Jason and the Argonauts (35 page)

3.359
And Eros was descending
:
This remarkable opening is a variation on the Homeric poetic feature known as ring composition. We return to the descent of Eros at 217. At the same time there is a transition from epic (a multitude of figures busy at court) to lyric mode, that of a single figure's perception and reaction.

3.361
stinging fly
:
This same image occurs toward the end of Book 1, describing the rage that overcomes Heracles on hearing about the loss of Hylas.

3.373
Sudden muteness
:
This careful description of the effect of erotic attraction on the psyche is one of several passages in Hellenistic poetry (another is the second part of Theocritus'
Idyll
2) that imitate a famous poem of Sappho, fr. 31 V. (“that one appears to me like the gods”). Sappho's poem implicated several contemporary medical images. Hellenistic poetry, with its awareness of new interests in medicine, further enhanced Sappho's medical language and imagery.

3.382
As when a workwoman
:
This striking simile compares the fire of a lone woman doing handiwork at night to Medea's isolated reaction on seeing Jason. While Homer had used comparisons of the heroic and everyday working culture, this simile takes the conceit a step further.

3.407
my sister Circe
:
Aeëtes' reference to his sister Circe conveniently locates her in the Greek west, thus pinpointing one geographical reference of the Argonauts' complex journey back home.

3.415
Argus answered first
:
Argus' surprisingly long speech serves as a summation of much of the past two books for the Colchian audience. Argus, though not the same Argus who designed the
Argo,
does
include the building of the ship briefly in this summary, a building that Apollonius himself had consciously omitted in his opening to the whole poem.

3.528
“Stranger, why should you tell”
:
Aeëtes, a figure within the poem itself, is in the unusual role of requesting narrative brevity, a hallmark of good poetry of this period.

3.587
Jason shone
:
Jason's physical beauty, and its effect on those who behold him, is an ongoing motif of the poem, as is its destructive potential.

3.718
a timid dove
:
This is another example of bird augury in the
Argonautica
. The dove is also associated with Aphrodite, so its landing in Jason's lap can be read as another instance of the erotic motif of this book.

3.741–42
as fellow crewmen / to women
:
Idas here takes the role Heracles had in Book 1 in reaction to the Argonauts' dalliance with the Lemnian women—an older heroic ethos disapproving of a newer one and its methods.

3.820
She dreamed the stranger
:
Medea's dream is in part an elaboration on that of Nausicaa which opens
Odyssey
6, but here has a more complex nature, part exposition of Medea's desires, part prefiguring the future. Dreams and dream interpretation were a subject of great interest in antiquity.

3.848
shameless as a bitch's
:
The Greek term for “bitch” (
kyon
) marks this as an allusion to Helen's self-deprecating language in
Iliad
 6, where she laments her own actions in abandoning her homeland for a foreign love.

3.858
She turned around, returned
:
Apollonius' description of Medea's hesitation here finds a striking parallel in one of the most remarkable passages of Euripides'
Medea,
Medea's agonized soliloquy (lines 1019–80) on whether or not to kill her children.

3.867
Think of a girl
:
The simile varies a traditional epigram motif of the bride dead on the eve of her wedding, and so now the bride of Hades (Death). At the same time, it hauntingly recalls the hopeful young girls inspired by the Evening Star (the planet Venus) in Book 1.

3.908
but no sound came
:
The motif of speechlessness, first apparent on Medea's gazing upon Jason, continues here and will recur again as a leitmotif of the girl's internal turmoil.

3.925
you must swear by Heaven and Earth
:
Oaths, their preservation and their breaking, are a recurrent theme of the Medea narrative. Apollonius' audience may well recall that Jason's
not
keeping his sworn oaths is one of Medea's primary charges against him in Euripides' play.

3.1054
So she resolved
:
Medea's contemplation of suicide is another of the detailed portrayals of her inner psychology that make the third book so different in tone from much of the rest of the poem. There are some lyric antecedents (Sappho fr. 94 V. is one), but the continued description of internal psychology is something quite new.

3.1104
Prometheon
:
Prometheus, whose torment the Argonauts sailed past toward the end of Book 2, recurs here as the source of Medea's magic drug. Prometheus will return again at lines 1402–4 as the origin of Jason's family.

3.1123
Brimo
:
Brimo is an aspect of Hecate as Underworld deity. The Greek word means “the one who roars.”

3.1139
Leto's daughter Artemis
:
Apollonius here reworks Homer's comparison of Nausicaa to Artemis at
Odyssey
6.102–9, yet there is a significant change in tone with the fear that Artemis/Medea inspires here. Virgil recasts the same simile at
Aeneid
1.498–504, again with contextual difference (Dido, unlike Nausicaa and Medea, has been previously married, so the comparison to Diana is intentionally problematic).

3.1192
Never among the men
:
Hera's rendering Jason an object of striking beauty recalls Athena's doing the same to Odysseus at
Od
yssey
6.229–37. The encounter of Jason and Medea here is a close intertextual recall of that of Odysseus and Nausicaa.

3.1205
Crows regularly sit
:
This passage is a somewhat humorous play on bird augury (reading divine will through bird motion or birdcall). Talking crows feature in another poem of this period, Callimachus'
Hecale
.

3.1229
Medea's heart
:
This passage again recalls Homer's scene with Nausicaa at play with her maids in
Odyssey
6, although here there is no ball (the ball, as it were, already figured earlier in the narrative of
Argonautica
3, and will appear again in a simile in Book 4). Medea's anguished anticipation of Jason's arrival also recalls, a second time, Sappho fr. 31 V.

