Geographical Names in Valerius Flaccus' "Argonautica"
The epic poem Argonautica, written by the Roman poet Valerius Flaccus some time between 69 and the late 80s CE, tells the story of the world's first ship, the Argo, and the 50 Greek heroes, the Argonauts, who sailed on her to reclaim the Golden Fleece.
In most of the maps below, you can click on the place markers for additional information about each location. Access a legend by clicking on this symbol whenever it appears in the lower left corner
There are two major battles in the epic, one at Cyzicus, on the Propontis (today's Sea of Marmara), and one at Colchis (in modern Georgia), on the far edge of the Black Sea.
At Cyzicus, all those fighting against the heroes are from that city, but at Colchis, fighters on both sides have come together from far afield, to aid in a civil war between brothers (King Aeetes and Perses).
In both battles, however, many of the fighters' names are closely connected with geographical locations elsewhere in the known world.
The purpose of this storymap is to visualize the possible or definite geographical referents of those names and consider what conclusions, if any, we may be able to draw from their localization and clustering. My original theory was that the suggestive confluence of many disparate geographical places into a single location, especially at Colchis, would add to a sense of cosmic disarray that is fundamentally present in the poem overall (see, e.g., Krasne 2018); whether or not this is borne out by the data is, I now think, a matter of interpretation.
Some maps below allow for further exploration of the data; a discussion of the methods used in gathering the data follows the presentation of the material. ( Click here to jump there directly. )
Similarity of Names to Places
While many fighters have names that precisely match a place name in the ancient world, others have names that are only suggestive, or are associated with a place (such as the eponymous founder of a city). Scholars have also proposed somewhat more tenuous connections with a number of place names, although I have not included in my dataset those that are generally considered implausible.
At Cyzicus, of the 34 fighters, 16 of those fighters (and/or one of their parents) have possibly-geographical names; of those, 11 names are identical to the name of one or more locations.
At Colchis, out of 81 fighters, 48 fighters and/or parents of fighters have a name that is suggestive of a geographical feature, and 26 of those are exact matches.
Ambiguity of Place Names
In addition to the difficulty of guaranteeing connections between a name and its homonymous (or suggestively similar) location, another complicating factor is the prevalence of certain names. Wherever a name could potentially refer to more than one place (due to either identical names or different possible referents), all possible options are shown on the maps, with identical markers. Many names have only one or two possibilities; but some have substantially more.
For instance, there is a fighter at Cyzicus named Glaucus (which means "greenish-grey" in Greek) and another at Colchis named Melas (which means "black"). These are both common names for rivers, as can be seen from the blue marks on this map (each is either a Melas River or a Glaukos River); but there's also no guarantee that these particular names were meant to refer to rivers at all.
Some names, however, are more unique.
Let's see how each battle looks when conceived of in geographical terms.
The next several map views present a few excerpts from each battle (in the Loeb translation by Mozley), with the present excerpt's "geographical" names displayed on the map.
The battle at Cyzicus
( The entire translation is available here. Click here for the original Latin of the passage.)
[3.95] Hereupon an ill-starred band of men began with a great shouting to hurl stones, pitchy brands, and the burden of the whirling sling; unmoved the troop endured the din, refraining their passion, until the first spate should have ebbed. Mopsus marked the glittering armour and Eurytus the looming bulk of Corythus, who halted in his stride. ... There fell Iron and Cotys and Bienor, a better man than his father Pyrnus. The wife of Genysus had taken away her husband’s weapons, when of a sudden he sees, beneath a gust, a live brand upon the hearth shine out; miserable man, thou art glad to find thy sword again.
( Click here for the original Latin of the passage.)
[3.148] ... Huge Phlias finds Ochus, while Pollux dashes against the trembling Hebrus. The captain himself, lord of the field and of the battle, sweeps over heads and bodies wallowing in gore, like some black storm over the deep; Zelys and Brontes and Abaris he leaves half-dead; ‘tis Glaucus he pursues; Glaucus falls, and he is on him, he deals him a wound that gashes his throat. Glaucus to oppose him grips the weapon, and gasping forth his last helpless words sees the planted javelin sink in and in. Thence as he passes he cuts down Halys with cruel blade, then Protis and Dorceus, famed for his harping and tuneful song, who after Bistonia’s mighty son dared to accompany men’s banquets with his melodious lyre.
