The hellenistic geography of the Black Sea region in the myth of the argonauts
Nella, Athena
The approach to the geographical theme of the Argonautica has not been very popular so far. There are two main reasons in my opinion: firstly, the geographical texts that are left are mainly in fragments, therefore, in many cases the information are not enough to help in research and in drawing conclusions from it, and secondly, only recently has the history of Hellenistic geographical literature gained the interest of the scholars. For that reason, the bibliography is not adequate and only now is enriched. The main argument of this dissertation was if we could connect the Argonautica with the geography of the Black Sea and if the places and the tribe names mentioned in the epic really existed. The result coming from the dissertation is that of course we can connect the poem with that specific region, since there are a lot of places, as well as tribes, that were really located there. The possibility that a ship could do the voyage through the places of the route given by Apollonius, which is another argument of the dissertation, is that the route could be followed up to a point. However, the poet exaggerates when referring to navigable rivers, that in reality did not have the location in the poem and cannot be navigated at all. Lastly, the dissertation shows how the Argonautica helps in understanding the geography of the Black Sea, since it provides us with information that is either personal knowledge of the poet or information taken from sources (historians, geographers), that could be assumed as more reliable. Of course, the basic thing that should be done in case we want a scientific result, is that we take all the mythological and poetical elements of the epic away.
