This book draws on theories of space in cultural geography and anthropology to study the representation of space in Apollonius of Rhodes’ epic poem, the Argonautika. In Apollonius’s narrative, the voyage of the Argo in quest of the Golden Fleece defines a space with mainland Greece as its center, and Greek culture provides the perspective through which the Argonauts’ experiences are principally portrayed. At the same time, the poem shows clearly the limits of Greek mastery of space. Some areas cannot be incorporated into Greek space, and in some episodes space is marked with signs that preserv ... More

This book draws on theories of space in cultural geography and anthropology to study the representation of space in Apollonius of Rhodes’ epic poem, the Argonautika. In Apollonius’s narrative, the voyage of the Argo in quest of the Golden Fleece defines a space with mainland Greece as its center, and Greek culture provides the perspective through which the Argonauts’ experiences are principally portrayed. At the same time, the poem shows clearly the limits of Greek mastery of space. Some areas cannot be incorporated into Greek space, and in some episodes space is marked with signs that preserve narratives in which the perspectives of the non-Greek peoples whom the Argonauts encounter are preserved. Thus the poem both affirms the centrality of Hellenism and questions it at the same time; it implies the traditional Greek division of the world into themselves and “barbarians” and simultaneously destabilizes it through the Argonauts’ experiences of others as an interplay of similarity and difference. Ethnic boundaries and cultural identity are thus shown to be uncertain and open to negotiation. This sense of the blurring of boundaries speaks to the experiences of Greeks in the early Ptolemaic period in Alexandria, where they lived among and ruled Egyptians in a multicultural city at a time when the conquests of Alexander had expanded Greek cultural horizons. The poem uses the Argonautic myth to explore the anxieties about identity and the sense of new possibilities arising from this experience of cultural contact.