[In the following excerpt, Beye explores the literary background of the Argonautica, outlines the plot of the work, and argues that its difficult structure and unanswered questions create difficulties for readers.]

She would have taken out her soul from her
  breast,
and given it to him, so thrilled was she at his
  desiring her.
Desire cast its sweet flame out from Jason's
  blond head;
It captured her gleaming eyes. Her wits
  relaxed in the warmth,
melting, fading, as the dew fades, warmed in
  dawn's early rays.
—Argonautica 3.1016-21

Relentless Love, great bane of the human
  race, abomination,
from you comes destructive strife, come
  groans and lamentations,
from you come countless woes to trouble and
  cause confusion.
—Argonautica 4.445-47

Tradition had it that the sixth-century Athenian tyrant Pisistratus established the custom of reciting the Iliad and the Odyssey at the Panathenaic Festival. Whatever the truth of that tradition, it is probably fair to say that as the sixth century B.C.E. came to its end, the Homeric poems had become an institution. And one might also assume that the original social needs and aesthetic impulses that had led to creating epic poetry were by this time beginning to dissipate. But the Homeric poems, which seem to have been universally acknowledged as superior to all other epic poetry, were valuable as cultural icons. Their preservation became almost a religion. On the island of Chios, for instance, there appeared a guild known as the Homeridai, "the men of Homer" (if not "the fans of Homer"), who took it upon themselves to maintain an authoritative tradition of the recitation of the poems. It is said that they preserved the original pronunciation of the Iliad and the Odyssey down to Alexandrian times.

As noted earlier, we have little knowledge and only minimal fragments of the works of the epic poets who created a series of poems that more or less systematized the saga and myth tradition of the early Hellenes. The poems of the Epic Cycle for the most part filled in the gaps in the story line from the origin of the world to the death of Odysseus, which might be called the end of the heroic age. They were widely read and influential; seven or eight centuries later the Roman poet Virgil seems to have composed the second book of his Aeneid from material contained in the so-called Ilioupersis (The fall of Troy). Four centuries after Virgil a Greek poet, Quintus of Smyrna, took some of the material of the Epic Cycle to create a poem called Posthomerica (What came after Homer), in which he scrupulously reproduced the narrative style of the Homeric poems. It is probable that the Epic Cycle poems were valued more as repositories of the ancient stories than anything else. The Hellenistic poet and critic Callimachus did not like them as poetry, complaining that the poems of the Epic Cycle depended for their coherence and fluency on the very mechanical narrative device of "and then."

The literary history of Greece in the fifth century B.C.E. is marked by the emergence of tragic drama and history writing. Both literary forms are a logical extension of the process of epic poetry. As collections of ancient stories in an age still barely literate and with minimal access to the written word, the poems of the Epic Cycle along with the Homeric poems constituted the archival record of the Hellenes. The historians took this material, particularized it, endowed it with motives, space, and time. As highly stylized, conventional narratives depicting stereotypic people in stereotypic scenes, the epic poems constituted a manual of behavior for archaic Greece. Tragedy mythologizes this conventional epic action by severely restricting details and rigidly schematizing action, thereby taking it one step further into abstraction.

Throughout the fifth century, epic poetry continued to be sung, and some new epic poems were even written. Apart from the Homeridai, professional singers known as rhapsodes, recited parts of epic poems at festivals and at other public gatherings. We have a portrait of such a man in Plato's dialogue Ion. The reader who gets past the ridiculous line of argument with which Socrates harasses poor Ion discovers a rhapsode who is a thoroughgoing professional, dedicated to his art and to the poetry of Homer.

A poetic form as routine, automatic, and unoriginal as epic had become either dies or is revised and reconstrued. In the late fifth century a certain Antimachus of Colophon composed Thebais, an epic poem, narrating the first expedition against Thebes. Antimachus borrowed from the style of the early epic poets but reordered his material to give it new meaning. He varied the language and development; he introduced new forms, stylistic elements from other genres, and every other kind of obscurity. It must have been an awful poem, even if an interesting commentary on literary practice and genre. Unfortunately, the surviving fragments of Thebais have been preserved because they illustrate its oddities; these tend to reinforce its idiosyncrasy. But Callimachus himself pronounced the poem slow and pedantic. One might argue that Antimachus shared Euripides' preoccupation with what Ezra Pound was forever enjoining his contemporaries to do: "Only make it New." This last of the great fifth-century tragic playwrights is remarkable for reconstituting the stories of tragic drama. Euripides' Alcestis and Electra and Orestes are dramas in which the characters act out behavior that is implicit in the legends but scarcely explicit or conventional. Compare Euripides' portrait of Alcestis, a wife who is willing to die for her husband only after making some rather harsh demands upon him, with Phaedrus's far more conventional description in Plato's Symposium of her thoroughly self-sacrificing wifely act of altruism.

From the vantage point of the twentieth century C.E., Antimachus seems to presage the third-century B.C.E. literary and cultural movement that literary historians call Alexandrianism. The term derives from the city of Alexandria, founded in 332 B.C.E. by the Macedonian king and conqueror Alexander himself on the Egyptian shores of the Mediterranean. After his death in 323 his general, Ptolemy, consolidated the position of the Greek-speaking conquerors in Egypt and made himself the ruler. He adopted the style of the Pharaohs and ruled absolutely, something new for Greeks, who were used either to illegal tyrants of dubious authority or to democratic city-states. But Ptolemy's philosophers were able to legitimate his position by language and logic from which descends the theory of the divine right of kings, which accounts for the words Dieu et mon Droit on the arms of the English royal family as well as for the pope's claim to be the Vicar of Christ on Earth.

Ptolemy chose to legitimate not only his royal person but also the colonial city of Alexandria, a Greek-speaking entity surrounded by Egyptians. He strove to make it a kind of new Athens, looking not to the declining city of the fourth century but back to what the self-advertising fifth-century Athenians characterized as their glorious experiment in democracy, art, and literature. He invited Demetrius of Phalerum, who had been involved in the Athenian school of Aristotle, to come to Alexandria and create a library. The Library and the so-called Museion (our word is "Museum"; at Alexandria it was a kind of think tank for scholars) attached to it deeply influenced all the literature produced in Alexandria during this most productive third century. In Western literary history the Alexandrian period is most important not only for what was produced but for the highly influential literary critical theories that arose then.

Ptolemy and Demetrius set out to collect copies of everything written in the Greek language. Eventually the Library contained 700,000 papyrus rolls, the largest collection in the world for a very long time to come. As noted earlier, the word for roll in Greek is biblion, generally translated as book, which is why so many ancient works are divided up into what are called "books" rather than "chapters." The division of the Iliad and the Odyssey, which are of such unequal length, into the same number of books seems artificial. Further artificiality appears in their each being divided into as many books as there were letters in the conventional Athenian alphabet. The divisions seem more obedient to the arbitrary logicalities of a library system than to the aesthetic principles of a poet, poets, or a poetic tradition. The problem of book division, like the aesthetic question of framing a painting, must have engaged the writers of the Alexandrian Age. In fact, the book divisions of the Argonautica seem to be speaking to this problem

The librarians who gathered the papyrus rolls and disposed them in the collection were at pains to authenticate and classify the texts. Remarks in the margins of Homeric manuscripts reveal that scholars of the time were concerned to remove from the poems lines that they believed offensive either to the Homeric manner, to the nature of epic poetry, or at times, obviously, to the scholars themselves. They wanted to delete Achilles at his most selfish when he is demanding that Patroclus not take too much glory for himself, Thetis telling Achilles to get over Patroclus's death by sleeping with a woman, Zeus being excessively violent, Dionysus described as afraid, and an entirely too tedious (to an Alexandrian whose medium was reading) ten-line verbatim repetition. Concerns such as these betoken an overriding emphasis on genre and concern for poetic decorum.

