Content area
Full Text
Anatole Mori. The Politics of Apollonius Rhodius' Argonautica. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. x + 261 pp. 3 tables. Cloth, $99.
The paradox that lies at the heart of Anatole Mori's excellent and thoughtprovoking study finds an emblem in the juxtaposition of the image she has chosen for her frontispiece and the title of her book. The image is a bronze cult statuette of Alexander Aigiochos ("Aegis-Bearing") now in the British Museum, a Roman copy of a Greek original dated to the late fourth century b.c.e. The title of her book refers of course to the four-book hexameter poem of the poet Apollonius of Rhodes, who was active at the court of Ptolemies II and III in mid- third-century Alexandria (exact dates of Apollonius' chronology are unknown; clearly, however, there is no doubt that Callimachus and Apollonius are, broadly speaking, contemporary, and that there is a complex web of recall and variation of one another in their work). A seemingly innocuous juxtaposition of image and title belies the reality that figure and poem fall under the purview of scholarship of different periods, and even of different disciplines.
Scholars of Hellenistic poetry are not, for the most part, students of the history of Alexander, nor of the powerful narrative of his campaigns. The very same critics of Hellenistic poetry whose training urges them to seek out recollections of earlier Greek literature and culture in the poetry of third-century Alexandria are apt to miss many of the resonances of a more recent "text" of incredible power and immediacy, that of the campaigns of Alexander and the Successors who followed him.
In recent years in the scholarship on Hellenistic Poetry there has been a marked turn away from considering texts to be self-contained entities toward readings that take into account the time and place of their composition-the signal phrase here is "in context" (e.g., the ICS seminar ongoing in London at the time of this writing, directed by G. B. D'Alessio, "Beyond the Library: Hellenistic Literature and its Contexts," and the 2010 Groningen Hellenistic Poetry Workshop, "Hellenistic Poetry in Context"). Whether an ancient reader of these texts was influenced in his or her reading by a knowledge of earlier Greek poetry (e.g., Fantuzzi and Hunter), by the surrounding...