Perhaps there is no other Greek poet in whose case the extremes of praise and condemnation have been further apart than have been the estimates of Nonnus, the author of the Dionysiaca. His first editor, Gerard Falkenburg (1569), ranked him with Homer, to Angelo Poliziano and Johannes Lascaris he was poeta mirificus, and of late von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, who ranks his disciple Musaeus very low, calls Nonnus the last Greek artist in style.

By English-speaking scholarship Nonnus has always been ranked very low. Marlowe paraphrased Musaeus in his Hero and Leander, following J. C. Scaliger's identification of the sixth century grammarian with the mythical Musaeus, but neither he nor any other Englishman seems to have studied Nonnus. At least Ludwich's bibliography mentions only Porson, Musgrave, Wakefield, Northmor and Pierson, of whom Porson has one or two emendations in his Adversaria, and Musgrave drew on Nonnus for the discussion of one verse in Euripides. J. A. Symonds devotes seventeen pages to Musaeus in his Greek Poets, but for all his liking for the "wonderful colors of decay," the “autumnal loveliness of literature upon the wane," he never mentions Nonnus. Donaldson's continuation of K. O. Müller gives an analysis of Quintus Smyrnaeus book by book, but while he has plentiful scorn for the formlessness of Nonnus' epic, and rather patronizes Marcellus, Nonnus' French editor and translator (Paris, FirminDidot, 1856), for asserting he has a plan for those who will read him, Donaldson gives no idea of what Nonnus' contents are. Of the shorter books in English, Gilbert Murray discusses only his metre, and Wilmer Cave Wright, who devotes more attention to Nonnus than most, assigns to his work of 21,088 lines just half the space she grants the 343 hexameters of his disciple Musaeus. It would be absurd to set up a quantitative measurement of poetry, and Musaeus is certainly free from many gross vices of style under which Nonnus labors, yet on the other hand it is at least disproportionate to fob off the founder of a whole influential school of poets with no more mention than is vouchsafed his meagre imitators Tryphiodorus and Coluthus.

Nonnus is known to have been a native of Panopolis not only from the testimony of Agathias of Myrina (IV, 23, p. 257) and the

Violarium of Eudocia, but since 1907 on the authority of the Berlin papyrus (P. 10507) of about the seventh century, fragments of a few lines luckily including the title of the fourteenth book. That the author was an Egyptian is plain from a passage in the poem 26.238 where he speaks of the hippopotamus

οἷος ἐμοῦ Νείλοιο θερει γενὲς οἶδμα χαράσσων.

That he wrote in Alexandria is evident from an anonymous epigram, (Anthol. Palat IX, 198)

Νόννος ἐγώ Πανὸς μὲν ἐμὴ πόλις, ἐν Φαρίῃ δὲ

ἔγχεϊ φωνήεντι γονὰς ἤμησα Γιγάντων,

which is itself derived from Book I, 13-14 where the poet says in his invocation,

ἀλλὰ χοροῦ ψαύοντα Φάρῳ παρὰ γείτονι νήσῳ

στήσατε μοι Πρωτα πολύτροπον κτλ.

His date is much harder to set. Ludwich, the editor of the splendid 1909 Teubner edition, fixes his floruit between 390 A. D., when Gregory of Nazianzus (whose mother's name was Nonna) wrote the poems which Nonnus imitated, and 405, when Eunapius published his Lives of the Sophists, in which (p. 92) he makes a statement which Ludwich interprets as referring especially to Nonnus. The words are, “ἐπὶ τά γε κατὰ ῥητορικὴν ἐξαρκεῖ τοσοῦτον εἰπεῖν, ὅτι ἦν Αἰγύπτιος. τὸ δὲ ἔθνος ἐπὶ ποιητικῇ μὲν σφόδρα μαίνονται ὁ δὲ σπουδαῖος Ἑρμῆς αὐτῶν ἀποκεχώρηκεν.” The reference to the taste of the Egyptians for poetry certainly alludes to such qualities as distinguish Nonnus, but as a dating point it still leaves much to be desired. Suidas gives the floruit of Coluthus as between 491519. Musaeus seems to have been the correspondent of Procopius of Gaza, who died in 520. Agathias, who wrote his history after 554, refers to Nonnus by name as one of oi véoɩ tointaí as opposed to oi πрóтероν. This means nothing more exact than "modern" as against “early” poets, and must not be pressed. The importance in the poem of Tyre and Berytus, each of which has a special panegyric devoted to it, that of Berytus being particularly minute in its geographical details, and alluding at great length to the law school of Berytus, may furnish some day a surer ground for dating than the vague reference of Euna pius to Egypt.

