War and Love in Valerius Flaccus’ Argonautica

The idiosyncratic co-existence of love and war not only stands as a peculiar feature of Valerius’ rewriting of the Argonautic myth, but also offers a privileged vantage point in order to evaluate the poem’s relationship with the whole epic tradition, namely its attitude to negotiate a place between its ‘exemplary model’ (Apollonius’ hellenistic epic on the voyage of the Argo) and its influential ‘code models’ (Virgil’s Aeneid above all, but also Homer’s Iliad).