SOURCE: "Argonautica and Aeneid," in The "Argonautica" of Apollonius: Literary Studies, Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 170-89.

In the following excerpt, Hunter examines how Virgil incorporated the Argonautica into his Aeneid as a source of motifs and as a model for poetic techniques.

The study of how the Argonautica is exploited in the Aeneid has a long, and occasionally distinguished, history.¹ That it has not advanced further than it has is due to a number of factors, most notably the relative paucity of serious literary critical work on Apollonius' epic; until we have learned to appreciate the Argonautica, we can hardly expect to understand how Virgil read it and used it. Moreover, too much of what has been written on this subject—particularly by critics whose primary interest is in the Aeneid—betrays a depressing unwillingness to take the Greek poem seriously, indeed often to read all of it...