Hello, this is Let's Talk About Midsbaby

and I am your host, live here after all this time with another reading series for our Friday episodes

So the plan here is I will still be releasing conversation episodes quite often

actually I have a bunch lined up and a bunch already in the can

it's really very exciting but they're also a lot more work so they will be interspersed with whatever kind of reading episodes I can provide for you guys

which is also just frankly fun for me I really love reading this fun stuff whenever I can find good public domain translations

which is the key and also often the stumbling point for me but we are starting today our first post-homer non-homeric hymn with Apolognesus the Argonautica

the epic poem telling the story of Jason and the Argonauts and the quest for the Golden Fleece

it is from about the third century and as I understand it is one of if not the only Hellenistic epic we have

that is an epic from the Hellenistic period after Alexander the Great

we will be breaking up these readings into sections within the books because unlike the Iliad and the Odyssey

these books are very very very long and the recordings would be too long

frankly too long for me to just read at one time and too long for you all

so we'll be splitting them up into maybe two or three sections per book depending on how long the recordings end up being

also a fun thing about this epic poem is that theoretically it takes place before the Trojan War

and so you have a lot of characters that come before that war and are the parents of people in that war

and it comes to the reading of the Iliad you might recognize when I used to have to say you know like this person son of this person

you're hearing the father's names now which is kind of fun including even like Pellius who is Achilles' father

now a quick note about that that I've thought of it there are two characters in this play Pellius and Pellius

P-E-L-I-A-S is the bad guy who assigns the quest and P-E-L-E-U-S is the hero who goes on the quest and is Achilles' father

I will try to pronounce the names differently enough but it might be weird

this is the Argonautica by Apollonius translated by R.C.C.

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