Abstract

When Apollonius' Argonautica began to reemerge as an epic worthy to be read as a classic in its own right in the 1960s and following, scholarly interest focused largely on topics such as the nature of the hero, narrative technique, limited scholarly audience, realism, the poem's engagement with archaic, classical, and contemporary texts, and its reception among later writers. In the 1990s, scholars began to examine the rehabilitated epic for evidence of possible engagement with contemporary political and cultural issues. Thalmann's new monograph builds upon this productive trend, offering a detailed analysis of the "space" defined by the Argonautic journey, "the medium through which it raises and probes those cultural questions". Cultural geography and anthropology inform the author's analytical method, according to which "human cultures do not just use space but produce it and are shaped in turn by it".