Apollonius Rhodius

(3^rd century BC)

Argonautica, is the epic retelling of Jason’s quest for the golden fleece. Along with his contemporaries Callimachus and Theocritus, Apollonius refashioned Greek poetry to meet the interests and aesthetics of a Hellenistic audience, especially that of Alexandria in the Ptolemaic period following Alexander’s death. In this carefully crafted work of 5,835 hexameter verses in four books, the author draws on the preceding literary traditions of epic (Homer), lyric (Pindar), and tragedy (especially Euripides) but creates an innovative and complex narrative that includes geography, religion, ethnography, mythology, adventure, exploration, human psychology, and, most of all, the coming of age and love affair of Jason and Medea. It greatly influenced Roman authors such as Catullus, Virgil, and Ovid, and was imitated by Valerius Flaccus (https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674996304).

BOOK I, 1-246

«[…] As soon as Pelias saw Jason he realized, and devised for him the challenge of a voyage which would be full of suffering, so that either on the sea or among a foreign people he might lose all chance of safe return […] As they hastened on their way a great crowd of the citizens ran with them, but the heroes stood out among them like bright stars among clouds. This is what each citizen would say as he saw them rushing forward with their weapons: ‘Lord Zeus, what does Pelias have in mind? Where is he hurling such a great band of heroes, out from the Panachaean land? The very day they arrive they will raze Aietes’ palace with the fire of destruction if he does not consent to give them the fleece. They must go; there is no way out from this terrible labour».

(Jason and the Golden Fleece (The Argonautica), trans. with an introduction and notes by Richard Hunter, GB: Oxford University Press, 1998).

Simmias of Rhodes 

(around 300 BC)

The first ancient Greek poet of whom we preserved  technopaegnia or poems-figure  in Western tradition