We are fortunate in having fragments of poetry by Callimachus, whose critical theories set the standard of poetry for the age and greatly influenced the Romans when they discovered the Alexandrian Age two centuries later. His major work was a poem of seven thousand lines called Aetia (Causes), about the origins or causes of things. Like Hesoid's Works and Days and Theogony, the poem reveals the antiquarian mind of its author, a collector of lore and curiosities, far more interested in fact than in fiction. So far as we can tell from the fragments, the poem was episodic, a grand catalogue more than anything else. His celebrated poem Hecale is in dactylic hexameters, a meter that immediately suggests heroic narrative, but it is heroic in miniature, since there are no more than a thousand lines. Here again Callimachus plays with conventional narrative values by skewing the focus. The story concerns Theseus coming to fight the bull of Marathon. Whereas a traditional narrative describing heroic action would have concentrated on the labor of Theseus—and there were many poems on such themes—this narrator spends the greater amount of time recounting Theseus's visit to an old woman, Hecale, and describing the dinner she serves him. The contest with the bull is casually sandwiched between that episode and Theseus's return to Hecale's house, where he finds her dead. The conclusion of the poem is a description of Theseus's grief and the rites instituted in the old woman's honor.

Callimachus calls for poetry that is brief, peeled down to the essence; he wants a sound that is clear and pure. He uses the images of a clean path, of priestesses bringing their water from the clear spring and not the muddied river, of the path untrod by the many, a narrow path where carts cannot go. Elegance, economy, refinement, and novelty, especially novelty, are the operative terms of the Callimachean aesthetic. As his parodies of the archaic Homeric hymns suggest, he also urged wit, that eighteenth-century term for the elegant juxtaposition of the incongruous. An amused tone, altogether foreign to the high seriousness of archaic and fifth-century Greek literature, permeates almost everything written in the Alexandrian Age.

Little remains of the enormous literary production of that age. There are fragments, but few complete works. Theocritus's pastoral poems, the notable invention of the period, survive intact. Alongside them, the most significant other work is the Argonautica of Apollonius Rhodius. We know very little about the life and times of Apollonius. He was born sometime in the early third century B.C.E., perhaps at Alexandria. He studied with Callimachus. His career got off to a shaky start with a hostile reception of his Argonautica, but he was much esteemed later on. He may have spent time on the island of Rhodes (hence Rhodius in his name to distinguish him from every other Apollonius). He may have been tutor to the prince and heir to the throne as well as director of the Library. He may have quarreled with Callimachus. The paucity of information, most of it dubious, requires us therefore to dispense with the poet for our understanding of the poem.

It is probably best to lay to rest, however, the ancient tradition of a quarrel between Apollonius and Callimachus, since it accounts for a critical bias against the Argonautica. Modern scholarly critics have argued that Callimachus, Theocritus, all Callimachus's disciples must have considered the poem an entire contradiction of Callimachus's aesthetic principles: it was too long, too imitative of Homeric epic, too dependent on a conventional story line for its coherence—in sum, not original, new, different. But the many Callimachean and Theocritan quotations in the Argonautica might suggest quite the opposite, that Apollonius was insisting on his adherence to the Callimachean ideal. Then, too, a 5,835-line poem is scarcely long when compared with the Iliad or the Odyssey, which are more than twelve and fifteen thousand lines respectively. In the Poetics Aristotle had said that the successful newstyle epic poem must be far shorter than the typical old epics; it should approximate "the size of tragedies performed for one hearing." If he meant the time allotted to the three tragedies and one satyr play that were performed at one continuous sitting at the Festival of Dionysos at Athens, then the four books of the Argonautica, each of them approximately the length of a typical tragedy, would satisfy his prescription.

Apollonius is far from imitating Homer, as anyone who reads the poem sympathetically can quickly see. But perhaps this is something only twentieth-century critics will recognize. For the author is recreating, rereading, reconstituting the Homeric poems after the fashion of the experimental twentieth-century painters and poets of the Modernist movement who have reconstituted the entire Western European tradition. It is true that the Argonautica demonstrates an immense knowledge of the Homeric poems and an intuitive understanding of the Homeric manner. The narrator's habit of playing off the Homeric originals requires that the reader know the Iliad and the Odyssey equally well. In addition, the work is studded with allusions to all aspects of the Greek world. Since the narrator demands a reader who is thoroughly familiar with Greek culture, the poem probably reflects, on the one hand, the insularity of the Greek-speaking population of Alexandria and, on the other, the obsessive exclusivity common to colonial elites.

This development marks an important turning point in literary history. In earlier epochs epic poetry and tragic drama were important forms of social communication, the characters and action in every instance emblematic of the culture at large; these art forms were completely accessible to the people. The Alexandrian poet did not strive to communicate with his audience so much as require the audience to understand the poet. The poet spoke exclusively to the Greek-speaking population; eventually, Hellenistic poets and their Roman followers spoke only to the cognoscenti—whence the Latin poet Horace's haughty declaration Odiprofanum volgus et arceo ("I hate the people who must stand outside the temple door [i.e. the uninitiated] and distance myself from them"). One might say that this is the true stance of serious twentieth-century art, music, poetry, and criticism as well. Modernism, as this elite culture is known, has had a very different history from Greco-Roman Alexandrian elitism, however. Apollonius's uninitiated were first of all the non-Greek-speaking population surrounding Alexandria and in its foreign ghettos. Horace's uninitiated were the uneducated proletariat of the city of Rome. The masses of the twentieth century, however, are members of a consumer society that demands and can afford a vibrant alternative artistic, cultural experience in film, television, rock concerts, and the like. American Modernism has long since capitulated to it. As the consumer society goes global, so goes vulgar culture as well; it has a power and vitality that elite cultures around the world cannot withstand. Nothing like it has occurred in the Western world since the destruction of aristocratic pagan culture by the emergent ideology of Christianity.

The Argonautica is the story of Jason's voyage on the ship Argo to get the golden fleece at the command of his malevolent uncle Pelias. The first book describes the gathering of the crew (the Argonauts), in the form of a catalogue similar to that in the second book of the Iliad, and their setting sail; then come three quite unrelated episodes that establish Jason's role in this story. The second book is an account of the voyage to Colchis. It begins, however, with a boxing match in which the shining young hero Polydeuces defeats and kills the giant bogeyman Amycus. One might say that the narrator has positioned Amycus at the beginning of Book Two as an obstacle. He stands as a kind of gatekeeper defying anyone who would enter the second book and the adventure of travel to be encountered there, as well as the world of love and danger thereafter. The boxing match ends in the triumph of shining youth, beauty, and goodness over ugly, old, brutish strength; this is the outcome one would expect in a story of Jason, the beautiful youth who triumphs through his charm and graceful manners over the demands of the harsh old King Aeetes, father of Medea. But the second book also presents the aged prophet Phineus, who tells the crew what direction their trip will take. As they proceed from place to place, what he has told them comes true, although sometimes with minor variations. The multiple versions of supposedly the same reality seem to betray an Alexandrian interest in narrative point of view. The voyage of the Argonauts takes them past many interesting peoples and places, most of them truly extraordinary and exotic, which the narrator describes after the fashion of an anthropologist or geographer from the temporal position of the reader. The narrator is thus ironically depicting men who are indeed out of a fable, or from heroic myth, as they pass through the so-called "real world," which is studded with descriptions relating to the reader's contemporary experience yet is a world so bizarre that it could be labeled fabulous even more reasonably than can the mythic men traveling through it. The third book is the story of how Medea's father, Aeetes, challenges Jason to an impossible contest of strength as the price of the fleece, of how Medea falls in love with Jason and decides to give him charms to help him in his contest with the bulls that guard the fleece, and of Jason's decisive success in the contest. The fourth recounts Medea's leaving home to join Jason, their getting the fleece, their flight from her father's army, her brother's murder, and then a series of episodes set in a landscape that evokes their mood until finally they return to Greece.

Callimachus could never accuse Apollonius of leaning on the stale narrative device of "and then," like the poets of the Epic Cycle. There is little attempt at making a story in this poem, other than in the breathtaking adventure of Jason and Medea in Colchis and later in flight. Essentially, the work is a reading of the Homeric poems in particular and epic poetry in general. As such it is quintessentially Alexandrian, mirroring the scholarly preoccupation with literary forms and stylistic authenticity. The age ushered in an entirely new way of looking at literature. Previous writers may have considered their predecessors when they composed; certainly any society so traditional, in which the opinions of the old were privileged, would encourage an originality based upon what had gone before. But just as Ptolemy tried to recreate Athens in Alexandria, so the writers in his capital city tried to recreate their literary past in their own writings. Rather than through slavish imitation, however, these entirely original poets imitated through distancing, looked to the past by rereading the past, and in their reading—that is, their willful misreading, their deliberate perversion and parody of what had come before—they recreated the past by demanding that their readers notice the difference between their models and what they made in seeming imitation.

