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 wellknown
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. She is portrayed
as having complex feelings, as in the passage
from Book III where she waits in worried anticipation
for Jason to appear. 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 of Apollonius. Carbondale: Southern
Illinois University Press, 1982.
Harder, M. A, R. F. Regtuit and G. C. Wakker, eds.
Apollonius Rhodius. Sterling,Va.: Peeters, 2000.