FROM THE PREFACE OF THE MOST DISTINGUISHED COUNT A MARCELLO
PREFIXED TO THE LATEST EDITION OF NONNUS' DIONYSIACA, PREPARED BY HIMSELF, WHICH HE KINDLY GRANTED US PERMISSION TO TRANSCRIBE.
I The Life and Contemporaries of Nonnus (a).
What can be said of the life of Nonnus, when we barely know his name? For him, as for most of the Greek epigrammatists who contributed to the anthology of the third period, when the collector Agathias, adding his *Circle* (kyklos) to the *Garlands* of Meleager and the *Crowns* of Philip of Thessalonica, recorded their short verses without concerning himself with their biographies, everything is reduced to very few certainties mingled with many conjectures.
Nonnus was born at Panos, or Panopolis, the city of Pan, in Egypt: this is something that is doubtful to no one, and which his poem, the *Dionysiaca*, would indirectly confirm if necessary. This city of Pan (today Akhmin) bore in the first place, say the ancient geographers, the name Chemmis; and although Stephanus of Byzantium makes them two cities, or rather places them in two distinct locations in his alphabetical Catalogue, where geographical notions seem only an accessory to grammatical instruction, there is reason here to reunite the two cities and to conflate them to make them the common homeland of Nonnus. For the city of Chemmis, which Herodotus says was the only one where the natives, even in his time, showed no aversion to Greek customs, is indeed the city of Pan, of which Diodorus Siculus has handed down to us the Egyptian etymology, Chemmo. Hence, no doubt, the important role the god Pan plays in the *Dionysiaca*, where we always see him as an acolyte of Bacchus, the Egyptian Osiris. Thus, when Nonnus chose the triumphs of Bacchus for his epic, it was, we must not forget, a national subject he was treating, or at the very least the ancient origin of the favorite cult of his native city. Who knows even if Nonnus was not led to celebrate the progress of Bacchus, civilizing god, or the conquests of the Greek spirit over Indian barbarism, by the spectacle of the religion which was then altering the face of the world, and if the future neophyte did not draw the mother-idea of the *Dionysiaca* from his own meditations on the Christian philosophy, also civilizing, whose empire he saw grow and develop each day? The singer of Cymodoce did well to ask of the homeland of Homer the brilliant colors with which he clothed the Martyrs.
Panopolis was situated in the Thebaid, on the eastern bank of the Nile, near Antaeopolis, opposite Crocodilopolis; and one can, upon reading all the names enumerated under Greek appellations by Pliny the Naturalist, rightly marvel to see the language of the Hellenes carry its influence so far, to extend to the line of the desert the perfect knowledge of its dialects, and to bring to birth almost at the limit of Ethiopia this Greek poet whom Suidas and the Empress Eudocia, author of the *Violarium* (*Ionia*), both of them echoes of the literary judgments of the times that preceded them, agree to designate under the envied epithet of *Logiotatos*. Now this expression, at the epoch when it is employed, signified "very skilled in fine speech." Would he, then, be a writer without value whose name saved from oblivion the very name of his homeland? For this same Suidas and Stephanus of Byzantium do not seem to attach any other importance to Panopolis than that for which it is indebted to its illustrious citizen.
Panopolis nevertheless had more than one inhabitant worthy of being marked for the memory of posterity. And I cannot help but note here a true analogy between Nonnus and one of his fellow countrymen, whom one might believe to be his disciple: it is Cyrus of Panopolis that I mean. In the few verses he has bequeathed to us, Cyrus, following the example of the author of the *Dionysiaca*, seems to have, above all, aspired to the beauty of rhythm and, at the same time, the imitation of Homer. This search for form and the Homeric meter was moreover of a nature to please his august protectress, another Eudocia, who brought to the throne of the second Theodosius the love of the arts and of Attic elegance; Eudocia, a woman philosopher, which, among the Greeks, signified now a friend of letters, now quite simply a virtuous woman; for this title did not have...
A entirely the pride that it carried at a certain epoch of the previous century. I am, I admit, keenly struck by the encounter, in the same epoch, or rather by the conformity of destinies that binds these three eminent minds. This pagan empress in Athens, under the name of Athenais, who became Christian in Constantinople, employs the heroic verse to translate the beginning of Genesis, the prophecies of Daniel, and constructs, with the help of hemistichs from the Iliad and the Odyssey, Centos destined to celebrate the mysteries of our faith: Nonnos, on the other hand, the singer of Bacchus, who paraphrases, a few years earlier, the Gospel of Saint John with the idiom and rhythm of Homer, as if he sought to poetize Christianity; finally Cyrus, a poet himself, who, disgusted with honors and political functions, becomes a priest and receives the charge of the episcopate. History has not remained silent for this latter neophyte; it tells us that his noble qualities, his talents, and the Attic elegance of his erudition having won the confidence of Eudocia, Theodosius had raised him to the rank of Prefect of the Praetorium of the East. Soon, jealous of his merit and of his favor with the people, the emperor dismissed him; and it was then no doubt that Cyrus, abandoning the capital of the oriental world for solitude, exclaimed in beautiful verses (1): ‹ Why did my father not teach me the art of tending to the thick-fleeced sheep? Seated under the elms or under a rock, I would dissipate my sorrows to the sound of my pipes! Muses, let us flee the city with the pompous edifices, let us seek a new fatherland; I am going to teach the world how much the pernicious drones B harm the bees. › (Anth. Jacobs, ix, Ep. 136.) And here, it must be remarked, the Homeric epithet εὐκτιμένην (well-built) takes, in the mouth of Cyrus, a quite personal acceptation. In the course of his skillful administration, the poet had rebuilt the ramparts of Constantinople, embellished the city, and earned that popular cry which was one of the causes of his disgrace: ‹ Constantine founded our city; but Cyrus has renewed it. › Now, if these first conjectures do not lead me astray, I would wish to draw from them some chronological light, not doubt to determine in a precise manner the dates of the birth or the death of Nonnos, but at least to fix more exactly the time when he wrote. And now that the identity of the singers of the Dionysiaca and of the Gospel is recognized; when the clouds spread over this question, so to speak bibliographic, by the first investigators of Greek poetry at their renaissance, find themselves completely dissipated; when the similarity of qualities or shortcomings of the two works, although in subject so diverse, leaves no doubt remaining, I am led to believe that the poem of Bacchus, an epic and national subject, which must have preceded by several years in the life of Nonnos his Christian poems, was composed, since one cannot say "appeared," toward the end of the fourth century, no doubt before the decrees of 391, where the great Theodosius declared pagan sacrifices criminal, and ordered the closing of the temples of the false gods. I would willingly think, on the other hand, that the paraphrase of the Gospel dates from the last years of this same century or from the beginning of the following century, and must have preceded by a short time the end of Nonnos, since such an abundant versifier has not left another production, even in the Anthology, though it was swelled with so many verses from that epoch. Would Nonnos be that same grammarian to whom a certain Ausonius the Sophist addressed epistles and verses, as Suidas says without other explanation? Now this Ausonius, if one must give to the title of Sophist the favorable sense that the scholiast of Pindar (2) indicates, would be no other than the Latin poet of my country. Undoubtedly he was a contemporary of Nonnos; but his verses, even in his many dedications, offer no trace of the poet of Panopolis. Or perhaps it would be a question of another Ausonius, one of those orators and subtle philosophers to whom the glossator of Aristophanes confers also the name of sophist (3), but this time under the unfavorable acceptation that it retains still in our language? That is, in effect, much more probable. Was Nonnos the father of that young Sosenna whom Synesius, also an African, recommends to his friends, and represents as nourished and raised in the art of speaking well? Διὰ λόγων τραφέντα καὶ αὐξηθέντα. (Syn. Epistle 102.) One may suppose so, without giving to this testimony an exaggerated authority, and recognize here that same Sosenna of Epistle 43. Now, in such a silence of history, it might not be straining conjecture too much to find again, in the misfortunes of which Synesius makes a title of recommendation for the son of Nonnos, the spoliation of the goods of the pagans, ordered by Theodosius. One could then understand our poet among those missionaries of philosophy, καὶ μάλιστα οἱ φιλοσοφεῖν ἐπαγγελλόμενοι, whom Socrates the Scholasticus, their contemporary, tells us had redeemed their life by their conversion to Christianity. (`Socrates, Hist. eccl., v, ch. 16, p. 274.) Another argument in favor of the approximate date that I assign to the life of Nonnos, from 360 to 420 of our era. Is it Nonnos, bishop of Edessa, to whom Nice-
Nicephorus applies the epithet of divine (1)? I am far from believing so.
Nor is he that Theophane Nonnos, a physician who, living under Constantine Porphyrogenitus, the encyclopedic scholar born in the imperial purple, dedicated to him the collection of his precepts on the art of healing.
Still less is he that other physician, Ludovicus Nonnus, with an incontestably Latin ending this time, whose Latin treatises on dietetics and ichthyophagy were published in the seventeenth century.
He cannot be the deacon Nonnos, appearing in 451 among the secretaries of the Council of Chalcedon, nor a certain Nonnos of Palestine, a partisan of Origen, whom Simeon the Metaphrast mentions in the Lives of Saint Sabas and Saint Cyriacus. On the other hand, Bentley has maintained that the Nonnos who was the author of the explanatory accounts of the mythological allusions in Saint Gregory of Nazianzus, within his panegyric of Saint Basil, had nothing in common with our poet; and these extracts, of which some trace will be found in my notes when they treat of certain subjects recalled in the *Dionysiaca*, have served me much less than they served the Empress Eudocia. "It is from these little streams," says the learned Creuzer, "that she very often drew the water with which she waters her Violets (2)."
I find just as vainly a Nonnos, Bishop of Raphanæa (Apamea of Media), among the signatories of the petition presented to Emperor Justinian, during the Council of Constantinople, by the bishops of White Syria, to complain of their tax collectors.
We shall remark in this regard that the Egyptians gave the name of *Nonnos*, which signifies saint, to the solitaries of the Thebaid and to spiritual chiefs, just as they gave the name of saint, *Nonnai* or *Nonides*, to aged virgins and to matrons consecrated to God (3). It is a respectful appellation that children still apply in Italy to their elders: *il Nonno, la Nonna*. And, to say it in passing, it is for this reason that martyrologies designate by the name of *Nonnus* Saint Hippolytus, the famous and learned martyr, whose work, which the Chevalier Bunsen, both philologist and diplomat, has attempted to rediscover in the *Philosophumena* of Origen, remains lost. Saint Hippolytus was Bishop of Portus, a deserted village at the mouth of the Tiber, now reunited to the diocese of Ostia, which is even more deserted, the vast solitudes of which I have so often traversed, and which serves as a suburbicarian title for one of the principal dignitaries of the sacred college; this learned saint, martyred in the year 240, certainly cannot be confused with the poet of Panopolis; and besides, Suidas has settled the question, for he states formally that *Nonnos* was the personal name of the author of the *Dionysiaca*, and had consequently never been either an adjective or a nickname.
Nonnos is incontestably, for example, that personage whom the historian Agathias, in his habit of saying everything without going into anything deeply, designates thus (and certainly he could have spoken to us of him at greater length, if he had seen fit, following the excellent method of our own day, to have the works of the poets whose names and verses he has preserved for us in his *Anthology* be preceded by a biographical notice): "Behold," he says, "the fables that the primitive poets sing, and that, in receiving from them, the recent poets also celebrate, among whom I will cite Nonnos, born in the city of Pan in Egypt, in I know not which of the patriotic compositions he has entitled: *Dionysiaca* (4)."
At the end of this all-too-long review of all the *Nonnoses* known or named in history, why then not recognize here the Nonnos of whom Suidas speaks, who, after having learned all of Demosthenes by heart sixteen times, could not bring forth from his mouth the slightest tolerable harangue? And this singular obstinacy inspires the learned lexicographer to a reflection quite appropriate to our century, which I have heard repeated more than once by M. Châteaubriand: "It is quite another thing to improvise for the multitude, or to write with elegance (5)."
As we see, all this is vague and conjectural, as Heinsius says; and as for the conclusions he draws for the profit of his *Aristarchus sacer*—that because Nonnos, in his *Paraphrase of the Gospel*, appears, from a theological point of view, to be imbued with the writings of Saint Gregory of Nazianzus and seems to ignore the commentaries of Saint John Chrysostom...
This indication, more ingenious than precise, would not assign to the Panopolitan a date other than the one I have just assigned to him.
II. Education of Nonnos. State of Letters in Egypt. Paraphrase of the Gospel according to Saint John.
Nonnos, one might suspect from his vast erudition, was most probably raised in Alexandria, in the shadow of the primitive Museum, within the heart of that library of the Serapeum, founded by Mark Antony, which barbarian hands were soon to outrage. "Nowhere," says M. Villemain eloquently, "was polytheism more tenacious and more inexhaustible than on this land of the Pharaohs, where nothing perished, neither reality nor falsehood; where the mysterious antiquity of the monuments preserved the antiquity of the beliefs; where life was so strong that it seemed a divine emanation spread everywhere, and where the superstitious imagination of the people made new gods incessantly swarm, just as the warmed mud of the Nile multiplies reptiles."
On this soil generating so many confused divinities, from which Nonnos caused the master-idea of his poem to spring, classes of philosophy and literature, which they then called grammar (it is almost still the same word, whether it comes from Greek or Latin), and of those mathematics which always dominate in times of decadence, were constantly open. One would still discern the student familiar with the observatory of Alexandria, erected by the Ptolemies, in his penchant for astronomy revealed at every turn in the *Dionysiaca*: a science or contemplation carried so far among the Egyptians, the first observers of the sky, that it soon produced astrology, as if to lead our less enlightened centuries further astray. A multitude of grammarians also explained, under the public vaults of the Museum or in private schools, the beauties of the great classical writers, as well as the myths of paganism. Talents were formed according to the rules of poetic discipline, softening language to the forms of refined manners; but, alas! genius cannot be taught, and the sublime simplicity of the ancient poems gave way to the labor of thought and the science of words. The style, polished in its affectation, was overloaded with the memory of preceding centuries and erudite allusions; but it poorly disguised, under the harmony and roundness of the phrases, the absence of imagination; taste and judgment were corrupted by these pedantic studies; the mass of figures, plays on words, and subtleties weakened the diction; in the end, everything was for the ear, nothing for the heart. "An era as corrupted as our own," M. de Bonald said to me, "where they put intellect above reason, and grace above virtue."
However, the darkness was approaching; ignorance, outside of Christianity, was spreading its dark wings over the fourth century, where the crumbling empire covered both Romans and Greeks with its debris. Already the Latin language had, like the Greek language, received the influence of the literary sects that were departing from Egypt to invade Europe; and nonetheless this same era, which saw the Roman idiom degenerate and the genius of Athens be veiled, also saw Christian eloquence and polemics take their greatest flight. The century, as it was dying, was still illuminated by some poetic glimmers. While Claudian was reproducing in Rome several of the qualities and many of the defects of this school of Alexandria which had been his homeland and his nurse, while Ausonius in Aquitaine, with his lively and spiritual sallies, and later Boethius in Milan, supported by his consoling and generous philosophy, were to draw still another spark of Latin verse in the Western empire, the sweet and dream-like melancholy of Saint Gregory of Nazianzus, Synesius and his meditations of a sublime metaphysics, Palladas and some elegant epigrammatists of Alexandria and Constantinople, and finally Nonnos in the depths of Egypt, with the help of his graceful imitations and the perfection of his rhythm, made the beautiful language of Anacreon and Euripides shine once more with some happy reflection in the Eastern empire.
Let us remark here, as a general thesis, that writers, in verse as in prose, of the second epoch of a literature, are almost always, in terms of diction, superior to the secondary writers of the flourishing epoch. The reason is quite simple: they did not receive, to direct them in its first steps, the language barely escaped its cradle; it arrived to them fully grown, developed, and, so to speak, entirely fashioned by the hands of their predecessors. It is thus that Lucian and Plutarch have a phraseology much more artistic than Herodotus. But, if the instrument is more perfect, the inspiration that makes it resound has weakened. As for Nonnos in particular, in an era where enthusiastic genius held so little place, he had to, in order to make a name for himself, write very correctly and seek, through the charm and harmony of the meter, to elevate the poetic style; it must be remarked, indeed, the care he takes to distance himself from vulgar expressions, from turns of phrase hostile to Atticism, from the trivial and incorrect phrases that were introducing themselves into the Greek idiom in Alexandria, and of which Lycophron and the Orphic hymns offer us more than one trace. Placed furthermore on the boundary of paganism which is dying, and of rising Christianity, he inherits the ideas and expressions of these two regimes which have successively chan
changed the face of the world, and he gathers the traditions or the customs of peoples before and during this great transition, like the knowledge scattered throughout all the precious writings that time has hidden from us.
Encouraged by these reflections, I persuaded myself that by introducing this poet, almost a stranger to the republic of letters, into that small fraction of European society which casts a glance toward past generations in order to study their customs, my work might not remain without some utility—if only, and I insist on this point, to profit from the lights, extinguished long ago, that then surrounded Nonnus, as well as to illuminate the literary history of a time so little known, and to serve as an initiation for the minds of our epoch when, in order to arrive at a complete understanding of the modern genius, they believe they must still ask for some lights from the genius of antiquity.
Thus, I confess, I have followed Nonnus with true curiosity, in the revolutions of his mind, as much as in the varieties of his style, always imbued with Homer, even when he paraphrases the Bible. I have studied, in the diverse application of his talent, this poet who moves from the tableaux of mythology, without veiling their nudity, to the images so pure of the disciple whom the Greeks nicknamed the Virgin, and whom the scholars of the sixteenth century also call *sanctissimus Parthenias*. I hasten to say that this contrast of the ornaments or figures of profane poetry applied to Christian morality—this sort of anachronism of expression, which would be of a nature to offend us like the worldly parody of an evangelical subject—disappears totally from the pagan poem. There, at least, by reason of its title, the imagination of Nonnus can give itself free rein, and even wander, without too much scandalizing our own.
