Apollonius of Rhodes

A noble band of men sets out from Greece, into the Black Sea, aboard the ship "Argo" in search of the fabled Golden Fleece of the magical ram. Under the watchful gaze of the gods, they encounter obstacles both horrible and seductive these test their very limits.

I found this selection a bit heavy going at first but feel guilty writing this, some 2300 years after it was written! The second of these small pages starts the setting out of the names and lineage of her noble crew and it went on, small page after small page, until page 10 when my head was filled with names - too many names, too much information! See my tags above, most of which come from the first ten pages of this little book, and that's only all of the names up to page six - I was rather more selective after that!

Still, I am glad I read this introduction to Jason and the Argonauts. As a naval officer, with an interest in maritime history, I should have read it many decades ago. I am glad I have read this short introduction and probably don't need to read the full book, The Voyage of Argo.… (more)

Best parts:
1. The metaphors. Lots of excellent ones here, much akin to the Iliad.
2. Medea shows up halfway in and steals the show. She might be the only interesting character, but she's interesting enough on her own to make up for the perfunctoriness of the rest. The gender relationships between men and women are a source of conflict throughout the text, and that is never more apparent than through the tensions inherent to Medea's character, simultaneously magically powerful and societally disempowered. Certainly a recipe for tragedy, though tragedy is not very present here.
3. Detailed nautical descriptions, if you're into that. I certainly am.… (more)

Okay, this was surprisingly good! I haven't really liked much of the ancient greek the class I'm reading these for has assigned, but this one caught me off guard!

I was a little hesitant going in since Hunter literally says in the preface "no one... is more conscious than I am of the failings of my translation"... Umm, cmon dude have a little confidence? It's a prose translation, so it's not accurate to the original metered verse, but as a non-scholar I didn't really mind that. Obviously when changing the form of a work this drastically you need to take some liberties, but I felt it was entirely adequate and much easier to read than the other epic poems that my professor has assigned. On top of that, I actually enjoyed it instead of slogging along-- this was a story I was unfamiliar with, and I found myself actively avoiding spoilers, for a work written thousands of years ago! I hesitate to use the word "riveting" but this was the closest classical literature to a page-turner I've ever read. This edition also has maps in the front, and it's really funny to watch how bad these guys are at navigation, but the overall effect is sort of like reading a high-fantasy novel that's set in a familiar location, so that's cool too.

A lot of people seemed to not like Jason's character but I found him a lot more interesting than Heracles for example. He's a lot more human, and this makes for a more realistic story. I wouldn't say he's relatable but the emotional journey was a lot more believable than some of the older Greek works (and I understand that this is a sort of aggregation of things written centuries before so that plays a role in its sophistication). Medea was obviously my favorite character, I found myself sympathizing with her the most throughout, and her speech on Drepane was quite powerful. I felt really bad for her, she deserved so much better!

So yeah that gets me to the failings of this poem, which are pretty common to the Greek I've read, which is listing people and misogyny lol. There's quite a bit of just listing names that contemporary readers would be familiar with, and it got frustrating to the point that I would just skip over those sections and figure out who's who later. This was made worse by the fact that the footnotes were all at the end instead of the bottom of each page, and I just didn't feel motivated to read them all, so I'm sure I missed important context. Also, I won't excuse misogyny just because it's old; after having read ancient literature that actually treats women as people (like the Homeric Hymn to Demeter) Apollonius honestly has no excuse :)))… (more)