Figure 70 Marble relief by Archelaos showing (bottom) Homer being crowned by Time and Humanity
and receiving worship at a round altar; height 1.18 m, ca. 200 BC. London, British Museum, 2191.
Source: © The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved.
The Hellenistic poet who came closest to challenging Homer directly was the epic poet Apollonius of
Rhodes. Like Callimachus, Apollonius lived in the first half of the third century BC and, like Callimachus,
he was associated with the library in Alexandria. His poetry is, accordingly, learned and refined, like that
of his contemporary. The ambitious poem for which Apollonius is known is the (by Hellenistic standards)
lengthy Argonautica, which recounts the heroic exploits of Jason and the crew of the Argo on their quest
for the legendary Golden Fleece. The Argonautica, in four books, is about a third as long as the Iliad or
the Odyssey and it imitates Homer’s language and style quite closely. Despite its setting in the world of
heroic myth, however, the Argonautica seems quite deliberately to undermine the heroic aspects of the
story and to underline the distance between the epic past and the Hellenistic present. Apollonius expects
his readers to be intimately familiar, not only with the Homeric poems but with the entire range of Greek
poetry from the time of Homer to the third century, in particular with the works of the Attic dramatists.
Part of the story of Jason had been memorably treated in Euripides’ Medea (pp. 193–4), and Apollonius
counts on his readers to have that tragedy constantly in mind. For the Argonautica treats of those events
that occurred before the dissolution of Jason and Medea’s marriage, and the reader of the Argonautica
cannot help but recall the sordid outcome of the story as dramatized by Euripides.
The Argonautica recounts, among other things, the beginning of the relationship between Jason and