Argonautica: A New English Translation

By Apollonius

A ship sails east out of Greece with fifty heroes aboard. Everything after that goes wrong in ways nobody expected - least of all the man in command.

Pelias, king of Iolcus, has been warned about a stranger with one sandal. When Jason walks into the city having lost a sandal in a river, Pelias sends him after the golden fleece - an errand meant to kill him. Jason gathers the best men in Greece, builds the Argo, and sails for a kingdom at the far end of the Black Sea.

They lose Heracles almost immediately. A boy is pulled under a spring by a nymph who wants him. A king who can see the future is starved by harpies until the Argonauts drive them off. The ship threads the Clashing Rocks with a dove flying ahead of it and the stern-post shorn away behind. And at Colchis, where the fleece hangs guarded by a dragon that never sleeps, the whole expedition turns on a teenage girl who cannot sleep either - because she has fallen in love with the stranger who has come to rob her father.

Medea

Book Three of the Argonautica is where European literature learns to look inside a person. Apollonius follows Medea through a sleepless night, a dream she cannot admit to, a walk to a temple she has no honest reason to take, and a meeting in which neither party says what they mean. Nothing before it in Greek poetry attempts anything like it. Everything after - Virgil's Dido, and every torn heroine descended from her - is written in its shadow.

Jason himself is the strangest hero in ancient epic. Apollonius calls him amechanos again and again: at a loss, without resource, helpless. He wins by being loved, by being helped, and by being willing to accept help. He is not Achilles, and he is not meant to be.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0HFZNYJW1
• ISBN13: 9798193992646
• Release Date: August 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 190 Pages
• Weight: 0.58 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 6.0" x 9.0"