The First Poets Read online

  This leads to a movement towards particularity of detail, place, time and emotion, away from characteristic (or formulaic) to specific detail, from classical to romantic perspectives. An epic poem was now to be of use, like the epinicean ode: it could focus on particular cities, peoples and persons.14 Hellenistic epic had been transformed by the drama, too, Euripides’ in particular: “The effective portrayal of an individual emotion is more important than a completely drawn picture of a character.”15 This does not mean that the poet writes dramatically: he focuses on the same kinds of moment, the same occasions, which arrested the dramatic writer, but his work is different in kind. Some descriptions are poised and poetic in ways unthinkable in the old poetry but also unavailable to the drama. Oliver Taplin translates a scrap of an epic by Choirilos of Samos about the Persians. Nothing is new, the poet says: What can he do?

  Ah, happy he who in that era was expert in poetry,

  a servant of the Muses, when the meadow was still unscythed.

  But now when everything has been apportioned out,

  and the crafts all have their own spheres, we are left behind,

  like the last off the starting-grid. And though

  I glance all round, I cannot light on any new chariot to harness.

  The poet seeking the new, or to make the familiar new, could have recourse to allegory, taking the old stories and finding in them indicative rather than literal truth, and then unpacking them as though they were a Christmas hamper of double meanings. Peter Green, Apollonius’ most inventive modern translator, insists that in the Argonautica the poet writes virtually without allegory, believing in the story as history. He stresses how, at the time, the growth of knowledge (logos) was taking place at the expense of story (mythos). The poet was on the side of mythos: it was his end and his means, a way of seeing and of showing the world. It had to absorb logos to justify itself. Allegory bowdlerises myth, depriving it of its actuality in the interests of oblique moral instruction. Rationalism, on the other hand, historicises it, which is equally reductive because it cuts away the elements of legend and myth which reason cannot abide. The Argonautica, says Green, is free of allegory and historicism.16 It does draw a large quantity of logos into the net of mythos, however.

  It shares with Callimachus’ poetry a fascination with origins, aetiologies, the births of cities, customs, traditions. The “and then … and then … and then” travelogue puts us in mind of Callimachus’ fragmentary Iambus VI, but here stretched out, it can seem, to the edge of doom. Indeed it shares specific aetiologies with Callimachus’ writings and occasionally, in phrase and form, echoes the master rather closely, though the general texture of Apollonius’ poem is loose and un-Callimachean. The age of the heroes, Apollonius’ poem seems to argue, is an “age of origins.” Exploring origins is a way of exploring identities, histories and through them the present.17 No less than the Aetia, the Argonautica is a “systematic aetiological enquiry.”18 Aetiologies are a core element in Hellenistic writing, perhaps because the further the Greek language and Greek men and women got from Greece itself, the more they needed to understand and affirm their roots.

  By the time Apollonius composed the Argonautica, the imagined geography of earlier poets had been explored and charted. Invention gave way to uneasy description; there was still hyperbole, there were blank zones on the maps, but the borders of the known had been rolled far back into the Black Sea. Many a monster and many unusual peoples had either been tamed by colonists or erased by explorers. In part, this knowledge is what the poem is about, reconciling legend and fact, explaining or adding to the explanations of origins. The gods have become bourgeois, their interventions infrequent, calculated and more selfish than ever. Lesky sees them almost as ornamental. But then the heroes, too, have by Homeric standards become singularly unheroic. The imaginative world is different, even if the scene Apollonius is trying to paint pre-dates the Trojan War by a score of years. Language is used in a different way and to different ends. It is no longer transparent, a lens, but opaque, an element in itself, so much so that it is in a sense the subject of the poem. There is no longer a feeling of necessity in the connection between divine and human, Lesky says; in fact, the connection between the heroic, as conceived by Homer, and the human is no longer tenable. The heroic must be reconceived in a scaled-down version.

  The structure of Apollonius’ poem is simple: plot and story are hardly differentiated. Compared with Homer’s subtle scheme for unifying the action of the Iliad, Apollonius is crude, his merely linear narrative at odds with the elaborated surface and texture of the poem. He achieves wonderful local scenes and effects but lacks the larger, integrating formal sense of a less self-conscious epic writer.

