Apollonius Rewrites Jason and Argonauts

Greek Epic Poem Argonautica Twists Tradition

Apollonius dramatically closed the distance between the writer and the reader in what is, arguably, the prototype of a new genre in literature; the poet used the epic form to write a traditional tale of high romance and adventure, but the Argonautica is historically unique in its psychological insight and personal point of view.

Apollonius Twists Tradition

After the canonization of such quintessential figures as Homer, literary genres became rigidly defined; writers, then, in order to be truly creative, had to bend these rules. Thus Apollonius, in the first-person voice with a self-conscious style, introduced himself by saying that he would not dwell at length on what other have said about the building of the good ship Argo.

As in many modern novels, the reader is directly addressed by the text which calls attention to itself as being just that, a coded text and not just a story. Acutely conscious of his reader and their inevitable familiarity with the story of Jason, Apollonius excuses himself from obligations of tradition, emphasizing instead the selective nature of his craft by reminding the reader of this manipulative process. The reader may get the feeling the poet was driven to thumb his nose at tradition; Henry James might well have been speaking of Apollonius when he said in his essay The Art of Fiction that "Art derives a considerable part of its beneficial exercise from flying in the face of presumptions."

Many passages in the Argonautica are obviously reminiscent of Homer but are decidedly non-Homeric. Compare the opening lines of Homer with the rather half-spirited invocation of the muse "Moved by the god of song, I set out to...."; the heroic quest for the Golden Fleece is begun on a very prosaic note. Likewise, in Homer, conspicuous and august divine beings intervene in the lives of Achilles and Odysseus. With Apollonius, however, the gods are only mentioned obliquely; it is the lame King Pelos who commissions Jason. The classical emphasis on the big picture -- the collective societal, cultural and national dimensions of the Trojan war -- has largely been replaced by a microscopic examination of an errant individual, a lone, ignoble figure limping across the world's stage with "one foot bare" sending a cute young kid on a deadly mission.

A Cosmopolitan Quest for the Golden Fleece

Apollonius was able to imaginatively inject into Jason's tale those ideas and experiences available to him through his environment. He was clearly open-minded and made good use of the literary possibilities and complications provided by the artistic and scientific dialogue focused at Alexandria, a large port connected to a huge transportation and communication network that extended throughout the Mediterranean. Countless ships anchored there bringing strange news and stories to the resident scholars and writers, resulting in the inclusion of various scientific and artistic points of view into the story of Jason.

The Argonautica has an encyclopaedic quality with bits of instruction artfully incorporated into the fantastic delight of the adventure story. As a typical travelogue, the work describes Jason's journey with plenty of nautical comments about the weather, shipping routes and travelling time, and an altogether hazy geography. Ostensibly, the quasi-historical facts and morality tales are the sugar-coated pills of wisdom meant to enlighten the reader. Such disparate details show a variety of authorial interests and concerns but, especially in retrospect, it is not the detailed information that we appreciate as much as the self-conscious narrator and the psychological investigative study of the love bond between Jason and Medea--stylistic devices that get more fully developed later in the rise of the novel.

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