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Focusing on Charles Burney's 1772 central European journey to collect material for a general history of music, this chapter shows how travel and musical mapping were co-opted for the making of a German cultural imaginary. It transnationalizes Bourdieu's notion of symbolic capital to show how national cultural identities were mobilized via the figure of the traveler. It was the traveler who was authorized to traverse liminal spaces, compare cultural systems, and exercise aesthetic judgments. German scholars like Christoph Daniel Ebeling, Johann Nicolaus Forkel, and Johann Friedrich Reichardt saw the Englishman's journey as an opportunity to reprioritize German over French and Italian music, and thereby contribute to a German Kulturnation. Yet Burney preferred a protosociological approach to the study of music and this helps explain his negative reception in Germany. The dispute between Burney and the Germans highlights the problems with an epistemology of music based on travel: the unreliability of the musical informant and the social and political uses of music did not ultimately cohere with the kinds of music-immanent criteria upon which the German scholars' project depended.

This chapter demonstrates that Valerius depicts the battle between the Doliones and Argonauts in Cyzicus as a terrestrial Gigantomachy. Gigantomachic motifs are used to distinguish the good from the evil, as the Doliones play the role of anti-Jovian Giants who are out of step with the new world order being inaugurated by Argo's voyage. Valerius also portrays the battle as a civil war, and he does so partly by drawing on a semantic code developed by Lucan for describing the horror of civil strife. However, given Valerius' strategy of employing gigantomachic image-complexes in order to disambiguate the opposing sides, what ensues is a very un-Lucanian civil war. This represents a recuperative return to the normative thrust of the Gigantomachy model, which had been undermined by Lucan. For Valerius civil war can thus be a catalyst for positive historical change.

The account of the Argonauts’ launching of the Argo and departure from Iolkos in Greece in the first half of Book 1 establishes Greece as spatially and conceptually central in the poem, and the Argo as embodying normative Greek culture. The catalogue of Argonauts relates each of them to his home and gives each place a story connected with him. It progresses systematically around the Greek mainland and so links these places together to produce a Greek space that will exert a centripetal pull in the poem, a space of the heroes of Greek tradition. The scene of movement from city to shore emphasizes the significance of home. Scenes on the beach, where land and sea meet, are paradeigmatic of Greek society: the cooperative work of launching the Argo, the apportionment of rowing benches, which brings together traditional and contemporary models of Greek society, and the peaceful resolution of a quarrel, which provides a model of social harmony. The Argo and its company are thus an idealizing microcosm of Greek society. The episode at Lemnos is discussed as threatening the expedition by a confusion of categories that anticipates later events.

This chapter focuses on the depiction of Ariadne in Catullus 64. Catullus' sixty-fourth poem is an extraordinary work, which takes the form of the Hellenistic epyllion, already a subtly sophisticated sub-genre, and pushes it to its limits. In this poem, Catullus inverts again a genre characterized by inversion to make contact once more with conventionally epic elements through his treatment of the myth of the Argonauts, whilst preserving neoteric contact with the feminine in the form of the Ariadne ecphrasis. This 213-line section (which takes up just over half of the poem) is also one of the most important, and most sensitive, treatments of the story of Ariadne in classical literature. It was recognized as a formative influence by later Latin poets not only for their own versions of Ariadne's story, but even for their portrayal of other characters, such as Vergil's Dido and Ovid's Scylla.

The Golden Era's youthful founders, Rollin M. Dagget, who was only nineteen years old when he arrived on the Coast, and J. MacDonough Foard, who was only twenty-one, had followed Horace Greeley's own advice: “Go West, young man!” The phenomenal success of their attempt to spread enlightenment on such matters as education, literature, and the fine arts through the Era's columns, beginning in 1852, when the infant city could not yet supply itself with even the common necessities of life, was indicative of that hunger for all the arts and refinements of civilization which inspired the Argonauts almost as much, it would seem, as the quest for gold. “To encourage virtue and literature” had been one of the announced objectives of the founders of the Bear Flag Republic in 1846. Certain it is that “virtue and literature”—and art, and learning, and architecture—have received rare encouragement in the cities around San Francisco Bay.

