The Hour 25 Book Club will host a
discussion on Apollonius Rhodius Argonautica Book 3, via Google+ Hangout
on Tuesday, August 11 at 11 a.m.
You can find R.C. Seaton’s
translation of the text
online for free here, or you can read any other edition you prefer. Here is my first random notes in preparation
for August 11;
3.1. 1 “Come now, Erato, stand by my side, and say
next…” Erato? What?
The Muse of Love Poetry? Not
Epic? We’ve studied so hard on the
standards of epic and heroes who battle for unwilting glory. Are their new standards and paradigms we must
learn for what I heard Nagy call Jason yesterday; “A Love-Hero”?
3.1. 37) “Cypris, which her husband, the halt-footed
god, ” So Hephaestus netted his wife
and Ares sometime between the beginning of the Argonautica and well before the
end of the Iliad when he was then married to Aglaia.
3.1. 60 “Him will I deliver, though he sail even to
Hades to free Ixion below from his brazen chains,” Why would Hera use an example suggesting the
freedom of a mortal that attempted raping her?
Zeus had a blooming
fruitful orchard on Olympus. 3.1. 113-4
& 158 Wonder what he was
raising? “
3.1.201. "willows and osiers, on whose topmost
branches hang corpses bound with cords. For even now it is an abomination with
the Colchians to burn dead men with fire; nor is it lawful to place them in the
earth and raise a mound above, but to wrap them in untanned oxhides and suspend
them from trees far from the city. And so earth has an equal portion with air,
seeing that they bury the women; for that is the custom of their land.” Intersting.
Are there any Bronze Age cultures that actually did this?
“Cytaean Aeetes” Cytae was
the town where Aeetes’ daughter Medea was born (Culture In Pieces: Essays on
Ancient Texts in Honour of Peter Parsons By Dirk Obbink)
“Eidyia his wedded wife, the youngest daughter of Tethys and Oceanus.” Interesting.
That makes her the last of the Oceanides. Was Styx the first?
3.1. 275-298; “ Meantime Eros passed unseen through the grey
mist, causing confusion, as when against grazing heifers rises the gadfly,
which oxherds call the breese. And quickly beneath the lintel in the porch he
strung his bow” Interesting that a
god uses the lintel to transition from the divine plan to the mundane.
I suppose that the orchard was full of apple-trees, and Themis took one of their apples to give to Eris immediately before the wedding of Thetis. It is usually presumed that the apple was from the garden of the Hesperides, but it hardly makes sense.
ReplyDeleteThe affair of Aphrodite & Ares when Hephaestus caught them is thought by some to have produced Harmonia. She lived before Heracles, and Heracles was contemporary of the Argonauts (in some versions, one of them), so time doesn't add up. But maybe Hephaestus and Aphrodite reconciled after the net and divorced later.
Maya,
ReplyDeleteThe Hesperides were the nymphs of the tree. The garden actually belonged ti Hera
Yes, it belonged to Hera, but it was located at the edge of the inhabitable world. To me, real estate thousands of miles away is a troubled asset. You have an orchard full of golden apples, but when you need one, there is no way to get it in real time. Especially if they were not gold but golden, i.e. with shiny surface but otherwise eatable and biodegradable.
ReplyDelete