Vicarius regis (King’s Vicar), as mentioned, 372. Victim and sacrifice, 152. Seeing God, what it means, 309, 310. Virgin evangelist, 411. Diverse species of visions, 310. Vile voice *peristréphetai* (revolves), 422. Vile creator invoked by Jews before a meal, 337. Calf made *en graphidi* (in the writing), 558. Words, what they mean to Varro, 49. Infinite words of Greek, Roman, Italic, Gallic, Hispanic, Syrian, Chaldean, and rabbinic origin in use, 229, 446. Interpretation of Hellenistic words to be sought not from Greek, but from elsewhere, 206. Voice of God, thunder, 277. Testimony of Majesty or divine presence, 456. Wouwerius, 208. Xylaloe, 519. Zin and Sin, two deserts, 169. Ziegler’s error, 395. Zupha of the Arabs, 513.
TO THE READER
Since it is not our intention to publish the entire Dionysiac poem—which Nonnus wrote while still a pagan, as it seems, or, as others maintain, in mockery of paganism—we first exhibit the arguments of the poem, which the most learned editor of the Dionysiacs wrote out in French; we provided his Preface above, with his own kind permission. Afterwards, we have transcribed the author’s Invocation along with the entire thirteenth book as a specimen. EDIT. Patr.ARGUMENTS OF THE DIONYSIACS
A**First book.** Invocation. The abduction of Europa. Typhon steals the thunderbolt. The ruse of Cadmus.
**Second book.** Disorders on earth and in heaven. Combat between Jupiter and Typhon. Death of Typhon. Jupiter announces his destiny to Cadmus and reveals the future to him.
**Third book.** Cadmus departs from Cilicia and lands at Samothrace. The palace of Electra. Cadmus tells Queen Electra of his origin. The reply and advice of Electra. Mercury sent by Jupiter.
**Fourth book.** Harmonia refuses Cadmus. Discourse of Venus in the form of Pisinoe. Persuaded, Harmonia loves Cadmus and follows him. Their travels. Cadmus’s struggle against the dragon of Dirce and against the inhabitants of Aonia.
**Fifth book.** Construction of Thebes. Wedding of Cadmus and Harmonia. Gifts of the gods. The four children of Cadmus; their marriages. Aristaeus. Actaeon: his death upon returning from India. Jupiter’s love for Proserpina.
**Sixth book.** Anxieties of Ceres: her visit to the divine Astraeus; she hides her daughter. Union of the dragon and Proserpina. Birth of Zagreus, the first Bacchus: his death. Vengeance of his father Jupiter. The fire and the deluge.
**Seventh book.** Lamentations of Time. Jupiter consoles him and announces the birth of the second Bacchus. Semele: her clandestine union.
**Eighth book.** Jealousy of Juno: she addresses the goddess Apaté, takes the form of Semele’s nurse, and sows envy and pride in her. Semele, consumed on earth, ascends to the heavens.
**Ninth book.** Jupiter as father and mother. Birth of Bacchus. The daughters of Lamos receive him. Ino, wife of Athamas, his true nurse, entrusts him to the care of Mystis. Madness of Ino: her absence.
**Tenth book.** Fury of Athamas. Return of Ino; her flight; she throws herself into the sea with Melicertes. Adolescence of Bacchus. The satyr Ampelus: their common exercises, their games.
**Eleventh book.** Struggle in the waters. Death of Ampelus. Affliction of Bacchus. Eros seeks to console him and recounts the misfortunes of Carpos and Calamus.
**Twelfth book.** The Season of the vintage goes to Phanès to know the future. Ampelus becomes the vine. Joy of Bacchus. Another legend about the origin of the grape. Drunkenness of the satyrs.
**Thirteenth book.** Counting of the mortal army of Bacchus: the Boeotians; the Phocians; the Euboeans; the Athenians; the inhabitants of Aegina, Crete, Arcadia, Sicily, Libya, Cyprus, Lydia, Phrygia, and Samothrace.
**Fourteenth book.** Counting of the divine army of Bacchus: the Cabiri; the Telchines; the Corybantes; the Centaurs; the Cyclopes; the Aegipans; the Sileni; the Satyrs; the Bacchantes; the Bassarids. Battle of the Astacid lake. The river turned into wine.
**Fifteenth book.** Drunkenness of the Indians; they are taken prisoner; Astrais, their leader, retreats before Bacchus. The nymph Nicaea and the shepherd Hymnos. Death of Hymnos. His flocks mourn him.
**Sixteenth book.** Vengeance of Eros. Bacchus’s love for Nicaea. His amorous complaints. He surprises her. Furies and regrets of Nicaea. She gives birth to Telete. Foundation of the city of Nicaea.
**Seventeenth book.** Bacchus leaves Maeonia. Hospitality of the shepherd Brongos. Battle in the mountains. Bacchus, the victor, arrives at the banks of the Orontes. Suicide of the Indian Orontes. Submission of Blemys, leader of Ethiopian Arabia.
ARGUMENTS OF THE DIONYSIACA
A Eighteenth Book. King Staphylus; his son Botrys; his wife Methe. The palace of Staphylus; his splendid hospitality; his death in the absence of Bacchus. The return of the god. His grief. Mourning of the royal house.
Nineteenth Book. Bacchus consoles Methe and Botrys. He institutes games in honor of Staphylus. The poetic contest between Oeagrus and Erechtheus. The challenge of pantomime and dance between Maron and Silenus, who is changed into a river.
Twentieth Book. Bacchus, incited by Discord, takes the road to India. He takes Methe and Botrys with him. He passes through Lebanon and arrives at Nysa, the dwelling-place of Lycurgus. Lycurgus pursues him and disperses the Bacchantes. The god takes refuge in the Red Sea.
Twenty-first Book. Combat of Ambrosia against Lycurgus and her metamorphosis. Lycurgus imprisoned by the nurses of Bacchus. His furies. His deliverance. His blindness. Bacchus leaves the sea. Mission and return of Pherespondes, the god’s ambassador, to Deriades. Ambuscade of the Indians.
Twenty-second Book. March of the army of Bacchus. Defeat of the detachment of Indians in ambush, revealed by an Indian hamadryad. The troops of Bacchus deploy. Splendor of the god. Exploits of Oeagrus, Erechtheus, and Aeacus.
Twenty-third Book. The enemy submerged; an Indian kills himself; the army prepares to cross the Hydaspes; anger of the river; threats of Bacchus. Conflagration of the waters. Ocean, to make it cease, calls Tethys to his aid.
Twenty-fourth Book. Supplication of the Hydaspes; it is changed into wine. Clemency of Bacchus. Crossing of the river. Mourning of the enemy. Complaints of the Indian widow. The feast of the army. Venus, emulating Minerva.
Twenty-fifth Book. Invocation of the poet to Homer and Pindar. Comparison of Bacchus with Perseus, Minos, and Hercules. Attis brings divine arms on behalf of Rhea. Description of these arms, Moria and Tylos.
Twenty-sixth Book. Minerva, in the form of Orontes, awakens Deriades and excites him to combat; enumeration of the Indian army. Genealogy of Deriades, its supreme leader.
Twenty-seventh Book. The armies deploy. Harangue of Deriades; harangue of Bacchus. Jupiter calls Apollo, Minerva, and Vulcan to the aid of his son; the gods choose sides.
Twenty-eighth Book. The charge sounds; the melee begins; Corymbas the Indian. The elephant of Deriades' chariot is killed. Courage of the Athenians. Exploits of the Cyclopes.
Twenty-ninth Book. The combat continues; great deeds of Hymenaios; he is wounded; Bacchus heals him. The army pens the Indians between the Hydaspes and the city. Dream of Mars; he departs from the battlefield to keep watch over Venus.
Thirtieth Book. Morrheus attacks Eurymedon, whom his father Vulcan defends. The Hydaspes protects Morrheus, who falls upon the Bacchantes. Death of Tectaphus. Juno excites B Deriades. Bacchus retreats. Minerva leads him back to the melee.
Thirty-first Book. Juno addresses Proserpine, who lends her the aid of Megaera; she sends Iris, under the form of Night, to Sleep, to entreat him to lull Jupiter to sleep. She asks Venus for her girdle.
Thirty-second Book. Juno decks herself with the girdle: her conversation with Jupiter; their union. The combat redoubles. Bacchus is seized by the rage breathed into him by Megaera, and goes astray. The Indians have the upper hand; all the Greek captains retreat, except Aeacus.
Thirty-third Book. The Graces weep before Venus, who sends Eros to the aid of Bacchus' army: he inflames Morrheus for Chalcomedusa. Amorous complaints of the Indian warrior. Fright of Chalcomedusa, whom Thetis reassures.
Thirty-fourth Book. Agitations of Morrheus. The combat recommences. The hero takes prisoner a large number of Bacchantes whom he gives to Deriades. Punishment of the prisoners. Chalcomedusa lures Morrheus far from the fray. The Bassarids are driven toward the city, where Deriades imprisons them.
Thirty-fifth Book. Defeat of the Bacchantes. Chalcomedusa and Morrheus. Mercury delivers the Bassarids. Awakening of Jupiter and his wrath. He wills that Juno cure Bacchus of his frenzy. Bacchus is restored to the combat, and excites the courage of his army.
Thirty-sixth Book. Combat of the gods. Mercury pacifies them. Melee of the satyrs and the Indians. Deriades attacked by Bacchus. The transformations of the god. The Rhadamanes build ships for maritime warfare. The truce.
Thirty-seventh Book. Funeral ceremonies. The pyre of Opheltes. Games around the tomb. The chariot race. The boxing match. The wrestling. The foot race. The discus. The prize of the bow. The simulated combat of two warriors.
Thirty-eighth Book. The war reignites. Presages. Episode of Phaethon recounted to Bacchus by Mercury. Description of the zodiac. Phaethon guides the chariot of the Sun. Disorders of the sphere. He is struck by lightning and becomes the celestial Charioteer.
Thirty-ninth Book. Fleet of Bacchus. Deriades gathers his own. Harangues of the two captains. Prayers of Aeacus to Jupiter and of Erechtheus to Boreas. Naval combat. Morrheus wounded. Fire-ship of the Cabirus Eurymedon. Conflagration of the fleet. Deriades flees.
Fortieth Book. Minerva excites and deceives Deriades. He dies in the waves of the Hydaspes. Lamentations of the princesses. End of the Indian war. Bacchus dismisses his army, and comes to Tyre. Its description. Hercules Astruchiton. Invention of navigation. Origin of the city of Tyre. Its fountains.
Forty-first Book. Description of Beroe. The nymph Beroe, daughter of Venus and Adonis. Her mother consults the tables of Harmonia regarding her destiny, and prays Eros to inflame Neptune and Bacchus for her.
Forty-second Book. Passion of Bacchus for Beroe. He disguises himself as
a hunter, then as a gardener, and declares his divinity and his love. Neptune loves and admires Beroe. Venus is alarmed by their rivalry, and orders a friendly struggle between the two lovers of her daughter. Forty-third Book. The divine army of Bacchus advances against the divine army of Neptune. Harangues of the two captains. The melée. Complaints of Psamathe. Jupiter stops the fight, and adjudges Beroe to Neptune. Eros consoles Bacchus. Forty-fourth Book. Bacchus arrives at Thebes. Troubles of the Thebans. Dream of Agave. Rages of her son Pentheus. He arms his subjects. Invocation of Bacchus to the Moon. The god, in the form of a bull, presents himself to Autonoe during her sleep. Forty-fifth Book. Delirium of Agave. Tiresias and Cadmus adopt the cult of Bacchus. Reproaches of Pentheus. Reply of Tiresias. The Tyrrhenians. The giant Alpos. Violences of Pentheus. Prodigies in the city of Thebes. B Forty-sixth Book. Bacchus in the presence of Pentheus, who, by his advice, disguises himself as a woman to spy on the mysteries. Pentheus is torn to pieces by the Bacchantes. Complaints of Agave, of Autonoe, and of Cadmus. Bacchus betakes himself to Athens. Forty-seventh Book. Bacchus in Attica. Icarius, his daughter Erigone; their end. Ariadne on the island of Naxos. War of Bacchus against Perseus in the Argolid. Death of Ariadne. The seer Melampus as peacemaker. Forty-eighth Book. The Earth incites her sons against Bacchus. Battle of the giants: they are conquered. The god fights and marries Pallene. Aura insults Diana, who implores Nemesis. Frenzy of Aura; her death. Her son Iacchos. Apotheosis of Bacchus.
NONNUS. DIONYSIACA. BOOK ONE.
The first book shows Jupiter in the form of a bull, ravisher of a nymph, and the sphere shaken by the hands of Typhon.
(1) Recount, O Goddess, the generative breath of the fire-bolt of the son of Saturn, the nuptial spark as the vanguard of a burning blaze, and the lightning which presided over the union of Semele. Tell of the double birth of the twice-born Bacchus, him whom Zeus raised as a liquid babe from the fire... C
(1) A learned critic, M. Ouvaroff, president of the Academy of Sciences of Saint Petersburg, and correspondent of the Institute of France, who before me attempted to rescue Nonnus from oblivion, but who did not push this literary fantasy to the point of translating him, goes into ecstasies over the beginning of the poem.
"This exposition," he says in German, "gives already a precise idea of the manner of Nonnus; for it contains a great part of his properties: artistic and harmonious versification; the superabundant and fantastic character of the description; the varied mixture of phenomena and their erudite complication; the original arrangement of words; the return of certain chosen expressions; finally the witty sallies which govern the whole work, and the sublimity which borders on grandiloquence, are already to be recognized there. The poet has promised a varied song; he will keep his word."
"It must be remarked here with what art Nonnus designates in advance the various myths that he is going to represent. The assimilation with Proteus is particularly ingenious. Bacchus appears at first, sometimes as Zagreus, the son of the Dragon, the enemy of the Titans; sometimes as the son of Semele, raised in the bosom of Rhea; then in the Indian form. Further on, it is the birth of the third Bacchus (Iacchos), then the Homeric myth of Lycurgus, finally the known history of Icarius. The poet, to use his own expressions, is truly a Proteus himself."
I cannot, I will confess, on this occasion make my enthusiasm march in step with that of M. Ouvaroff; I am willing to agree with him that the Egyptian poet paraphrased three lines of Homer in order to make the diverse destinies of his hero spring forth; but I find in such an exposition only a degree of grandiloquence perhaps much more pronounced than in the rest of the epic; and it is impossible for me to forget, even in favor of my author, the precepts of Aristotle and Horace, so well repeated by Boileau: "Let the beginning be simple, and have nothing affected."
"Nonnus," said the too-severe Cunaeus, well before Boileau himself, "committed a grave fault in his beginning; he fell into the ridiculous vice that the ancients call the *parenthyrse*. This happens when the writer grows heated without cause, bubbles over and loses his temper all alone, while those whom he wishes to move only laugh at him or yawn. The exordium must always be D mild, temperate, and modest. When one becomes inflamed at the very first without having prepared others for it, one looks like a mad or drunken man among sensible and sober people."
