CHAPTER THREE

THE POET OF DIONYSUS

Introduction

This poem never tires of examining and representing its own textual processes; its narrative is packed with legendary characters who are also figures of the poet. 1

Recent work On Latin epic poetry has done much to focus atten• tion on the figure of the epic poet and the ways in which he is 'embedded ... in his own narrative'.2 Literary critics have become increasingly conscious of the poet's own self-conscious participation in the action of his poem. Ecphrastic descriptions alert the reader to the artful construction of text; characters present themselves as potential doublets for the 'character' of the poet; the journey of the hero functions, in its entirety, as a suggestive allegory for the jour• ney of the poet, from beginning to end.3 But if this approach works well for interpretations of Latin epic poets,4 it has been little explored with regard to the Greek poets of the later Roman empire. This chapter will focus attention on the figure of Nonnus, and will examine the extent to which the poet of the Dionysiaca is embed• ded in his own narrative. It will be my contention that the quota• tion which stands as an epigraph to this chapter (and comes from arecent collection of essays on Ovid's Metamorphoses) provides an appropriate description of Nonnus' Dionysiaca. At every stage we will see a poem obsessed with its own textual processes, peopled with characters who participate in, and further encourage debate about, the right way to write an epic poem. Following on from the impor• tant work of Hopkinson and Harries, this chapter will show how the

I Hardie, Barchiesi, Hinds eds. (1999) 10. 2 Hardie (1993) 99. 3 Cf. Hardie (1993) 119: ' ... the poet, as much as his heroes, is involved in a power-game for high stakes. If the hero must strive to be the best, or to win the world for his throne, the poet is always challenged to be supreme in the supreme genre'. 4 Ovidian studies have been particularly active in this direction. See, for exam- pie, Leach (1974); Lateiner (1984); Hinds (1987); Harries (1990). 114 CHAPTER THREE

Dio11)siaca teHs both the story of the epic hero, and the epic poet Nonnus, and his own heroic attempt to write a Dionysiac epic.5

a) Nonnus and Dionysus Before turning to a detailcd metapoetic analysis of the narrative of Dionysus, it will be useful to consider the proemial section of Nonnus' epic, the poet's own preface to his work. It is here, during his opening invocation to the Muses, that Nonnus first establishes an analogy between hirnself and the subject of his song, Dionysus:6

a~a1;E 1101 vap&r,Ka, 'tlva~a'tl:: KUI1ßaAa, Mouam, / Kat 1taAal1ll öD'tE 8upaov aElOOI1EVOU .ilOvuaou. (Bring me the fennei, rattle the cymbals, you Muses! Put in my hand the wand of Dionysus whom I sing.) [1.11-12]

a~a'tE 110l vap&r,Ka, M1I1aM6vE~, cOl1aOhw OE / vEßpioa 1tOlKtMVOYtOV E{h1l1ovo~ av'tt Xl't&vo~ / a!piy~a'tE 1101 a'tEpv01crt, Map(OviOo~ EI11tAEOV oOI1i1~ / VEK• 'tapET]~. (Bring me the fennei, Mimallons! On my shoulders, in place of the wonted kirtle, bind, I pray, tight over my breast a dapple-back fawn• skin, full of the perfume of Maronian nectar.) [1.34-7] In the words of Harries, 'the proem is about Nonnus becoming a Dionysiac poet'.7 Un1ike Hesiod, who took the laurel staff from the Muses on Mount Helicon, Nonnus has asked the Muses to come to hirn in Alexandria, to inspire hirn with the thyrsus of Dionysus and the mantle of a Bacchic celebrant. Right at thc start of his epic, then, Nonnus has dissolved the traditional distance between epic poet and epic subject; he has entered into an open relationship with the subject of his poem.

5 See Hopkinson (1994b); Harries (1994). 6 Most obviously, the birth of Nonnus' poem coincides with the birth oi' his sub• ject (even though Dionysus does not appear in the narrative until Book 8). At this point, Nonnus' song could weil be described, like the baby Dionysus as 'incomplete' [1.5]: ~1.lt'tD.. Ea'tov; cf. the programmatic use oi' this adjective at 24.322; see p. 170. Furthermore, as Dionysus' life begins with his near destruction, with a thunderbolt that almost kills hirn, so Nonnus' narrative begins on a similar note with the thun• derbolts stolen from Zeus-[1.155-6]: Ö1tAa ~lO~ Vl!poEv'!a KlA1S EKA,EIJIE Tll