And, on this subject, it is, in my opinion, to his theme—too exclusively mythological—and to the scruples of the scholars of the sixteenth century, that we must attribute the oblivion in which the *Dionysiaca* languish, while commentators flock to the *Paraphrase* and have multiplied its translations. These prejudices, whose motives one certainly cannot reprove, but which one may regret in a purely literary interest, have been carried so far that one has sought to establish the poetic superiority of this latter work over the former. This judgment, I must say, would seem to me sovereignly unjust, and I readily adjourn the debate until after the reading of the translation, or rather of the text as I have reconstituted it. One will then understand more easily how much the contrary proposition is more natural and more true. There is more invention, that goes without saying, but also, I maintain, much more poetry and real talent in the episodes of the life of Bacchus, even including his ancestors, than in the gloss of the evangelical narratives, however artistically regular it may present itself. And although the pace of the rhythm, the prodigality, and the neologism of the epithets are the same on both sides, one cannot help but notice that the poet is much more at ease in the forty-eight books of the *Dionysiaca*, open to the caprices of even the most contradictory legends, than in the twenty-three chapters of the holy Gospel, where he had to remain subservient to a uniform progress and a rigorous theme. Let us agree on this, moreover, with Despréaux:
*Of a Christian’s faith the terrible mysteries* *Are not susceptible to gilded ornaments.*
I rely on this sentence to observe that, in the entire course of my work, I have concerned myself but little with this second work of Nonnus, and that I have wished neither to defend it against Heinsius nor to judge it myself. I have not, however, deprived myself of the lights that could spring from the confrontation of the two texts, the similarities that the poet may have sought, and the locutions that he caused to pass from his great work into the latter. One will find some vestiges of my efforts on the *Paraphrase* in the commentaries, where I have compared the epithets and certain hexameters. It is only too true; it is especially toward this long amplification of the Gospel according to Saint John that the zeal of philologists and grammarians has turned until now, when they have wished to fix the place that Nonnus should occupy in the Greek literature of the fourth century; it is this diction and these images that they have submitted by predilection to their censure and to their crucible, while neglecting the original composition of which they were the copy. And yet Nansius, the most famous of his translators, said in a preliminary notice: “I would have wished to give the partisans of Greek poetry some taste for another work of Nonnus: and I cannot urge and exhort them enough, after having read attentively Homer, Hesiod, Callimachus, Theocritus, Apollonius, and the other ancient poets, to study with care the *Dionysiaca*: they will find there many excellent things (*praeclara*) that one does not encounter elsewhere.”
Everything has long since been said regarding the *Paraphrase* of the Gospel. Editions abound as do translations and commentaries; and it seemed to me that by weighing myself down on a subject so little analogous to my own, I could have incurred, in the eyes of my readers, the blame of a heterogeneous mixture and of a kind of profanation.
III.
Why I do not judge Nonnus here.
Not being able to do anything, or almost anything, to dissipate D
A the shadows accumulated over the existence of Nonnus, it would have been, perhaps, the case here, to compensate myself for it, to expand in a special chapter on the merits or faults of his works, or at least of the poem to which I have devoted my vigils; but it seemed more natural to me to yield my turn to speak to those who, in one sense or another, reproach or praise, have preceded me; and, in this double matter, before drawing from myself, I had much to choose from among others. Almost all the critics who have followed the *Dionysiaca* to the end, upon their reappearance in the first editions which were so incorrect, or, strictly speaking, in the primitive and unique edition simply repeated at a later epoch, or even most of the scholars to whom, in our own day, the text of Graefe, still quite defective, has allowed the traversing of certain detached episodes—as if to compensate for this labor or to boast of their patience—have thought they must publish a judgment sometimes indulgent, but much more often severe. As for me, who have prescribed to myself the task of restoring to his verses, as much as I have been able, their primitive luster, of freeing them from the obscurities or repetitions due to clumsy copyists, and finally of translating them in their entirety, I shall content myself with reporting in prose here, and in detail in the corpus of the work, the sentiment of my learned predecessors, reserving to myself the right to confirm or combat it as the occasion arises. I wish above all to let the reader judge for himself; and, to this end, I have referred my own appreciations to the special notes. It is there only, and not in this preface which is not near B to an end, that I shall attempt to make effective or rather to underline the text, so to speak. My remarks will also concern style or composition, when my translation has not signaled them sufficiently by itself; and here I must apologize in advance for not being able, in a prose that is always a little dragging when it interprets poetry, to make one taste the whole charm of this elegant versification even under its inflation, and of this idiom that is always melodious in its abundance. Are not all translations, and here I speak of the best ones, like those flowers that the hand of an ingenious woman copies after the most perfect model? Exactly similar in form and color to those same flowers that nature created, they always lack, not only the perfume, but also that delicate freshness that the native dew gives it, in short I know not what charm for the one who is going to gather it, to see it brilliant upon the stem that nourished it and attached it still to the ground where it lived.
IV. History of the editions: Sambucus, purchaser of the *editio princeps*, Archbishop Arsenios, copyist or owner of this manuscript.
Now, to make up for a serious biography of Nonnus which I have just pursued gropingly without being able to attain it, I leap over the twelve centuries that he passed himself, sleeping in the dust of manuscripts; and I arrive at the days of his renaissance. These days were slower to dawn for him than for the other Greek poets, and they throw, even today, only very faint glimmers upon the literary horizon. About a century after the discovery of the printing press had vivified letters and rapidly propagated the taste for antique masterpieces, there was born in Hungary a man who distinguished himself among all others by his penchant for old manuscripts, as well as by his assiduous researches into the monuments of the Greek and Latin centuries. John Sambucus, born of a patrician family at Tyrnau, in the heart of the provinces where Latin is still spoken, and where in 1820 a few phrases borrowed unkindly from Cicero helped me have eight horses harnessed to my thin coach to cross the lakes of mud that were then called the imperial road—John Sambucus, I say, in the shadow of his Latin name, and prepared for his intellectual excavations by laborious studies, set out across Europe in search of old papyri, the object of his unique ambition. He stopped little before the meagerness of his fortune, but never in the face of difficulties or even the danger of travels. Witty, even eccentric, like all those amateurs of old books C of whom Charles Nodier was for us the most brilliant type, he did not content himself, like them and him, with pursuing them on the parapets of bridges, and on the shelves spread out in the open air on the quays of a single city; he wanted to hunt them down in their most mysterious retreats, and he ran through the world, sometimes on horseback, sometimes descending the course of rivers in a boat, alone, followed by two faithful dogs, of whose names he has preserved for us, as if the presence of Madel and of Bombo, sagacious and D this image is dedicated to fidelity. One reads at the bottom some iambs in the Latin language, the work of Sambucus, from which I have extracted these verses just as bad as his own: They have followed me everywhere, over sea as on land. They often came to Paris, They have known Neapolis, They have seen Rome and had little suspicion of it. Through Belgium they take their way; And, thanks to their faithful instinct, Toward my sweet country that calls me They will bring me back tomorrow.
A infatigable investigators of the hosts of woods and plains, was surely meant to serve him as an encouragement and an emblem in his literary hunts. His wanderings lasted twenty-two years, no doubt much longer than the life of those quadrupeds, his assiduous companions. Thus it was that, in the course of his patient searches, he came to Taranto, a city as destitute then as it is today of European communications, but whose situation, closer to Greece, had made it, even better than the other Italian cities of the Adriatic coast, the refuge of learned Greeks after the fall of Constantinople.
It was there that Arsenios lived, or rather it was there that he died, the author or compiler of the Scholia on Euripides, an unfinished work, for nothing concerning this learned personage was destined to remain complete or certain. He had been deposed from the see of Monembasia, in the Morea, by a decree of the synod of Constantinople around 1509, and was not named Archbishop of Monembasia by Leo X, as his biographer Clavier has asserted with a lightness not habitual to him (Biog. univ., art. Arsenios), as if this vain title were not of a nature to revive the prelate’s regrets rather than to console him for his lost homeland. It is not even certain that he ever appeared in Rome; we only learn from his dedication of the Scholia, addressed in 1534 to Pope Paul III, that he complained bitterly of the abandonment in which the Holy See left the Greek Church. Arsenios had escaped the barbarian invasion with his father, Apostolios; and both, according to the custom of the time, received or adopted, upon reaching Italy, that Latin ending "-us" in place of "-os," which they have kept ever since.
Apostolios composed in his exile, to relieve his misery, that species of lexicon of Greek proverbs (Paroimiai) which helped Erasmus immensely in the gigantic work of his Adages. Now, incidentally, this taste for proverbs and popular sayings has not yet ceased among the Hellenes, and I possess a collection of the idioms and maxims of the wisdom of the modern Greeks, which was printed at Arta, under the very shadow of the fortress of Ali Pasha, tyrant of Epirus.
Apostolios could not resolve to live far from Greece, and he left his two sons in Italy; the second, Aristobulus Arsenios, author of the poem on the War of the Cats and the Mice (the Galeomyomachia), was no less versed than the first in ancient literature. His father returned to die on the island of Crete, from where he sent, to provide for his old age, copies of ancient manuscripts, executed by himself. To this end, he had gathered a great number of them; I cannot, however, believe that the copy of the *Dionysiaca* that was found among the papers of his son, Archbishop Arsenios, was a copy in his own hand. I have as many motives for doubting this as there are errors in the faithful printing of Falkenburg; and certainly Arsenios would not have let them remain in the condition and number in which they are revealed to us. I must even believe that this copy of Nonnus was rarely consulted by the father or the son in their philological lucubrations, for one and the other scarcely mention it. The learned archbishop, in dedicating to Charles V the Venetian edition of the zoological iambics of Philes, of which he possessed the unique copy, explains all the trouble that this manuscript caused him, trodden underfoot, torn into numerous pieces, without sequence, with loose and unstitched leaves: it is, in short, he says, another Pelias whom only another Medea could rejuvenate. B Certainly Nonnus was hardly less in need of assistance; and, passing under the pen of Archbishop Arsenios, he would not have emerged as Falkenburg or even Graefe have presented him to us. Will I be forgiven for adding that the superscription of this letter from Arsenios to Charles V, written thirty-eight years before the battle of Lepanto, is worthy of remark at a time when, after having, like the great emperor, driven the barbarians back into Africa, Western Europe is stifling Greece for their benefit? “To King Charles. May he always erect the trophies of his victories over the barbarians!”
However, I hasten to repeat after this long digression, it was at Taranto that our bibliophile traveler met this manuscript of Nonnus, sold with the cast-offs of the indigent archbishop, and that he managed to acquire it for the price of forty-five gold crowns. Here I could, just like another, make the equivalent sum in current French currency shine, for the satisfaction of the bibliophiles of our day, if I were quite sure of the value of the gold crown as it was understood in Tyrnau or Taranto in 1560, and if this point deserved to be cleared up. The sum, in any case, was quite considerable, since it was a matter of gold, given the quite limited fortune of Sambucus.
V. The manuscripts of Fr. Filelfo and of Hurtado de Mendoza
It is not, however, that this manuscript was unique, but there is every reason to think that it was one of those on which were successively executed the first copies destined to cross the Alps: these copies, very few in number, after having C
A traveled into Europe, finally took refuge in public libraries, where they sleep today, alongside the edition princeps, also very rare, under a common dust.
Imperfect as it was, this copy was nevertheless consistent with the thirteenth-century manuscript that Francesco Filelfo purchased in 1424, in Constantinople, from the wife of John Chrysoloras. In this voluminous Codex, Nonnus finds himself in good company, and admitted in advance, as he was to be later, into the corpus of Greek poets. He occupies under this honorable cover, on the in-4° parchment transcribed in two columns, 164 pages, which will appear quite small when it is a question of more than twenty thousand verses. One sees him thus side by side with Theocritus, Apollonius of Rhodes, Oppian, Moschus, Nicander, Tryphiodorus, Saint Gregory of Nazianzus, the Oracles of Apollo, the Riddles, the Epigrams on the Hippodrome of Constantinople, all poems which would seem to belong to the Alexandrian school, if one did not also remark there Phocylides and Hesiod, the second or perhaps the first in date of the Greek poets.
Before going further, I owe it to this precious manuscript, and to all those who have the kindness to read me, to come to the aid of the embarrassments of the bibliographer Bandini, in his exact description of this so mixed Codex. "One reads at the end of the Dionysiaca," says he, "in the handwriting of Fr. Filelfo, these words: 'Bought in Constantinople, from the wife of the famous John Chrysoloras, in 1423 (ἀπὸ τῆς γυναικός).'" And, he continues in a note, there is above this last Greek word another word, *methison*, which he is very careful not to translate, for it is unintelligible; it is *mētēras*, mother, that must be read, since Filelfo, having married, shortly after the acquisition of the manuscript, the daughter of Chrysoloras, added with his own hand to his purchase the title of mother; which he gave quite naturally thus to Manfredina Auria, the wife of his Greek master, Chrysoloras; a noble and virtuous matron, of whom he has made for us, in prose as in verse, a pompous eulogy.
Be that as it may, the last line of the 164th page, which terminates this heavy manuscript of the Dionysiaca, is not the final verse of the poem, but indeed an exclamation of the copyist, happy to have reached the end of his task, and which I tremble to hear repeated by my readers: Glory to you, Lord, who have delivered me from it!
Now, if, on the occasion of this Codex of the Laurentian Library, I dwell with too much complacency on some details of the intimate life of its original purchaser, it is first of all because this manuscript of the Dionysiaca seems to me to be the first B that left Greece for Italy; it is then, must I admit? because Filelfo was for me for a long time a type and a model. Secretary of legation in Constantinople, he brought back numerous Greek manuscripts from there. Thus, four hundred years later, being a secretary of embassy myself, I was to bring back, manuscripts also, the Popular Songs of Modern Greece: but there, unfortunately for my literary renown, the parallel stops; and these high faculties of writing in Greek verse and prose, of which he was so proud, this vast and piquant erudition which earned him alternately the hatred and the esteem, the rewards and the persecutions, the crowns and the daggers of the petty Italian princes, friends of letters as much as they were jealous, could not find their pendant in my obscure existence.
One might also believe, it seems to me, that the copy of Sambucus which he had paid for so dearly, and which had belonged to Arsenius, was a sister copy of those of Hurtado de Mendoza. The learned Spaniard, model of the great lords, himself a remarkable poet and historian, first had transcribed, at great expense, numerous manuscripts from the Greek collection of Cardinal Bessarion, then had recopied those which the Sultan Soliman sent him, in recognition of the liberty returned to one of his sons, of the imperial race of Osman, whom he had ransomed. In this case, would not Arsenius, Archbishop of Monembasia, have been taken by Falkenburg for his homonym Arnold Arsenius, whom the famous Castellan, honor of diplomacy, employed in the capacity of copyist? or better still, for his brother Aristobulus Arsenius; for this Arnold, cited by M. Abel Rémusat, is suspect to me, seeing his name so little Hellenic. The archbishop would thus have kept or had redone for himself the copy of the Dionysiaca in question.
Be that as it may regarding my fastidious conjectures, it is the manuscript of Arsenius, read lightly and not at all corrected by the prelate, which this theme, too little analogous to his habitual meditations, no doubt repelled; it is, I say, this copy which served for the first Antwerp printing, and which rests today under the imperial locks of the Vienna library.
VI. Utenhove, first reader of Nonnus.
Charged with the manuscript bought in Tarentum, from an unknown and illiterate holder, as D'Ansse de Villoison says, Sambucus still further increased the burden with several precious acquisitions, also Greek, such as Eunapius, Aristaenetus, Stobaeus,
and subsequently by a great number of letters from Saint Gregory of Nazianzus and Saint John Chrysostom, which had remained unpublished until then. Finally, he returned to Hungary, but only after having directed his steps toward Belgium and Holland, the homelands or meeting places of the most skilled and studious philologists. The first man of letters who, in these provinces—approximated to each other less by their geographical position than by a taste for scholarship—concerned himself with Nonnus, whether to profit from him or to facilitate the reading of him for others, was a patrician from Ghent, Charles Utenhove, a "Sambucus in miniature," about whom little is known; and it is undoubtedly as a result of the obscurity of this figure that, in a very short article, the *Biographie universelle* makes him born around 1536 to a father whom, ten lines later, it kills in 1527. Charles Utenhove dedicated his leisure and his fortune to the honorable labors of letters. He planned a Latin translation of the *Dionysiaca*; and with this aim, he had leafed through them so much that he had worn out the pages, made of papyrus, perhaps cotton, and not parchment: a fate quite similar to that of the copy of the Leipzig edition that I myself have used for a similar task; for the German paper of the year of grace 1819 did not have much trouble succumbing to the iron beak of my correcting pens. "And no one," adds Falkenburg, who had had dealings with Utenhove in Paris and England, "was more suited to the task of translator than a man so versed in the assiduous reading of all the poets, and who, moreover, possessed several manuscripts of the *Dionysiaca*."
These manuscripts, so carefully examined by Utenhove—and which he had probably acquired or brought together in the course of his travels—were four in number. And if this figure, at which I was surprised, given the rarity of the copies that have circulated in Europe, is accurate, I am only the more disposed to regret the loss of the works of this zealous amateur of philology. Nevertheless, their comparison could not have brought notable improvements to the text, for they must all have been from the same period and, like those of the Escorial, belonged to the sixteenth century. Moreover, Guillaume Canter, having addressed Falkenburg in order to calm his impatience and to appease his hunger [with] an excerpt that he had transcribed himself from Utenhove’s favorite copy, namely the exordium of the first book, a year before the manuscript of Sambucus was placed into the hands of the original editor, the latter later found very little difference in the texts of this partial copy from the other, and no serious matter for rectification.
VII. Falkenburg, first editor of Nonnus
It is therefore, I repeat, the manuscript of the *Dionysiaca* belonging to Sambucus the Hungarian that the Dutchman Falkenburg undertook to give to the public. There prevailed then in Germany, among the scholars, a sort of communicative fraternity that this learned editor complains of not encountering either in Italy or in France. "Your liberality," he said to Sambucus, "is all the more magnificent, in that many Frenchmen and Italians especially, when they possess old manuscripts, reserve them for themselves, as if they alone knew how to appreciate them, or at the very least they do not abandon them to the printers until after having sold them at a high price."
Falkenburg declares further that he only made use of the manuscript of Sambucus, and that he put all his care into having it reproduced as accurately as possible. Now, perhaps one must regret the overly conscientious scruples of this first editor of the *Dionysiaca*, even though he has wittily justified them. "If everyone acted thus," he says, "the ancient authors would be better known to us. For, in all these corrections of text, one cannot believe how much our own judgment leads us astray, and exposes us to rejecting today what we adopted yesterday. I strongly approve, for my part, the answer of that man to whom one asked what was the best edition of Homer: 'The least corrected,' he replied."
