Argonautica
Argonautika
Jason succeeds in retrieving the Golden Fleece not through Homeric heroic combat but largely through the sorceress Medea's passionate, destructive love for him, making psychological interiority and personal desire, rather than martial glory, the epic's true engine.
- Medea's psychological interiority as the epic's engine
- departure from Homeric martial heroism
- learned, allusive Alexandrian epic style
- influence on Virgil's Dido
- epic reworked for a scholarly court audience
The Argonautica, composed in Alexandria by the scholar-poet Apollonius of Rhodes, narrates Jason's voyage aboard the Argo with a crew of assembled heroes to retrieve the Golden Fleece from Colchis, consciously working within the epic tradition established by Homer while departing sharply from it in tone. Its most celebrated achievement is the third book's portrait of Medea, whose sudden, overwhelming infatuation with Jason, rendered with unprecedented psychological detail, becomes the story's actual turning point, since Jason succeeds mainly through her magical assistance and betrayal of her own family. The epic's learned, allusive Alexandrian style later influenced Virgil's portrait of Dido's passion in the Aeneid.
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