As for me, setting aside the obscurity of the over-erudite images which disfigure this epic frontispiece, I am struck, from the outset, by the mother-idea adopted by the poet; it seems that he has taken it upon himself to undermine at its base the whole philosophical system that the Emperor Julian had wished to make prevail in that same century. Nonnus leads Bacchus, of Greek origin, to the Indies to civilize them, while Julian brings this same Bacchus from the Indies to enlighten Greece. The passage where the rhetor, master of the world, treats of the allegories of the Bacchic cult, is too curious not to find its place here.
"... Semele was learned in divine things. Indeed, she was the daughter of Cadmus the Phoenician, born of that nation whose science the god of oracles attests in these terms: 'The Phoenicians have taught many routes that lead to the immortals.' - Semele was the first..."
A Bacchus, whom Jupiter snatched, all humid yet, from the flames, the imperfect product of an uncompleted maternity. Both father and mother at once, the god prepared for him, with his own hand, masculine entrails [1] in the incision of his thigh; for he did not forget that, in another painful birth, he had already himself caused to spring forth from a tumor of his brow, Minerva, resplendent and all in armor.
O Muses, bring me the ferules [2], agitate the
I conclude from this that the spirit of Nonnus had already detached itself from those profane myths whose origins he was going to celebrate. Indeed, the invocations of Homer to the Muses and the gods of Olympus proceed from a truly religious sentiment and a believing heart. The Latin poets, following his example, epic or semi-epic, have submitted to this usage which became the rule, perhaps more from discipline than from faith. But Nonnus, a slave in his turn to the formula, appears to me, in this prolonged exordium, to laboriously develop his subject, even at length obscuring, in spite of himself, with metaphysical terms the mystery of the birth of Bacchus, as if he had already detached his convictions from the cult of mythology, and reserved all his adoration for the verses of Homer. In a word, when he illustrates the old falsehoods, still dear to the imagination of the peoples, with all the prestige of tradition, he shows himself already, it seems to me, disgusted himself with the fables which are soon to dissipate before his eyes in the light of the Gospel.
[1] Masculine entrails. — It is the same word in Euripides: *arsena tande bathi nēdun*. (Bacch., v. 530.) "May the body of your father be for you a maternal womb." It is thus that a recent translator has stifled under a periphrasis the excessive crudity of the poet.
[2] The ferules. — The stalks of ferules were consecrated to Bacchus, either because their hollow stem served to carry the fire of sacrifices, just as, according to Hesiod (Theogony, v. 558), Prometheus used it to steal fire from heaven; or, as Pliny holds (book XXIV, c. 1), because this herb, harmful to animals, is loved by the ass, mount of Silenus, and cherished by Bacchus. Plutarch gives two other reasons. The first, entirely material: it is, he says, that these ferule-rods, being at once solid and very light, support the elderly and the unsteady guests without tiring their hand; and that if, in the drunkenness of the meal, they come to strike one another with them, they do themselves no harm. The second motive is entirely philosophical: in giving as an attribute to the god of wine oblivion and the ferule, antiquity intended that one should pardon by forgetting the excesses of the cup, or at least that they should be followed by insignificant and almost puerile punishments.
Apropos of this proverb which Plato cites in the most sublime of his dialogues (Phaedo, § 69): "There are more ferule-bearers than Bacchus," Erasmus indulges in a quite amusing sally. "This means that many men have more reputation than virtue. Indeed, not all those who wear the doctor’s cap are theologians. Not all those who take the title are poets. Not all those who have the cowl are monks. Not all those who attend the offices are Christians. Not all those who have the Golden Fleece are nobles. Not all those who do not yet have the coif are virgins. Not all those who gird the crown are kings, nor are all those who have the crozier and miter bishops, nor are all those popes whose tiara signals holiness. Not all those at last who show an eagle on their standards are generals. It is not, as Plutarch says, either the cloak or the beard that makes the philosopher." (Erasmus, Adag., p. 234.)
A and into your hands give the thyrse chanted of Dionysus; but touch the dance, near the island neighboring the Pharos; set for me the Proteus of many turns, so that he may appear, wearing a varied form, since I am striking up a varied hymn. For if he creeps like a dragon, coiling in a trail, I will sing the divine struggle, where with an ivy-clad thyrse the fearful tribes of the snake-haired giants were slaughtered; and if he should bristle as a lion, shaking his neck-hair, I will shout the Bacchus-cry, stealing the breast of the lion-rearing goddess upon the arm of grim Rhea; and if, aloft in a stormy leap of his feet, he rushes as a leopard, changing his many-crafted form, I will hymn the son of Zeus, from where he slew the race of the Indians, when he rode upon the chariots of leopards and elephants; and if he should liken his body to the form of a boar, I will sing the son of Thyone, longing for the boar-slaying Aura, the mother of the third Bacchus, born later, sister of Cybele; and if he should become as mimicking water, I will sing Dionysus, entering the gulf of the sea to avoid the onrushing Lycurgus; and if he should tremble as a plant, straining with a false rustling, I will remember Icarius, from where at the Bacchante’s winepress the grape was crushed by the feet of the competitive treader.
B Give me the fennel-stalks, O Mimallones; and instead of my accustomed garment, tighten for me round my chest the dappled fawn-skin, full of my Maronian nectar, nectar-like; and let the foul skin of the seals be kept for Menelaus at the hands of the sea-dwelling Eidothea and Homer. Give me the cymbals and the shields; and bestow the double-flute to another, lest I stir my Apollo; for he refuses the breathing echo of reeds, because of Marsyas, whom, having convicted him of being a god-fighter, he skinned...
A while stripping all the limbs of the impious shepherd, and stretched his skin upon a tree and made of it a swollen wineskin, to punish his provocative flute. Begin then, O goddess, the wandering searches of Cadmus.
DIONYSIACA, BOOK XIII
I shall tell in the thirteenth book of the numbering of the army, and of the warrior heroes gathered around Dionysus.
Zeus the father soon dispatched Iris to the divine stalls of Rhea, to announce to the war-loving Dionysus B that with his avenging thyrsus he should drive from Asia the arrogant race of those Indians who know no justice; that he should vanquish in a naval battle the horned son of a river, Deriades the king; and that he should teach all nations the joys of nocturnal dances and the vine-fruit of the vintage.
Iris, rushing impetuously on her wind-swept, beating wings, arrived at the entrance of the resounding cave of the lion-taming goddess C and fixed a voiceless step. With mute silence, she reined in her mouth, and, near the queen of the mountains, she stood bowed. As she bent low, with suppliant lips she kissed the feet of Rhea. At a nod from the august divinity, the Corybantes conducted Iris to the bowls of the divine table; she marveled to drink there this new liquor which charmed her and intoxicated her; then, her head heavy with the fumes of wine, the messenger disclosed to the son of Zeus D, who was present, the will of Zeus:
"Valiant Dionysus, your progenitor commands you to exterminate the impious race of the Indians. Take in your hands the warrior thyrsus, and merit Olympus by your exploits. The immortal court of Zeus shall not receive you without trials, nor shall the Hours open to you the gates of heaven until you have labored. Hermes only with difficulty came to heaven, once he had with his wand killed the herdsman Argus, flashing with eyes from his feet to his hair, and had loosed the bonds of Ares."
• Preliminary observation. In epic matters, all the processes of Homer make him. His enumeration, which prompted so many voluminous dissertations, started by being a law unto itself. It is by the authority of this code of primitive geography that Mycale was adjudged to the inhabitants of Miletus, Calydon to the Aeolians, and that Solon, the wise Solon, seized Salamis legitimately; it is again in imitation of these poetic archives that Herodotus, a Homeric narrator so to speak, reviewed the army and fleet of Xerxes before recounting the great war of the Greeks and Persians. So if Virgil, Lucan, Statius, and even Silius Italicus, the versifying historian, have reproduced this movement of the epic without displeasing us, if Tasso, Ariosto, Camoens, Ercilla, Milton, Klopstock, Fénelon, and Voltaire, in repeating it, allow themselves to be read without regret, why disdain the enumeration of Nonnus? Is it because it is written in Greek verse as harmonious and didactic, if not as simple, as that of Homer? or because it dates from the fourth century, an epoch systematically neglected and ignored? Be that as it may, I must well admit that Orpheus and the enterprise of the Argonauts, Homer and the war of Troy, even Hesiod and his theogonic enumeration, often present themselves to the memory of Nonnus in his review of the peoples gathered under the standards of Bacchus, or rather of the nations that were then favored by the culture of the vine; and yet these facts, according to mythological traditions, must have been subsequent to the expedition of Bacchus into the Indies, if one dared to assign a precise epoch to such fictions. I add that these anachronisms, in the *Dionysiaca*, are mingled with many others even more striking, of which the *Iliad* could have given no example, since Homer wrote a short time after the combats he celebrated. Now, this chronological confusion is saved from time to time only by the repetition of the words *πάρος*, *ποτέ*, *τότε* of the Greek text—beforehand, one day, then—which are quite insufficient to rectify dates or at the very least to designate a century; but, despite everything, a true interest of erudition attaches to these imaginary legends which connect to very positive notions of ancient geography. After this preliminary observation, I enter into the matter.
A Delphine. Your father himself, the first of the gods, the great Jupiter, did not occupy the throne of the stars without fatigue, for he had previously chained the assailants of Olympus, and buried the Titans in the caverns of Tartarus. When you will have suffered, like Apollo and Mercury, you shall also have as your heritage the dwelling of the airs as the prize of your labor.
She spoke, and returned to Olympus. Immediately Rhea, the universal mother, sent forth as a herald to assemble her troops, Pyrrhichus, the dancer with the noisy tambourine; he is charged to proclaim the war and to announce its preparations. Pyrrhichus traverses all the regions of the eternal world, and forms from the most diverse elements the army of Bacchus; he gathers the generations of Europe, the nations of Asia, and leads them all together to the voluptuous Lydians.
But this heroic race of warriors so different, the hairy satyrs, the generation of the centaurs, the tribes of the Sileni with legs bristling with hair, and the phalanxes of the Bassarides; tell them yourselves, O Muses of the Corybantes! for to enumerate the multitude that Bacchus rallies under his spear, ten tongues would not suffice me, nor even ten voices of bronze. To celebrate their leaders, I shall call to my aid Homer; Homer, haven of all beautiful language. And what! do not navigators, wandering in their vagabond course, also implore Neptune for help?
And first, at the call of the god of the thyrsus, hastened Actaeon. He has, to do honor to their common origin, left his fatherland, Aonia, which seven rivers traverse. The phalanxes of Boeotia follow him. These are the citizens of Thebes of the beautiful towers, of Onchestus, seat of Neptune, of Peteon, Ocalee, Erythrae, of vine-clad Arne, whose
B Delphine — the serpent Python, as Apollonius of Rhodes has said (book II, v. 706). Without doubt, because it was born from the corrupted mud, left at Delphi after the deluge of Deucalion, or else, because in testimony of Apollo's victory, the scaly skin of Python surrounded the tripod of Delphi.
C Imitation of Homer — Here Nonnus is proud; he follows step by step the traces of Homer, the complete haven of beautiful language, as he calls him himself; for, after having recoiled, like him, before the task of describing such a multitude, and wished for the ten tongues and the ten voices of bronze, he invokes the Corybantian Muses in place of the Olympian Muses, and begins also the catalogue with Boeotia. There he repeats the names of the localities cited by Homer with such exactness that the text of the Iliad has served me to restore the text of the Dionysiacs. Thus, it is evident that the name of Arne, which begins both verses 58 and 59, must be suppressed in the first, where it has slipped in through the carelessness of a copyist, and must be replaced by Onchestus, which Homer endowed, as it will be here after my correction, with a temple of Neptune. Then instead of [Greek omitted], I read: [Greek omitted]. And I have had no other trouble to restore the measure of the verse than to remove the conjunction [Greek omitted], just as it appears in several of the hemistichs that precede or follow. Nonnus has nevertheless pruned from the Homeric Boeotia, not without doubt Hyria and Aulis, which one finds again in the second class of the Boeotians under the orders of Hymenaeus, but indeed Eteonus, Glisas, Eutresis; and he adds only D Ascrea, to bring a well-merited compliment, moreover, by Hesiod. I would also make a slight inflection to a letter of the Meleone of Nonnus, which will thus become the Medeone of Homer. One might also think that the three cities omitted by our poet did not exist any longer in his time, or even that there remained no longer in the fourth century, in Boeotia, but a very small number of the cities named by Homer and repeated by Nonnus.
— a height without trees; and its temple of Neptune is private of trees also: but poets embellish everything. ([Greek omitted].)
near the road from Thebes to Anthedon, does not sound very high in antiquity, says Eustathius; one knows only that it received its name from a certain Peteon. I have pushed my researches further than the learned archbishop of Thessalonica, and I wish to see, in this certain Peteon, the king Peteos, son of Orneos and grandson of Erechtheus, who, chased from Athens by Aegeus, established himself in Thessaly. He was the father of Menestheus, the skillful charioteer, who commanded the Athenians under the walls of Troy, and who, chief of the faction of the Pallantides, reigned in Athens after Theseus.
— Stephen of Byzantium, because it was the shortest road to go from Thespiae to Thebes.
is the mother of the Ionian colonies of this name, if one must believe Strabon, and not some bold critics, his modern contradictors.
A *Arne, rich in grapes* (7), rejoicing in Dionysus; and those who inhabited Mideia, and the famed small towns of Hilesion, and Scolos, and Thisbe, with its seaside harbor of Aphrodite, and the plain of Schoenos, and Eleon with its pastures, and Copas, with its glorious ground, where I hear it is celebrated for rearing eels, and is still named for its lake; and woody Medeon, and those who occupied the fertile Hyle, the long-legged nurse of the cobbler Tychios; and the wide-stretching ground protected by a chthonic pit, named after the later chariot of Amphiaraus.
(7) *Arné.*—Arné, with many grapes (πολυσταφυλος), is here again under the same qualification (βοτρυόεσσαν), the country proud of Bacchus. The imitation is complete. Arné, the second city of Boeotia, took, later on, the name of Chaeronea, from Cheron, son of Apollo. It saw the triumph of Philip over the Athenians, of Sylla over Mithridates, gave birth to Plutarch, and it hides itself now under ruins where neighboring shepherds shelter their goats, and which, because of this, they call Caprènes.
(8) *Midée.*—Midée, as if by way of compensation, the obscure Midée, which, in the mythological epoch, a single verse of Homer has saved from entire oblivion, has yielded its place to Livadia of a quite modern celebrity.
(9) *Hilesia.*—Hilesia, which must have owed its name to the proximity of the marshes (ἑλος), has left no trace.
(10) *Scolos.*—Scolos, famous in antiquity, since a proverb ordered one to flee its outskirts, Scolos, whose ruins Pausanias himself could not see, shares with Hilesia the epithet of "famous." I should have said "famous" (plural); B for, in the thought of Nonnus, they do not appear to me to acquire celebrity except by reason of the praises of Demetrius of Phaleron, and consequently at the price of an anachronism. In Homer, he says, the names "of the Boeotian cities, imperfect or ignored, take, from their harmonious agglomeration, a certain grandeur and some importance." (*On Elocution.*)
(11) *Thisbé.*—Thisbe, which Homer designates as the favorite sojourn of doves, is seen on the shores of the Gulf of Corinth. It is the port where maritime Aphrodite gathers her most beautiful doves (ἐϋτρήρωνα). And, in effect, the port of Thisbe, now Gianiki, is girdled by rocks where the birds of Venus make their nests in great number: *Dionæis avibus circumsona Thisbe.* (Statius, *Theb.*, bk. VII, v. 261.) Lactantius asserts that Jupiter gave oracles at Thisbe by means of doves, no doubt as at Dodona.
