Valerius Flaccus’ Argonautica breaks off at a crucial and tantalising moment on the island of Peuce at the mouth of the Hister (Danube). With Medea’s assistance, Jason has managed to obtain the golden fleece and the Argonauts have departed Colchis for Greece with Medea in tow. Medea’s parents grieve her betrayal, and her brother Absyrtus assembles a Colchian force to pursue the Argo in hastily-constructed ships. Having taken an alternative route home to avoid revisiting the Symplegades (Jason and his crew are unaware that their first passage through the rocks has rendered them immobile), the Argonauts arrive on Peuce and hold an ill-omened wedding ceremony for Jason and Medea.

As Colchians approach, Jason’s men urge their leader to abandon his new bride in exchange for their safety, while Medea pleads with Jason to honour his vows to her. Juno’s intervention prevents the feared battle from ever taking place, and we never learn of the outcome of the competing appeals to Jason since Valerius’ narrative comes to an abrupt halt as Jason attempts to master his inner turmoil. The would-be participants in this skirmish are quick to frame their actions as responses to threats posed by hostile foreign enemies: the Argonauts and Colchians forget their earlier cooperation in the Colchian civil war, and both Medea and the Argonauts seek to ‘other’ one another in competing for Jason’s loyalty.

However, Valerius’ stress on the bonds of affiliation between the various parties within the Peuce episode and the Argonautica’s broader discussions of kinship and conflict suggest that the situation here is far more complex. Throughout the Argonautica, Valerius depicts varied forms of kinship—between family members, brothers in arms, and individuals or groups joined by alliances—as well as the consequences of violating such kinship, such as during the horrifying violence of the Lemnian women against their menfolk and the tragic unintentional battle between the Argonauts and their former hosts on Cyzicus. Therefore, by the time we come to Peuce, we are primed to recognise internal strife in various forms. Against this narrative backdrop, we come to see that the perception of the conflicts and discord which develop on Peuce by Valerius’ internal characters is at odds with what we as external readers may recognise.

This study proposes that we may understand the conflicts which play out on and around the island of Peuce—the interrupted Colchian attack, the discord within the Argonautic party between Medea and Jason’s men, and Jason’s own mental tumult—as examples of specifically civil or internal conflict. Valerius’ emphasis upon Jason and Medea’s wedding ceremony as a moment which cements a kind of kinship between the Argonauts and Colchians thus casts a more ominous civil shadow over Absyrtus’ attack and the response of Jason and his crew, while his wider presentation of the Argo’s crew as a ‘brotherhood’ and the framing of Medea as a socia somehow cast out from the Argonautic socii problematises the Argonauts’ attempts to distance themselves from Medea and Medea’s reluctance to see herself as part of the Argonautic group as each party pleads with Jason. By depicting these complex disputes alongside moments of stasis and cosmic dissolution—such as during the storm Juno sends to hinder the Colchian fleet and Jason’s mental impasse when torn between the demands of his men and his wife—Valerius evokes the civil war imagery of the wider Roman literary tradition. We are thus encouraged to recognise the ‘civil’ nature of these instances of strife and appreciate the fragility of different kinds of kinship whose failure risks the outbreak of destructive internal conflict.

The associated research – KIN CONFLICTS AND STASIS: CIVIL WAR ON PEUCE IN VALERIUS FLACCUS’ ARGONAUTICA – is out now open access in The Classical Quarterly.