Oral Tradition and Hellenistic Epic: New Directions in Apollonius of Rhodes

Abstract

Any investigation of oral tradition in Hellenistic literature immediately runs up against two longstanding interpretive frameworks that have not only defined the nature of Greek literature during this period (roughly 323-30 BCE), but also seem a priori to cut off the possibility of oral traditional influence. The first is the idea of a radical separation: as refugees in northern Egypt, poets such as Callimachus, Apollonius of Rhodes, and Theocritus were cut off—temporally and culturally, as well as geographically—from the native springs that inspired the poets and other writers of archaic and classical Greece. These later authors, conscious of an epochal break between themselves and the great writers of the past, were still the heirs of a tradition, but by then a decidedly literary tradition, fixed in the texts on deposit in the Library of Alexandria. The image of the Library leads us to the second paradigm: the daunting bookishness of Alexandrian poetry. Little need be said about the self-consciously sophisticated, highly allusive, and scholarly nature of Hellenistic poetry; one need only read a hymn of Callimachus or a few lines of Lycophron to understand its essentially textual nature. The combination of these fundamental and mutually reinforcing interpretive frameworks produced, in the title of Bing's important study (1988), a well-read Muse, under whose patronage "poetry . . . for the first time became grounded— institutionally—in the written word" (15). This standard view has important consequences for our reading of the lone Alexandrian epicist whose work survives in full, Apollonius of Rhodes. The resurgence of scholarly interest in the Argonautica has largely overlooked any connections between that poem and oral tradition, preferring instead to explore the epic's exquisite webs of literary allusion; or matters of character, especially the elusive character of Jason; or the place of the Argonautica in contemporary Alexandrian poetic debate (a perilous subject). Recently, however, a few scholars, most notably Robert Albis and Martijn