INTRODUCTION

Studying the primary narrator of one long epic poem is, of course, very different in many ways from examining the many narrators of shorter poems or parts of poems in Theocritus or Callimachus' Hymns or Aetia. Nevertheless, there are some important similarities. Apollonius' narrator in the Argonautica is much more prominent when compared to Homer's, for example, and exploits many of the devices we are now familiar with from Callimachus and Theocritus to make his presence obvious. There are regular narratorial first-person statements, comments on and judgements about the events in his narrative, addresses to the audience and characters, and prominent passages of indirect speech. Some of these features have (limited) Homeric precedents, but it is clear that there has been a shift in Apollonius towards a greater visible involvement on the part of the narrator in his narrative. The Argonautica confuses, but does not entirely abandon, the discrete Homeric narrator- and character-vocabularies of emotive and evaluative language. The Apollonian narrator also invests his exclamations and character addresses with more emotion (e.g. δεσμοὺς ἀνελύετο φωριαμοῖο | ἐξελέειν μεμαυῖα, δυσάμμορος, ‘and now she was undoing the ties of the chest, eager to take them out, wretched girl’, 3.808–9 of Medea) than Homer does.

The Apollonian narrator also resembles other Hellenistic narrators (e.g. the gradual moral progress of the primary narrators of the Iambi towards the new Hipponactean ideal) in that he too becomes a subject for a continuing narrative which runs through the epic, parallel to that about the Argonauts and their quest for the fleece.