“Meantime through a gray mist came Eros, invisible,
An itch, a sting, like the gadfly that swarms…”
Composed in the third century B.C., Jason and the Argonauts is the timeless story of Jason's quest for the Golden Fleece and his relations with the dangerous Colchian princess, Medea.
It is the only extant Greek epic between Homer and the later Roman Empire.
Apollonius explores many of the fundamental aspects of life in a highly original way: love, deceit, heroism, human ignorance, the limits of science.
The only extant Greek epic poem to bridge the gap between Homer and late antiquity, it is a product of the brilliant world of the Ptolemaic court at Alexandria, written by Apollonius of Rhodes in the 3rd century BC.
Apollonius of Rhodes (Latin: Apollonius Rhodius); fl. first half of 3rd century BCE), was an ancient Greek author, best known for the Argonautica, an epic poem about Jason and the Argonauts and their quest for the Golden Fleece. The poem is one of the few extant examples of the epic genre and it was both innovative and influential, providing Ptolemaic Egypt with a "cultural mnemonic" or national "archive of images." The description of Medea's emotional suffering exercised a profound influence on subsequent writers and especially on Virgil in his account of Dido and Aeneas.
