In this chapter I focus attention on the ways in which the Argonautica combines different attitudes to the past and its connections with the present: once again, historiography (especially Herodotean historiography) is crucial, since the epic engages in important ways with the different types of explanation in historiographical texts, including explanations of human action or motivation, explanations of events, and explanations of origins or causes, which together account for why things happened as they did in the past, and what effect this has on the present. A historiographical approach to the mythic past can be fruitfully contrasted with modes of explanation more typical of the Argonautica’s key poetic intertexts, such the use of mythical aetiology to authorise connections between past and its present in Pindar’s Pythian 4. It is the combination of elements of both kinds of approach to the past and how to explain it which problematises the connections of past and present in the Argonautica.