The book divisions of the Argonautica, for example, require the reader to reconsider the nature of continuous narrative and the aesthetics of arbitrary interruptions of it. Some features would startle or at the least unsettle a constant reader of traditional epic poetry. The Homeric poems, for instance, have been made to divide where episodes end in sunset and sleep, whereas Apollonius's first and second books close with the sunrise and the commencement of new action, which seems to be a kind of perversion of the notion of an ending. The first, third, and fourth books begin with an invocation, calling upon a deity for aid in narrating the story, but the symmetry of this very conventional manner of introduction is flawed by the simple and unadorned first line of the second book: "Here were the stables and farms of Amycus." It is unlikely that a modern reader would even notice this anomalous opening line; to someone who knows the constant symmetries of ancient literature, however, the raw, unadorned beginning to the second book comes as a surprise.

In the first line of the first book the narrator calls upon Apollo to help him with the story of the entire poem. A few lines later he calls upon the Muses to act as interpreters in his telling of the first two books of his poem. The third book commences with an appeal to the Muse Erato to help the narrator tell the tale of the last two books. This appeal stands in symmetry with the call to the Muses in the first book. What is more, Erato is a love nymph and thus entirely appropriate for these books that focus on the love of Jason and Medea. The beginning of the fourth book, however, is so peculiar that it threatens the rationale of the entire scheme. The narrator calls upon both the goddess of the Iliad and the Muse of the Odyssey, adding other words that remind the reader of those texts. Then, having summoned up this out-of-scale and intrusive aid to recitation which recalls the commencement of two entire monumental narratives, he proceeds to ask a simple question that deals only with the immediate psychology of Medea: did she flee her home out of fear of her father or love for Jason? Then the narrator makes a very grammatical connection between this and the preceding book which is interesting for its subtle penetration of the narrative. The third book ends with a description of the angry Aeetes and a notice that night has fallen, an entirely conventional and thus satisfying conclusion. But the fourth book, after the overelaborate invocation, picks up Aeetes in a pronoun ("now he …"), as though the narrative of the fourth book were a seamless continuation of the third, just as the second book's first word "here" implies that there has been no break in the narration between Books One and Two. These several features cause the reader to stop, to notice, to ponder the form. And since the book divisions do not seem to clarify or reflect the narrative, the reader must think about the nature of the Apollonian books still further.

Consider, for instance, that the third book is often treated as though it were an independent whole. It alone is the truly popular book of the poem, sometimes printed separately as an individual story. As such it is unusual among the surviving pieces of ancient Greek literature because it builds to a climax at its conclusion. Yet of course the third book is not independent; the story continues, the traditional description of the action's outcome, the capture of the fleece, fills the first part of the fourth. Apollonius again demonstrates his amazing complexity in balancing the various elements of his story. The third book seems complete until we enter the fourth. Not only is the grammatical carry-over decisive in bonding the two narratives, but our hero has yet to get what he came for. Again, Jason seems to be the hero, the only hero, the true traditional centerpiece of the action, until in the middle of the third book Medea starts to debate her great moral choice. Suddenly all that is crucial is hers; she begins to emerge as Jason's equal. The reader is forced to make some adjustments. Thus, though the conventional aristeia with which the third book concludes seems to be also a conventional climax, it recedes in our interest, becomes the traditional postclimax or outcome; it is replaced by the love scene between the two principals, an agon moment of far more tension and movement, from which Jason's aristeia proceeds as a foregone conclusion. What is truly remarkable throughout the third and fourth books is that the poet manages to contrive a narrative in the third which has a theatrical beginning, middle, and end, is complete in itself, and yet when extended into the fourth book easily dissolves into a larger unity that culminates in the murder of Medea's brother Apsyrtus. Then in turn the narrator brings the reader into a still larger narrative structure that reaches back into the second book; the travels of the fourth parallel the travels of the second until, when finally we arrive again on shore ("you go ashore," the very last word of the poem), we are once more at the poem's beginning ("setting out," one of the two meanings of the first word of the poem). Suddenly a still greater overarching unity has been realized. Noticing this process of narrative was, we may assume, the way in which the Alexandrians intended their poetry to be addressed. For one thing, it requires reading, which makes for a response entirely different from that fostered by the traditional oral poems; for another, it requires the reader to take on the text as a problem in categorization and authenticity—just what one would expect of someone trained in a library.

The question the narrator asks his divine helpers at the beginning of the fourth book betrays his own ignorance of the events in his narration. We may recall that the Iliad narrator, after calling upon the Muse for his story, enters the narrative twice again to emphasize how difficult his task is; otherwise, the story proceeds on its own with an absolute authority. By contrast, the Apollonian narrator enters the poem often: he talks to the reader ("you would imagine …"); he lectures the reader about strange customs or unusual natural phenomena; he talks to his characters, bidding them farewell at the poem's end; he twice shows his human heroes calling upon a god, only to enter the narrative to address the deity himself as though he were presiding over the events on some Olympian plane similar to theirs.

Moreover, he omits information that the constant reader of Homer would expect to be given. For instance, in the opening lines of the poem the narrator mentions Pelias's fear of a man wearing one sandal, and then Jason arrives at Pelias's banquet shod in only one sandal. This brief notice is entirely, if not shockingly, un-Homeric. The details are omitted, particularly Jason's progress from the moment he lost a sandal in the river (which the narrator does mention) to the scene of his arrival at the banquet. Why didn't he stop to get another? we want to know. Later, when two members of the crew arrive at the beach after all the others are assembled, the narrator not only does not tell why they are late; he does not put one word in their mouths to account for their actions, and what is more, he says "Jason forebore to ask them." What is going on here? Why were they late? Why didn't Jason speak to them? Homer tells all; this narrator perhaps does not know, certainly will not tell. The reader is distanced from the narrative, which suddenly becomes the private property of the characters. Throughout this poem the characters preserve their privacy; whereas early epic presented only public figures who acted out their lives and spoke their thoughts completely to their audience, the Apollonian characters live at one remove. It is a feature of the early romance and the later novel that the characters are private individuals in this manner, and one may say that the Apollonian narrative looks forward to that genre of narration. If the Odyssey, as remarked earlier, has features associated with prose romance—most important, the star-crossed and separated lovers who struggle under a variety of fortunes and misfortunes to reunite—it is in the Alexandrian period that romance begins to take shape as an overtly fictional prose narrative, although our few surviving examples come from several centuries later.

The beach scene in which Argus and Acastus arrive late (1.317ff.) is also important as the moment in which the narrator begins to betray his hero. The Homeric narrator is almost perfectly consistent in his approval of Achilles or Odysseus; it is evident that they are superior to their fellows, that their actions reveal strength, authority, and intelligence. Even the gods with whom these heroes have such rapport are almost always approving. Consider, however, the beach scene in the Argonautica: "Jason stood there at the point of entering," says the narrator, "and all the heroes were gathered together opposite" (which is perhaps to say, in anticipation, or as a group facing someone singled out). In conventional epic narrative this language signals the designation of Jason as the centerpiece of the scene if not the story. But then Argus and Acastus arrive late; their clothing is described, and the narrator remarks that all the others marveled that they had come in defiance of Pelias. In several ways the narrator has taken the attention from Jason, has, as it were, upstaged him. What is more, when Jason thereafter calls upon the assembly to choose a leader, the reader naturally expects Jason to be named: first, because the myth tradition has Jason as the leader of the expedition to get the fleece, then because in the opening lines he has been mentioned as the central figure in this narrative, and finally because the arrangement of this scene conventionally requires it. But instead, the crew in one voice calls out for Hercules. The contradiction of expectation is exhilarating and witty, possibly witty enough to provoke a laugh, although one is never sure what made the ancient Greeks laugh. The perversion of the convention also reminds the reader of the extreme selfishness and narcissism of an Achilles or an Odysseus and in this fashion reconstructs yet more clearly the underlying truths of the earlier epics.

