Structure

Apollonius’ four-book epic is essentially bipartite in structure, employing the formal device of a ‘‘proem in the middle’’ placed at the precise center of his narrative (Ap. Rhod. Arg. 3.1-4), and combined with the closural motif of the completion of a journey (i. e. the Argonauts’ arrival in Colchis). The medial proem features an invocation to the Muse Erato, and signals a quasi-generic shift from the adventures of the outward voyage to Medea’s love for Jason. This bipartite organization with its strongly marked physical ‘‘center’’ clearly influenced Valerius: like Apollonius, he provides a medial proem immediately following completion of the outward voyage. Moreover, Valerius’ second proem follows its model in signaling a thematic redirection via the “introduction” of Medea, the crucial figure in the second half of both epics. But while evincing a clear formal indebtedness it makes an important departure on the programmatic level by announcing a switch to depravity and horror rather than erotics:

Begin now, goddess, another song and tell of the wars of the Thessalian chief, which you have seen. My mind, my voice do not suffice. We have come to the madness and the abominable compact of the [king’s] daughter, and the vessel frightened beneath the dreadful maiden. The accursed battles on the portent-bearing fields arise before me. (Arg. 5.217-21)

Before Valerius, of course, Apollonius’ bipartite narrative structure had been creatively adapted by Virgil: in this as in other matters, the Aeneid stands as a crucial mediating term between the two Argonautic epics. Virgilian influence can be seen in Valerius’ displacement of his second proem some 216 lines from the start of Book 5, which appears deliberately to ‘‘outdo’’ the more modest postponement of 36 lines in Aeneid 7. Valerius also follows Virgil in dividing his poem into ‘‘Odyssean’’ and “Iliadic” halves, though he goes beyond his model in the disjunctive effects of this type of narrative structure.

One ofValerius’ more significant innovations within the epic Argonautica tradition is the inclusion of a lengthy battle narrative at Colchis, in which Jason and his companions provide decisive aid to the Colchian king Aeetes in his conflict with his brother Perses (6.1-760). As a result, the Flavian epic involves a perilous sea voyage followed by war and other trials on land, with the two thematic movements separated by a ‘‘proem in the middle’’ - a quintessentially Virgilian arrangement (Schetter 1959). Valerius, however, inverts the relative valences of the two halves of his poem. The Aeneid makes the second half its maius opus (‘‘greater work’’ Aen. 7.45), maintaining a more epic register in the later books, which offer a series of martial narratives whose consequence is nothing less than the founding of Roman civilization. For the Argonautica the situation is rather different: with respect to the providential staging of a larger human destiny, the poem is clearly weighted towards the first half, which opens with the inauguration ofnavigation and closes with Hercules’ liberation of Prometheus. Despite some notable Homeric touches, the martial activity of the second half unfolds in the context of a particularly degraded form of civil war that, unlike Aeneas’ conflict with the Latins, is historically inconsequential, and serves as little more than a convenient expedient for inciting Medea’s destructive sexual passion. As a mildly paradoxical result, the debased ‘‘Iliadic’’ violence contributes to the “hypertrophy of the epic apparatus’’ in the later books (Feeney 1991: 326).

Valerius’ bifurcated approach to his narrative gives structural expression to a fundamental tension in the developed mythographic tradition, which had arisen centuries earlier when Attic dramatists grafted on to the earlier legendary heroic material a tragedy of guilt and retribution. According to the canonical version of Euripides, Jason and Medea meet with calamity years after the expedition while living as exiles in Corinth. At that time Jason forsakes Medea in favor of the Corinthian princess Creusa, and Medea consequently murders both Creusa and her own children by Jason. In Valerius’ fifth book, shortly after the medial proem, an ecphrastic description of the prophetic scenes engraved upon the doors of the Colchian temple of the Sun offers a detailed prolepsis of this tragic aftermath:

His former spouse he abandons: avenging Furies watch from the palace roof. His wife, sore distressed in her chamber and moved to anger by her rival, prepares a robe and the deadly gift of a jewelled crown, first bewailing all her sufferings. With this gift the unhappy rival is adorned before her country’s altars; and already, in the grip of the flaming poison, wraps all the palace in fire. These marvels had the Fire-god wrought for the Colchians, though as yet they knew not what enterprise was that, or who it is that with winged serpents cleaves the air, dripping

With murder; they hate them nevertheless, and turn away their gaze. (Arg. 5.444-54; trans.

Mozley 1934)

The sequence amounts to something like a resume of Euripides’ or Seneca’s Medea (Davis 1990: 61), signaling an emergent poetics of guilt and retribution, of tragic nefas. This is borne out in the second half of the poem, which contains a great many further anticipations of the tragic fallout of the expedition. As Garson (1965: 108-9) observes, ‘‘the leitmotif of [Valerius’ later narrative] is the final tragedy. [The poet] wants his readers to know that what is happening now is leading inevitably up to it... only the Roman narrative is wholly colored by allusions to the final outcome.’’

The ‘‘proem in the middle’’ thus inaugurates a profound transformation of the narrative, a radical tragic contamination of Valerius’ epic. The initial, teleologically focused account of heroic striving and technological triumph gives way to an essentially regressive narrative pattern of tragic denouement constructed around the anguished figure of Medea. In the epic’s second half, tragedy provides a narrative telos as well as a conceptual domain and an allusive background against which Valerius’ thematic treatment emerges. The narrative shifts from a pattern of purposive and providentially guaranteed development to a more fitful and aleatory mode characterized by narrative delays, faltering repetition, and a heightened sense of moral indeterminacy. This is perhaps most evident in the account of the laborious attempts by Juno and Venus to bend Medea to their purpose through erotic engulfment. This extended sequence, which takes up much of Books 6 and 7, is marked by repeated narrative regressions, by disruptions of linear narrative flow. Notable here is the disproportionate effort expended by the goddesses, the fitful and convulsive straining of the divine machinery, in comparison with the model passage in Apollonius (Fucecchi 1996: 129). Throughout this protracted (and at times exasperating) account, what is being highlighted is Medea’s anguished resistance to the dictates of Juno’s master-plan. It is largely through the ethical and metaliterary posture of the ill-fated Colchian princess that Valerius gives expression to the complexities of his darkly tragic mythographic sensibility in the later books of the poem.