Jason and the Argonauts (Penguin Classics)

by Apollonius Of Rhodes

  4.1390 Danaë: Daughter of Acrisius. Zeus came to her as a shower of golden rain in the prison where her father confined her. Her father then placed Danaë, and her son Perseus, in a chest that he had cast into the sea. The story was narrated in lyric poetry by Simonides (fr. 543 PMG) and by Aeschylus in his fragmentary Dictoulkoi (“Net Drawers”).

  4.1393 Echetus: Echetus is a savage king of Epirus, father of Merope. The extant sources for this tale are fairly late. Arete here combines the catalog (an epic tradition) with a Hellenistic scholar’s eye for contested narrative versions and/or unusual detail.

  4.1406 war down on Hellas: As noted earlier, Hellas is not a term used of the Greek world in Homeric epic; rather, it is a coinage that comes to define Greek vs. Barbarian. A “war” on “Hellas” evokes the Persian Wars, and indeed Aeëtes, coming from the far east of the known world and associated with the Sun, can easily be aligned with the one-time Persian kings.

  4.1450 Zeus’ Nysaean son: This is Dionysus, a god with whom the Ptolemies claimed close association. For a recent, somewhat novel and very accessible study of the spread of the Dionysus cult in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, see Hunter 2006 ch. 2.

  4.1458 glinting golden fleece: The fleece has been a leitmotif throughout the poem, and we have seen it in several settings: as a living thing on Jason’s cloak and as the guarded object that Medea and Jason take from its dreadful guardian. At its beginning the golden ram bears Phrixus and Helle away from their stepmother Ino, at its end here it serves as the bedding for Jason and Medea, the latter also fleeing a cruel parental figure.

  4.1469 The nymphs had come: The setting of this wedding serves in turn as the model for that of Aeneas and Dido in Aeneid 4, where at lines 165–68 the woodland nymphs sing the wedding song, and Juno serves as the pronuba (matron attending upon the bride).

  4.1483 sang the wedding hymn: A wedding hymn was a genre of lyric song, known as an epithalamium (the song sung “before the chamber”). There are several references in Apollonius’ poem to other types of song, which may reflect the interest of his period in categorization of earlier poetry.

  4.1485 was not the place: The passage leaves open a certain ambiguity about the wedding, and about whether it in fact constitutes a true wedding, leaving open, and unresolved, a very important issue for the future of both principals.

  4.1491–92 we / the members: An unusual philosophical comment on the ephemeral nature of human happiness that, coming so closely upon the wedding, casts a pall on the whole scene.

  4.1500 Dawn had returned: This is Apollonius’ version of, and elaboration on, an image fairly common in Homer, but not in the Argonautica. The lines here may be meant especially to recall the opening of Odyssey 8 and Alcinoös summoning the Phaeacian leading men to take counsel on the future of Odysseus.

  4.1533–34 dancing / a cyclic dance: Another evocation of actual cult practice, and the type of song that accompanies it.

  4.1555 and settled on the island opposite: Apollonius’ poem includes a number of references to settlements and their future histories, a way of weaving history into an epic narrative. Callimachus does something very similar in his narrative of Acontius and Cydippe, in the third book of his Aetia.

  4.1579–80 the land / of Pelops had arisen into view: This passage reworks Odysseus’ first approach to Ithaca (Odyssey 10.29), when his ship is then blown off course by his followers’ illicitly opening the bag of winds given to Odysseus by King Aeolus. The “dismal gust of wind” that blows the Argonauts off course is a recollection of the Homeric passage.

  4.1645 odd omens have been witnessed: Ancient historical narrative often includes both natural and supernatural phenomena as testimony of difficult times. Here Apollonius is evoking that tradition.

  4.1655 fall in the sand, and die: This is the second time that the heroes of the Argo have given up hope, and prepare to die. The scene, particularly with the shrouding of their heads, may recall the end of Odyssey 5, where Odysseus, exhausted and shipwrecked, buries himself, more like an animal than a human, to await a very uncertain future.

  4.1665 swans release their dying proclamations: The idea that swans sing most beautifully before dying is a belief that recurs in a number of Greek authors, particularly Plato’s Phaedo, which the poet may be in part recalling here.

  4.1676 the guardians of Libya: These divinities are the daughters of Poseidon and Libya, thus their fitting role in bringing the Argonauts from Libya to the sea. The same group of female maidens (called “ladies, heroines of Libya”) feature in an elegiac fragment of the poet Callimachus (fr. 602 Pf.) with their mother, here probably Cyrene. As is the case with Odysseus, the Argonauts are often helped in their return by female figures.