Hercules, of course, demurs; the narrator, riding the crest of the irony, has him magisterially insist, while remaining seated, that the crew choose Jason as the leader. Throughout the poem Jason's capacities as a conventional leader remain dubious. He cries, for instance, as they set sail, moments after the narrator has described Hercules entering the ship with such weight that it sinks significantly in the water. And Jason is never really sure of himself thereafter. The other episodes in the first book function as establishing scenes rather than standing as parts of an ongoing story. They show Jason inadequate in battle, splendid in bed; by the end of Book I his rival Hercules, the old-style military strongman, has left the narrative, thus ceding to Jason the authority that the reader and the narrator know would never otherwise be his.

Shortly after their departure the heroes arrive at the island of Lemnos (1.608ff.). Here is Jason's first triumph but as usual the narrator undercuts it by describing a situation of which Jason is not altogether the master. The narrator tells us that the women of Lemnos some years earlier killed off all their men in retaliation for their infidelities. Now, faced with a childless future, these women suddenly need men, just as the Argo sails opportunely into port. Jason and some others go ashore and up to the town to reconnoiter, recalling Odysseus's exploration of Circe's island. The difference is vast, however. Jason is equipped with a magnificent cloak upon which various scenes from myth are embroidered. He is beautiful; the women of Lemnos are excited by him and his men. A reminiscence of Circe's capacity for baleful enchantment perhaps resides in Princess Hypsipyle's lies to Jason about the absence of Lemnian men; she tells him something quite different from what the narrator had told the reader. But Jason stays with Hypsipyle until the much disapproving Hercules, who has remained on the beach with some of the crew, exercises sufficient moral force to cause the lovemaking men to leave their Lemnian beds and return to the Argo. Hypsipyle in tears bids Jason goodbye, asking to hear from him and expressing the hope that she is bearing his child. The conventional tears of goodbye, the wish for communication, and the hope of a tender remembrance of the departed lover in the shape of a baby have a somewhat unconventional effect when the reader remembers that these women are in desperate need of babies. For once, the tables are turned. The ancient Greek males traditionally married to have offspring; they viewed their wives as so many brood mares. Here it is the Lemnian women who have thoroughly exploited a band of visiting males for their semen.

Jason's success as lover is immediately set in balance with his misadventure as a warrior in the ensuing disastrous visit to the homeland of the young Prince Cyzikus, who greets and entertains Jason, his equally young guest. After the Argo sets sail again, a nighttime storm sends the ship back to the same shore. But with the land and people unrecognizable, Jason and his men are on the alert, while Cyzikus and his men fear an invading enemy. The two sides engage in battle, and Jason kills his erstwhile host. In describing this nightmare encounter, the narrator returns exactly to the language of Homer and reproduces a stock battle scene of the Iliad (I.1039ff.). The outcome is a perversion of a Homeric androktasia—by mistake a good man kills his friend. Once again the old-style epic poetry has failed this Alexandrian hero.

The final scene of the first book sets the stage for Jason's triumph as something other than the traditional warrior-hero. With the Argonauts' earlier instinctive call for Hercules as their leader, the narrator introduced into this very Alexandrian poem a reminder of the conventional hero of the tradition. Somewhat later, as the crew enjoys a picnic, a dejected and worried Jason sits by until a drunken crew member, Idas, jeers at him, deriding his fear. At the same time Idas brandishes his spear, claiming that his strength and his weapon are all that are needed. But as the reader knows and Jason will discover, spears and strength are not what is required to win the love of a woman who will provide the only means to yoke the magic bulls of Aeetes; it is sweet talk, diplomacy, politesse, and physical beauty. Gruff, tough Idas is an anachronism. So is Hercules, and he leaves the narrative in a significant way. The final scene of the first book describes the rape of Hylas, Hercules' young companion, by a nymph. (The ancients, we must remember, for reasons probably self-serving to the males, called any sudden, physically energetic act of possession—not always for sexual purposes—a rape, even if the "victim," either at the time or eventually, acquiesced in or actually enjoyed the attentions of the raper.) The episode poses a special historical problem for the reader because the story of the rape of Hylas is treated by Theocritus in the thirteenth of his Idylls, just as the opening scene of the second book is also to be found in a Theocritean version in the twenty-second. Since we have no way of knowing which version was prior, we cannot detect how the one plays off the other.

In any case, although Apollonius does not say so (Theocritus does), Hylas is Hercules' young male lover, taken away by him (indeed, raped) after Hercules, in one of his commonplace acts of violent aggression, has killed the boy's father. True to the almost universal custom in fifth-century Greece, Hercules not only nurtures Hylas and teaches him but also makes love to him. (It is not too much to say that behind the niceties of the story lies the brutal truth that in a world of minimal civic protection strong men could easily kill fathers in order to take their teenaged sons as docile servants and compliant sexual partners.) In the Apollonian scene Hercules goes into the forest and yanks a tree trunk out of the ground to replace the oar he has broken while trying to paddle too vigorously, while Hylas goes to the spring to get water for the evening meal. Their respective activities exactly mirror their relationship in all its sexual and psychological complexity. As the boy Hylas bends down to dip his pitcher into the spring, his skin glistening in the light of the moon, a nymph, captivated by his beauty, reaches up and draws him down under the water to make him her own (1.1228ff.). Hercules' companion, Polyphemus, hears the boy cry out and rushes in search of him, shouting to Hercules. The two in desperation go off to seek the boy, and eventually Jason determines that the Argo must sail on, leaving these archaic pederastic heroes behind.

Brilliant writing marks this episode; its sensuality leaves a lasting impression in the poem. For the boy, it is the transition from boyhood to heterosexually aware manhood. The cry that Polyphemus heard was perhaps Hylas's first orgasmic shout as he transferred his sexuality from the adolescent boy's penetrated anus to the adult male's ejaculating penis. Just as Jason seems to have lost his virginity with Hypsipyle, to have become authoritative and active through adult masculine sexuality, so Hylas, on the other side of the coin, has left the shelter and comfort of a strong male protector to be seduced into the vast unknown pool of water, and possibly to some kind of death, by a woman. Jason will replicate this frightening immersion in the unknown (3.1194ff.) when on the night before he meets the contest of the bulls, following Medea's instructions, he goes naked into a pool and then, wrapped in a robe given him by Hypsipyle, makes sacrifice to the dread goddess Hecate, whose frightening apparition Apollonius describes in detail.

Making love, not war, seems to carry the day in this poem, but it requires a special kind of courage for the male who must encounter a woman on her own terms. Ancient Greek males consistently repressed and exploited their womenfolk. The surviving literature is uniformly misogynistic, more often than not describing women as killers, betrayers, or at the least sexual predators who ensnare and weaken their males. These characterizations are more likely the projection of the men's fear of their quasi-enslaved women than any realistic assessment of female power. In the third-century world of Alexandria, however, there is evidence to suggest that women were considerably freer in their actions than in previous centuries. Theocritus's fifteenth Idyll, portraying two women in dialogue on an outing to the Ptolemies' palace to see a show and on the way sparring in a tough way with a bystanding man, probably illustrates the way in which women were beginning to participate more in the culture. These women seem also to have commanded greater respect from men. Perhaps for this reason the age-old custom of males fulfilling their deepest needs for affection, love, and respect with adolescent male lovers seemed to disappear. Theocritus wrote poems of love between a man and a woman—a boy and a girl, really—which describe the playful side of passion; Apollonius writes of the other side to love, its problematic, frightening, all-consuming, dangerous passion in which a man encounters that which he can never really know or understand: to wit, a woman. Apollonius could draw on a long tradition of portraying women as a fundamentally negative force in a man's life to tinge all the encounters of male and female in his poem with a hint of the female's destructive force.

