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Truth and Opinion in Nonnos' Paraphrase of John and Dionysiaca
(abstract)

by Edwin D. Floyd

Though outside the main chronological frame of Classical literature, the
oeuvre of Nonnos (fifth century A.D.) is yet significant for fully
appreciating Greek thought. Probably the Christian /Paraphrase of John /
and the pagan / Dionysiaca / are by the same author. Moreover, it now
appears fairly probable that the latter poem draws upon stylistic
features which were first developed for the / Paraphrase /; see Vian,
/Revue des Etudes Grecques/ 110, 1997, 143-60. How can this be, inasmuch
as the Paraphrase represents something relatively new in the Greco-Roman
world, while the Dionysiaca represents an older world view?

The answer which I suggest is that the philosopher-poet Parmenides
served as Nonnos' model. The first section in Parmenides' poem, /
Aletheia /, maintains that Being can exist only now and that "was" and
"will be" are hence excluded. Such a view would seem to be incompatible
with any sort of physics; nevertheless, Parmenides goes on, in another
section, / Doxa /, to provide an explanation of the nature of the sun,
moon, and stars, the development of human life, etc. Building upon (and
adding to) some verbal parallels between Parmenides and Nonnos,
discussed by Accorinti, /Nonno di Panopoli, Parafrasi ..., Canto XX/,
1996, I see a similar overall pattern in Nonnos' oeuvre. With some
oversimplification, the pattern is that the Paraphrase and Dionysiaca
deal with the sacred and the secular - with truth and opinion -
respectively.

One instantiation of this is the fact that Parmenides effects the
seemingly precluded transition from Aletheia to Doxa through the
resonances of an ancient formula, / kosmon ... epeôn/ "arrangement ...
of words"; see Floyd, /Actes du XVe Congrès International des
Linguistes/, vol. 4, pp. 15-18 (1993). Nonnos also uses the combination,
if we are bold enough to bridge the transition from one poem to the
other. At the end of the Paraphrase (20.....), we have the phrase
/kosmon aeîai/ "for the world to raise up". Then, the first word of the
/Dionysiaca/ is /eipe/ "speak". This is exactly the same as the pattern
in Parmenides, with / kosmon/ separated from the verb /eipe/, from the
same root as /epeôn/, by a single word. Moreover, even though the
specific usage of /kosmon/ is different in these particular Parmenides
and Nonnos passages, the use of /kosmos/ as "world" was, according to
Theophrastus, first introduced by Parmenides.