Latin texts of the Argonautica have been published in Teubner editions by E. Courtney (1970) and W. W. Ehlers (1980). The most up-to-date text is the two-volume bilingual French edition by G. Liberman (1997, 2002). Anglophone readers of Valerius Flaccus have been at a disadvantage for centuries. The first full English translation of the poem was produced for the Loeb Classical Library by J. H. Mozley in 1934 (with the usual facing Latin text); it remains to the present day the only complete and reliable translation in English. The recent translation of D. Slavitt (1999) is both arbitrarily lacunose and, at times, grossly inaccurate. H. G. Blomfield’s excellent translation of Book 1 (1916) comes complete with helpful notes, but copies of this highly readable volume may be hard to come by. A. J. Boyle and J. P. Sullivan’s Roman Poets of the Early Empire (1991) includes an elegant translation of Book 7.
Perhaps the best introductions to the poem in English are the relevant sections of Feeney 1991 and Hardie 1993, both seminal works. A brief but dense and informative thematic overview is found in Boyle 1991. Hershkowitz 1998b is a rare book-length study which offers a useful distillation of the state of scholarship on Valerius, particularly with respect to poetics, as well as an exhaustive bibliography. The classic study on self-consciousness in the poem is Malamud and McGuire 1993, updated in certain respects in Zissos 1999. McGuire 1997 well situates the poem in its sociopolitical context. Detailed commentaries in English are available for Book 2 by H. M. Poortvliet (1991) and for Books 5 and 6 by H. J. W. Wijsman (1996 and 2000); both commentators are readable, but Poortvliet is the more reliable of the two. A commentary on Book 1 by A. Zissos will be available shortly after publication of this volume.
A Companion to Ancient Epic Edited by John Miles Foley Copyright © 2005 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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