Jason and the Argonauts (2 page)

One area where we repeatedly observe Apollonius' own enhancement, or variation, on Homer is in his similes. Similes are a central feature of Homeric narrative. Plainly put, similes make the intangible tangible for the poem's audience. For example, the military prowess of a mythohistorical hero, a figure distant in time and space, when compared to a ferocious beast that preys on flocks and terrifies shepherds, becomes more “vivid,” or “present,” for the narrative's listener, who can, through the comparison
to what he or she knows through experience, or through common knowledge, then better imagine what is going on in the narrative. Similes in Homeric poetry are of many kinds, among them human to nature, human to art object, human to divine, and human to human (Odysseus' weeping in
Odyssey
8 compared to the weeping of a woman widowed in war and about to be led off to slavery). Some are simple, and easily repeated (e.g., military hero to lion); others are rather more complex both in composition and in their meanings (the previously cited comparison at the end of
Odyssey
8 would be a good example of the latter). In Apollonius' poem, which, unlike the Homeric poems, is
not
the product of an oral poetic tradition, and lacks many of the features of that tradition (repeated epithets, formulaic lines, repeated short similes), similes are not only complex but also generally are implicated in multiple ways in the surrounding narrative.

Let us consider two examples. The comparison of Jason as Medea beholds him at
Argonautica
3.1239–50 to Sirius, the Dog Star of late summer, not only emphasizes his physical beauty in the girl's eyes, but at the same time denotes great foreboding for her; this love has great destructive force. The comparison at
Argonautica
4.203–18 of Jason cavorting with the golden fleece to a young girl admiring her dress in the moonlight not only highlights sensual pleasure in material in both cases, but both emphasizes Jason's physical allure and also brings his stature
qua
hero into an odd light. While the heroic Medea pacifies the horrific monster, Jason prances in the moonlight. The moon, Medea's companion throughout the narrative of her nights troubled by erotic visions, and the scornful celestial body that watches over her night-time flight from home and family earlier in the book, here reappears in a comparison that likens Jason's radiance to that of a young girl's dress, and frames an epic hero in a setting of sensuality and something rather like decadent irresponsibility.

There are many individual moments throughout the poem, both larger and smaller, that recall moments in the Homeric epics. Apollonius can certainly be read as an extraordinary act of reception of Homeric epic, but he is not derivative (and here some prejudices of earlier scholarship on the Alexandrian poem continue to echo in modern criticism). His engagement with Homer is anything but one-sided: the
Argonautica
questions, furthers,
enhances, alters its Homeric models; its reading next to Homer is at once an act of attraction and disjunction.

Modern criticism of the
Argonautica
has foundered on several of the poem's novel features. One is of course the “difference” from Homer. Many of the standard features that the Homeric poems owe to an oral narrative tradition, formulaic epithets and repeated set scenes among others, are missing in Apollonius' poem. As already observed, there is a distinctly different mechanism in the use of simile. The portrayal of the gods, and their appearance in the poem, is markedly different from Homer. In the Homeric poems the gods serve a variety of functions within the poem, as metaphor, as directional movement (the passage of a divine figure from Olympus to Earth and vice versa changes the scene of narrative focus), and in the
Iliad
in particular as lighter and deathless contrast to the grim realities of war on the battlefield. Generally gods in the Homeric poems interact with mortals in disguise, even in dream sequences. Appearances of the gods in the
Argonautica
are quite different, and consciously play on Homeric convention. The one extended scene on Olympus (the opening of Book 3), in some ways a reworking of several scenes from the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey,
is at the same time unlike any scene in Homer: Homeric Olympus does not allow for this kind of portrayal of domestic intimacy. There are two extraordinary moments in the poem when the heroes actually see the god Apollo
as
the god Apollo. And when gods intervene in the Apollonian narrative, as Athena does when holding back the Clashing Rocks, they do so as anthropomorphized divine forces.