  Jason sets out to take back the throne of which he has been unjustly deprived. He arrives at Iolcus having lost a sandal fording a river, and the omen identifies him to the usurping King Pelias, who promises to give him back the throne if Jason will first undertake a heroic, and Pelias hopes an impossible, challenge. A stiff politeness prevails between pretender and usurper. Jason accepts Pelias’ challenge and sets out for Colchis to bring back the Golden Fleece. Two long books trace, settlement by settlement, headland by headland, the trip of the Argo to Colchis. Book III comes alive because it belongs to Medea and borrows some of her magic and charm. Then in Book IV the Fleece is taken, and the heroes flee back by seaways still belonging to myth. They return via a series of hardships to their point of departure, Iolcus, aided by and finally dependent upon Medea’s subtle sorcery.

  The pace of the poem is uneven. What makes it readable is the oddity and definition of the detail and the occasional blinding beauty of some passages. Apollonius is fascinated by certain details, peculiarities, exoticisms; then he seems bored by a series of possible stops and possible epiphanies, until again his eye is arrested by something which demands to be described and explained. This verse is a kind of stuttering catalogue, in which some items are passed over and many lovingly defined.

  If we list the things that do detain him, we can detect a kind of pattern. It may well be that Apollonius lingers instinctively rather than by deliberate design, but we can, I believe, see into the artist through the kinds of windows he shapes in his poem. Starting with the gods, it is not Apollo, his namesake, whom the poet invokes at the outset, or Zeus, who intervenes briefly and grumpily, but Hera who governs the action, seconded by Athena. Hera is the schemer whose scheming goes largely unopposed. She likes Jason because once, when she was disguised as an old woman, he carried her across a raging torrent.19 This passage—and in Book I the presentation of frail Iphias, the priestess of Artemis who wishes to speak to and bless Jason, but only manages to kiss his hand—puts us in mind of Callimachus’ Hecale, not because of the imagery of crones but because of what those crones do and what they will to happen.

  Hera is Jason’s and Apollonius’ tutelary spirit and the first of many feminising elements, some structural, some metaphorical, that make the poem unique. At the level of plot and character, it is Hera and not Zeus, Medea and not Jason who cause things to happen. Athena and Aphrodite (with her hair down) play major parts too. Goddesses and women, and the feelings and concerns of women, are privileged, and the masculine is ironised and reduced, the traditional heroic scaled right back.

  The good ship Argo itself had nominally been designed by Argos, but his hand was guided at every stage by Athena. The ship is virtually her own invention, a fact repeated by the poet.20

  When Jason is about to go down to the Argo and depart on his journey, his mother, Alkimede, clings to him. Apollonius likens her to a girl persecuted by an evil stepmother, clinging on to her nanny for comfort. Where does this elaborate simile come from? How apposite is it? How proper is it to see Jason, ostensibly the hero and subject of the poem, pressed to his mother’s bosom, without any indication of his feelings, but a total concentration on hers? She never makes a second appearance. Jason tells her not to inflict pain on him, she is pressing him too hard. His consolation
is cold, conventional: you stay here and wait; that’s the lot of women.

  Then comes an extended episode with the women of Lemnos. Their conduct is not judged, and the stud-farm morality of the Argonauts goes morally unquestioned as well. We will remember, from Callimachus’ telling of the story,21 how the Lemnian women, having failed in their duties to Aphrodite, began to stink. Their husbands turned to the girls of nearby Thrace. The Lemnian women killed the menfolk and their lovers and set up a matriarchy, more or less democratic in structure and successful except that, without men, they began to die out. Cue the Argo bound for Colchis and crewed by handsome gene-rich heroes. After initial Lemnian misgivings, there is universal copulation until Heracles, whose affections are bound up with the boy Hylas and who with a few companions has stayed on the ship, calls everyone to order and the heroes depart, having sowed their seed to repopulate Lemnos.

