Five-minute digest
The Argonautica
Summary
The Argonautica is the one full Greek epic of the voyage of the Argo that survives from antiquity, composed in four books of dactylic hexameter by the Alexandrian scholar-poet Apollonius of Rhodes in the third century BC. King Pelias of Iolcus, warned by an oracle to beware a man wearing one sandal, sees Jason arrive having lost a sandal in the river Anaurus, and sends him to fetch the golden fleece from Colchis at the far end of the Black Sea. Book I gathers the crew, among them Heracles, Orpheus, the steersman Tiphys, the twins Castor and Polydeuces, the winged sons of Boreas, Peleus, Telamon and the seers Idmon and Mopsus, and launches the ship from Pagasae. The heroes stay among the women of Lemnos, where Queen Hypsipyle receives Jason; they kill King Cyzicus by accident in a confused night battle and mourn him; and they lose Heracles when a water nymph pulls the boy Hylas into her spring and Heracles will not leave off searching. Book II brings the boxing match in which Polydeuces kills the Bebrycian king Amycus, the rescue of the blind prophet Phineus from the Harpies, the passage of the Clashing Rocks with Athena's help, the deaths of Idmon and Tiphys among the Mariandyni, and the arrival at the river Phasis. Book III, the most admired part of the poem, turns inward. Hera and Athena persuade Aphrodite to send Eros, whose arrow makes Aeetes' daughter Medea, a priestess of Hecate, fall in love with Jason. King Aeetes demands that Jason yoke fire-breathing bulls, plough the field of Ares, sow a dragon's teeth and fight the armed men who spring up. After a sleepless night divided between shame and longing, Medea gives Jason a drug at the temple of Hecate, and he wins the contest. In Book IV Medea flees with the Argonauts, charms the guardian serpent asleep so that Jason can take the fleece, and helps him ambush and kill her brother Apsyrtus. The return wanders by the rivers of Europe to Circe, who purifies them, past the Sirens and the Wandering Rocks to the Phaeacians, where Jason and Medea are married, then into the Libyan desert, where the crew carries the ship for twelve days and Mopsus dies of a snakebite, and finally to Crete, where Medea brings down the bronze giant Talos. The poem ends as the heroes step ashore at Pagasae. The library text is R. C. Seaton's complete prose translation for the Loeb Classical Library (1912), with his introduction and endnotes.
Top Lessons
A leader who needs others
Jason is chosen captain only after Heracles refuses the post, and he often despairs. He succeeds by persuasion, by counsel from Phineus and Argus, and above all by Medea's help, which makes the poem a study of a different kind of heroism from Achilles' self-sufficient strength.
Love as an arrow and a fire
Apollonius shows love arriving from outside, through Eros' arrow, and then working within Medea as heat, sleeplessness and divided thought. The night scene of Book III follows her reasoning back and forth between shame before her parents and longing for the stranger.
The price of the fleece
The prize is won through a betrayal of Medea's father and the killing of her brother, and Zeus sends storms until Circe purifies the pair. The epic does not hide the cost of success, and readers who know Euripides' Medea feel the shadow of what will happen in Corinth.
The world mapped by myth
The poem explains the origin of rites, place-names and tombs along its route, from the barrow of Sthenelus to the shrine on Anaphe. For an Alexandrian scholar the voyage was a way of joining geography, cult and story into one map of the Greek world.
Verified Quotes
Frequently cited
“Beginning with thee, O Phoebus, I will recount the famous deeds of men of old, who, at the behest of King Pelias, down through the mouth of Pontus and between the Cyanean rocks, sped well-benched Argo in quest of the golden fleece.”
“and the bolt burnt deep down in the maiden’s heart like a flame”
“and her soul creeping like a dream flitted in his track as he went.”
Frequently cited
“And fast did her heart throb within her breast, as a sunbeam quivers upon the walls of a house when flung up from water, which is just poured forth in a caldron or a pail may be; and hither and thither on the swift eddy does it dart and dance along; even so the maiden’s heart quivered in her breast.”
Frequently cited
“Ruthless Love, great bane, great curse to mankind, from thee come deadly strifes and lamentations and groans, and countless pains as well have their stormy birth from thee.”
“So Talos, for all his frame of bronze, yielded the victory to the might of Medea the sorceress.”
“Be gracious, race of blessed chieftains! And may these songs year after year be sweeter to sing among men.”
Medical Lens
Medea is the epic's physician-sorceress, and her drugs are described with herbal specificity: the charm of Prometheus, said to grow from the ichor of the tortured Titan, protects Jason's body from fire and bronze, and a sprig of juniper dipped in a brew puts the guardian serpent to sleep. Ancient Greek pharmakon covered both remedy and poison, and the poem keeps both senses in play. The account of Medea's love reads almost like a clinical sketch in the older tradition of lovesickness: sleeplessness, flushing and pallor, and a pain felt under the nape of the neck; Seaton even renders a phrase about her fine nerves. These are poetic conventions, later systematized by physicians as erotic melancholy, and should not be read as a diagnosis. Phineus, blind and wasted because the Harpies snatch or foul his food, is a vivid figure of starvation and old age. The death of Mopsus from a Libyan snake is told as a progression of local pain, numbness, dimming sight, cold and rapid decay, while Talos dies when the single vein of ichor at his ankle is opened.
- Book II, Phineus and the Harpies
The blind old prophet, starved by the Harpies, totters out to meet the heroes and is fed once the sons of Boreas drive the birds away.
- Book III, Medea's night and the charm of Prometheus
Medea's sleepless night of divided thought, followed by the narrator's account of the flower sprung from Prometheus' ichor and how she gathered it.
- Book IV, the serpent and the fleece
Medea sings to the serpent and sprinkles its eyes with a brew from a juniper spray until it sleeps.
- Book IV, Libya, death of Mopsus
A serpent sprung from the Gorgon's blood bites Mopsus; numbness, failing sight and rapid corruption of the body follow.