His reader would also know Euripides' fifth-century play Medea, which takes up the tragic events in the last days of Jason and Medea's life together. In Corinth, to which they flee after Medea has been instrumental in the death of Pelias, King Creon proposes that Jason jettison Medea and marry his daughter Creusa. The action of the play begins shortly after Medea learns that Jason has agreed to this scheme. Essentially, it is a collision between a traveling prince, whose only form of support is to marry the local princess, and his foreign wife, whose claims to her husband in Greece are perhaps shaky but who wants him for something other than the formal fact of marriage. He cannot see why, if she is well provided for, she has cause to complain if he decamps. She cannot believe that he does not want her anymore. Furthermore, Medea is possessed with love or at least overwhelming desire for Jason, a passion that the ancients assumed to be a bodily sickness like typhus or malaria. To remind Jason of her claim upon him—that she is the brood mare who has provided him with a dynasty—her only recourse is to kill her children. The tragic fact is that she is killing the only justification for a woman's existence in ancient Greek society. It is a bitter play, and the two of them fight it out, hurling bitter, cruel insults at one another. For the reader, the memory of it can only cast a pall over the developing romance in the Argonautica. He or she will read that memory into the words of the narrator after Jason has proposed marriage to Medea: "And thus he spoke. Her soul melted at his words, and yet, the deeds of destruction, she shuddered to think of them" (3.1131f.).

Apollonius's Medea is a remarkable literary construction. The Homeric epic figures are monoliths, utterly consistent and predictable in their behavior. Achilles is essentially a self-pitying, narcissistic male whose self-preoccupation never falters. Odysseus is a man whose need to reinvent himself motivates his stoic determination to get home and resume the mantle of husband, father, squire as much as it does his notable artistry in creating new identities whenever he is asked who he is. But Medea is not so simple. The narrator amply describes the naivete of her virginal passion as Eros wounds her with his arrow, but then he shows her wielding her gruesome charms and reminds the reader that she knows the landscape from her expeditions to scout for corpses. Medea is both witch and maiden. But she is still more than that. In his creation of her Apollonius plays upon his reader's expectations, which are built up from familiarity with other myths and other narratives. Among the major epic and tragic associations are these: (1) Ariadne, the girl who helps Theseus and is abandoned by him on Naxos; (2) Penelope, the wife who waits and helps by keeping the household intact and then is in effect abandoned by her husband and the narrator of the Odyssey once she and Odysseus have gone to bed after his return; (3) Euripides' Medea, a tragic female figure who on the one hand must destroy her living issue, which is almost herself, yet who on the other hand is daughter of the Sun and a malevolent figure because she survives her evil deed, unlike the purely tragic Deianeira of Sophocles' Trachinian Women, who dies; (4) Homer's Circe, who enchants men to their doom, a malign witch/goddess figure who is sexually dangerous to males on the model of Aphrodite (Adonis perishes in his relationship with her) and Artemis (Actaeon perishes when he has seen her nude, a quasi-sexual relationship) and many others; (5) Aeschylus's Clytemnestra, who seduces Agamemnon into entering the warm bath where he is stabbed to death, the paradigmatic threatening mortal woman whose power to kill is directly related to the intimacy of the matrimonial chamber. Medea's behavior in this poem, therefore, often comes as a surprise. For instance, there is a great difference between the frightened and vulnerable young girl who calls out to her nephew for protection after she has run away from her father's house, the coldly resolute woman of action who plans with the ineffectual Jason her own brother's death, and the charming and insincere girl in love who beguiles Arete (far more credulous than her Homeric counterpart) into believing that she and Jason have committed the merest peccadillo. These turns in character surprise the reader, and this is a new development in the history of ancient Greek literature.

Apollonius is often congratulated for his psychological realism. The story of Medea and Jason falling in love is superb precisely for this quality. Perhaps nowhere else does he achieve such subtle psychological truth as in the three monologues that Medea delivers in her bedroom. These are interesting as well for the changes they reveal in audience perception between the time of the oral Homeric poems and that of the written Argonautica meant for readers. A Homeric monologue is nothing more than a conventional speech delivered by a character to himself or herself by virtue of that curious dichotomous sense of self that Homeric heroes display. The monologues have absolute validity for the audience; there is no sense of the unconscious, of another level to the psyche hidden by the speakers from themselves. Thus a character may not lie to himself or herself. But Medea's monologues reveal a woman who, if not self-deceived exactly, is at least (to use a vague term) exceedingly muddleheaded. One might say that in oral performance the immediate and complete symbiosis between speaker and auditor—visceral, sensual, intellectual, totally compelling—gives absolute authority to the words spoken. Apollonius, however, is dealing with an audience who will read his poem, not hear it. In a literate culture where readers must decipher for themselves and by themselves the words of an absent and thus far less compelling writer, the problematic quality of what is said becomes in its written from something the narrator can play with.

Medea's moral travail is expressed in these three monologues in the third book. Like Achilles' three great refusals in the ninth book of the Iliad, which grow increasingly equivocal in their denunciation of the request made to him, Medea says no while she means yes, gradually weakening until she finishes by agreeing to aid the stranger. That there are three monologues gives the passage the fairytale sense of her having made the enchanting, transforming decision. Medea begins by telling herself that she does not want to get involved but that she does not want to see the stranger hurt (464-70). Then she sees in a dream (619-31) what is indeed the underlying truth of the poem, that the golden fleece is somehow symbolic of her virginity, and that Aeetes' anger at losing the fleece is a father's anger at losing his daughter to another man. The dream provokes the second monologue (636-44), in which Medea determines to remain a virgin, hoping that the stranger will woo some Greek girl—entirely ignoring the fact that Jason has not yet cast a glance in her direction. In the third monologue (772-801) she wishes he would die and asks for her own death. Once having divorced action from its consequences by allowing herself the fantasized luxury of suicide, she proceeds to contemplate helping the stranger, betraying her parents, and losing her reputation in a series of rhetorical questions that have no answer.

In the course of these three speeches, Medea wrestles with and overcomes her guilt at betraying her father for a lover. The monologues portray a Medea more active and decisive than Jason is anywhere. The result is to constitute her as a major figure, at least equivalent to Jason, in the narrative. Jason does not have a shadow companion like Achilles' Patroclus, nor do the members of his crew interact with him as Odysseus's do. He is quite alone. Into this void emerges Medea, who develops in the fourth book into Jason's absolute equal, if not superior, in power, energy, and daring. Apollonius has again contradicted the expectations of his reader. The traditional bonded males in heroic action stories establish a superior figure (an Achilles, an Odysseus, a Gilgamesh) set beside his inferior (Patroclus, the crew, Enkidu). But here is a woman as the second figure in the traveling duo. That is not all. The reader, acculturated to the values of the ancient Greek world, would naturally assume that the woman would take the inferior place, but the narrator increasingly reveals her strengths as Jason remains weak, with the result that she becomes the dominant figure. In his creation of Medea, Apollonius is again absolutely original.

The Argonautica may explore the manner and values of heroic narrative, but it is also a great love story, the earliest in a long tradition of love stories in the Western world. Apollonius is also original in describing aftermath, something with which the ancients seldom dealt. One may compare his version of the story of the golden fleece with that of Pindar, the fifth-century B.C.E. choral lyricist. Pythian IV is Pindar's longest surviving poem; one may assume that he gave himself ample scope to include whatever details he chose. Yet it is significant that once Jason has the fleece, the poem is nearly over, just as the Odyssey narrator takes Penelope out of the narrative as soon as the couple has been reunited and spent a night together in bed. Apollonius, by contrast, fully describes the onset of Medea's love, the passion of the couple's first meeting alone, their interaction while getting the fleece, their tension with each other as they seem to be cornered by their pursuers, their desperate act of murder, and the heavy depression that engulfs them until they finally marry—by which time it seems to the reader that love has gone away. This poem mirrors the common experience of Western romantic love, which flares up so prominently in the raptures of first meetings and fades so quickly in the deadening quotidian conjugal routine. As such, the poem is hard to place. Epic stories like the Iliad are tragic because they are founded on the realization that the hero must die, revealed through the mechanism of the death of the friend, the alter ego, the surrogate. The prose romance is comic because at the end the two lovers who have struggled through so much adversity and have preserved their love are reunited and "live happily ever after." The Argonautica tells a cynical and sad story of two lovers who stick together through adversity, even going to the extreme of murder, but who, when they are at last united in marriage, are not happy. Nor do they live happily ever after, since the reader knows what Euripides has already prepared for them. In a sense the bonded traveling couple has been split, even if it is not death that carries one off, as it does Patroclus. This is not exactly tragic (although if one accepts the notion that Apollonius is describing the universal human conjugal condition, it approaches something like a tragic event); still, when Hera tells Thetis near the very end of the poem that someday Medea will pass all eternity in the Elysian Fields with Achilles, the narrator has introduced a somewhat lopsided happy ending (though it is not clear that female readers of this poem who also know the Iliad would congratulate Medea on the prospect of spending eternity with Achilles).

