Granddaughters of the sun, it was immediately obvious that Ariadne and Medea were related. They both had a sort of golden light spreading outward from the eyes. They were born far apart, in the far south and the far north of the earth. Both helped a foreigner, were carried off by him, by him abandoned. They never met. But they touched each other through a fabric. Each had fingered that purple tunic, woven for a god and still fragrant with his vanished body.
Oistrus, the gadfly who torments the cattle, is the most elusive and at the same time the most omnipresent of the powers that governed the Greeks. Ate, that infatuation that includes its own punishment, is the equivalent figure among the women of destiny, the Fates. But Oistrus is a boy and rarely shows himself. In the sultry mythological heat their seminude bodies inhabited, gods, heroes, and the sons and daughters of gods moved about with moist, bright eyes, until a buzzing approached them from the invisible. A sting pricked them to their very souls, and thus were events unleashed. In the beginning it was difficult to tell erotic and murderous frenzies apart. Both arose from that intermittent buzzing, the incursions of that small, malicious creature. Only once, on the wonderful Canosa wine bowl, now in Munich, does Oistrus appear in all his majesty. It is a synchronic vision of the last convulsion of the tragedy of Medea. The characters are arranged on three levels. Above, as always, are a few distracted divinities: the Dioscuri are looking at each other, maybe talking quietly. Athena is seated, one arm resting on her shield, the other holding her helmet. Heracles, naked and armed, is watching her. The next level shows Creon’s palace. Creontea is lying across the throne, on her head the poisoned crown, gift of the sorceress Medea, crazed with jealousy: “coronam ex venenis fecit auream.” Her brother, Hippotes, is running to snatch the murderous crown from her head, while Creon, her father, clutches his hair in desperation. Other people are running to help too, even an old man with a stick. And they all know there’s nothing they can do. On the lowest level we find Medea, Oriental granddaughter of the Sun. She is wearing the most sumptuous, ornate clothes, which hide everything but her beautiful, staring face and her hands, the right gripping a big sword while with the left she grabs the hair over her son’s forehead from behind. He is on tiptoe, as though dancing, on an altar stone. Another second and the sword will plunge into his naked chest. Jason bursts into the picture from the right, Jason the betrayer, the hero who has been overwhelmed. His body is tense and powerful, more so than Heracles’, an expression of furious impotence on his face. Farther to the right, and motionless, stands another Oriental figure, solemn this time. The painter of the bowl has written around his head: “phantom of Aeetes.”
The ghost of Medea’s father, who had always been against her passion for Jason, thus watches the denouement he had foreseen. Then there are two objects as well, strewn like toys on a dark background: an open box in which Medea had put the poisoned crown; a nuptial basin, knocked over, forgotten. And in the center of it all, firm and erect between Medea and Jason, a young man with long hair and a smooth chest holds a torch in each hand. He is standing on a light-wheeled chariot, driven by two long snakes, which rise in flowing spirals, turning their forked tongues toward Medea. That young man on the chariot is Oistrus, and it is he who is directing events; he is the prompter, the archon who just this once shows himself in the splendor of his person. But elsewhere, even in the element where he resides, the invisible, Oistrus is the companion of all excesses, all cravings, all the passions with which for centuries the Greeks wove their stories.
One of the most charming enigmas of the ancient world is the life of Nonnus. Almost nothing is known about him with any certainty, except his place of birth: Panopolis, in Egypt. As to the date of that birth, scholars have varied embarrassingly, but it now seems generally accepted that it must have been in the fifth century A.D. The enigma, however, has to do with the order in which he wrote his works: Nonnus left us the Dionysiaca in forty-eight books (a number equal to the sum of the books in the Iliad and the Odyssey) and a Paraphrase of St. John’s Gospel.
This great writer, who has often been disparagingly dubbed “baroque,” but in the same spirit could equally well be described as rococo, encrusted his poetry with voluptuous idylls and cosmological secrets. The Dionysiaca are an overflowing summa of the pagan world, a world that should have been on the brink of extinction but that here opens up before our eyes like a meadow of narcissi. What bothers people, though, is the fact that the only other work by Nonnus, his Paraphrase of St. John’s Gospel, presupposes a Christian author. Yet there is nothing that would allow us to claim that the Paraphrase was written after the Dionysiaca. This raises the following questions: did Nonnus celebrate the last, and truly dazzling, lights of the pagan world with his poem on Dionysus, then convert to the new and already dominant faith and write the Paraphrase? Or was it the other way around: Nonnus, a Christian, was quite suddenly struck by the pagan vision, as though by lightning, and thus went from the Paraphrase to the tidal wave of the Dionysiaca? Or could one offer a third hypothesis: that Nonnus wrote the Dionysiaca and the Paraphrase at the same time. With one hand he described the adventures of Dionysus while the other evoked the trial of Jesus. His mind was moved by both these divine beings. And perhaps he didn’t even need to ask himself whether he believed in both, because he was writing them.
There are no demonstrable facts to help us solve the enigma. All we have are the texts, the style. And here the rhetorical ploy that most immediately strikes us in all Nonnus’s writing is his redundancy. The Dionysiaca are the most sumptuous celebration imaginable of the redundant variant and the rampantly superfluous. But behind Nonnus the poet lurks Nonnus the theologian. This churning variegation, vain as nature itself, in fact alludes to the ultimate truth of the tale he is telling: that it is precisely those endlessly and meaninglessly shifting colors that lie at the heart of the divine. Nor does the vision change when Nonnus abandons the many gods to tell the story of the only son of the one God. The form he chooses this time is not the epic poem broken into a multitude of idylls but the paraphrase, which is to say redundancy reduced to its essence, so that each of the bare phrases of the Gospel is blown up and up as though by the action of an irrepressible breath and a good dose of yeast.
It is in this choice of style that we may glimpse something of Nonnus’s faith: before being either pagan or Christian, it is a faith in redundancy as the way in which the cosmos makes itself manifest. And if we go on to examine the details of the narrative, there is at least one that would lead us to plump for the most improbable of our hypotheses: that Nonnus wrote the Dionysiaca and the Paraphrase at the same time, or at least without seeing any discrepancy between them. The Dionysiaca are dominated by Oistrus. Time and time again we see him at work, and some of the most torrid erotic scenes begin with the buzzing of that gadfly. But now let’s turn to Palestine, according to Nonnus. The Jews accuse Jesus. And where St. John’s Gospel says: “Say we not well that thou art a Samaritan and hast a devil [óti daimónion écheis]?” Nonnus paraphrases: “and now the wandering and vengeful gadfly [alástoros oîstros] of the demon Lyssa [Madness] goads you on.” It is a delicate and precise pointer to Nonnus’s consistency: impartial to Dionysus and Christ alike, he constantly finds the same demonic gadfly in both their stories, goading them on to intoxication, frenzy, delirium, illumination.