ipsa quidem, sed non <eadem est>, eademque nec ipsa est.
It is itself, but not the same, the same and not itself.
(Lactantius, De ave phoenice 169)Footnote 1Introduction: the voice of the Christian poet
The Christian poets of late antiquity speak with a loud, and markedly personal, authorial voice.Footnote 2 In what is probably one of the earliest extensive Christian poems, Commodian, a third-century poet,Footnote 3 speaks of his conversion to Christianity: he was an ‘errant’ pagan for a long time, but then the Lord shone his light on him – a blessing of such magnitude that the poet's voice will hardly suffice to express his gratitude.Footnote 4 In the fourth century Juvencus writes the first extant biblical epic, a hexametrical ‘harmony’ of the Gospels titled Evangeliorum libri quattuor. In his polemical preface to this epic Juvencus declares that, if the poems of Homer and Virgil, ‘which interweave the deeds of men of old with falsehoods’ (quae veterum gestis hominum mendacia nectunt, 16), have won ‘long-lasting fame’ (longam famam, 15), then his own poem, which proclaims the deeds of Christ and cannot be accused of lying (falsi sine crimine, 20), will not only survive the final conflagration of the world, but will also save the poet himself from the flames (hoc etenim forsan me subtrahet igni, 22).Footnote 5 Juvencus thus introduces in the Latin Christian tradition two influential themes: the forceful renunciation of mythological, literary fictions,Footnote 6 and the poet's personal salvation in the afterlife through his poetic work.Footnote 7 The epilogue of Juvencus’ epic again draws attention to the poet himself and the importance of his endeavour: his own mind (mea mens, 802) has been empowered, the grace of Christ shines upon him (lucet mihi, 803), and in his own verses (versibus ut nostris, 804) the divine law happily takes on ‘the earthly ornaments of language’ (ornamenta … terrestria linguae, 805).
Later Christian poets continue to be personally involved in their poetry,Footnote 8 in a way that both defies modern distinctions between author and narrator,Footnote 9 and highlights the poems’ status as written texts, addressed by the historical author to the reader. Para-textual devices, such as prefaces and epilogues, play a cardinal role in this development,Footnote 10 but are far from being the only places in which poets step inside their poems. Sedulius interjects exclamations, apostrophes and rhetorical questions throughout his epic on Christ, the Carmen paschale, and likes to exhort his audience using the first person plural.Footnote 11 Proba's Virgilian cento features an interlude, which separates the Old from the New Testament section, and in which the poet announces, in the first person singular, that she will now ‘set in motion a greater work’ (maius opus moveo, 334).Footnote 12 Proba's preface, in fact, includes a striking sphragis-verse in which the poet names herself: she asks God to receive this ‘sacred song’ (sacrum … carmen, 9) and open up her heart, ‘so that I, Proba the prophetess/poet, may relate all mysteries’ (arcana ut possim vatis Proba cuncta referre, 12).Footnote 13 Other Christian poets also name themselves in their verses, and indeed use creative means to do so. Commodian, mentioned above, ends the second, final, book of his Instructiones with a poem whose initial letters, when read from bottom to top, yield the sphragis Commodianus mendicus Christi. According to Martha Malamud, the last verse of Prudentius’ Hamartigenia conceals an anagram that refers to the poet's name, Aurelius Prudentius Clemens: the final four words, poena levis clementer adurat, can be rearranged to read Aurelio Prudente se clamante; if we include the clementer of the original text, we have here all three of the poet's names.Footnote 14 Obviously, the presence of sphragides within anagrams or acrostics reinforces the very textual nature of these poems: they are clearly meant to be read (not heard) and examined carefully, with the reader scanning the letters and pages in search of hidden clues.
It has been argued that, whereas in the Latin West the combination of classical literary forms and Christian themes needed some qualification and justification, in the Greek East there was a stronger sense of continuity between pagan and Christian literature (and culture),Footnote 15 which explains the lack of a noisy rejection of poetic fictions in Greek Christian poetry. This might be true in broad terms, but, as Robert Shorrock warns, we should not be beguiled into thinking that the role of classical poetic forms was entirely unproblematic for Greek Christian poets.Footnote 16 In his long autobiographical poem, Gregory of Nazianzus (second half of the fourth century) clarifies that his reason for wanting to study classical authors as a young man was so that he could put these ‘bastard letters’ into the service of the genuine, Christian ones.Footnote 17 In another poem, titled Εἰς τὰ ἔμμετρα, Gregory offers a polemical defence of writing poetry on theological topics: this includes both an implied competition between classical and Christian literature (‘I cannot allow that the outsiders be superior to us in letters’)Footnote 18 and an explicit didacticism (poetry sweetens the bitterness of the Commandments and makes the path of virtue more palatable to the young). Modern