Because centuries of critics faulted Apollonius for what he was not or seemingly ever intended to be, his particular virtues as a narrator are generally in danger of being scanted. The Argonautica in fact constantly attests to his skill. One thinks, for instance, of the moment in which Medea is struck by Eros's arrow. Love is described as overcoming her as a fire bursts up from dry twigs. The poet embellishes the simile by describing the woman who builds up this fire, a woman who must struggle at the hard work of spinning wool, getting up at the crack of dawn to start her fire (3.291-95). The image returns in the fourth book (4.1062-65) as Medea cries, awake and restless during the night, just like a woman who must turn her spindle through the night, as her orphaned children hang about her and she thinks how awful her life has become. In the first simile the woman of toil parallels a woman in love and dependent, in bondage forever to a man, as this culture saw it. The second simile finds the poor working woman now bereft and deserted, just like Medea, who has had to fight not to be rejected by Jason and turned over to her family.

Another superb image is contained in a description of night:

Then night brought the dark over the earth.
  Sailors
on the sea looked out from their ships to
  Orion
and the Bear. Both the traveler out there on
  the road
and the gatekeeper by this time were longing
  for sleep.
And a heavy slumber enclosed all around that
  woman
whose children had died, nor was there any
  dog barking
through the town, nor the echoing voices of
  men.
Silence held the black darkness.
[3.744-50]

Apollonius recalls Homeric ring composition in returning to the darkness with which he begins. Like Homer, he presents conventional night figures, except for the startling image of the bereft mother in slumber. The description moves in time from early evening, when the traveler is hurrying along and the doorkeeper waits, to the dead of the night, when the men have all gone home and the dogs sleep. Apollonius goes from the porter who waits up for someone to the mother in deep sleep because her children are dead and no one any longer will make demands on her. Her cares are over and she can sleep, as the porter cannot. But her sleep is perverse; it is the heavy sleep of the depressed and recently bereaved mother, the sleep of escape. It is the sleep of the dead of the night. The image is completely woeful, befitting the moment in which Medea debates with herself her future course, which, as we know, will end in her killing her brother, her husband's uncle, and finally her children. It is a simile so grim and perverse, so unlike "the classical," that we must marvel at its originality.

The sailing of the Argo (1.536-68) is an example of Apollonius's ability to stage a scene. He begins with a simile that describes the mood of the scene and the men: the crew cleaving the sea with their oars, to the rhythm of Orpheus's lyre, are compared to youths dancing to the sound of the lyre in honor of Apollo. Next, Apollonius moves his reader farther away from the scene by describing the armor glistening from the ship as it speeds along, then still farther with the comparison of the Argo's wake to a path stretching over a green plain. This takes the focus to the horizon line, where the poet pauses to recapitulate the now greatly enlarged view by describing the scene from the Olympian vantage point: all the gods, he says, looked down from heaven. Thereafter, the poet begins to redirect the focus, moving down and closing the view when he says that the nymphs gazed down from the top of Mount Pelion upon the heroes. He continues the downward movement now to the lowest point and adds a scale figure to the foreground, exactly in the tradition of heroic landscape painters of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. "Down from the mountaintop came Chiron … and at the surf he waved, calling out bon voyage" (1.553-56). The final sentence of the description ("And his wife, carrying Peleus's son Achilles, displayed the child for his father") ties the foreground and the frame into the picture, adding domestic human interest to heroics. What narrator ever before thought of the woman who changed Achilles' diapers?

In the third book Apollonius creates his bittersweet love story with splendid writing. The book begins with a portrait of Aphrodite and her son Eros, upon whom Athena and Hera call to ask for aid in getting Medea to help Jason. A modern will note that the gods' intervention marks Medea as the victim of love. An ancient would not have considered otherwise, since, as has been remarked, love was thought to be a disease of the body over which its owner had no control. Desire (eros in Greek) is the better word, a condition manifested by sweat, trembling, secretions, erections, taut nipples, and all the other disagreeable yet agreeable, wayward yet thrilling sensations of extreme sexual passion. Apollonius's portrait of the goddess and her son reveals much about love. She is narcissistically brushing her long hair, taking it up in her hands. The boy has just beaten Ganymede at dice; his mother wonders if the lad cheated. She offers him a grand toy, a golden ball; he greedily yearns for it. Before setting off on his mother's mission, he hands her his dice, first counting them. Love, the narrator shows us, is narcissism, greed, bribery, mistrust, and cheating. What has appeared in this scene will be reenacted shortly by Jason and Medea. No wonder the lovers finally arrive at their nuptials so dispirited. One could also argue that the poem bears a message of doom to those who would marry for love.

The tone of the third book's opening scene is cynical, clever, and humorous, thereby saving the reader from taking the ensuing story too seriously. It may sometimes be thrilling, sometimes sad, but it is always amusing. When, for instance, Medea goes with her maiden attendants to her assignation, a simile compares her to Artemis, the very same simile used to describe Nausicaa in the Odyssey (quoted in Chapter 5). Readers will recall the innocent Nausicaa, dreaming of marriage, sturdily standing her ground as the naked stranger comes forth from the bushes, and the sang-froid with which she handles the business of getting him bathed, clothed, and directed to her parents' palace. Medea, by contrast, has just mastered thoughts of suicide; she arranges her hair, just as Aphrodite did eight hundred lines earlier; she arrays herself in shining clothing and goes forth with her handmaidens. There is no cart filled with clothes for washing here. Instead, Medea selects a magic ointment to take with her for Jason's use in his contest with the bulls. The narrator gives every detail of its gruesome origin, then offers one of those marvelously unsettling juxtapositions which generations of critics so disliked in Apollonius but which today's critics so applaud: "She took up the charm and set it in the perfumed band of cloth that encircled her as support for her ambrosial bosom" (3.867ff.)

As she and the girls approach the shrine, Medea demonstrates as much courage as Nausicaa showed. She tells her attendants to wait while she goes to the meeting alone. She has already proved courageous, if not downright foolhardy, noting that no women are at the precinct today because so many strangers are out on the town. With this the narrator reminds us that in this ancient village there are fifty sailors off a ship. Such were the conditions of life in those times that the reader would immediately imagine the extraordinary threat of rape which such a situation implies for a woman, the extraordinary daring—whether courage or sheer recklessness—which possesses Medea. She must bribe her girls: "We'll sing and pick flowers, and you will go home with many a gift from me, if you will humor me." So they are to risk themselves in this dangerous journey through town, and they are to stand discreetly aside and let her speak to the stranger alone (imagine what Aeetes would do to them, if he learned). No sweet Nausicaa here, although someone just as tough, we may say.

Jason's trip to the shrine is equally amusing. He sets out with Argus, Medea's nephew, and Mopsus the prophet to beseech Medea for her aid—and the reader will be reminded of the Embassy to Achilles in the ninth book of the Iliad, when a similar triad went to seek the army's salvation from the great hero. Of course, Jason is more beautiful, sexy, charming than any of the heroes in days of yore, the narrator says, thus placing this gorgeous youth incongruously in the ranks of those brawny men of heroic narrative. And, of course, it is not Achilles these three will supplicate but a sweet young maiden. As they proceed, a crow in the tree cries out to Mopsus: "Are you so simpleminded that you don't know what even children know, that a girl won't say anything to a young man in front of others? … Stay away, you idiot!" (3.933ff.). The crow effectively bursts the balloon of pretension in this imitation heroic embassy.