Of all the arts San Franciscans have practiced, the one they have most nearly perfected is the art of living, but hedonism is only one of the elements of which San Francisco's civilized social tradition is compounded. Not without reason did the Argonauts boast that no coward ever started for California and no weakling ever got there. The Gold Rush was composed almost entirely of young men, many in their teens, with a lust for adventure as strong as their lust for fortune. In this adventurers' paradise, ladies of joy reveled in a degree of latitude rarely heard of in the history of America. Any talents used to entertain the public were handsomely appreciated. Dr. D. G. Robinson, part-owner of the Dramatic Museum, was elected alderman in 1851 to reward him for the pleasure he had given by renditions of his “Random Rhymes.”

This chapter includes the commentary on books 13 to 15 of Ovid's Metamorphoses. It cites the Pagasae, which was a town on the borders of Magnesia and Thessaly where the Argo was built, and Colchis, which was the destination of the Argonauts. The Tyrrhenian is a Greek word for those called 'Tuscan' or 'Etruscan' by the Romans, which was then given to name the sea between Italy and Sardinia. It also mentions Circe's father, the Sun, who had seen the adultery of Aphrodite (Venus) and Ares (Mars) and had informed her husband Hephaestus (Vulcan). Ovid makes no mention of Croton's death, but he agrees that Hercules had reason to honour him.

What happened to the French Argonauts who traveled to California? The large numbers of French Argonauts who came to California in response to the gold discoveries consisted of varied groups—members of several California companies and local companies; independent voyagers; veterans of the Garde Mobile; and lingotiers. Few of these remained in California. In fact, after a wide range of experiences and mixed success and failure, most of them returned to France. The French Argonauts were not greeted back home by cheering crowds. Most first-person accounts pay little attention to the return home.

The myth of Jason and the Argonauts, preserved in two extant epics by Apollonius and Valerius Flaccus, has inspired a number of films. This chapter builds on the discussion of Homer by exploring how two Jason and the Argonauts films engage with the Argonautica epics, and key themes such as narrative structure (the distinction between epic, romance, tragedy, and adventure) and the depiction of the Olympian gods. These epic narratives, in both literature and film, question and reassess epic conventions in important ways, as the chapter's discussion of Jason's heroism shows.

This chapter illustrates that ancient religious rituals (euocatio and translatiodeorum), connected with war or motivated by other situations of crisis in the life of Roman republican society, play a significant role and influence the imagery of imperial literary culture. In its self–conscious effort to win primacy over the Augustan poets (especially Virgil), Flavian epic displays particular interest in recalling such traditional paradigms indirectly and with sophisticated taste, more than indulging in a purely antiquarian recuperation. The poems of Silius and ValeriusFlaccus offer large and variegated evidence: the curious reversal of an euocatio (Minerva asks Diomedes to take her in the future site of Rome); Hannibal’s vain attempts to imitate the Roman ‘imperialistic’ custom of appropriating alien gods; Medea’s characterisation as a goddess who undergoes a peculiar sort of translatio from East to West, in a way reminiscent of Minerva herself or Magna Mater.

This chapter examines Catullus' poems 63 and 64 in order to see the learned allusions used in the poem. Catullus is known for not relying on learned allusions, making him famous in several Latin courses, but he makes a definite exception in his poems 63 and 64. In poem 64, he uses several allusions that mislead readers, such as when he appears to make allusions about Jason and the Golden Fleece, while in fact actually alluding to Thesseus – one of the members of the Argonauts. In the same poem, Catullus wrote about the plight of Ariadne, who is abandoned by her lover Thesseus but is saved by the god Bacchus in the end passage – showing his inversion of what seems to be a tragedy but a happy ending instead.

In the Histories, the fourth-century historian Ephorus engages with one of the central aetia of the past: the story of how Apollo founded the oracle in Delphi (F 31b). Ephorus shifts the emphasis from the continuity of archaic time to the more dynamic time of the history of men on earth. In his discussion of the Spartan constitution and its origin (F 149), Ephorus uses aetia to give a nuanced picture of the interplay of continuity and change in human affairs. Callimachus, in the story of Acontius and Cydippe in his Aetia, juxtaposes the reference to the continuity of Acontius’ line with the eventful history of Acontius’ island of Chios, thus raising the question how stable the aetion can actually be. Rather than the aetiological formula, the beauty of the young couple, made immortal in Callimachus’ poetry, guarantees the story’s eternity. In Callimachus’ Hymn to Apollo, aetia are prominent in creating an intense moment of the sacred presence of the god, in which the present moment of the performance is just as much involved as the historical past of the city of Cyrene and the mythical past of Apollo’s deeds on earth. The aetia employed in Apollonius Rhodius’ Argonautica function as hinges between the earlier foundational deeds of the Olympian gods and the new earth-bound time-frame of the Argonauts, which is carefully measured out in terms of the days and nights the Argonauts spend at sea or on land. Overall, however, the aetia of the Argonautica emphasize continuity and eliminate further change, creating a present that is remarkably stable, while being anchored in several layers of the past