  4.1770 I sing at the Pierides’ command: The poet’s recourse to the Muses’ authority here marks both a debt to the epic tradition (an appeal to the Muses to give veracity to a more than human account (the Catalog of Ships in the second book of the Iliad, for example) and the extraordinary nature of the story. Bearing a ship to the sea has strong parallels in Egyptian religious belief and practice.

  4.1796 Heracles had already shot: Once again the Argonauts are preceded by Heracles, whose peregrination just precedes their own. The description of Heracles from one of his victims at lines 1837ff. is an especially vivid one.

  4.1833 they emerged out of the trees: There are several types of nymphs associated with trees in Greek belief. Apollonius is evoking something of that image here.

  4.1912 Then, O Canthus: The deaths of Canthus and Mopsus continue a trend in the poem of significant deaths of heroes in pairs. As with the frequent paired arrivals at the poem’s opening, this is particularly appropriate to a heroic narrative involving a ship and oarmates.

  4.1941 the lethal sort of asp: Snakebite was a constant danger in North Africa, particularly from the asp. In some accounts of her death, Cleopatra VII commits suicide by holding an asp against her breast—this is the version popularized by Shakespeare. The poet Nicander (probably second century BCE) wrote a poem in hexameters, the Theriaca, on various creeping animals. The poem survives in its entirety; it includes a long section on snakes.

  4.1956 the Gorgon’s freshly severed head: The narrative of Perseus and the Medusa is known to us from several ancient sources—the most familiar one is in the fourth book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses—but the myth is much older. Here Apollonius uses a traditional Greek myth to emphasize the earlier presence of North Africa in Greek mythology, a gesture very common in Hellenistic poetry.

  4.1967 Slumber the Loosener of Limbs: Sleep and Death have a long tradition as partners, both in poetry and in art. Apollonius’ description of the death of Mopsus is influenced both by earlier artistic tradition and also by medical descriptions of the effects of poison (the death of Socrates in Plato’s Phaedo is a famous example of the latter).

  4.1981 and mourned the man: The description refers in part to a threnos, or song of lament. An interesting feature of the Argonautica is the variety of song forms that this heroic epic evokes. A famous threnos in epic hexameter is the conclusion of Iliad 24.

  4.1989 As when a serpent: This simile may evoke the Egyptian belief that the arc of the sun passes from west to east at night, while a serpent threatens its nightly voyage. On the presence of Egyptian culture and beliefs in the Argonautica, see esp. Stephens 2003 ch. 4; on this particular passage, see Mori 2008 Introduction.

  4.2070 As when a trainer: The simile encapsulates the previous events (a stallion’s emergence from the sea at lines 1749–55; now for a second time salvation comes from the sea.

  4.2158 Father Zeus, profound astonishment: One of the great interests of poets of this period was paradoxography, the study of strange and unexpected phenomena.

  4.2216 Epiphany: This episode of Apollo at Anaphe (“radiance”), which occurs here toward the end of the Argonautica, is one of the earliest episodes of Callimachus’ Aetia, again suggesting a close knowledge of both poets of each other’s work.

  4.2230 because of
all this humor: Laughter and the ludicrous have a place in many Greek rituals, including, perhaps most famously, the initiations at the cult of the goddess Demeter at Eleusis.

  4.2237–38 Euphemus happened to recall / a dream: Euphemus’ dream looks to the future, when Thera will in return become the source of the great cities of Cyrene. There is a longer narrative of the clod of earth at the opening of Pindar’s longest ode, Pythian 4, which Apollonius places, significantly, toward the end of his own Argonautica narrative. The Hellenistic era took great interest in dreams and dream interpretation.

  4.2289–90 To this day / the Myrmidons: The final aetion of Apollonius’ poem. Like Callimachus’ four-book Aetia, Apollonius’ Argonautica is replete with aetia, and the two poems have many other shared features in common. Callimachus’ elegiac poem, though, is not a linear narrative in the same way as Apollonius’ Argonautica.

  4.2293 O heroes, offspring of the blessed gods: The ending of the poem, like the opening line of the first book, is markedly hymnic. Here the poet addresses his heroes as figures of the distant past, and addresses them as objects of prayer themselves. It is they, the heroes, rather than the traditional Muses, whom the poet calls upon to watch over his song and its life in the future. In the ancient world heroes, such as Heracles or Jason, were themselves the objects of cult ritual as figures more than mere mortals but less than gods.