There is little that can be said with certainty about the author of the longest surviving poem from the whole of antiquity. It appears that Nonnus came from the town of Panopolis in Upper Egypt, and by his own testimony seems to have lived and worked in the literary metropolis of Alexandria (Dion. 1.13). Allusions to Nonnus by other writers suggest that the Dionysiaca was in the public domain by 470 ce (Vian 1976: xv-xviii), whilst an allusion by Nonnus to the poet Cyrus of Panopolis reveals that he must have been writing after 441 ce (Shorrock 2001: 144-6).
Late antiquity was a time of great mobility, especially for poets (Cameron 1965), and it would not be surprising to discover that Nonnus had indeed traveled widely, whether for education or employment. The details that Nonnus supplies about the cities of Tyre, Beirut, and Athens might suggest personal experience; it is, however, equally possible that Nonnus never left Egypt and knew about these places from written sources. Curiously, perhaps, Egypt features hardly at all in Nonnus’ epic.
It has often been asserted that, since the Dionysiaca is full of alcoholic and sexual excess and astrological lore, its author must have been pagan in his outlook. This view is complicated by the attribution to Nonnus of a hexameter Paraphrase of St John’s Gospel. One response has been to imagine that Nonnus abandoned his 48-book ‘‘pagan’’ epic after a conversion to Christianity and that he channeled his creative energies into a more respectable activity: turning the unadorned prose of St John’s Gospel into a poem in the grand meter of Homer. To say nothing of the over-rigid distinction between pagan and Christian discourses that this implies, comparative metrical analysis of the two poems renders this hypothesis highly implausible: the Paraphrase is the less technically accomplished of the two, suggesting that it was in fact composed at an earlier date than the Dionysiaca. (On theological grounds the Paraphrase best suits a date after the Council of Ephesus in 431 ce.)
The following chapter is divided into four main sections. The first section considers the form and content of Nonnus’ vast epic. The second is concerned with allusion and intertextuality, with the way that Nonnus engages with the Greek literary and mythological tradition in order to give a universalizing texture to his work. The third section focuses on metapoetry and examines some of the ways in which the narrative of the Dionysiaca draws attention to the process and practice of writing an epic poem. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the various afterlives of the Dionysiaca.
1 Form and Content The story of Dionysus
The Dionysiaca is narrated in 48 books (equivalent to the Iliad and the Odyssey combined) and comprises more than 21,000 lines. It tells the long and eventful story of Dionysus, the hero who grows up to become a god.
The action begins several generations before the birth of Dionysus with the abduction of his great-aunt, Europa, and the fruitless attempts of his grandfather, Cadmus, to find her. But Cadmus’ voyaging is not a total failure: he helps Zeus to defeat Typhon, the hundred-handed monster who has launched a chaotic takeover bid for Olympus, and receives Harmonia (the love-child of Ares and Aphrodite) as a reward for his efforts. There follows an account of the various offspring of Cadmus and Harmonia that culminates in Book 8 with the rescue of Dionysus from the smoldering corpse of his mother Semele.
After a second period of gestation, in the thigh of Zeus, Dionysus is eventually transported to the mountain court of Rhea in Asia Minor. It is here that he grows up amidst bears and lions, in company with a band of playful satyrs. Here too he falls in love for the first time, with the young satyr Ampelus. Such is Dionysus’ love for Ampelus that he would gladly renounce his destined place in heaven in order to remain with him. Their relationship is not to last, however, as Ampelus falls awkwardly from the back of a bull, is gored by its horns, and is decapitated. Yet Ampelus is not to have died in vain: he is resurrected as a vine at the end of Book 12. It is thus that wine is invented, a liquid that gives comfort and pleasure; and something that Dionysus will keep constantly by his side.
No sooner has wine been discovered than Dionysus is given opportunity to try out its power. Zeus sends him instructions that he is to drive the impious race of Indians out of Asia and to teach the entire world about the benefits of viticulture. Through these labors Dionysus will earn for himself a place in heaven at the side of his father Zeus. Avast army from both Europe and Asia is now mustered, and Dionysus begins his long advance towards the heart of enemy territory and the (unnamed) city of the Indian chieftain Deriades. An early skirmish with the enemy at Lake Astacis in Book 14 proves the superiority of the Dionysiac force and the effectiveness of wine as a weapon, capable of incapacitating all that drink it. The power of wine is further demonstrated by Dionysus’ conquest of the virgin huntress Nicaea, the first of many such erotic encounters. Where the oxherd Hymnus fails in his ‘‘pastoral’’ attempt to seduce Nicaea, Dionysus is successful. His superior charm consists of nothing more nor less than wine. By chance, the mountain spring from which Nicaea drinks is polluted with the wine that had been used to drug Lake Astacis. In her incapacitated state, he rapes her and leaves her pregnant.