scholars have argued that Gregory feels he needs to make the case for Christian poetry because a number of heretics had used poetry to spread their misguided beliefs,Footnote 19 and/or because in the ecclesiastical milieu of Constantinople the validity of Christian verse in general and biblical paraphrase in particular (which Gregory had also composed)Footnote 20 were not yet undisputed and indeed were to come under fierce attack by Nilus of Ancyra (late fourth – early fifth century).Footnote 21 Whatever his motivation, Gregory-the-poet is as self-referential as the Latin poets mentioned in the paragraphs above, and, like them, he both renounces the staple topics of profane poetry,Footnote 22 and encourages us to identify the narrator of his poems with the historical author behind them, occasionally even ‘sealing’ his verses with his own name,Footnote 23 including within acrostics.Footnote 24
While Gregory might be unique in the degree of metaliterary reflection with which he endows his poetry, other Greek-speaking Christian poets seem to be just as personally involved in their poems. At 343 lines and dating from the early or mid fourth century,Footnote 25 the Vision of Dorotheus (P.Bodmer 29) is the earliest extensive Christian poem written in Greek that has (partly) survived. This hexameter composition bears the title Ὅρασις Δωροθέου and narrates in the first person a visit to heaven (imagined as a palace) by an imperial guard. While in heaven, the poet-narrator experiences a (Hesiodically inflected) poetic investiture (vv. 170–7),Footnote 26 when Gabriel-Jesus places χαρίεσσαν ἀοι[δήν] (v. 173) in his heart; this, it is implied, allows him to ‘sing’ the present poem. He then undergoes a transformation, during which he becomes a stronger, braver and more virtuous version of himself, and decides to adopt the name Andreas (v. 226). Indeed, he is called Andreas by the Lord in v. 267, but then, when other characters in the vision see him and he appears to them taller than usual and bright as the sun, they ask ἦ τοῖός ἐστιν ὁ Κυντιάδης Δωρόθεος; (v. 300: ‘Is that really Dorotheus, the son of Quintus?’). When the vision ends, the poet-narrator rises up and says that the Lord has laid songs of various kinds in his heart (vv. 340–1). The poem ends here, which the papyrus indicates with a subscription that reads τε´λος τῆς ὁρα´σεως. Δωροθε´ου Κυι´ντου ποιητοῦ.Footnote 27 It is clear that the text presents itself as the true experience of a real person called Dorotheus. We might like to keep the narrator of this ‘fictional autobiography’ separate from the poet,Footnote 28 but Dorotheus-the-poet has ‘sealed’ the narrator with his own name,Footnote 29 and an ancient audience would be, in any way, inclined to hear the narrating ‘I’ as the voice of the real-life author.
From the first half of the fifth century we have three large-scale biblical epics: Nonnus’ Paraphrase of the Gospel according to John (henceforth, Paraphrase), the Metaphrasis Psalmorum and the Homeric Centos that come down to us under the name of the Empress Eudocia. The apocryphal Metaphrasis Psalmorum, attributed to Apollinaris, begins with a protheōria in which the authorial voice dedicates the poem to his spiritual father, Marcian, who had encouraged him to undertake the task of restoring the metrical grace of the Old Testament Psalms – the grace that was lost in the prose translation commissioned by Ptolemy (v. 21).Footnote 30 The very first word of the epic is an emphatic first-person verb, ἔλπομαι, which blurs the boundaries between poet and narrator, and immediately sets forth the poet's agenda. Apart from a literary programme (to celebrate God in the Ionian language, v. 107, and restore the metrical grace of the Psalms), the protheōria also offers information on the poet and his personal circumstances: in v. 3 he claims he is blind (τυφλὸς γεγαώς) but bears a different light (φάος ἄλλο),Footnote 31 while in vv. 36–43, within a reported speech by Marcian, the poet informs us that he is originally from Egypt, but at some point moved to Constantinople, where Marcian offered him patronage. The protheōria closes with a strong first-person claim that the poet has fulfilled Marcian's wishes, having the ever-living Christ as his assistant in song (Μαρκιανὸς ποθέεσκεν, ἐγὼ δὲ οἱ ἤνυσα βουλήν | Χριστὸν ἀεὶ ζώοντα λαχὼν ἐπαρωγὸν ἀοιδῆς, vv. 109–10).Footnote 32
In the long apologia which must have stood at the beginning of Eudocia's Homeric Centos (a composition which might or might not be what is nowadays referred to as the First Redaction) the poet pre-empts criticism of her poem, and details the history of its composition.Footnote 33 This book (deictic, τῆνδε … βίβλον, in v. 2) was first put together by Patricius,Footnote 34 but it had considerable imperfections and omissions, which Eudocia set out respectively to correct and fill in. Again, the poet merges with the narrator, as Eudocia describes her process of composition (e.g. ἀλλ’ ἐγὼ … σελίδας ἱερὰς μετὰ χεῖρα λαβοῦσα, vv. 9–10) and even draws attention to her female gender (κἀμοί, καὶ θηλυτέρῃ περ ἐούσῃ, v. 35). Even after the apologia, the poet-narrator of this poem inserts herself (or himself, if the verses do go back to Patricius) in the story and reveals her/his emotions and thoughts on the events s/he narrates – a practice well attested in Latin biblical epic.Footnote 35
