Much as an ancient hymnist carries a familiar subject into new directions of song, the contributors to "A Californian Hymn to Homer" draw upon Homeric scholarship as inspiration for pursuing new ways of looking at texts, both within the Homeric tradition and outside it. This set of seven original essays, accompanied by a new translation of the Homeric "Hymn to Apollo," considers topics that transcend traditional generic distinctions between epic and lyric, choral and individual, performed and literary. Treating subjects ranging from Aeschylus' reception of Homeric anger to the representation of mantic performance within Early Islamic texts, the collection presents a selection of imaginative critical work done on the West Coast by scholars of antiquity.

The Argonautika narrates the adventures of Jason and his comrades, the Argonauts, when they sailed from Iolkos, in eastern Greece, on the ship Argo to acquire the Gold Fleece from King Aietes of Kolchis, at the far end of the Black Sea. Book 3 tells how they achieved their aim with the aid of the king's daughter, Medea, who fell in love with Jason, betrayed her father, and abandoned her homeland. Finally it relates the Argonauts' far-flung wanderings on their voyage home to Iolkos, during which Medea connived in the murder of her brother and became Jason's wife. This translation represents the rhythm of the original, a dactylic-hexameter meter like that of the poet's Homeric models, the Iliad and the Odyssey. This evocation of Homer's epics is important to the significance of the story and to the way readers understand the characters and the action of the poem. The rhythm also gives greater value to the pace of the narrative, the descriptions of places and events, and the extended Homeric similes. The music carries the reader pleasurably forward along with the voyage that it describes, especially if the epic is read aloud from time to time. The brief introduction should help readers understand the issues raised in this poem of the third century BCE, when its author Apollonios Rhodios was a scholar and librarian at the great library in Alexandria. But the epic itself provides all necessary contexts, and readers are encouraged to encounter it directly, not being overly concerned with precise mythical or geographical references. This is a work to be enjoyed, not sweated over.