As for the rest, this timid protector of the integrity of texts has himself traced for us the path that leads to their revision. "It was easy for me," he adds, "to perceive, in the original that belongs to you, many injuries that a mediocre Grecian himself might have healed; but I preferred to gather my conjectures on the suspect passages separately, rather than risk letting my rash ideas slide into the text. I only wanted to make the reading of Nonnus easier, until others come who, on the authority of old manuscripts, will fill the lacunae and mend the tears."
I sometimes imagine that these last words were written with my intention in mind; that Falkenburg was thus glimpsing me in the future, through the clouds of three centuries; and, although it was impossible for me to encounter, together or separately, the four *Codices* that Utenhove had gathered, or even to find myself face to face with those that the foreign libraries contain, I persuade myself that my Dutch predecessor would forgive me, if he still lived, the scratches to which I have subjected his text, and would approve of me, in the absence of those lights that can burst forth from manuscripts.
A when they date back through the ages, and are not themselves modern copies, to have used simple common sense, or my familiarity with his favorite poet, to rehabilitate his memory, and to establish the *Dionysiaca* in a greater purity.
VIII. *Plantin, the first printer of Nonnus, at Antwerp. — S. Cramoisy, in Paris, Oporinus, at Basel, Aldus Manutius, at Rome, were equally occupied with it.*
Plantin took charge of the printing; Plantin, the man from Tours, established in Belgium, one of the most famous printers of the era; this same Plantin, whose epitaph I read and whose funereal marble I contemplated on August 15, 1853, far from the banks of the Loire, under the vaults of that superb cathedral of Antwerp, while a holy crowd of people flooded the porticos. Our compatriot added, of his own initiative, to his publication the corrections of Canter, but separated them, to conform to the meticulous method of Falkenburg; and it is this same Guillaume Canter, a passionate lover of archaeology, an imperturbable reviser of Greek manuscripts, who became a master in the art of corrections, the process of which he revealed and the system of which he drew up, who, at the age of thirty-three, died at his toil, a bachelor, so much did he dread the forced distractions that a wife and children might have brought into his studies. Plantin, by inserting the very limited readings of Canter, which moreover extend only to the first twenty-four books, announced them at the end of the edition in a few Latin lines; for, at that era, printers knew and wrote Latin like the critics; and I could name, in our own day, some just as famous who faithfully preserve in their families these precious traditions of the noble craft.
The *Dionysiaca* therefore appeared, printed for the first time in 1569; and, without resorting to the varied arsenal of weapons with which the modern art of publishing covers itself, they made a great noise, right from the start. This appearance stirred the learned world, much more numerous than today, and especially much more sensitive to ancient discoveries, if one judges by the little effect that the manuscripts recently escaped from Mount Athos have produced upon us. And yet, news of the republic of letters did not then circulate coupled with political news. The dedicatory epistle or the preface of a book was at once its prospectus or its announcement; and for effective advertising, a paradox, or even novelty, sufficed.
For these various reasons, Falkenburg deserved general attention; since, in his dedication to Sambucus, B with that ardor and that impetuosity he brought to all his tastes, he declares, quite simply, Nonnus to be the happiest imitator and the rival of Homer, and denies him almost none of the virtues of poetic style that certain critics were already beginning to contest. Great was the astonishment, and consequently the anger of the scholars at this ridiculous pretension: following the fashion of the time, insults were opposed to praise; and, personal attacks ensuing, it was made known to posterity that this Falkenburg, a heresiarch in philology, a former student of Cujas, had first left the study of the Justinian Code for ancient poetry, subsequently that he had modestly practiced the Hellenic hexameter and iambic himself, in some essays preserved by Douza; finally, that he had left no other testimony of his expertise than this same edition of the *Dionysiaca*, adorned with such a presumptuous panegyric. They added also, as a final stroke of satire, that being too steeped in his subject, he had pushed his admiration and zeal for Bacchus to its ultimate limits, since he had just died from a fall from a horse, caused by drunkenness.
And nevertheless, this infatuation of Falkenburg for Nonnus was to be surpassed even further. A little time later, the first director of the Royal Printing House, established by Cardinal Richelieu at the Louvre, Sébastien Cramoisy, exclaimed in Paris: "Nothing is more abundant than his speech, more elegant than his composition. For the thread and method of his discourses, nothing is more magnificent, more elevated, more august. He equals the majesty of Homer, the sublimity of Pindar, the gravity of Sophocles, the sententious wisdom of Euripides, the sweetness of Callimachus, the ornaments of Musaeus, the harmony of Nicander, the simplicity of Hesiod, the sagacity of Theognis, the tenderness of Anacreon, the salt of Aristophanes, the urbanity of Menander. The philosophers find in him the genius of nature; and this is the poet whom Plato sought without finding."
To reduce the praises of Sébastien Cramoisy to more just proportions, and to calm his effervescence, I must say at once that the *Dionysiaca* present, by turns, imitations of almost all the great poets of Greece, and some fortunate trials in very diverse genres of poetry. It is thus that they seek to draw closer to Homer in the painting of battles; to Hesiod in the genealogical details of his *Theogony*; to Theocritus in the varied tones of his *Idylls*; to Callimachus and Orpheus through his hymns; to Aeschylus and Euripides in their religious dramas, such as *Prometheus* and the *Bacchae*; to the harangues of the rhetorician Aristides.
the elegy of Sappho and Mimnermus in the plaints of lovers and widows. Finally, Lucretius and Virgil have lent Nonnus their physical or rustic tableaus, and Ovid his fables; but he followed them by inaugurating, so to speak, in the last age of Hellenic decadence, the descriptive genre such as we reproduced it at the end of the eighteenth century, and such as we practice it in the nineteenth by exaggerating it; so that he seems to have married the use of the epic machinery of antiquity to the resources of our didactic and picturesque poetry.
The fiery printer of Louis XIII, who nonetheless did not understand the *Dionysiaca* in his editions of ancient authors, ends this apotheosis with an assertion no less glorious, which I must relegate, along with all his exaggerations, among the dreams of his thought. “It is Nonnus,” he says, “who converted Saint Pelagia and brought back from the gates of hell to heaven thirty thousand Saracens.”
Be that as it may, the Baron of Baufremont celebrated these various miracles in a few couplets; and at that same epoch, when gentlemen held it an honor to know Latin, or even Greek, Alexandre de Cossé addressed to the memory of Nonnus this epigram more worthy of the Cavalier Marini than of Martial: “After having celebrated Bacchus in a heroic poem, Nonnus has chained John with his melodious words. Why be astonished when he launches thunder, or shines with the softer fire of lightning? If lightning snatched Bacchus from his mother’s womb, Nonnus must also be the son of a divine thunder.”
Sometimes a single critic, taking on both roles, attacks and defends Nonnus at the same time. This is how Tristan, the most learned of the ordinary gentlemen of Louis XIII, declared that there is much extravagance in his imaginations, “more impiety and hypocrisy than rectitude in his belief”; and the boiling numismatist, who cannot suffer any contradictor other than himself, says however, a few pages away: “The truth is that he is very learned, exalted, and very ingenious, full of poetic fire and curious; he teaches us many things that he alone finds he has remarked.”
Finally, one last critic, erecting a literary heresy into a system, has made the defects of late-period style and of Nonnus into so many virtues, or at least into so many titles to curiosity:
“Can one be ignorant,” he says, “that, just as there is more than one plague in the world, there is also more than one form in style?” (What a beginning and what a connection!) Style varies according to the epoch, the century, and the age of the writer. In the times of Augustus himself, speech was sometimes dignified and chastened like a matron, sometimes free and extended like the dressing of a young girl. Maecenas, Tiberius, and before them Antony, each spoke in his own fashion; and their diction was full of boldness, of hollow pomp, of ambition and inequality. Who then would not make much of Pindar, who would not love Nonnus? And yet, if you compare the indefatigable metaphors of the one, the swelling and redundancy of the other, with the simplicity and modest economy of Hesiod and Aeschylus, you will say, like the judicious Scaliger for Thucydides and Livy, that these are winged horses, and that their vessel sails with full sails, when the others enjoy a calm sea timidly. The imperfections, fruit of boldness, do not wound; for roses that come rare and out of season are only the more appreciated, and Ovid affirms that a blemish further enhances the beauty of a face.
Let us say at once, so as not to have to return to it, that the works of Plantin and of Falkenburg had been preceded by the attempts of Oporin; who, furnished for many long years with a manuscript of the *Dionysiaca* encountered in Italy, had prepared or rather announced its printing, which he never began.
A half-century earlier, the famous Aldus Manutius had likewise recoiled before the same task, distracted as he was constantly by so many other important works; and, for lack of time, he had not been able to do honor to the recommendation of Janus Lascaris, who had signaled the *Dionysiaca* to his typographic solicitude.
IX. Daniel Heinsius, premier critic of Nonnus. Canter, Joseph Scaliger, Saumaise.
Here presents itself, in the order of the times, in the first rank of the partisans and critics of Nonnus, the illustrious Daniel Heinsius, translator of the *Paraphrase of the Gospel according to Saint John*. He has accompanied this work with the most developed and theological commentaries on the text of Nonnus, under the title of *Sacred Exercises*; and it would seem that after having occupied himself with the prefaces of the *Dionysiaca* with all the heat of youth, he no longer considered them, as if to adorn himself with a second finery. In his passion for antique letters, he thus borrowed something of his name from the two most beautiful languages that men have ever spoken, according to the noble expressions of the swan of Orléans, those languages “which were being formed to recount one day to the earth the things of heaven.” (M. Dupanloup, reception speech pronounced, Dec. 9, 1854, to the French Academy.)
in his old age, as a compulsory study to better arrive at an understanding of the poet, and as an approach to his pious labors. But let us let him speak for himself.
“I still remember with pleasure,” he says, in elegant Latin interspersed with Greek, “the inclination, the training, even the ardor that carried me toward Nonnus. The first time I came to Leyden, eleven years ago, as I was reading with very great attention most of the Greek poets, he alone seemed to be missing from the full enjoyment that I derived from this genre of writing. Thus, when I finally found him, I seized upon him greedily, and did not leave him until I had devoured him from one end to the other. I was not even content to read him: through a fervor of my age, I was already exercising my critical faculties there, and I considered myself very fortunate when, after Falkenburg, a man much more versed in the reading of Greek poets than the common run of scholars believes, I encountered a few very small corrections (*emendatiunculas*), or a few probable conjectures to add to it. I felt no less joy from this than from a uniquely gifted daughter whom I had kept in my house to offer to a husband of excellent character. It is thus that I admired my author, and that I sang his praises everywhere and always. Now, they seemed all the more natural to me at that epoch of my life, as I had to support me in my judgment Angelo Poliziano and Marc-Antoine Muret. The first qualified Nonnus as a wondrous poet (*mirificum*), the second boasted of his erudition and the nobility of his style (*eruditum et grandiloquum*), and both affirm that he is of rare value among the ancient authors who have reached our hands. It was the famous Joseph Scaliger who, first, dampened my ardor or my intemperance. His admirable and almost celestial taste in these matters taught us in his letters the estimation we should hold for Nonnus.”
I ask Heinsius here for permission to interrupt him, to intercalate in his narrative the very text of the letters of Scaliger which he recalls. In the first, addressed from Leyden to Saumaise in 1607, the French professor of belles-lettres in Holland expresses himself thus, with the arrogance that is habitual to him: “The poets of the following epoch, in seeking abundance, could find only the vain sound of words and a bombastic style. Among those who have ventured furthest in this genre, Nonnus of Panopolis occupies without a doubt the first rank; and, in the *Dionysiaca*, the nature of his subject could serve as an excuse for his diffusion, if, in the *Paraphrase of the Gospel*, he had not, in some sort, abjured all modesty. I read him with the same sentiment that makes us look at comedians, and only be amused by them in so far as they are ridiculous.”
In a second letter, which the critic from Agen writes on the same subject, and in almost the same tone, to the adolescent Heinsius (*admodum adolescenti*), he tells him: “If you were near me, I could show you monstrous (*immanes*) transpositions that have slipped into the verses of this poet. I would also show you the defects, the improprieties of his style, and how one must read it or make use of it, for I would make a whole enormous volume (*encore immane*) of my criticisms. I have, however, rendered him a service in a thousand places: for, if one must not imitate him, one must at least read him.”
One will easily recognize here the exaggeration familiar to the inhabitants of the banks of the southern river who — must I warn the reader? — saw my own birth as well. This enormous volume, these infinite corrections of Scaliger, were to be limited to two or three hundred mutations of words, some very contestable, which barely fill thirteen small in-12 pages at the end of the pamphlet by Cunaeus.
I return the word to Heinsius:
“And yet, the advice of the divine old man had not yet extinguished in me the ardor to ‘Nonnise.’ Each time I amused myself by making Greek verses, I expressed my thoughts there in imitation of Nonnus, and assimilated myself to him so much that, if my self-esteem or my memory do not deceive me, I could have inserted my verses into the middle of his, and thus imposed upon readers who were not mediocerally experienced. Insensibly, nevertheless, taste came with age. I drew a sounder judgment from the reading of other writings. I reconciled myself little by little with reason and with myself. I managed to shake off this Bacchic fury; and as we are in a poor and miserable century, where we regret the majority of their works, we owe it, in my opinion, to the writers of antiquity to welcome the little that God has preserved for us of them with joy; we must study them to draw profit from them, much rather than to strive out of season for the vainglory of laying bare their I-know-not-what stains, or certain pedantic negligences; and yet there is nothing more worthy, in my sense, of a scholar than to use the fullness of his judgment in the very heart of this antiquity, and to weigh, which is given to few persons, the forms of the Hellenic language, so as to discern its qualities and defects easily. This is the highest point that happy natural faculties can reach, united to solid erudition; for, when style possesses such a great affinity with the mind and the word, that the Greeks expressed these three things by one and the same word (*λόγος*): to judge the style of a man is to judge the man himself; and style is not the distinctive sign of men only; it is also of
A a whole epoch. This is what makes a century recognizable by its way of expressing itself. Might one not say here that Heinsius submitted to Buffon the immortal axiom of his discourse before the Academy, and that the critic from Leiden said, one hundred and fifty years before the great French naturalist: "The style is the man himself"?
I return for a moment to that literary perversity of his youth, which Heinsius ingenuously confesses, to say that I truly believed I glimpsed more than one trace of it in the copy of the original 1569 edition which belonged to him. It is preserved very preciously at Leiden, alongside another copy of the same date, which Falkenburg burdened with notes or corrections that he undoubtedly intended to use to enlarge a second edition; but the reproductions of 1608 and 1610 did not benefit from either, any more than did that of Geneva in 1606.
These two copies, undoubtedly very carefully examined by M. Graëfe for the benefit of his 1819 edition, had nothing to teach me. I read nevertheless, in the one that was the property of Heinsius, in the midst of multiplied and confused marginal notes, alongside a small index of the witty traits of Nonnus (*Dicta Nonni ingeniosa*) and of his sentences, *γνῶμαι*, indicated by the very hand of Heinsius on the blank leaves at the end (*scriptus et in tergo*); I read, I say, a Latin epistle where his admiration for Nonnus overflows. Now, I have not been able to find it in the printed collection of his poetic works. Could it be, then, that his son Nicolas Heinsius, less of a friend to Greek letters, did not judge this enthusiastic inspiration worthy of appearing there, by reason of its subject—the praise of Nonnus, always disdained by scholars?
I have retained these four verses from it: *Jurarunt numeros eripuisse suos:* *Quemque ego Pimplai de montibus orta putarim* *Numina cuncta suo continuisse sinu.*
The light choruses of the Aegipans, the dryads, and the satyrs swore that this poet had stolen their songs; and it seems to me myself that all the divinities, born on the mountains dear to the Muses, reside in his bosom.
Will one not find, as I do, that for having been such a fanatical partisan of Nonnus, Daniel Heinsius pushed his spirit of quibbling too far when he reproached his former favorite with the very title of his poem? It is *Dionysiade* (2), he claims, that one should have said, and not *Dionysiaca*; just as one calls the *Iliad* the account of the exploits of the armies around or in Ilium; and that B if Nonnus wished to title his book *Dionysiaca*, implying *πράγματα*, the deeds and actions of Bacchus, it is one more absurdity, which grammar and common sense reprove... I do not go any further, and the only thing that surprises me in all of this is that Heinsius should heap blame upon Nonnus for a pretended crime of which many other writers had rendered themselves guilty before the fourth century, and that he did not think, among others, of Apollonius of Rhodes, whose memory should have presented itself spontaneously. Now, without treating it more particularly here, I propose to bring out in my notes, by some citations, the borrowings or the dissemblances of the two epics.
I recall, meanwhile, that the poet—also an Alexandrian, against whom Nonnus struggled, sometimes successfully—named his poem of the exploits of the Argonauts, *Argonautica*, and no one, so far as I know, has sought to find fault with it to this day. It is the same with as many other ancient or modern poems, lost or recovered, under the same ending—*Troica*, *Bassarica*, etc.—precursors or contemporaries of the *Dionysiaca*, upon which there is so much to comment that, moreover, it would have been in better taste to spare their irreproachable title.
And yet Heinsius did not stop there: as in great passions, his love turned to hate, and his declarations into insults, although they were addressed more particularly to the *Paraphrase of the Gospel*. Saumaise was moved by this. "One did not expect," he says, "the wickedness and virulence of the insults that Heinsius has accumulated against Nonnus, whom he calls, on every occasion, absurd, foolish, tainted with Arianism, and whom he accuses of ignorance of the Greek language! But what of it? Nonnus will have his defenders. *Sed reperiet suos vindices.*"
X. Cuneus, Zoilus of Nonnus, and other critics.
Alongside Heinsius, or rather far above him—if unjust bitterness, when it is exercised against Nonnus, constituted true merit—comes Cuneus (Van der Kuhn), who, latinizing his Dutch name, directed against the *Dionysiaca*, which had scarcely been printed, the fits of his atrabiliar verve. Stung by the favor that greeted Nonnus at its renaissance, he sought to demonstrate that this author, whom the princes of genius and science—Politian, Muret, and almost all the rest—thought nothing less than a great and superior writer, was much less understood than they said in his knowledge of things, and that he lacked at once the usage of style and the skill in imitation. Then, mingling with the excesses of satire the principles of enlightened criticism, he attacked minutely the grammatical imperfections of the first books and spared the latter, whether because he had, from the start, exhausted all the traits of his [sharpness].
anger, or because irony and insult manage to weary even the mind that lavishes them. In his animadversions, interspersed with rare praise, he emended, despite the injunctions of Falkenburg, in his own fashion and not always appropriately, some Greek verses, under the pretext of clarifying obscurities, deflating swelling, or even supplying supposed lacunae of the original. He was hardly concerned, like Canter and Scaliger, with correcting readings and purifying the words: thus, more than once, his indignation, taking to task a fault of the copyists or a lacuna in the manuscripts, falls wide of the mark, when it suffices to give more serious attention to the text, or to have a more intimate familiarity with the ways of Nonnos, in order to rectify the vicious sense and repair all the damage. Now, this is what I have not failed to practice carefully in my edition, when Graefe, in his own, had not done it before me. It would nevertheless be unjust toward Cunaeus not to recognize in him, in the midst of his most bitter assaults, a judgment formed on the study of the great models, and on those principles of taste in epic poetry that Vida and Boileau were about, in imitation of Horace, to proclaim in such beautiful verses. I say no more about this principal Zoilus of Nonnos, who did not, however, disdain to announce and recommend him to the public in the preface of the 1610 reprint; but I reserve the right to point out successively in my notes what is most remarkable in his frequent blame as in his rare praise.
