Aitia (Jul 2012)
Le palais d’Aiétès et son jardin chez Apollonios de Rhodes (Arg., III, v. 194-252). Un exemple de paysage-palimpseste antique ?
Abstract
When the reader of the third book of Apollonius of Rhodes discovers, in the course of the characters’ visual progression, the space of a Colchian “urban landscape”, s/he mentally creates a literary space made of Homeric recollections. The garden space seems composed of a bouquet of intertexts of endogenous nature, whereas the palatial architecture combines archaic structure with hellenistic ornamentation. So no trace of the exotic, but a space composed of typical Greek references. As a result of these literary references, the construction of palatial urban space borrows its own configuration from the type of poetic writing the epic poet himself solicits: re-writing. How else can one explain that the palace of Aeetes can be the image of a hellenistic Greek royal palace, the perfect image of an architecture that inscribes itself into a divine order? One should see here not only the reconfiguration, the concrete illustration through the archictecture and, consequently, the urban “landscape” of such an unusual hybrid character, as a result of the wish to reconcile East and West, but also, perhaps especially, the means of its implementation. The palace and garden would then only be a promise, an ideal prototype to be extended, on a large scale, over all of the Colchian land and the entire oekoumene.
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