Metaliterary hints in Nonnus’ Paraphrase
Nonnus of Panopolis does not fit in the pattern outlined above, and his Christian epic, the Paraphrase, appears to be an anomaly among large-scale, ambitious biblical epics. This poem shows no (obvious) signs of poetic self-consciousness. It has no prooemium,Footnote 36 epilogue or interlude, and its narrator never speaks about himself or allows us in any way to identify him.Footnote 37 This is all the more striking because Nonnus’ strategy in his mythological Dionysiaca is the exact opposite of the reticence he adopts in the Paraphrase. His 48-book secular epic is, indeed, heavily self-conscious. It begins with an extensive prooemium, in which the poet-narrator describes his own investiture by the Muses with Bacchic accoutrements (ἄξατέ μοι νάρθηκα, … Μοῦσαι, 1.11), catalogues his subject matterFootnote 38 and sets forth his aesthetic programme of poikilia (ποικίλον ὕμνον ἀράσσω, 1.15).Footnote 39 Apart from the prooemium there is also an interlude in the middle of the epic, in book 25, where the poet-narrator proclaims his ambition to surpass other poets, ‘both old and new’ (νέοισι καὶ ἀρχεγόνοισιν ἐρίζων, 25.27).Footnote 40 Later on in the same book, after a direct invocation of Homer (25.253–63),Footnote 41 he asks the Muse to transport him again to the battlefield (ἀλλὰ θεά με κόμιζε τὸ δεύτερον ἐς μόθον Ἰνδῶν, 25.264), where he expects to go on killing Dionysus’ Indian enemies (ὄφρα κατακτείνω νοερῷ δορὶ λείψανον Ἰνδῶν, 25.270).Footnote 42 The narrator of the Dionysiaca thus enters the world of his characters and participates in their actions in what could be taken as a strong version of metalepsis.Footnote 43 He also encourages us to identify him with the real-life author of the poem by occasionally reminding us of his Egyptian origin. In the prooemium, he privileges the Egyptian Proteus as his model, and refers to Pharos as a ‘neighbouring island’ (Φάρῳ παρὰ γείτονι νήσῳ, 1.13).Footnote 44 This connection of the poet-narrator with Egypt also crops up, unexpectedly, in a non-poetological passage. When the narrator of the Dionysiaca speaks of the (fictitious) Indian hippopotamus, he says that this animal also lives in his own Nile (οἷος ἐμοῦ Νείλοιο, 26.238), again reminding his readers of the real-life Egyptian author who is never far away from the story he is telling.Footnote 45
Arguably, Nonnus made a very deliberate choice not to reveal his identity or offer any poetological reflection in the Paraphrase, but why is this so? The only answer that has been offered thus far, by Thomas Schmitz, is that the poet-narrator of the Dionysiaca felt confident in polemically staking his ground against his classical models, poets ‘both old and new’, whereas the one of the Paraphrase would have found it unthinkable to challenge his biblical model: John the Evangelist himself.Footnote 46 It is obviously true that no Christian poet would pit him/herself against the Bible, but, as the discussion above suggests, Christian poets can and do speak about themselves and their poems, assuming a variety of different poses, some of which would have been available to the poet of the Paraphrase. A renunciation of the themes and motifs of profane poetry, as found in many Latin poets and in Gregory of Nazianzus,Footnote 47 would have been unlikely here given the (probably contemporaneous) composition of the Dionysiaca,Footnote 48 but other poetological concerns could have been addressed: the poet could have explained what motivated him to undertake the task of setting John's Gospel into hexameters,Footnote 49 or why he chose this Gospel in particular.Footnote 50 A defence of Nonnus’ aesthetic programme of poikilia (as set out in the Dionysiaca) would have also been supremely appropriate: the whole enterprise of paraphrasing depends, after all, on the art of variation – saying the same thing in different words.Footnote 51
An attempt to discern an implicit metapoetic relationship between the Paraphrase and the Dionysiaca has recently been made by Konstantinos Spanoudakis,Footnote 52 who noticed that the end of Nonnus’ mythological epic and the beginning of his Christian one are linked together by a ‘bridge’. The Dionysiaca ends with the formal reception of Dionysus, the θεὸς ἀμπελόεις (48.974) in Olympus, where he shares a feast with his father Zeus and is seated next to Apollo (in the last verse of the epic, 48.978, σύνθρονος Ἀπόλλωνι).Footnote 53 These final lines of the Dionysiaca invite a comparison with the beginning of the Paraphrase, where Christ, the θεο`ς … λο´γος (1.5), is ‘indivisible from the Father, seated on the same throne in the boundless abode’ (πατρὸς ἔην ἀμέριστος, ἀτέρμονι σύνθρονος ἕδρῃ, 1.4).Footnote 54 According to Spanoudakis, this ‘bridge’ shows Dionysus as an inferior god compared to Christ, and presents the Paraphrase as ‘a “historical” continuation and prospective consummation of the longer poem’. The connections Spanoudakis points out are doubtlessly valid and significant, but will only get us so far in determining Nonnus’ own objectives and his cultural/literary agenda for the Paraphrase. Thus, although it could be argued that the impersonal initial hymn for the Theos Logos is an appropriate preface for an epic poem (as hexameter hymns did sometimes introduce longer epics),Footnote 55 the lack of a narrative set-up and an independent authorial voice at the beginning of the Paraphrase is still felt, and indeed to such a degree that Schmitz is inclined to say that the poem begins in medias res.Footnote 56
