APOLLONIUS

Culture and Non-Culture

The Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes is a work of the third century B.C., and the leap from the archaic period to the Hellenistic age is a vast one. At the same time, there are strong links of cultural heritage between the two periods. Thus, the Argonautica takes its subject matter from archaic Greek mythology and patently harks back to the style and language of Homer, even as it articulates preoccupations quite foreign to archaic literature. As we turn to the Argonautica, it will be useful to keep in mind the picture of the signifying practice of Homer which emerged from our analysis of the Iliad, since we will want to pay attention to the way Apollonius interprets and redeploys elements of that signifying practice. The wolf simile with which we began turned out to be an anti-meal, an isomorphically constructed negative image of a proper Homeric meal. The opposition which underlies the relationship of this simile to the descriptive system of a heroic meal is basically “correct” vs. “incorrect,” and the problem of Achilles is that in Homeric culture there is little middle ground between this opposition. Having rejected his role in his culture, Achilles can only act as a non-Achilles, or more precisely, as an anti-Achilles. For whatever is not defined within the scope of culture is anti-culture; and “anti-culture” does not have a mechanism or internal coherence of its own except as a negative reflection of culture.¹ Thus, when Homer compares the Myrmidons to wolves, he is not suggesting that there is an “analogy” between the way the Myrmidons act and the way wolves act. The description of the wolves is entirely dependent on the description of heroic meals, and the “natural history” of wolves is entirely secondary to this consideration.

Another example of this negative portrayal is the description of Thersites, who is everything a βασιλεύς is not (B 212-20):

Only Thersites of the unmeasured speech still scolded,

who knew in his head many words, but with no order to them;

vain and without decency he would quarrel with the princes

with any word he thought would amuse the Greeks.

This was the ugliest man who came beneath Ilion.

He was bandy-legged and lame of one foot, with shoulders

stooped and drawn over his chest, and above this his

skull went up to a point with the wool grown sparsely over it.

He was especially hateful to Achilles and Odysseus.

Poor Thersites apparently has no socially redeeming characteristics. It would be easy to show that this passage, like the wolf simile of Book 16, is a full-scale conversion of the descriptive system of Homeric heroes. Within the scope of Homeric culture, a βασιλεύς is contrasted with a δήμου ἄνδρα, “a common man” (compare B 188 and B 198), but Thersites is neither of these. He is an anti-βασιλεύς, and the fact that he takes the side of Achilles in this particular instance, contrary to his usual practice, is a significant index of Achilles’ situation.²

The Iliad, however, is not a simple rehearsal of what is and is not “correct” within the scope of culture. The fact is that Achilles does achieve in a small way an identity outside of his culturally determined role, an identity which is not simply a negation of that role. The establishment of this “other” culture with Priam intimates the possibility that non-culture need not be anti-culture, an intimation which gains momentum in the period after Homer. When Archilochus says that he left his shield by a bush (West, fr. 5), he is not simply portraying himself as the negation of a warlike person; he is implying that there are other cultural values besides those of the epic hero which are more suitable to him. So also, when the Delphic oracle states that the gods prefer to be worshipped νόμῳ πολέως (Xenophon, Memorabilia, IV, 3, 16), this is a recognition that religious ritual is only “relatively” correct, not absolutely right or wrong. Finally, when Protagoras asserts that “whatever seems right and admirable to a particular city is truly right and admirable during the period of time in which the opinion continues to be held” (Theatetus 167c), he is expressing in the most general terms the relativity of human values and institutions.

In the period after Homer, in fact, the Greeks find themselves involved to a great degree in “international relations.” Instead of the relatively under-girded, univocal culture of Homer, the Greek world becomes a more interactive culture. Non-culture is no longer viewed as something necessarily antinomous and inherently dangerous, but as “other” culture: other systems of values which have their own internal coherence and with which there can be intercourse and exchange. Herodotus reports with amusement the mutual repulsion of the Greeks and Indians at each other’s practice of disposing of the dead. From this he concludes that Pindar was correct in calling νόμος the king of all things.³ A culture’s νόμοι are the means by which that culture defines itself; and Herodotus’ point that customs and laws have only a relative value is the precondition for international relations.

