Join us Tuesday, March 28 for our first Classics Colloquium of the Spring! Dr. Jonathan Reeder, Visiting Assistant Professor of Classics here at the University of Iowa, will be giving a talk titled “Characterization and Heroic Inspiration in the Argonautica of Apollonios of Rhodes” at 5 p.m. in 101 Becker Communication Studies Building.

The heroic qualities of Jason in Apollonios’s Argonautica have been questioned in scholarship from a number of angles. The goal of this talk is to challenge the view that Jason is an inferior epic hero and to propose a new reading of the characterization of Jason. Lexical and thematic analyses of divine inspiration in the epic reveal Jason to be a hero in the mold of his Homeric forebearers, distinguished by formidable cognitive ability.