Eros and the poetics of violence in Plato and Apollonius

This chapter examines the role of violence in Apollonius Rhodius' Argonautica, a unique epic known for its ambition to combine the genre's typical ratification of the use of violence with Hellenistic literary sensitivities. Medea's violent transformation has been typically discussed in scholarship in relation to her characterisation in Euripides' Medea. The chapter then explores Medea's aggressive passion as Apollonius' response to the Platonic ethics of violence. Apollonius describes Eros' attack on Medea with two striking images: Eros wounds the Colchian princess with his arrows as a skilful archer, but is also compared to a gadfly that attacks heifers. The latter image which evokes readily the tale of Io, the Argive maiden who was transformed into a heifer and was relentlessly pursued by a gadfly until she yielded to Zeus' sexual aggression, was also employed by Plato in his Phaedrus to refer to the compulsive frenzy that overwhelms the lover.