Phineus' Perpetual Night: Ovid, Metamorphoses 7.2-4, and Apollonius, Argonautica 2.178-497* by Brian D. McPhee Ovid severely truncates the voyage of the Argonauts in Book 7 of his Metamorphoses, focusing attention squarely on events in Colchis (7-156). The journey there is summarised in six elliptical lines (1-6), in which a single phrase, multa perpessi ('after enduring many trials', 5), stands in for most of the crew's adventures en route to Colchis. 1 The journey back is treated so succinctly that it is barely even acknowledged - in three lines, Jason successfully gains the fleece and, proudly bearing it off along with Medea, suddenly arrives in Iolcus (156-8)! 2 Only one non-Colchian episode from the Argonautic expedition barely survives Ovid's thoroughgoing abridgment of the myth: the Boreads' rescue of the blind seer Phineus from harassment by the Harpies (7 .1-6): Iamque fretum Minyae Pagasaea puppe secabant, perpetuaqu e trahens inopem sub nocte senectam Phineus visus erat, iuvenesque Aquilone creati virgineas volucres miseri senis ore fugarant, · I would like to thank William H. Race and Hann ah Sorscher for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Any remaining errors are my own . 1 Text of Ovid's Metamorphoses is taken from Anderson 1977; translations are my own. Kenney (2008, 364 with n. 9, 368) refers to Ovid's 'radical surgery on the plot as he found it in Apollonius' as an example of his recurrent technique of 'fast- forwarding ' through the necessary but thematically unimportant links in his narrative. 2 Anderson (1972 ad 7.155-8) notes that Ovid 'skip[s] over the wanderings of Jason (to which Apollonius devoted a quarter of his poem)' . Ovid thus anticipates much of the modern reception of Apollonius' Argonautica, in which appreciation of Book 3, with its subtle psychological portrait of Medea in Colchis, has so often crowded out that of Books 1-2 and 4 (see, e.g., Carspecken 1952, 37).