In this thesis, Hospitality in Apollonius Rhodius' Argonautica Books One and Two, I offer a detailed and systematic analysis of the epic motifs used by Apollonius Rhodius. Careful comparison with its principal models, the Homeric epics, shows the poet's sophisticated manipulation of the Iliad and Odyssey, and reveals much of his narrative technique. Read in the context of its sources, it is possible to focus with more precision on Apollonius' innovations. For this study, I have selected the major hospitality scenes of the first two books, which are concerned with the outward journey to Colchis. Reference is, however, made throughout to the hospitality scenes in Books Three and Four. The hospitality theme is one of the most important in an epic concerning the voyage heroes make in order to retrieve the Golden Fleece. Hospitality scenes are characterised by a certain repetition of motifs: e.g. arrival, reception, meal, storytelling and exchange of gifts. These elements are always adapted according to the particular poetic context and purpose of a scene. With their elaborate structure hospitality scenes provide fascinating material for the study of the reworking of the Homeric epics, crucial for the understanding of Apollonius' work.

A syntagmatic analysis of the Argonauts’ encounters with the Lemnian women and the Doliones in Apollonius of Rhodius’ Argonautica Book 1. Combining intertextuality with cognitive narratology, I approach the text from the perspective of the reader. Beginning with a study of the poem’s programmatic proem before moving to a study of the Argonauts’ first encounters on their outward journey, I map the reader’s experience on their own voyage through a difficult and elliptical narrative. To tackle the demands of a densely allusive text and the manipulations of a subjective narrator, I employ a plurality of readers: the general reader is accompanied on this exploration by two fictional readers. Charting the varying interpretations of the attentive reader and the experienced reader (Homeric auditor and Homeric scholar respectively) enables me to combine investigation of text and intertexts as moderated by the narrator with analysis of the ways they modify the expectations of the reader as they progress in a linear fashion from episode to episode. By consideration of where interpretations overlap and where they differ according to what the reader brings to the text and of how the narrative conditions its readers on the journey, I demonstrate the value of the reader-orientated approach to tackling the complexities of the narrative and the demands it places on all its readers.

This paper addresses intertextual similarities of ethnographical and geographical details in Xenophon’s Anabasis and Apollonius of Rhodes’ Argonautica and argues that these intertextualities establish a narrative timeline of Greek civilization on the Black Sea littoral. In both these works, a band of Greek travellers proceeds along the southern coast of the Black Sea, but in different directions and at vastly different narrative times. I argue that Apollonius’ text, written later than Xenophon’s, takes full advantage of these intertextualities in such a way as to retroject evidence about the landscape of the Black Sea littoral. This geographical and ethnographical information prefigures the arrival of Xenophon’s Ten Thousand in the region. By manipulating the differences in narrative time and time of composition, Apollonius sets his Argonauts up as precursors to the Ten Thousand as travellers in the Black Sea and spreaders of Greek civilization there. In Xenophon’s text, the whole Black Sea littoral becomes a liminal space of transition between non-Greek and Greek. As the Ten Thousand travel westward and get closer and closer to home and Greek civilization, they encounter pockets of Greek culture throughout the Black Sea, nestled in between swaths of land inhabited by native tribes of varying and unpredictable levels of civilization. On the other hand, in the Argonautica, Apollonius sets the Argonautic voyage along the southern coast of the Black Sea coast as a direct, linear progression from Greek to non-Greek. As the Argonauts move eastward, the peoples and places they encounter become stranger and less recognizably civilized. This progression of strangeness and foreignness works to build suspense and anticipation of the Argonauts’ arrival at Aietes’ kingdom in Colchis. However, some places have already been visited before by another Greek traveller, Heracles, who appears in both the Argonautica and the Anabasis to mark the primordial progression of Greek civilization in the Black Sea region. The landscape and the peoples who inhabit it have changed in the intervening millennium of narrative time between first Heracles’, then the Argonauts’, and finally the Ten Thousand’s journey, and they show the impact of the visits of all three. / text

This report examines heroism in Apollonius’ Argonautica and argues that a different heroic model predominates in each of the first three books. Unlike Homer’s epics where Achilles with his superhuman might and Odysseus with his unparalleled cunning serve as the unifying forces for their respective poems, there is no single guiding influence in the Argonautica. Rather, each book establishes its own heroic type, distinct from the others. In Book 1, Heracles is the central figure, demonstrating his heroic worth through feats of strength and martial excellence. In Book 2, Polydeuces, the helmsmen, and—what I have called—the “Odyssean” Heracles use their mētis to guide and safeguard the expedition. And in Book 3, Jason takes center stage, a human character with human limitations tasked with an epic, impossible mission. This movement from Book 1 (Heracles and biē) to Book 2 (Polydeuces/helmsmen and mētis) to Book 3 (Jason and human realism) reflects the epic tradition: the Iliad (Achilles and biē) to the Odyssey (Odysseus and mētis) to the Argonautica (Apollonius’ epic and the Hellenistic age). Thus, the Argonautica is an epic about epic and its evolving classification of what it entails to be a hero. The final stage in this grand metaphor comes in Book 3 which mirrors the literary environment in Apollonius’ own day and age, a time invested in realism where epic had been deemed obsolete. Jason, as the representative of that Hellenistic world, is unable to successively use Iliadic or Odyssean heroics because he is as human and ordinary as Apollonius’ audience. Jason, like his readers, cannot connect to the archaic past. Medea, however, changes this when she saves Jason’s life by effectively rewriting him to become a superhuman, epic hero. She is a metaphor for Apollonius himself, a poet who wrote an epic in an unepic world. The final message of Book 3, therefore, is an affirmation not of the death of epic but its survival in the Hellenistic age. / text