At the end of the Argonautika of Apollonios, produced in Alexandria probably at some point between the 260s to the 240s bc under Ptolemy II Philadelphos or III Euergetes (Hunter 1989: 7-9), the very last section before the Argonauts reach home predicts the creation of an island, Thera, which all knew was the mother-city of a Greek colony in North Africa:
So he spoke, and Euphemos did not reject Jason’s answer, but took heart from the prophecy, hefted the clod and flung it into the deep. From it there rose an island,
Kalliste, sacred nurse to the children of Euphemos - who’d dwelt in former times in Sintian Lemnos, then, driven out of Lemnos by Tyrrhenian warriors, reached Sparta as suppliant colonists; later they quit Sparta, led by Theras, Autesion’s noble son, to this island, Kalliste. He changed its name to Thera
After himself. But by then Euphemos was long since gone. (Argon. 4.1755-64, tr. Green)
The city the Therans would found, though Apollonios does not mention it here, was Cyrene in Libya (cf. Herodotos 4.150-8, Pindar Pyth. 5.72-81), a seventh-century bc foundation which had had long-standing contact with Egypt and in the Hellenistic Period fell largely under Ptolemaic control. The prominence of Thera at the end of the epic must be meant to point the audience to this city. Part of the reason for its implicit presence at the end of the epic may be the issue of Alexandria’s authority over
Cyrene after its ruler Magas’ rebellion against Ptolemaic rule (Hunter 1993a: 151-2, Hcllbl 2001: 39, 45), but Cyrene also plays the role of a legitimizing model for Alexandria as a Greek city in Africa (Stephens 2003: 179-82).
The clod of earth which Euphemos flings into the sea at the end of the Argonautika is from Libya, and given to him by the god Triton (Argon. 4.1551-63), so that the foundation of Cyrene from Thera is a kind of ‘‘return’’ of those raised on what is originally Libyan soil (Thera) to the motherland itself. But it is not only through this prior claim on Libyan territory that the Greek colony of Cyrene is justified: Apollonios is also alluding to and adapting earlier Greek versions of this story, in particular that in Pindar’s Pythian 4, which also narrated the giving of the clod to Euphemos by a sea-god. This is part of the wider patterns of appropriation and connection with the Greek world (and its literature) of centuries past which we have already examined above, but the particular ways in which Apollonios exploits elements of the Pindaric account are worth studying in greater detail. Pindar’s version begins with a prophecy given by Medea on Thera concerning the foundation of Cyrene:
Listen to me, sons of high-spirited men and gods:
I tell you that one day from this sea-beaten island
The daughter of Epaphus will plant a root
From which cities revered by men will spring,
Near the foundations of Zeus Ammon. (Pyth. 4.13-16, tr. Verity)
The ‘‘daughter of Epaphos’’ is Libya, but more significantly there is a reference here to the shrine of the Egyptian god Amun (Zeus Ammon) at Siwa in the Libyan desert. This shrine played a part, of course, in the foundation of story of Alexandria itself: there to Alexander the god appeared with an instruction to found new city opposite the island of Pharos (Alexander Romance 1.30.6-7). Later in the same prophecy in Pythian 4 Medea describes how Battos, the first king of Cyrene, will go to Delphi and be prompted to found his colony in Africa:
In time he will make a journey to Pytho’s temple,
And Phoebus in his gold-rich palace will remind him through oracles
To transport cities in ships to the rich precinct of Cronus’ son by the Nile.
(Pyth. 4.53-6, tr. Verity)
The Pindaric model for Apollonios itself appears to assimilate Libya and Egypt as the precinct of Zeus Ammon by the Nile, so that the legitimizing of Cyrene’s presence through its African ‘‘roots’’ could be seen by Alexandrian audiences of the Argonautika as extending to their city also (for the possibility that Alexandria could be seen as in ‘‘Libya’’ see Stephens 2003: 181-2).
If Cyrene represents one way of thinking about Greek presence in Egypt, there are several further ways in which contact between Greeks and non-Greeks expresses itself in the Argonautika. As the Argonauts in Book 2 move towards Colchis and away from Greece, the customs of the people they pass become (from the Greek perspective) steadily stranger (Hunter 1993a: 159-60, Stephens 2003: 175-6):
Next, soon, they rounded the headland of Genetaian Zeus and held their course past the land of the Tibarenoi.