XI. Character of the epoch when Nonnos was first printed.
One could also justly contend that the reputation of Nonnos has not only suffered from the outrages of time against his manuscripts, but also from the era in which they were entrusted to the press. It was the moment when high Greek studies were beginning to go out of fashion, and the Latin language to predominate. Certainly, Julius Caesar Scaliger, who compared Nicander to Lucan, if he had known the *Dionysiaca*, which were not yet printed at his death, would not have failed to give them a place in his *Poetics* and to signal some beauties in them. Joseph Scaliger, less versed than his father in Hellenic letters, was content, as we have just seen, to correct the text imperfectly, and Heinsius, the student of the latter, who occupied himself with it the most, and who took the title of "sacred Aristarchus of the *Paraphrase according to Saint John*," did not seek to counterbalance the severe critique of his friend Cunaeus. A
B Furthermore, this diversity of appreciation, I say it at once, was destined to reproduce itself with less brilliance in the centuries that were to follow. If Pierson (1) reproaches the Dutch philologists with anger for not having rejected Nonnos from the start, Bentley, the most famous critic of England, seeks him out for the varied erudition and the talent of a writer displayed in the *Dionysiaca* (2). When P. Francius attacks him (3), J. Schrader defends him (4); and all agree on this one point, that it becomes almost impossible to establish a certain judgment on this author, as he presents himself, and that there is cause above all, as Ruhnkenius wishes, to occupy oneself with washing him of the heap of defilements that he owes to his copyists (5).
In summary, Nonnos is tedious, said then, and still say today, almost all the scholars who have not read him, or who have not known how to read him, and their number is great. As for those who have pushed to the end of the *Dionysiaca*, or who have only exploited one half, if they have applied themselves to understand this Nonnian poetry, which had its difficulties no doubt, but whose enigmas I hope to have uncovered, they can still, and that is very simple, prefer true masterpieces to it; but they have learned to disdain it less, for even the most recalcitrant spirits in forming a new judgment on ancient authors agree that it amply compensates for the curiosity—little contagious until now—that makes one turn an attentive look toward him; finally, in the man who dares to leaf through him at the risk of the reputation of a bizarre or frivolous reader, there remains at least a profound knowledge of the Greek language, poetry, and mythology. I dare add, for having made the experiment, that he makes the reading of all other poets easier, whether by familiarizing one with the elegance and harmony of the beautiful idiom, or by the preliminary studies and the abundance of words with which he enriches the memory, *copia verborum*, or finally, if one wishes, by comparison.
XII. The translators: Lubinus Eilhartus, Boitet.
After these principal critics, neglecting the testimonies of the numerous philologists of the same epoch who, all, at his appearance, paid some tribute to Nonnos, I come to his translators. The number is much more restricted; and as I cannot take into account attempts at partial translation, whether in verse or in prose, which do not extend, in any language, beyond a page or two, I cannot take note of any but Lubinus Eilhartus, translator
A of the primitive Latin and until now unique, and of Boitet, the French translator of Lubinus more than of Nonnus, himself remaining until now without a rival in our language.
I must nevertheless add that at the moment when Eilhart, plastered with the name of Lubinus, was deforming Nonnus, another translator announced himself to the republic of letters, disguised himself under the name of Forestius. "We too," he said, "if it pleases the gods" (why not God? has Nonnus ceased, all by himself, to be a pagan?) "are attempting, despite our weakness, great things, while we are yet green. We are translating the Dionysiaca of Nonnus into Latin, and we will add to it some slight annotations with our conjectures; for it is inundated with a torrent of the most disgusting errors." Did Jean Forest later become frightened by the competition, so little formidable, of Lubin Eilhart? I do not know; but his translation never saw the light of day, any more than his corrections and his notes.
Bah! I shall be told, if Nonnus is not translated, it is because he is not worth the trouble! It is because no one, I would respond (let me be forgiven this parody of the objection), has yet taken the trouble; for it is a true labor, of long breath, bristling with incessantly recurring difficulties. Many passionate Hellenists have recoiled before the enterprise; some have lost courage after having resolutely begun, and we are going to see that the unintelligible Latin of Eilhartus, like the aged and distorted Gaulish of Boitet, left the work still to be attempted and to be finished.
It was therefore the B Antwerp princeps edition that Lubinus Eilhartus, professor at the University of Rostock, a mediocre man of letters but a very prolific translator, undertook to interpret at the same time as the two thousand epigrams known then from the Anthology, and the epistles of the philosophers Democritus, Heraclitus, Diogenes, and Crates, surmounted by some letters of Hippocrates. Whether by the overload of so many labors, or by precipitation, or perhaps by respect for the Greek text, Lubinus did not seek, after the example of Scaliger, Canter, and even Cunæus, to pierce the obscurities of the Dionysiaca, to readjust its lacunae, to make its innumerable inaccuracies disappear, finally to give a meaning to the places where the formless manuscript had left none: he limited himself to hitting, in the same line, with great blows of the dictionary, the Latin word, corresponding well or ill, with the Greek word in the same place C that it occupies in the hexameter, without worrying about the form or even the sense of the phrase. I will give in my notes some samples of this procedure, but here I spare the reader. I ask him only to consider what this bastard and quasi-interlinear translation of such a corrupt Greek text can be: he will then easily understand that Lubinus Eilhartus has not a little contributed to thicken the shadows cast as if by pleasure upon the poet of Panopolis, and he will remember this reflection of such pure taste, which escapes Saint Jerome as a profane souvenir of his penchant for literature: "Let one try," he says, "to translate word for word Homer into Latin." I will go further, let one translate it into prose in its own language: here I interrupt Saint Jerome, to say that I possess in effect in modern Greek two translations, one of the Iliad in verse, the other in prose of the Odyssey, but both very prosaic. "You will have there," continues Saint Jerome, "only a ridiculous work; and the most eloquent of poets will appear barely to stammer." What the holy and judicious doctor of the Church said so aptly for Homer, would it therefore be less true for Nonnus?
Well! there is the version foreign to all poetic sentiment, subversive of all elegance, extinguisher of the epic, in a word, that Boitet judged suitable to follow D almost step by step in his work; if it is permitted to call it that, which is only a series of detours to avoid all work. He attached himself almost always to translate much rather the literal Latin of Lubinus than the harmonious Greek of Nonnus: an accident more common in Greek versions than one generally believes, for it is of those who never admit it. Sometimes, also, he has drawn from himself his misinterpretations and abbreviations in such a way that he seems to have stolen his own wings only to shorten those of Nonnus. Finally, what shocks me the most in this interpretation, it is without doubt the trivial and the burlesque returning incessantly under his pen, and this language of the beginning of the reign of Louis XIII, which has lost the naivety of Amyot in his Greek translations, and has not yet gained the precision and the clarity of Boileau, the interpreter of Longinus. I am going to provide two or three examples only; and I will use as much reserve in my notes out of regard for my only predecessor, without doubt, but above all not to overwhelm the reader under the number and the mass of my demonstrations, much too justificatory. Thus in the twenty-fourth chant, and I take it at random, Boitet disfigures the plaints of the young Indian, which remind one of Racine and the
tenderness of the gentle Iphigenia; here is the text: “Ah! your son whom I shall have brought into the world, if one day he asks me for his father, how shall I be able to point him out when he lisps your name?” Let us listen to Boitet: “I am at my term. But when I have been delivered, and my son wishes to look for his father, by shouting papa, one would point him out to him.”
Then, instead of the “new Protesilaus of another Laodamia,” he spins out in this fashion this mythological memory comprised in three words in the Greek text: “As Laodamia regretted the death of Protesilaus, dying in the arms of her husband whose shade appeared to her, by the means of the favor of the gods.”
Here, right alongside, is a sample of his habitual narration: “But as Bacchus was crossing the river, Deriades, who had declared war on him (if he wished to usurp his country and bring his vines there, and bring his shoots there, as he threatened him by the satyr that Bacchus had sent on an embassy), prepared to support him, and to this effect he assembled all the regiments of the Indians, and gave them order to camp near the river to prevent the army from crossing.”
I pass on my turn, in this twenty-fourth chant, one of the most graceful of the poem, many accumulated contradictions, so as not to exhaust, by drawing from it, a single source. One will see in the second book how Boitet expresses himself, even when he is the most exact interpreter of the thought. I choose the beautiful verses which present the great image of the Olympian struggle, and which are praised without restriction even by Cunæus:
“This is what Typhon uttered in a threatening voice, Jupiter mocked these rodomontades. The combat astonished the two enemies: Typhon had the goddess of Discord who assisted him; and Jupiter was accompanied by Victory. The subject of their war was not for a flock of sheep or oxen: nor for the beauty of some goddess; nor for the usurpation of a city; but it was a question of the whole empire of the heaven and of absolute command over the earth. That is why Jupiter did not forget to defend himself well.”
Now, as I do not want to leave the reader under the impression of a prose so humiliating for Nonnus, I take the liberty of repeating mine here:
“Such were his clamors. The son of Saturn smiles at them; their courage bubbles over. Discord leads Typhoeus to battle. Victory guides the king of the gods. It is not a question here of a herd of oxen or of sheep, nor of the beauty of a nymph, nor of a wretched city, but indeed of the Olympus itself. The prize that Victory will award, and which she holds upon her knees, is the throne and the scepter of Jupiter.”
XIII. Pierre de Marcassus, imitator.
A short time after these *Voyages, loves and conquests of Bacchus in the Indies*, the second explicative title of the first, which Claude Boitet de Frauville, translator of Homer, of Quintus of Smyrna, historian, and lawyer at the parliament of Orléans, had imagined to attract the reader, appeared a sort of counterfeit of the first eight chants of the Dionysiaca, due to the abundant pen of Pierre de Marcassus. Here the style is as swollen and precious as that of Boitet is prosaic and trivial. While seeking to heap ridicule upon the author from whom he makes his borrowings, Marcassus seems to have taken pleasure in exaggerating its defects; he outdoes the wit, the confusions of thought, the antitheses which he redoubles in his own manner. And although this boastful man of letters, who took the title of Principal Historiographer to the King, defends himself, in a notice to the reader, for having copied Nonnus, “who,” he says, “in the liberty he gave himself to write verses, has for the most part made bankruptcy of judgment,” the first two books of these adventures, inspired by the Dionysiaca, are distant imitations of them, if one wishes; and the last six present chimerical paraphrases. These episodes, foreign to the subject, are much closer to the novels of Scudéry than to the Greek historians with whom, however, Marcassus pretended to rival.
One will judge of it by the use he made of a charming comparison, and I do not fear to signal it in advance, for it is destined to rest pleasantly our imagination, weary of the celestial combats of the first chant:
“As a lover to whom fortune presents the possession of the beauties for which he has long sighed, loses the memory of so many evils that he has suffered, so much do the present goods possess him. Sometimes he admires the soul of the two suns which made his days happy or unhappy.” (Need I say that it is a question here of the eyes of the beauty?) “Sometimes, as if to reproach her for the harm they have done him, he opposes his mouth to their clarity and prevents them from seeing. Sometimes, casting his imagination upon everything he sees that is lovable, he wanders his desire and his passion wherever one and the other can find their contentment; finally, to be entirely to that which he adores, he is in no way to himself.”
Must one not also apply to Pierre de Marcassus, who challenged his successors to do better, these words of Graefe:
“The hallucinations and the fantasies of Lubinus in Latin, and of Boitet in French, have pushed so far the omissions, abbreviations and interpolations of the text of Nonnus, that there remains of it hardly a shadow.”
XIV. Muret, Balzac, Caspar Barth, critics.
At the same time that clumsy interpreters and imitators were parodying Nonnus, the Lord of Balzac, the first of that name, was attacking him with great bitterness. I transcribe the entire passage from his *Critical Dissertations*, to distract the reader for a moment.
A "Muret... had his sorrows and his fancies... like others... I would wish at least that he were constant in his ill-humors. And in truth I cannot understand how, having so thoroughly despised the epigrams of Martial, he could have made so much of the *Dionysiaca* of Nonnus. This Nonnus was an Egyptian whose style is savage and monstrous. He was a painter of chimeras and hippocentaurs. His images, I say even the most regulated and sober ones, go far beyond ordinary extravagance. In certain places, one would take him for a demoniac rather than a poet; he appears much less inspired by the Muses than agitated by the Furies. The poets of Clérac and of Bergerac were less extravagant, even before they had crossed the Dordogne, and had said of the eloquence of Queen Marguerite:
*I hear a precious torrent* *Which pours all the heavens onto the earth.*
The beautiful spectacle, my reverend Father, of seeing the heavens melted and liquid rolling over the face of the earth, of seeing these great globes in such a small space, is something more than the sea, in something less than is the basin of a fountain. B These poets, nevertheless, wrote more reasonably than Nonnus, and I do not doubt at all that he would have admired what they wrote, and that some courtiers found it so beautiful, that monarchs should be interpreted only by the mouth of cannons. Not even, says the commentary, when they give audience to ambassadors; when they are seated in their *lit de justice*, and make their will heard to their peoples; not even when they pray to God in their oratory. These poets from Gascony and Périgord were wise and modest, in comparison to this poet of Egypt, whom my neighbor Muret esteems so highly."
Oh! my God, no, dear rival of the elegant Voiture, what one might reproach Nonnus for is not this fury of imagination, which would be, however, quite conformable to the nature of his subject. And it is very wrongfully, I swear to you, that you represent him as carried away, like Horace, by the god with whom he is filled. *Quo me, Bacche, rapis tui plenum!* C Barth, a great critic, your contemporary, has taken care to avenge him of your accusations. "Nonnus," says he, "would be a happy writer, if a temperate style were sufficient for writing the triumphs of Bacchus." Alas! quite on the contrary, this gait of Nonnus, too level and always uniform, is accompanied, even in the episodes and in the features of sentiment, by a diction much more moderate than the movements of passion. And to say everything to you, O honor of the city of Angoulême, forgive me if I believe, in my turn, that I recognize a little of the chagrin and fancy in your *Dissertation*, and if I see there a critic more jealous of the neighbor Muret than a serious reader of the poet of Egypt. Doubt it no longer; if he has deserved blame, it is that which posterity has already addressed to a certain writer of another D epoch, who is known to you, too praised by his century, too disdained since; and to whom, you have already guessed, Voltaire also reproaches having sometimes sacrificed the justness of thoughts to the arrangement of words.
XV. Silence of a hundred and fifty years. No good translators in the century of Louis XIV.
After these two unintelligent translators, this ridiculous paraphrast, this too severe critic, and all the glossators who had grouped themselves around the *Dionysiaca* at their appearance, Nonnus rested for one hundred and fifty years in a sleep hardly interrupted by the light stings of the hornets who buzzed in small numbers around his works without penetrating them. Let us say rather that the seventeenth century forgot him; whether because, too naturally occupied with the masterpieces of ancient Greece, the arbiters of our Parnassus paid no attention to writers of contested merit and secondary value, or because the precious and convoluted style of periphrases strayed from their elegant simplicity. In effect, the mania for antitheses and word games, bequeathed by the poetic school of Alexandria to the Italy of the *Seicentisti*, as they are called beyond the Alps, and to the France of Henry III, faded for a time under satire, and was not to reappear until later.
Moreover, it must be said, the best writers of the great literary epochs did not translate the immortal singers of ancient Greece, still less the poets of the decadence. They contented themselves with studying their spirit, and drawing inspiration from their beauties to rival their genius. Thus Homer created Virgil, who did not dream of translating the *Iliad*; Pindar, Horace, who did not make the echoes of Tibur repeat the *Nemeans*; Euripides, Racine, who raised the criminal passion of Phaedra on the banks of the Seine higher than the chaste virtue of the Hippolytus of the Ilissus. In short, never the *Bacchica potuissent*. (Barth. Advers., lib. VII, cap. 21.)
A the century of Augustus has transmitted to the century of Louis XIV, nor has the latter to us, a faithful interpretation of those primitive masterpieces; and when their imitations are excellent, their translations disfigure them.
After a long silence, towards the end of the last century, that intrepid pioneer of the dark mines where some vein of Hellenic gold might still shine, d'Ansse de Villoison, reopened the lists and drew curiosity back to Nonnus. It was nonetheless through many reservations and much abuse that the laborious investigator of the treasures buried in Weimar and Venice acknowledged himself that there was room to draw from the little-frequented sources of the *Dionysiaca* certain lessons, vainly sought in other writings, and that their reading initiated one into the mysteries of mythology, at the same time as it provided a more complete knowledge of antiquity (1).
At this announcement, Germany awakened—that Germany which was itself then being born to philosophical studies and was inheriting that leaning toward ancient literature which its neighbor, Holland, saw fading away. Let us add that it has faithfully kept the preeminence, if I may dare to borrow that old word from Henri Estienne, our master to all humble Grecists.
And, may I be permitted to remark, these laborious meditations on the Greek writers have remained the domain of the scholars beyond the Rhine; today even, with the exception of two or three learned commentators whom Paris still praises, and who alone worthily sustain the comparison, it is in Germany that they multiply; it is there that the art is practiced and reigns of gathering fragments, of studying texts, of sewing back together the tatters, and finally of repairing the damage of time and relighting the almost extinguished torch of the Hellenic genius.
B XVI. Godefroi Hermann, Avenger of Nonnus. Sweet epithets; — descriptive; — compound.
What d'Ansse de Villoison stammered barely about the importance of the *Dionysiaca*, while making all his reservations, Godefroi Hermann—bolder, Hermann, the most learned and the most perspicacious explorer of rhythmic art—extended and amplified.