The chief interest Nonnus will always have is not so much literary as historical-he is an example on a gigantic scale of the confusion of styles in literature and the syncretism in religion

which mark the later Roman Empire. At the same time Nonnus was not at all entirely destitute of poetic inspiration-his merits however, whatever comparisons the Renaissance drew between him and Homer, are quite invisible to any modern reader who applies a Homeric standard to him. So far from its being Nonnus' intention to reproduce the Homeric atmosphere as Quintus Smyrnaeus endeavored to do, he seems to have been far less an archaizer than a most audacious modernist. The purists of his time must have been shocked at his introduction of such "barbarous" themes as

υἱέες Αὐσονίων, ὑπατήια φέγγεα Ρώμης!

into a Greek epic, and equally by his mention of Augustus,2 and the picture of Hermes carrying a Aarıvíða déλtov.3 In religion, as we shall see, he was as much a syncretist as Proclus-in one elaborate passage, which reproduces the form of an Orphic hymn, the Tyrian Heracles Astrochiton is identified with Helios, Belus, Ammon, Apis, Arabian Kronos, Assyrian Zeus, Sarapis Zeus of Egypt, Phaethon, Mithras the Babylonian Helios who in Greece is Phoebus Apollo, Gamos, the son of Eros, Paieon the slayer of pain, and finally Aether!

Indeed, Nonnus can be rightly appreciated only if we realize that he was a sophist of a school not far removed from that of Heliodorus, Achilles Tatius, and Longus. He was a sophist for sophistic was the only living style of his age. His aim was evidently to reproduce the beauties of Homer, Hesiod, Euripides, Callimachus, Theocritus and the bucolic school, including especially the author of the Επιτάφιος Βίωνος and the pastoral Anthologists, such didactic poets as Oppian of Apamea and the so-called Orphic poets, the epideictic rhetors, and not least perhaps the prose romancers, in a continuous poem with a plot elastic enough to allow the insertion of anything. Callimachus' famous "uéya Bißλίον μέγα κακόν” could not be allowed to daunt him if he was to satisfy the taste of his age with its insatiable appetite for words.

It is not attempted in this paper to discuss the sources of the vast congeries of stories worked by Nonnus into his ποικίλον ὕμνον.4 This a mere essay at determining what the Dionysiaca is, and how Nonnus uses his material.

The form of his poem was dictated by the strictest convention

141.366.
2 41.381.

3 41.160. 4 I, 15.

7

the deeds of gods and heroes must be recited in hexameters, which was the same thing as to say the poet must be Homeric. Great innovator in verse-form and vocabulary as he was, Nonnus yet felt himself one of the 'Ounpida so much as any poet of the old type. Indeed not content with making tacit declaration of this by countless reproductions of Homeric language and ideas, or even by open reference by name to characters and scenes of the Iliad3 and Odyssey, he is inspired by the 'Ounpides Movσau, bears himself "the shield and spear of Father Homer," hopes to hear in battle "the ceaseless blast of Homer's learned trump," and prays to "Meles's all-splendid son"1o that his "book coeval with the dawn" may be gracious. It is at the beginning of the twenty-fifth book that this consciousness of having Homer's eye upon him, so to speak, becomes especially acute, and it is here that he announces that in imitation of Homer he will describe only the last of the seven years of the war against the Indians.11 It is worth noting that Quintus Smyrnaeus never refers to Homer by name in the Posthomerica.

