I have always had a fondness for the older Penguin Classics. My favorites are the orange Penguins and light blue Pelicans. They have such a restrained timelessness about them—simply typography on the cover and spine, a black-and-white photograph of the author on the back, and a small illustration in the style of old engravings on the front to vaguely suggest its contents. Then there are the slightly later black editions, which truly precede our modern black Penguin Classics. The books are thin and cheap, with a black spine and restrained white text on the front and back. The covers are typically dated photographs vaguely reflecting the book’s contents, and it is somewhat difficult to read the tiny, faded type on the stiff yellowed pages.
I found a few at my old employer, Amazing Books and Records in Pittsburgh, and began reading them with delight starting with the famous archaeologist Leonard Woolley’s Digging Up the Past. It was a small treatise from Penguin, and I gobbled it up quickly before starting on the first book of the summer, The Voyage of Argo by Apollonius of Rhodes.
Despite my well-known interest in Greece and Rome, I had never read this particular work. It simply fell into my lap. My acquaintance with Jason and his infamous Argonauts came chiefly from Euripides’ Medea and a few secondary retellings (Bulfinch’s Mythology, Robert Graves’ Greek Myths, etc).
There are a great many attempts to expand the epic genre after Homer. The only truly successful attempt was Virgil’s Aeneid, which certainly achieves poetic greatness even if its philosophical and artistic depth is somewhat hampered by its purpose as Augustan propaganda. My other experiences with post-Homeric epic have been, unfortunately, somewhat disappointing.
I was pleasantly surprised when I began reading Apollonius’ account of Jason and his voyage east from Greece to Colchis, on the eastern shore of the Black Sea in what is now western Georgia, to retrieve the Golden Fleece. Even today, it is a land with vague memories of its past—although it boasts the invention of wine, the tortures of Prometheus, pretends to have been a site of Alexander’s conquests and provided kings to Byzantium, Persia, and the Ottomans, and was more recently a major concern in the Great Game, Nazi invasion, and the birthplace of Stalin. I will stop before I begin to recount my experiences of the 2024 protests, or meandering through an endless history of Tamars and Erekles (although the astute reader may recognize the connection of the latter name with a similar hero of the Argonauts, Herakles). Suffice it to say, this is a region which has long been shrouded in high-altitude mists and mystery, which begins with the story of Jason’s voyage.
Contrary to my expectations, I found this to be an incredibly entertaining work. From the political origins of Jason’s voyage, the cast of famous characters assembled, his romance of the witch Medea (and subsequent, unwritten but alluded to, tragedy), to the great, sweeping travelogue which brings the reader from the Caucasian Gates to the Pillars of Herakles, through Italy and Charybdis and across African shores, back to Greece. The book’s translator, E.V. Rieu, does an excellent job.
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