"Epic poetry, among the Greeks," he says, "was departing from its ancient elegance, in such a way that it required nothing less than a notable change in its manner to preserve it from death; and this happy innovation, I do not hesitate to attribute to Nonnus. Indeed, he who pointed out the path where one followed him like another Homer must have opened it by way of a great and famous composition. And the imitation of Nonnus is so evident in the poets who submitted themselves to the new form of heroic verse that he had most certainly preceded them in this career.
"The *Dionysiaca*, if I am not mistaken," continues Hermann, "must have acquired such renown that they became the subject of contemporary studies. I believe I can cite as proof the hymns of Proclus, whose metrical process leaves no doubt that he lived in the epoch of Nonnus and studied his works attentively. Now, the lyric poets were not alone in seizing upon the new hexameter of Nonnus; one must also add the epigrammatists, Paul the Silentiary, Leontius the Macedonian, etc. To this school also belong Musaeus, Tryphiodorus, Coluthus, Gazeuos, and many anonymous poems of the *Anthology*.
"Yes, it is Nonnus, or at the very least it is the author of this perfected method; but, in my opinion, it is Nonnus who exchanged the heaviness of spondees for the rapidity of dactyls (2), who introduced the caesura at the third foot, by chasing out the trochee from the fourth, who delivered the hexameter from Attic abbreviations, curtailed the apostrophe as best he could, and pursued the hiatus to excess, tolerating it—and then very rarely—only in expressions borrowed from Homer. It is Nonnus who totally banned the abuse of short syllables becoming long in favor of the caesura; in such a way that if heroic verse had lost its original dignity, it recovered at least its elegant and numerous rhythm; and from then on it was subjected to such strict rules that one had to, from then on, seriously study the science before attacking the epic."
Truly, if I am not mistaken, Nonnus is definitively placed as the true reformer of poetry; and let no one be fooled, this school—of which Nonnus is the chief proclaimed by the most experienced arbiter of ancient rhythm—this school, I say, has not only extended its empire over prosody. To the regular purity of his hexameter, Nonnus has added a sustained elegance and an imperturbable harmony. Pushing aside the systematic obscurities of thought or diction, like the C *pollet Siculæ telluris alumnus*. (Terent. Maurus, de Metris.) I believe and maintain, in opposition to some of his commentators, that Theocritus consulted his natural genius on this point, his ear above all, and that he did not observe this metrical process as an absolute rule, as it is contradicted more than once, even in the first verses of his first Idyll. Now, it is for me a hereditary opinion. (See the preface to the Idylls of the Count of Marcellus. Paris, 1820.) D
natural or sought-after enigmas, of which Lycophron was the propagator and the unhappy model; rejecting these subtle A productions arranged in the form of an altar, a hatchet, or a panpipe, where the poet, a misshapen painter, wishes to strike the eyes without touching the heart; rejecting finally that Egyptian frenzy of lipogrammatic poems, where the composer deprives himself alternately, to no purpose, of the help of a consonant or a vowel, and chains his inspiration to a mutilated alphabet, he disdains these abuses of style which nonetheless were to reappear long after him; for I have myself, on the banks of the Bosphorus, in a circle of certain idle literati of modern Greece, traced a few vestiges; but no doubt the rays of the sun which illuminates the Parthenon anew will have chased away these backward clouds from the banks of the liberated Cephisus. It is true that, to replace these tours de force which were never ornaments, Nonnus has sometimes given too much space to wordplay, to their etymological clatter, or even to the pun, and that he has run with too much haste toward B antithesis, the honor of style when it is sparsely sown, a fatigue to the intelligence when it is lavished. "That," M. de Chateaubriand told me, "is in every language the sign of the decline of polite letters; and it is also the hallmark of our eighteenth century." Now, has the aging author of the *Vie de Rancé* and the *Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe* always avoided this pitfall, and has he not himself too often sacrificed to the false divinity?
But what! Nonnus, overbidding this excess of the eighteenth century, has approached the nineteenth even more closely, when he has stamped, so to speak, his phrases one after the other with the mark of a convoluted turn of phrase, a bizarrely imaged term, or a too scholarly acceptation, and principally when he has overloaded his verses with a C multitude of epithets that no writer before him had deployed so richly? To this objection, which I build with the help of the objections of others, and which I address to myself, I stop to treat thoroughly this characteristic point of the talent of Nonnus: the prodigality of the epithet; a virtue, if one believes Conrad Dinner, the most patient collector of Greek adjectives, who represents Nonnus as another Midas converting everything he touches into epithets (*Midam alterum*); a vice, if one must rely on certain critics of a more severe taste, among others the rigorous Cunæus.
And to begin with sacred epithets, which I place almost outside the question, it is very true, as Heinsius and other expert philologists observe, that the abundance of adjectives or attributes of the Divinity is a special property of the holy books: one might say, to glorify it, or at least to excuse it, that God himself has given the example, and that he has designated the form of style which is most pleasing to him when he seizes, through the mouth of Moses (1), upon his numerous attributes: *Misericors, verax*, etc., finally *tardus ad iram*, slow to punish, a sublime prerogative of Providence which Saint Jerome has weakly rendered, in my sense, by the word *patiens*.
Among the Greeks, certain hymns are also nothing but necklaces of epithets whose pearls touch one another; and certainly, if it were not too profane a comparison, and if the holy melodies of our churches could soften us even here in these pages, such invocations would recall the litanies that I have heard with such vivid emotion in Bethlehem, resounding beneath the vaults raised by Saint Helena over the cradle of a God. But these hymns themselves, and the chants overloaded with pious adjectives by Onomacritus, hidden under the name of Orpheus, are from an era neighboring that of Nonnus, like that of the decadence, and can without anachronism carry some trace of the poetry, or even of the history, of the Hebrews. Homer, one must admit, in the lesser poems attributed to him in honor of his favorite gods, as his anonymous imitators or the disciples of the true Orpheus in the others, did not have recourse to the pile of epithets any more than Callimachus, and they did not admit the surnames of the inhabitants of Olympus, or the distinctive signs of their power, except with a certain sobriety.
I arrive at Nonnus, author of a long epic, and not of a short dithyramb; for his part, he has not brought the sacred epithets into play in the same manner as his predecessors. Instead of chaining, without order and following the demand of the prosody, the titles won by his hero to the adoration of humans, he has disseminated them at random, and, in the course of his work, he has brought in almost without exception the ninety-six attributes of Bacchus; a symmetric battalion that the Anthology presents to us, in close column, four deep, on twenty-four lines, each commanded by a letter of the alphabet. But he only made them appear to our eyes after having broken their ranks, at the moment and at the place where his narratives were most naturally to bring them.
As for the descriptive or purely poetic epithets which certainly abound in our author, I do not know if, on this point, he does not deserve more praise than blame; apart from one or two idle adjectives whose very meaning has remained vague and enigmatic by reason of the incorrectness of the text, if one leaves aside certain favorite expressions that one could call the idioms of the Nonnian language, all the others are significant, energetic, and do not present themselves anywhere as the most terrible enemies of the substantive. His Aristarchs,
it is true, have painfully noted in him certain verses formed entirely of four epithets, and, as they went along, they have rounded them into snowballs to throw in his face and insult his reputation: this is indeed, I do not hide it from myself, that which Aristotle so justly reproaches in Alcidamas when he says, by a sort of play on words that is here well placed, that “this orator uses the epithet not as a seasoning that pleases, but as a perpetual food that palls”(1). Now, this fault of Alcidamas, Nonnus would seem to have aspired to; he would even have pushed it so far, says one of his most severe critics, that he gives epithets even to his epithets. I concede, if one wishes, that he sometimes doubles them, although such a misdeed is quite uncommon, and I can find the example and at the same time the excuse for it in Homer (2). But I ask to observe in my turn that, when Nonnus triples the epithets, it is that, almost always, he has elevated one of his adjectives to the dignity of a verb, and the attribute has become active. Now it is upon this knowledge, acquired for me, of his manner that I have partly constructed my method of correction; and I believe I have owed to it a few quite plausible encounters. I do not deny, however, that in more than one instance this crowd of epithets arrives at obscuring the image it ought to clarify; but most of the time it casts upon it only an antithetical light. My notes will cite a few examples of it; but they will not be able to tell all the embarrassments into which these new terms have thrown the translator. How many times have I not cried out with Ronsard? How much I am saddened that the French tongue Does not make words as the Greek one does: Ocymore, Dispotme, Oligochronien.
I pretend here only, and in advance, at the risk of contradicting on this point again learned critics, that if the epithets, in Nonnus, are sometimes superabundant, they are never improper; and this observation, I repeat, has also guided me many times in my revision. A There remain the compound epithets, with double words; and Nonnus in this genre is, in effect, a very powerful, and sometimes a very happy creator. When they present thus from time to time several pleasant images fused into a single expression, they give at once color and amplitude to the style; but, when one multiplies them, this amplitude touches very closely upon turgidity. “However,” adds another critic, “the readers most shocked by the faults of Nonnus cannot help but do justice to the ingenious turn, to the fertility and to the erudition of his epithets, even the most hazardous (3).” It must be said, moreover, to the discharge of Nonnus, these words where two images are reunited, these compound epithets, belonged above all to the style consecrated to Bacchus, because they denoted inspiration and added to the vivacity of the dithyramb, a tumultuous accessory of the orgies. “The graces,” according to Demetrius of Phalerum, “are often born from a compound and dithyrambic term (4).” And no language lends itself to these alliances of words as much as the Greek language, an immense source which, similar to the ocean of Homer (5), has caused the waves of its riches to flow back upon the most remote idioms. As for me, who places all opinions in presence, pressed as I am to conclude after so long a digression thrown across my historical narrative, I rejoin myself again to Aristotle, to whom one must return without ceasing to learn to discern the true from the false, as to regulate taste, and I maintain with him that in this matter poets have liberties or even licenses denied to other writers.
XVII. Dupuis and his astronomical system drawn from Nonnus. Fréret.
Scarcely had Hermann, this judge so fine and so exercised in antiquity, this philosopher of erudition, in his metrical meditations, dressed a throne or rather a chair for the Egyptian poet, scarcely had he thus in the art of versification crowned him chief of a school, than immediately the enthusiast Dupuis erected him into a professor of transcendent astronomy. Already Nonnus is no longer uniquely this arranger of dactyls, skilled in making the Greek rhythm render all that it contains of harmony; he is also the contemplator of the stars, the scrutineer of the sphere, the interpreter of the constellations; it is in the *Dionysiaca* that Dupuis goes to draw the original idea of his system: a monstrous system, which he had from its beginning supported upon these impious aphorisms, as upon two indestructible columns. — “It is the earth that made the heaven. The education that degrades us delivers us all to imposture.” And certainly, of these two propositions which, I hasten to affirm, are not even to be found in germ in the *Dionysiaca*, Dupuis would not have liked without doubt to see the latter retorted against that own exuberant education to which he owes such a vain erudition. It is nevertheless, for a great part, from the poem of Nonnus, leafed through and leafed through again with a patience which, I fear, will find very few imitators, and, for the other part, from his brain en-
encompassed, that Dupuis has brought forth the confused heap of his sidereal observations. It seems that, like the witches of Macbeth, causing to boil in a vast cauldron where he saw them melt together, with his reason, the heterogeneous ingredients of all cults, he has expressed from it I know not what universal religion without a name, another Babel built by his immense incredulity.
A ‹ Greece, › says the blasphemer, ‹ was too little instructed to preserve for us the traces that ancient fiction had with places and with the march of the sun, the true and only Bacchus whose benefits antiquity had ever celebrated. It is in Egypt that we must seek the sources of this history, and in an old Egyptian poem that Nonnus, born in Panopolis, warmed up in Greek in the first centuries of our era, › (T. II, p. 27).
‹ This warmed-up old poem is not a body of works of the mind, › he adds, ‹ it is but a heap of legends scattered in the night of time, › and Dupuis cites for us in a note some primitive collectors of these legends: Linus, Orpheus, Musaeus, Pronopides, whom he makes a preceptor of Homer, little enough known until now. Certainly it would have been easy for him to enlarge his nomenclature; and, without speaking of the tragedians among whom figure in the first rank Aeschylus for a lost tragedy, Euripides for his admirable Bacchae, without taking into account the numerous comic writers among whom one notes Eubulus, Epicharmus, Timocles and even Aristophanes, all singers of the exploits of Bacchus, whose works have disappeared from our eyes, but which the library of Alexandria had placed under the eyes of Nonnus; he could have named more than one epic, the *Dionysus* of Euphorion, the *Facts and Deeds of Bacchus* by Theolyte, and finally the *Bassarics* of a certain Dionysus, whose fragments have been gathered lately, and which it is said were lent to the Egyptian poet for some hemistichs.
But these titles of poems, exhumed for the most part from the vast catacombs constantly open in Athenaeus or Stobaeus, do not seem to me to take away any merit from the work of Nonnus, a work which he founded upon a national subject already treated no doubt by a great number of writers; for, far from letting himself go to invention in a subject so favorable to deviations, he took it upon himself to follow the mystical traditions step by step, to connect them with one another, and to draw up a sort of code of the cult of Bacchus. I continue.
‹ This poem, › says Dupuis, ‹ little known, although infinitely worthy of being so, if not for its poetic qualities, at least for its mythological traits, its sustained relations with the march of nature, and especially with that of the sun, which are there in great part preserved › (there begins to point the dream), ‹ is composed of forty-eight chants, which contain in themselves almost all ancient mythology; it is in this poem that we will follow the march of the sun or of Bacchus in his conquests and his voyages around the world. We will find there also a complete proof that Bacchus is the sun, since it is only in the heavens and in the zodiac that one can follow his traces, just as it is in the zodiac that we have followed those of Hercules, of Osiris, of Isis, of Theseus and of Jason. ›
This program, written all in one breath like an oracle of the Sibyl, is followed by a dry, cold analysis, separate for each of the forty-eight chants, containing (he counted them) 21,895 verses. Dupuis has accompanied this prosy summary of the *Dionysiaca* with so many allegories and astronomical allusions that, apart from some ingenious ideas that I have taken care to note in my annotations, his work on Nonnus cannot be of any utility for the translator. It is furthermore sown with direct epigrams, or even sly traits shot in the manner of Voltaire against the Christian religion; and, in effect, the author set such store by the prince of incredulity that he had erected him in his mind as a favorite divinity, no doubt in place and stead of the God he was trying to dethrone; one cannot read without stupefaction, in his dedicatory epistle to his beloved spouse, this phrase: B ‹ The greatest praise that one can give to your taste is your esteem for Voltaire, to whom you devote all the time that the economic cares of your house leave to you. ›
This reminds me of what a Levantine confided to me in Constantinople concerning the requirements of Muslims in their domestic life; they disapprove of devotion in their wives, and I no longer know which Oriental poet, a predecessor of Parny, required of his Iris that she make no account of the Koran.
What would one say today of this proof of the virtues of a housewife and of the gallantry of Dupuis, who, at the end of this amorous and philosophical declaration of a few lines at the head of his three voluminous in-quarto volumes, adds in a madrigal, as in the final couplet of our vaudevilles: *I care more for this epistle than for all the rest of the work.*
After such bizarre ideas on the education or at least on the reading of women, I cannot help, however, admiring the marvelous erudition of Dupuis, acquired and increased during our civil troubles; he was present there, however, and took an active part in them, sometimes deputy of the province, sometimes representative of the capital. And as there is not, in our time especially, a question so literary, nor even a dissertation so poetic, where politics does not make its appearance and where the opinion of the writer does not agitate his pen for a moment, one will forgive me for saying that we must honor Dupuis for his courageous role in the horrible drama of 1793 and for his negative vote in the great regicide trial. Europe and posterity, he exclaimed
will judge the king and his judges. And it is to his systems, already disdained by the public, and to the mental distractions that were believed to be their consequence, that he owed the fact of not having paid with his blood for his noble temerity.
And yet these fictions which place the sun and the moon at the head of all the divinities of paganism are not the creation of Dupuis; he drew them from ancient sources. But as for his system of extending and prolonging the empire of the two stars even over our consciences, as for his hypotheses—metamorphosed into theological rules and axioms regarding the influence of the simultaneous appearance or disappearance of the constellations—he alone is the responsible creator, and one would be wrong to cast any part of it upon Nonnos.
On the other hand, the citations so numerous that Dupuis made from him to prop up his scaffolding would seem to be of a nature to establish the astronomical reputation of Nonnos: his knowledge, in effect, in his capacity as an Egyptian and a student of the school of Alexandria, must have been great on this subject; but it does nothing for his poetic fame. The fiery demonstrator invokes him almost always as an authority, but he does not endeavor in the least to highlight or reproduce the elegance of the writer, not even in the thirty-eight verses (for I count them too) that were published by the *Nouvel Almanach des Muses* of 1803. I have searched, not without difficulty, in this collection of ephemeral poetry for those alexandrines which, on the word of M. Auguis, biographer and editor of Dupuis, I was to believe were a translation or at the very least an imitation of a fragment of the *Dionysiaca*; and it has been impossible for me to recognize them as anything other than an invocation to Hercules regarding his twelve labors, perhaps the beginning of that *Heracleid* which holds such a great place in the first volume of Dupuis—a sacred poem on the Calendar which he was meditating and for which he had borrowed the title in advance from Panyasis, Pisander, and Cleophilus, chanters of Hercules in the Greek centuries; or else, finally, a rhymed and detached inspiration, the flow of which the indefatigable scholar interrupted amidst his incessant compilations.
Among the critics who have refused to see with Dupuis, in the fabric of the *Dionysiaca*, a series of purely astronomical facts, Fréret (and this name, without announcing an infallibility that is not the share of anyone, especially in ancient conjectures, must nevertheless cause any judicious reader to pause before contradicting such a scholar), Fréret, I say, did not think that this was precisely the source from which Nonnos had drawn the fundamental matter of his epic. He believed rather that the traditions followed by the Egyptian poet established Bacchus as a truly historical personage who had really existed. He thus attached him to A the system of Euhemerus, in which "all the divinities of paganism were, without exception, men raised by apotheosis to the rank of gods, and all the fables were events of an ancient history, which the partisans of Euhemerism place as best they can, either as to time or place (1)."
XVIII. Schow, Fuessli, Gottlob Weichert, Moser, Creuzer and other German critics.
Soon, while France—even in its bouts of impiety or religious indifference—was rejecting the strange theory of Bacchus as universal god, the worship of whom people were trying to rejuvenate, learned Germany directed, once again, its gaze toward this poem of the *Dionysiaca* which had provided Dupuis with the first idea, if not the developments, of his system. Following his example, but without having them follow the same extravagances, Schow, Fuessli, and some philologists published short abridgments of the *Dionysiaca*, rather to try to draw from it a body of doctrine and establish its scientific importance than to have its literary merit or diction appreciated.