Dionysus continues his advance towards the city of Deriades, overcoming numerous waves of enemy resistance and taking every opportunity to introduce the vine to those that he meets along the way, such as the shepherd Brongus and the family of King Staphylus. At last, Dionysus crosses the river Hydaspes and enters the territory of Deriades. Here in Book 25, at the halfway point of the Dionysiaca, the Indian War proper can be said to begin. It is a conflict on an epic scale that lasts for seven years.
In the seventh and final year of the war Dionysus receives a set of divinely crafted armor and the Olympian gods descend to earth to help out favorites on either side. When the fighting inclines in favor of the Dionysiac force, Hera deceives Zeus, drives Dionysus mad and thus gives ascendancy to the besieged Indians. The deception does not last for long, however: Dionysus regains his sanity and returns to the battlefield in Book 36. After one inconclusive encounter with Deriades, in which the Indian is defeated but allowed to go free, Dionysus makes a temporary truce and celebrates funeral games for his dead friend Opheltes. Battle is then resumed for a short period by sea, after which Dionysus closes in single combat with Deriades for a second and final time. The Indian leader attempts to flee, but is deceived by Athena into standing his ground and is killed by the faintest touch of Dionysus’ thyrsus.
After the death of Deriades and the surrender of the Indian city in Book 40, Dionysus establishes a client king, divides up the spoils and sets off on his journey ‘‘homewards.’’ His journey takes him first to the home of his grandfather Cadmus in Tyre, where he meets Herakles and partakes for the first time of ambrosia and nectar, the food and drink of the gods. He then moves on to Beroe, where he competes with Poseidon for the girl who gives her name to that same city. Although he is unsuccessful, he proves himself to be a worthy competitor against Zeus’s brother, and is encouraged by the promise of future amorous conquests.
Dionysus next revisits the home of his mother Semele and his own earthly place of birth, Thebes, in Books 44-6. Here he encounters a hostile Pentheus, whose death he causes at the hands of his mother Agave. Out of pity for Agave and her surviving sister Autonoe, Dionysus gives them wine to soothe their cares. After Thebes, Dionysus journeys to Athens where he teaches the art of viticulture to Icarius, who is then killed by neighbors who think that the new drink of powerful, mind-altering wine must be a kind of poison. Naxos is Dionysus’ next port of call. He arrives on the island just after Theseus has departed, in time to offer comfort to an abandoned Ariadne. With Ariadne in tow, Dionysus pays a visit to Argos, the city of his implacable enemy, Hera. Here he enters battle with Perseus. Although Perseus petrifies Ariadne with his Gorgon’s head, he is no match for Dionysus, who does not need winged sandals to fly through the air, even to touch Olympus. But for the timely intervention of Hermes, Dionysus would have wreaked destruction on Argos, Mycenae, and Perseus, and would even have wounded Hera.
After making peace with his stepbrother Perseus, Dionysus continues on his journey into the final book of the epic. In Thrace he is attacked by an army of giants, stirred up by their mother Earth at the instigation of Hera. Zeus had needed the help of Cadmus to defeat the giant Typhon; Dionysus almost effortlessly defeats this younger band of Typhons. He takes a break from fighting only to wrestle an athletic maiden into submission and kill her murderous father. From Thrace Dionysus makes his way back to his childhood home, the court of Rhea. Here he faces his final erotic challenge: the seduction of the virgin Aura who has dedicated herself to Artemis. Conventional techniques of seduction induce only scorn on the part of Aura, and Dionysus resorts to the method that worked so effectively (and serendipitously) with Nicaea: wine. In this familiarly deceptive manner, Dionysus rapes Aura. She gives birth to twin boys. One son she kills, the other, Iacchus, is snatched away by Dionysus and transported to Athens and the care of Athena and the Bacchants of Eleusis.
In this way Dionysus’ earthly labors are brought to an end. In the final lines of the poem, having proved himself to be worthy of a place at his father’s table on Olympus, the hero at last becomes a god.
Style and meter
The Dionysiaca has a verbal energy and a capacity for prolific growth that makes it look like a literary version of the vine itself. Nonnus’ style is characterized by linguistic exuberance, a constant striving for variation and antithesis, and a fondness for mythological exempla. Most striking are the compound epithets, many of them coined by the poet himself, that appear in abundance throughout the poem (see Hopkinson 1994a: 14-16).
