Works of Nonnus

by Nonnus

  If Nonnos had been a more consistent thinker and more of a poet, he had hold of an idea which would at least have given his work a grandiose pattern and a real, contemporary interest. He seems to have tried to fit the events of the story into an astrological background, ill though he was fitted to do so, when his knowledge of both astronomy and astrology was evidently feeble. Astrology had long been popular and widely accepted, and it continued to be so, whatever the Church might say or do, till modern astronomy made its schemes cease to appeal to the average man’s imaginative picture of the universe. Stegemann has shown that he had some acquaintance with astrological writings, and that his general scheme of the universe is in accord with their teachings. He divides time into world-months constituting a world-year, and after the cosmic month which brings the Flood (bk. i.) and that of Typhon’s attempt (bk. ii.), the cosmic winter is over (bk. iii. 1), summer is come to the universe and the blessing of the new god, a god of the fruitfulness of autumn, is due. This comes in the later books of the poem, with the birth, growth and triumph of Dionysos. But unfortunately, having got his new saviour-god born, he has no idea what to do with him, and the poem trails off into a series of conventional adventures, military and amorous, each more tiring than the last, till finally a few concluding lines huddle Dionysos away to heaven. He has lost sight of his own framework, recurring to it only now and again, and so the work which might have been a curious monument of astrological religion, instinct with some genuine feeling, is but a heap of episodes, loosely connected.

  Nonnos had, however, another enthusiasm, which gave rise to a piece of apparently original and not wholly unpicturesque creation. He had, even at that late date, unbounded faith in the civilizing mission of the Roman Empire (much less dead, of course, in the East than in the West) and especially in the benefits of Roman law. Therefore he provides one of the greatest of the law-schools, that at Berytus, with a foundation-myth of its own, the story of the nymph Beroë, child of Aphrodite (see bks. xli.-xlii. and notes there). If all his constructive ideas were as interesting as this, or as his astrology, the Dionysiaca would be more readable and fuller of interest to the historian of ancient culture.

  There is yet another point of view from which Nonnos’s mythology may be examined. As Bentley says of him, “he had great variety of Learning, and may pass for an able Grammarian, though a very ordinary Poet.” Hence the episodes with which the poem abounds, and the continual digressions and allusions which interrupt the narrative, teem with stories, mostly in late literary forms, often probably also of late origin, even invented or given their present shape by Nonnos himself, which either cannot be found elsewhere or are not told in full save in the Dionysiaca. Instances of this will be found in abundance in the notes; besides the story of the fight with Perseus, already mentioned, we may remind the reader here that Nonnos is our authority (bk. i. 155, 511) for the very curious legend that Typhoeus contrived to steal not only the thunderbolts of Zeus but his sinews, which at once betrays itself as being in its origins at all events popular, probably old and hardly Greek. Nonnos it is who tells us the whole series of tales (bks. x. ff.) of the various loves of Dionysos who were metamorphosed into various plants connected with viticulture. Nonnos gives us incomparably the longest account of the expedition of the god against the Indians, and though he probably invented a good deal himself, still there are no doubt elements derived from earlier fancies than his, and in the dearth of documents for this interesting development of quasi-political mythology, he has his value. Nonnos again is full of local legends, such as the naming of the promontory Pallene, though that is also to be found in a minor geographer or two; and, in general, as has already been said, he furnishes material for the study of Alexandrian mythology in its degenerate forms. Incidentally, he is so full of imitations of earlier and better poets than himself that here again he fills gaps in our knowledge, in a manner not to be despised considering how huge a proportion of Alexandrian literature is lost to us. His astrological episodes, in which various gods such as Aion (himself a late personification) turns nativity-caster and Harmonia keeps a sort of celestial Old Moore on her wall, we may ascribe to him and to no predecessor, so far as our knowledge goes.

  While therefore anyone who uses Nonnos as a handbook to any sort of normal and genuinely classical mythology will be grievously misled, the searcher into sundry odd corners will be rewarded for his pains, and even those who are studying the subject more generally cannot afford to neglect this belated product of the learned fancy of Hellenized Egypt.

  H. J. Rose.

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  Little is known about the life and death of Nonnus — his native town of Panopolis was likely where he spent his final days