My suggestion is that the end of the Paraphrase, rather than the beginning, is where we should be looking for poetological reflections, as this is also where the narrator of John's Gospel reveals that the source/author of this text is the Beloved Disciple.Footnote 57 I would like to start by taking a closer look at the very last episode narrated in book 21. In the corresponding chapter of John's Gospel, the resurrected Jesus asks Peter three times if he loves him more than any other. Each time, Peter replies in variations of ‘yes’, and Jesus commands him to shepherd his (Jesus’) flock, after which he prophesies that Peter will die with his arms stretched out (i.e. on a cross). Jesus’ commands in John 21:15–17 read: βόσκε τὰ ἀρνία μου (‘Tend my lambs’); ποίμαινε τὰ πρόβατά μου (‘Shepherd my sheep’); and βόσκε τὰ πρόβατά μου (‘Tend my sheep’). In the Paraphrase, the corresponding commands read: βόσκε μοι ἔμφρονας ἄρνας ἀσιγήτους σέο ῥάβδῳ (‘With your staff tend for me my unsilent, intelligent lambs’, 21.89); ἡμετέρων ποίμαινε νοήμονα πώεα μήλων (‘Shepherd the rational flocks of my sheep’, 21.98); and οὐρανίῃ ποίμαινε καλαύροπι μῆλα καὶ ἄρνας (‘Shepherd my sheep and lambs with the heavenly crook’, 21.108). Nonnus has ‘embellished’ the flock to be shepherded by Peter with adjectives which mean that these animals are endowed with speech and intelligence, and has added the pastoral instruments Peter will have to use: the staff and the crook. As is his practice elsewhere,Footnote 58 the poet starts by adhering closely to his model before striking out on his own: the first two commands repeat the exact same verbs we find in John (βόσκε for the first command, ποίμαινε for the second) and mention the same kinds of animals (‘lambs’ in the first one, generic ‘sheep’ in the second). In the third command Nonnus adds ‘lambs’ to the Johannine ‘sheep’, and uses ποίμαινε instead of (John's) βόσκε. While the differences might seem inconsequential, they could draw our attention to the fact that the conjunction ποίμαινε καλαύροπι only occurs here and at the beginning of the Dionysiaca (Κυπριδίῃ ποίμαινε καλαύροπι νυμφίον Ἥρης, same sedes, 1.82). Following in the path forged by Spanoudakis, it is possible to detect here another ‘bridge’ between Nonnus’ two poems, as the very last narrative of the Paraphrase and the opening narrative of the Dionysiaca both include scenes of paradoxical or metaphorical shepherding. In the first episode of the Dionysiaca we find Eros ‘shepherding with the crook of Cypris’ Zeus, who is transformed into a bull and is abducting Europa – note that, like Jesus’ ‘sheep’, Zeus is also not really an animal, and is, in fact, later described as an ‘intelligent ship’ (ἐχέφρονα νῆα, 1.91).Footnote 59 The effect of this ‘bridge’ is again to highlight the superiority of the Christian god: Jesus is in control, and commands his disciple to tend the Christian community, whereas Zeus is himself the ‘animal’, out of control, being driven by an irrational force.
There is one further element which adds force to the idea that this final episode holds some poetological significance for the Paraphrase. Strikingly, after prophesying Peter's death, Nonnus’ Jesus gives him an additional order, which is not present in the Gospel of John: that is, Nonnus’ Jesus commands Peter a fourth time to shepherd his flock, but this time he tells him to do so ‘with the blossoms of books’, (ἄρνας ἐμὰς ποίμαινε σαόφρονας ἄνθεσι βίβλων, 21.117). These verses have been suspected,Footnote 60 but, stylistically at least, seem to be Nonnian enough (this fourth command follows the same verbal pattern as the first three), and they do carry a certain metaliterary potential. The new, and entirely unexpected, command indicates that Peter will need books (and not a staff or crook) to carry out his ‘shepherding’,Footnote 61 and could imply that this book that we are reading now is such an instrument of teaching the Christian flock, as it propagates the Christian message through poetic, flowery language.Footnote 62 But still, there is no authorial voice telling us that this is what the poet set out to do. If we recall Juvencus’ confident proclamation that in his verses the divine law takes on ‘the earthly ornaments of language’ (ornamenta … terrestria linguae, 805), the parallel can serve only to highlight the contrast between the attitudes of the two poets.Footnote 63
After the conversation between Jesus and Peter, John's Gospel concludes with an epilogue, in which it is finally revealed that the source of the information contained in this text is the Beloved Disciple (21:24–5):
Οὗτός ἐστιν ὁ μαθητὴς ὁ μαρτυρῶν περὶ τούτων καὶ ὁ γράψας ταῦτα, καὶ οἴδαμεν ὅτι ἀληθὴς αὐτοῦ ἡ μαρτυρία ἐστίν. Ἔστιν δὲ καὶ ἄλλα πολλὰ ἃ ἐποίησεν ὁ Ἰησοῦς, ἅτινα ἐὰν γράφηται καθ’ ἕν, οὐδ’ αὐτὸν οἶμαι τὸν κόσμον χωρῆσαι τὰ γραφόμενα βιβλία.
This is the disciple who bears witness about these things and who wrote them down, and we know that his testimony is true. There are many more things that Jesus did, which, if written down one by one, I do not think the world itself could have enough space for the books that would be written.