At the banquet before the battle at Colchis
( The entire translation is available here. Click here for the original Latin of the passage.)
[5.576] Jason too seeks to learn about the war so passionately aroused and the array of friendly princes: “Who is that hero yonder, girt with a studded belt, and near him a squire with drawn bow, as though preparing battle and to bring havoc on the ordered tables?” In answer spake the Persean offspring of the flaming Sun: “’Tis Carmeius of whom thou askest; it is his custom ever to have his weapon ready, ever to be mindful of his quiver.” “Tell me of him likewise,” said Jason, “whose cloak is rough with embroideries, and whose curled hair exhales many a fragrant breath.” Glancing at him Aeetes tells his name also: “Rich Aron is he; not a horseman of his but scatters such saffron odours, not a man of his company but curls his tresses thus; yet despise not the man nor distrust his tended locks. Here is Campesus in tiger’s spoils; there Odrussa deep in his wine-cup; mark his breast with its broad growth of hair and the great beard that fouls the goblet.”
[5.593] The guest gazes at him in wonder, and at Iaxartes immoderate in bitter speech and violent tongue, flinging many a threat without regard of gods above or present Phoebus. But Aeetes in his turn says: “Those mighty taunts fly not in vain from his proud mouth, and he has a sword to match his words, nor by day or by night rests he from assiduous warfare. ... What if thou shouldst marvel at Latagus or river-born Choaspes? mark him drinking his charger’s blood: yet none the slower will he gallop when the reins are loosed. But were I to tell what troop, what standards follow each chieftain, ere that would the light disperse the humid shades.
The battle at Colchis
( The entire translation is available here . Click here for the original Latin of the passage.)
[6.189] ... Caspius bore away Aeaean Monaeses, grasping him by the hair; Colchians and Greeks alike follow him with missiles; he slays his foe and leaves the booty, but the dead man is no more heeded by his friends. Caresus strikes down Dipsas and Strymon who scatters wounds in concealment from a sling; he falls himself by the spear of Albanian Cremedon, and already is lost to view; chariots and squadrons sweep over him. Melas and Idasmenus strode forward; Melas first hurls his spear, but the light fir-shafts play both men false. Then they rush in with the sword; Melas gets home a swift blow on the bottom of the helm; the neck is shattered by the stroke. In the mêlée valour goes for naught: neither Ocheus nor Tyres know to whom they owe their fate. While Iron looks round at the whistling of an Argive spear, he receives a Pylian javelin in his flank.
Allies of Perses or Aeetes
We can also look at how the geographical names at Colchis are divided between warriors allied with King Aeetes and those allied with his brother Perses:
The geographically-derived names appear to be well-integrated with each other: if nothing else, for a civil war, this seems appropriate.
Concentration of Names
If there appears to be no pattern to the distribution of names used for Aeetes' and Perses' allies, the same does not appear to be entirely true of the names used for fighters at Cyzicus versus those used for fighters at Colchis. The two can be compared below by dragging the slider: the lefthand map shows the clustering of geographical names used at Cyzicus, while that on the right shows those used at Colchis. (N.B. The heat maps may not be visible in Safari; the static kernel density maps below are more or less equivalent.)
Heat maps of geographical name origins used at Cyzicus and Colchis.
However, despite the apparent clustering – around Greece and the Propontis for Cyzicus, and around the Propontis and the Caucasian region for Colchis – we could also attribute this to our better knowledge of place names in those regions, or even just the prominence of the name Melas for rivers in Greece. Additionally, the possible geographical referents of names used at Colchis span practically the entire oikoumene (the known and inhabited world).