For a culture to recognize the validity of another culture’s values, it is necessary to become conscious of itself in new ways; specifically, it is necessary to be able to to view one’s culture as a model, a form for behavior. That Greek philosophy from Thales on was preoccupied with form is a well-known fact--a preoccupation which was to lead to the apotheosis of form in the philosophy of Plato. It is in this period that thinkers begin to intellectualize about forms of government, forms of religion, etc. When the form of a cultural institution is abstracted into a model, it is then possible to establish comparisons with other models. In fact, comparison with other institutions is itself a privileged means by which an institution can be thought of formally.

The cognitive implications of such a formalization process is, as Goody notes,⁴ twofold: it is reductive, in the sense that any decontextualization is a simplification which results in distortion; and it is generative, in the sense that it creates new ways of looking at things, a greater consciousness of things previously “taken for granted.” This in turn can lead to the “corruption of the youth,” of which the sophists were so frequently accused. In the Phaedrus, Socrates asks his interlocutor if he should present, as he often does, the opposing argument. When Phaedrus agrees, Socrates cites a proverb to justify his procedure (272c):

Thus it is said, Phaedrus, that it is just for the wolf also to have
his say.

In the Iliad the wolf, as the figure of the Other, never “gets his say,” for he has no words of his own. Since the wolf is there defined as “anti-culture,” he has no signifying system of his own. He can only groan inarticulately to indicate the absence of signification. In Plato, the wolf has his own signifying system, whose structuredness allows him to enter into a dialogue with other systems and work out a dialectical solution.

These brief remarks are not meant to take the place of a cultural or intellectual history. The purpose is simply to call attention to the increased tendency towards formalization in Greek thought concomitant with the shift from the more univocal cultural perspective of Homer to the more relativistic perspective of the subsequent period. The point is not that Homeric man was more narrow-minded than his classical counterpoint, but that the question of cultural value was posed in a new way and under different circumstances; and, I might add, Goody might be closest to the mark when he connects this shift in the semiotics of culture to changes in the means and modes of communication.⁵ At any rate, in the new intellectual climate of Greece, the function and understanding of the simile is also reoriented significantly, a fact illustrated in a striking way by the discussions of Homer’s similes in the rhetorical tradition and in the Homeric scholia. A brief consideration of the key texts in Aristotle and the scholia will serve us as a transition to Apollonius of Rhodes in the third century.

The Simile as Reciprocal Exchange

Aristotle does not discuss similes in his Poetics, but his treatment of the use of example (παράδειγμα) in the Rhetoric deals with similes. Marsh McCall has shown that in Aristotle, as in antiquity in general, there were several terms used for what we have come to think of as a simile. Aristotle, however, consistently uses the term παραβολή for a comparison used as an element of proof, and εἰκών for a simile used as a feature of style.⁶ Although Aristotle indicates various ways in which the εἰκῶν can add to the persuasiveness of an argument, we have here already an example of the division between function and ornament so prominent in formalist discussions of figures of speech. The εἰκών is discussed in the third book of the Rhetoric, chapters 4, 10 and 11.

From his fourth century perspective Aristotle does not recognize the generative function of Homer’s similes, but he makes provision for it. In discussing the means to attain an urbane style (τὸ ἀστεῖον), Aristotle observes that metaphor and simile are especially helpful, since they allow us to “get hold of fresh ideas easily” (Rhetoric 3, 10, 1410b 2-3):

Let us begin by saying that getting hold of new ideas easily is naturally pleasing; all words mean something, so that words which make us learn something are most pleasant. Strange words we do not understand, and common words we know already. It is metaphor that creates this effect best; for when the poet calls old age “a withered stalk,” he conveys a new idea, a new fact to us by means of what is common to both: both have lost their bloom. The similes of the poets do the same thing; and therefore if they are good ones, they give the effect of urbanity. The simile, as I have said before, is a metaphor, differing only by the addition of a particle.