Nonnus’ rendition of these final lines is the second passage in which, I argue, it is possible to detect a subtle metaliterary hint (Par. 21.135–43):
Gianfranco Agosti has already argued that these final verses contain some poetological reflection. His argument centres on the adjective νεοτευχέας, a Homeric hapax which Nonnus uses to qualify the Johannine βιβλία, and which earlier poets had also employed to highlight the innovative nature of their poetry.Footnote 64 For Agosti, Nonnus advertises through this adjective the new book(s), written in his characteristic, modern style. More recently, Andrew Faulkner has expressed doubts regarding the self-reflexivity of νεοτευχής. He objects that it would ‘be quite a boast to set one's own poetic output in apposition to the numerous books needed to record all the deeds of Christ’, and points out that the same adjective was used twice more in the Paraphrase ‘without any programmatic implication’.Footnote 65 While the two other attestations of νεοτευχής in the poem are not self-reflexive in any obvious way, they nevertheless can have some bearing on the present passage. In 14.5–9 Jesus tells his disciples that the heavenly abode has many chambers to receive them (14.5–9):
Like the ‘newly wrought books’ that will never be written, the ‘newly wrought place’ in heaven is part of a counterfactual conditional, and, like them, it will never come to be, but for the very opposite reasons from those we find in the epilogue: in book 14, the heavenly abode already has enough space and no new chambers will be needed; in the epilogue, the world does not have enough space to contain the never-to-be-written books which would record all of Jesus’ miracles.Footnote 67 Moreover, the idea that Jesus would create a ‘newly wrought place’ is notably absent from John's Gospel, which merely speaks of ‘preparing’ the place – perhaps inspired by Cyril, Nonnus’ νεοτευχέα χῶρον is as much his own creation as it is Jesus’.Footnote 68
The only other appearance of νεοτευχής in the poem again refers to an act of creation by Jesus (and the poet). In John 9:6, Jesus heals the man born blind by applying on his eyes the mud he has formed by spitting on the ground. Nonnus innovates here by presenting the blind man as lacking eyes (or having eyes that are somehow ‘undivided and uninscribed’: ἀμέριστον ἔχων ἀχάρακτον ὀπωπήν, 9.5), which Jesus goes on to mould with the ‘familiar mud, out of man-begetting dust’ (ὀφθαλμοὺς τελέων νεοτευχέας ἠθάδι πηλῷ | ἐκ χοὸς ἀνδρογόνοιο, 9.33–4).Footnote 69 Nonnus, therefore, makes this scene into a second Genesis by explicitly recalling God's creation of man.Footnote 70 The blind man's ‘newly wrought eyes’ are evidently fashioned by Jesus, but, in a way, ‘added’ by Nonnus, as the poet once more introduces exegesis into his poetic rendering of the Gospel. Faulkner's suggestion that the poet would not put his own work on a par with the obviously unattainable βίβλους τοσσατίας is valid, but it ought to be further qualified: both the use of νεοτευχής elsewhere in the epic and its positioning in the narratively privileged epilogue allow us to see here a subtle hint towards the poet's careful innovations in his retelling of the Gospel, perhaps only one ‘newly wrought’ book among the τοσσατίας that could (but will never) be written.
The Paraphrase and/as the Gospel
If this hint is felt to be rather too subtle (and it is true that Nonnus does not, in any way, advertise his input), we must return to the epilogue and ask what it can tell us about the narrator of the poem. The astonishing answer to that question is, ‘absolutely nothing’. Where a reader might have expected to find a sphragis containing some information on the author of the poem,Footnote 71 or the poet's farewell to his work,Footnote 72 Nonnus uses wording reminiscent of Theognis’ famous self-naming sphragis (σοφιζομένῳ μὲν ἐμοὶ σφρηγὶς ἐπικείσθω, 1.19)Footnote 73 to negate further information and effectively shroud himself in silence (σοφῇ σφρηγίσσατο σιγῇ, 21.139). Although to ‘seal something in silence’ is quasi-formulaic in Nonnus, the combination of sealing, silence and wisdom only occurs here and in 11.145, exactly in the middle of the epic, where the Nonnian Jesus tells Martha to keep silent (in Nonnus’ wording, ‘place on her lips the wise seal of silence’, αἴκε φυλάξῃς | χείλεσιν ὑμετέροισι σοφὴν σφρηγῖδα σιωπῆς, 11.144–5), an order which is remarkably absent in John.Footnote 74 It should also be noted that John's Gospel does not mention ‘silence’ here, and that it is perhaps paradoxical that the poet would want to end the Gospel of the Logos on a note of silence,Footnote 75 which, at least in theory, is the opposite of the authorial pose of frankness and full disclosure to which readers would be more accustomed.Footnote 76
The use of a first-person verb in Nonnus’ epilogue, in the very last verse of the poem (21.143), represents another dead-end in any attempt to identify a poet-narrator for the Paraphrase. Nonnus’ ἔλπομαι ‘translates’ the Gospel's οἶμαι, maintaining the same person, number and tense, and thus creates the impression that the one who speaks here is the Evangelist himself. In these first-person verbs, the ἔλπομαι of Nonnus and the οἶμαι of the Gospel, the poet and the Evangelist merge into a single authorial voice. This ventriloquism recalls (and is reinforced by) Nonnus’ equally striking rendering of the only other passage in which the Evangelist uses a first-person verb.Footnote 77 Right at the beginning of the epic, in 1.42–3, Nonnus says that ‘His glory | we saw with our human eyes’ (κλέος αὐτοῦ | εἴδομεν ἀνδρομέοισιν ἐν ὄμμασιν). Nonnus’ εἴδομεν ‘translates’ the Johannine first-person verb ἐθεασάμεθα (καὶ ἐθεασάμεθα τὴν δόξαν αὐτοῦ, John 1:14), again maintaining the same person, number and tense. If taken at face value, εἴδομεν implies that the poet-narrator of this poem is one of the people who witnessed Christ's glory with their own eyes.
