Chapter 1 - Rivalling Song Contests and Alternative Typhonomachies in Ovid and Nonnus

Summary

The much-debated engagement of late antique Greek poetry with Latin models could have important consequences for the interaction between the two literary traditions in this period. The present chapter focusses on Ovid and Nonnus. In the song contest between the Pierides and Calliope in Ovid’s Metamorphoses 5, the Pierides focus on the gods’ transformations as they flee from Typhoeus and hide in Egypt, while Calliope’s lengthy song about Proserpina’s rape begins with the defeat and punishment of Typhoeus. We examine how the Typhonomachy myth in Nonnus’ Dionysiaca may have been inspired by these complementary narratives of the same myth in Ovid’s epic. The flight of the gods sung by the Ovidian Pierides features in Nonnus’ own Typhonomachy (Dion. 1.142–3); moreover, Cadmus and Typhoeus are portrayed in Dionysiaca 1 as singers of similar calibre, while Cadmus, disguised as a pastoral singer carrying ‘deceiving pan-pipes’, recalls the deceitful Mercury of Ovid’s Metamorphoses 1. Like Nonnus’ Cadmus enchanting Typhoeus, Mercury, on Jupiter’s orders to free Io, assumes a shepherd’s shape and puts the hundred-eyed herdsman Argus to sleep with stories and the music of his pan-pipe.