An examination of the Anatolian sources of Greek theogonic traditions, syncretistic myths that took shape in admixed Ur-Aeolian–Luvian communities in the Late Bronze Age, and descendent Aeolian assemblages of mythic and cult elements that persist into the Iron Age. Essential to many of these traditions is the presence of honey, especially honey having psychotropic properties of a sort that occurs naturally along the southern and eastern shores of the Black Sea.

Ecphrasis, as we saw in Chapter 4, is a characteristic feature of the enargeia of epic, but there is one case in which an expected ecphrasis is conspicuous for its absence. The Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes tells the myth of Jason, Medea, and the Argonauts, already encountered in Chapter 2. The Golden Fleece, one of the most famous supernatural objects in all mythology, calls for a detailed description, but Apollonius does not provide one. Films that retell the myth must, however, show it. Hence the concept of neo-mythologism, a useful term coined by director Vittorio Cottafavi: an original work based on myth must be changed for its visual adaptation. The chapter reviews and interprets the different appearances of the Golden Fleece in romantic adventure films (Hercules, The Giants of Thessaly, Jason and the Argonauts), art-house cinema (Medea, The Golden Thing), Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion animation, and computer-generated images.

This chapter charts the knowledge of Apollonius Rhodius shown in imperial Greek literature, where there are fewer references in prose writers than might be expected for so prominent a poet, but much exploitation of his language by hexameter poets, above all by Dionysius Periegetes.

A simile in an ancient Greek or Roman epic poem uses the simile form “A is like B” to frame a brief tale about something outwardly unrelated to the poem’s main story. The simile structure asserts a kinship between two things that come from different conceptual domains. Similes tell highly concentrated immersive stories, which invite the reader to experience and not simply to observe the described situation. To do justice to epic similes, they should be studied both within the immediate narrative contexts in which they appear and within the many webs of meaning that they create. Some of these are found within a single poem, while others emerge across multiple poems over time. A detailed reading of Apollonius Argonautica 2.121–29, which compares a fight between the Argonauts and the Bebrycians to wolves stealthily attacking a flock of sheep, sets out the common features of shepherding similes, the ways that similes tell their stories, and the style and approach of the book’s argument. Shepherding similes embody several relationships that bring out a range of themes fundamental not simply to all the poems in this book, but to any exploration of the human experience.