The Argonautica is the third century BCE epic about Jason, the Golden Fleece, and a heroic crew including Heracles, Orpheus, Castor and Pollux, and the keenest pair of eyes in the world. The pop image of it is the Ray Harryhausen film, with the bronze giant and the sword-fighting skeletons and Jason being a perfectly competent hero in a tunic. The book is delightful and almost the opposite. Jason spends most of the poem in tears, the strongest man in the world quits halfway through the trip, the ship gives prophecies, and the Golden Fleece is taken off a tree by a man who has done none of the work to deserve it. The hero of Greek epic's most ambitious sequel is, on the page, hopeless.
He cries. Constantly.
Apollonius of Rhodes, the author, has a word he keeps applying to Jason: ἀμηχανία, amēchanía, which means roughly "no resources, no idea what to do." Jason is in amēchanía whenever the plot needs him. He sits down on beaches and weeps. He waits to be told what comes next. He is, in succession, rescued by a singer, a blind prophet, a goddess, a dove, an athlete, a sorceress, and a talking piece of wood. The Iliad opens with the rage of Achilles. The Argonautica opens with Jason being handed a quest and going pretty much straight to bed.
Medea does all the work
Roughly a quarter of the whole book is a long romance about a teenager. Aphrodite, owed a favour, sends her son Eros down to Colchis to shoot Medea, a princess and a working sorceress, so that she will fall in love with Jason on sight. The poem then spends a remarkable number of lines on Medea's insomnia, her shame, her arguments with herself in the dark, her dreams, and her decision to betray her father for a man she has just met. This is, as far as anyone can tell from what has survived, the first sustained interior portrait of a woman in love in Greek literature, and it sits inside what is supposed to be an action epic about a boat.
Then she does every interesting thing in the plot. She gives Jason a salve that makes him fireproof. She walks him through how to plough a field with the fire-breathing, bronze-hooved oxen, how to sow the dragon's teeth, and how to throw a single rock among the soldiers that sprout out of the ground so that they will fight each other instead of him. He follows the instructions. Then she takes the unsleeping serpent guarding the Fleece and sings it to sleep. Jason walks up and lifts the Golden Fleece off a tree branch. The hero of the most famous quest in ancient literature wins the prize by reaching.
The ship can talk
The Argo has, set into its prow, a piece of magical oak from Dodona, the oracle of Zeus. Athena put it there when she built the ship. The wood is alive and it talks. It gives prophecies and occasional warnings. The Argonauts have an entire all-star roster of heroes, including the strongest man alive, the best singer alive, two demigods, the keenest-sighted lookout in mythology, and a woman who can outrun anything, and they still need the boat to tell them where to go. Greek epic has invented a great many things. As far as I know it is the only place in literature with a sailing vessel that argues with the crew.
They lose Heracles to a boy in a spring
This is my favourite scene and most people have never heard about it. Heracles, the strongest hero on the ship, gets left behind on the coast of Mysia about a third of the way through the trip. The story is short and a little sad. Heracles loves a beautiful young man called Hylas. Hylas goes off to fetch water from a spring. The water-nymphs in the spring see him, fall in love, and pull him under. Heracles hears one faint cry, loses his mind looking for him, refuses to come back to the ship, and the Argo sails without their best fighter. The strongest man in the world is removed from the plot of his own quest by aquatic infatuation. Apollonius reports it with a straight face.
Orpheus beats the Sirens with a better song
The famous Sirens moment, where Odysseus tied himself to the mast to hear them and survive, has a quieter solution here. Orpheus is on board. As the singing starts he simply picks up his lyre and plays louder and better than the Sirens, drowning them out, until the crew can row past. One man fights enchantment with art and wins. It is one of the few moments in the poem where someone other than Medea does anything useful.
The harpies eat the prophet's lunch
Phineus is a blind prophet who has been cursed by Zeus. Every time he sits down to a meal a flock of harpies, winged women, swoops in, steals most of the food, and fouls what they leave behind. The crew chases the harpies off with the winged sons of Boreas, the north wind, who are conveniently among the Argonauts. Phineus, in gratitude, gives them the secret of the Clashing Rocks. Send a dove through first, he says, and as soon as it has passed, row. They send the dove. It loses some tail feathers. They row. The Argo loses an ornament off the stern. After that the Symplegades fix themselves in place and never move again. This is from the third century BCE. It sounds, in summary, like it was written last Tuesday.
How they get home
The trip back is where the poem stops being funny. Medea's younger brother Apsyrtus is sent by her father to bring her back. She lures him into a meeting and Jason kills him. To slow the pursuing fleet, they cut Apsyrtus into pieces and drop the pieces into the sea, one by one, because the fleet has to stop and collect each one for proper burial. This is the hero, with the prize, escaping home by littering a brother into the wake of his own ship. It is what makes Apollonius not Homer. Homer would have looked away. Apollonius writes it down.
The bronze giant has an ankle
Just before Greece they land on Crete and find the whole island guarded by Talos, a giant made of bronze who walks the coast and throws rocks at passing ships. He is hollow, with a single vein of divine ichor running from his neck to his ankle, sealed by a bronze nail. Medea, again, handles it. She fixes him with her eyes, sends him visions, and the bronze nail comes out. The ichor drains. The bronze giant falls. The first hero in surviving literature to die from a vulnerable ankle is a robot, killed by a teenage witch, decades before Achilles became famous for the same anatomical detail in a different war.
Why it reads like this
Apollonius worked at the Library of Alexandria, which in his lifetime was the largest collection of books in the world. He had read more Homer than anyone alive and decided not to write more Homer. So his hero loses his nerve. His heroine has feelings. His ship has opinions. His monsters have weak spots that are already mapped before the fight. It is what a librarian does with five centuries of epic on his shelves. He folds a small joke into every scene.
The longer shelf
Storica's Odyssey at A2 is the obvious next book: another Greek hero who weeps a lot and is rescued repeatedly by women and gods, and whose wife at home is the smartest person in the poem. The Iliad at B1 is the older book Apollonius could not stop thinking about, the one his every page is quietly answering. And Gods and Mortals at A2+ is where the rest of this cast lives in smaller form, the goddesses and monsters and minor heroes who keep wandering in and out of the bigger poems. Read in any order, you can watch the same Greek imagination test the same handful of figures across about a thousand years, and the figures keep arguing back.
I build Storica, a daily reading club for the language you're learning. We adapt the classics, including the ones where the strongest man in the world quits the quest halfway through to chase a teenager into a fountain, into short daily readings of about fifteen minutes, from A0 up to B2, in seven languages.