Authors

Greek

Apollonius of Rhodes

Apollonius of Rhodes was a Greek epic poet and scholar who served as chief librarian of the Library of Alexandria. His Argonautica — the only surviving Hellenistic epic — narrates the voyage of Jason and the Argonauts for the Golden Fleece with a self-conscious literary sophistication quite unlike Homer: the gods are remote, the heroes are psychologically complex, and the portrait of Medea falling in love with Jason is one of the great psychological studies in ancient poetry. He reportedly had a famous literary quarrel with his teacher Callimachus over the value of long poems.