There, when the women bear children to their menfolk it’s the husbands who take to their beds, and lie there moaning, heads tightly swathed; the women cook them meals and prepare for them baths that follow childbirth.
From here they came to the Holy Mount and the land
Where up in the hills the Mossynoikoi inhabit
Those wooden huts, mossynes, after which they’re named.
Their customs and laws all differ from those of others:
What it’s normal to do quite openly, in public
Or in the marketplace, all such things they perform
In the privacy of their homes: but whatever we’d keep private
This they enact, without blame, on the public highway,
Not even blushing to couple there: like free-ranging
Swine in herds, unabashed by the bystanders,
They pick any woman they fancy, and mate with her on the ground.
(Argon. 2.1009-25, tr. Green)
The echoes of the ethnographic manner of Herodotos should be clear, as should the Herodotean designation of Egyptian customs as the reverse of what is normal, in particular with regard to public/private actions (2.35, and see §2 above). When the Argonauts finally reach Kolchis on the far shore of the Black Sea they are in a land whose people Herodotos had explicitly connected with Egypt:
For the fact is, as I first came to realize myself, and then heard from others later, that the Colchians are obviously Egyptian. (Herodotos 2.104, tr. Waterfield)
The king of Kolchis, Aietes, is the ‘‘son of Helios’’ (Argon. 3.309), which recalls the Pharaonic title, ‘‘son of the Sun (Re)’’ (Stephens 2003: 176). We should, however, resist the temptation to see an easy (and polemical) identification of Kolchis with Pharaonic Egypt. Aietes is an unsympathetic character and a violent, treacherous despot (cf. Argon. 3.579ff., 4.6-10), but he is by no means the only Argonautic character who echoes Pharaonic custom or practice. Jason, for example, in killing and cutting off the extremities of Apsyrtos, son of Aietes (Argon. 4.477-81), echoes the Egyptian treatment of their enemies (Stephens 2003: 215-16, who cites the funerary temple of Ramesses III in Medinet Habu for the piling up of enemies’ extremities), while in his dependence on both magic and a woman to gain the golden fleece (see §4 above) he also echoes Horus and the magical protection he receives from his mother and other goddesses (Stephens 2003: 213-14).
Indeed Apollonios even describes (in the mouth of Argos, one of the sons of Phrixos, half-Greek grandsons of Aietes) one Egyptian Pharaoh in terms which strongly recall Alexander the Great, but also a time when the Greeks themselves were not civilized:
No one then could have answered questions about the sacred race of the Danaans: only Arkadians existed,
Arkadians who (so it’s rumored) were living even before the moon, in the hills, eating acorns. Nor was the Pelasgian
Land then ruled by Deukalion’s lordly line, in the days when Aigyptos, mother of earlier mortals, was known as the Land of Mists, rich in fertile harvests, and Nile, the broad-flowing stream by which all the Land of Mists is watered; there from Zeus never comes enough rain; it's Nile's flooding makes crops grow.
Starting here, they say, one man traveled the whole journey through Europe and Asia, trusting in his people's force, strength, and courage: countless the cities he founded as he advanced, of which some are inhabited
Yet, and some not: many ages have passed since then. (Argon. 4.262-76, tr. Green)
Apollonios, who leaves Cyrene implicit at the close of the epic also does not name the legendary Sesostris here, though the identification is clear enough (cf. Herodotos 2.102ff.). Sesostris here provides a double analogue, for the Argonauts’ still visible influence on non-Greek peoples (their voyage is the aition or ‘‘origin’’ of several of the customs of those they meet, even typically ‘‘non-Greek’’ ones, such as the worship with drums of the Great Mother by the Phrygians, Argon. 1.1132-9, see Stephens 2003: 187-8), and (of course) for Alexander’s own conquests and foundation of cities, including Alexandria itself. The fact that there existed such an ancient Egyptian conqueror of Europe and Asia makes the presence of Macedonian Greeks in Egypt, in a city founded by his Greek analogue, Alexander, into another kind of ‘‘return.’’ It is perhaps also significant that Herodotos’ account of Sesostris ends with the story of the Egyptian priests of Hephaestus refusing to let the Persian Darius erect a statue of himself in front of those left by Sesostris, because his achievements did not surpass those of Sesostris (Herodotus 2.110). Educated readers of the Argonautika might well see a pointed reference in the story of Sesostris, through this Herodotean intertext, to another man who could claim to have matched Sesostris' military and city-founding achievements, and even conquered the land of the Pharaoh himself.
World History