Aristotle is here concerned with the cognitive implications of metaphor and simile, particularly their ability to generate new ideas. But the generative function ascribed to simile and metaphor by Aristotle is quite different from those we noted in Homer’s similes. The Aristotelian εἰκών allows one to “get hold of new ideas easily” by positing a relationship between two sememes based on some sort of commonality (διὰ τοῦ γένους). This is, for reasons which would be worthy of investigation of themselves, our most commonsense idea of how figures like simile and metaphor work: some sort of commonality between two things makes it possible to posit an analogy based on that commonality, so that it is possible to say “they are alike in this way.” This notion is thought of by Aristotle as an exchange between models, a semiotic mechanism which presumes a process of formalization.

The notion of exchange and reciprocity in similes is made explicit by Aristotle in several key passages. In the first one he states that reciprocity and exchange are the very characteristics which distinguish successful similes from failures (Rhet. 3, 11, 1413a 13):

It is in these respects that poets fail worst when they fail and succeed best when they succeed; I mean when they set up an exchange.

The verb ἀποδίδωμι means literally “to give back” or “to give in return.” In Homer it means simply “to make atonement for something.” Later, as in Herodotus, it can refer specifically to commercial exchange, to “take something somewhere for the purpose of selling” (e.g., Histories 2, 5). With a genitive of price, it can mean simply “to sell.” The extension of this term to meam “to interpret one word by another” (LSJ s.v. 11) suggests the establishment of a structure of exchange between signs, or better, between codes. The structure of exchange which underlies Aristotle’s treatment of simile is truly the structure of “international relations”--relations between different cultures, economies, etc.

The verb ἀποδίδωμι occurs again in Aristotle’s discussion of the “analogical metaphor” (ἠ μεταφορὰ κατ’ ἀναλογίαν), the type of metaphor to which, in his view, the simile is closest. That Aristotle chooses to make simile a subordinate part of metaphor creates certain difficulties which need not detain us here; but it is clear that what makes simile and the analogical metaphor akin to each other for Aristotle is that they share the structure of exchange (Rhet. 3, 4, 1407a 4):⁷

The analogical metaphor should always set up a reciprocal exchange between the two things of the same genus; for instance, if the goblet is the shield of Dionysus, then the shield may properly be called the goblet of Ares.

In this, the best type of metaphor for Aristotle, there is an exchange ἀνἀ λόγον, “according to a logos”; that is, according to a formalized proportion able to be thought of as a code establishing correlations between the comparata. This point is made again in Aristotle’s discussion of the analogical metaphor in the Poetics, where the same example of the goblet and the shield is used (AP 1457b):

By analogical metaphor I mean this: when a first is related to a second in the same way that a third is to a fourth, then a poet will say the fourth instead of the second and the second instead of the fourth. And sometimes the transferred term of the metaphor is used together with what is relative to the supplanted term. For instance, a cup is to Dionysus what a shield is to Ares; so that the poet will call the cup “the shield of Dionysus” and the shield the “cup of Ares.”

Here the structure of exchange is schematically laid out in its most general form: 1 is to 2 just as 3 is to 4. Although Aristotle takes for granted that the two comparata are already alike to begin with, thus somewhat begging the question, it is clear that the process of replacing terms is a kind of exchange based on the value of the terms. The full-blown analogy is the most explicit form of this process of exchange. Both the εἰκών and the analogical metaphor are less explicit about the relationship of the terms, but are most successful for Aristotle when they are based on an underlying analogy.⁸

The functioning of the εἰκών is thus based on a structural similarity in two models; or to use our semiotic terms, a similarity in the structure the codes which constitute the comparata into sememes. For an εἰκών is basically a matter of code-switching: speaking of Ares in the drinking code or of Dionysus in the fighting code. The point of entry from one code to another is determined by a structural similarity in the configuration of the code; or at least this is the way it is seen by Aristotle. The structures of codes are, it should be remembered, established on the basis of a message: when a given text postulates them as an explanatory condition. In a given discourse, the factors which determine code-switching may be any number of things, but the message will always imply a certain configuration of codes for its own interpretation. In this way a text always gives the impression that the codes existed prior to itself, although this is not always the case. Indeed, the “fresh ways of looking at things” proceed in part from the way innovative texts can restructure the configuration of codes. Thus whereas Aristotle speaks of an exchange between the terms of already constituted models, we can specify more accurately that the process is one of an exchange of the models themselves, thus emphasizing the constitutive function of comparison. For such a process is not necessarily based on values, but often can be that which produces values.