A bare outline of the books follows, by which it is easy to see that the poem divides itself into six octads of which the first and last have nothing to do with the Indian war.

I

1. Rape of Europa. Cadmus seeks her and meets Zeus who is seeking his thunderbolts stolen by Typhon.

2. Cadmus helps Zeus defeat Typhon's attack on heaven and is promised Harmonia for bride.

3.

Cadmus sails to Samothrace to woo Harmonia.

4. Unwilling Harmonia is persuaded by Aphrodite. Cadmus slays dragon, and men born of his teeth.

5.

Cadmus builds Thebes. His sons Aristaeus, inventor of bee-keeping, and Actaeon.

6. Zeus loves Persephone. Birth of Dionysus Zagreus. He is slain by Titans. Zeus afflicts earth with fire and deluge.

7. Aeon, Mithraic god of time, begs Zeus to restore joy to the world. Zeus promises to do so. Eros fires Zeus with love of Semele.

8. Zeus lies with Semele; Hera jealous. Dionysus born.

5 Achilles and Lycaon 22.380-3; Glaucus and Diomede 15.165; Simois, Scamander, Achilles 23.221.

6 Odysseus and Iphigeneia 13. 109-10; Proteus and Eidothea I, 14.37.

II

9. Dionysus nursed by nymphs, Ino, Mystis, and Rhea. Ino driven by Hera to wander.

10. Ino and Melicertes and mad Athamas. Young Dionysus loves Ampelus.

11. Ampelus slain by a bull. Dionysus consoled by Eros and comforted with story of Calamus and Carpus.

army.

12. The Hours read of the coming Vine on the tablets of Harmonia.
13.

Zeus sends Dionysus against the Indians. Catalog of Dionysus'

14. Rhea marshals the gods on Dionysus' side.

15. Dionysus defeats the Indians by making them drink of a river turned to wine. The nymph Nicaea and Hymnus the shepherd who dies for love of her and by her hand.

16. Eros punishes Nicaea. She drinks wine, sleeps, is found by Bacchus, and bears him Telete.

III

17. March continued. Brongus the shepherd entertains Dionysus in his hut and is rewarded with wine. Orontes, general of the Indians, kills himself in despair. Aristæus the leech. Blemys, ancestor of Blemyes, submits to Dionysus.

18. Dionysus in Assyria entertained by King Staphylus, Queen Methe and Prince Botrys, sends defiance to Deriades, king of Indians.

19. Games for funeral of King Staphylus-contest between Erechtheus and Oeagrus in song, and Maron and Silenus in pantomimic dance.

20.

Dionysus renews war. Lycurgus of Arabia pursues him into the sea. 21. The Nymph Ambrosia, turned into vine, binds Lycurgus. Deriades returns defiance to Dionysus, and divides his army on the Hydaspes, himself and Thureus generals.

22. Revels of Dionysus' Bacchanals by the Hydaspes. The battle by the River. Oeagrus, Aeacus, Erechtheus champions in Dionysus' army. 23. Dionysus defeats Thureus' army, Thureus only left alive. Hera rouses Hydaspes to fight Dionysus. Dionysus fights Hydaspes with fire. Gods help Dionysus. Deriades retreats Indians weep for the dead. Bacchanals

24. Hydaspes prays for mercy.

into city on news from Thureus.

feast. Leucus of Lesbos sings of Aphrodite at the Loom.

IV

25. Army of Deriades stays six years in the city. The poet will be very Homeric and sing only last year—the seventh. Comparison of Dionysus with other mythological heroes. After ten months Attis prophesies victory in the seventh year and brings Dionysus from Rhea a shield made by Hephaestus— shield described.

26. Athena in guise of Orontes in a dream rouses Deriades to battle. Deriades marshals his forces. Catalog of his army and wonders of India. 27. Speeches of Deriades and Orontes to armies, speech of Zeus to gods urging them to take sides.