(12) *Schœnos.*—The city of Schoenos, which is placed near Scolos, as in the verses of the *Iliad*, although eponymous from Schoeneus, the father of Atalanta, sees its plain traversed by the Schoenos, the Morikios of today, a very small river, if one judges by its name. The reeds that give it its name generally grow only at the edge of small, slow, or weak watercourses, for they are uprooted and carried off by great rivers.
(13) *Eléone.*—Eleone is still one of those villages, born of the marshes, which seem to appear on the poetic map only in favor of their melodic name and their euphony.
(14) *Copé.*—Copae, a small city near the lake to which it gave or borrowed its name, was renowned for its eels, unknown to Homer. He mentions, however, the eels of the Scamander, which have seemed excellent to me also. The Copaic eels gained great favor at the tables and markets of Athens. The Boeotians, by an ancient tradition of which they could not render an account, (was it therefore by reason of their quality as Boeotians?) sacrificed them to the gods by way of victims: "There are, in effect," says Pausanias, "where one finds the largest and the most exquisite." (Και μεγέθει μέγισται, καὶ ἐσθίειν εἰσὶν ἥδισται). And Archestratus, the partisan of Epicurus, adds in verses worthy of being recorded by gastronomes: "The eel of Lake Copais and of the Strymon is large and of marvelous thickness; it surpasses in succulence all the rest, and it is, in my opinion, the queen of feasts." Κωπαῖοι καὶ Στρυμόνια, μεγάλαι τε γάρ εἰσι, καὶ τὸ πάχος θαυμασταί. Όμως δ' οἶμαι βασιλεύει πάντων τῶν περὶ δαῖτα, καὶ ἡδονῇ ἡγεμονεύει.
(15) *Médéon.*—Medeon, which Homer (ἐϋκτίμενον) calls well-built, does not appear here except as loaded with thick shrubs (λάσιον). C It had been founded by Medeon, son of Pylades and Electra.
(16) *Hylé.*—Hyle, like Copae, owes its name to a small lake which discharges into the western strait of Euboea, but under the open sky, and by the river Ismenos, while the overflowing waters of Lake Copais head there by underground channels.
(17) *Tychos the armorer.*—Hyle was the fatherland of the armorer Tychos, who made the shield of Ajax, similar to a tower (ἠΰτε πύργον). And Nonnus here makes allusion to verse 220 of the seventh chant of the *Iliad*. Tychos, whom Homer immortalized, was that same worker in leather of Neon-Tychos on the shores of the Hermos, with whom the sublime beggar, in his misfortunes, found generous hospitality, and made his first verses: "Honor the stranger who has neither resources nor asylum, O you inhabitants of the city, high and charming, which Cyme brought to birth on the regenerated slopes of Mount Sardene, whose summits cover themselves with shade; O you all who drink the delicious water of the deep Hermos, divine river, birthed by the immortal Jupiter."
(18) *The chariot of Amphiaraus.*—The plain of Amphiaraus designates the city of Harma. It is there that, in his flight, Amphiaraus, terrified, and his chariot (ἅρμα) were swallowed together into an abyss opened by Jupiter. "For the children of the gods," says Pindar, "are terrified also by the terrors that the gods send." Ἐν γὰρ δαιμονίοισι φόβοις φεύγοντι καὶ παῖδες θεῶν. (*Nem. od.* IX, v. 61.)
(19) *Thespiae.*—Thespiae, to which is adjacent Cacosi, according to the geographer Meletius. And is he not the best authority for this part of Greece that he had long inhabited, traveled through, and studied? Thespiae had no longer, in the century of Cicero, other title to curiosity than the Cupid of Praxiteles: *Cupidinem illum qui est Thespiis, propter quem Thespiæ visuntur : nam alia visendi causa nulla est.* (In Verr. act. II, lib. IV, c. 2.) The Roman orator forgets the famous fountain of Thespiae, which, according to Pliny, gave to women the
A city of the Thespians, the deep-breasted Plataeans, / And the well-watered Haliartus, which the streams of the Helicon / Divide in the middle; and those who held Anthedon, neighbor to the sea, / The small town of the immortal fisherman / Glaucus, dweller of the waters; and craggy Ascra, / The eloquent fatherland of the tireless poet, / And the holy city of Graea, and of spacious Mycalessus, / A name mirroring the throat of the gorgon Euryale, / And the Nisaean land, and the eponymous city of Coronos.
failing to borrow the equivalent from him, following his custom, all the while reproducing Hesiod’s humor against his own country through the term *duspemfelon*. It might suffice for me, moreover, to banish irrevocably from the Greek text the word *dafnhessan*, to observe that it is found five verses away, and this time very justly applied to Apollo.
(25) *Graea.* — Graea, which is known to the ancients as Tanagre and to the moderns as Sicamino, gave its name to Greece, having received it itself from Tanagra, daughter of Aeolus or Asopus, as the famous Corinna, born within its walls, would have it. The nymph Tanagra was nicknamed the Old Woman (*Graia*), for having reached an extreme old age. The citizens of Graea were called *Graikoi*; hence the Greeks of our day, whether they derive their origin from Graea, or from a distinct *Graecos* inhabiting Graea; and they have kept this name through the centuries, even after the etymological city (*hieron asty*), the sacred city, has disappeared.
(26) *Mycalessus.* — Nonnus has here, to the advantage of Mycalessus, reproduced Homer's epithet *euruchoron*, of the wide plains; he added to it an etymological commentary to trace the appellation of Mycalessus back to the lowing of a gorgon (*muchêma*); but he is, on this point, in contradiction with Pausanias, a more grave authority. The latter reports the national legends and asserts that Mycalessus took its name from the prophetic heifer which, while guiding Cadmus toward Thebes, came to low in that spot.
(27) *Nisa.* — Is this Nisa, *zafên*, because one saw there a temple of Bacchus? Nonnus says the fields of Nisaea, and, involuntarily no doubt, he thus indicates a territory other than that of the Nissa of the Iliad. I have indeed, in the past, to reach Nisaea, the port of Megara, traversed for nearly an hour smiling countrysides that my guide called the plain of Nisaea. On the other hand, there is no city of Nisa in Boeotia, which Strabon the great geographer, an adorer of Homer, has difficulty admitting. It is desired then to see, in the Nissa of the Enumeration of the Iliad, the hamlet of Isos, of which there remained yet some ruins in the time of Strabon. But, whether Nonnus recoiled before the controversy, or whether he wished to distance himself from Homer, which I could not believe, the fact remains that on this occasion, in citing the plain of Nisaea, he has transported a name from the Megarid to Boeotia.
(28) *Coronos.* — Coronos, founder of Coronea in Boeotia, was, like Haliartus, son of Thersander, “that hero honored in the struggles of young men and in warlike combats.” (Pindar, Ol. II, v. 76.) Coronos was adopted by Athamas, finally cured of those long furies of which we have just moaned in the tenth cantos; and his city became famous later by the battle where Agesilaus defeated all the forces of Greece combined against him. Xenophon was present among the vanquished and has left us the most vivid and striking tableau of it. Coronea was fertile in wheat, as Glisas was in wine. Homer named them both; but Nonnus has suppressed the latter.
A Under the leadership of Actaeon, the Boeotians made their way to the eastern regions; and his ancestor [(29)], the god of the laurel, prophesied victory to the young hero.
The second part of the Boeotian army was drawn up under the orders of Hymenaeus of the rich hair; he had only a scarcely discernible beard, and, still very young, he was cherished by Bacchus. A warrior with white hair followed him to watch over him; his name was Phoenix [(30)]. Thus, Laocoon once embarked on the Argo, the ship of Jason, to accompany Meleager to Colchide and to sail with him. Such was elegant Hymenaeus, in the flower of his adolescence, when he prepared for the war of the Indies. On both sides of his cheeks, a mass of hair, a match for his age, stirred, and the combatants of his own time obeyed him. These were the inhabitants of the citadel of Aspledon [(31)], of Orchomenus, the city of Minyas, where the grove consecrated to amorous dances is found; Orchomenus [(32)], which the goddess Charis never abandons; those who inhabit Hyria, whose soil, an asylum for the gods, has received the name of the hospitable Hyrieus [(33)]. It is there that the giant...
Feracem Messe Coroniam, Baccho Glisanta colentes. (Stace, Theb., l. VII, v. 308.)
We see it; the happy times predicted by Virgil in his fourth eclogue had not arrived, those times when all lands were to bring forth all fruits, *Omnis feret omnia tellus*. We were at that point in Coronea, and we will long remain subject to this more positive axiom of the Georgics: *Nec vero terræ ferre omnes omnia possunt*. (Liv. II, v. 109.)
(29) *Actaeon*. — This Actaeon, killed and buried in the fifth book, then reappearing at the head of the Boeotians in the thirteenth, would have greatly embarrassed me had I not remembered that, by this very verse 302 of the Vth book, Nonnus announces in advance that Actaeon, whose death he recounts, will wage the war of the Indies. It seems to certain critics that the Egyptian poet, a great lover of fabulous chronicles, did not content himself with a single adventure for each of his heroes; and that after having sacrificed Actaeon to the wrath of Diana, as Apollodorus, Euripides, and so many others wish, he resurrects him by his own authority to send him with Bacchus into the Indies. The verse which brings about this double situation has, in effect, every appearance of having been slipped in after the fact into the final mortal narrative, solely to justify Actaeon’s presence in the army, as if Nonnus had improvised it later to figure in his census. I wish at least to draw from this rather confused myth two or three moral conclusions for my own benefit. And first, I say with Theocritus, in an utterly allegorical sense: "Feed dogs, then, so that they may devour you," *Θρέψαι κύνας, ὡς τὸ φάγοντι*. (Idyll. V, v. 38.) Then I maintain with the mythologist Fulgentius, a contemporary of Nonnus, that curiosity gives its partisans more sorrows than pleasures: *Curiositas semper periculorum germana, detrimenta suis amatoribus novit magis parturire quam gaudia*. (Fulg., Myth., liv. III.) Next, I recognize with Natalis Comes (the learned Venetian Noël Conti) a great danger in meddling in what does not concern us and in penetrating the secrets of others: *Admonemur præterea per hanc fabulam ne simus nimis curiosi in rebus nihil ad nos pertinentibus, quoniam multis perniciosum fuit res arcanas aliorum cognovisse*. (Nat. Com., Myth., liv. VI.) Finally, with Palaephatus, the interpreter of incredible facts, I advise not to forget about serious business while hunting. This ancient writer represents Actaeon to us under the traits of a negligent and dissolute farmer; and he draws close in this to the thought of a celebrated modern publicist: for M. the Baron d'Ekstein makes of the two Actaeons (the two princes of Thebes and of Attica, merged into a single king) an "Actaeon-Actaeus," representing under these two names the cultivated and cultivable soil or coast (*ἀκτή*); and since there was also more than one Actaeon, *neque vero unus tantum fuit Acteon* (Nat. Com., ibid.), he gives to the one the agricultural department of fertile Attica, and to the other the hunt of uncultivated Boeotia. This is all I know to say to try to cast a certain glimmer through so many shadows.
(30) *Phoenix*. — If Phoenix, tutor of Hymenaeus, is a person, and even a name borrowed from Homer, Laocoon and Meleager are allusions to the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes. Laocoon: *Τὸν μὲν ἄρ᾽ Οινεύς* *ἤδη γηραλέον κοσμήτορα παιδὸς ἴαλλεν.* (Ch. I, v. 194.)
(31) *Aspledon*. — The citadel of Aspledon, son of Neptune and Midea. It was later called Eudeielos, to designate its happy exposure to the slopes of the evening and to the rays of the setting sun. This epithet, which Homer consecrated to Ithaca (*Ἰθάκην εὐδείελον*) (Od. IX, 20), has received more than one interpretation; it designates at once a very distinct point, highly visible to the eye, which is perceived from afar, and an occidental height, illuminated by the last fires of the day.
(32) *Orchomenus*. — This is the Orchomenus of King Minyas. Homer praises its opulence (Il., IX, 381), and Montesquieu attributes it to the commerce of the Propontis and the Black Sea, whence comes the fable of the Golden Fleece. (Espr. des lois, XXI, 7.) King Eteocles built beautiful monuments at Orchomenus, among others, a temple to Gratitude (*Χάρις*), to thank the gods for his riches. This is what Nonnus alludes to. Great constructions, if one is to believe Strabo, are the proof of great fortunes; "for," he says, "one can only give much when one has much; the vase which fills or empties according to need can be considered as always full." (P. 415.)
(33) *Hyrie*. — Hyrie, the homeland of the Hyrians. Hyrieus was the most hospitable of men, according to Palaephatus, *φιλοξενώτατος*. He received Jupiter, Neptune, and Mercury in his small house, *exiguam casam*.
A Orion, born of three fathers who knew not marriage, sprang from the maternal breast of Earth; when the accumulated urine of the three generative gods transformed into a spontaneous product, it impregnated the furrow of a fertile ox-hide, and caused to grow within flanks of leather a mortal whom no union had begotten. And those who occupy the hospitable fields, where the Greeks gathered, stony Aulis B, the dwelling of Diana, where the irritated goddess accepted on her mountain altar the sacrifice of a false Iphigenia. A fawn of the hills was consumed there by the sacred fire, a deceptive image of the true, vanished Iphigenia. It was she whom the cunning Ulysses had brought to marry Achilles before the war, and from this comes the belief that Aulis is the conciliator of the nuptials of Iphigenia, who never married. From that moment, a wind favorable to the ships of the Greeks blew, struck without sound a motionless surface, and submitted the rebellious breeze to the king who murdered a hind. Later, after having traversed the air and landed in Tauris, the young nymph learned there the inhospitable laws of the horrible cauldrons, and sacrificed humans there. But, very close to the homicidal altar, she recognized and saved her brother Orestes, pursued by his terrors even upon the seas. Such was the innumerable troop of the Boeotians, who followed Hymenæus to the war of the Indies.
To these were joined, near the fatidic rock of Delphi, the Phocians, their neighbors, those who inhabited the region of Cyparissus C (35), and Hyampolis (36), whose name is that of the... (Ov., Fast., book V, v. 500). These gods, in reward, granted him an heir he no longer hoped for, because he was a widower. The text says the rest, and says it only too well; for it is difficult to render it honestly in French. (Pudor est ulteriora loqui, Ov., ibid.) To extract myself from so bad a predicament, I yield the pen to Voltaire, much less modest than Nonnus: "One day Jupiter, Neptune, and Mercury, traveling in Thrace, entered the home of a certain king named Hyrieus, who gave them good fare. The three gods, after having dined well, asked him if they could be of service to him in some way; the good man, who could no longer have children, told them he would be much obliged D if they would make him a boy. The three gods began to p..... on the hide of a freshly flayed ox. Thence was born Orion, of whom they made a constellation known in the highest antiquity..." (Volt. Dict. philos. art. Allégories.) I interrupt this cynical account, which is going to end in an impiety. In short, Orion is derived from that strange origin, and has lost the first letter of his name, which recalled it too crudely. *Perdidit antiquum littera prima sonum.* (Ov., ibid.)