The passion of their meeting is described (956ff.) in one of the strongest evocations of erotic desire surviving from antiquity. The narrator lavishes detail on Medea's physical collapse before this beautiful man and couples it with a simile taken from Sappho describing trees standing side by side in silence in the mountain, then suddenly stirring and whispering to one another when the wind comes up. When Medea takes the charm from her bosom and hands it to Jason, the narrator again describes her extreme weakness and excitement, adds that she would have given him her whole soul, so thrilled was she at his desiring her. They grow shy, they stare at each other, they smile. Conventional epic poetry, indeed all the poetry of high seriousness from antiquity, minimized descriptions of physical desire. Male desire especially, because it must inevitably center upon the erection, is inherently ridiculous, just as any sculpture of the nude male must contend with the penis, which offends against the aesthetic perfection of the torso. (A modern may argue that the penis punctuates the sublimity of the torso, but the ancient Greeks, who emphatically preferred small penises on men real or sculpted, would probably disagree.) Appollonius has powerfully imagined Medea's passion and given to Jason as much physical emotion as possible. The epic form does not allow for any precise acknowledgment of sexual intercourse; furthermore, epic describes a class of people whom the ancient Greek reader would know to have been governed by archaic or even contemporary strictures on female virginity. Jason and Medea could not, therefore, be imagined to have performed the physical act of sexual intercourse before their marriage in the fourth book. But the eroticism of this passage describes the same passion as that of the young boys and girls who make love in pastoral poetry or in the many love poems of the period which survive in a contemporary collection titled The Anthology (which we might translate as "The Bouquet of Flowers"). Jason's request to Medea and gift of the charm, set in this swirling sea of passion, plus the profound change in their relationship that gradually occurs in the dialogue that follows, seem like the irreversible transaction of physical love between a virgin and her young boyfriend. It is not unreasonable to read it that way through the convention.

After it is all over Medea goes home, so lovestruck that she cannot even speak to her sister, and sits alone in her room. Jason, as in the cliche of males through all time, goes back to his comrades and tells them the whole story. However vulnerable this leaves women in general, Medea, it seems, has won for herself exactly what she wanted in return for the charm: before they have parted company in this passionate moment Jason has asked her to marry him and go back to Greece. The scene immediately following the moment of extreme passion, in which it looked as though Medea were losing all self-control, is a striking reversal.

Aphrodite needed Eros to enchant Medea, and bribed him to do it with a golden ball. Jason needs Medea to enchant the bulls. His glowing sexuality suggests one thing, but, when he speaks to her (3.990-95), he offers her fame—his version of the golden ball. Medea, with her eyes fastened on Jason, has other ideas. Her negotiation with Jason (3.106off.) is thoroughly amusing and, though touching, gently cynical.

"Take the fleece and go away. Go nevertheless where you will." That telltale "nevertheless" marks her opposition to his departure. She acts it out with tears, thinking of him gone; then she speaks to him face to face and—dropping all her sense of shame, as the narrator remarks—takes his hand. Passive Jason must be trembling, the reader imagines. This is Medea's great moment.

"Remember me," she continues (3.1069) just like Nausicaa, no doubt enkindling some guilt in Jason's breast. For when he replies, he is fervent: "One thing I know all too well, I shall never forget you night or day" (3.1079-80). She has asked about his country, too, and also more about Ariadne, taking up homecoming and an accompanying maiden as a means to maneuver the conversation in the direction of her goal. Ariadne, whose help to Theseus parallels what Medea has been asked to do for Jason, can enter the text only with irony, however, because although Jason has mentioned Ariadne's going on board ship with Theseus and leaving her homeland, he omits to mention that Theseus left her on Naxos, where he was able to give her the slip while she was sleeping.

Pressing her point still further, Medea points out to Jason that Aeetes is not the same as Minos, being untrustworthy, and adds ambiguously, "I can't compare myself to Ariadne" (3.1107-8)—which, of course, she has indeed done, if only in negation. The persuasive rhetoric of these speeches is formidable. Then she hints more forcibly: "May a little bird come with a message to you when you forget me [still more guilt for Jason!], or, better still, would that a swift wind would carry me across the sea to Iolcus so that I can reproach you for having forgotten that it was my aid that saved you [guilt, guilt!]. Oh, if only I could be sitting in your great hall, a surprise guest!"

She bursts into tears, and Jason is lost. "Forget winds and messenger birds! If you were to come to Hellas … So far he is in the subjunctive mood and the thought is hypothetical, but he is clearly testing the water. He falls back on the subject of fame. Then suddenly in the indicative mood he takes the big plunge: "In our bridal chamber you will prepare the marriage couch. Nothing shall take our love away till death envelops us" (3.1128-30).

Like Odysseus, who approached Nausicaa speaking soothing words to gain his ends (Odyssey 6.146,148), Jason has taken his glamor to the temple of Hecate and spoken as a practiced courtier—as Apollonius remarks, "fawning" (3.974). He has gotten what he wanted, but he has paid a price. And that is what love is all about.

The fourth book begins with Medea's surreptitious flight from home to Jason's encampment. Medea is like a serving girl fleeing a cruel mistress, the narrator says. He has just mentioned Aeetes' night-long angry meeting with his lieutenants and put Medea's reaction in another telling simile: "like a fawn whom the baying of hounds frightens as she lies hidden in the underbrush deep in the woods," which calls up an image of the terrified girl as inevitable victim, property of the possessive men whose angry shouts and cries float up and into her window from the meeting downstairs in the palace. Now the narrator compares Medea to a serving girl, one who, having recently been taken away from her native land and still quite ignorant of life's struggles and all its misery, sneaks away from a rich house, terrified of her harsh mistress. This simile, too, projects in all its detail what lies ahead for the sheltered princess daughter of Aeetes. Both similes underscore her vulnerability.

Upon reaching Jason's camp, Medea calls out to the younger of her two nephews who are there; by stressing the younger nephew and mentioning the crew's absolute amazement at hearing her voice, the narrator aptly reflects the mores of the time. Medea would not dare to call out to Jason, a man not of her family, for protection; and she will not call out to the older nephew, Argus, who has been the authoritative representative of her family throughout, no doubt for fear he will oppose her extraordinary breach of decorum. Her subsequent speech of supplication presents an interesting mixture of motives, arranged by the narrator for the delight of the cynics, since its persuasive strength depends finally on what is buried in its center: the goods Medea can deliver. "Save me, and save yourselves from Aeetes' anger," she says to her nephews. And "Honor your proposal of marriage to me, o stranger," she says to Jason. "I shall put the guardian serpent to sleep and get the fleece for you; now that I have fled, do not leave me vulnerable to blame and infamy because I have no kinsmen" (4.83ff.).

Jason responds to her by vowing marriage. Shortly thereafter, through her ministrations, the fleece is his. The narrator describes (4.167ff.) Jason's ecstacy at holding and possessing the fleece in language again suggesting that the subtext goal throughout has been the possession of Medea's body (when the two of them are finally married, they use the fleece as their wedding-night bed). Just after getting it, and while he is so deep in the emotional experience of its possession, Jason will let no one touch the fleece. Similarly, once back on the Argo, he seats Medea in the stern and delivers a speech in which he speaks of his marriage vow and asks the crew to "preserve" her. This injunction is guaranteed to protect her virtue while she travels unchaperoned and unprotected by female attendants on a ship with fifty males.

Ariadne got left on Naxos while Theseus, mission accomplished, sailed on to Athens. Medea is in danger of being left as well, when, shortly after Jason's vow, an army of Colchians, led by her brother Apsyrtus in hot pursuit, blocks their passage. Jason and the crew agree to a truce that gives them the fleece and puts under arbitration the question of whether Medea will be returned to her father or continue with Jason. This is the very extreme of dependency in which this hitherto powerful woman has been placed simply because of her sex. In ancient Greece a woman was legally a minor for her entire life, always under the jurisdiction of a male relative or spouse—a fact of social life which generates enormous tension in the fourth book. It was certainly true then and in much of the world is still true that a woman exercises what little control males allow her only in the bidding for her body. Once Medea agrees to help Jason, she has made a commitment to him utterly, since she has so betrayed her father that she is no longer safe in his jurisdiction. She has thus for all practical purposes surrendered her body to Jason; at the same time, however, she has managed to extract a promise of marriage from him. These negotiations emanate from the remarkable intelligence of a girl who must struggle to rise above the violent physical pangs and delirium of sexual passion to assure herself some safe passage in the unsparing, cruel world of men. Apollonius is being neither sentimental about women nor particularly sympathetic to them, any more than Euripides is in his Medea. Rather he is coolly viewing the conditions in which women live as a factor in their (from the male viewpoint) sometimes suspicious behavior.

