Une épopée au féminin. La question des genres dans le livre III des Argonautiques d’Apollonios de Rhodes

Abstract

In the third Book of his Argonautica, Apollonius Rhodius deeply modifi es sexual stereotypes inherited from the archaic epic tradition in order to give a more important place and a more positive status to feminity. Important changes in the epic sphere and in the way of writing it result from this renewal of genders. Furthermore they are not to be read as a simple way to adapt the epic themes to the new political and social norms of the Hellenistic age but they are deliberately showed by the poet as part of the generic experimentations that distinguish his poem from the epic tradition considered as a mixed genre. However, as he programmatically announced it in the Lemnos episode in Book I, Apollonius also wonders about the validity of such experimentations and finally shows their limits.