One can also cite from among the partisans that Nonnos enrolled, at long intervals, under his disdained banner, Gaspard Ursini, at the end of the seventeenth century, and Weichert at the beginning of this one. The sentiment of this latter philologist was signaled by the famous Harles in his edition of the *Greek Library* of Fabricius as the most enlightened sentence that criticism has yet passed on the merit of Nonnos. By this title, it has the right to appear in this introduction, and here is an extract:
"Some readers," says Weichert, "frightened by the thickness of the book, have persuaded themselves that it is surcharged with superfluous narrations arranged without any order. We must forgive these men who find pleasure only in writings of short duration (*libellorum brevitati*), and who are terrified by a work of some length, even when it has been applauded by its own century. I declare that none of those who read the *Dionysiaca* attentively will accuse the author of confusion. The unity of action, and, to use the words of Aristotle, the composition, which consists in a beginning, a middle, and an end, is perfectly observed there. Everything is so skillfully attached to a single thread that the art of the poet shines there as much as his wit; and it is clear that before writing, Nonnos had his whole plan in his head. On the other hand, if several conditions that aesthetics, as they say, requires of an epic were found omitted or used poorly, it is not Nonnos one should blame for this as a crime. Entirely occupied with drawing from his reservoirs the erudition that he had there…
in such a pile, and taking pride in it, without worrying about the time and the men who might later see in it only trivia, it was enough for him that a circumstance belonging to his subject could cast some charm upon his poem for him to seize it and put it to work; and if we consider the *Dionysiaca* from this point of view, it must be admitted that the poet completely executed the plan he set for himself, and that, by the breadth of his knowledge, as by the fertility of his imagination, he deserves the praise and admiration of all. But, although Nonnos found in his theme the occasion to open all the sources of his erudition, it must also be admitted that, by the grace of the narrative, the harmony of the rhythm, as well as the variety of the episodes and the brilliance of the images, he charms the reader equally. Here I pause to declare that, far from exactly translating the Latin praises of Weichert, I temper his enthusiasm, and I hasten to say with him: "I confess nevertheless, so as not to be accused of blindness or of connivance with the defects of this poem, that I would have liked to excise some details, and that I have not always found therein the perfume of Athens."
Since I have begun to temper the Nonnian ardor of Gottlob Weichert myself, I must continue and draw a reasonable conclusion from so many controversies. Yes, undoubtedly, among all these men who, in an exhausted century, have sought to imitate the inspirations of the chanters of heroes and of primitive nature, and who asked for erudition and the art of words from the works of the schools and the vaults of libraries, among all these writers who came after the geniuses disappeared under the empire of Rome and under the domination of a single master, as Tacitus says (1), among those talents whom Alexandria, asylum of the Greek muses, returned to Athens and to Constantinople in the fourth century, nourished by its sciences, but enervated under the vices of its decrepitude—finally, among those witty versifiers who gave the epic style not, surely, its original energy, but a constant elegance—Nonnos is certainly the least known poet and yet the most worthy of being so.
One sees in my reviews of ultra-Rhenish criticism that I passed over some expressions of mood that the famous Heyne seems to launch against Nonnos, merely as the echo of a whim of Hemsterhuis; the latter, after having declared that the authority of Nonnos should count for nothing in archaeological matters, admits nevertheless that one cannot impartially judge him in the state so informal in which it has come down to us. And M. Creuzer has reproached, in my stead and place, this avenger of the Greek muses—put to flight by the school of Justus Lipsius—for not having appreciated and meditated as much as it deserved this subject of the *Dionysiaca*, the most magnificent canvas of the fabulous world (2). As for Heyne, through certain insults that derive more from the habitual impetuosity of his character than from reflection, he displays an erudition too sagacious and too speculative not to have guessed, beneath the imperfection of the manuscripts, the true value of the poet, and he pronounced these words which have been for me a powerful encouragement: "He would have well deserved of letters and would be the worthy object of great gratitude, who would reunite all that is best in the *Dionysiaca*, and, suppressing the inanities, would make a single body of all the rest (3)."
Here appears, more than he shines, M. Moser, whom Graefe later stigmatized with the title of "scourge of Nonnos," coupling him with Lubinus Eilhartus, A"a couple well worthy of allying themselves," he said.
M. Moser, annotator of six books of the *Dionysiaca* (8, 9, 10, 11, 12, and 13), disdained to translate them into Latin or even into German, as if he had looked there only for a theme for a commentary to exercise his youthful erudition. For undoubtedly M. Fred. Creuzer, the most learned and most perspicacious of the mythologists of our day, did nothing, by signing the preface of this essay, but encourage the efforts of one of his students; and he could not in advance, for this single attempt, assign him a rank among distinguished philologists.
M. Moser does not appear to me to have sufficiently valued the works of his predecessors; and among other inaccuracies—for I do not enter into the substance of the quarrel and stick to the peccadillos—he signals, among the manuscripts of the *Dionysiaca* which must be consulted, a Parisian manuscript, which, as I have assured myself by many researches, has never existed in our capital. This is an opinion that I would like to transmit in passing to M. Louis Dindorf; for I saw him last autumn in Leipzig, very disposed, on the faith of M. Moser, to make a trip to Paris to consult the unfindable manuscript. Now, that would be a pity, and M. L. Dindorf demonstrates to us every day that he can make much better use of his time. On this subject, I will observe that one must sometimes be wary of that German gravity that Madame de Staël, in more serious matters, calls the pedantry of levity; it sometimes covers very conjectural propositions with a heap of knowledge, and lays down upon
a thick bed of Greek and Latin citations assertions half-fanciful, when they are not entirely erroneous, so that truth and good sense remain smothered under the weight of the erudition. All these apprentice-doctors, suddenly smitten with the Bacchic cult, following the example of the master, the learned Fréd. Creuzer, illustrious author of *Dionysos*, and better still of the *Symbolik*, took it upon themselves to demonstrate the qualities of the god far more than those of his poet; they explained one by one the epithets and surnames of Bacchus with great archaeological exactitude, without any concern for style; and, in their technical and colorless enumeration, they remind me of those followers of Mahomet I have seen, huddled on their soft sofas, rolling in their phlegmatic hands the oriental toy (the *komboloi*), by way of diversion from the slowness of their conversations, as if they were counting off, one after the other, the virtues of their prophet.
XIX. *Graefe and M. Ouvaroff.*
Finally Graefe appeared; or, to speak more accurately, we saw arise in 1819, from the presses of Leipzig, a Greek volume, corrected under his care, containing the first twenty-four books of the *Dionysiaca*, without preface, translation, or commentary. Graefe, in 1815, had caused this first volume to be preceded by an exercise in German translation, undertaken on a detached portion of the fifteenth book, in verses similar in intent to those of Voss's marvelous translation of the *Iliad*. This attempt at poetic interpretation had no other result than certain fragments scattered in literary analysis, and always in the German language, which M. Ouvaroff—to whom I am coming—provided on a more extensive plan; one reads this in the short foreword of that work, which Graefe has entitled *Hymnos et Nicée*:
“A prejudice credited for centuries holds that Nonnus is not a poet, but only a curious collector of fables and archaeology. It is sad to see the great poet smothered under the learned mythographer. No doubt, when Nonnus, to conform to his century, accumulates excessive expenses of erudition in expressions loaded with antitheses, his poetry becomes bombastic, cold, and tiresome; but when he uses mythology like Ariosto uses history, then his verses take on a rapid and powerful flight. His rhythm, more correct and richer, sometimes attains lyrical enthusiasm, and rises to the most brilliant imagery; in a word, his inflation and his affectation in the epic are of his time; to him alone” belong his laughing imagination and this singular abundance of thoughts and of sentiments which give a new life even to extinguished traditions.
This was to open a wide road to the rehabilitation of Nonnus, and the philologists of the North hastened to walk it. Among them, and before all others, eager to bring to this almost new proposition a second series of arguments, and to the poet another tribute of support, M. Ouvaroff, today president of the Academy of Sciences of St. Petersburg, published in 1817, under the title *Nonnus of Panopolis, Poet, or Supplement to the History of Greek Poetry*, a study as learned as it is honorable to the memory of the chanter of Bacchus. I shall extract from it, in my notes, some fragments, to admire them, rarely to oppose them. Although the learned correspondent of the Institut de France has proven to us, by more than one dissertation printed in Paris, his facility in wielding our language, it is in German, and at St. Petersburg, that he published this work, which reviews the forty-eight books of the *Dionysiaca*: I am going to transcribe some lines from the beginning and the end:
“My goal,” says M. Ouvaroff in what he calls his *Nonnian Anthology*, “has been to facilitate, as much as in me lies, the study of the *Dionysiaca*, and to defend the poet of Panopolis and his talent against the prejudices of the learned world; despite being universal, they are nonetheless sovereignly unjust... The poem of Nonnus has been condemned, for centuries, to be but a garret full of rust and dust, where only the most intrepid mythographers enter from time to time... And yet,” concludes M. Ouvaroff, “perhaps the friends of Greek poetry will find a new motive to judge the chanter of Panopolis less severely in the reflection that with his final verses also resound the final accents of ancient poetry. It is the touching farewell of a friend who is about to disappear forever. His supreme words are then doubly precious and sweet. We must therefore retain them.”
XX. *The Greek edition of 1819-1826. Wakefield in England. Bernhardy in Germany.*
These preliminary praises, such public reclamations in favor of Nonnus, seemed an announcement of the edition of Graefe, and served as happy forerunners. He, seven years after having published the first twenty-four books of the Greek text, produced the final twenty-four, and this time with a notice which explained quite rather all that one promised to do.
that he did not account for what had been done. The two complete volumes now presented at the bottom of the pages only the versions corrected from or chosen among the conjectures, whether of the early commentators Falkenburg, Canter, Cunaeus, and Scaliger, or of the latest ones, such as d’Ansse de Villoison in France, Hermann in Germany, and even in England the fiery Wakefield, in his *Silva critica* of bilious philology. Certainly, it is not erudition that Graefe lacked in giving more perfection to his Greek text; it is solely the fact of not having himself translated the poet he was editing: the inaccuracies that escape the reader and that are misunderstood by the glossator should necessarily have yielded before the research and efforts of the translator.
Graefe was preparing a general commentary, no doubt similar to the fragment that he had given in 1813, following two hundred and fifty-two verses of the detached episode of *Hymnos and Nicaea*. He spoke of dissertations on the era and writings of Nonnos, on the mythological sources from which the poet was supposed to have drawn his legends, on the virtues and vices of his style, on his idioms; he announced a historical notice of the editions, an overview of the metrical system, and finally a summary of grammatical notes, all things which I have tried to treat in my turn in my preface as well as in the remarks that I have appended to each separate canto. And it is with great confidence in this work already begun that he provokes the curiosity of future glossators and refers them to his universal *Lexicon of Nonnos*. Why must it be that, thirty years later, we still have to regret its absence; that these lights, which no doubt would have guided us happily through more than one dark corner, were extinguished at the moment of shining, and that finally Graefe himself disappeared before fulfilling his promise? It is to Graefe, however, it must be recognized, that this return so marked of learned Germany toward Nonnos is primarily due; for, with Hermann his master, he enthroned him irrevocably as a true pontiff of the cult of the hexameter. Yes, Nonnos established a school; and this event of the poetic annals of the world, which I try to note in my turn, has just been proclaimed recently by the famous Bernhardy; not in one of those ephemeral or capricious theses that the students of Germany, jealous of exercising their erudition, give to themselves to make themselves better known to their colleagues in the Universities, but in one of those books destined to live, which the conscientious philologists of the Rhine combine and ripen for twenty years, and which, by perpetuating the merit of the stubborn scrutineer, signal doubly the progress of the great history of the human spirit.
« Soon, » says Mr. Bernhardy, « came the dominating influence of a man gifted with a rare talent who drew toward him the studies of his neighbors, and chained them to his rules, this Nonnos who, for his honor, gives his name to the last poetic epoch of the Egyptian school. His work is a premeditated reform of the epic meter, united with a marvelous hue and linked to a plan so firm that nothing disconcerts it, and that the poet himself could not, without great art and stubborn labor, support and weld together all the materials of his edifice. Few Greek poets can boast of an imagination so creative and yet always subservient to the subject. It unfolds during forty-eight cantos without wandering, without languishing, and is enriched with brilliant traits, expressive turns, and a prodigious surfeit of images. With such qualities, one should not be surprised if, despite the constant application of the fruit of his studies, Nonnos remained original. »
Be that as it may regarding this enthusiasm, it is the edition of Graefe, the second in date—for the reproductions of 1606 and 1610 are not a new edition, they are its two volumes printed at Leipzig, removed by two hundred and eighty years from the primitive edition—which I would not want to make on my own person the double experience of this verb..., etc. Oh Heinsius! what has become of that good taste one preaches to others? Well! it is I who will try to answer the Dutch Aristarchus. Instead of *ἀνέρα νικήσαντα κατηφεῖ χειρὶ πατάξας*, read *ἀνέρι νικήσαντι κατηφέα χεῖρα πετάσσας* (Homeric expression), and you will have reasonable verses, even elegant ones, and above all very conformable to the ancient custom which they recall while confirming it. That is most certainly a correction that would not have escaped Graefe if, instead of editing, he had translated.
Few months before the interruption of all political relations with Russia caused the cessation, or at least rendered the literary commerce very difficult, I learned, through a note emanating from the University of Saint Petersburg, that the commentary which the late Mr. Graefe had promised to follow his edition of the *Dionysiaca* has never appeared, and is not even found entirely finished in the literary succession of the learned philologist.
Leipsic, B removed by two hundred and eighty years from the primitive edition of Antwerp, which I took as the base for my own, without however forbidding myself the right to admit into it the readings of the sixteenth-century annotators, even when Graefe thought it appropriate to reject them. Nor have I permitted myself to forgo the efforts of modern critics who came after him, such as M. Riegler in his *Grammatical Studies on Nonnus* (1), and especially M. Koehler in his scholarly analysis of the *Dionysiaca* (2). Their corrections, which almost always agree with mine, impose upon me the obligation to speak of them with modesty, perhaps, but always with gratitude. It is especially in my system of reconstruction—a scaffold erected to repair the cracks in the edifice—that I have separated myself from Graefe, by taking on the task of filling the numerous lacunae that he signals, establishes, or leaves to persist. I would not wish to appear too presumptuous in asserting that my method gives the poem of Nonnus an entirely different character, or at least a regularity and cohesion which it lacked; one will judge of that. But it is time to explain in what my methods consist.
XXI. My methods of correction.
It must be the same with the *Dionysiaca*, I shall easily be granted, relative to the material preservation of the text, as with the *Paraphrase of the Gospel*. The two manuscripts, coming from the same epoch, from the same country, from the same city, from the same author, and perhaps also from the same copyists, must have had the same destiny. Now, if the *Paraphrase*, commented upon and interpreted so many times during the Italian Renaissance of Greek letters—an epoch more naturally avid for writings inspired by the Christian religion at its dawn than for the final gasps of its dying rival—if, I say, this *Paraphrase*, so often corrected, is nonetheless still in need of correction, what is there to be astonished at if a production by the same author, rejected at first by reason of its purely mythological theme, has remained in that formless or neglected costume from which its twin sister, despite so much assistance, has not been able to emerge entirely?
Certainly, if I were the scholar I would wish to be, I should have had, before providing an edition of a poet as mistreated as Nonnus, to consult all his manuscripts myself; here are my excuses for having dispensed in part with this work: will they be enough to soften the ire of the critics, to which, through this forced negligence, I have imprudently exposed myself?
First, there is no trace of these manuscripts in our largest Paris libraries, even less in our provincial collections. At Florence, distracted by the Pitti Palace, the gallery, and perhaps also by the Cascine, not then foreseeing my late-blooming passion for the *Dionysiaca*, I did not think to ask at the Laurentian Library for the manuscript that I have already described. Might I have forgotten, perhaps, to mention that it bore on its last page, in three very incorrect Greek iambics, this:
*By great fortune this manuscript* *Has just finished being transcribed:* *Manuel began it; Maximus, by his hand,* *Thanks to heaven, has brought it to the end.*
Now, in this final inscription I have not been able to see, as Bandini did, the names of the owners of the manuscript; I maintain that it concerns copyists, and bad copyists at that, who, despite their imperial appellations, deserve, for their honor, nothing but oblivion. Furthermore, Bandini affirms that this copy accords with the edition where Lectius himself reproduced, in his *Corpus of Greek Poets*, the voluminous 12mo of 1605. Thus the folio of Geneva supplied that codex for me (5).
When I was at Rome, I was occupied there much less with Nonnus than with the ambassador of France, who was called Chateaubriand at that time; and I only passed through the Vatican to go and see, in that cabinet which overlooks the eternal city—resplendent for all adornment with a crucifix—the pope, so pious, so spiritual, and such a skillful reformer, who had taken the title of Leo XII. Since then, to supply my own neglect, I have had to see, through the enlightened eyes of another, the manuscripts from the libraries of the Holy City and of Naples. A friend, a practiced hellenist—for in our own days still, as in the time of Louis XIII, the gentleman, after having wielded the sword, knows how to hold also the pen of the traveler and the pencil of the archaeologist—M. the Count Adolphe de Caraman, the ingenious restorer of Anet, kindly consented to collate from the Italian copies certain passages, the most mutilated, which I had signaled to his zeal for letters, and he gathered no new version there.
The copies of Venice, of Milan, and of Munich replicate the Palatine exactly; and the researches of d'Ansse de Villoison at Weimar revealed to him only a very small number of variants, from which Graefe, before me, had been unable to draw any profit.
I have only been able to consult myself the Palatine copy restored at Heidelberg. It is therefore on this manuscript that I stop for a moment; an *in quarto* traveler, bound in old morocco with gilt edges, written on cotton paper, quite neatly, and still bearing the stamps of the Vatican and of Paris, where it resided. I read it very attentively, despite the method that places each distich on a single line in the two columns, the second verse opposite the first, which renders the reading quite frustrating. I have scrupulously collated it.