The thesis I put forward in this article is that Nonnus does not leave any trace of his identity inside the poem because he does not set out to write a παράφρασις or a μεταβολή of the Gospel (which are both valid titles, but which do not appear nor are alluded to inside the text itself).Footnote 78 Nonnus apparently intends to write the Gospel, and ‘become’ John the Evangelist by doing so. The lack of deictics in the epilogue is telling. When Nonnus says that he (i.e. the Beloved Disciple) is the one who, ‘having perceived all these things, wrote them down in the book filled with the words of God’ (καὶ νοέων τάδε πάντα κατέγραφε θέσπιδι βίβλῳ, 21.138), he introduces no deictic to differentiate between this poem and the Gospel.Footnote 79 Which is ‘the book filled with the words of God’? Is it the Gospel, or this book that we are reading here, or both? The answer, I would argue, should be ‘both’, because, on some level, they are one and the same text. This observation is borne out by Nonnus’ rendition of the interim ‘epilogue’, which closes book 20, and also centres on the idea that the ‘witness of truth’, who is not identified with the Beloved Disciple on this occasion, omitted many miracles from his account.Footnote 80 This is the passage as paraphrased by Nonnus (Par. 20.136–42):Footnote 81
Again we have a τάδε πάντα, which refers to the contents of the Gospel, and by extension the Paraphrase, accompanied by a reference to ‘the book filled with the words of God’ (θέσπιδι βίβλῳ, 138; the same conjunction, in the same sedes, and same line number, is found in 21.138). In this passage too there is no deictic marker to set Gospel and Paraphrase apart. It is significant that John's Gospel does include a deictic here, when it says that many miracles are not written in this book (ἐν τῷ βιβλίῳ τούτῳ, 20:30). Nonnus’ immediately following mention of a book, in v. 140 (ταῦτα δὲ πάντα πέλει τετυπωμένα μάρτυρι δέλτῳ), is just as ambiguous, as it could equally refer to the Gospel itself (the original ‘testifying tablet’) or its poetic rendition, since the Paraphrase still contains ‘all of these things’, and thus continues to bear testimony for Christ. The introduction of an author-figure, ‘he who inscribed all these things’, in v. 139 (ὃς τάδε πάντα χάραξε) – where John's Gospel only has an agent-less passive construction (ἃ οὐκ ἔστιν γεγραμμένα, 20:30) – similarly conflates the poet and the Evangelist: both of them have, in fact, ‘inscribed all these things’, but we only have a singular ὅς here, implying that the two are, paradoxically, one.
Returning to Nonnus’ final epilogue in book 21, it is not necessarily clear here either that the authorial οὗτος right at the beginning of that passage is someone other than the author of this text.Footnote 83 When we read, in John's Gospel (21:24), Οὗτός ἐστιν ὁ μαθητὴς ὁ μαρτυρῶν περὶ τούτων καὶ ὁ γράψας ταῦτα, we instinctively assume (and ancient commentators did so too) that the Evangelist, the one ‘who wrote these things’, is referring to himself in the third person, and revealing that he was involved as a character (the Beloved Disciple) in the narrative all along without us knowing it.Footnote 84 There is absolutely nothing in the way Nonnus renders this sentence that would prevent us from making the same assumption about the identity of the Paraphrase's οὗτος, even though we, of course, know that this text is not the Gospel, and its author is not the Evangelist.Footnote 85
In a way, Nonnus’ impersonation of John the Evangelist is an entirely ‘classical’ strategy of authenticating his text and, perhaps, indicating its generic affiliation (‘Gospel’ more than ‘epic’).Footnote 86 As scholars have long observed, ancient poets do not just imitate other texts, but impersonate other poets (usually the πρῶτοι εὑρεταί), meaning that one who sets out to compose iambic blame poetry ‘becomes’ Archilochus, one who composes a theogony ‘becomes’ Hesiod, and so forth.Footnote 87 Poets earlier than Nonnus also experimented with close adaptations of their models. Catullus 51 is a near-translation of Sappho 31 (but Catullus does not quite ‘become’ Sappho, as he mentions his own name, v. 13, and that of Lesbia, v. 7). The Posthomerica of Quintus of Smyrna lacks a proem, and presents itself as ‘still’ the Iliad, picking up the story from Hector's funeral, exactly where the Iliad left off.Footnote 88 The narrator of this epic not only speaks like Homer, replicating Homeric language and style, but also inserts a pseudo-autobiographical interlude whose details can easily be ascribed to ‘the real’ Homer.Footnote 89 This poet's impersonation of his great predecessor is, thus, a thorough and sustained conceit, and can be compared to Nonnus’ meticulously constructed fiction that he ‘is’ John the Evangelist.
