The Argonautica

Jason sails east with a crew of heroes to seize the Golden Fleece from distant Colchis, and everything he wins there he owes to Medea, the king’s daughter, whose love and sorcery make the theft possible and set a tragedy in motion. Writing in the third century BC, Apollonius of Rhodes reshaped the old Argonaut legend into a learned epic threaded with geography, ritual, and a startlingly human attention to Medea’s divided heart. It is the only long Greek epic to survive from the centuries between Homer and Rome, and it left deep marks on Virgil. This edition carries Arthur S. Way’s verse translation. Free PDF and EPUB editions are available to download.