A I have collated it scrupulously with the text of Graefe—who says he had only indirect communications of it—as well as with the *editio princeps* of Antwerp, and the two reproductions given of it, either by Lubinus Eilhartus in 1605-10 or by Lectius at Geneva in 1606. This long and difficult operation, which I regret not having been able to apply to the nine or ten copies merely catalogued in Europe—for I understand their full utility—has nevertheless demonstrated to me that, similar to the others and bearing the same date, this one was a very exact tracing of the manuscripts of Sambucus and Philelphus; the calligrapher, when he found himself embarrassed or when he perpetuated erasures, far from having to resort to another copy or to innovate, took care to say in the margin, in poor Latin: *sic erat in exemplari mihi communicato*. I noted therein only one or two traits that escaped the perspicacity of Graefe or his correspondents. The eyes of M. E. Miller, librarian of the Palais Bourbon, clearer than my own, extracted from it also some marginal notes of which he has allowed me to profit. Furthermore, without foreseeing that his kindly expertise would come to my aid, did he not leaf through, in Spain, the four sixteenth-century copies, partial or total, that the Greek Lascaris bequeathed from Messina to the Escorial, or that Hurtado de Mendoza sent there from Venice? Did Falkenburg not also give me, in his primitive edition (alas! much too faithful), the manuscript of Sambucus, now useless in Vienna? And does it not result from his investigations and my own that the rare copies dispersed throughout Europe all bear almost the same imperfections, for having been taken from one and the same original? In the absence of the insights that cannot spring from these primitive copies, the only ones found until now, Graefe later allowed me to enjoy at my leisure the summary of the work on grammar that, up to 1826, had accumulated around Nonnus. B Undoubtedly, the very painful reform of the Greek text—even though I have given it all the completion of which I was capable—is not yet perfect, and when there has been so much to rectify after men such as Falkenburg, Scaliger, and Graefe, I could not flatter myself that after me nothing remains to be done: but if my new readings, so numerous that they amount to no less than fifteen hundred, have not erased all the stains, I have at least indicated to my successors the base or rule that can serve them in this difficult operation.
I proceed from this principle: although he is fond of two or three epithets whose meaning is from time to time obscure to us, Nonnus has not knowingly admitted into his verses a proposition devoid of meaning, rarely a repetition of the expression when it is not indispensable for clarity, and never—let us speak plainly—a triviality or an ineptitude, as Heyne says. I could even affirm, and here I would not be the only one of my opinion, that never has a fault of quantity voluntarily made the strings of his lyre grate. Also, if, in a hexameter submitted to my preliminary meditations, I happened to encounter:
*A vowel, to run too hastily, Which was by a vowel in its path struck;*
or, to speak less well but more positively than Boileau’s imitative periphrasis, as soon as I glimpsed the shadow of a hiatus, I almost always stopped short, and did not leave the suspect verse until I had recovered or ventured the version that was to make the stain disappear—let us say rather, the irregularity unnoticed by the primitive poets, but become a stain in the centuries of decadence. For I knew that the pupil was a much more scrupulous observer of prosody than his own masters, and that, in this almost insignificant respect, Nonnus surpassed Hesiod as well as Homer. C On the other hand, if the elision came to shock my eyes or my ear, I put the poorly forged verse back on the anvil, according to the precept of Horace; finally, when the hexameter seemed to me to sin by a lack of elegance or euphony, or when the same terms were found in the same phrase brought together without necessity one to another; and if there was insignificance in the thought, unfitness, or a contradiction in the epithet, I made it a rule to seek a new lesson. For I knew also that my poet, imbued with the precepts of the school of Alexandria, and son of a century where the form of the language was particularly polished and enriched, avoided the repetitions that mar the style even more than abundance and periphrases render it languid.
Thus, to cite at once only three examples of these thousand inaccuracies: when the reader sees the nymph, discoverer of garlands and of many other mystical rites that have caused more serious disturbances among the learned, as one will judge by my notes; when he D
will see, I say, Mystis (Book XIII, v. 14) suddenly qualified by the unintelligible name of "mother of Corinth," instead of "mother of the garland" (*Korinthou* for *korymbou*); when Silenus, far from defying Apollo, begins to celebrate Bacchus (*Melizomenou Dionyso* for *Erizetai Argyrotoxo*, ch. XIX, v. 325); then, when a flute dances on the ground instead of a shepherd (ch. XIV, v. 290); finally, when I take at random these three absurdities (an expression used toward me by certain Essenes in a similar occurrence, but which is hardly more polite among them than among us), and that these absurdities of the primitive text are scrupulously preserved in the latest edition by Graëfe, is it the fault of Nonnus, and must his reputation suffer forever, and without a defender, from the carelessness of glossators or the negligence of the copyists?
If I myself, more obstinate than my predecessors, perhaps because I have profited from their first labors, but nevertheless weary like them of seeking uselessly the key to an enigma that is the fruit of a scribal error, have admitted one or two times only, if my memory serves, a half-satisfactory equivalent, shall we accuse one of the most witty writers of the fourth century—too much escorted perhaps by epithets, yet by epithets always significant—of abuse of language, of confusion, or of imbecility?
If, therefore, I have gone further than the corrections of the Leipzig edition, and if, far from the manuscripts, I repeat it, I have overloaded with a great number of rectifications the verbs, substantives, and adjectives, principally of the Greek text, it is because, to raise to its summit this edifice of which one had barely built the first floor, I have been almost always directed by a certain habit of the ways of Nonnus, which the meditations inseparable from an exact translation must have made familiar to me; then by common sense, for I could not suppose that the poet of so witty an era would have frequently and lightheartedly, so to speak, sinned against the rules; sometimes also, shall I confess it? I have let myself be guided in these corrections by a sort of instinct and sentiment, of which I would have difficulty in giving myself the reason.
XXII. Lacunae. Interversions.
I do not believe either that Nonnus is guilty of the lacunae that Graëfe has frequently introduced to resolve his own difficulties; and I have not been able to resolve myself to leave a single one subsist in my text. I can well believe sometimes that there has been disorder, transversion, if one wills, but never a lacuna, nor verses left unfinished, as in the Aeneid. The clumsy copyist blurred the text, but he did not omit; and those verses that Graëfe has replaced with dots or with asterisks, I have always found them before or after, in the same chant or in neighboring chants, without recurring to the insufficient resource of supplementary verses or hemistichs.
The lacunae, no doubt, are not always improbable in Greek manuscripts, and it requires in the proofreader almost as much perspicacity to discover them as art to remedy them. But here they have appeared to me out of season; and the first three books, like the last two, not having signaled a single one, one could conclude that Graëfe and Falkenburg have taken for lacunae the carelessness of copyists less trained than those of the beginning and the end. Moreover, this lacuna, assuming a connection between the alleged fragment and the thought of the critic, more than with that of the poet, cannot be put forward except in desperation; and one must be wary of the too natural penchant to cut the knot of difficulties without resolving them, and of substituting one's own manner for that of the author.
For the rest, the character of Nonnian poetry, or rather the memory of the poet, seems to me to have suffered even more from the interversions of the manuscript than from its other corrections—as numerous as they are, however; it is principally, I am more convinced than ever, to the transpositions of a poorly transcribed text, so common in the intermediate chants, that Nonnus owes his reputation as a "repeater" (*ressasseur*), an expressive term invented by d'Alembert, but by no means for the occasion of our poet, whom he had not read. One will understand me.
When, for example, the final trait of one of the harangues is found placed in the center of the address, the series—always so prolonged in Nonnus—of images and mythological allusions, which seemed finished when it is only clumsily interrupted, seems to recommence; and the reasoning remains in the air, deprived of all conclusion. Now these thoughtless errors of the copyist become, in the eyes of the Aristarchs, a habitual vice of style in an author of whom they have often, and with good right, blamed the abundance and the lack of sobriety.
Let one imagine the fourth book of the Aeneid interverted in the same way. The fragments of the chaste confessions of Dido mixed with her passionate outbursts or her touching farewells, the plaints of Iarbas confounded with the exhortations of Mercury; hence, one will agree, the admirable drama will deserve the most just criticisms; the taste of Virgil will appear suspect, and his genius will receive a first blow, which this same process, if it is renewed in the other chants, will soon have transformed into negligence of style and a disjointedness of composition.
A I ask, what masterpiece or what poet’s renown would withstand such outrages? And yet, upon the lower steps of the temple of which the prince of Latin poets occupies the sanctuary, this is what happens to Nonnus. Now, the Egyptian is all the more suspected of these bad habits because the returns and the superfluity of descriptive words fall into the defects familiar to the writers of his century. But let no one demand of me a categorical demonstration of how the inversion must have occurred, nor that I explain by what kind of negligence the verses went astray under the hand of the copyist. When distichs and even entire paragraphs, once re-established in the place I assigned to them without ever altering them, present a natural meaning, a continuous and satisfying order of ideas, that satisfies me; I want nothing more, and I look for nothing beyond that.
Thus, when in a long narration, I say it once again to better manifest my thought, the reflection or the idea that the poet wished to mark and seal at the end is encountered at the exordium; when, moreover, the lively part of the speech or the interrogative paragraph finds itself split into two sections by another sequence of reasoning, it is evident that this babbling, as J.-J. Rousseau used to say, can weary the patience; and that then the author, already burdened by the load of his own weaknesses, succumbs under the weight of the scribe’s faults, for which he becomes responsible to the readers.
I have therefore had to devote a large portion of the time which I dedicated to the *Dionysiaca* to this classification of the text, for which my scruples as a conscientious translator were a true help. These two labors, moving at the same pace, walked side-by-side, so to speak; and, after having surrendered myself ardently to the profession of word-corrector and sentence-adjuster, I did not wish to leave for the Hellenists who will come after me this task to recommence. I therefore bravely determined to provide a Greek edition myself, having it followed by the complete table of my corrections and their principal motives, as well as the method which I followed. This dark and dense forest which the first editor had too scrupulously respected, of which the critics of the sixteenth century had cleared some approaches, and which in the nineteenth the last editor had cleansed of its brambles, I have applied the axe to it in my turn, and I have clarified it to attempt to bring light and life back to it. Now I had to struggle all the more obstinately B against this imperfection of the text, for it is the reef of which I fear the danger above all, and against which it is probably in my destiny to be shipwrecked; for it is also from there that this fatal prejudice against Nonnus comes, and this stigma of mediocrity which was inflicted upon him long ago, without ever seriously attempting to revise either his text or such a sentence. To combat these age-old prejudices, I do not demand that my readers be grateful to me for all my care in applying dressings to so many wounds, in repairing and coating with a new varnish these dusty paintings: I ask simply that, instead of leafing through verses unrecognizable in the first editions, and crushed under the disdain of three centuries, one reads them attentively in the text as I have reconstructed it with the help of its own materials, and as if it had just escaped in this new form from the heaps of worm-eaten parchments of Mount Athos.
XXIII.
Poets contemporary with Nonnus. Coluthus, Tryphiodorus, John of Gaza, Musaeus, Quintus of Smyrna. Poets of the Anthology, Claudian, Ausonius.But when, through a wholly natural distrust of myself, the inconvenience of which nevertheless should not rebound upon Nonnus, I decline the task of pronouncing, in a reasoned and distinct paragraph, my own sentence on the poet whom I translate; if I hide in the shadow of the judgments and the critique, of which the preceding pages sufficiently reflect the clarity; if finally I thus discharge myself onto the reader of this part of my obligations, I cannot hide so boldly from another usage better established. The custom which governs prefaces wants every serious translator to engage there in sustained comparisons between his author and the works of the same genre and the same age. But even here, it is easy to see, I could not submit entirely to these requirements: how to trace around a writer whose epoch is so little precise, an exact circle of contemporaneity? And must I not eliminate first of all Coluthus, who, without contest, lived a century after Nonnus, and Tryphiodorus, whose uncertain birth is also for him nonetheless, according to Hermann, very much later?
The one, Coluthus, born at Lycopolis, modern Siout, whose immense palm trees I have seen reflected in the waves of the Nile, starts from Egypt at the head of three hundred and eighty-five verses to carry off Helen; and he has conquered, even in the eyes of his purifiers, only the reputation of a weak imitator of Homer and a mediocre disciple of C (which remained very nebulous). Now, if I have resolutely placed it at the very end of the fourth century, despite my predecessors who fix it to the first years of the fifth, it is not only to bring myself closer to both and for the sake of chronological truth, but it is also to vindicate both opinions, without too much effort and at the same time.
A Nonnos. Or, if the scholarly efforts of M. Stanislas Julien have not been able to completely save the disciple from oblivion, I very much fear that the master will also disappear without leaving further traces, despite all my attempts to rejuvenate him.
The other, Tryphiodorus, having escaped from I know not what unknown region—though still an Egyptian—in overturning Ilion with the aid of six hundred and seventy-seven hexameters, has provided only a cold sketch of the marvelous paintings of the second book of the Aeneid; a faded analysis, which the merit of a harmonious diction alone has preserved from time.
I must put aside John of Gaza, printed for the first time at the beginning of the eighteenth century, a shameless plagiarist of Nonnos. His verses, which, numbering seven hundred and one, describe a cosmographical map of Antioch, were revealed to us by Rutgers, and have left very little trace in the memory of the most persistent Hellenists.
But if these three poets, semi-epics, who came long after Nonnos and his zealots, have taken it upon themselves to steal from him certain epithets, a greater number of turns of phrase, or even, from time to time, a hemistich, Musaeus, who appears to be his contemporary, has also borrowed from him some images and even complete lines. B Now this last consideration would suffice all by itself to settle the dispute that has arisen between commentators jealous to determine the respective and personal relationships of one with the other: for never did Nonnos, for his part, borrow an entire verse from anyone but Homer. The majority of philologists have made the poet of Panopolis the preceptor of the chanter of Hero, and Bernhardy explicitly entitles the latter the "happiest imitator of Nonnos." Only one has been encountered who, reversing this natural order, makes Musaeus the teacher, while another, even more daring, has wanted Musaeus to be Nonnos himself, but Nonnos, adds a third, cured of an unreflective superabundance of style, and returned to a better taste.
I will readily agree, for my part, that aided by the choice of a more restricted and more moving subject, Musaeus has deployed more sensitivity and grace under shades that are often true, sometimes exaggerated; but, in this poem, which at most equals the importance of one episode of the Dionysiaca, I cannot admit that he has surpassed Nonnos and the numerous cantos where the latter allows passion to dominate; and I maintain, in any state of the case, that the Egyptian C is always superior due to his harmonious flexibility. As for the talent of invention, this point is not doubtful for anyone: I have no need, it seems to me, to demonstrate the superiority of my author, to have recourse to his "thundering and sublime spirit," an expression under which I found it difficult to recognize the characteristic traits of Nonnos; and yet these terms are recorded and repeated without hesitation in the preface of a learned commentator on Musaeus, who, certainly, does not appear elsewhere to be a fanatical partisan of the Egyptian poet. Could it be, then, that he had read or appreciated only the first two cantos of the Dionysiaca, where the scene indeed passes in the midst of the air, in the middle of the bursts of lightning and the rumblings of thunder?
Be that as it may, the student was destined to be more fortunate than the master in the eyes of posterity. The most celebrated poets of the century that saw the renaissance of Musaeus received him with pomp and formed his retinue. Boscan, who had just overhauled the system of Spanish metrics, and created—or at least perfected—for the fatherland of the old romances, the hendecasyllabic verse, charmed the court of Charles V with it.
Ah! Could I forget Boscan? Is it not he who revealed to me the poem of Musaeus long before the Greek language had told me enough secrets to read it in its original form; this Boscan, who followed me along the banks of the brooks, always united with Garcilaso, when, in my youthful dreams, I invoked for all my future a voyage to the oriental lands. Initiated, almost as a child, into the sonorous idiom that reigns beyond the Pyrenees, and of which the Gascon dialect, the first I ever stammered, is the brother as well as the neighbor, I only left the pastoral laments of Nemoroso to cast into the echoes of my valley the sighs of the intrepid swimmer of Sestos. D Did I know then that my heart would soon beat on the shore where the tower of Hero stood, and that I would hear the splashing of the waves of the Hellespont, where Leander died?
Later, I was to rediscover the sad adventure on the banks of the Arno, when a little volume, spread out under the porticoes of the Florence gallery, showed it to me retraced in the Italian stanzas of Bernardo Tasso, the father of the divine chanter of Jerusalem.
Finally, Clément Marot, in his naive style, gave them the Gallic rhyme, and made Francis I and his gallant court shed tears over these imaginary loves.
Nothing was to be missing for Musaeus, not even
A the strange honor he shared with Virgil in the burlesque travesties of Scarron. This easy and bold rhymester, laughing at everything, even at his wife, whom a happy widowhood was about to raise to the highest destinies, also wanted to laugh at the sad Hero, just as he had laughed at the unfortunate Dido.
And, during these triumphs of his disciple, Nonnus, disdained and misunderstood, languished, gnawed by worms B under the dust; and even now, punished for my lack of genius (caret quia vate sacro), he waits sadly for my modest prose to try to push open for him the door of the literary world.
In this shortened view of the school of Nonnus, my readers will perhaps have noticed for themselves that most of the Greek heroic poets of the last epoch were Egyptians, and belonged to Upper Egypt, as if the ecstatic life of the ascetics of neighboring Thebais had communicated to them the exaltation of thought and the habit of meditation. They combined with it, it is true, everything that the education and knowledge acquired at Alexandria could add of reality. It is thus, no doubt, that interest was directed toward the deeds and actions of Bacchus, the dithyrambic god, the father of enthusiasm, because they recalled the conquests, so popular in Greece, and even in Egypt, of Alexander the Great.
I finally arrive at Quintus of Smyrna, who figures well here, and without a play on words, as the fifth among the poets whose crown I weave around the head of Nonnus. He was found in Calabria joined to Tryphiodorus and Coluthus, whether the nature of the subject or a whim of the copyist had cemented their alliance, much more than a chronological date or even an analogy of style. Quintus, more than his two colleagues, brought from the monastery where they lay buried the surname of Calaber, joined to his Latin designation, which was imagined in order to disguise the poorly determined appellation of Cointos, and because of the embarrassment one felt in inventing another. I add also, following that fierce war that the sixteenth century waged against Greek names in order to convert them into *-us*; hostilities declared across the board, from which Nonnus has had so much to suffer on his own account.
The fourteen books of the *Paralipomena* of Cointos, a supplement—if one does not prefer to say the dregs—of Homer, only resemble the *Dionysiaca* in their volume and the number of verses, which are however triple on our side. This second *Iliad* affects all the manners of the first, and even copies the irregularities of rhythm, such as the hiatus and the spondaic verse, which Nonnus, the declared protector of the dactyl, has always so scrupulously avoided. "Cointos," says M. Tourlet, "has nobility, fire, enthusiasm, and genius; there reigns in the work C a sound taste, a nervous touch, a truly epic tone (1)."