The semiotics of many of Homer’s similes, it should be clear, is not that described by Aristotle. The point of entry for the wolf simile of Book 16 of the Iliad, for example, is not a structural similarity between a formal model of the Myrmidons’ behavior and a formal model of the wolves’ behavior. The point of entry is a textual complication which necessitates a shift in discursive mode, a shift which generates text at a point where the proairetic mode had become blocked. The simile is not a shift from the code of the heroes to the code of the wolves, but a shift from one narrative mode to another. The code which determines the description of the wolves is still that of the heroes. The wolf simile is generative in the sense that it is propulsive: it allows text-production to continue.

This function, along with the others described above, are rather “conservative” in nature: they are not designed to seek out “fresh ways of looking at things,” but rather to keep the text from going awry. Whether a simile manages the circumvention of an obstacle to the proairesis, as in Π 155ff., whether it establishes a generative model for the articulation of major developments in the plot, as in Λ 84ff., whether it “corrects” a local muff in the flow of the story, as in Λ 558ff., or whether it performs the role of textual interpretant, as in B 780ff., in each case it could be argued that the simile is a device for containing textual deviation rather than for setting off on a semantic adventure of some sort. There is always the possibility, however, that such textual devices will themselves generate “new ways of seeing things,” that they will produce readings which will enrich a code; the difference with Homer is that the semiotic mechanism for this process is not fully developed. The tendency to divide everything up into culture and anti-culture, between what belongs to us and what does not belong to us, is not peculiar to traditional societies like that of Homer; nor did it suddenly disappear in the fifth century, as a glance at the use of the word barbaros will show (= both “non-Greek” and “repulsive”). But the increasing tendency toward formalization which marks the post-Homeric world put at the disposal of the Greeks of that period a tool for exchanging models; and Aristotle’s perception of the simile and his prescriptions for its use are a function of this development.

Apollonius and the Structure of Exchange

Despite the fact that Aristotle’s view of the simile is inappropriate to Homer’s poetics, the scholiast tradition on Homer shows the direct influence of the conception of the simile as having the structure of exchange. The most prominent readerly expectation evident in the Hellenistic commentaries on Homer’s similes is parallelism. Thus, the sememe of “wolf,” for example, is a sign system whose structuredness can be abstracted into a model and then exchanged with the model of the sememe of “warrior.” If a warrior is compared to a wolf, the simile should, it seemed to Hellenistic critics, establish an exchange between elements of the sememe of “warrior” and elements of the sememe of “wolf.” This expectation, Adolf Clausing notes, is often completely frustrated in Homer’s similes:⁹

Wenn man sich auf den Standpunkt stellte, dass auch bei Homer eine genauere Parallelisierung zwischen den beiden Teilen des Vergleichs möglich ist, und wenn man zu den weiteren Ausmalungen Beziehungen konstruieren wollte, musste man auf die allerbedenklichsten Abwege geraten und zu geradezu lächerlichen Interpretationen verführt werden.

With Apollonius the situation is different. As Clausing shows in a number of examples, Apollonius’ imitations of Homeric similes conform more closely to the current literary and rhetorical theories. Specifically,

1. Apollonius is more careful to make analogical correspondence.

2. He usually keeps the number of things equal in the two parts of the simile.

3. He carefully correlates the wie and so particles, a matter Homer is often careless about.

4. He occasionally adds an explanatory antapodosis to the simile which precisely identifies the relationships of the things compared.

5. He is most careful that the ethos of the things compared be akin, another failing for which Homer was often criticized.¹⁰

All of these characteristics indicate a textual strategy which presupposes a reading based on the structure of exchange; it is a textual strategy which reflects, as Clausing points out, the influence of the Hellenistic criticism of Homer’s similes.