Now, if, regarding the word Búpons, which I had to substitute for yaíns, to remain faithful to the legend, one were to become formal about my undertakings against the integrity of the *edition princeps* of Antwerp, a reproduction so exact of the most faulty manuscript, I would observe that Graefe allowed himself many other liberties against the Leipsick edition, and that he harvested, during his lifetime, many praises for this fact: when the scholars have consented in majority to read the *Dionysiaca*, I hope that they will be equally grateful to me for all the trouble I have taken to dispel some of the clouds that formed such deep darkness around this epic, so famous, and I have nothing to add to Nonnus, who is here the abbreviator of Euripides.
A The Aonian [maiden] who, they tell me, lifted her proud neck toward heaven, and strove with Tritogenia in beauty. Those too who possessed Pythone, and the steep-sided threshing-floor, and Crissa, celebrated in song, and Daulis, and Panope, having Bacchus as a neighbor; for Apollo, the laurel-god, joined the Parnassus of double peaks, his own inheritance, with his brother Dionysus. And to the gathering multitudes, the Pythian prophetic rock clamored, and the tripod sounded of its own accord, and the babbling surge of the unsilenced Castalian spring bubbled toward the wise stream.
The shield-bearing Corybantes, nurses of the growing Dionysus, adorned the phalanxes of the Euboeans; they who, having the Phrygian gulf beside mountain-roving Rhea, encircled the infant Bacchus still with ox-hides—he whom they once found among the crags, a horned babe covered in a purple robe of wine-color, where Ino had placed him in the care of Mystis, the nurse, mother of the corymb.
All these, then, came from the island celebrated in song: Prymneus, and Mimas with the glancing feet, and mountain-running Acmon, and Damneus, and Ocythous, the shield-clanger, with whom traveled, running alongside the Idaean, Melisseus, nimble of crest. These, whom Socos, father of the wanderer, once possessed by the foolish goad of impiety, had driven from his native land with their six-fold mother; but they, fleeing, came to the Gnossian soil. And they were wanderers back again from Crete to Phrygia, and from Phrygia to Athens, foreign dwellers sharing the same hearth, until Cecrops destroyed Socos with the avenging bronze of Justice. And leaving behind the land of wave-beaten Marathon, they bent their homeward steps to the sacred soil of the Abantes, the earth-born race of the elder Curetes, for whom the music of flutes, the life of the clashing of well-sounding swords, and the rhythmic circles of feet and shield-bearing dance were the concern.
(37) Pythone. — Pythone. This is the name given to Delphi as it aged, and that says it all. (38) Crissa. — Crissa! At this magic name, I suspend my scholarly researches, and I transport myself in spirit to those enchanted shores where I once plunged into the waves that go to bathe Corinth. Crissa, I loved your gulf with its sparkling tides, your horizon of azure, those summits of Parnassus and Pindus that dominate you, those isolated sails that slowly skirt your desert shores, just as one loves nature and her grand scenes in the spring of life. I did not think then that one day I would have, for my only enjoyment, the imperfect pleasure of retracing the memory of it in these commentaries, and of contemplating it from afar, still, through the shadows of the past. I return prosaically to my course of mythological geography. (39) Daulis. — ‘Daulis, homeland of Philomela and Procne: It is there,’ says Thucydides in his severe style, ‘that women performed the deed of Itys; and from this memory it follows that many poets name the nightingale the bird of Daulis.’ (Book II.) (40) Panope. — Panope, according to Pausanias, cannot be called a city, when it has neither palace for magistrates, nor gymnasium, nor theater, nor public square, not even a perpetual fountain. These are houses hollowed out in the rock, or rather mountain huts in ravines. Such was the homeland of Epeius, the maker of the Trojan horse. (41) Mystis. — I cannot resolve myself to let Mystis enjoy in peace the motherhood of Corinth, and this word seems to me of base alloy. Corinth, founder of the city of that name, was the son of Jupiter or of Pelops. One does not know who his mother was. I prefer to read *korumbou* instead of *korinthou*; it would be to sign in this way the *corymbes*, those garlands of ivy or vine that adorn the hair of Bacchus and the Bacchantes. Mystis, the ordainer of Dionysian feasts and customs, Mystis, whom we have seen in the 9th chant (verse 120) invent the ornament of the *corymbes*, should only figure here as the mother of the garlands, and has nothing to do with Corinth, city or hero. (42) Socos. — Socos, the Vigorous, who borrows so unsuitably his name for an epithet of Mercury, the powerful preserver (Iliad, book XX, v. 72), was without doubt one of the primitive kings of Euboea; one also finds, in the Iliad, a Trojan named Socos, noble, generous, avenger of his brother, who falls, like him, under the blows of Ulysses (book XI, v. 458); but he had nothing in common with the inhuman husband of Combe. (43) Combe. — I cannot believe that it is a question here of Combe, the daughter of Ophius, whom Ovid recalls: *Ophias effugit natorum vulnera Combe.* (Metam., book VII, v. 383.) She invented bronze weapons and received the name of Chalcis [bronze-maker], which she bore in Euboea. But this Combe, the armor-maker, had had a hundred children, and her fecundity became proverbial, whereas the Combe of Nonnus had only given birth to seven offspring. We return to Homer, after having strayed from him for a moment, and we arrive at the lands of the troops commanded by the Corybantes.
A With them appear the warlike sons of the Abantes, who inhabit the beetling Erétrie B, Styra, Cérinthe, and the famous Caryste, where the temple and arid plain of Jupiter are found. The citizens of Acré; Acré, where the waves of Cape Géreste thunder, which never cease, and Tycha, and the mountain of Cotylée, and the banks of the Cirès, and the hill of Marmarie, and the plain of the venerable Ægée. Beside them comes to take its place the people whose fatherland is Chalcis. It is the metropolis of these Hellopians, whose hair unfolds behind the head. Seven chiefs command them; but they all have one heart for war; they invoke, on an altar lit with fire, the stars that inhabit the path of the zodiac, and they divide their troops into as many battalions as they number stars of the Pleiades.
Erechtheus, insatiable for combat, enrolled the Cecropides; he is of the illustrious race of this Erechtheus of noble children, who, in his virginal retreat, lit by the fires of sacrifice, Minerva the virgin, born of herself, the chaste nurse, approached with her virile breast; she rocked in her timid and inexperienced arms this son of Vulcan, when the unhappy spouse, deceived in his desires, caused the spontaneous germs of his burning loves to penetrate the womb of the earth.
The troops gathered from Attica appear then. Athens in its entirety, adorned with helmets, C excites the fury of its warlike children who run to the fray with lance and sword. Under their martial march, the Phalerum port resounds, and the city... D
A of the golden cicada (56), which reveals their autochthonous origin, multiplies upon the elegant braids of their hair. With him come the cultivators of the fertile plain of Oenoë (57), of the slopes of the neighboring Hymettus, motherland of the bee (58), and of the mounds of Marathon, shaded by an olive forest (59); the citizens of Cytheros (60), and of the port of Minerva, Brauron (61), the maritime, where is the tomb of Iphigenia, of the Thorician plain (62), and of the rich Aphidna (63), and those who hold the land of Ceres, the august mother, Eleusis (64), where the priests of the goddess of the beautiful ears and the heavy baskets boast of descending from Triptolemus; the divine Triptolemus who, lashing the spotted flanks of the dragons yoked to the chariot of the sheaves of Ceres, once guided these monsters through the midst of the airs. Many old men of Acharnae, brandishing here and there their iron weapons (65), extend them to their children to prepare them for combat. Such is the army B of the Athenians, whose chief is Erechtheus; Siphnos (66), of the same city, comes to his aid.
Aeacus (67) also left his Aegina; it is he whom Jupiter, the aerial eagle, the winged spouse of Aegina, deceitful bird, caused to be born by uniting with the daughter of Asopus after having ravished her. The name of Aeacus had come to him from this union; and more than any other...
(56) The golden cicada. - The Minerva, adorned with a helmet, and the golden cicada, are borrowed from the medals of Athens. (57) Oenoë. - Oenoë, and not Oenone, is a city on the borders of Attica; Thucydides C informs us that because of this situation, the Athenians fortified it to make it a rampart against their neighbors of Boeotia and Euboea. Oenoë, moreover, city of wine, finds its place here better than Oenone, city of the Troad, namesake of the neglected lover of Paris. Here, etymology decides; and, although lavished by Nonnus, the etymology is not without authority. More serious authors have paused there. Did not Plato himself, without departing from our subject, claim that wine is called *oinos*, in Greek, because it makes the majority of drinkers believe they have wit who do not have any. D *Oinos*, because it makes one think one has wit among those drinking who do not have any. (Plato, Cratylus.)
(58) Hymettus. - I will say of the Hymettus as did Pomponius Mela of Athens, their capital: *Clariores quam ut indicari egeant*. And I add, with him, Brauron, Thorice, formerly cities, now only names. *Olim urbes, jam tantum nomina.*
(60) Cytheros. - Celeos, whom I confuse here to dethrone him, obviously usurps over Kytheros, a village of the Pandionid tribe, and on the other hand, Celeos, as we shall see later, reigned at Eleusis, which Nonnus is going to name. Now, in his enumeration, he has the habit of designating the names of the cities themselves, and rarely their namesake kings or the heroes who had sprung from them.
(61) Brauron. - I glimpsed the location among some ruins near the sea, when I looked around me from the top of a mound of Marathon, and when I trampled under my feet the bones and arrows of the Persians.
(62) Thorice. - Thorice, a village of the Acamantid tribe.
(63) Aphidna. - Aphidna, of the Leontid tribe, celebrated for its silver mines.
(64) Eleusis. - Eleusis can be passed over in silence, like Athens, and without more inconvenience.
(65) Acharnae. - Acharnae, the borough of the Oenoid tribe, where iron weapons were manufactured, and which Aristophanes immortalized. These numerous old men of Nonnus remind me of Thucydides. "Acharnae," says he, "is the most considerable borough of Attica," *χωρίον μέγιστον τῆς Ἀττικῆς τῶν δήμων καλουμενῶν*. (Thuc., book II). "Acharnae, renowned in ancient times for its heroes," says Pindar: *Ἀχαρναὶ δὲ παλαίφατον εὐάνορες*. (Pind., N. m., od. II.)
(66) Siphnos. - Siphnos, whom our poet gives as a colleague to Erechtheus in the command of the troops of Athens, appears there, without doubt, in his capacity as son of Sunios, which Dionysius of Byzantium attributes to him on the authority of a certain Nicolas. (Could it not be the learned Nicolas of Damascus?) The eponymous father of Cape Sunium gave birth to a child eponymous of the island of Siphnos. That is in order; but I was forgetting all these topographical etymologies with the aspect of the great landscapes, the day when, heading towards the Sunium promontory that I wanted to approach, I left behind me the hills of Siphante, the ancient Siphnos, and its fertile country sides which cover gold mines, celebrated in the past, lost today. What I then found most striking about this island was the muslin mask that the Greek women of Siphanto, outdoing the Turkish ladies, have borrowed from them; these bands, hiding tightly and under a sort of thick and flattened network the mouth, the nose, the forehead and the eyebrows painted, it is said, with the blackest colors, allow one to perceive only the white of the eyes. I had met at Constantinople, at the promenade of the Field of the Dead, one of these living mummies, and I could have believed her escaped from these same tombs that surrounded us.
(67) Aeacus. - Is it Aeacus (Aeacus), as Nonnus wishes, or the Earth (Aia) of which he was one of the most skillful administrators, as other archaeologists pretend, which is the root of the name of Aeacus? Be that as it may, he deserved, by his love of justice, divine honors; and he went to govern after Aegina, in the kingdom of shadows, the Elysian islands.
*Ereptum stygiis fluctibus Eacum* *Virtus, et favor, et lingua potentium* *Vatum divitibus consecrat insulis.* *Dignum laude virum Musa vetat mori :* *Caelo Musa beat.* (Horace, l. IV, od. 8.)
A ...eager to assist his brother Bacchus. He instructed in the art of combat these phalanxes of Myrmidons, who were originally ants, always pressed to run upon the earth with their many feet; until the moment when the prudent Jupiter gave a superior form to this lowly insect born of the soil. The battalions thus arose fully armed; and all at once the silent swarm, sprung from the earth, this ant of another nature, became a body endowed with human form and with speech. Aeacus was their leader. On his rich shield, as a sign of his origin, he had traced the intelligent bird, the emblem of Jupiter, which carries off a woman in its caressing talons; one also saw there the river consumed by the thunderbolt, and on its banks, the sad and plaintive Nymph, even though an inanimate image, looking sideways at her father, the unhappy Asopus, with his slowed current, as if she were mourning his fate: she seemed to say: "Your victory over my father is therefore the first pledge of your love."
Asterios, who is distinguished by his beauty, commands the Cretans of many tongues. He is as lovable as he is valiant. The nymph Androgeneia (68) of Phaestus (69), forgetting her maidenly wisdom, and yielding to the love of Minos (70), had formerly brought him into the world in her palace of Cydonia (71); now he leads to Bacchus the people of the hundred cities, and in this way honors the race from which his father is descended. Minos, in fact, had the same origin as Cadmus, and was a cousin of Semele. All these diverse combatants obeyed this single leader. The warlike inhabitants of Cnossus (72) and of Lyctus (73), united with the troops of Miletus (74). With them armed the numerous citizens of Gortyn (75), of Rhytium (76), of the fertile Lycastus (77), of the territory of Phaestus-Cydonia, which Tournefort has recognized as the modern Canea.
(68) Androgeneia. — Androgeneia was from the city of Phaestus-Cydonia, which Tournefort recognized as being modern Canea. B (69) Phaestus. — Phaestus, conquered and destroyed by the Gortynians (Polybius, bk. IV), had been famous for the innate taste of its inhabitants for banter (Athenaeus, bk. VI), and Cydonia was a colony of the Samians who built temples there. History speaks thus through the mouth of Herodotus (bk. III), while mythology holds that Cydonia and Phaestus were founded by Phaestus and Cydone, fathers-in-law, brothers, or sons of Minos.
(70) Minos. — But what was Minos, whose wisdom passed into a proverb, when, as the legitimate spouse of Pasiphae and of Crete, the personified Crete, he seduced Androgeneia, and forced, by the fear of his violence, the nymph Dictynna to cast herself into the sea?
(71) Cydonia. — Nonnus begins by establishing at the first rank of his Cretan nomenclature the cities that Homer cited himself.
(72) Cnossus. — The great city (Homer, Od. XIX, 178), abode of Minos, where the tomb of Jupiter was. Long the capital of the island, it had to yield this honor to Gortyn and Cydonia. Later, Cnossus, in its decadence, saw the birth of Strabo. And I cite this torch in gratitude, which illuminates me in my dark investigations.
(73) Lyctus. — Lyctus, an inland city, well-built (Iliad, XVII, 611), colony of the Lacedaemonians (Aristotle, Polit., bk. II, ch. 8), and home of Idomeneus: *Lyctius Idomeneus* (Virgil, Aen., bk. II, v. 401).
