The Myth of Paganism: Nonnus, Dionysus, and the World of Late Antiquity (review)

“Christianity and Paganism; Antike und Christentum; Athens and Jerusalem.” The most interesting word in the usual formulations of these two religious ideologies of Late Antiquity may well be the shortest one. The relationship between Christian and pagan culture in the world of Late Antiquity is notoriously difficult to pin down. On the one hand, it could be openly adversarial, which is how the copula has been understood by many, from Tertullian to Ramsay MacMullen. On the other, the nouns on both ends were not always viewed as strictly dichotomous in Late Antiquity, and this is the perspective the book under review aims to reinforce. In the first chapter, Robert Shorrock invites his readers to consider the implications of the fact that at the end of the fifth century ce, long after Constantine’s famous conversion, both pagans and Christians in Rome could still join in celebrating the festival of Lupercalia, a venerable fertility rite in which young men wearing nothing but the skins of recently killed goats ran around the city lashing women with leather straps. In view of this and other historical and literary evidence that challenges “the traditional boundary between ‘pagan’ and Christian,” Shorrock suggests, “the old certainties begin to break down.” He proposes to “consider the overlap and similarities between ‘pagan’ and Christian texts that often lie concealed behind the masks of difference” (5) and to establish a “new integrated model for the understanding of late antique poetry.”

As such, Shorrock’s book represents a welcome addition to the growing body of scholarship devoted to advancing our understanding of the astonishing proliferation of verse production in general in Late Antiquity. Certainly, there are few poets of the period who better represent the tensions between the two poles joined by the “and” of the common formulation cited above than Nonnus, the author of a prodigiously long Greek epic poem (in 48 books, the number of books in Homer’s two great epics combined) on the life of Dionysus and a hexameter paraphrase of the Gospel of John. There are many obvious differences between Dionysus, the fertility deity whose followers’ intoxicated revelries on Mount Cithaeron are portrayed so unforgettably in Euripides’ The Bacchae, and the God of the Old Testament and his stern prophets who resisted mightily the allure of contemporary fertility cults. The worldview of the Apostle Paul who admonished his readers against “rioting and drunkenness” and later champions of celibacy like the church fathers Jerome and Augustine could not be further removed, it would seem at first glance, from that of Dionysus and his notorious retinue of wasted and wanton worshippers.

Unlike many of the Latin Christian poets of Late Antiquity who were careful to distinguish their own literary projects from those of their pagan poetic forbears, Nonnus’ poems gives us little reason to believe that he was interested in trying to “Christianize” Dionysus or, for that matter, to “paganize” Jesus. Indeed, the very notion that these two works, one so clearly pagan and the other so clearly Christian, could have been produced by one and the same author has led some scholars to assign them to different authors or to the same author at very different points in his life, that is to say, before and after his conversion to Christianity respectively. In view of the scholarly consensus, however, which now assigns both works to the same, Christian, author, Shorrock explains in his second chapter how best to understand the relationship between what would seem to be two ideologically contradictory poems written by the same poet. The question is not whether Nonnus was being hypocritical or insufficiently transparent when he wrote one or other of the poems, but rather from where the poet’s inspiration for each work was thought to derive. It makes all the difference, Shorrock argues, that in one work the poet is in the service of the Muses and in the other of...