Is there a connection between the success or failure of a text and the success or failure of its central protagonist? To answer this question, I shall explore the issue of ‘heroism’ in Apollonius’ Argonautica, a constant bugbear of modern scholarship, especially in its attempts to determine Jason’s suitability and success as a leader of the Argonautic crew. While he was once commonly lambasted as a weak figure (e.g. Wright 1932, Bowra 1933), recent scholarship has found many ways to rehabilitate Jason as a worthy hero of Apollonius’ epic: his journey imitates that of an ephebic rite of passage (Hunter 1988), his qualities reflect the ideal attributes of fourth-century kingship (Sandridge 2005), and his characteristics embody the qualities of Apollonius’ new modern epic, in contrast to Heracles, who reflects the outmoded nature of Homeric and cyclic epic (Heerink 2010). Jason has, in short, been transformed from a failure into a success.
In this paper, I propose to explore these shifting perceptions of Jason and set the increasingly optimistic assessment of his character in the context of the re-evaluation of the Argonautica as a piece of literature. Once the Argonautica was no longer regarded as “a magnificent failure” (Wright 1932), but recognised as a sophisticated epic, its protagonist could no longer be dismissed as a failure either: he too had to be redeemed. The assessment of text and protagonist thus seem inextricably intertwined. After tracing these developments, I shall conclude by exploring their consequences for our approaches to ancient literature: does the assessment of a character really have to follow that of its text, and for a text to be successful, does it really need a successful protagonist? Ultimately, is failure a problem that has to be explained away at any cost to justify a text’s or a character’s worth?