(74) Miletus of Crete. — Miletus, metropolis of another more famous Miletus. This hero or this village primeval of Crete also gave their name to the ruins that I saw on the banks of the Rhyndacus, in Bithynia, between Loupat and Mikalitza; my geographical maps, in default of my guide, indicated them under the ancient name of Miletopolis.
(75) Gortyn. — Gortyn, a great fortified city (Iliad, bk. II, v. 646), which shared with Cnossus the primacy and the political importance; it is now a forgotten village, which the terrestrial river of the Lethe still traverses.
(76) Rhytium. — Rhytium, which the multitude of scolopendra made them abandon, if one is to believe Aelian, who says that they also forced the settlement of this city to move (Hist. anim., bk. XV, ch. 26). It is, without doubt, this little venomous scorpion, which is so common in the Orient, where it travels during the humid seasons.
(77) Lycastus. — Lycastus, whose whiteness, or to say it better, its clayey soil in Homer (*arginhoessa*), no more than its fertility in Nonnus (*eukarpoto*), have been able to save it from time. I would have wanted to find some affinity between this epithet of Homer, "whitening," and the nymph Arges, "white," about whom Plutarch speaks. She was native to Lycastus or Lyctus; Jupiter carried her off, and transported her to the mountain Argillos, in Egypt. Now, this clayey mountain of the banks of the Nile, I take pleasure in recognizing as the chalky Mokattam, which dominates Cairo. In any case, Lycastus already existed no longer when Strabo wrote in its vicinity. Soon, neglecting Phaestus, of which he has already made mention regarding Androgeneia, after having exhausted the treasure of Homeric Crete, our poet borrows no longer from anything but his own resources. C D
A of the high-crested city of Gortyn were armed, and inhabitants of Rytion, and of fruitful Lycastus, and of the land of Idean Zeus, and the dwellings of Thennae, and the plain of Cissamos, and the fair cities of Cytaeum. Such was the leader who came from Crete. As he advanced, shedding a prophetic brightness with hotter rays, the star of Ares, his namesake, shone, a herald of future victory; but having conquered in battle, he felt a strange, unaccustomed goad; for he was relentless. He was not destined, after the strife of the Indians, to see the ancestral cave of Ida, that shelter of Erinys, but he preferred a life of exile. Instead of Dicte and his Cretan citizenship, he took up residence in Scythia, and having left behind old Minos and Androgeneia, being a man of wisdom, he went to the barbarian nations of the Colchians. He named them Asterians, and gave the Colchians a Cretan name, to whom nature alone provided foreign laws. Forsaking the ancestral Cretan herd of the nurse-maid of Amnisos, he drank, with human lips, the strange water of the Phasis.
Only Aristaeus came slowly, the last of the others, of those who inhabited the land bordering on the land of Greece, he who from the many-holed hives of sweet honey lifted his proud neck, and contended with wine-pouring Dionysus for the prize of honey-sweet victory. The dwellers of Olympus were judges for both; but the son of Phoebus, offering the freshly-flowing juices of the hives to the immortals, missed the honey-sweet victory; for the gods, having received the thick stream of the honey-loving bee, quickly felt a sharp satiety from the unpleasing dew. And the satiety was the third cup of the blessed; and they did not taste the fourth cup when it was mixed, though they were very thirsty; but delighting their minds with the rain of Bacchus, with its fine drops, B of Jupiter the Idean (78), of the soil of Thenae (79), of the plain of Cissamos (80), and the fair walls of Cytaeum (81).
Such was the chief of the army that came from Crete. When he marched, the star of Mars, his namesake, sparkled and, with more ardent rays, threw a prophetic light as a precursor of victory. But after his triumph, Asterios was seized by a strange taste for an unaccustomed country, and did not wish to see again, after the war of the Indians, the warlike cave of the rocks of Ida, his paternal home. He preferred the life of an exile; instead of Dicte (82), the citizen of Gnosos settled in Scythia. He abandoned old Minos and Androgeneia, and came, a civilized man, among the barbarian populations of Colchis, where they sacrifice guests; he called them Asterians, and thus gave a Cretan denomination to these same Colchians whose strange laws nature alone ordained. Then, renouncing the paternal waves of the Amnisos of Crete, which had seen his childhood, he drank, in his maturity, the foreign water of the Phasis.
Of all those who inhabited the regions bordering on Greece, Aristaeus alone came without eagerness and even as the last. Proud of having invented honey and hives with a thousand compartments, he had disputed in vain with the god, creator of the vine, for the prize of the sweetest beverage. All the inhabitants of Olympus, as many as there be, were their judges. The son of Phoebus presented them with the nectar freshly flowed from the combs; but the victory escaped him; for, upon receiving this thick product of the prolific bee, the immortals were soon disgusted by the insipid drink; they tired of it from the third cup, and the most thirsty refused to touch it when it returned full for the fourth time; while they delighted C to draw in long draughts the limpid liquor of Bacchus, and drank it incessantly for a whole day. In their drunkenness, they marvelled one after another at the sweetness of the place, the importance of which has no more been altered by the centuries than its spelling. A manuscript bears, instead of Cisamos, Dictamos, which was a city of Crete, and was also called Dictynna, always in memory of the nymph Dicte or of the famous Dittany.
Et le dictame idois, qui par le daim mangé, Ne guarit seulement son flanc endommagé Par le trait gnosien; ains promptement rejette Contre l'archer voisin la sanglante sugette. (Dubartas, Trois. jour de la semaine, l. 1, p. 1286.)
(81) Cytaeum. — Cytaeum has passed for having disappeared under the city of Candia: its harmonious name has faded before the modern word, and yet, despite the negation of Tournefort, it is truly Greek, from *chandax*, ditch; this name was given to it by the Saracens, who fortified it in the ninth century; and Candia, which communicated its softened, but barbarian, appellation to the whole city, has designated, for a long time, the divine island that we have just traversed in the company of Homer and Nonnus.
(82) Dicte. — I cannot forget the pleasure that the sight of this mountain gave me, when, after a stormy night spent among the reefs on the great waves of the Carpathian sea, I found soft breezes and calmed waves under the shelter of the mountains of Crete; finally, when, on a day of the most burning dog-days, gliding slowly over the waters almost at the shade of the shore, I contemplated the black firs of the summits of Dicte, and, lower down, its arid rocks and its picturesque promontory.
1259 NONNI PANOPOLITANI …of this beverage, and joyfully called for one cup after another; and they drank in the wine, that charm of the imagination, an indefatigable gaiety. Jupiter, no doubt, admired the works of the bee, the drops of honey, and the ingenious multiplication of the swarms, the invention of Aristaeus; but he gave the palm to the liquor of Bacchus, for it eases pains. And it is thus that Aristaeus, ill-cured of his spite against his happy competitor, came so slowly to the war of the Indies, and departed tardily from the sojourn of Cyllene, the dwelling of Mercury; for he had not yet inhabited the first island of the Meropes (83). He had not yet softened the inflamed vapor of the hours of drought and brought the beneficent breaths of Jupiter, the vanquisher of evil. He had not yet, keeping watch under a garment of iron, for the brilliance of the devouring constellation, halted and lulled to sleep, throughout the night, the fire of the Dog Star (84); thanks to him, now the winds refresh the world with their light breaths, while she launches fire and aridity from her burning throat. He still dwelt in the plain of Parrhasia. The wandering people of Arcadia, who feed on acorns, followed him into battle, as did the possessors of the banks of the Ladon (85), of the great sacred woods of the Lycaeum (86), of craggy Stymphalus (87), and of the towns sung by the poet: Ripe (88), Stratie (89), Enispe (90), Mantinea (91), and finally Parrhasia (92) to the great [city…].
1260 for the whole day they drank the flow of soothing wine. And drunk with sweet wine, one gazed at another, Desiring from one another a second cup with pleasant spirit, Having insatiable joy from the mind-delighting wine. And Zeus admired the works of the honey-dripping bee, And the cunning travail of the honey-loving birth, The gift of Aristaeus; and to wine-pouring Dionysus He granted to take the first-fruits of the victory over toil. A Thence Aristaeus traveled slowly toward the story of the Indians, Late in arriving, having previously snatched away the victory of anger, Leaving the midday seat of Hermes on Cyllene. For not yet had he settled in the former Meropian isle, Not yet had he stopped the fiery steam of the thirsty season, Bringing the life-giving breeze of Zeus, the averter of evils, Nor, iron-clad, watching for the gleam of the star, Holding back the Dog Star of the scorching fever, Did he soothe the night, while even yet the thirst-inducing fire, Hurling heat through the ether with a burning throat, Is cooled by thin breezes in gentle breaths; But still he dwelt in the plain of Parrhasia; and as he went, The acorn-eating, wandering Arcadian people were stirred, They who held the Ladon, and the fair groves of the Lycaeum, And craggy Stymphalus, and the much-sung little town Of Ripe, and Stratie, and Mantinea, and Enispe, And wooded Parrhasia, where is the plain of the goddess.
(83) The island of the Meropes. — It is in the island of Ceos that Aristaeus reigned, disgusted with Boeotia after the death of his son Actaeon. Nonnus, in designating it by the name of the island of the Meropes, borrows this epithet from the Homeric hymn, Κῶς τε πόλις μερόπων ‹ἀνθρώπων› (Hymn. to Apoll., v. 42), and confuses Ceos with Cos, the fatherland of Hippocrates. Alas! the most minor Turk of our day makes the distinction, since Cos is still under the Muslim yoke, while Zea, modern Ceos, depends upon the kingdom of Greece. Be that as it may, Aristaeus, benefactor of this island, was worshipped there under the invocation of Jupiter Aristaeus. B One observes regularly at Ceos, Cicero tells us, "the rising of the Dog Star, to conjecture from it the good or bad influences on the course of the year." (Cic., De divin., book I, ch. 57.) (84) Aristaeus and the Dog Star. — Nonnus recalls here summarily some of the benefits of Aristaeus, which he detailed in the fifth book. He repeats a whole line and a hemistich of his preceding description, and, even in this, he has the example and the excuse of Homer; then, he returns complacently to the invention of honey and the raising of bees. "The bee," says Eustathius, in a judicious and witty remark, "has a real affinity with poetry, by reason of all the trouble that its composition gives it, as by the sweetness of its work, and the industrious regularity of its labor. Poetry takes its share of duties quite similar and of these same fatigues. For, without labor, nothing beautiful." — Οὐδὲν γὰρ τῶν καλῶν πόνου χωρίς. (85) The Ladon. — Lasion, unknown in Arcadia, is going to disappear in my text and in my translation beneath the floods of the Ladon, the famous Ladon, of which so much has been said through all the centuries, but of which one no longer says, as did Pausanias: "It passes for the most beautiful of all the rivers of Greece, and even of barbarian lands." It is true that, higher up, the ancient archaeologist, almost always exact and positive in his judgments, attributes this superiority to the limpidity of its waters. "One would be wrong," he adds, "to believe this river important enough to have islands similar to those of the Danube or the Po, when they are at most large [no more than a small ferry]." (86) The Lycaeum. — Mount Lycaeum, from which I have seen the peaks dominate southern Arcadia from afar and lower themselves abruptly toward Messenia, is still one of those mountains endowed in the East with the title of Olympus. Et cum Cyllene gelidi pineta Lycæi. (Ovid, Met., v. 217.) These pines of the Lycaeum and Cyllene have given way to thorny shrubs and a stunted vegetation. Polybius says, in effect, that its surroundings are abrupt and difficult, δυσχωρίας. C (87) Stymphalus. — Nonnus qualifies it as "craggy"; Polybius, in fact, says that its surroundings are abrupt and difficult. (88) Ripe. — As for Ripe, I will hardly understand whence would come the isolated celebrity with which the Greek text qualifies it, and here is what Strabon said of Ripe, as of (89) Stratie, — and of (90) Enispe and its neighbors: — "They are difficult to find; and if one found them, that would be of no use, for they are deserted." It is forbidden to me to push my commentary further on this point; I give only to these three towns, of which certain detractors have wished, in spite of Pausanias, to make islands of the Ladon, the common epithet of ἀειδομένας τε πολίχνας instead of ἀειδομένην τε πολίχνην which is found in the singular in the text, and that signifies that these three towns have been already celebrated by Homer, the poet par excellence. (91) Mantinea. — Mantinea, Homer’s "lovely" (ἐρατεινή), has ceased to be so in Nonnus, who has disinherited it of every attribute, despite its titles to glory. Fr. Hardouin, who commented on Pliny, as I am trying to comment on Nonnus, makes it [a city of Jupiter]. (92) Parrhasia. — Founded by Parrhasius, son of Jupiter. Ancient city which also poetically gives its name to Arcadia. Lupercal Parrhasio dictum Panos de more Lycæi, said Virgil, who sometimes also sought the etymological meaning.
A ...the stillness of the primeval birthplace of Rhea, and the plain of Pheneus, and the city of Orchomenus, Orchomenus rich in flocks, the abode of the Aphidantes; and those who held Arcadia, the city of Arcas, whom his mother Callisto once bore to Zeus; and his father, having set him in the sphere of the stars, called him the tempestuous Herdsman. So great was the host that Aristaeus armed with the Arcadian spear, leading nomad hounds into the fray for men fighting—he whom Cyrene, another huntress Diana, destroyer of lions, bore to the love of Phoebus, when the fair Apollo had carried her through the air, upon his raptorial and nuptial chariot, into the midst of the sandy wastes of Libya. And while he was still hastening, leaving behind the prophetic laurel, Apollo the father himself armed him with his own hands; and he gave to the boy a bow, and fitted a damascened ox-hide shield to his arm; and he fastened the hollow quiver, hanging down along his back by a raw-hide strap. And after him came Achates, darting arrows from Sicily, and his fellow-councillors, shield-bearers, followed him, and the people of the Cossyrians, and a great host of the Elymi, and those who [the Palici...
[Translational note: The following is an account of the commentary following the Greek text.]
(96) Arcas. — And here, finally, is this founder of Arcadia, who, upon departing with his mother Callisto to the celestial sphere, left his name to his native province, and his tomb at Mantinea: his remains were transported there from nearby Mount Maenalus, according to the terms of a Delphic oracle, expressed in this rather prosaic verse: B *Where Arcas lies, from whom all are called by name.*
(97) Achates. — Here Nonnus seems to have let himself go, and to be swimming without a cork; for Homer did not send the slightest Sicilian deputation to the siege of Troy; but Virgil will soon be there to rescue him; and, in the first place, this Achates who commands the Sicilian troops seems to me to be purely a reminiscence of the Aeneid. Moreover, my voyage to Sicily in the year 1840 enables me to rectify the topographical notions of Nonnus, or rather to repair the errors of his copyist. It is not the promontory of Pelorus that bears a frowning head; it extends, on the contrary, toward the Strait of Messina and the rocks of Scylla, a long sandy beach perfectly in conformity with the description Nonnus gives of Cape Pachynus, which, for its part, does not present to the sea the ground of a peninsula (νησαῖον δάπεδον), but rather a steep hill. It is sufficient, therefore, to reconcile the Greek text with geographic accuracy, to leaf through the last pages of my *Twenty Days in Sicily*, and to ensure here that the two promontories, Pachynus and Pelorus, change places with each other.
