The Argonautica

Jason, sent by his usurping uncle to bring back the Golden Fleece from Colchis at the far end of the Black Sea, gathers the greatest heroes of Greece, Heracles, Orpheus, the twins Castor and Polydeuces and many others, aboard the ship Argo. After adventures among the women of Lemnos, the Harpies and the clashing rocks, they reach Colchis, where the king's daughter Medea, struck by Eros, falls in love with Jason and uses her magic to help him win the fleece, before they flee together.

Apollonius of Rhodes, who headed the great Library of Alexandria in the third century BC, wrote the only Greek epic to survive from between Homer and the Roman age, and his portrait of Medea's passion influenced Virgil's Dido. This translation is by R. C. Seaton. Read Euripides's Medea and Virgil's Aeneid.