I shall certainly take care not to take anything away from this infatuation of a translator, for fear that one might come to accuse me later of a fault entirely similar in my own cause. But, vocational jealousy aside, Nonnus has always seemed to me more correct, more elegant, more melodious, and above all less a servile copyist of Homeric expressions than Cointos, whose simplicity, while working to make itself primitive, could not be exercised in the fourth century without often appearing hard, rough, and too imprinted with archaism. I do not, however, close my eyes, out of a sort of systematic opposition, to the special merit of this continuator of the *Iliad*, who, without preamble, without invocation to the Muse, without exposition of his subject—all necessary accompaniments of the epic—takes the narrative where Homer left it, just as Maffeo Vegio, the Italian, extended the *Aeneid*, and Th. May, the Englishman, the *Pharsalia*. I admit that the diction of Cointos is sometimes energetic, even ornate, and I recognize that he has at least a certain advantage over the poet whom I believe to be his predecessor, in the comparisons, the charm and diversion of the epic, which he lavishes, while the author of the *Dionysiaca* has spared them far too much, in my opinion.
Must it be confessed, and to risk the paradox? Of all the writers born from the poetic school of Alexandria in its second epoch, the one who seems to me most incontestably related to Nonnus in style, as well as in manners, the virtues or the vices of style, is Claudian: but, since the works of his that remain to us are almost exclusively Latin, I have little to say about them here, except to regret his descriptions in Greek verse of Nicaea and Berytus. If they had reached us, they might have been able, if only by comparison, to throw some light on the date of the *Dionysiaca*, where the same subjects are treated. I will only observe that the exotic adornments whose profusion some Aristarchuses reproach him for, little suited, they say, to the Latin dialect, are found better placed in the Hellenic idiom, for the oriental breadth lends itself to the full abundance of imagery. Claudian and Nonnus both sought to enhance, through the richness of colors and expressions too constantly elevated not to be sometimes exaggerated, the themes of politics or Fable. Both, too partisan to a false grandeur, under a diction that is easy and harmonious, but sometimes monotonous, have developed to excess the fantasy of an ornate, fertile mind, with more energy, verve, and pretension to the sublime in the Latin, with more sweetness, sentiment, and abuse of language in the Greek. I do not know what the future holds for Nonnus, if he ever manages to be read attentively
A by those who are able to appreciate the merit of having known how to handle a foreign language so as to make a name for himself among the heroic poets of Rome, three centuries after Statius, the last of them, and for having obtained that a statue erected in the Forum of Trajan, by a senate even as servile as that one, should have perpetuated his memory.
After Claudian, one could still cite Ausonius among the contemporaries of Nonnus, though rather so as not to omit anything than to compare them. Ausonius certainly has as much erudition and wit as the poet of Panopolis; but this wit owes much more to the sallies vulgarly attributed to the influence of the banks of the Garonne where he was born, than to the banks of the Nile where intelligence seemed to have taken refuge, fleeing before the invasion of the Visigoths. However, if my countryman was not sometimes obscure, I would like to pay him homage with this remark of Cicero: "The negligence of a writer who is laboring over things more than words, does not lack grace." His style is tormented, difficult, and from time to time as harsh as that of Nonnus is harmonious and flowing. They have this in common, that one can doubt of the one and the other whether they were Christians. As far as Ausonius is concerned, one would affirm it when one reads his Ephemerides, one could deny it when one peruses his epigrams and centos. But, on this point, for our two poets everything is conjecture; and when at that same epoch so much darkness covers for us the West where the light was arriving, must one be astonished that we are ignorant of what was happening at the border of Ethiopia from where it was going to withdraw? To reconcile everything, there would be reason to believe that, like Nonnus, Ausonius was, according to the expression of Saint Gregory of Nazianzen, "engaged at first in the paths of error, then a faithful and zealous disciple of Christ." And at that epoch, as in the revolutions that followed it, it was thus for many men of heart and talent, who asked the only consoling religion for a shelter against the disorders and the debasement of their century, and who, after having been pagans or strong spirits—terms that have become synonyms—ended by being sincerely Christian.
Following the recognized or contested contemporaries of Nonnus, one more word on a poet his friend, I almost said an emulator of his B literary researches and of his religious conversion, who outlived him, if I am not mistaken, and was his student. Yes, in this Synesius, the illustrious African descendant of Hercules, who, first enamored of mythological ideas and the beautiful geniuses of Greece, knew how to carry the truth to the foot of the throne of the weak Arcadius, then became bishop of Cyrene, his homeland, to defend it by his courage and honor it by his writings, I see again an image and a disciple of Nonnus, whom he admired and whose old age he must have known; for even in his hymns where the Platonic word expresses the sublime metaphysics of Christianity, where the Anacreontic iamb is consecrated to the praise of the One Being, the principle God, the pious bishop seems to have profited from the perfected method of Nonnus, and shows a sort of reflection of the elegance and the euphony of the hexameter, which the poet of Panopolis had just inaugurated.
One of the characteristic traits of this sort of Egyptian renaissance, which I would willingly call the fourth and last phase of ancient Greek literature, is its profound respect for its predecessors. And it is not only to the Homeric era or to the century of Pericles that it pays homage with its admiration and its borrowings; it is also to the poetic school that appeared before it at Alexandria. It seems, in fact, that the more it distances itself by the affectation of the idea and the exaggerated adornment of style from the heroic simplicity of the primitive age, or from the dignity of the grandeur of the civilized age, the more it venerates them and seeks its models there carefully. It is not to its own annals, dishonored by humiliating revolutions and soiled by so many servilities, that it goes to ask for its inspirations or light; it ascends ceaselessly towards its past, feeds on the fabulous or historical glory of Greece; and one must be grateful to it for not having blinded itself regarding its own merit, and for having known how to have recourse, even when it imitates them from so far away, to the true types of the beautiful. That was, if I am not mistaken, the symptom of a leaning to struggle against decadence and against the invasion of bad taste; for it belongs above all to superior spirits to distrust themselves and to confess nobly all that they owe to their predecessors. The most original of modern geniuses has said: "We cannot go further than the ancients; they have not left us in verse" C anymore than some Greek novels, without taste and without genius, deserve to be placed among the productions of art. One could be astonished at this severity of Lebeau, if one did not notice that he was writing in 1762, in the second epoch of the darkness that formed around Nonnus. And undoubtedly the historiographer had never read either the *Dionysiaca* or the Greek novels in verse that he places between the two Theodosii, when the only ones that remain to us belong to the twelfth century. D
left for our part that the glory of following them well (1). A
XXIV. Borrowings of Nonnos. His imitations. The Bassarica of Dionysos. The Indian poems.
As memory dominates invention in Nonnos, I shall not, in order to do honor to the second of these faculties at the expense of the first, deny that he has made use of the fabulous traditions of his predecessors. What fiction, a product of his own thought, could he have slipped with success or propriety into the mythology of the fourth century of the Christian era? I have judged it useless to follow in this the example of some German abridgers, and to search out, one by one, the archaeological sources from which he drew his legends; I shall indicate later only the principal ones. He is accused above all of having put under contribution the Bassarica of a certain Dionysos; but, since one knows neither the era, nor the homeland, nor even sufficiently the name of this author—confounded perhaps with that of his hero—it has not yet been well established which of these two bards of Bacchus inspired the other. Moreover, I would be quite inclined myself to yield to Dionysos, the Samian says, the honors of priority, and it would not be doing a great wrong to Nonnos; for the Bassarica have only reached us in the state of isolated verses, or even of broken hemistichs, escaped for the most part from citations by Stephen of Byzantium. Their merit is purely ethnographic, and could not give any precise idea of the plan or the execution of the work.
"These Bassarica," says Colonel Wilford (2), "contained the history of the great Indian war, the Maha-Barata, written in Greek verse. It is lost; but, at the sight of the small number of fragments that remain of it, it appears that this work was approximately similar to the poems of Nonnos; the Dionysiaca, he adds, replace the lacunae of the Sanskrit Maha-Barata."
Sir W. Jones thought otherwise concerning the Dionysiaca, although he was disposed to relate them to another Hindu composition, the Ramayana; he did not doubt that a sustained comparison of the two poems would establish the identity of Bacchus with one of the most ancient heroes of India, Rama.
This double system has been contested by H. Wilson. While blaming his adversaries for having read only half of the Dionysiaca, he confesses that he perused them in haste, only to form a general idea of the details: a convenient method, and one which has been perfected in our day, in that it dispenses even with leafing through pages; it consists now in reading carefully the table of contents or the chapter headings: after which, the book is judged. B
Despite his rapid examination, M. Wilson establishes victoriously, it seems to me, that there is, between the Hindu poems and the Dionysiaca, no resemblance, no more in the heroes, their names or their attributes, than in the course of events. He is less successful when he seeks to rediscover in modern geography the cities and tribes of the Indian census, in the twenty-sixth book; and this is due in part to the fact that the names cited by Nonnos have been almost all disfigured or Hellenized by the copyist of the Dionysiaca. C
I excuse myself entirely in the presence of this contentious point, and entrench myself behind my complete ignorance of Sanskrit; it is nonetheless difficult to believe that Greece, which knew the Indies so poorly both before and after the expedition of Alexander, or even Egypt, to which commerce brought only notions that were either imperfect or exaggerated, could have resolutely penetrated then into this mysterious Hindu literature, only recently unveiled to our gaze. Greece, it must not be forgotten, made its lineage go back to the Phoenicians and the Egyptians, and claimed to have spread, in its turn, light into the Indies, through the aid of the exploits of Hercules, and better still the triumphs of Bacchus, the civilizing genius par excellence; but it did not keep the primitive memory of the banks of the Ganges, and its historical traditions present very few distinct vestiges of an Indian origin.
On the other hand, the little that I have read of the ancient Indian poems, through French or English translations, persuades me that Sanskrit poetry, if it piles up facts and exaggerates images, nevertheless simplifies the style and spares the figures and the epithet. There is not in it the bizarre confusion and the luxury of color that radiates incessantly in Arabic or Persian poetry. Its boldness is in the imagination; but the expression is almost always clear and naive, even in the most fantastic tableaux; one would find it difficult to rediscover in Nonnos these characters of the old Hindu epics. D
Nonnos, in summary, is essentially an imitator, but an imitator in his own manner; he sometimes weakens his models, but it is in attempting to rejuvenate them. He is without doubt a great manufacturer of epithets: he forges them, it is true, from several metals, and his fusion extends even sometimes to the verb; but he never uses those filler adjectives, those ready-made surnames, or those invariable attributes consecrated and accepted in the poetic glossary: he borrows from Homer locutions or proverbial hemistichs; but, first, the fact occurs rarely; and as for the epithets, far from drawing them from the Iliad and the Odyssey, far even from adopting those of the other poets whom he also imitated, he
makes it a rule to avoid them everywhere, to produce an equivalent of his own, or rather to compose a new term to better express his thought: such is his habitual process, and it follows that the study of his poetry is an excellent exercise for a Hellenist. For my part, my translation has so initiated me into the secrets of Greek versification and has furnished my memory with so many epic expressions, that the reading of the great poets has become for me henceforth much less laborious, and consequently much sweeter.
XXV. Plan and character of the epic of Nonnos.
In general, the chanters of heroic acts and the wonders of an expiring cult, who, in this advanced decadence, sought to struggle with the weapons of mythology against Christianity—whether, like them, they attempted to exalt their decrepit theogony upon the ruins of their Olympus, while Synesius was already placing the seat of the new religion beyond all the heavens; or whether, like Palladas and Paul the Silentiary, they placed at the service of a morality already impressed with Christian dogma the erudition of the Fable and the last elegances of the Hellenic language—all these Greeks, I say, still pagans, skeptics, or already Christians, had emerged from the same schools that saw the birth of the naive and flowery verses of Saint Gregory of Nazianzus, the elegant creator of the genre of poetic and religious meditations that Lamartine has brought so high in our days; and they hailed a guide and a model in this same Nonnus, who, in this great epoch of renovation, had led his Muse to Parnassus as to Calvary, and drawn from both sources: for, we cannot repeat it too much with his judges of modern Germany, he had in the *Dionysiaca*, as in the *Paraphrase of the Gospel*, carried the artistic form of rhythm to its perfection; and, if he sometimes marred the idea by an excessive emphasis, he owed at least to the melody and the polish of his style a true originality.
What pains taken for a poet of an inferior century after all! And what a pity that the twenty-six thousand verses of Nonnus have remained to us in two poems, when so many tragedies of Sophocles and all the comedies of Menander have disappeared! No doubt, the compensation is not satisfying and our regrets remain irreparable; but does it follow that, out of an exclusive respect for the masters of ancient art, we must let their too-late and their last imitator languish in oblivion? Must the author of so many harmonious hexameters, or, if one wishes, the collector of so many poetic myths, of so many elegant turns of phrase, perish unknown, because these turns and these phrases were sometimes charged with expressing researched thoughts—let us say better, the precious ridicule of his century? If one does not wish to consider the *Dionysiaca* as an epic, why not see in it, under a religious and mythological envelope, however, one of those primitive novels, contemporary with or predecessors of the *Erotica* of Heliodorus, more fertile in episodes and in digressions, perhaps similar to the rhymed novels that have for some years usurped the name of poems; in short, a long versified drama, departing by its sacred and national nature from the Milesian tales, and redeeming by the beautiful fabrication of the verses, and the sustained tone of the diction, the antiquated mythology of the subject?
No, there is not in Nonnus, as one might have said, several poems in one; he has an exact method, a well-conceived plan, traced without confusion, followed without disorder. He has put into action and into a preamble what elsewhere is in narrative, that is all. Before showing the beneficent God, it was necessary to explain from what chaos his power was going to bring forth the world. Hence, at the beginning, the struggle of good and evil, or of Jupiter against Typhoeus; then the trials of Cadmus, who, followed by Harmonia, brings into the heart of Greece the cult and the arts of Phoenicia and of Egypt. After Zagreus, who disappeared in the conjuration of the Titans, a second effort of the evil-doing element, there finally appears the great Bacchus, Bacchus the Theban, the civilizing genius begotten by the thunderbolt; he escapes from the dwelling of Athamas, from the jealousy of Juno, and grows up beside the universal mother, Rhea. Then the god tames the monster scourges of the earth, softens his body for the auxiliary exercises of combat, and creates the vine, a pacific and conquering weapon. Soon he gathers from all points of the globe and recruits in the ranks of the divine races an immense army; he departs at its head to enslave the Indies, by the same path that Alexander took. Then come the days of the Astacid lake and the defiles of Lebanon, which are for Bacchus the battles of Ipsus and of the Granicus: one follows slowly the invading march of the vine in this pompous itinerary from the bottom of the Gulf of Nicomedia to the banks of the Hydaspes through the enemy ambushes, or the hospitality of the cottage and the palace. In the Indies, the war develops with all its peripeties, the advantages, the defeats, the reverses, the surprises, and the stratagems. Finally, Bacchus prevails, and he establishes his cult and his empire among the peoples of the Indian Orient. From then on, he returns to the shores of the Mediterranean, where he has no other army than his usual retinue; he visits, along the way, Tyre, the homeland of his ancestor Cadmus, fills with his gifts the brilliant Berytus and the valleys of Lebanon; then, crossing Cilicia and Lydia, he carries into Europe his influence and his benefits, descends from Illyria and from
Macedonia towards Thebes, where he is born, and where his divinity and his power are manifested by the chastisement of an unbelieving king; he soon initiates Athens into his mysteries, consoles a forsaken lover at Naxos, for he possesses the art of drying tears and calming sorrows. Next, he struggles against his eternal enemy Juno in the heart of Argos, the earthly center of the power of the queen of the gods, tames the giants of Thrace or the infertile mountains, subdues Pallene, or its soil, rebellious to cultivation; having returned to Phrygia, the domain of his nurse Cybele, from whence he departed, he contends there against the insalubrious emanations of the air which he tempers, and finally leaves the earth to occupy a throne on Olympus, in the midst of the immortals.
All this assemblage, one will agree, lacks neither grandeur nor connection. It is not, without doubt, the unity of place or the short duration of the *Iliad*, the most perfect and best-ordered picture of the quarrels of gods and heroes. The *Dionysiaca* approach much more closely to the *Odyssey*, that painting so touching and so varied in its traverses of human life, or its immortal continuation, the *Telemachus*.
XXVI. Conclusion.
Thus, this translation, so long and sometimes so difficult, I cannot regret having undertaken. I acknowledge, and it is perhaps my excuse, that I did not have, to support and encourage me in my labor, the enthusiasm which excites and the fire which animates the interpreters of the epics of Homer. My principal stimulant was curiosity. In imitating these forms of a style almost always tempered and which offer little pretext for the strong emotions of the heart, in analyzing these witty, numerous verses, brilliant with images, such as the decadence or the exhaustion of an idiom produce, but at the same time devoid of the energy of the beginning or of the apogee, I had before my mind, instead of dazzling lights, only the reflection of the poetic coloring.
Well! I carry the stubbornness in my literary illusions so far that it would be enough for me to have pushed back on a single point the limits of our mythological knowledge, or diminished by a single assailant the number of the adversaries of Nonnus, to congratulate myself on having taken up arms in his favor, and brought to an end my perilous enterprise. After all, has the art of blackening the whiteness of paper been invented only to undo reputations, mislead judgments, perpetuate prejudices, or, if one wishes, to defend from every man reputed profane, even without examination, the approaches to the temple of letters and sciences? Can I not, in my turn, charge my pages with ink to rehabilitate a reputation, level the access to Parnassus, and set up again there an altar destroyed?
Finally, when, in the heart of this region of our noisy capital, where studies flourish in peace, I saw, on the facade of the library that shares with the Pantheon the name of the holy protectress of Paris, just as the Pantheon of false gods hides itself at Rome under the name of Saint Mary of the Rotunda; when I saw, I say, Nonnus gleaming in gold letters in the sun among the greatest writers of all centuries, I conceived the project of tearing him from the sleep in which he sleeps on dusty shelves still on the other side of this rejuvenated wall; and I attempted to disengage him from the rust of time. To save from the darkness a monument of this beautiful language which was the mother of civilization, and made heard, for twelve hundred years, the noblest accents of glory and liberty—it is, I believed at least, to contribute to honoring human thought and to emancipating the intelligence.