The Argonautica

What It's About

At the command of King Pelias, the hero Jason assembles a crew of Greece's finest warriors and sets sail on the ship Argo to fetch the Golden Fleece from the distant land of Colchis. The voyage takes the Argonauts through storms, hostile tribes, and monstrous encounters, from the island of the man-eating Amycus to the prophet Phineus tormented by the Harpies, and on through the Clashing Rocks at the mouth of the Black Sea. In Colchis, the Argonauts find that the fleece is guarded by a fearsome dragon, and Jason's chances rest on the help of Medea, the king's daughter, whose growing feelings for him complicate her loyalty to her own family.

Key Concepts

The Argonautica is the only Hellenistic Greek epic to survive complete, and it reshaped the genre for the age that followed. Where Homer's heroes act on martial glory, Apollonius gives equal weight to inner emotion, most famously in his portrait of Medea's conflicted infatuation, a psychological study that later influenced Virgil's Dido in the Aeneid. The poem also folds in the era's fascination with geography and ethnography, tracing a semi-realistic sea route through the known and half-known edges of the world, and it opens with an extended catalogue of the assembled heroes, a device drawn from earlier epic tradition.

About the Author

Apollonius of Rhodes was a Greek poet and scholar of the Hellenistic period, active in Alexandria in the third century BC. He is traditionally said to have served as a librarian at the Library of Alexandria and studied under the poet Callimachus, with whom he later had a famous literary falling-out. The precise dates of his birth and death are not recorded.

About This Edition

This is a 1912 prose translation by R. C. Seaton.