One should hasten to point out that the “failings” of Homer’s similes are, of course, failings from the standpoint of the rhetorical tradition, not from the standpoint of Homer’s own poetics; and this fact leads to a number of ironies. Carspecken, for example, notes that in contrast to Homer, Apollonius’ similes reflect the tendency “to make poetic ornamentation be, or, possibly more often and more accurately, seem to be, functional or structural.”¹¹ Homer’s similes, however, are indeed functional in his propulsive (but not particularly structural) poetics. At the same time, it is just because Apollonius’ similes are used “as part of a pre-conceived design” (Carspecken, 67) that they become more ornamental than Homer’s. Clausing notes that Apollonius’ similes are often simply “indirekt Darstellung,” taking up something which could have been represented directly (Kritik 46); but this is the very formula for an ornament. Apollonius’ similes are not text-building strategies generated by the needs of a propulsive textual dynamics, but rhetorical devices introduced qua device to adorn the narrative, to make it “urbane.”

Thus, for example, the woodsman simile of Λ 86ff., is imitated in Argonautica 1, 1172-77. After rowing prodigiously, the heroes reach the land of the Mysians:

At the time when the vinedresser or the plowman goes eagerly

from the field homeward, thinking of dinner; in the vestibule

he bends his worn-out knees, shriveled by the dust, he

looks at at his worn-out hands and curses the belly which commands

such toil; at that time they landed on the Cianian coast.

The weary vinedresser, after wearing out his hands by working all day long, heading home for dinner, parallels the heroes, who row until they are exhausted and then arrive among the Mysians where they have a feast. Like the woodsman simile in Iliad 11, the Apollonian imitation is a Zeitangabe; but the Iliadic simile did not so much mark mimetic time as it marked the introduction of Zeus’ influence. It was a transition from one type of narrative to another; and it was, moreover, the textual generator of the subsequent narrative. The Apollonian simile is a transition from one punctual event (the rowing) to the next proairetically determined punctual event (the landing). It is, in short, a Zeitangabe and that is all.

The difference can be looked at another way. Space and time can be thought of as formal parameters for organizing narrative action. Clearly a logic of action (proairesis) is based on a spatial-temporal logic: sequentiality and contiguity. In Homer, however, the use of explicit references to time and space rarely play a significant role in organizing the mimesis (in Riffaterre’s sense). Orts- and Zeitangaben are generative elements which can play any number of roles in the propulsive poetics of Homer. Any role in organizing the narrated events is likely to be secondary to their function in text and meaning production. Hence Homer’s use of spatial-temporal relationships is generally rather foggy, and occasionally downright “ungrammatical.”¹² In Apollonius spatial-temporal organization is quite prominent.¹³ Carspecken, for example, notes that in his similes Apollonius seeks “to convey directly to the reader a total impression of a scene, a sense of its logical and emotional meaning” (89). He compares Odyssey 6, 102-8 with Argonautica 3, 875-84 and concludes (79):

Homer’s simile is not really organized as a scene. In contrast, Apollonius has created a formal, systematic grouping of the figures.... It has as a scene the close spatial organization expected in representational art designed to attract attention within a restricted area of vision.

Carspecken’s remark points out the difference between a poetics in which the simile is primarily a semiotic device for performing various textual functions and one in which the simile has become a kind of decorative device whose main function lies in clarifying the relationships among things at the level of the mimesis.

The distinction between Homer and Apollonius is, of course, a relative one. Homer’s narrative is not amorphous with respect to space and time, but the minimal role they play in explicitly organizing the narrative action points to the overall lack of structure at that level in Homer. The increased use of spatial-temporal organization in Apollonius is an index of the increased formalization and schematization of phenomena which distinguishes the Hellenistic world from that of Homer. In the Republic Plato describes at length the structure of an ideal state, but the purpose of the discussion is to provide an extended analogy for the structure of the soul. Such an extended analogy is unthinkable in Homer, for this kind of formal analysis relies on a mechanism for exchanging models.¹⁴ Such a notion is the basis of Aristotle’s conception of the simile; it is also the precondition of “indirekt Darstellung.”

Generative Functions in Apollonius’ Similes

Clausing gives as an example of “indirekt Darstellung” the similes which describe the battle with the Bebrukes in Book 2 of the Argonautica. The battle consists of a series of individual encounters in the Homeric manner followed by a double simile. Here is the passage (Argo. 2, 123-35):

As when grey wolves terrify a great flock of sheep on a

winter’s day, falling on them unnoticed by the shepherds

and the keen-scented dogs; they look to see which they

should pounce on and carry off first, inspecting them all

together. The sheep crowd into a mass and trample on each

other. Just so the Argonauts terrified the haughty Bebrukes

in their plight As shepherds or beekeepers smoke a great

swarm of bees in a rock; for a while there is a tumult in

the hive and an angry buzzing from the crowded bees; then

blinded by the thick smoke they dart out of the rock.