  Jason’s robe, when he visits the Lemnian leader Hipsypile, is described in detail, like Achilles’ shield in the Iliad. It is covered with legends, not least (self-referentially) the ram whose Golden Fleece he is on his way to steal. He walks into town not like Apollo, with whom he has previously been compared, but like the bright star that brides-to-be observe and pray to. Hipsypile, whose feelings, like those of her people, are identified, asks him to accept the Lemnian crown, but he declines.

  Later in Book I there are serious storms. Rhea, the mother god, requires propitiation. Argos, master craftsman and ship-builder, sculpts her image and Orpheus choreographs a mollifying ritual. The task is undertaken more seriously, one is tempted to say more sincerely, than the propitiatory ceremonies dedicated to Apollo before the heroes set sail. Indeed, a literal Apollo passes through the poem at one point. He is colossally striding home to Olympus at dawn, returning from his annual vacation among the Hyperboreans. The Argonauts avert their terrified gazes, Orpheus sings, an altar is built and they name the place for the dawn Apollo, but he has very little impact on events.

  Apollonius is a sort of ur-Levi-Strauss, registering odd customs. When he gets to Colchis, he tells us an interesting fact which has no bearing at all on the plot: the people of Colchis have the custom of “burying” dead men in the trees, wrapped in untanned ox hides, a kind of Zoroastrian rite. Women are buried in the ground. Briefly puzzled, he soon returns to his story. Long before Colchis, back in Book II, the Argo sights the land of the Tibareni of Pontus. Among them, the men “do” childbirth. That is to say, when a woman goes into labour, her husband takes to his bed and moans and groans while the woman applies poultices to his head and cooks him a meal and heats up a post partum bath. The man thus draws off the pain from the woman. Again, the female experience focuses his attention, as it does elsewhere in the catalogue of curious customs that accompanies the catalogue of places sighted as the ship makes its way towards the Fleece. It is a relief when the navigator declares at the end of Book II, “We have reached the land of Colchis and the river Phasis.”22 The human drama can begin.

  Apollonius invokes the Muse Erato, conventionally associated less with epic poetry than with the lyre and lyric. It is dawn, and the tone of the poem changes from the dogged and scholarly. There is a sudden focussed brightness about the narrative, as we enter boldly for the first time into the world of the gods—or rather, into the world of goddesses, because the conversation is between Athena and Hera, who then visit Aphrodite, a single parent with an unruly child in the form of Eros, whom she must bribe and beguile to get him to do her bidding. Much of the impact of the scene is that, after the stuttering itinerary of Books I and II, which at times give the impression of being mere decorated lists, we linger, characters grow from dialogue, rooms fill with voices and movement. There is leisure, hair is being brushed, a day—albeit a divine one—is being prepared for. Goddesses have preserved the Argo and will now preserve the heroes in their quest. They will use wiles, of course: the irresistible magic of love secretly administered as an arrow by Eros, and administered to a powerful young woman with deep magical skills of her own. There is tension and jealousy between the goddesses, but their common interests override their bitchiness.

  Eros shoots his arrow into the already predisposed Medea. The moment when is recounted exhaustively. Apollonius, with his insistence on detail (which here descends unarguably into pedantry) takes us through every stage of the act of erotic archery. When at last the missile is discharged, love laboriously blazes up in Medea’s heart. She witnesses Jason accepting Aeetes’ challenge: the hero looks so handsome that her stimulated love bubbles dangerously and threatens to dislodge the lid of decorum.

  One of the heroes is a good old-fashioned Homeric sort who objects to the Argonauts depending on women. What has happened to traditional male heroism? Idas demands:

  “What, is it with women that we’ve voyaged hither,

  the way we’re begging Kypris to be our saviour?

  No longer do you look at the war god’s might …

  Begone with you, take no thought for deeds of warfare,

  but plan to cajole weak girls with supplication …”23

  Idas realises, as we cannot fail to do, that we are so many miles from the world of Homer that the word “epic” is a ghost of itself, the word “romance” is nearly on our lips. Idas signals the generic transformation. In this post-heroic world, which still uses the rhetoric of heroism and Homer, he is naturally overruled.