(98) The Cossyrians. — I cast aside without pity the Cillyrians, a people that has never been part of any Sicilian or other region, however little known, from the first rank that this census had offered them, and I was going to put in their place, in the Greek text, the Lilybaeans, whom, without this correction, Nonnus would have passed over in silence. Now, it seemed to me that he was too good a geographer and too accurate a nomenclator to separate, in the thirteenth book, one point of the triangle from the other two points, and Lilybaeum from Pachynus and Pelorus, when he had already united them in three. C
(99) The Elymi. — Eryx and Segesta were the capitals (Thucyd. I, ch. 2.—Silius Ital., book XIV, v. 46).
A
Those who surround the temple of the Palices (100), those who inhabit Catane (101), a maritime city, neighbor to the Sirens (102). These Sirens, whom the rosy-cheeked Terpsichore saw born from her union with her horned spouse, the impetuous Achelous (103); and the possessors of Camarina (104), where the mobile Hipparis (105) vomits noisily its winding waves, and the sacred city of Hybla (106), and those who live near Etna, where fire-craters cause to spring forth from the bosom of the scorched rocks the incandescent flames of Typhon's bed, and those who spread their habitations over the brow-laden Pachynus, the peninsula lengthened toward Pelorus, where the sea beats the shore, and the Sicilian Arethusa (107), where creeps the traveler Alpheus, who goes into exile all laden with the crowns of Pisa. He carves a path for himself through the waves, rolls, a slave of love, on the surface of the seas, a wave which their bitterness never corrupts, and preserves its flame always burning beneath the coolness of the floods.
With them comes Phaunos (108). He has left this prodigious plain of Italy, dominated by a double summit which is branded by fire (109). Circe, united to the king of the seas, son of Saturn, bore him; the enchantress Circe, the sister of Aeëtes, who dwells at the edge of the forests, in the obscure and circular depths of a palace of rocks. The Libyans also enrolled themselves. They dwell in the B
(104) Camarina, — which one sees from so far, *Camarina procul* (Virgil, *En*., III, 70). (105) Hipparis, — river or stream vaulted by Pindar (*Olymp*. V). (106) Hybla — and its bees, rivals of Hymettus. (107) Arethusa — finally, sung by so many poets; and regarding all these melodic Greek names, I refer all my readers again to these same *Twenty Days in Sicily*, if they are sufficiently hungry for commentary not to be content with those which precede or will follow. As for me, I could not tire of them. For, finding myself useless to this century, I throw myself back into that one; and I am so spellbound that these old things interest and impassion me. (Montaigne)
Nevertheless, since I have, ten years in advance, written on Sicily all that can aid in the understanding of the text of Nonnus, clear enough in this place, I ask permission, to procure a diversion for my mind and my pen, to translate another Greek poet besides, and to say with the sententious Theognis: « And I too, I once went to Sicily; I too, I have seen the fields covered with the vines of Euboea, and Sparta, illustrious city which the Eurotas bathes, laden with reeds. Everywhere I have been welcomed with kindness. And yet these foreign lands have never given me enough pleasure to make my heart forget that nothing is better than the fatherland. »
(108) Phaunos. — This designation of Italy has nothing precise nor satisfying, whether one keeps the word *pyrisphragiston*, sealed by fire, or whether one adopts *pyrisphragiston* (sic), swollen by fire, more intelligible in French than suitable in Greek. There would always remain the enigma of the three points, *trilophon*, or of the three summits: by substituting *dilophon*, the two summits, which nears more closely the edition of Falkenburg and consequently the original manuscript, one could see the Apennines, whose peaks, if they are not double, look at least onto the Italian plains on both sides. But it is more probable that, by an anachronism pardonable in a poet, Nonnus wished to designate the campaigns of Naples, and the two heads of Vesuvius, which, in his time, already counted three centuries of ravages, but which did not exist for Phaunos. (109) The summits of fire. — It is in this sense that... C D
the learned commentator of the bronzes of Herculaneum has resolved the difficulty, in translating this passage thus: Fauno vien dopo, dagli arsicci campi D'Italia, ove due teste inalza un monte Fauno di Circe figlio, e del gran Giove. (Bronzi, t. II.) And yet, there remain to me some scruples concerning this epithet, *trilophos*, which we have already encountered (book VI, v. 329), applied to the country of the Tyrrhenians, and which, instead of Vesuvius and Monte-Somma, could designate the Alps and their continuation, the Apennines, under the varied aspects of their summits and their slopes. A (110) The hill of the Graces is found in Herodotus (book IV, § 175), and the river Cinyps, cited further on, descends from it to run for very little time toward the sea, like all the torrents of Northern Africa, other than the Nile. (111) Maurousia. — It is Maurusia, the country of the Moors, *gens Maurusia*, of which Iarbas, spurned by Dido, is the king in the Aeneid. Nonnus designates here by his epithet, *eremonomos*, the nomadic Moors of whom Dionysius the Periegetes makes this remarkable description: “It is in these deserts that the innumerable tribes of the nomads extend and disperse themselves.” B dwelling in the cities near the clouds—those that Cadmus founded in the course of his travels on the western edge of the world. For, carried away by the blasts of contrary winds, it was there that he dwelt for a long time with the nymph of Thrace, his companion in navigation, Harmonie, still a virgin. Her beauty, which fame makes to be the cause of combats, had armed all the neighboring rivals. The Libyan army had surnamed her his Charis: the charming daughter of the Bistonian land flourished, in fact, like a mortal Charis; and is there not in Libya a hill of the Graces also? (110) Foolishly consumed by the desire to carry her off, the people who live in the deserts of Maurousia (111) rose up entirely in their horrible fury; it was a barbarous war. But Cadmus made the lance of the Libyan Minerva vibrate in his marriageable hands, and fought to defend his spouse Harmonie; he was aided by Jupiter, Mars, and Venus, and put to flight the entire race of the Ethiopians of Hesperia. Thus antiquity tells it. It is there that, near Lake Tritonis (112), the charming Harmonie was united for the first time to the vagabond Cadmus. The Hesperidian nymphs made the song of Hymen heard. In their gardens, Cypris and Eros, to adorn this happy marriage, hung a golden vine over the nuptial bed, a dowry well worthy of such a love; and, in their opulent retreat, Harmonie, as well as Cadmus, crowned their hair with this rich foliage, in place of the accustomed rose. Laden with these golden gifts offered by the golden Venus, the bride appeared even more beautiful. It was then that the Libyan Atlas, her maternal grandfather, wakening the joyful sounds of the celestial lyre, made the sphere that rested on his bowed shoulders turn in the dance; and with a voice brought close, he sang the song of the wedding of Harmonie. In memory of his spouse and of this amorous union, Cadmus founded on the land of Libya cities to the number of one hundred (113), and endowed each of them with inaccessible ramparts dominated by towers of stone: grateful for these benefits, their warlike inhabitants present themselves in the first ranks to take part in the wars of Bacchus. They had left the lands near to the Moon when it comes to be born (114), and the retreats C where they live on the shore and in the middle of the forests, seeking in the hunt their miserable existence, for they do not know how to split the earth with the plow; they never hear the pleasant sound of the chariot, nor the lowing of the oxen that return to the stable. They graze themselves in the midst of the oaks, without knowing the ear of grain, without understanding the harvest. (112) Lake Tritonis. — It is also the lake or the river Tritonis, situated, like the garden of the Hesperides, in the vicinity of the ancient Atlas. (113) The hundred cities of Libya. — It is thus that, by the foundation of a hundred Libyan cities, Cadmus was to accomplish the prophecy of which Herodotus speaks. "A Triton," he says, "announced to Jason, cast by the tempest onto the coast of Africa, that one day the Greeks were to build one hundred cities on the banks of Lake Tritonis." Τότε ἑκατὸν πόλιας οἰκῆσαι περὶ τὴν Τριτωνίδα λίμνην Ἑλληνίδας, πᾶσαν εἶναι ἀνάγκην. (Herod., book IV, ch. 179.) (114) The Moon when it comes to be born. — I had to renounce the commentary that Graëfe promised us on this verse; for, having been awaited for thirty years during his life, it will not appear after his death; I therefore establish the text thus: *Τηκομένης ναίοντες ἐδέθλια γείτονα Μήνης.* It would be a question here, according to my conjectures, not of the moon, but of the island of Mena, situated in Lake Tritonis, and inhabited by the ichthyophagous Ethiopians. D
C of the prophetic oracle of the horned god. There, the Hesperian Jupiter, hidden under the name of Ammon and in the form of a ram with triply-coiled horns, once announced the future with his prophetic mouth. Then came the cultivators of the banks of the Chremetes, the sandy and arid plain, neighboring the waters of the Cinyps, the Auschises and their companions the Cabales, favorites of Mars, whom the valley of Zephyr nourishes. Such was the numerous population of the hundred cities. Crategon commanded them. Anchinoe, daughter of Chremetes, had brought him into the world in the plain which her father the river waters, after her fleeting union with Psyllos the senseless; Psyllos, the antagonist of the gods, whose crops the Notos, the scorching wind, had one day dried up with its consuming vapors. Immediately, transporting Mars and his sparkling helmets upon the sea, Psyllos had gathered a swarm of maritime warriors to raise a vengeful struggle against these devastating winds; he intended to sacrifice the burning Notos, and to the sound of shields, he brought a powerful fleet near the Aeolian islands. At the sight of his madness, the winds also armed themselves, attacked his vessels with their resounding tempests, agitated all their gathered breaths together, carried them away, and buried beneath the sea Psyllos as well as his troops.
(Diodorus, Book III.) I have moreover, to support my version, Bochart, who would wish to read *athomenes* (burning [plain]), by reason of these expressions of Diodorus: "Mene possesses great vents of fire," (*ἔχει πυρὸς ἐκφυσήματα μεγάλα*); he is supported himself by Triller (*Crit.*, Book I, ch. VI), who proposes *liquentis*, of a melting island; and if I adopt this latter reading, it is because it resembles more the term of the manuscript, *tiktomenes*, and better explains the error of the copyist.
(119) Crategon. — Crategon, son of Force, is a character totally unknown in Greek mythology, and belongs without doubt to some legend of Egypt or Africa that Nonnus will have gathered on the spot.
(120) Psyllos. — Psyllos, the senseless, is taken here probably to personify national imbecility. "The wind of the south," says Herodotus always, "having dried up their cisterns, the Psylli held council among themselves, and resolved, by a unanimous consent, to make war against the wind of the south (I report what is said in Libya). Arrived in the deserts, this same wind began to blow and buried them under the sand." One reads on this subject in the *Mémoires de littérature de l'Académie*, vol. X, p. 437, regarding the tradition of the Psylli buried by the winds of Africa in the sands of the desert: "Nonnus outdoes all this marvel in the XIII book of his Dionysiacs, where, making the enumeration of the peoples who accompany Bacchus in his expedition of the Indies, he supposes, on the occasion of the Psylli, that one of their kings, to avenge the death of his son, equipped a fleet against the wind of the south, that he landed at the Aeolian islands with the design of attacking it there, and that the winds, armed for their defense, submerged the king Psyllos with all his vessels. Is it not admirable that this king goes to seek in the north the wind of the south? For the Aeolian islands are to the north of the Great Syrtis; but it is something about which Nonnus has little embarrassed himself." I have at heart to whitewash my poet of the unjust imputations of M. l'abbé Souchay. There is nothing extraordinary nor inconsistent in that Psyllos, to extinguish the devastating river of his campaigns, and not to avenge the death of a son, of whom neither the fable nor the Egyptian poet have spoken, went to attack the winds at their home, in their kingdom and their citadel; it is a tactic approved in all times and, moreover, those who find it ridiculous should they not remember that Nonnus has made of Psyllos a senseless man?
A
The phalanges of the Cyprians are under the orders of Agapenor (121) and of Lapithos of the beautiful hair. Many warriors follow them; these are the happy inhabitants of Sphecia (122), which the sea bathes in its roundness; Cyprus, divine retreat of the loves with rapid wings; Cyprus, honored by the name of the primitive Cypris, and of which Nereus, tracing the contours with the point of his maritime trident, made the shape similar to the dolphin, his companion. For, at the moment when the productive and divine dew, mixed with a powerful germ, fertilized the foam of the seas, and created from it the goddess of Paphos in the regions of Cerastid Cyprus (123), it was a dolphin that ran, in its prudent instinct, on the surface of the waves, and supported there Venus seated on its back; the possessors of the plain of Hylate (124); of the walls of Chytros (125); of Tamase (126); of Tembros (127); B
(121) Agapenor. — From Libya to Samothrace the journey would be long and the transition abrupt. And yet all the texts of Nonnus, both printed and manuscript, agree in bringing us back to Samothrace to send us back immediately to the island of Cyprus. This movement, contrary to the ethnographic order, surprised me. And the more I reflected upon it, the more I became convinced that there was a strong transposition of the text. I believe I have done well to repair it. To this end, I have transported the thirty-eight verses that separate Psyllos the Libyan from Agapenor the Cypriot (from 392 to 431), to the end of the enumeration, three verses before the end of the book, that is to say under the numbers 527 to 565. In this way, the reader passes quite naturally from Egypt to Cyprus, which is the usual route; and he will have very little road left to travel to return from the summits of Mycale to Samothrace. Thereby, Nonnus will have imitated the Homeric order, which, without enjambment, always goes from one neighboring province to the other. He will have, in addition, to crown his nomenclature, reserved the memory of the first singer of the world, and placed the end of his enumeration under the patronage of Orpheus, as the invocation to Homer makes it the end. These good effects will have cost him nothing, for his part, and for me, only a few figures changed in the pagination of the leaves.
It is by an identical procedure, but with a lesser transposition of the text, that I have placed the Mygdonians after the Phrygians; verse 514 seemed to order me to make this reform; and since the army of the Indies meets in Mygdonia, the Mygdonian contingent had to close the catalogue. I have only made Caunos and Orpheus appear after it, whose personal adventure or memory Nonnus wanted to recall for us, and thus to crown his long enumeration with a sort of poetic episode. Now my conjectures and my procedure of reclassification, which have pushed Samothrace to the end of the book, have received a perfect confirmation from a manuscript consulted at the Vatican by my friend, M. the Count Ad. de Caraman, in 1854. It is the Regina copy, which belonged to Queen Christina of Sweden, where the final verse 562 directly follows the enumeration of Samothrace, as common sense had prematurely indicated to me. C
We are now therefore at the island of Cyprus; and first of all I eliminate from the Greek text that valiant Litros of whom no one ever heard (Λίτρος ἀγήνωρ), and I substitute for it the famous Agapenor, who, after the siege of Troy, was thrown by the tempests onto the island of Cyprus where he founded Paphos. Ἐκοσμήτην Ἀγαπήνωρ εὐχαίτης τε Λάπηθος. I use for this effect, to re-establish the rhythm, the dual gender, just as Homer taught me in an entirely similar occasion: Τῶν μὲν ἄρ᾽ Ἀμφίμαχος καὶ Θάλπιος ἡγησάσθην. (Iliad, II, 620.)