It is clear that, at least for certain types of poetry, the impersonation of older, canonical models hinges on the (re)performativity of texts: poets take up their personae like actors take up masks, and create an illusion of identity with their models – ‘an illusion that was ever predicated on universal awareness of its unreality’.Footnote 90 In a cultural milieu where declamation – the pinnacle of rhetorical education – involved precisely such a self-aware identification of the (present) speaker with the (past) icons of myth and classical history, poets could be, and were, conceptualised as declaimers and actors.Footnote 91 Although Nonnus’ poems are obviously ‘bookish’ compositions, their (re)performativity should not be ignored. The fact that the narrator of the Paraphrase ‘becomes’ John can usefully be examined within the context of oral delivery, and ought to reinforce recent attempts to examine the Paraphrase as a text that was not just read by individuals, but performed in front of an audience, perhaps even in a liturgical setting.Footnote 92 Nonnus’ contemporary, Synesius of Cyrene, provides a vivid example of how, in his public reading of written texts, he identifies to such a degree with the author whose text he performs that he often makes impromptu additions, which are lauded as much as the original text (Dio 18.14–25):
ἤδη δέ ποτε οἶδα, περικαθημένων ἀνθρώπων ἐτύγχανον μὲν τῶν εὐγενῶν καὶ στασίμων τι συγγραμμάτων ἔχων ἐν ταῖν χεροῖν, δεομένων δὲ ἀναγινώσκειν εἰς κοινὴν ἀκοὴν ἐποίουν οὕτως⋅ εἰ δέ ποτε παρείκοι, προσεξεῦρον ἄν τι καὶ προσηρμήνευσα⋅ οὐ μὰ τὸν λόγιον, οὐκ ἐπιτηδεύσας, ἀλλ’ ἐπελθὸν οὕτως συνεχώρησα τῇ γνώμῃ τε καὶ τῇ γλώττῃ. καὶ δῆτα θόρυβος ἤρθη πολύς, καὶ κρότος ἐρράγη τὸν ἄνδρα ἐπαινούντων ἐκεῖνον, ὅτου τὸ σύγγραμμα ἦν, ἐπ’ αὐταῖς οὐχ ἥκιστα ταῖς προσθήκαις. οὕτω μοι τὴν ψυχὴν ὁ θεὸς ἁπαλὸν ἐκμαγεῖον ἐποίησεν τῶν ἐν λέξεσί τε καὶ ἤθεσι χαρακτήρων.Footnote 93
I know that one time, I happened to have some noble and weighty composition in my hands, and when those sitting around me asked me to read so that everyone might hear, I proceeded in this manner. Whenever it was appropriate, I would invent something or add an explanation – not, by the God of Discourse [Hermes], having prepared it, but rather whatever occurred to me I yielded it, just as it was, to my thought and tongue. Then indeed a great uproar arose, and applause broke out as they praised that man whose composition it was, and not least for my own additions. Thus the god made my soul a receptacle of soft wax for the words and characters to be imprinted on.
What Synesius describes here approximates the process of paraphrasis. Synesius is both the reader of a fixed text, and the ‘author’, in his own right, of that same text. Like the Platonic Ion, he becomes so enthralled in the performance that his soul receives the imprints of the original text,Footnote 94 and he becomes the ideal conduit for that text's transmission. Unlike the rhapsodic rapture of Ion, however, Synesius’ enthusiasm does not lead him to lose his own identity. He is still able to make additions and append interpretations, in the same manner that the poet of the Paraphrase amplifies and interprets John's Gospel (mostly through adjectives such as νεοτευχής), but without ever destroying the conceit that he ‘is’ John. Like the Paraphrase, the text that results from Synesius’ performance both ‘is’ and ‘is not’ the original composition, and the audience certainly appreciates this duality. The fictional identification of the Paraphrase's poet-narrator with the Evangelist would also be all the more effective and striking in a performative context, where any first-person statements (εἴδομεν, ἔλπομαι) are more readily attributed to the speaking ‘I’. The lack of autobiographical details and autonomous authorial voice in the Paraphrase, which appeared so incongruous with the poet's practice in the Dionysiaca, can now be explained as a device that would allow any performer, in all subsequent readings, to also ‘become’ John the Evangelist.
Conclusion: the poet and/as the Evangelist
But why was it so important for the poet-narrator of the Paraphrase (as well as its subsequent performers) to ‘become’ John? As well as honouring the Evangelist and his text, this impersonation, I argue, ought to be seen as an exercise in Christian ὁμοίωσις θεῷ. The idea that one can really ‘become’ John (and by doing so ‘become’ Jesus) had already occurred to a prominent Alexandrian theologian and commentator on John's Gospel, Origen.Footnote 95 The crucial passage comes from the prologue to this commentary (1.4.23):
τολμητέον τοίνυν εἰπεῖν τῶν δὲ εὐαγγελίων ἀπαρχὴν τὸ κατὰ Ἰωάννην, οὗ τὸν νοῦν οὐδεὶς δύναται λαβεῖν μὴ ἀναπεσὼν ἐπὶ τὸ στῆθος Ἰησοῦ μηδὲ λαβὼν ἀπὸ Ἰησοῦ τὴν Μαρίαν γινομένην καὶ αὐτοῦ μητέρα. καὶ τηλικοῦτον δὲ γενέσθαι δεῖ τὸν ἐσόμενον ἄλλον Ἰωάννην, ὥστε οἱονεὶ τὸν Ἰωάννην δειχθῆναι ὄντα Ἰησοῦν ὑπὸ Ἰησοῦ. εἰ γὰρ οὐδεὶς υἱὸς Μαρίας κατὰ τοὺς ὑγιῶς περὶ αὐτῆς δοξάζοντας ἢ Ἰησοῦς, φησὶ δὲ Ἰησοῦς τῇ μητρί⋅ “ἴδε ὁ υἱός σου” καὶ οὐχί “ἴδε καὶ οὗτος υἱός σου”, ἴσον εἴρηκε τῷ “ἴδε οὗτός ἐστιν Ἰησοῦς ὃν ἐγέννησας.”
I would dare say, then, that the first-fruit of the Gospels is the one according to John, whose meaning (νοῦς) nobody can comprehend, unless he has also reclined in the bosom of Jesus or received Mary from Jesus to become his mother too. But the one who is to become another John needs to be such that, like John, he will be shown by Jesus to be Jesus. For if, according to those who hold a sound opinion of her, Mary had no son but Jesus, and Jesus tells His mother, ‘Behold, your son’, and not, ‘Behold, he too is your son’, it is as if He had said, ‘Behold, this is Jesus, whom you bore.’
