons to Homer
The tremendous distance from Homer’s world is in exciting contrast with the fact that numerous and essential elements of ancient epic remain preserved. In Apollonius, the gods also act, but the very nature of the great Olympian scene at the opening of book 3 reveals the ornamental character of such passages. With Hera, Athena, and Eros a complete divine apparatus is developed, but Medea’s love and its consequences are completely imaginable without it. Also, in the portrayal of the girl’s emotional struggles, the poet can be recognized much more directly than in the conversations of the Olympians. While in Homer, man’s actions are determined simultaneously by his own impulses and by the influence of the gods, in Apollonius this duality of motivation has resulted in separate spheres of action. The divine plot takes place on an upper stage; its connection with earthly happenings is neither indissoluble nor irrevocably necessary.
Apollonius retains important formal elements of Homeric epic. While he is sparing with metaphors, he uses similes with great frequency. Their free, Homeric spontaneity has been restricted in Apollonius in favor of a more direct bearing on the action, although the subject matter has been expanded in many directions. Illustrations of emotions by means of similes, found in the verse of Homer in rudimentary form, have been developed by Apollonius with great skill. Thus Medea’s agitation and irresolution are elucidated by the image of the sun’s ray which is reflected onto a wall by the ruffled surface of water. Apollonius also uses stock scenes, but he keeps recurrent formulas to a minimum. This is connected with another, fundamentally important observation. Apollonius’s language is largely based on that of Homer. This does not mean that Apollonius accepted the tradition without due reflection or that he imitated it naïvely. Rather, the linguistic resources he borrowed are given new effectiveness through constant, well-planned variation, sometimes even by means of a shifting of the meaning.
The Homeric legacy, which functions as a sort of framework for the Argonautica with regard to themes and style, contrasts with the poem’s Alexandrian element. Apollonius is a realist, although the term is to be taken in its broadest sense. In the final analysis, this realism is connected with the altered attitude toward myths, with the awareness of their illusory nature. Apollonius may be granted poetic ability, and there may be much that is praiseworthy in his work, but he was not truly a poet filled with the Muse; time and again, the reader is struck by the cool objectivity with which he describes legendary events. This also explains the great care he takes with motivation and establishment of cohesion.