(122) Sphecia, — literally, the island of Wasps; and further on,
(123) Ceraste, — the Horned one, by reason of the multiplicity of its capes, are varieties of the primitive names of the island of Cyprus reunited in a single line by Lycophron; I add that Stephen of Byzantium did not understand it, and that he is not without excuse, given the habitual obscurity of the Alexandra (Lyc., verse 447). Then I come to
(124) Hylate, — which also figures in Lycophron, and which is the city Dyle or Hylate, consecrated to Apollo. There has never been in the geographical dictionaries, and especially it has never remained in my traveler's memory, any other — than *The grand tower of Sestos, Where Hero, for love, so dared.* (Marot.)
I am therefore going, in place of this Sestos, a stranger to the island of Cyprus, which the Greek text carries, to propose Chytros, now Citria, or Cythere, or Palæo-Chytro, if one believes the judicious d'Anville; Chytro, whose honey rivaled that of Hymettus (Diophanes, Geop., book XV). I do not know if, in this circumstance, I am not letting myself be carried too far by my old leaning for Citria, and if I am not committing a grave topographical error; but I see, and I would like to see everywhere again, this delicious valley of Cythera, with which my imagination is imprinted; watered by the waters of the high and abundant spring of Mount Panacre that we are going to encounter further down, it is shaded by orange trees always in flower and in fruit. It is there that, after a whole day of poetic fatigues in these picturesque hills, I received at the house of the rich Hadji Pétraki the most relaxing hospitality. It was this same Peter the Pilgrim whom I was to recognize, three years later, poor, exiled, almost mad, in the streets of London, and whose misfortunes M. de Chateaubriand helped me to relieve. I stifle these reminiscences which make my thought return, with a sigh, toward a happier age; D
(126) Tamase. — Certainly it ought not to be far from Chytri, since Ovid affirms that it is the best region of the island. *Telluris Cypri pars optima* (Met., book X, v. 545); no doubt by reason of the abundance and the quality of its copper mines (Strabo, book XIV).
(127) Tembros, — another dependency of Apollo Hylate, is cited in a verse of the Bassarica of Dionysius the Samian, which Stephen of Byzantium has preserved for us; and this verse confirms the name of the following city Erysthée, which Græfe seems disposed to contest.
A and a sanctuary thick with trees of Panacrus, dweller of the mountains. B And from Soli came a numerous host, and from Lapethus, which they later named after the leader who at that time gathered the people, and who died in the turmoil of the wine-press [or, in the din of the fray] and was buried, leaving his name to the citizens. And those who held the city of Cinyrea, still named for the stones of the ancestral Cinyras, and the plain of the seat of Urania, named for the ethereal void, because it fostered citizens radiating like the form of the stars of heaven. And those who held Carpasia, a sea-beaten floor of earth, and Paphos, the wreath-bearing harbor of the delicate Loves, the landing-place of Aphrodite rising from the waters.
(128) Erysthée — belongs to Apollo the physician, or savior (from *Erúomai*, I save), worshipped in Cyprus for having healed Venus of her love after the death of Adonis, without a doubt, adds a malicious chronicler, while trying to replace him.
(129) Mount Panacrus. — These three cities, packed into a single verse of the *Dionysiaca*, bring me back, in spite of myself, to Mount Panacrus which dominates them. Meursius, on the faith of Nonnus, had called it Panarcius (*Cyp.*, lib. I, p. 42); but Abr. Berkelius, in commenting on Stephen of Byzantium, substituted Panacrus there. Instead of this latter name, which I thought belonged to a mountain in Crete, I would have in my turn willingly qualified it as Mount Phlacrus, "Bald Mountain" (*Chaumont* in French), if Nonnus had not boasted of the thickness of its forests. For, to be truthful, I have seen only bushy thickets and vigorous shrubs, in full vegetation in the month of June, on these heights of Mount Panacrus, bristling with rocks and sharp peaks.
(130) The Solons — (book V, § 110), are designated by Ptolemy as inhabiting the northern slopes of the island. "Departing from Egypt," says Plutarch-Amyot, "Solon passed into Cyprus, where he had very great friendship with one of the princes of the country named Philocyprus, who was lord of a city, not very large, in a very strong position, but in a harsh, meager, and sterile country. Wherefore Solon counseled him that it would be much better to move it from that place into a beautiful and fertile plain which was below, and there to rebuild it larger and more pleasant than it was: which was done at his persuasion; and he himself was present, having entire superintendence of the building of the city, which he helped to arrange and order very well, as much for pleasure as for strength and safety, so that many people came from elsewhere to live there. And he, to honor Solon, called his city Soli, which before was called Aipeia."
(131) The Lapeths — or Lapithes, named later after this Lapithus, who commanded the Cypriot battalions with Agapenor, were to the north of the long mountain which divides the island into two regions and two climates: the charming city of Lapethe, thus designated by a verse of Alexander of Ephesus (*Steph. Byzant.*), *Kai himeroessa Lapēthos*, is today the wretched hamlet of Lapito.
(132) Cinyras. — Cinyras, thus called after Cinyras, incestuous father of Adonis, whom maritime Cyprus saw filled with riches by the divinity; and the wealth that the divine hand spreads is the most lasting. (Pindar, *Nem.*, 8.)
(135) Urania. — I did not at first recognize the city Urania, namesake of the celestial sphere. I thought I had found some traces of it in this invocation of Catullus, from which some critics have even chased it: "O Venus," he says, "you who honor with your presence holy Idalia, Ouria/Urania, Amathus, etc." But I later encountered a satisfactory explanation of it by half. Meletius asserts that in the neighborhood of Carpasia is found, brought together as in the *Dionysiaca*, the plain *Oura boos*, "tail of the cow"; and it is indeed the eastern extremity of the island whose shape one has sometimes compared to a heifer. The learned Archbishop of Athens turned Strabo’s *Boosoura* in this way; and I see no inconvenience in it. But Nonnus, frightened no doubt by the vulgarity of the image, must have sought a more elevated etymology; and it seems to me that, in his turn, he has carried it too high, since, by a strong hyperbole, he makes of its inhabitants as many stars. Moreover, *Ouraboos* would have its counterpart in ancient and even modern geography: one knows more than one promontory called "Bull's Head," Bucephalus, not to mention the charger of Alexander; and the Delta formed by the two branches of the Nile below Cairo is also called "the belly of the cow" (*Batn el-Bakhara*) in the language of the Fellaheen. Nevertheless, I must think that Nonnus borrowed his Urania, like the following city, from Diodorus Siculus, who makes it one of the conquests of Demetrius.
(134) Carpasia — (and not Crapasia as Græfe wishes it) was founded in the eastern part of the island by Pygmalion, brother of Dido, and king of the city of Tyre which was almost opposite on the continent.
(135) Paphos. — Everything is said about Paphos, if it is not that the torrent from which it drinks some drops of water is this same one.
(136) Satrachus — where Venus and Adonis would be today quite embarrassed to bathe during the season, prolonged in the island of Cyprus, where
A for she has very often flooded the son of Myrrha, her spouse, with the waters of this river, when he gives himself over there to the pleasures of the bath. Finally, the States of ancient Perseus, where Teucer, fleeing Salamis and the anger of Telamon, was one day to found a second Salamis B (137), more famous than the first.
The voluptuous phalanxes of the Lydians flocked together. Those who occupied Cimpsos (138) with its rich pebbles; and the haughty Itone (139); and the vast Torebie (140); and the nurse of Plutus, Sardis (141), pregnant with subterranean opulence, contemporary of Aurora; and the Earth, which the clusters of Bacchus adorn, where this god, while yet a child, filling a cup with the juice of the vine, poured it for the first time to Rhea, and in memory named the city Cerassas (142); and those who had as their portion the slopes of Hoanie (143); and the currents of the Hermus (144); and the waves of the Metallos, whose yellow treasures cause the silt of the Pactolus to gush forth and shine in its waters; and the multiplied ranks of the Stataliens (145).
One bathes there in the open air. And yet this river Satrachus must be the same as the "Barbaros river," with a hundred mouths, which has no need C of rains to fertilize Paphos. (Eurip., Bacch., v. 404.) As for the rest, Paphos, though no longer the capital of the island, is still its most famous city.
(137) Salamis, Lapithos, and Paphos form the first three sections that Cluvier, the most learned geographer of modern times, determined for the island of Cyprus. The fourth alone is missing in the census of Nonnus; and it is Amathus. One will notice here that the verse of Nonnus, "where once Teucer, etc.," is the literal translation of Horace: *Teucer Salamina patremque Cum fugeret.* (Liv. 1, od. 7.) Teucer, brother of Ajax and creator of Salamis, was luckier than Helenus, brother of Hector; the latter founded on the shore of Epirus only a weak simulacrum of his country: *Parvam Trojam simulataque magnis Pergama,* while Teucer established in Cyprus a city much more considerable than his tiny fatherland. "And these Cyprian cities," cries the chorus of the Persians in the enumeration of the countries subject to Darius, "Paphos, Soles, and Salamis, whose metropolis is now for us the cause of so many tears." (Aeschylus, Persians, v. 895.) Before having traveled in a few hours all this island of Salamis, neighbor to Athens, I had followed in its transformations the other Salamis of Teucer, from its antiquity, begun under the names of Coronis and Constantia, up to the last, which was Famagusta: and I saw the ruined ramparts of this city of the Venetians whiten at the end of the long plain of Cyprus when I was hunting francolins in the beds of torrents bordered with oleanders.
(138) Cimpsos. — I should have had to give up on Cimpsos, and search for a replacement for it among the Lydian cities, which are rare or at least little known, if I had not finally met it, city or country, in a verse of Lycophron (verse 1353) between the Tmolus and the Pactolus. Tzetzes names it without adding anything. Meursius and Potter neglected it in their commentaries on the unintelligible Alexandra, perhaps by reason of a certain appearance of strangeness that this word carries in itself, and I do as they do. Now M. Dehèque, who has devoted himself recently with such happy patience to guessing the riddles of Lycophron, has not stopped any more than I at Cimpsos.
(139) Itone. — Itone is also a city of Lydia, said Etienne de Byzance, when he speaks of the Itone of Thessaly; that is all I know about it. I have nevertheless discovered in the Pharsalia a certain Itonus who, at first, minted silver and struck coinage: *Primus..... Fudit et argentum flammis aurumque moneta Fregit.* (Lucan, l. VI, v. 402.) This primitive monarch must have been of Itone in Lydia, if even his name did not naturally signify "Itonian." "Of all the peoples that we know," says Herodotus, "the Lydians were the first to make, for their use, coins of gold and silver" (book I, § 94). The metals brought by its rivers or produced by its soil abounded therein.
(140) Torebie. — Torebie, whose name our poet has softened by favoring the meter of his verse, was founded by Torrhebus, son of Atys, like Lydos, and both of them gave their name successively to the region; but Lydos left his own to it. Their sister Torebie was loved by Jupiter and had a son, Carios, who, for his part, gave this name to one of the mountains of the country.
(141) Sardis. — Sardis, D whose soil was heavy with silver and gold, *euvdinous*, was truly the nurse of Plutus, chthonic god of subterranean riches, for it was the capital of the kingdom of Croesus.
(142) Cerassas. — Cerassas, a region associated with Bacchus, takes its name from the verb *kérannumi* (I pour or I mix the wine), source of so many other etymologies. It must have been situated on the slopes of Tmolus, father of generous wines. *Firmissima vina, Tmolus et adsurgit quibus.* (Virg., Georg., l. II, v. 97.)
(143) Hoanie. — Hoanie is a city of Lydia, cited in the Bassarica of Dionysius and nowhere else, which we have lost to my deep regret, for they would have thrown great light on my investigations. Etienne de Byzance, who recalls them, qualifies it as a city; here it is a mountain.
(144) Metallos. — Metallos is a source or an affluent of the Pactolus which explains itself.
(145) Stataliens. — The Stataliens seem to me to constitute, with the Arimi of the Iliad, a single and same people where Typhoeus lies overturned (book II, v. 763), Typhoeus the volcano, personified.
A It is there that, vomiting the burning exhalations of the flaming thunderbolt, Typhoeus had set fire to the surrounding region. Under the swirling vapors of his fires, the summits of the steep peaks, dried out by devouring sparks, crumbled into ash. Then, leaving the perfumed temple of the Lydian Jupiter, a priest appeared, unarmed, to fight with his dominating word and to subject to obedience the son of the Earth; a penetrating word which replaces the sharp iron. His lance is his intrepid mouth; his sword is his tongue; his shield is his voice. From his inspired throat he brings forth these words: "Stop, wretch!" B Immediately the incandescent giant, chained by the magical power of the invincible word, stops and trembles before this man armed with the lance of intelligence; and, better than iron, these avenging words become shackles. Never had the terrible two-hundred-armed Typhoeus shuddered before the arrows of the thunder as much as before the powerful magician whose mouth launches an eloquent shaft; struck by these sharp words, he groans under the cutting edge of the voice; and already scarred by the thunderbolt, already pierced by a spear of fire, he has encountered the fire of thought, even more burning: he is struck by a blow that leaves neither blood nor trace behind it, and he succumbs; then he forcibly suspends his march, solidifies, plants his monstrous feet in the bosom of his mother, and takes root there... But all these things, time has accomplished among the primitive men.
Beside the valiant Lydians ranked the Phrygian peoples; the inhabitants of Boudée; of Telmesse, a celebrated city, adorned with its beautiful trees and the shades of its vast forest; of Drésie, and of the banks of the Obrime, which mingles its waters with the winding course of the Maeander; of the land which bears the name of Doias; the possessors C of Celanae...
(146) Etymology of the Stataliens. — This etymology is found further on in verse 485 of this same chant of the Dionysiacs: Στῆθι, τάλαν. "The word is the weapon of Apollo," said Himerius, Λόγος δὲ ἄρα τὸ βέλος Ἀπόλλωνος (ap. Plut., p. 113). And as one topic leads to another, I cannot help but apply to Nonnus and to myself, his humble translator, what M. Boissonade says so judiciously of this Himerius and of M. Wernsdorf, his collector: "Some readers of a taste too severe, perhaps, and too disdainful, will not thank him overmuch for all the pains he has taken to make us read, as completely as possible, a declaimer of the Lower Empire. But good minds know that nothing is to be despised; that one must carefully collect and conserve even the smallest remnants of antiquity, that monuments illuminate one another, and that those which one would sometimes believe oneself entitled to neglect become precious by the light they can shed upon the most beautiful masterpieces." (Boissonade, Biog. Univ. art. Himérius.)
(147) Boudée. — Boudée is cited in the Iliad as a well-inhabited city, εὐναιομένη. Was it in Thessaly, in Boeotia, or in Macedonia? I wish to believe with Nonnus that it was also in Phrygia; and it could have some analogy with this stop of Scipio, Beudos quod vetus appellant, which Titus Livy mentions (book XXXVIII, ch. 15).
(148) Telmesse. — Téménie is a Phrygian city on the borders of Lycaonia. That is all that Stephen of Byzantium says of it; and Strabo does not mention it. The celebrity which Nonnus attributes to it vanishes before this almost unknown name. But if, instead of Téménie, we read Telmesse or Termesse, which must have been neighboring, a city quite different from this other Telmesse or Telmisse whose ruins I believe I have seen in Lycia, the meter of the verse will lose nothing by it; and since, according to the testimony of Cicero, it had an excellent school of haruspices (qua in urbe excellit aruspicum disciplina), and furthermore it has been praised by Herodotus, Arrian, St. Clement of Alexandria, and St. Gregory of Nazianzus, the epithet ἀειδομένην would thus find its just application, and the great sacred woods, εὔσχιον ἄλσος ἀρούρης, would have their reason for being (if I dare, on such a subject, to express myself in such a modern way) in the agros uberrimos maximeque fertiles (Cic. De div., lib. II, ch. 42), whose fertility favors the experiments of D divination.