  Close upon the heels of the Idas passage we come upon Medea in an agony of love and confusion. She is likened to a widow, deserted and miserable, falling passionately, helplessly on her bed. Just then sister Chalciope arrives: the Argonauts beg Medea’s assistance. Here begin her recovery and transformation. Oppressed with guilt and doubt at her intended treachery, she nonetheless resolves to act, the way a Homeric hero might, but Medea is a woman: something fundamental has changed.

  Dawn comes. She puts on her make-up and preparation for the first trial commences. She meets Jason in a flurry of similes: he is an ascending bright star (as before, with Hipsypile); they stand silently facing one another like oaks. Jason at no point responds to her beauty: it is his beauty that the poem celebrates. Jason at no point shows sexual desire: it is her desire that the poem emphasises. Medea’s perspective is our perspective. Jason’s lack of interest, or vision, is part of his neutrality as the central “heroic” figure. He does not have the energy, intelligence or passion to hold the poem together. Medea does. The poet alludes to another enabling woman, Ariadne, a sinister precedent from Medea’s point of view.

  Decisively Medea instructs the blank-faced, blank-hearted hero what to do with the bulls and the dragon teeth. The magic she prescribes (including an unguent to make him invulnerable) has elements of other legends mixed in with it, not least an echo of the instructions to Orpheus when attempting to rescue his Eurydice. Jason will follow instructions. That much we can depend on. He thanks Medea by proposing to her. He declares that he is—grateful. There is no declaration of love, but then Eros has not struck him under the left pap. He says that if he gets back to Iolcus (that means, he will need a lot more magic, not just this first instalment), he will make an honest sorceress of her. She weeps and is passionate, he receives her thanks with guile. Now she is silent, he is voluble.

  When the trials begin, Aeetes arrives like Poseidon in his chariot, and Jason stamps the ground like a war horse. Then, as he strips to the waist for battle, he resembles first Ares, then Apollo. The male gods are presented in the postures and movements of the protagonists, but they are not there as presences. Apollonius recounts the taming of the fiery-breathed bulls and the sowing of the dragon teeth that grow into hostile warriors with a continuing abundance of metaphor. The account is exciting in the way that a great tapestry is exciting, entertaining the eye but not speeding the pulse.

  For the fourth book Apollonius invokes the aid of Athena as his Muse. He describes Jason’s theft of the Fleece and the Argonauts’ much-interrupted return, and the book belongs to Medea in more ways than one. The Colchians wanted to
retrieve the Golden Fleece, but they would not have pursued so hotly had Medea not fled with the heroes. They intended to capture and punish her.

  When Medea fled, driven by Hera, she left a long lock of her hair behind for her mother as a memento that she is still a virgin, an important point to remember: her sexual virtue is intact, there was no Lemnian looseness about her. Apollonius goes out of his way to clear Medea of the various charges usually laid at her door. Her love was divinely caused, not chosen, and her actions throughout are marked by an instinct to virtue, a habit of probity.

  Her magic remains potent. She makes the dragon guarding the Fleece fall asleep, and Jason performs the theft. The simile Apollonius uses is at once powerful in itself and strange in context, feminising the hero who has, in any case, sold out to the female:

  As a full moon climbs the sky, and its risen brightness

  shimmers down on the garret bedroom of some young creature

  who catches it on her fine dress, and the heart within her

  lifts at the sight of that pure radiance, so now Jason

  was filled with joy as he hefted the great Fleece in his hands,

  and over his fair cheeks and brow the bright glint of its texture

  cast a ruddy blush like a flame.24

  The Argonauts flee, followed by a flotilla of Colchians. After the eventful escape, aided time after time by Medea’s magic rather than heroic prowess, Idas must have been really out of sorts. The Argonauts were intended to be heroes, but apart from a few vivid battles en route to Colchis and some narrow escapes on the way home, heroism is precisely what they lack. They are even tempted to abandon Medea on the way home so as to curb the pursuit of the Colchians. It is not Jason who saves her. She saves herself, threatening revenge if she is abandoned, and the men are cowed and compliant.