Just so the Bebrukes could no longer hold their ground, but fled.

The wolf simile and the bee simile indirectly represent two punctual events: the fear which overtakes the Bebrukes when they realize they are lost and then the flight. Each of the similes expands a single simple notion: ἐφόβησαν and οὐκέτι δὴν μένον, and the details of the scene are relegated to the similes. But more importantly, these similes reveal a peculiarly Apollonian (in contrast to Homer, that is) preoccupation.

To begin with, the verb φοβέω has a different meaning in Homer than it does in Apollonius, a change which reflects an important shift in perspective in the Greek language. In Homer, φοβέω means not “to terrify,” but “to set to flight”; it does not describe in Homer an internal emotion, but an action determined by other actions. This shift in meaning and a number of other similar shifts from “concrete to abstract” have often been commented on.¹⁵ But it is particularly interesting in the present example, since the wolf simile, in effect, interjects into the logic of the action (the proairesis) a punctual event which does not even exist in Homer. The bee simile describes the actual flight of the Bebrukes; the wolf simile describes the emotions they feel at the moment between fighting and fleeing. The implication is that before one flees, something else happens, another “event” occurs, which determines the fleeing; and this event is an internal one that can be depicted as a specific event quite apart from fleeing. The articulation of the action here to include a slot for a psychological event is of great importance for Apollonius’ epic technique. Whatever faults critics have found in the Argonautica, everyone is in agreement that Apollonius excelled in psychological portrayal, in giving depth to his characters--even that he was preoccupied with this matter to a fault.¹⁶ The epic simile provided Apollonius with a medium for giving concrete expression to a host of internal, private realities whose existence the Greek language had come to recognize.

The bee simile which immediately follows shows similar concerns. Fraenkel has suggested that this simile is a Stoic conceit Both Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius use a comparison of a smoke-filled room whose door is always open to illustrate that man is always free to commit suicide when his inner peace is threatened by external pressures.¹⁷ A reference to a Stoic notion about the maintenance of inner peace shows again Apollonius’ preference to represent the internal implications of narrative actions. Many of Homer’s heroes “give way” in various situations without necessarily implying anything about their character. Usually, in fact, retreat is represented by Homer as the direct influence of divine agency. In Apollonius, however, men retreat because they are cowards, and the logic of these inner events is more interesting to him. At the same time, if the simile is a reference to Stoicism, it is a textual interprétant, an invocation of an extra-textual “code of behavior” to interpret the actions of the characters in the story. But the flight of the Bebrukes is not ethically comparable to Stoic suicide--the latter is supposed to be heroic, not cowardly. The passage thus exemplifies a type of “intertextual conflict” between two codes, such as we noted in the Iliadic references to the Typhonomachy (pp. 82-83, above). Do we have here in the Argonautica a thematization of some fundamental social conflict? Is the text groping to formulate an imaginative solution to some real social contradiction? Hardly. It is much more likely that Apollonius is being ironic, that he is simply poking fun at the Stoics by implying that suicide is really the coward’s way out.

Now irony is something which is unlikely in Homer--although not theoretically impossible--for irony presumes a certain relationship of mastery toward conflicts raised in a text, an ability to stand above them, to be able to laugh at them. This kind of ironic distance seems to be more frequent in Apollonius; and often Homeric conventions are themselves the object of such irony. Clausing and others, in fact, have noted numerous examples of similes which seem to be criticisms of Homer’s epic technique.¹⁸ That similes should themselves be pretexts for irony of this sort in Apollonius is a particularly pertinent point: Homer’s similes are often attempts to exercise control over the course of the narrative; for this reason, they are at one level symptomatic of a certain lack of mastery. In fact, a dense accumulation of similes in Homer often signifies textual complexities. If Homer’s similes are places where the narrative needed to “catch its breath” for one reason or another, the similes of the Argonautica often seem to be places where Apollonius flaunts his mastery over the narrative flow. The issue here is not that Apollonius is so much more in control of his narrative than Homer--although certainly literacy had specific advantages in this regard--it is that Apollonius’ similes are no longer devices for exercising control; they no longer function to propel the narrative forward.