(149) Drésie. — Drésie is yet another of these insignificant localities that the poet Denys in his Bassarica had alone designated. Could it be the homonymous homeland of the warrior Dresos who fell under the blows of Euryalus, at the beginning of the sixth chant of the Iliad?
(150) Obrime. — The river Obrimos has another ending according to Pliny, Obrimas. Titus Livy speaks of its sources, near which Seleucus went while traveling from Apamea to meet Scipio.
(151) Doias. — Doias is a borrowing by our poet from Apollonius of Rhodes. "The plain of Doias," says his scholiast, "is near three cities inhabited by the Amazons, according to Pherecydes the historian: Lycastie, Themiscyra, and Chalybe." Not being able to retrace its location, I admire at least its euphony.
A They inhabited the broad-flowing streams and the auspicious river Orgas. With them joined those who were allotted to dwell in the cities near the Sangarius and the Epictetus region of the land, whose chief leader, having left behind the serpent-haunted Dirce, was Priasus, a settler in the Aonian land. For when rainy Zeus flooded the plain of Phrygia, pouring down high-coursing water in rainy seas, and the oaks were hidden, and in the thorn-bearing glens the thirsty hills surged like rivers—then, abandoning his moist dwelling, covered by the rain, and flowing with a dry-roaming, spear-casting roof, Priasus migrated to the gulf of the Aonian land, escaping the death-bringing, rainy water of Zeus. Yet always, while shedding tears among men of another land, he remembered the Sangarius, and sought the familiar spring, drinking the alien water of the Aonian river. But at last, Zeus the Highest calmed the snow-heavy swell and the watery necessity, and from the heights of Sipylus he drove back the water from flooded Phrygia; and the Earth-Shaker moved the whole stream away with his trident into the deep chasms of the unfathomable sea, and the precipices were laid bare of the resounding snow. B And then, leaving the Aonian land, Priasus, the far-thinking, entered his own fatherland; and his heavy-kneed father, with the supporting pull of his arm, he snatched up in his homecoming embrace—he whom, for the sake of his pious deeds, the great Zeus rescued from the rainy destruction—him whom they call the Torrential. From the Phrygian gulf, the high-minded warriors gathered around Priasus. C
(152) Célène. — Célène, which has since become Apamea, is situated at the foot of Mount Signia, which is surrounded by the three rivers Marsyas, Obrimas, and Argas. This connection and this proximity, which Pliny attests, have been a marvelous resource for clarifying one of the most jumbled lines of Nonnus. I have therefore set aside the version of Cunaeus, *hiera rheumata Gorgous*, [sacred streams of Gorgo], that of Falkenburg, *Daeochria*, and even that of Graefe, *hicastēria Gorgous*, [judgments of Gorgo], just as obscure; and, persuaded that my poet, a partisan to excess of complete reminiscences and prolonged images, did not wish to separate the river—
(153) Orgas. — ...named one next to the other, I give to the first the Greek ending *os*, just as Nonnus proceeded with regard to its neighbor, instead of *as*, the presumed product of Caria in the barbarian language, *Karōn barbarophōnōn* (Homer, *Il.* II, 867). Then, having noticed that Strabo speaks of its slow and tranquil course, *prāon kai malakon*, I have composed from all these elements, or rather I have restored to the text these words: *hilaou rhoou Orgous* [the auspicious stream of the Orgas]. Finally, emboldened by my own initiative, I have changed in the same line the epithet *chrysochōrous*, which Graefe finds stupid, and his own *chrysopphorous*, which seems to me equally ill-suited to Célène, for that of *euruchoros*, spacious, which seems to me more suitable for a city bathed by three rivers and destined to bear later the name of Cibotos, the universal ark. Such is and will remain my reasoning on this line 517, until some new commentator or reader of Nonnus tries to overthrow it; but the one and the other are very rare.
(154) La Phrygie Épictète. — I claim again to be entirely right when I strip the land of Elespide, which is an enigma to all scholars, and make of it the soil of Epictetus. Phrygia-Epictetus in fact comprised the greater part of the cities that the Sangarius waters in its upper region, and before it moves closer to the Euxine.
(155) Priase. — The rain of Jupiter (*Dios ombros*) was among the Greeks an excessive, diluvial rain, of which the king of the gods reserved the privilege to himself alone; he could lend his thunder and his storms to Pallas to punish the second Ajax, to Juno to persecute Aeneas, but he kept his rain for himself. Now, as Theognis says, Jupiter cannot please everyone, whether he lets loose his rains or keeps them back. And it is from there that comes the *Métayer* of La Fontaine:
*Whether he had heat, cold, fine weather, or the north wind,* *In short, from the dry or the wet . . . .* *Jupiter consents. The contract passed, our man* *Acts as king of the air, it rains, it blows, and he makes in short* *A climate for himself alone. . . .*
I ask permission to interrupt the course of my meteorological observations in favor of a few lines of this episode of Priasus. The same eyes that have justly softened at the image of the Greek of Virgil dying on the land of Latium with the sweet memory of Argos, will they not have a tear for Priasus, weeping at the memory of the Sangarius and regretting the source that had been accustomed to quench his thirst? The epithet applied to this exile who thinks backward, *histeropomnēs*, does it not have here, I dare say, a sublime expression? Let us agree: these three lines, so melodious and so touching, which stop the reader of their own accord to make him sigh, and are so well engraved in his mind, redeem the dryness of a nomenclature and compensate for many asperities.
A Gadius and Stamnus armed the Indians for the fray, they who strike the earth with rhythmic soles. And seeing this dancing army leaping and bounding, you would say their leader was conducting his armed men in a chorus, and not into battle. It is the Mygdonian lyre that regulates their march with a dance-song. Its sounds, instead of leading them in rounds, precipitate them into the mêlée. Amorous reeds are for them warlike trumpets. The double flute of Berecynthus resounds; and the tambourines, struck on both sides by their noisy hands, clang beneath brass rattles.
The son of Asterios, who marches in the army on a different side from his father, Miletus, at the flower of his youth, stands beside Bacchus. His brother Caunos accompanies him: Caunos, still quite young, leader of the Carians; he guides them to the war of the Indies; he has not yet experienced this fatal and deceptive love which destiny reserves for him and which his innocent sister must inspire in him; he has not yet celebrated and invoked in his songs Juno, herself a sister and companion of Jupiter, image of this fraternal union which he is one day to desire so ardently; he has not, near the others of Latmos, where Phoebe never sleeps, envied the tender loves of the Moon, intoxicated with desire for her spouse Endymion, who sighs beneath the neighboring rock. Byblis is still the chaste Byblis. In his innocence of these baneful passions of the same blood, Caunos has only yet learned the hunt; and the nymph, at the departure of her amiable brother, has not yet lost her form to her tears, and made the currents of a plaintive spring gush from her inanimate body.
With Miletus, and under his orders, hastened the warriors of Mycale and the inhabitants of the banks of the Meander, whose tortuous course crosses subterranean abysses before crawling out into the daylight.
Then came in a crowd the warriors of Samothrace, robust and sturdy like the Titans. It is their king Hamathion who sends them; Hamathion, slowed by old age, with a thick beard and white hair. With them, the inhabitants of Myrmeke, on the sea, and of Mount Saoce, B and the flowery Saoce.
A and the land of Tempyra, and the groves of the Odrysians with their green fields, a thick brushwood of trees, and divine Zerinthos of the sleepless Corybantes, a foundation of the fabled Persis, where there are orgiastic haunts of the torch-bearing maiden; and those who dwelt by the many-angled foundation of the land, and those I hear of by the neighboring sea, the paths of subterranean Poseidon. So many allied ranks came; and they established the kindred progeny of primeval Electra. For there, Harmony, a race of the sky, blood of the sea, was given as a wedded wife, without a dowry, to Cadmus by Ares, Zeus, and Cytherea, the protectors of the gods. B To these arrayed with Dionysus of the thyrsus, Electra, the seventh star, rose through the ether, a favorable sign for the struggle; and around the victory, the echoing voice of the Pleiades resounded, gracing Dionysus who brought the blood of their kinswoman, and giving the army similar courage. And as they came, Ogyros led them, a second Ares to Ares, Ogyros with his head held high, having the image of the Giants. His body was wholly unyielding; and from his head and the muscle of his neck, locks reaching the back, like thorny hedgehogs, flowed down to his loins; he had a long neck, of girth like the neck of a rock, having the savage customs of his fathers. C Nor did any other man braver than he come to the eastern battle of the Indians, apart from Dionysus; and he swore an oath by Victory that he alone would destroy the entire Indian land with his spear.
[Notes appended to the text] (163) Tempyra. — On the faith of Ovid, who claims that Samothrace is not far from Tempyra, *Saltus ab hac terra brevis est Tempyra petenti*, I erase from the Greek text *Tesmérios*, which has never counted in the topography of Thrace, and I insert *Tempyra*. Alas! Ovid knew the place of his exile only too well. He visited Tempyra; and from there, taking leave of the faithful boat that had brought him across the seas of Greece, he did the rest of the journey on foot, no doubt to arrive at Tomes as late as possible. *Nam mihi Bistonios placuit pede carpere campos.* (Tristia, I. X, v. 23.)
(164) The Odrysians. — I cannot discover a trace of the sacred woods of Physiade that the manuscripts carry. I have replaced it, on my own authority, by *Odrysiade*, of which Bacchus bore the surname, and of which Stephanus of Byzantium, as if on purpose to come to my aid, is pleased to indicate the feminine gender, which suits my version so well. I had thought for a moment that Callimachus would lend me *Physadie* for the occasion, which he does not know what to do with (*Hymn to Pallas*, verse 47), for his commentators have been unable to find it anywhere; but Physiade is a fountain in Laconia, and Physiadé or Odrysiade is a forest of Thrace D exposed to the winds, of the fields of Tympyra (163); of the sacred forests of the Odrysians (164), of rich meadows shaded by groves; of divine Zerinthos (165), abode of the Corybantes who know no sleep. It was built by the famous Hecate Perseis (166), where are the rocks consecrated by her festivals and her bloody ceremonies; and those who inhabit Brisia (167), on the shores of a land with so many promontories, and the country neighboring the sea that I have been told is called the paths of subterranean Neptune (168).
Such were the fellow-citizen battalions who obeyed, issued from the same tribe, to the generation of the primitive Electra. It is in their fatherland that Jupiter, Mars, and Venus had granted as a legitimate spouse, Harmonie, race of the heavens, lineage of the sea, to Cadmus their auxiliary, even though he had no dowry to offer her. While these populations were arming themselves in favor of the god of the thyrsus, Electra, the seventh constellation, rose in the sky, a happy augury of the combat. The reverberating voice of the Pleiades, in honor of their sister whose descendant was Bacchus, repeated the songs of victory and redoubled the intrepidity of his battalions. Ogyros guided their march: Ogyros (169), a second Mars in the combats; Ogyros, who carries his head high and the appearance of a giant. His strength never tires. His hair, similar to the prickles of hedgehogs, falls on the nerves of his neck, on his back, and down to his flanks. His outsized head lengthens like the point of a rock; he keeps from his country the barbaric customs; none surpasses him in the exploits of the eastern war, if it is not Bacchus. And he has sworn by Victory that, he alone, he would annihilate under his spear the legions of all India.
(165) Zerinthe. — Zerinthe is, in Lycophron, a city of Thrace, consecrated to Hecate; and a verse of the obscure Cassandra served me to explain an enigma of Nonnus. (166) Hecate, Perseis. — The terrible Hecate was indeed called Perseis, for she was the daughter of Perses and Asteria. (See Hesiod's Theogony.) *Ibat ad antiquas Hecates Perseidos aras.* (Ovid, Metam., I. VII, v. 61.) (167) Brisia. — Finally *Brotios*, which I have uselessly searched for in the treatises of ancient geography, becomes Brisia, a tribe of Thrace, which Nonnus could not conveniently forget; for the nymph Brisa, his namesake, was one of the nurses of Bacchus; and for this motive also, Bacchus was surnamed Briseos. (168) The paths of Neptune. — It is not without difficulty that I have corrected these denominations of Thrace; I find more easily in my memory, no doubt not the location of this underwater city, so to speak, than the map of the unfortunate Riga has shown me, and of which Nonnus says only the vulgar surname, but at least its topographical attributes. I have seen in the gulf of Enos, by the edge of the sea, similar escarpments. The poet's description also reminds me of the paths suspended over deep seas and hollowed out in the rocks of Santorini, like the approaches to Ithaca that Homer described with their monstrous rocks and their steep paths (ἀτραπιτοί τε διηνεκέες, — πέτραι τ' ἠλίβατοι), Homer, Odyss., XIII, 195. (169) Ogyros. — Ogyros, whom the old Hamathion, after the apotheosis of Electra, placed at the head of his
A troops, in sending them to the army of Bacchus, was doubtless a chieftain of Thrace. His stature is like that of the giants who dwell in the high mountains of Rhodope; he is a second Mars, the national divinity of the place. Finally, he is a barbarian just like the Thracians, and his name, which is not found in Greek annals, is as barbaric as he is.
(170) Pimplée. — Orpheus receives here a special and well-merited mention. Nonnus detaches from the enumeration of the tribes subject to the giant Ogyros, Pimpleia, the fatherland of the Star of Thrace, and he gives to Oeagrus, the father of the first chanter in the world, a special place among the heroes. Pimpleia is situated at the foot of Mount Olympus, and to-day forms part of Thessaly; but in ancient times, the boundaries of Thrace extended that far.
(171) Epilogue to the enumeration. — I ask grace, in ending this long topographical commentary, for the memories of my travels in the Orient which have slipped into it as I wrote, and almost in spite of myself. Certainly, I do not seek to pride myself on the advantage that I have been able to draw from my Levantine excursions for the interpretation of the [enigmas or allusions of Nonnus.] B Poor profit, a stern critic recently said to me, poor profit applied to a mediocre poet! Is it a sufficient compensation for all your fatigues during these pilgrimages so difficult then? — To that I replied, first, that this labor was a pleasure. Fatigue if you like, but my fatigue is dear to me; then, that, dedicated to the great writers of Greece and especially to Homer, for I was not thinking then of Nonnus, this voyage had been for me what it has remained since, a true delight.
As to my torments as a commentator regarding these verses of technical geography, I could console myself with malice by reflecting that the poet, the author of these troubles, experienced at least as much in composing them; but I prefer to believe that his efforts and mine will not have been completely unproductive, and that, if the ethnographic notions of Nonnus cannot, like those of Homer, enter into a Hellenic code, they will at least cast some light on several points hitherto obscure in the history of nations.
NONNUS' COLLECTION AND INTERPRETATION OF THE HISTORIES MENTIONED BY ST. GREGORY NAZIANZEN.
Vide hujusce Patrologiæ tomum XXXVI, Operum S. Gregorii Nazianzeni tom. II.