Thematics

I sing of seas first traversed by mighty sons of gods, and of the fate-speaking ship that, having dared to seek the shores of Scythian Phasis and to burst a course through the Clashing Rocks, finally came to rest on fiery Olympus. (Arg. 1.1-4)

Although Valerius’ subject is myth rather than history, he ascribes immense historical importance to the Argonauts’ expedition. In Roman poetry the ‘‘Argo’’ was generally the first ship, and hence a potent symbol of the rise of technology and the human conquest of nature. Ancient constructions of cultural history were virtually unanimous in regarding the invention of navigation as a pivotal moment (for better or worse) in early human development. Apollonius Rhodius had rejected this aspect of the myth: for him the voyage of the ‘‘Argo’’ was merely an extraordinary application of existing technology rather than an essential innovation. As Valerius’ opening verse makes clear, his poem follows the dominant Roman tradition in making the Argonauts the world’s first sailors. Their voyage inaugurates the first properly international phase of human affairs by enabling ready interchange between far-flung terrestrial regions. The birth of commercium and the end of the Saturnian Golden Age are alluded to (1.246-7,1.500), but without unambiguously signaling a moral decline. The ‘‘Argo’’ will be rewarded with catasterism (i. e. a placement in the heavens as a new constellation) (1.4), and some members of its crew will achieve apotheosis (1.561-7). Sailing will result in intercourse between nations and the rise of great empires, as the Jovian prophecy at 1.531-60 makes clear. That Jupiter is presiding over a global transformation is given powerful symbolic expression through the dramatic account of the liberation of Prometheus in Books 4 and 5 (discussed below). The resolution of the Titan’s suffering at the supreme god’s behest signals final Olympian acceptance of Prometheus’ technological benefaction to humankind, of which sailing is the latest and most consequential offshoot.

For Valerius, then, the Argonautic expedition is an event of transcendent geopolitical importance, inaugurating a new world order based on international competition. It results in a ‘‘Darwinian’’ struggle between nations that may (or may not) culminate in Rome. The idea of a succession of world empires was well known to ancient historiography, probably coming to the Greeks from Asiatic sources. To the original sequence of Assyrian, Median, and Persian monarchies, the Greek and Roman empires were added in due course. Valerius’ historical plan deviates from these schemes only in consolidating the initial Asiatic series of monarchies into a single unit, so as to make the Trojan War, an event which his epic frequently anticipates, the first significant transfer of power fTom one nation to the next. Moreover, Valerius follows the lead of a small number of earlier writers, including the Greek historian Herodotus, who had treated the Argonautic expedition as a direct cause of the Trojan War. These adaptations result in the superimposition of a schema of universal history upon the inherited mythopoetic tradition.

As with the Aeneid, a central concern of the Argonautica is to account for the combination of providential and aleatory forces that govern human affairs. The Virgilian ‘‘world system’’ that Valerius (partially) resurrects involves an overarching principle of theodicy. This is based on the teleological notion of Jovian fata which dictate - at least in broad outline - the unfolding of a providentially guaranteed human destiny, preordaining such crucial historical events as the fall of Troy and the rise of Rome. At the same time, the parallelism between divine will and Roman destiny that pervades the Aeneid - and Augustan culture generally - is not unambiguously asserted in the Argonautica (Schon-berger 1965: 125).

As the foregoing might suggest, the gods play a far more prominent role in the Flavian Argonautica than in its Hellenistic predecessor. One of Valerius’ habitual procedures for reworking an episode from Apollonius is to motivate it on the divine level, in other words, to provide an explicit supernatural causation that is wanting in the earlier epic (Hershkowitz 1998b: 220-1). Some notable examples of this transformative strategy include the episodes of Hylas’ abduction (engineered by Juno), the Lemnian massacre (incited by Venus), and the demise of Cyzicus (brought about by Cybele). In short, there is a pervasive management of important narrative events on the divine level: the uncertainties and causal obscurities of Apollonius’ epic are largely resolved into explicit narrative articulations of divine will (Feeney 1991: 317). As in Virgilian epic, the heroes themselves often seem constrained to carry through a course of action whose outcome is essentially predetermined (Burck 1979). This treatment is all the more notable in that Valerius was writing in the wake of Lucan’s radical experimentation with exclusion of the divine machinery in the Bellum civile. Where Lucan presented a cosmos in which the gods were either non-existent, uninterested, or merely powerless and irrelevant, Valerius reentrenches the Olympian divinities of the Aeneid as major characters in their own right as well as decisive determinants of events on the human level. A slight divergence is the assignment of prominent roles to lesser deities, for example, that of Boreas in witnessing the sailing of the ‘‘Argo’’ and inciting a violent storm in response (Arg. 1.574-607).

Working against an overarching principle of theodicy are the personal - often petty and vindictive - agendas of the gods under Jupiter. This divine behavior, an essentially Homeric feature, imparts a sense of chaos and contingency on the level of individual events, undermining the smooth and untroubled master-narrative of Jovian fata. Here a strong note of pessimism is sounded, for individual deities, often demonstrating flaws that are all too human, have considerable scope to degrade or pervert the precise manner in which individual historical strands are enacted without negating the final outcome decreed by Jupiter. The result of this contradiction in divine agency is frequently - perhaps even programmatically - tragic, and reflects an “irreducible moral ambiguity’’ in Valerius’ epic universe (Barich 1982: 133). This disquieting aspect becomes increasingly prominent as the narrative progresses, and seems to dominate the action of the second half of the poem (see the section ‘‘Structure,’’ below.)

On the human level, Valerius moves away from the composite focus ofApollonius’ epic, in which the Argonauts as a group serve as something like a “collective hero’’ in the context of a noticeably democratic undertaking. While collective depictions of the Argonauts are not lacking in Valerius’ epic, the focus is for the most part on a small number of prominent individuals: Jason and Hercules in the first half of the poem, and Jason and Medea in the second. In attributing motivations to Jason and other Argonauts, Valerius effects a re-evaluation of epic heroism, emphasizing personal glory as a central heroic preoccupation. Throughout the poem, gloria is the counterpart to and compensation for the labors and perils faced by the epic hero (Ripoll 1998: 207). This ideological nexus - an essentially Homeric construct, supplemented with notions of apotheosis - is largely absent from the Greek Argonautica, where Jason expresses only a fatalistic acceptance of the troubles the gods have in store for him (Ap. Rhod. Arg. 1.298-300). It is also a fundamental departure from the Aeneid: one ofVirgil’s important ideological innovations was to relegate the pursuit of personal glory to a position of secondary importance, enshrining pietas rather than gloria as the proper heroic motivation.