Apollonius Rhodius, Herodotus and Historiography

This book examines the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes through one aspect of its relationship with other texts. The particular intertextual relationship examined is that with the Histories of Herodotus, focusing on the presence of the latter text in the former in terms of the poem's employment of characteristics and features of historiographical discourse, narrative structures, presentation and description of characters, aetiology and patterns of explanation, portrayal of ethnic groups, depiction of kingship and tyranny; the relationship between particular passages in both texts is also explored. The consequences for the interpretation of the poem are profound: the Argonautica employs Herodotean historiography as a key intertext in order to manipulate and frustrate the reader's generic expectations for an epic poem and to complicate the relationship between the contemporary Hellenistic Mediterranean (and its kingdoms) and the distant mythological Argonautic past.

1. Introduction; 2. Receiving Herodotus; 3. Creating authorities; 4. Explaining the past; 5. Telling stories; 6. Greeks and non-Greeks; 7. Kings and leaders; 8. Conclusions and consequences.

A. D. Morrison is Professor of Greek at the University of Manchester. He is the author of The Narrator in Archaic Greek and Hellenistic Poetry (Cambridge, 2007) and Performances and Audiences in Pindar's Sicilian Victory Odes (2007) and co-editor of Ancient Letters (2007) and Lucretius: Poetry, Philosophy, Science (2013). He is currently working on a commentary on selected poems of Callimachus for the Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics series and a 'New Survey' on Hellenistic poetry for Greece & Rome and is co-directing the AHRC project on Ancient Letter Collections (2016–21).