Alexander and the Ptolemies in Egypt

In comparing Jason with Alexander the Great, among others, it is not my intention to argue for anything resembling consistent parallelism. That there is a loosely selective parallelism between these two figures has already been discussed by scholars like Hunter and Rostropowicz, and it has no doubt also been recognized privately by countless others. Jason's voyage with the Argonauts from Thessaly to the Black Sea shares the broadest of outlines with Alexander's expedition from Macedonia to the far reaches of India. Both are young leaders, confronting political opponents before and during foreign campaigns; both marry eastern princesses and survive the rigors of prolonged travel. Yet there are also countless differences between them, foremost among them being, for example, Alexander's Achillean battle lust and Jason's unheroic domestic overthrow by Medea. The argument of this book is not that Apollonius seeks to reconcile these extremes but that the Argonautica splits aspects of Alexander's character into separate wavelengths, like bands of light in a prism, some of which are reflected at times in Jason, while others may appear in Heracles, and so on. Jason in his turn is a composite figure, now a warlike Alexander or Ares (3.1282–83), now radiant like Apollo (1.307–11; 3.1283) as a kind of Ptolemaic precursor.