Homeric Poetics at the Dawn of Christianity

The empress Eudocia’s De martyrio sancti Cypriani is a curious and rare cultural artefact. It is a versification in Homeric hexameters and combination of various Christian hagiographical accounts on St Cyprian that was written by a pagan convert caught up in the culture wars of the 5^th century CE about paideia.

In the first half of Nonnus’ Dionysiaca, a substantial amount of space is given over to Dionysus’s charioteer, Maron. This paper considers why. The long-standing poetological significance of the chariot (Choerilus SH 317.4-5, Astydamas II TGrF 60 T2b, Callimachus, Aetia 1.25-8; Nünlist 1998, 255-64 for earlier examples) prompts the reader to explore the wider literary significance of this figure. What drives Nonnus’ Dionysus?

Nonnus’ double-length epic the Dionysiaca presents itself as both mythically prior to, and chronologically posterior to, the poems of Homer. Nonnus’ narrative of the birth and exploits of Dionysus makes much of its narrative precedence to Homeric events, narrating the riverside battles of Achilles’ grandfather Aeacus, for instance, as a knowing ‘prefiguration’ of Achilles’ own quintessentially Iliadic performance (D. 22.384-9).

By the second century CE, Homeric poetry held a position of considerable authority in Imperial Greek literature; one has only to look at the frequency with which references to the Iliad and Odyssey are deployed: nearly 500 times by Lucian, 400 by Dio, and 300 by Aristides (Householder 1941, Kindstrand 1973, Gangloff 2006). Such citations, whether used as decoration, examples, or supporting evidence, collectively functioned as a respected ‘language’ in which authors or speakers could communicate to their audience.

To the Late Antique poet, Homer represented the ‘classic’ par excellence, the source of all cultural and literary identity, but he was also a contested figure, as open to satirizing as to sacralizing (Kindstrand 1974; Lamberton 1986; Zeitlin 2001; Kim 2010). In most cases, epic’s response is openly Oedipal: Nonnus’ Dionysiaca both praises Homer and programmatically discards his theme (1.34-8;25.255-60) and Triphiodorus’ speedy rewriting of the ‘tiresome’ Trojan War (Iliou Halosis 1-5) is an implicit critique.