In this first chapter investigating the golden ages of heroes, Tomasso examines how nostalgia for the mid-twentieth century golden age of peplum (“sword and sandal”) films, which inspired the heroic “golden age” world of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys (1995–9), is redoubled in “Once a Hero” (Episode 2.14, 1996). In staging a second voyage to re-claim the Golden Fleece, the episode presents Hercules as a guide for the demoralized Jason’s recuperation of his masculinity and status as the titular hero, in the wake of his ex-wife Medea’s killing of their two children and the mysterious disappearance of the Golden Fleece. In defining heroism within the scope of the series’ interpretation of the classical golden age, the episode highlights the challenge of reconciling the regressive sexual politics inherent in the peplum genre with the “girl power” Zeitgeist of 1990s American society and culture. On the one hand, the episode leans into the traditional villainization of Medea as a femme fatale; on the other, it also presents an invented character, Phoebe, who earns her own place as a hero among the Argonauts.

A symbol of disorientation par excellence, the Cretan Labyrinth has become an emblematic image of Catullus’s longest extant work, his “epyllion,” poem 64, on the marriage of Peleus and Thetis. Chapter 4 argues that due to this depiction and others like it of wandering and roaming in the spaces of Rome’s ever-growing empire, Catullus’s oeuvre represents the culminating example of the Republican poets’ interest in becoming lost as a theme related to expansion. After tracking the theme in the fragmentary “neoteric” poets Cinna, Calvus, Caecilius, and Varro of Atax, this chapter proceeds via a series of specific Catullan examples. In poem 22, Catullus underscores the disorientation of the erring self as a special concern by calling attention to each person’s self-delusional error (20). Catullus depicts a disorienting epic-style journey to Asia Minor, a site of Roman expansion, in another “epyllion” on the eunuch priest of Cybele, Attis (poem 63). Poem 61 represents the roaming, androgynous marriage god Hymen as responsible for producing youths to guard Rome’s imperial borders. The wandering course of the Argonauts in poem 64 again directs attention toward Rome’s imperial ambitions in the Greek East, while the fearful errores of the Cretan Labyrinth link the myth of Theseus to the Argonautic story so as to make wandering an ambiguously unifying theme of the poem as a whole. Such geographical movements become unstable analogs in Catullan verse for internal transitions from love to hate, erotic and familial attachment to isolation and abandonment, and even male to female.

The Odyssey poet knew and drew upon the Iliad, Hesiod, and some Ionian elegy and iambus. He was familiar with much of the subject matter of the Epic Cycle, and he knew poetry about Heracles’ exploits and an epic on the Argonauts’ voyage, from which he adapted several episodes to extend Odysseus’ adventures. His references to Sicily, Egypt, Libya, and Phoenician traders, and his evident priority relative to certain of the Homeric Hymns, establish the dating of the Odyssey to the last third of the seventh century BCE.

The poet’s treatment of his material is here analysed. He filled out the picture of Odysseus’ family and environment; invented the journey of Telemachos as a means of sketching in the returns of other heroes from Troy as a background to Odysseus’; inflated the number of Penelope’s suitors and the duration of Odysseus’ wanderings, which he augmented from the Argonaut saga. The visit to Hades, Calypso, the Phaeacian episode, Odysseus’ homecoming and strategy against the suitors, and the events of Book 24 each receive separate discussion. Many passages are identified as expansions made by the poet in earlier drafts of his narrative.

An exploration of the geographic and hydrographic features of the Bosporus strait, and the ways in which they impacted on the lives of the inhabitants of Byzantium. This chapter investigates how the currents, winds, and dangerous, winding shores of the Bosporus made it possible to tax or to exploit the strait. It also, in this connection, uses Dionysius of Byzantium’s treatise of the region to recreate a vivid tableau of mythological and epichoric traditions which bound the various villages and communities along the shores of the Bosporus together.

The Introduction begins by briefly summarizing the remaining chapters. After a prefatory section, it examines the word nostos and cognates. A long section on nostos in Greek literature and history pays special attention to the Argonauts and to Xenophon’s Ten Thousand, and seeks to fill other gaps in the coverage of the remaining chapters. A section on exile and return from it, and the special vocabulary it attracted, is followed by a Conclusion: were nostoi always happy?