Nonnus

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Nonnus of Panopolis left behind the longest surviving poem from classical antiquity, and almost no trace of the life that produced it. From the Egyptian city of Panopolis, known today as Akhmim, this 5th-century poet wrote 21,286 lines of epic verse in a language that was already ancient when he put pen to papyrus. He did it not once, but twice. He gave the world both a sprawling pagan epic about the god Dionysus and a verse retelling of the Gospel of John. What kind of poet writes both? Was he a pagan who converted, or a Christian whose faith coexisted with a love of myth? The two great works of Nonnus raise questions that scholars have argued over for centuries, and the answers have been harder to find than anyone expected.

• 2. The World He Came From

  ›

  Panopolis, the city that gave Nonnus his name, sat in the Egyptian Thebaid, in the region of Upper Egypt. Its modern name is Akhmim. That Nonnus came from there is confirmed in manuscript sources and in epigram 9.198 of the Palatine Anthology, one of the few scraps of external evidence that connects him to anything datable.

  Scholars have generally placed his active years between the end of the 4th century and the middle of the 5th century AD. The lower boundary comes from his apparent familiarity with Claudian's Greek Gigantomachy, a work composed between 394 and 397. He must have read Claudian before writing his own epics. The upper boundary is softer. A 6th-century writer named Agathias Scholasticus referred to Nonnus as a "recent author," which suggests he was not entirely forgotten soon after his death, even if no precise dates for his life were recorded.

  His name has sometimes been confused with other figures from the same era. Some have linked him to Saint Nonnus, who appears in hagiographies of Saint Pelagia, or to Nonnus the bishop of Edessa, who attended the Council of Chalcedon. Both were roughly contemporary with the poet. Scholars have largely concluded these connections are mistaken.

• 3. The Dionysiaca

  ›

  Forty-eight books. Twenty-one thousand, two hundred and eighty-six lines. The Dionysiaca is a monument in scale alone, telling the life of Dionysus from his origins through his famous expedition to India and his triumphant return. Nonnus wrote it in Homeric Greek and in dactylic hexameter, the meter of Homer himself, yet his handling of that meter was distinctly his own.

  For a long time, critics dismissed it. The Dionysiaca carried a reputation for poor literary quality that clung to it for generations. That assessment began to change with the publication of a scholarly edition and commentary on the poem in 18 volumes, the Budé edition, which made the case that Nonnus showed consummate literary skill. The baroque extravagance of the poem, which had put off earlier readers, came to be read as a deliberate artistic choice rather than a failure of discipline.

  Nonnus's verse technique rewards close attention. He used a higher proportion of dactyls and less elision than earlier poets working in hexameters. He also employed alliteration and assonance in ways that give his lines a musical quality unlike anything before him in Greek epic. Whether a reader finds that quality beautiful or excessive may depend on their taste, but it is not accidental.

• 4. The Paraphrase of John

  ›

  The second major work that Nonnus left behind is the Metabole, his verse paraphrase of the Gospel of John. Its full Greek title identifies it as a rendering of the Gospel according to John into hexameter verse. It survives, as the Dionysiaca does, but it arrives with a puzzle attached: which came first?

  Textual analysis has led some scholars to argue the Paraphrase preceded the Dionysiaca. Others find that hard to credit. They point out that a Christian who had already devoted a major work to the Gospel of John would seem an unlikely candidate to then spend the bulk of his creative life celebrating the mythology of Dionysus. The debate has not been resolved.

  What can be fixed with more confidence is the earliest possible date for the Paraphrase. Cyril of Alexandria wrote his commentary on the Gospel of John between 425 and 428. The theological layer of Nonnus's paraphrase draws clearly on that commentary, which means the Paraphrase cannot have been written before those years. Establishing how much later it was written is harder. One possible upper limit is a work attributed to Pseudo-Apollinaris, a Metaphrase of the Psalms written around 460, which appears to reference Nonnus's poem.

• 5. A Scholarly Legacy

  ›

  For readers who want to engage with Nonnus in translation, several options have accumulated over the decades. W. H. D. Rouse produced a bilingual Greek-English edition of the Dionysiaca for the Loeb Classical Library in 1940, with a mythological introduction by H. J. Rose and notes on textual criticism by L. R. Lind. That three-volume set remained a standard reference for decades.

  The French Budé edition, edited by F. Vian and published between 1976 and 2006 across 19 volumes, brought detailed introductions to individual books and extensive notes. Italian scholars have produced their own bilingual editions, including a series edited by D. Gigli Piccardi published in 2003 and 2004.

  For the Paraphrase of John, the most recent complete edition of the Greek text was published in 1881 by Augustinus Scheindler under the imprint of Teubner in Leipzig. That text remained the standard for well over a century. A team of mainly Italian scholars has since been producing a new edition, book by book, with introductions and commentary. Among the individual cantos published so far is K. Spanoudakis's edition of Book 11, published at Oxford in 2014, which brought the project into the 21st century.