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VALERIUS
sense to Valerius' detriment, for few would be prepared to dispute the innate
superiority of the Greek poet. To have to contend for laurels not only with
Virgil but also with Apollonius is Valerius' misfortune: add further the epic's
incompletion and the total of disadvantages is formidable.
Apologists have nonetheless existed. One of Valerius' earliest champions,
H. E. Butler, though admitting faults, held that he ' offends less than any of the
silver Latin writers of epic', for 'he rants less and exaggerates less; above all
he has much genuine poetic merit*. Butler saw that, in his choice of subject,
Valerius faced difficulties: 'The Argonaut saga', he wrote, 'has its weaknesses
as a theme for epic. It is too episodic, it lacks unity and proportion. Save for
the struggle in Colchis and the loves of Jason and Medea, there is little deep
human interest.' Compensation could, however, be found in 'variety and brilliance
of colour', in 'romance' and 'picturesqueness'. 1 For some, the Argonautica
has emerged primarily as a romantic epic, an adventure story, threading its
way from incident to incident — a form predicated by its kinship with the
periplus, the narrative of a coastal or circumnavigatory voyage. The first four
lines perhaps bear out such an interpretation:
Prima deum magnis canimus freta peruia nautis,
fatidicamque ratem, Scythici quae Phasidis oras
ausa sequi mediosque inter iuga concita cursus
rumpere, flammifero tandem consedit Olympo. (I.I—4)
/ sing of straits crossed first by the heroic offspring of gods, of the vessel with power
to prophesy that dared the quest to the shores of Scythian Phasis and plunged headlong
through the midst of the clashing rocks, at length finding its seat in the fiery
heaven.
At first sight, the words seem almost naively functional: but there may be
hidden depths in them. The idea of a voyage through hazards to a celestial
reward suggests both the metaphor of human life as a journey and of the earth
as a ship with mankind as its crew: it is worth remembering that in antiquity
the myth of the Argonauts was used in an 'Orphic', allegorical context. The
crew of the Argo are denominated in 1 as heroes of divine ancestry; man and
god are brought into juxtaposition. Valerius, compared to Apollonius, augmented
the role of deities in his epic, stressing their influence over terrestrial
events. The first word, prima, may •well imply that the Voyage of the Argonauts
is to be regarded as archetypal and revelatory. In such terms, the
supposedly ornamental epithet fatidica applied to the Argo — although it
alludes to a famous feature of the ship — gains an added significance. Scythian
Phasis and the Cyanean Rocks are determinate synonyms for barbarism and
violence, for obstacles in the path of life, only to be overcome by struggle and
1 Butler (1909) 190—1.
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