Thus, for example, a survey of the content of Apollonius’ similes shows that he introduces a much broader and more exotic range of material into his similes. Like other Alexandrian poets, Apollonius prefers unusual and often obscure versions of myths as well as arcane geographical references. Also noteworthy are the numerous astral comparisons which make it possible for Apollonius to display his considerable astronomical learning.¹⁹ Another contrast between Apollonius and Homer can be seen in the use of double similes and alternatives within a single simile. In Homer, we saw examples of double similes having a “corrective” function.²⁰ Double similes in the Argonautica, however, provide some of the most extraordinary examples of rhetorical flourish in the entire poem. Commenting on two magnificent double similes falling between lines 1280-1302 of Book 4, Carspecken writes (82):

The poet is not offering true alternatives. Although each part could, conceivably, stand by itself, it is in the combination of parts that the effect of the simile lies, in the relation of each part to that preceding and that following, in the accumulation of incident and detail according to a predetermined pattern of increasing emotional tension.

Once again, what is a propulsive device in Homer becomes significantly redeployed in Apollonius. A double simile in Homer often suggests that a first simile did not resolve a textual complexity adequately; and such “correction” devices are necessary in Homer just because “predetermined patterns” are such weak text-constitutive forces in Homer’s propulsive poetics. Although Apollonius has no need of such correction devices, he imitates the form of Homer’s double similes while at the same time producing new and sophisticated rhetorical effects. Again this redeployment of a Homeric device often involves the articulation of the emotional world of figures in the epic.

The reference to Stoicism in the bee simile cited above is also pertinent because of what such a philosophy reflects about Hellenistic culture. The Stoics viewed man as a microcosm; not so much as an element in a larger system, but as an internally coherent system himself. The cosmos was studied not so much to find one’s place in it, but as a model for man’s inner logos.²¹ Hence Zeno’s famous dictum, ὀμολογουμένως ζῆν, “life according to a logos” The possibility of a “homologous” life presumes the structure of exchange to predicate a “little world” within man. The autonomization at the heart of the Hellenistic philosophies has as its corollary (perhaps its cause) a lesser interest in man as a cultural entity. The early Stoa was thus apolitical, particularly in contrast to Panaetius and the middle Stoa; the Cynics and the Epicureans were notoriously doctrinaire in this regard.²²

The differences between Homer and Apollonius exemplify these changes. Homeric narrative is populated by generative elements, interacting at various levels of linguistico-textual organization, whose propulsive dynamics set up relationships among basically static and role-determined characters. Character in Homer is determined by one’s status, one’s relationship with others, not by the λόγος of one’s ψυxή. Many critics have noted the typical nature of Homeric characters, that there is generally no conception of an “inner life” of the mind or soul and that the origin of action is represented as coming from outside of the heroes.²³ Homeric characters do different things and enter into new and shifting relationships with each other, but there is very little in the Iliad to encourage the view that any of the heroes actually undergoes a metamorphosis or grows inwardly. The Iliad is interested in individuals as cultural entities.

In Apollonius, the individual as the sum of a series of cultural relations is no longer the focus of interest. Instead, the individual as such has become interesting in a new way. The rise of the new Hellenistic philosophies testifies to this focus on individuals apart from culturally defined roles. So also, the new realism in art, the move toward depicting the peculiar and even grotesque indicates a fascination with the particular.²⁴ This is, to be sure, not something which suddenly appears in the Hellenistic period; for the “rise of the individual” is something already heralded in the Iliad; but in Apollonius the influence of this development is pervasive. For example, Carspecken notes that certain groups of similes describing particular figures in the poem seem to form a series which together articulate a “developing symbolism.” Thus Jason is compared to a star on several occasions, but with different aspects foregrounded so that a sort of psychological evolution is delineated (Carspecken, 97-98). Much more famous, and very distinctive of the difference between Homer and Apollonius, is the set of extraordinary similes which describe the inner turmoil of Medea as she begins to fall in love with Jason.²⁵ Thus, if Apollonius’ similes are less functional with respect to narrative propulsion than those of Homer, being often merely an alternative way of representing proairesis, they are nevertheless productive. Specifically (but by no means exclusively), the Apollonian simile predicates models for the inner world of humans and establishes equivalences between this unseen world and the seen world. In this way his similes create character as a logos, a structured entity produced by exchange with other structures. The constitution of character is one important way that the generative potential of the εἰκών becomes realized in the Argonautica. Apollonius uses the structure of exchange to articulate the “human cosmos,” thereby delineating a new “psychology.”

