Argonautica - The Story

The Story

The Argonautica was an adventure for the poet, one of the major scholars of the Alexandrian period – it was a bold experiment in re-writing Homeric epic in a way that would meet the demanding tastes of his contemporaries. According to some accounts, a hostile reception even led to his exile to Rhodes. The literary fashion was for small, meticulous poems, featuring displays of erudition and paradoxography (the account of marvels and oddities), as represented by the work of Callimachus. In adapting the epic genre to this audience, Apollodorus went a long way towards inventing the romance novel, including narrative techniques like the "interior monologue", whereby the author identifies with a character's thoughts and feelings. The re-evaluation of his work in recent times has led to a mass of innovative studies, often jostling each other for attention, so that Argonautica has become a daunting adventure for many modern scholars too:

Scholars that row against this current feel as if they are sailing through the Clashing Rocks; they have barely struggled halfway through one wave and there rolls the next one tossing them backwards twice as far as they had progressed ... Even if the attempt to pass through the clashing mountain of books succeeds, there is no hope of a pause and scholars find themselves in the grip of a debilitating ἀμηχανία . —Reinhold F. Glei.

Since scholarship is a key feature of this unique story, here is a preview of some of the main issues in the poet's treatment of the Argonaut myth, as addressed by recent scholarship.