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.

About this edition

Apollonius of Rhodes wrote in Alexandria in the third century BC, where he ran the greatest library in the world. He was writing epic three hundred years after Homer, for readers who had Homer by heart, and every line of the poem knows it.

This is a new English translation, complete and unabridged, of all four books - made directly from the Greek text edited by George W. Mooney (1912).

It is set as verse, one English line to each line of the Greek, with the traditional line numbers in the margin. That makes it a poem to read and a text to work from: any passage can be found, cited, and checked against the original. Most inexpensive editions of the Argonautica are prose, and most are more than a century old.

The English aims at clarity without flattening. Apollonius is a difficult, allusive, deliberately learned poet, and the translation does not pretend otherwise - but it is written to be read straight through, by someone meeting Jason and Medea for the first time.

THE LYCEUM PRESS publishes new translations of the classics from public-domain source texts, each one made from a named critical edition and identified as such.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0HFZNYJW1
• ISBN13: 9798193992646
• Release Date: August 2026
• Publisher: Independently published
• Length: 188 Pages
• Weight: 0.58 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.5" x 6.0"