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5.0 out of 5 stars
The Dionysiaca Volume 1 -- The Forgotten Epic of Late Antiquity, March 11, 2010
This review is from: Nonnos: Dionysiaca, Volume I, Books 1-15 (Loeb Classical Library No. 344) (Hardcover)
This is the longest surviving epic from Antiquity, longer even than the Iliad and the Odyssey, but it's been forgotten. And this is the only English language translation currently available - itself nearly seventy years old. Why the Dionysiaca (aka "The Story of Dionysos") is overlooked is a mystery, as it's a hallucinogenic, kaleidoscopic, psychedelic trip through the Greek mythos, complete with the sex, violence, and usual acts of rape, bestiality, and general unpleasantness that the Greek gods were known for. And even this translation, published by WHD Rouse in 1940, is not so bad - though it's been split into 3 fat volumes, with the Greek original on the facing pages, and Rouse's translation is in prose rather than the original verse.
Yes, an encyclopedic tale of Dionysos, written in the same poetic structure as Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, so large and stuffed with stories that the titular god doesn't even appear until Book 6. And get this - it was written in the Fifth Century CE! This is enough of a hook to get anyone interested. Who could believe that an epic about the "pagan" gods would be written a hundred years (or more) after Emperor Constantine legalized Christianity? The Dionysiaca was written even after the Emperor Julian was murdered - Julian the so-called "Apostate," Constantine's nephew, who attempted to bring back the ancient gods and depose Christianity.
The story of its author is just as compelling. Story? Actually nothing is known about Nonnos of Panopolis. Only that - get this - the only other work of his handed down to us is a "Paraphrase" of the Gospel of John. Sort of a Homeric take on John, but still, Christian-themed and biased. Scholars long supposed that Nonnos wrote the Dionysiaca early in life, and his "Paraphrase" later, once he'd converted to Christianity. But recent scholarship reveals that the "Paraphrase" was actually written first; internal clues point to the fact that it was turned out by a younger pen, by a poet in the early stages of his craft, with all of the errors and internal inconsistencies such an early going would entail. The Dionysiaca however retains its form throughout its meaty 48 Books - a daunting feat for any poet, not the least a first-timer.
So, it now seems that Nonnos, a Greek living in the Hellenized Egyptian city of Panopolis around 400 CE (or even later), took up the task of restoring the ancient epics of Greece. Epics ancient even to him - Nonnos himself was writing a thousand years after the time in which Homer lived. Why did he do it? How could anyone endeavor to undertake what must have been a decades-long pursuit about gods that were now basically illegal? Gods who were spurned by the new Christian majority? Gods whose temples were being razed right around the time Nonnos was taking his stylus in hand? Again, nothing is known. Nonnos is an enigma, a cipher, and so the reader is free to imagine.
I like to think of Nonnos as the Emperor Julian of poetry; that is, if Julian had gone into literature rather than warfare. And like Julian it seems obvious that Nonnos was raised Christian (at least, there's no way he could've avoided the religion) but later rejected it - because the Dionysiaca does not feature a single word about Jesus. Good for you, Nonnos! I also like to think that perhaps Nonnos attended a Dionysian festival (aka a Bacchanalia) shortly before they were banned, drank some of the potent wine these celebrations were known for, and, in a psychedelic flash of insight, the trap door of Nonnos' mind slammed open and he realized the "True Doctrine" (re Celsus). Gone were the Christian pretensions of his "Paraphrase;" Nonnos would now devote his life to an epic of the true gods, the gods of the ancients. And what god to better celebrate than Dionysos, a god long favored in Panopolis, a god who so challenged Christianity that it seems the Gospel of John was partly written to "prove" that Jesus was the more powerful of the two (re: "The Gospel of John: A Commentary" by Rudolf Bultmann)?
The Dionysiaca is most comparable to Ovid's Metamorphoses. But whereas the Metamorphoses jumps from story to story, spending little time fleshing any of them out, Nonnos takes his time building up and drawing out his scenes. An example - Ovid covers the battle between Zeus and the Titan Typhoeus in a few scant lines. Nonnos plays the confrontation out into two entire books. It's for this reason that I actually prefer the Dionysiaca to the Metamorphoses.
Volume 1 contains Books 1 to 15. The sweep is overwhelming -- we go from the origin of the gods to a war amongst them, with humans suffering the fallout. Dionysos doesn't appear until Book 6 but it turns out to be a different Dionysos; there were two myths of the god, and Nonnos covers them both. Indeed, this entire epic comes off like a hagiography of Dionysos, and if some new cult to the god were to spring up, they'd need look no further for their Bible. The volume gradually builds to a war Dionysos wages against India, and there it ends. Nearly six hundred pages and you've still got two more volumes to go. Now THAT'S an epic!
"Rouse is not universally praised," wrote Andrew Dalby in the Notes of his "Bacchus: A Biography," a book incidentally which leans heavily on the Dionysiaca. I myself have a soft spot for Rouse; his prose translation of the Iliad and the Odyssey were the first ones I read. It's true, his translation shorns the Homeric verse of Nonnos' original Greek, reducing it all to a sort of "novel." But beggars can't be chosers; there's no other English translation of the Dionysiaca out there. On the positive side, Rouse strives to lend his prose a "poetic" feel; he creates words in what I swear is inspiration from Joyce's "Ulysses" in that they are certainly Joycean. He also provides copious footnotes (some of which snarkily poke fun at Nonnos' grand ambitions - ambitions which sometimes fall flat), explaining the multivarious gods and myths Nonnos casually mentions, assuming his reader is well-versed in said gods and myths. The vast majority of us, these centuries later, are not. Rouse, luckily for us, was. Nonnos also likes to show off his knowledge of astrology; though, as Rouse explains in his notes, Nonnos is often wrong. So you have to take it in stride - though there are many negatives to Rouse's translation, I think the positives outweigh them. And until a modern translator takes up the task (I'd nominate Burton Raffel or Stanley Lombardo), this is all we have.
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