The Men Who Would Be King: Basileos in the Argonautica

Amanda Regan (University of Michigan)

Recent work on the Argonautica has revealed it to be a uniquely Hellenistic epic, incorporating both Greek and Egyptian elements familiar to the bicultural audience of Alexandria (Stephens, 2003). While the potential for further work in this area is vast, this paper examines only a small portion of it: what kind of reading the qualities that bind the Argonautica’s four kings offers for the poem as a whole. For a βασιλῆος in Jason’s world is more than a mere leader of men: he reflects a particular aspect of the Hellenistic kings.

For all the leaders of men and women that Jason encounters throughout his journey, only four merit the title βασιλῆος: Pelias, who governs Iolchus; Amycus, the Bebrycian boxer-king; Aeetes, who rules the Colchians; and Alcinous, the Phaeacian king at Drepane. While Amycus, Aeetes, and Alcinous have each received consideration on their own (Bettenworth, 2003; Williams, 1996; Livrea, 1973), Pelias has been almost entirely neglected, and the four have yet to be considered as a cohesive group. That group takes shape around the parallels between two of the four kings. Though the similarities between Amycus and Aeetes have long been well attested (Rose, 1984), the similarities between Pelias and Aeetes are particularly striking: in addition to other strong parallels of character and circumstance, each king is suspicious of strangers, insecure about the stability of his own power, and possessed of a violent desire to cling to whatever he considers his – even when it properly belongs to someone else. Stationed as these kings are at the opposing sky poles of Jason’s world, the possibilities for interpretation intrigue. Though the reading of Colchis only as the barbarian east and Greece only as the civilized west has rightly been discarded for one of cultures entwined, the nuances of that reading have yet to be fully explored. The similarities shared by Pelias and Aeetes offer one such exploration: when it comes to Apollonian kingship, there is neither ‘Greek’ nor ‘other,’ merely ‘Hellenistic.’ Between these two kings the lines of cultural demarcation are not only fluid; they are nonexistent. Pelias and Aeetes may well rule the opposite ends of the earth, but in their qualities of character and circumstance Pelias and Aeetes are almost precisely the same kind of king. A look at third century Eastern and Mediterranean politics reveals the reason for this parallel: the concerns of both kings reflect those of the diadachoi, who not more than a generation before Apollonius’s epic took the title βασιλῆος for their own. An evaluation of the Argonautica’s other two kings affirms this interpretation; a survey of the leaders who do not merit the title enhances it. For while it is entirely true that the Argonautica crosses boundaries to construct an epic past for an Alexandrian present (Stephens, 2003), that border, once breached, does not allow only one side to bleed through: in the very construction of the past, it is impossible to keep the politics of Hellenistic kingship entirely separate from Jason’s world.