The Argonautica, by Apollonius of Rhodes

The Argonautica, or The Voyage of Argo to give it the Penguin name, may seem like a cut-price Greek epic, and there’s an argument for that being the right appraisal. It has received criticism from scholars, both ancient and modern, mostly on the grounds for it being something of a Homeric knock-off, but my own reservations against it are far more general than that. On the plus side it’s short – tiny, if you compare it to the Iliad. It has one or two interesting characters lurking within, and it’s fairly consistent as a story – we follow our heroes from start to finish, whereas in Homer’s stuff the narrative veers all over the place. Alas however it’s not particularly gripping, most of the characters are non-entities, and it finishes without any real conclusion. Essentially, it’s boring. And it's not a matter of translator this time either: this edition was done by the same guy who did the translation of the Odyssey I spent so much time praising a month ago, so it just goes to show.

So the story of ‘Jason and the Argonauts/The Golden Fleece’ is a genuine piece of Greek mythology, much like ‘Theseus and the Minotaur’ or the ‘Twelve Tasks of Heracles [Or Hercules for the Romans, but people – particularly Hollywood – keep calling him that even in the Greek context, which makes no sense],’ but it wasn’t until after Alexander the Great that anybody thought to write down the whole thing; which is what Apollonius of Rhodes did in about the 3^rd century BCE, a good few centuries after the Homeric stories were composed. Of Apollonius little more needs to be said; this is his only real contribution to history or literature, and the first time he tried to write his own epic, it thing apparently turned out a bit rubbish. But, undeterred, he went back to the drawing board and did a whole load of editing, mostly cutting, and then he put it back on the market where it became an international best-seller.

          So the story. Jason is a hero; he needs to sail off and get himself a Golden Fleece so he can do something about a vaguely villainous king called Pelias, so he assembles a crew of would-be heroes, loads up a boat which they name the Argo, and they sail off to unknown waters. After stopping over in Lemnos, where they swan around with the all-female inhabitants until Heracles tells them to get a grip and carry on adventuring, the Argonauts then have a chat with a blind seer and sort out his harpy problem, who then gives them helpful directions to distant Colchis where the Fleece apparently is, and so they head through the Clashing Rocks – a nice little coastal-feature that pretty much gates off the Bosporus – into the Black Sea, and finally arrive at the Caucasus where they are duly welcomed by King Aeetes and his daughter, Medea. Aeetes is not well disposed to hand over his favourite Fleece, so he puts Jason through a suicidal challenge to yoke a couple of fire-breathing bulls and plough a field with serpents’ teeth which will immediately grow into a bunch of homicidal warriors. With help from Medea, who has – with a bit of Divine interference – fallen in love with him, Jason overcomes these challenges, nicks the Golden Fleece, and sails back homeward, via the Danube, the Adriatic Sea, Switzerland, and the deserts of North Africa, and there the tale ends with them pulling into port back home at Pegasae, with no closure about what happens with King Pelias, what they do with the Golden Fleece, or whether Jason and Medea live happily ever after. It was a cop-out ending, make no mistake!

          Most of the characters are a bit rubbish; I mean, for odd incidental characters who are only there to advance the plot this isn’t too bad, but Jason is the protagonist, and he’s as boring as they come. The rest of the Argonauts, though they’re each given their own dreadfully long introduction, are also a bit lifeless – this point I will just go over again, because it’s something I particularly dislike to see in books; it’s bad form to introduce a load of characters in one lump, as we can’t be expected to memorise a whole list of names and their associated traits all at once, and it only really ends up frustrating the reader. This is what the Argonautica does right at the beginning, boring us before we’d even set off. With the Homeric heroes you generally get some amount of personality in the characters, and the Odyssey goes about this in the right way by introducing the players gradually, fleshing them out in their own time, and never having too many to deal with. If only Apollonius had taken this particular leaf out of Homer’s book.

          There is one major exception to this criticism. The best character in the Argonautica, one who actually goes a long way towards making this story actually worth reading, is Medea – the daughter of King Aeetes of Colchis, dabbler in magic and potion-making, and the girl who’s more or less responsible for pulling Jason’s arse out of the fire. For Medea we not only have a more detailed and sympathetic human personality than every other character in the book combined, she pretty much steals the show the moment she first enters the story. Basically she fulfils the same role as Ariadne does in the story of ‘Theseus and the Minotaur’ – that is, being the daughter of the tyrannical king who goes over and helps the hero against him, giving him handy tips and useful items which will aid in the coming trial, before the hero does his business and they sail off back home together before some horrible ‘Greek-Tragic’ twist ruins their lives at the end. But the thing about Medea is that she has actual personality and character-development, and the writer never neglects just how important a character she really is. If the whole thing had been about her from the start, then it would have been a much better story. For one thing, it would have had an actual protagonist, because Jason and his goons certainly don’t fit the bill. 

          So that’s about the long and short of it. A Hellenistic paperback that some people say was made simply so that Apollonius could prove he could write an epic all of his own, while other people say that this work is a definite departure from Homer, innovative and new. I hate the fact it offers no closure about the story whatsoever; I mean, I was hoping to hear the story about Jason sitting despondently under the decaying wreck of the Argo years later only to be crushed to death when its prow falls on him, but I would have settled with having him hand over the Fleece and actually do something worthwhile about Pelias, even if they gave us a pathetic faux happy-ending. In the Iliad we didn’t really see an ending to that story either, yet that epic still managed to end more strikingly than this piece of disappointing post-Alexandrian shite. Yet it has its moments – and I genuinely mean that. It comes alive when Medea enters the stage, and to give praise where it’s due, she’s one of the better characters in Greek myth I’ve seen so far. If you read it for any reason, it’d be for her – or if you just really love that cheesy old Todd Armstrong film from the ‘60s, and who can say fairer than that?

Biblionautica

Apollonius of Rhodes. The Voyage of Argo. Translated by E.V. Rieu. Penguin: London. (1971 [First Published 1959 – or the 3^rd century BCE, if you’d prefer])