To win the golden fleece, Jason must yoke two fire-breathing bulls in a single day. Medea, the king's daughter, knows every drug that grows in Colchis, and she has just fallen in love with him.
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The Argonautica follows the Argo from Greece to Colchis, at the far end of the Black Sea, and home again with the golden fleece. Book 3 is its heart. Aphrodite sends Eros to shoot Medea, the king's daughter and a priestess of Hecate, and she spends a sleepless night torn between her father and the stranger. In the morning she meets Jason at Hecate's temple and gives him a salve made from a flower that sprang up where the blood of the tortured Prometheus dripped onto the Caucasus. Rubbed on his body, it keeps fire and bronze from harming him for one day. The press starts with Book 3. Nothing is readable here yet; support it and it will be.
Apollonius worked in Alexandria in the 3rd century BC and was for a time head of its great Library. Ancient biographies say the poem was poorly received at its first reading and that he left for Rhodes, which is how he came to be called 'of Rhodes'. Virgil drew heavily on Book 3 when he wrote Dido's love for Aeneas.
Few ancient poets spend this long inside a young woman's head. As Medea lies awake, her heart jumps like a sunbeam thrown off water in a pail, darting about the walls of a room. Her drug gets a botanist's description: a flower the color of saffron on twin stalks, with a root that looks like freshly cut flesh.
Making an interlinear The Argonautica is real work: freezing a scholarly source text, aligning every word to its dictionary form, glossing what resists translation, and proofing it all to a hard quality bar. Pressing a book is how that work gets funded. When enough readers press it, Book 3: Medea gets made, and then it is free to read forever, for you and for everyone who comes after.
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