The statistical concentrations of locations, approximated in the heat maps above, can be seen more accurately in the two kernel density analyses below. We might note that the clustering of Cyzican name locations on the west coast of Asia Minor and in Greece could reinforce interpretations of the battle between the Greek Argonauts and the people of Cyzicus as a civil war (see, inter alia, Manuwald 2015). As for the clustering and spread of the names at Colchis, as I commented at the outset, one could likely support a number of different arguments using this same data.
Kernel density analysis of name locations at Cyzicus (using Jenks natural breaks, six break points).
Kernel density analysis of name locations at Colchis (using Jenks natural breaks, six break points).
Explore the names' origins further!
The legend of this map is interactive: use it to control exactly what you see.
Methods
Data Collection
I began by entering each fighter's name from the two battle episodes into a pair of spreadsheets (which can be downloaded here: cyzicus_fighters.csv and colchis_fighters.csv ), including the first line of the poem in which the fighter is mentioned, any variant names they have in the manuscripts or due to emendation, and the name of their parent if given.
GIS data came from the Ancient World Mapping Center (AWMC) and Pleiades (with old versions of the river shapefiles that actually included the names of many rivers helpfully provided by Gabe Moss ).
To build my dataset of names and places in ArcGIS, I wrote several Python functions that allowed me to search through the Pleiades dataset using regex (since the spelling and transliteration of both fighter names and placenames is highly variable, with textual variants and emendations increasing the plurality of possible name-forms) and to add places and fighters to a dictionary, along with booleans indicating (among other details) whether a place was a river, whether their name exactly matched a place name, and so on. ( The entire Jupyter notebook for the project can be downloaded here. )
pleiades_df = pd.DataFrame.spatial.from_featureclass(fc_pp) pleiades_df.drop(['SHAPE'], axis=1, inplace=True) pdf_name_pid = pleiades_df.filter(['title','id']) pdf_name_pid["id"] = pdf_name_pid["id"].astype("Int64").astype("string") def find_place(df, col, pattern): result_df = df[df[col].str.contains(pattern,regex=True)] return result_df cyzicus_fighter_names = { 'cyzicus_fighter_id': [], 'pid': [], 'exact_match': [], 'river': [], 'parent': [], 'place_eponym': [], 'place_founder': [] } def add_cyz_fighter_geo(cyzicus_fighter_id, pid, exact_match=True, river=False, parent=False, place_eponym=False, place_founder=False, leader=False): cyzicus_fighter_names['cyzicus_fighter_id'].append(cyzicus_fighter_id) cyzicus_fighter_names['pid'].append(pid) cyzicus_fighter_names['exact_match'].append(exact_match) cyzicus_fighter_names['river'].append(river) cyzicus_fighter_names['parent'].append(parent) cyzicus_fighter_names['place_eponym'].append(place_eponym) cyzicus_fighter_names['place_founder'].append(place_founder) colchis_fighter_names = { 'colchis_fighter_id': [], 'pid': [], 'exact_match': [], 'river': [], 'parent': [], 'place_eponym': [], 'place_founder': [], 'leader': [] } def add_col_fighter_geo(colchis_fighter_id, pid, exact_match=True, river=False, parent=False, place_eponym=False, place_founder=False, leader=False): colchis_fighter_names['colchis_fighter_id'].append(colchis_fighter_id) colchis_fighter_names['pid'].append(pid) colchis_fighter_names['exact_match'].append(exact_match) colchis_fighter_names['river'].append(river) colchis_fighter_names['parent'].append(parent) colchis_fighter_names['place_eponym'].append(place_eponym) colchis_fighter_names['place_founder'].append(place_founder) colchis_fighter_names['leader'].append(leader) cyz_fi_df = pd.DataFrame.from_dict(cyzicus_fighter_names) col_fi_df = pd.DataFrame.from_dict(colchis_fighter_names)
An example of running the find_places() function.
In order to force ArcGIS to preserve the correct column types on import and export (since line numbers appear to be decimal numbers, and I likewise needed the Pleiades IDs to be strings, but ArcGIS tries to automatically detect the correct datatype), I included placeholder datatype-setting rows at the end of each CSV and each dataframe, which I subsequently deleted.