Thus, when the Argonauts consider a truce with Apsyrtus, the possibility that Jason will abandon Medea is a cynical commentary on male moral weakness, a humorous recognition of the fate of human contracts made on both sides from simple self-interest in a poem that is meant to be an amusing yet tragic commentary on women's alienated position in the larger world. Medea's subsequent anguished speech about dependency and betrayal speaks to that female position (4.355ff.); Jason's reply, which is ambiguous to the point of vacillation, is simply another revelation of this very young lad's inexperience of the moral world. Her reply to him is the climax of the emotional journey of this union, and yet another revelation of her strength and Jason's weakness. As she had the daring to defy her father, to come to assignation with Jason alone, to flee her house and board the ship, she now sums it all up with the courage to kill her brother.

The murder of Apsyrtus, the ultimate gesture of betrayal of her own family, represents the cutting of all ties with them which every new bride in ancient Greece had to do as she both accepted and was assumed into her husband's family and household. Apollonius, of course, makes it something more in this story. For his traveling duo, murder is the extremity to which they go in finding their own special bond. As a metaphor for the emotions that have animated the relationship from its start, the murder and the subsequent guilt and depression are apt expressions of the aftermath of romantic ecstacy when the inevitable ugly truths of the relationship become clearer. If one were to psychoanalyze Jason and Medea, one would say that although weak Jason wanted a sweet submissive wife such as he imagined the very young virginal Medea would be, his subconscious recognized and wanted the strong bully she turned out to be; strong Medea confused the simple facts of Jason's maleness and physical beauty with strength and resolution, while all along her subconscious saw in him the very person she could effectively dominate. Their relationship had no other way to evolve than to turn sour. Thus, while Apollonius was no doubt describing what males in his misogynistic culture imagined to happen always in male-female relationships of real duration, he had the instinct to create two characters whose psychologies could only lead to misery when coupled.

The murder scene is again an example of bravura Apollonian writing; it reads like a scene from tragic drama, so well does the narrator indicate the setting and detail the action. "In the entryway to the temple he [Apsyrtus] fell to his knees; there as he breathed out his life, in his one last act he took the dark blood at the wound with both his hands, and he made red his sister's silver veil and her gown as she tried to dodge away" (4.471-74). All the horror and guilt of murder are in this scene. Resonating through several scenes thereafter, the horror and guilt are played out through a fantastical geography: the Po, Rhone, and Danube rivers in Apollonius's imagination form an inland waterway that allows the Argonauts to make their way from the Black Sea across a great land mass to what is now the Italian Riviera. Just as the poet uses the various reactions to the fleece to illustrate all the various emotions and attitudes that love inspires—desire, possessiveness, seduction, joy, and glitter—so he uses the landscape in the fourth book to express the couple's state of mind, brilliantly describing guift inthe group's progress up the Po River. At the lake where the sun god's offspring fell to his death—"No bird is able to cross the water, spreading out its fragile wings. Mid-course it falls into the flaming water, fluttering"—daughters of Helios, the sun god, enclosed in poplar trees stand at the lake lamenting; from their eyes fall tears of amber. "No desire for food or drink came to the heroes, nor did their minds turn to joyful thoughts. All day they were strung out, exceedingly weak, weighed down by the dreadful smell, intolerable, which the streams of the Eridanus [Po] sent forth from the burning son of Helios. All night they had to listen to the shrill cry of the daughters of Helios wailing in a sharp voice. As they cried, their tears were borne upon the waters like drops of oil" (4.619ff.).

Depression is the emotion suggested by the landscape of North Africa. The impotence and cyclic nature of the depressed state are caught in verbal repetitions: "Everywhere shoals, everywhere thick seaweed from the bottom, the foam of the wave lightly flows over them. Sand stretches out until the eye mistakes it for air. Nothing creeps here, nothing flies … pain overcame them as they gazed at the air and the broad expanse of earth looking like air, stretching far away without end. No watering hole, no path, no shepherd's enclosure could they see anywhere. Everything was held in dead calm (4.1237ff.)." Their prior meeting with Medea's aunt, the sorceress Circe, has done nothing to change the mood, since she is so scornful, so disapproving of them. Even their marriage, a hasty, frightened affair, rushed through to protect Medea from yet another band of pursuing Colchians, is desperate and sad (4.1161ff.).

Still Apollonius is not done with them. True enough, he gives little more to Jason than a kind of superficial blessing from the god Apollo, to whom Jason, yet again in tears, cries out as he finds himself lost in the Pall of Darkness, a night so dark that not one star shines forth. For Medea, however, the narrator has reserved one final triumph as she conquers the monster Talos. And a triumph it is indeed: the narrator expands his description of it, using the language of old heroism to describe the monster's fall to earth. As the fourth book began with Medea's lulling the fleece-guarding serpent to sleep, so it ends with her sending Talos to his destruction.

The fourth book is more complex than the other three, since it contains a gripping story of suspense in the pursuit and flight of Medea and the Argonauts, the pace of which is suddenly much slowed by the episodes of journeying that have landscapes as their central purpose. The murder of Apsyrtus turns the narrative somber, a mood from which the reader is rescued by the highly humorous account of the desperate couple's visit to Circe, who is, on the one hand, very bourgeois, proper, and nervous, and, on the other, surrounded by grotesques that suggest a Circe even more crazily outree than the witch figure of the Odyssey. The narrator makes her violate the propriety of epic poetry by speaking to her niece in Colchian, while Jason, the presumed hero of this poem, is to be imagined by the reader as sitting about impotently twiddling his thumbs.

Curiously enough, one thoroughly lighthearted passage (4.930-64) pierces the persistent gloom of the fourth book. It is a parody of the description of the Argo 's passage through the Symplegades, which occurs in the second book. Here, when Thetis marshals the Nereids to lift the boat on high, they are first compared to dolphins at play around the ship and then, as they hike up their dresses to keep them out of the water, to frolicking girls at play with a ball, which they pass from one to another. When they succeed in their task, Apollonius describes Hera's joy as she throws her arms around Athena. We could be at a soccer match. Once the ship is past the Wandering Rocks, Apollonius devises a charming pastoral landscape to go with the euphoric mood. The daughters of Helios here are not amber-crying poplars, but two shepherdesses, one with a silver crook, one with a crook of orichalcum, an even more exotic metal, to be found only in fable. The cows are as white as milk and have horns of gold. We are reminded of Dresden porcelain shepherdesses, or Marie Antoinette at her milking. The narrator uses the figures to remind his readers of the absurdity, the artificiality, and the essential, delightful charm of a grim tale that they might otherwise take all too seriously. The wandering twosome has just been shown the door by Medea's aunt, and there is little cause for joy. But the unexpected passage is an imagistic outpouring of the comic resolution to Medea's plight, which Hera has just announced (4.810-15): someday all her troubles will be over, and she will be in the Elysian Fields married to Achilles, a man as bold and overbearing as she herself and hence finally her own true mate.

The prophecy is followed by the narration of the marital career of Achilles' mother, Thetis (4.866-79). A strong woman, a goddess, she was married to the mortal Peleus, who was incapable of understanding her attempts to render their son immortal. In wrath she left him. In this narrative, at Hera's command, she communicates with Peleus but as briefly as possible: she touches the tip of his hand, and leaves the minute the message has been delivered. As Apollonius's readers know from Euripides' play, someday Aegeus will offer Medea sanctuary, and she will leave Jason and Corinth in a skyborne vehicle. She, like Thetis, like the Nereids, will be in control. True to the comic vision, Apollonius is reminding us that perils, problems, and tears are here only for a moment; finally, even through the Pall of Darkness, Apollo sends light.