Apollonius’ Argonautica

Even if he had never written a line of poetry, Apollonius’ name would still be known to us, for he was one of the leading scholars of his day, and headed the library at Alexandria for some dozen years (probably from around 260 to 247 BCE). He published re searches on Homer, Hesiod, Archilochus, and Antimachus, and modern studies have documented the way in which his learning became part of the fabric of his great epic, the Argonautica. If he was very much in the mainstream of scholarship, he was also a brilliant reader by any standard, as every page of his poem shows. It is exceedingly frustrating that we are effectively shut out from reading much of what was important to him, for only fragments survive from the epics composed between the Homeric era and the time of Apollonius. The loss of Antimachus is especially to be regretted; here was an innovative artist who was famous for his learning, spoken of as the ‘editor’ of a text of Homer, and a poet whom Apollonius treated as the object of scholarly study.

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