Nonnus’ text is also highly episodic and discursive, so much so that it often appears that the aim of the poet ‘‘is not the coherence of the whole, but the effect of individual scenes, not clarity of line, but intensity of color’’ (Keydell 1936: 910.14-28). These are qualities that are shared by much contemporary poetry. Although Michael Roberts’s work on late antique poetics focuses exclusively on the Latin poetic tradition, his observations on the ‘‘jeweled style’’ with its emphasis on fragmentation, polished juxtaposition, and glittering display represent an equally apt description of Nonnus’ style (Roberts 1989). Striking parallels can also be adduced with late antique material culture, specifically mosaics, tapestries, and portraiture (Riemschneider 1957).
From a metrical point of view, Nonnus’ hexameter lines represent something of a gold standard, marking a return to, even an improvement on, the tightly controlled form of the Callimachean hexameter (see further Whitby 1994). In addition to the adherence to Callimachean ‘‘rules’’ on, for example, the position and form of the caesura and the placement of monosyllables, Nonnus reduced the combination of dactyls and spondees permitted in any line from twenty in Callimachus to only nine. Within this limited metrical range, the purely dactylic line predominates. Nonnus’ capacity to produce exact and exacting quantitative verse seems especially impressive when one considers an important linguistic change that had taken place by this time: little distinction was now made between long and short vowels in ordinary speech, and word accent, not vowel length, began to be used to determine the quantity of syllables. Nonnus’ response to this change can be seen in his adoption of a rigorous system for the regulation of accent at different positions in the hexameter line. At line ends, for example, words are accented on the ultimate or penultimate syllable (with no such words accented on their antepenultimate syllables). Nonnus’ high metrical standards are only compromised on rare occasions when quotations from Homer or some other author are introduced directly into the text. The strict discipline of Nonnus’ hexameters forms a striking counterpoint to the rhetorical luxuriance of the poetry itself.
Structure
Despite its many digressions and embellishments, Nonnus’ narrative follows closely the orthodox life-story of Dionysus as described, for example, by Apollodorus in his compendium of mythology, the Bibliotheca. This loose narrative framework is, however, only one of a number of different structural systems used by Nonnus in an attempt to underpin and shore up the vast edifice of the Dionysiaca. One such structure is that of the ‘‘Royal Encomium.’’ Along the lines of the model laid down by Menander Rhetor, the Dionysiaca can be divided into encomiastic sections: introduction (Books 1-2), ancestry and homeland (3-7), birth, upbringing and education (8-12), followed by achievements both in war and in peace (13-40) and concluding with an epilogue (48). Another system of organization is supplied by the technique of ring-composition. Around the hub of the Indian War is arranged a series of episodes in mirror image. In the opening two books of the epic, Zeus rapes Europa and struggles to defeat the monster Typhon; in the final book Dionysus effortlessly defeats the Thracian giants and concludes his activities on earth by raping Aura. Similarly, Cadmus’ marriage and meandering attempt to establish a home for himself in Books 3-5 are paralleled by Dionysus’ own homeward journeying and marriage with Ariadne in Books 40-8.
A further contribution to the structure of the epic is made by astrology. There can be no doubting the significant role played by astral lore and planetary wanderings in the Dionysiaca. The enigmatic tablets of Harmonia in Book 12 constitute a set of horoscopes for a cosmic year (each of the six tablets covers two star signs) that begins at the beginning of Greek mythology and moves down to the end of the age of heroes. It has been argued that, in an analogous manner, the Dionysiaca constitutes its own cosmic year, with its 48 books divisible into four seasons each consisting of the twelve signs of the zodiac.
The systems of astrology, ring-composition and encomium come persuasively into view at different times over the course of the epic. Yet not one of these structures is able to bear the entire weight of the 48-book narrative. It is in vain that one looks for a single, unifying superstructure: the narrative of the Dionysiaca refuses to be contained within the rigid bonds of any one system. Conventional approaches to Nonnus’ narrative have seen this overlapping web of structures as a sign of poetic incompetence and degeneracy from the classical Golden Age, suggesting that Nonnus has failed to develop and sustain a coherent narrative structure. Our postmodern age can afford to be more sympathetic to the multiple structures and narratives contained within the Dionysiaca. We have already seen how from a stylistic point of view Nonnus was the product of an age when surface display and the juxtaposition of individual scenes came to dominate over wider narrative concerns. In one important respect, however, Nonnus’ epic ran counter to the spirit of the age: scale. In fifth-century ce Egypt epyllia, encomia, and patria - works of small scale and modest ambition - were the prevalent literary modes of expression. The appearance of a 48-book epic must have been nothing short of astonishing. Nonnus attempted what no other poet from the whole of late antiquity was ever to attempt: the combination of an ornate and episodic style with the demands of a grand, unifying narrative. Nonnus’ multiplex narrative is the result of that attempt, and from our knowledge of the epic’s early reception, it was a spectacular success.
World History