Origen believes that the ideal reader of John's Gospel is the one who will become ‘another John’ (ἄλλον Ἰωάννην). What this controversial commentator had perceptively observed is that in the two actions he refers to here, John, the Beloved Disciple, becomes a double of Jesus.Footnote 96 First, at the beginning of the Gospel, Jesus is in the bosom of his Father.Footnote 97 In the famous Last Supper scene, John reclines in the bosom of Jesus.Footnote 98 Then, at the crucifixion, Jesus entrusts his mother to John, telling her, ‘Behold, your son’, and not ‘one more son’. For Origen, it follows that Jesus designates John to ‘become’ Jesus. Origen's argument, therefore, is that it is possible for the ideal reader of the Gospel not only to ‘become’ John, but also, through John, to ‘become’ Jesus, the son of Mary.Footnote 99 Nonnus’ narrator embodies this process of ‘becoming’ John, and therefore ‘becoming’ Jesus, through writing and performing the Gospel of John. He thus also allows subsequent readers and performers of his poem to follow him in this path towards ὁμοίωσις θεῷ.Footnote 100
Nonnus’ Jesus, indeed, places a great amount of emphasis on the idea that his disciples are (or should become) his identical copies – and he does so using vocabulary that oscillates between the notions of ‘making a copy’ (that is, something that is still different) and ‘really becoming one and the same’. One marked example of the Nonnian Jesus’ paradoxical vocabulary of imitation can be found in the speech he delivers after washing his disciples’ feet. Here, he explains that he did this so
The stress on imitation is seminally present in the Gospel, where Jesus says he provided an ὑπόδειγμα (‘example’) for his disciples,Footnote 102 and it cannot be denied that the vocabulary of imitation plays an important role in Nonnus’ overall poetic aesthetics. But we can go beyond Nonnus’ noted penchant for the type of expressions that focus on copying and imitating.Footnote 103 Even in the Dionysiaca such expressions can be pushed to the extreme, and imitation can become identity: at 19.346–8 the metamorphosed Silenus is called the ἰσοφυὲς μίμημα of the river, at a moment when he has already turned into the river, and the narration of the miraculous event has reached its end. At that point, Silenus is not a ‘replica’ of the river; he is the river. In the Paraphrase, when Jesus exhorts his students to behave like his exact replicas, what ἀντίτυπον or ἰσοφυὲς μίμημα implies is, in this case, the spiritual metamorphosis of becoming like God, ὁμοίωσις θεῷ.Footnote 104
Jesus’ long monologue in books 13–17 abounds in this kind of rhetoric. In the parable of the True Vine, for example, the Nonnian Jesus exhorts his disciples (the metaphorical branches of the vine tree) to ‘stay and grow together into one with me’ (μίμνετε συμπεφυῶτες ἐμοί, 15.8), where the Johannine Jesus simply said ‘stay in me’ (μείνατε ἐν ἐμοί, 15:4). Nonnus’ addition of συμπεφυῶτες emphasises the potential for full assimilation and identity between Jesus and his disciples.Footnote 105 This participle is strongly reminiscent of the adjective σύμφυτος, which Nonnus uses elsewhere to describe the relationship between the Father and the Son, two separate beings that are, nevertheless, one.Footnote 106 It was already fundamental for the ideology of John's Gospel that the blueprint of the Father–Son relationship can be extended to the disciples, and through them to all the Christian faithful. Nonnus’ added emphasis on the concepts of imitation and identity (or imitation leading to identity) could indicate that he saw in the Gospel's ideology the challenge to create a text that, like the Son, is both different from and the same as the Father. Also, like the disciples (and in particular John),Footnote 107 this text performs an exact imitation of its original, and thus becomes an ἀντίτυπον or ἰσοφυὲς μίμημα of the Gospel, equal to it in every way, though still a different text.Footnote 108
While the Latin Christian poets hope that their poetry will guarantee their salvation in the afterlife, Nonnus’ poem makes no such claim and indeed tells us nothing about its author and his objectives. This silence seems, at first sight, an aberration considering the strong authorial voice that characterises both Greek and Latin Christian poetry. The Paraphrase, however, may in fact be serving the same purposes through the silence and effacement of its narrator. By ‘becoming’ John, the poet-narrator of the Paraphrase shows that he has understood the νοῦς of the Gospel, and stakes a claim for his personal salvation as the disciple who ‘becomes’ Jesus. Moreover, through this strategy, he allows his reader or performer to follow him in this spiritual journey of ὁμοίωσις θεῷ.
Recent attempts to ‘rehabilitate’ the Paraphrase aim to bypass ‘its apparent lack of originality’,Footnote 109 and examine how the text resonates within its fifth-century context. This article does not mean to contest such approaches. My argument is, rather, that the ‘lack of originality’ (in that the poem rarely diverges from its Vorlage) is itself the most salient feature of this text, and that this is calculated and designed – it is no accident that readers have to remind themselves, and feel forced to affirm, that this text is different from the Gospel and should be seen within its own context. Late antiquity saw the flourishing of poetic forms such as centos, whose authors strove to create texts identical to, yet paradoxically not the same as, the originals from which their verses were culled.Footnote 110 The Paraphrase is, in this sense, a perfect example of this late antique ‘anachronic’ mentality: like Lactantius’ phoenix at the epigraph of this article, the poem is itself, but it also ‘is’ a different text – its own prior incarnation – the Gospel.Footnote 111 As I have argued, the ventriloquism of John by Nonnus’ narrator makes of this ‘double’ text a deeply spiritual, as well as a literary, exercise.
