“Beginning with you, Phoebus, I will recount the deeds of the heroes of old.”
Argonautica 1.1
Apollonius headed the library at Alexandria before retiring to Rhodes. His Argonautica retells the quest for the Golden Fleece across four books, deliberately answering Homer rather than imitating him.
Its greatest invention is Medea: a young woman who betrays her family for Jason, and is dissected from the inside as she does it. Virgil read the poem closely, and the Dido episode of the Aeneid is built on it.
Legacy
It carried epic into the Hellenistic age and shaped both Virgil's Aeneid and the later European treatment of Medea.