Apart from finding location names myself using the find_places() function, I used the various scholarly commentaries that exist on the relevant books (Baier 2001, Fucecchi 1997 & 2006, Liberman 1997 & 2002, Manuwald 2015, Spaltenstein 2004 & 2005, Wijsman 1996 & 2000) to ascertain what additional similarly-named places might exist, as well as the original publication on Valerius Flaccus' use of geography (Heeren 1899), from which many locations suggested elsewhere derive. This combined approach was fruitful: for instance, the Caucasian town Irona, suggested by several scholars as a parallel for the fighters Iron (a name that occurs at both Cyzicus and Colchis), is not in the Pleiades database (it is also only mentioned once in our surviving sources, in the Ravenna Cosmography ), while the river Carmeius (homonymous with a warlord at Colchis) is not mentioned by any of the commentators insofar as I could find. (However, it was not a minor river: a series of coins featuring the river god Karmeios, from about two centuries after Valerius, were issued by a Roman city, Hadrianopolis, near the river; an earlier Greek city was located nearby.) Very occasionally I had to do more extensive research when a place was known from literary sources but unknown elsewhere: the Asian waterfall Dipsus (mentioned by the poet Lucan) and the Thessalian river Onchestos (mentioned by the historiographer Polybius) are two examples (see Postgate 1917 and Pritchett 1969, respectively).
RPC VI, 5803 . A coin of Hadrianopolis showing the river god Karmeios.
After importing these data back into ArcGIS, I left-joined the new dataframe tables to the original two fighter name tables and then inner-joined those to the layer of Pleiades places, to create new layers of Colchis- and Cyzicus-specific Pleiades locations. (All of this, as well as some later styling, was done via the Jupyter notebook so that I could update layers as necessary without having to redo work.)
Data Emendation
The next step was to supplement and correct data from AWMC and Pleiades. The river shapefile that I had obtained contained the names of some rivers, as well as some Pleiades IDs for those rivers, but a number of rivers had only one or the other, as well as some connected line-segments lacking either name or Pleiades ID. (In some cases, rivers change name as they flow through regions, so one can't guarantee that all connected lines have the same name, but there were also lines sandwiched between two named pieces that were lacking identification.) I therefore added both names and Pleiades IDs wherever they could be determined; an updated shapefile of exclusively the named rivers can be downloaded here .
Some Pleiades locations were also misplaced, either compared with their locations in the Barrington Atlas or because the representative points for rivers did not fall along the actual line of the river. I adjusted these anywhere that I saw a misplaced point, as well as for all river points that were in my dataset.
Example of a misplaced Pleiades point.
Map Styling and Presentation
My hope was to allow a user to filter based on the various different attributes; however, it turns out that Interactive Legend, the ArcGIS instant app that I used to create the exploratory map above, only allows filtering on a single facet. Accordingly, I tried to present the main distinctions (fighter/parent of fighter; exact/inexact name match; alliances; etc.) visually, through shape, color, and transparency, in the other maps. I made other information available in the popup, using Arcade expressions when necessary; the most complicated of these was specifying who was killed by whom during the battle at Colchis, which required referencing another table entirely (since not all warriors are represented in the feature layer of geographic names):
var killer_id = iif($feature.killed_by == '', 'not killed', $feature.killed_by);
var colf_table = FeatureSetByName($map, 'VF_names_map_gdb - Colchis fighters',['col_fighter_id','name']);
var killer = Filter(colf_table, "col_fighter_id = @killer_id");
var killer_name;
for(var k in killer){
killer_name = iif(k.col_fighter_id == killer_id, k.name, $feature.killed_by)
}
return When($feature.killed_by == '', 'N/A',
killer_name == null, $feature.killed_by,
killer_name);Future Work
There are two main tasks that I want to pursue in the future. One is to roughly place as many of the unplaced locations as possible, using approximate speculative locations based on the Barrington Atlas Map-by-Map Directory (Talbert 2000b) and other sources. The other is to work with ArcGIS Dashboards to try and create an interface for filtering by multiple attributes. Together, these will allow for a more comprehensive view of the available data, both for myself and for others.
