D—
Æson's Home:
Portrait of the Departing Warrior (261–77)
As one can see in the schematic view of the action, the balanced departures and speeches set the portrait of Jason's farewell to his family in relief. In this chapter, differently from subsequent chapters, I have found it expedient to turn immediately to the center of this brief episode, where Apollonius has positioned the first in a series of connected allusions. The scene begins with the poet's striking description of an emaciated Æson, who can do little more than groan pitifully in reaction to his son's departure:
Now the many 
, 
, gathered,
and also the mother tightly embracing her child. This was a painful
sight for each of the women. In their midst , the father, in the
grip of
consumptive old age , keeping his bony frame tightly covered in
his bed ,
was moaning .
As commentators have recognized, Apollonius has in mind the description of Priam lamenting his son's death in Book 24 of the Iliad :[7]
She [sc. Iris] arrived at the home of Priam and came upon the
sound of moaning .
, seated around their father within the court
drenched their clothing with their tears while their old father lay in
their midst ,
keeping his bony frame tightly covered in his cloak ; there was much
dung around the head and neck of the old man,
which he had heaped upon himself as he rolled on the ground.
His 
and daughters-in-law were weeping throughout the
house,
recalling those who, many and noble,
lost their lives, slain at the hands of the Argives.
Like Priam, Æson sits wasting away from sorrow at the thought of his son's absence. In addition to the close rendering of Il. 24.162–63 at lines 263–64, since Apollonius makes Jason an only son (287b–89),[8] he has recast Hector's brothers and sisters as the male and female servants of Æson's house.[9] The evocative image thus asks the reader to compare the effect that Jason's departure has on Æson and his whole household with the grief experienced by Priam and his family over the death of Hector.[10] This is not
an isolated reference to the death of Hector and its effect on his family. Apollonius sustains and expands the equation between Hector's death and Jason's departure in what follows with a series of allusions to passages from the Iliad and Odyssey that pertain to this tragic event.
The poet immediately turns his attention from the decrepit Æson to the almost hysterical Alcimede. She holds on to her son, crying like a girl who clings to her aged nurse:
Just as his mother had at first thrown her arms around her child,
so she continued to hold him crying constantly, like a girl
who, alone in the world, falls gladly upon her elderly nurse
and sobs. She has no one else to care for her,
but leads a grievous life under a stepmother
who recently scolded her with many abusive taunts ;
as she weeps, her heart is imprisoned by her anguish
and she cannot release as much grief as wells up within.
In just this way 
was crying as she held her son in her
arms.
The little girl with whom Alcimede is compared in the simile lost her mother and now lacks any other sympathetic family members
to care for her.[11] Moreover, her father has remarried and does not prevent his new wife from heaping verbal abuse upon his own daughter.[12] The elderly nurse alone consoles the little girl, who is terrorized by stinging comments from her new maternal guardian. The words that Apollonius has chosen to express this verbal abuse ( 
, 273) recall what Andromache feared would happen to Astyanax once Hector was dead:[13]
A child, both his parents still alive, thrust him from the banquet,
striking him with his hands and scolding him with taunts :
"Get out of here in your condition! No father of yours shares in
our feast."
With tears in his eyes he returns to his widowed mother, the child
.
Overcome with anxiety, Andromache envisages Astyanax's future without his father (cf. ibid. 477–514) and imagines her son going to the home of one of Hector's friends to beg for food and clothing (492–95) and returning to her in tears after being cruelly rebuked (499), a situation comparable to the experience of the little girl who runs sobbing to her nurse. This contrast between the text and subtext whereby the abusive treatment imagined by Andromache for Astyanax, her little boy , becomes the experience encountered by the little girl with whom Alcimede is compared parallels the more explicit contrast that informs the simile: the elderly nurse (female) who provides solace is an analogue for the youthful Jason (male) and the defenseless young girl suffers the plight of the aging Alcimede. The role reversals suggested by the poet highlight an uncomfortably realistic fact of life: the elderly are so often reduced to the helplessness of children when encumbered by advanced old age.[14] Apollonius in fact will make reference to the unfortunate effects of aging at the end of the episode in his explanation for the passing-by of the aged Iphias: she was left behind 
(315–16). In sum, once we presume Æson's almost complete inability to act in any significant way both from his pathetic response to his son's departure and his wife's lack of reference to him as a source of protection or comfort, Alcimede's predicament becomes all the clearer: she will have to endure a difficult lot in her old age, even the outrageous abuse of uncaring guardians, after she is deprived of her only functional and caring 
. Alcimede herself will address this fear in her speech to Jason.