(ca. 295-ca. 247 b.c.) epic poet
Apollonius of Rhodes is one of the great literary figures of the Hellenistic Age. He was born in the city of Alexandria, a Greek community founded in Egypt when Alexander the Great conquered that country. During Apollonius’s lifetime, Alexandria was the greatest city of the Hellenistic world, not only a hub of economic and political activity but also the center of scholarly life for the Greeks. Apollonius spent many years in Rhodes, another city noted for its civilization and learning, working as both a writer and a teacher. Eventually he returned to Alexandria, called there by the great Library, one of the famed intellectual institutions of the ancient world and the pride and joy of the city. After a period of serving as tutor to the ruling family, the Ptolemies, Apollonius was made head of the Library, where he wrote his only surviving work, Argonautica, or “The voyage of the Argo.”
This piece tells the famous story of Jason and the Argonauts, as they make their way through dangers and adventures in search of the legendary Golden Fleece, which some historians believe is based on real expeditions into the Black Sea dating from the fourth or third millennium. As a well-known legend, the story made an appealing subject for epic poetry; moreover, as far as audiences of the time were concerned, the legend was true. As scholar Green observes, the Greeks felt that tales such as the expedition of the Argonauts and the fall of Troy were datable, if distant, events. To them, “the mythic past was rooted in historical time, its legends treated as fact, its heroic protagonists seen as links between the ‘age or origins’ and the mortal, everyday world that succeeded it.” Both herodotus and pindar, writing centuries before Apollonius, make references to the story as though it were actual fact.
The Argonautica differs from traditional Greek epic poems in many ways. Like his contemporary and sometime-friend callimachus, Apollonius dared to experiment with the traditional epic form as shaped by homer. Jason, the hero of the poem, is portrayed as reluctant and not entirely confident in his abilities, which stands in stark contrast to the valiant and superhuman portrayals of such figures as Achilles and Hercules in other Greek works. Furthermore, despite being an adventurous story, the main theme of the poem is not the quest of heroic achievement, but rather the romantic love between Jason and Medea. Apollonius’s achievement in the poem is the psychological depth given to the character of Jason’s spurned wife. In a passage rich with poetic tension and epic similes, Apollonius writes, “Medeia could not remove her thoughts to other matters / whatever games she might play,” and instead was continually “looking round up the road, peering into the distance”:
The times her heart snapped in her breast, when she couldn’t be sure if the sound that scampered by her was wind or footfall! But soon enough he appeared to her in her longing like Seirios, spring high into heaven out of Ocean, a star most bright and splendid to observe . . .
Thus, the writing of Apollonius, with ideas of the reluctant hero and romantic love, stands as a predecessor for much of the Western literature that followed it.
Disagreements over the use and function of the epic genre led Apollonius to argue bitterly and ultimately break with Callimachus. In his lifetime he saw the Alexandrians warm to his work and welcome him as a great poet. Though the Callimachean fashion was to treat poetry with intellectualism and self-conscious irony, Apollonius’s explorations of the human heart and the numinous mystery of the Golden Fleece made his poem enduringly popular. Apollonius’s lasting impression on the tradition of
Greek epic poetry eventually passed on to the Roman world, where echoes of Apollonius would resound in the Latin epics, particularly in the Aeneid of virgil.
English Versions of Works by Apollonius of Rhodes
The Argonautika. Translated by Peter Green. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.
Jason and the Golden Fleece (The Argonautica). Translated by Richard Hunter. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.
Works about Apollonius of Rhodes
Albis, Robert. Poet and Audience in the Argonautica of Apollonius. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 1996.
Beye, Charles Rowan. Epic and Romance in the Argonautica ofApollonius. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982. Harder, M. A, R. F. Regtuit and G. C. Wakker, eds. Apollonius Rhodius. Sterling, Va.: Peeters, 2000.
