Bacchic Echoes: Dionysus as Metaphor in Apollonius' Argonautica

Abstract

This thesis argues that an interpretation of Apollonius’ Argonautica must take account of a Dionysiac schema mobilising the epic’s meanings: this schema operates as an organising principle for understanding the epic’s initial reception not only because Hellenistic literary production is steeped in Dionysiac forms that gave prominence to Attic tragedy and theatrical performance, but also because Dionysiac cult played a critical role in Ptolemaic royal ideology both ritually and politically. As Hellenistic epic proclaimed and bolstered Ptolemaic regional and political hegemonic claims, the Argonautica ought to be expected to contain a reflex of this Ptolemaic focus on Dionysus. (1) Euripides’ Bacchae provides the main frame and a patterning (the ‘hospitality plot’) within which Argonautic action can be invested with Bacchic significance: resistance to foreign strangers, inversions of identity and power, Dionysiac social cohesion, intimacy with natural environments, the Argonauts as a chorus with Jason as 'exarchos' and Orpheus as 'choregos'/'koryphaios', etc. Bacchic intertextuality animates meaning in the Argonautica. (2) The women of the Argonautica are demonstrably Maenadic. Jason’s relationship with Medea is mapped onto the model of the ‘tragic marriage’ which opposes the endogamy of über-elite households with a civic cohesion resulting from the mixing of citizen households. This triggers a destructive necessity to admit the foreigner into the 'oikos'/'polis' which, as R. Seaford argues, was so allergic to tyrants and royal houses in tragedy and, of these, the Bacchae most programmatically. The maenadic submission of local women to Dionysus in tragedy offers a way of reframing the meanings of Medea’s seduction by and escape with Jason. (3) Jason is assimilated figurally to the god Dionysus and emerges as an epic hero caught between twin pairs of Dionysian imperative: the literary and the cultural-political on the one hand, and between the Euripidean martial Dionysus and the ‘Philadelphian’ cosmopolitan wine-god on the other. In the end, Apollonius’ innovation in the Argonautica is the elaboration of a Dionysian epic hero apt for the third century Alexandrian tastes of the court of Philadelphus.