Greek literature

If you cast your mind back to 2016 you may (or may not) recall Brill's Companion to Nonnus of Panopolis: a substantial volume, comprising thirty-two chapters in 754 pages of text, together with twenty-six pages of preliminaries, seventy-seven pages of bibliography, and forty-one pages of indices.¹ Prudent readers should be cautious when handling a blockbuster volume on this scale; the risk of dropping one and a half kilos of scholarly text on one's foot is not to be treated with careless abandon. There is, then, something to be said in favour of less demanding but more accessible starting points for the exploration of the Nonnian landscape. For most readers, Robert Shorrock's The Challenge of Epic. Allusive Engagement in the Dionysiaca (2001)² and The Myth of Paganism. Nonnus, Dionysus and the World of Late Antiquity (2011)³ would provide a more readily accessible resource. Admittedly, accessible guidance is not easy to find when it has been swamped by a tsunami of impressive editorial scholarship: for example, Konstantinos Spanoudakis, Nonnus of Panopolis in Context;⁴ Camille Geisz, A Study of the Narrator in Nonnus of Panopolis’ Dionysiaca. Storytelling in Late Antique Epic;⁵ Herbert Bannert and Nicole Kröll's Nonnus of Panopolis in Context II. Poetry, Religion, and Society;⁶ and Filip Doroszewski and Katarzyna Jażdżewska's Nonnus of Panopolis in Context III. Old Questions and New Perspectives.⁷ As for Nonnus’ Paraphrase of John's Gospel, I confess that I have barely had time to glance at it in its entirety. Perhaps I should have been paying more selective attention to Nonnus, and less to everything else.

Here, then, and leaving the Paraphrase to one side for convenience, is the beginning of the forty-eight books of Nonnus's Dionysiaca; that is to say, the beginning of W. D. H. Rouse's translation, published in 1940 and distributed across three Loeb volumes. Here are the opening lines:⁸

Tell the tale, Goddess, of Cronides’ courier with fiery flame, the gasping travail which the thunder-bolt brought with sparks for wedding-torches, the lightning in waiting upon Semele's nuptials; tell the naissance of Bacchos twice-born, whom Zeus lifted still moist from the fire, a baby half-complete born without midwife; how with shrinking hands he cut the incision in his thigh and carried him in his man's womb, father and gracious mother at once—and well he remembered another birth, when his own head conceived, when his temple was big with child, and he carried that incredible unbegotten lump, until he shot out Athena scintillating in her armour.

There is undeniable eloquence in Rouse's translation, at least in the parts that I have read. But there is an alternative: William Levitan and Stanley Lombardo have edited Tales of Dionysus. The Dionysiaca of Nonnus of Panopolis, with an introduction by Gordon Braden and a multitude of other poetic contributors.⁹ Braden's introduction provides a convenient ‘Summary of the Poem’ (19–38):

It was the classical epic to end all classical epics—which, as it happens, it did. At 20,426 lines it is, if the truth be told, an almost impossible read. It seems longer than that, with a sprawling, repetitive, digressive, often confusing narrative, relentlessly violent…written in a highly mannered mutation of Homer's language and style that comes across as tightly ordered and insanely unruly at the same time. (1)

Consider, then, Douglass Parker's disconcerting sample of the beginning of the Tales of Dionysus:

ONE has light-bearing Zeus

Putting a nymph to sad use.

The sky-striking fists of Typhoon

Drag down darkness at noon.

SING,

O

MUSE:

Cronides’ go-between gutting the pallet in blaze

Thunderbolt's orgasm birthing in strain at the coupling flash

Sheet Lightning, Semele's chambermaid, strewing her bride-bed

& SING:

Twyborn Bacchus’ blessed event:

Unfinished foetus

of mother unmidwifed, scooped still damp from the embers by Zeus—

whose gingerly fingers slot his thigh to a he-man womb,

a uterine device which doublecasts him, matripaternal,

to bring the baby to term in terms of his prior confinement:

From forehead gravid with swollen bolus by temple spermatick,

Zeus fired unconceived, unconceivable Athena glinting in full kit.

Samples taken from various other contributors illustrate the diversity of the Tales of Dionysus:

War roared:

Bows bent, spears swerved—struck

On the center-spot as stone split ox-skin.

Blood, more blood: it streams through the pasture,

As half-dead bodies eat dust. And with the red din

Fading, clamorous Cadmus founded Thebes.

(Book 5: Rob Turner, 125)

Then Zeus, whose divine discourse resonated

Across the celestial expane, spoke by elucidated…

‘My Eternal Creator, clansmen, and self-sown shepherd,

Do not resent their misfortune since humanity's truth

Ripens or fades with nature just like the moon.

Nectar is for gods, but I will give mankind a defence for grief

Whose taste flows sweetly, but it is more suitable

For drinking and speaking and existing on earth.’

(Book 7: Christian Teresi, 162)

Then came their soft sister, Spring,

her lips puffed with breath of the sweet West Wind,

a seraphic solace to mortal men,

and her hair tied back from her windy face

with a dewy diadem, and all the while

she laughed like a flower in bloom.

(Book 11: Darwin Micheber-Rutledge, 224)

So Dionysus claimed again his purpose, restored nature's

throbbing pulse—he the god of ravishment, of juicy jizm

of glistening life-pumping pearls, of ecstatic joyance.

(Book 12: John L. Gronbeck-Tedesco, 232)

Krunked, libated, pished, schnokered, quadled, poonted, right-rack-ripped,

shellacked, blasted, hammered—drunk:

the whole wine-basted brood saw rock, rill and river in twos,

doubling their pleasure and venom.

(Book 15: John L. Gronbeck-Tedesco, 265)

But now to more serious matters.

Simon Hornblower has engaged intensively with Lykophron's Alexandra, publishing a Greek text, with an introduction, translation, and commentary, in 2015;¹⁰ then, three years later, a monograph, Lykophron's Alexandra, Rome, and the Hellenistic World;¹¹ and, finally, in 2022, a slender volume in the Oxford World Classics series, translated with an introduction and explanatory notes:¹²

I see the winged firebrand

rushing to snatch the dove, the Pephnaian bitch,

which the aquatic vulture gave birth to,

encased in a round covering of shell. (86–9)

Rachel Lesser's Desire in the Iliad. The Force that Moves the Epic and its Audience ¹³ ‘clarifies how the Iliad is fundamentally an epic about human feelings and human relationships rather than spectacular violence’ (3). But why ‘rather than’? After all, spectacular violence is a widespread and easily recognizable feature of human interactions. Lesser aspires to ‘put to rest evolutionary notions of literary history that view Homeric epic as primitive and unrealistic, lacking interior depth and a recognizable concept of intellect’ (3), but the results of her analyses seem consistently to yield unconvincing conclusions. Amit Shilo's Beyond Death in the Oresteia. Poetics, Ethics, and Politics ¹⁴ is more successful. Alexander Kirichenko's Greek Literature and the Ideal. The Pragmatics of Space from the Archaic to the Hellenistic Age is in turn more demanding—though not necessarily more informative.¹⁵

Meanwhile I shall look forward to a wider range of opportunities—not least, to improve my limited (my very limited!) knowledge of the Byzantine commentaries on ancient Greek texts of the twelfth to fifteenth centuries.

There is so much more to be learned.¹⁶