A related observation can be made about the quest structure of the Argonautica. The quest is a narrative form in which the questing subject can be transformed by exchange with his environment. As the quester moves from one place to another, from one situation to another, he becomes the locus of predication. In a quest there is the potential for an endless consecution of situations related to each other only by the presence of the questing subject. The Argonautica is thus episodic in a way that the Iliad is not. In Homer, the characters are the data, the backdrop for the narrative process. In Apollonius, the propulsive, generative functions of language are relegated to the inner world of the individual; the drama of internal processes is played out against the narrative backdrop of the quest. Apollonius’ handling of the quest form makes its role as a backdrop conspicuous. Arthur Heiserman has called attention to the fundamental shift in interest suggested by a comparison of the Argonautica and Pindar’s fourth Pythian ode, which has a long digression on the Argonauts. This ode, with its patent political overtones, is focused on the conflict between Pelias and Jason, allowing Pindar to insert gnomae about justice and right rule.²⁶ However, the conflicting claims of Pelias and Jason are not even mentioned in the Argonautica. We are not told why Jason accepts the quest; the fleece, once taken, is soon forgotten. The Argonautica, in fact, ends with the abrupt declaration that the heroes made it home safely without further mishap. Nothing is said of Jason’s winning of the throne from Pelias. Whatever purpose the voyage had is left in silence. This is because its main purpose was to provide a narrative scheme which would allow Apollonius to articulate character.

To say that the Argonautica’s lack of interest in the constitution and organization of culture differentiates him from Homer is, however, not enough. For the difference between the two texts is not simply thematic (as though Apollonius more or less arbitrarily chose to do something new); the difference lies in the very character of discourse itself. There is a vast difference between the relatively homogeneous community of the Iliad and the far-flung Hellenistic empires. The latter consist of a loose articulation among individual city-states already constituted as such. The relationship among the heterogeneous sectors of Alexander’s empire do not make up a unity based on a shared commonality, but a loose “association” based on more abstract relationships such as economic reciprocity. If comparison of the Argonautica to Homer’s epics has led critics to view Jason as “alienated” or as an “anti-hero,”²⁷ that is because Hellenistic culture as a whole looks fragmented and alienated from the standpoint of Homeric culture. After all, social transformation is thematized in the Iliad as the disintegration of “community” (Gemeinschaft), as alienation and anti-heroism (see above, p. 72).

When Apollonius sets out to imitate Homer, to “interpret” him, he continues a movement already incipiently at work in the Iliad. Given the constitution of the individual as such, the Argonautica documents his lateral movement among other individuals with whom an explicit exchange (a “contract”) can be established. If the Homeric simile can be seen as attempts to “homogenize” heterogeneities which the narrative flow encounters for one reason or another, the Apollonian simile can be seen as attempts to set up diplomatic relations with various heterogeneities the narrative has set out to discover. Returning to the economic parallel underlying Aristotle’s discussion of metaphor and simile, we can characterize Apollonius’ use of the simile as “laissez-faire” meaning production. Given this difference from Homer, it is easy to see why the Argonautica has suffered by comparison with the “classic line,” despite the fact that it was immensely popular in antiquity. The centrifugal impulse, the resistance to closure and containment of meaning, has led critics to claim that the Argonautica is less unified than its Homeric counterparts; that it is “anti-heroic,” and a “failed epic”; that it is “merely romantic,” and “escapist”; or that it is “decadent” and “novelistic.”²⁸ But unlike Homer, Apollonius would have been able to recognize these value judgments as grounded in aesthetic suppositions which are only relative.