During a stopover of the Argo in Mysia, the boy Hylas sets out to fetch
water for his companion Hercules. Wandering into the woods, he arrives
at a secluded spring, inhabited by nymphs who fall in love with him and
pull him into the water. Mad with worry, Hercules stays in Mysia to look
for the boy, but he will never find him again . . .
In Echoing Hylas, Mark Heerink argues that the story of Hylas-a famous
episode of the Argonauts' voyage-was used by poets throughout classical
antiquity to reflect symbolically on the position of their poetry in the
literary tradition. Certain elements of the story, including the
characters of Hylas and Hercules themselves, functioned as metaphors of
the art of poetry. In the Hellenistic age, for example, the poet
Theocritus employed Hylas as an emblem of his innovative
bucolic verse, contrasting the boy with Hercules, who symbolized an
older, heroic-epic tradition. The Roman poet Propertius further
developed and transformed Theocritus's metapoetical allegory by turning
Heracles into an elegiac lover in pursuit of an unattainable object of
affection. In this way, the myth of Hylas became the subject of a
dialogue among poets across time, from the Hellenistic age to the
Flavian era. Each poet, Heerink demonstrates, used elements of the myth
to claim his own place in a developing literary tradition.
With this innovative diachronic approach, Heerink opens a new dimension
of ancient metapoetics and offers many insights into the works of
Apollonius of Rhodes, Theocritus, Virgil, Ovid, Valerius Flaccus, and
Statius.