A major problem for modern criticism of the poem is the portrayal of Jason. Admittedly our first encounters with Odysseus in the
Odyssey
(the hero on the beach weeping with longing for his homeland) and Achilles in the
Iliad
(the hero on the beach lamenting to his mother of his mistreatment by Agamemnon) are not high moments in epic heroism, but these moments fit within a code of epic-heroic expectations: the hero in isolation, the hero dishonored. Jason is more complex, and, quite arguably, more problematic. The Argonauts' initial choice of Heracles to lead the expedition is only the first of a series of moments in which Jason's leadership is cast in doubt either by other Argonauts or by the poet's descriptive language. Jason is frequently characterized as
amekanos,
“resourceless,” “at a loss
.”
His first action in battle is to kill his host Cyzicus, king of the Doliones, albeit in error, but the action remains problematic. The hero who steps forward to fight the savage Amycus at the opening of Book 2 is not Jason but Polydeuces. Jason
does
succeed at the superhuman tasks assigned by the Colchian Aeëtes, but only through Medea's magic. And, as already observed, Jason's prancing about with the golden fleece is an odd reflection of traditional heroism.

To be sure, Jason has his defenders. Indeed, defenses of
Jason are something of a small industry in Apollonian scholarship.
1
And the argument can indeed be made that here, as with Aeneas (though in some ways differently), at issue is a more modern, more complex type of epic hero. Certainly there are some factors that set Jason rather apart from his Homeric predecessors. One is without doubt the role of Jason's erotic appeal, already present in the Lemnian episode in Book 1, and at the center of the drama of Medea's psychological struggle in Book 3 and the opening of Book 4.
2
Only Paris in the
Iliad
is similarly characterized, but
he has a somewhat circumscribed role in that poem.
3
Jason's beauty is the object of an eroticized female gaze, and, particularly in the case of Medea, this leads to extensive internal psychological reaction.

Jason is also a different kind of leader, one whose diplomacy is called repeatedly into action. Here one reading of Jason would be not so much as a hero of traditional epic as a reflection of the needs, and realities, of a modern monarch. Apollonius is a court poet who composed his poetry at the court of one of the successor kings who followed Alexander's campaigns, which transformed the ancient Mediterranean world into a series of competing dynastic monarchies. The
Argonautica,
and the figure of Jason himself, can be read against this immediate historical backdrop, and the relations of the male power figures in the poem can be understood in light of the political and military struggles of the Ptolemies, the Seleucids, the Antigonids, and other successor kings.

Similarly Medea's character, and the dominant role that she takes in the last half of the poem, can be read against a recent history where powerful women, among them Olympias, Alexander's mother, play central roles in the unfolding of political and dynastic (and even military) events that are far different from those of
the archaic and classical periods. A recently discovered text from this period, a series of epigrams now attributed to Apollonius' near contemporary poet Posidippus of Pella,
4
is of particular interest here. The collection of hitherto almost entirely unknown short poems focuses largely on women in a variety of conquests, including as queens and subjects of victory celebrations. As several scholars have observed, Medea becomes a different sort of hero in the latter half of the poem. Whereas Jason's psychological processes are rarely touched on, the inner workings of Medea's mind, her dreams, her fears, her frightened inability to control her emotions, are all given considerable scope in the poem's third and fourth books. A particularly revealing moment is her interchange with the enchantress Circe in the fourth book, where Medea and Circe communicate in their own language. This moment sets Medea in the role of Odysseus, who seeks Circe's aid and whose particular relationship with Circe sets him apart from his followers. In the final combat with an otherworldly figure, the giant Talus, it is Medea whose magical knowledge is victorious, as is true with the dragon that guards the golden fleece, and of her “creation” of Jason as the hero who slays the earthborn men.

