Nonnus

The poet and the poem. Nonnus of Panopolis wrote the Dionysiaca, an epic of Dionysus. The poem’s opening section is called the proem. It announces the themes (1.1–33).^[1] They are the god’s double birth, from Semele and from the thigh of Zeus; his fight with the Giants; his war against the Indians; his love for Aura; Lycurgus; Icarius; and the first wine-press. The last lines show him drinking nectar at his father’s table, “enthroned with Apollo” (48.975–978).

In the Perseus text (W. H. D. Rouse’s Loeb, 1940–1942) the poem fills 48 books and 21,281 hexameters. Each book is introduced by a short verse summary. None of the metrical sources used on this site gives Nonnus’ life or date. West places him in the fifth and sixth centuries, with “his followers”.^[2]

Students of Sappho may meet him in an unexpected place. Nonnus tells how roses sprang up when the foam-born goddess Aphrodite first stepped ashore. That account is cited in a reading of the garden of Aphrodite in Sappho’s fragment 2 (Dion. 41.118–25).^[3]

Why the metre matters. The story of Greek verse in the later centuries begins from a change in the language. Classical Greek had a pitch accent, and the accent played no part in the metre. From the Hellenistic period on it slowly took on some stress. Accented syllables tended to lengthen, and unaccented ones to shorten. By around the third century AD the contrast of long and short syllables had largely gone from speech.^[4]

The stress accent grew up together with the loss of vowel quantity. The change started in popular speech and reached the literary language late.^[5] Poets went on writing quantitative verse, which they learnt at school. But it was now a thoroughly artificial skill.^[6] (The accent itself is the subject of the Accent page.)

Nonnus writes in this situation. The Alexandrian hexameter reaches its peak in Callimachus.^[7] Nonnus keeps every one of its refinements, and refines it further still.^[2] His contraction, elision and hiatus are tightly restricted. Several of his rules concern the accent, which by his time was what a reader actually heard.

One of these rules shows the logic. In everyday speech, words such as πολλά (polla), “many”, or ἄλλος (allos), “other”, no longer had a long final syllable at all. So scanning them by the classical rules felt too unnatural.^[8] The rules are set out, with examples from the Dionysiaca, on the Nonnian hexameter tab.

West’s two examples. West quotes two lines of the Dionysiaca. D. 42.43 shows the one place where Nonnus lets a word of the shape — ⏑ have its last syllable lengthened by a following consonant. That place is the start of the line, and the word is an oxytone of three syllables. An oxytone is a word with the acute accent on its last syllable. D. 8.349 is “exceptional”. Here ἀθρῆσαι (athrēsai) has a long penultimate and a final -αι, and its last syllable is lengthened before μ:^[9]

Rouse’s text, quoted here, has the same words in both lines. It writes Ἐρώτων with a capital, where West has ἐρώτων. The works section Dionysiaca, 42.40–53 scans the passage that contains the first line.

Followers. The sixth-century poets of Agathias’ Cycle go back to a far stricter technique. Their hexameters lean the same way as Nonnus’, though less strictly than his. Agathias himself is stricter in the hexameters of his preface than in his epigrams.^[10]

The works. Dionysiaca, 1.1–33 is the proem. In it the poet calls for Proteus, whose changing shapes promise a varied poem. Dionysiaca, 42.40–53 is Dionysus’ first sight of Beroe. Every line in both is checked against each of West’s rules, and the counts are on the Nonnian hexameter tab.