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Greek literature

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 September 2023

Malcolm Heath*
Affiliation:
University of Leeds, UK
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Extract

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. 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) and The Myth of Paganism. Nonnus, Dionysus and the World of Late Antiquity (2011) 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; Camille Geisz, A Study of the Narrator in Nonnus of Panopolis’ Dionysiaca. Storytelling in Late Antique Epic; Herbert Bannert and Nicole Kröll's Nonnus of Panopolis in Context II. Poetry, Religion, and Society; and Filip Doroszewski and Katarzyna Jażdżewska's Nonnus of Panopolis in Context III. Old Questions and New Perspectives. 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.

Type
Subject Reviews
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Classical Association

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.Footnote 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)Footnote 2 and The Myth of Paganism. Nonnus, Dionysus and the World of Late Antiquity (2011)Footnote 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;Footnote 4 Camille Geisz, A Study of the Narrator in Nonnus of Panopolis’ Dionysiaca. Storytelling in Late Antique Epic;Footnote 5 Herbert Bannert and Nicole Kröll's Nonnus of Panopolis in Context II. Poetry, Religion, and Society;Footnote 6 and Filip Doroszewski and Katarzyna Jażdżewska's Nonnus of Panopolis in Context III. Old Questions and New Perspectives.Footnote 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:Footnote 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.Footnote 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;Footnote 10 then, three years later, a monograph, Lykophron's Alexandra, Rome, and the Hellenistic World;Footnote 11 and, finally, in 2022, a slender volume in the Oxford World Classics series, translated with an introduction and explanatory notes:Footnote 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 Footnote 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 Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 16

References

1 Brill's Companion to Nonnus of Panopolis. Edited by Domenico Accorinti. Leiden, Brill, 2016. Pp. xxxii + 872, Hardback £179, ISBN: 978-90-04-31011-7.

2 The Challenge of Epic. Allusive Engagement in the Dionysiaca. By Robert Shorrock. Leiden, Brill, 2001. Pp. vii + 245. Hardback £179, ISBN: 978-90-04-11795-2.

3 The Myth of Paganism. Nonnus, Dionysus, and the World of Late Antiquity. By Robert Shorrock. Bristol Classical Press, 2011. Pp. x + 181. Paperback £19.99, ISBN: 978-0-7156-3668-8.

4 Nonnus of Panopolis in Context. Poetry and Cultural Milieu in Late Antiquity with a Section on Nonnus and the Modern World. Edited by Konstantinos Spanoudakis. Leiden, Brill, 2014. Trends in Classics: Supplementary Volumes. Hardback £109, ISBN: 978-3-11-033937-6.

5 A Study of the Narrator in Nonnus of Panopolis’ Dionysiaca. Storytelling in Late Antique Epic. By Camille Geisz. Amsterdam Studies in Classical Philology, 25. Leiden and Boston, Brill, 2017. Pp. ix + 282. Hardback €120, ISBN: 978-90-04-35533-0.

6 Nonnus of Panopolis in Context II. Poetry, Religion, and Society. Edited by Herbert Bannert and Nicole Kröll. Mnemosyne Supplements, 408. Leiden, Brill, 2017. Pp. xviii + 436. Hardback €121, ISBN: 978-90-04-34119-7.

7 Nonnus of Panopolis in Context III. Old Questions and New Perspectives. Edited by Filip Doroszewski and Katarzyna Jażdżewska. Mnemosyne Supplements, 438. Leiden, Brill, 2020. Pp. 552. Hardback €135, ISBN: 978-90-04-44323-5.

8 Nonnus. Dionysiaca, with an English Translation. Translated and edited by W. H. D. Rouse. Loeb Classical Library volumes 344, 354, and 356. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1940. Hardback £20 each, ISBN: 978-06-74-99379-2.

9 Tales of Dionysus. The Dionysiaca of Nonnus of Panopolis. A Group Translation edited by William Levitan and Stanley Lombardo, with an Introduction by Gordon Braden. Michigan, University of Michigan Press, 2022. Pp. xviii + 708. Paperback $39.95, ISBN: 978-0-472-03896-1.

10 Lykophron: Alexandra. Greek Text. Translation, Commentary, & Introduction. By Simon Hornblower. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2015. Pp. xxi + 617. Hardback £120, ISBN: 978-0-19-957670-8.

11 Lykophron's Alexandra, Rome, and the Hellenistic World. By Simon Hornblower. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. xxv + 254. Hardback £60, ISBN: 978-0-19-872368-4.

12 Lykophron. Alexandra. Translated by Simon Hornblower. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2022. Pp. xlvi + 138. Paperback £8.99, ISBN: 978-0-19-886334-2.

13 Desire in the Iliad. The Force that Moves the Epic and its Audience. By Rachel H. Lesser. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2022. Pp. x + 270. Hardback £75, ISBN: 978-0-19-286651-6.

14 Beyond Death in the Oresteia. Poetics, Ethics, and Politics. By Amit Shilo. New York, NY, Cambridge University Press, 2022. Pp. x + xii. Hardback £75, ISBN: 978-1-108-83274-8.

15 Greek Literature and the Ideal. The Pragmatics of Space from the Archaic to the Hellenistic Age. By Alexander Kirichenko. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2022. Pp. vii-x + 290. Hardback £75, ISBN: 978-0-19-286670-7.

16 Byzantine Commentaries on Ancient Greek Texts, 12th–15th Centuries. Edited by Baukje van den Berg, Divina Manolova, and Przemyslaw Marciniak. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Pp. x + 386. Hardback £90, ISBN: 978-1-316-51465-8.