At the time of the
Argonautica
's composition, the Ptolemaic Empire covered a vast geographical space, extending from the Cyreneica in the west (modern Libya) to Coele-Syria (modern Israel, Palestine, Lebanon) in the east, much of southern Asia Minor, and many Aegean islands.
5
The Ptolemies were further major players in the political world of mainland Greece, where they served as a counterweight to Macedon. The new epigrams attributed to Posidippus include a number of poems dedicated to early Ptolemaic queens, several of which, poems that celebrate victory in horse racing at Nemea in the Peloponnese, attest to the actual presence of individual royal family members at the games. Apollonius'
Argonautica
can be understood in one sense as a four-book travel narrative, one that takes its point of departure from a long-ago saga that told of a journey from Thessaly through the Propontis and around the Black Sea (an older trajectory). The poem then, in its long last book, brings the poem's audience (the newer trajectory) along the Danube, then down the western Adriatic coast, back up the Adriatic to the Po in Italy, to the Rhône in France, to Libya (importantly, the setting of the prophetic oracle
of Zeus-Ammon at the Oasis of Siwah, where Alexander had been proclaimed son of Zeus), to Crete, and thence back to the Greek mainland. Apollonius' mapping of the Argonauts' return brings the heroes of the
Argo
through areas that were relevant to the Ptolemaic Empire with its vast naval fleet, a different Greek world from that imagined in the ancient saga tradition.
6
From the perspective of the ancient saga, this return involves a journey into the unknown. This journey may be in part a reflection of the expeditions that took place under the Ptolemies to Nubia, and particularly the Arabian Sea. The quest narrative of the original legend (a young prince is sent to the land of the Sun in search of a magical object, and is aided in that quest by a local princess) finds real-life parallel, as it were, in the early Ptolemaic quest for more widespread hegemony and control of the import of luxury goods.

While the
Argonautica
is, on the one hand, an epic hexameter poem heavily imbued throughout by Homeric and Hesiodic tradition, it is, in other ways, quite new, and to a modern reader, particularly one coming to the poem without much experience of its earlier models, may read much more like Tolkien in poetic form than anything else. And this would perhaps be right. In its combination of the real and the fantastical, its engagement with traditions of medicine, astronomy, and science, its magical vessel that speaks and yet serves as the plaything of water nymphs, heroes that have wings, and a king whose grandfather is the center of the solar system, it is truly without exact parallel in previous or contemporary Greek literature. The
Argonautica
has its detractors, and has long had its detractors, but for those who admire the poem, even on multiple rereadings, it is an experience close to magical.

BENJAMIN ACOSTA-HUGHES

Notes

1
.
Clauss 1993 is an excellent and accessible study of this issue.

2
.
There are a number of studies on the role of Eros in the
Argonautica.
A particularly good one is the second chapter of Richard Hunter's 1993 literary studies of the poem.

3
.
Here the portrayal of Paris in two poems of the Trojan cycle, the
Cypria
and the
Little Iliad,
may have been contributing factors to Apollonius' portrayal. Neither poem, however, has survived.

4
.
These are available in English in the translation of F. Nisetich in Gutzwiller 200
5.

5
.
On the Ptolemaic naval empire see now Bursalis, Stefanou, and Thompson 201
3.

6
.
Thalmann 2011 is an excellent and proactively new study of the poem in these terms.

References Cited

Bursalis, Kostas, Mary Stefanou, and Dorothy J. Thompson, eds.
The Ptolemies, the Sea and the Nile: Studies in Waterborne Power.
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

Clauss, James J.
The Best of the Argonauts: The Redefinition of the Epic Hero in Book 1 of Apollonius'
Argonautica
.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

Gutzwiller, Kathryn, ed.
The New Posidippus: A Hellenistic Poetry Book
. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Hunter, Richard.
The
Argonautica
of Apollonius: Literary Studies
. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

———.
The Shadow of Callimachus: Studies in the Reception of Hellenistic Poetry at Rome
. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Leitao, David.
The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor in Classical Greek Literature
. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Loraux, Nicole.
Tragic Ways of Killing a Woman.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Unversity Press, 1987.

Meuli, Karl.
Odysee und Argonautika: Untersuchungen zur griechischen Sagengeschichte und zum Epos
. Berlin: Weidmann, 1921.

Mori, Anatole.
The Politics of Apollonius Rhodius'
Argonautica
.
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Stephens, Susan A.
Seeing Double: Intercultural Poetics in Ptolemaic Alexandria
. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.

Thalmann, William G.
Apollonius of Rhodes and the Spaces of Hellenism
. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011.