3.1240–41
as the Dog Star, / Sirius
:
The comparison of Jason to the notoriously destructive hottest time of the year is one of brilliance and foreboding. There is a close parallel description of Sirius in Apollonius' contemporary poet Aratus at
Phaenomena
326–35.

3.1276–77
I have come, / a suppliant
:
This is another close recall, with important variations, of
Odyssey
6.149–85, where the desperate Odysseus supplicates Nausicaa. One intriguing variation is that in the Homeric passage Odysseus concludes by noting that a well-married couple achieves the greatest reputation (line 185); here Jason picks up the theme of reputation, but of two figures (line 1283) living apart.

3.1290
Minos' maiden daughter Ariadne
:
Jason's mythological choice of exemplum is full of foreboding: Theseus abandoned Ariadne, who had aided him in his quest to slay the Minotaur and then left her family and homeland with him, on the island of Naxos. Jason's version of the Ariadne story is geared to persuade and is also only partly true.

3.1317–18
a miraculous / and winning fire
:
This is often an image of a divinity, and appears in the iconography of some Hellenistic monarchs. Fire in this case, following on the Jason-Sirius comparison, has a dangerously ambiguous value.

3.1344
to turn and look behind you
:
In ancient magical practice, it is standard for the practitioner calling forth an Underworld spirit to beware of looking upon that which should not be seen.

3.1516–17
Cadmus found / this serpent
:
The narrative of Cadmus and the serpent's teeth links two of the great mythological cycles, that of the Theban royal house and the
Argonautica
. Like other Hellenistic poets, Apollonius has great interest in mythography.

3.1533
The sun god Helius
:
Helius here is both metaphor (for the sun) and a pertinent mythological presence as Aeëtes' father.

3.1552
Lemnian Hypsipyle
:
There are several mantles in the poem: Jason's cloak in
Argonautica
1, which plays a role in the seduction of Hypsipyle; this gift
from
Hypsipyle, which figures here at the moment Jason carries out Medea's magical instructions; this same mantle then makes a reappearance in the luring of Absyrtus to his death in the first part of
Argonautica
4; and then there is finally the mantle in which Dionysus embraced Ariadne, in which Jason and Medea make love in
Argonautica
4. Each covering implicates earlier narrative or narratives into the present.

3.1579
a special gift from Ares
:
Aeëtes and Ares, the Greek god of war, are again equated. This parallelism begins already at the altar of Ares toward the end of the previous book.

3.1590
Phaëthon was waiting
:
The image of this Phaëthon holding his father's chariot cannot but evoke the image of Phaëthon the son of Helius. Like the son of Helius, this Phaëthon will prove, in his tragic end, unequal to his father.

3.1597
the god Poseidon
:
The simile may serve to evoke particularly Poseidon the implacable foe of Odysseus, and to heighten the sense of Jason's heroic isolation here in the face of a foe truly larger than life.

3.1669
Think of a blacksmith's bull-hide bellows
:
The simile recalls in part the Cyclopes on Jason's cloak in Book 1 as they fashion the thunderbolt of Zeus.

3.1759
the seedlings grown
:
Many editors assume a missing line between this line and the next.

3.1785
The sun went down
:
Again a book concludes with nightfall. Whereas the other books of the
Argonautica
cover longer periods of time, the entire action of Book 3 encompasses only a few days.

BOOK 4

4.1
deathless Muse
:
The poet does not name this figure. Some scholars assume this to be Erato, the Muse of the proem to
Argonautica
3, and that this is one of several factors that bind the two books as a unit, one that centers on Medea and Jason. Other scholars point to the different, more heroic-epic direction of
Argonautica
4, especially as outlined in the proem, and suggest that this is rather a changed Muse, the typically unnamed one of epic poetry (cf. the opening lines to Homer's
Iliad
and
Odyssey
).

4.4
wondering whether
:
Questions in epic, as the late Thomas Rosenmeyer observed, are generally phrased as “x or y, then y.” The second option usually prevails. See “Apollonius Lyricus,”
SIFC
10 (1992): 177–78.

4.14
Hera, meanwhile
:
Hera will continue to play an active role in this book of the poem. The simile that follows is a typically heroic-epic one, thus confirming the direction that the poem now follows.

4.26
She would have drained
:
The lines capture two features of Medea in particular: her emotions as a young girl (this is the second time she contemplates suicide), a strong feature of Book 3, and her role as a sorceress, which will repeatedly come to the fore in Book 4. The choice of action here reflects, on a different level, the change of direction the poem takes now from that of the previous book.

4.37
heartfelt lamentation
:
The final version of Callimachus'
Aetia
closes with the young queen, Berenice II, dedicating a lock of her hair for her husband's safe return from the Third Syrian War, a lock that itself laments its being severed from its sister-locks, and that ends up in a heavenly apotheosis in the lap of Arsinoe-Aphrodite, figured in cult terms as Berenice's mother. This is one of many striking parallels between the poetry of Callimachus and Apollonius'
Argonautica
.

4.41–42
“I wish . . . / before you ever reached the land of Colchis”
:
This is a very close echo of the opening two lines of Euripides'
Medea
. In Euripides' play these lines are spoken by the children's nurse. The difference of speaker underlines some of the conventional differences of tragedy and epic.