Fifteen centuries have passed, and the number of readers who have understood Nonnus could be counted on the fingers of one hand. Giovan Battista Marino, who read Nonnus in Eilhard Lubin’s Latin translation (Hanau, 1605), had no doubt about it: Nonnus was the only one who could compete with Homer, the only poet who could empty his work of all heroic sobriety and encourage every possible twirl and caprice while still preserving a quite vast frame all around. This was just what Marino needed for his own Adonis: an ancient authority for at last departing from all those liberations of the Holy Sepulcher and other such bold and noble deeds. With Nonnus behind him, the poet could abandon himself to a project that until now had seemed blasphemous: the weaving together in a massive epic of garland upon garland of erotic verse.
Thus Marino frequently pays Nonnus the supreme homage that one writer can pay to another: theft — and the sweetest of thefts at that, the kind that remains a secret, shared in complicity by the two authors, because no one else notices. With a note of defiance Marino wrote to Achillini: “they [other literati] do not ply the sea where I fish and trade, nor will they ever catch me with my prey, unless I reveal it to them myself.”
As early as 1817, in his essay Nonnos der Dichter, dedicated to Goethe, the learned young Ouvaroff of St. Petersburg, friend of the Senator, i.e., Joseph de Maistre, could justly complain that: “The flowery field of Greek poetry has been so thoroughly tilled that it would be hard indeed to find a poet who has not been appreciated and studied with care, not to say love; Nonnus alone pays for the sins of his age; for centuries his poem has been condemned to being a lumber room invaded by dust and corrosion where only the most zealous mythographer might penetrate. It would be hard to name but a few who have read him for the quality of his poetry, and harder still to name any who have been sufficiently bold to declare that Nonnus was truly a poet, in the full sense of the word.” Another hundred and fifty years would have to pass before Giorgio de Santillana, speaking at a conference, would point to Nonnus’s Dionysiaca as the “blossoming” of that “Japanese flower” that was for him “the archaic myth.”
Jason would have preferred to live a bourgeois life at home, just as Nietzsche would have preferred to be a professor in Basel, rather than God. “I would be happy enough living in my home country, if Pelias would give his consent. May the gods see fit to free me from my labors,” says Jason to Hypsipyle. And his voice is at once that of the ever hypocritical lover trying to soften the cruelty of his desertion and that of the hero who looks, weary and detached, over the scene where he is obliged to kill, cheat, travel, desert, and finally be killed, with any luck by a rotten timber while sleeping in the shade of his ship. The fable’s happy ending is not an option for the hero. His part was written before he was born; his labors predate him: they are never chosen but come to meet him, like a towering wave.
Jason never managed, not even for the briefest of moments, to go beyond his role as hero. He soon realized this and clammed up in gloomy silence. He worked at his adventures: but that was precisely the point, he worked. Even the women he came across, who usually fell in love with him, were part of that work. He abandoned Hypsipyle because he had to press on with his expedition. He promised Medea he would marry her because he had to get hold of the Golden Fleece and needed her help. Then he did marry her, because King Alcinous forced him to; the Golden Fleece was their shining nuptial pallet in the cave of Macris. Then he abandoned Medea, because he had to unite his family with that of the reigning house of Thebes. Everything he did was done to achieve something else, and always in obedience to orders from above. There were days when this made the memory of his cruelest deeds easier to bear: he had done them because they were his destiny. He had traveled far and wide, visited the remotest of peoples, yet had always lived like a donkey plodding around the same well.
Right from the start, beautiful as she was, Jason felt a strange repulsion for Medea. She was a woman who knew only two states: either hopeless unhappiness, desertion, lonely misery, helpless rejection; or dazzling, lightning-swift power. It was conceivable that one might go through all kinds of adventures with such a woman (and she could be pretty useful too, more so than many a hero); but could you live with her day in day out? Jason was old now, shunned by everybody. People told his adventures to their children, with the result that he couldn’t find anyone to tell them to himself. He went back to Corinth, where he had witnessed horror upon horror, where he had even reigned as king. There, pulled up onto dry land, lay his ship, the Argo. It was his first, his last, his only true companion. And he couldn’t say it had been a silent companion either, because its main beam had a voice, a sound unlike any other and one Jason would always remember. Once it had frightened him; now it pricked him with nostalgia, like the voice of an old nurse. He looked at this ship, which he had loved more than any woman, and certainly more than Medea, that fake savage, who always seemed to be on the brink of disaster but at the end of the day did nothing but slip from one palace to the next, one kingdom to the next, sowing calamity everywhere she went and always saving herself, along with her chariot and her snakes. The charms of the Argo were rarer and nobler. Jason thought the Argo might grant him a last favor: he would hang himself from the wooden bowsprit. Then he lapsed back into his thoughtful brooding, his back resting against the keel. A rotten timber fell from the deck, struck him on the head, and killed him.
The appearance of the heroes covers a very brief period in Greek history. They all knew one another, or had heard stories about the others from people who had known them. Like links in a bracelet, the Cretan cycle, the Argonauts’ cycle, the Theban cycle, and the Trojan cycle are all connected. And the whole phenomenon burned itself out in just a few years. Between the killing of the Minotaur and the killing of Agamemnon, there were only two generations. Theseus buried his sword in the Minotaur, and his son Acamas was one of the Achaeans who lay in ambush in the Trojan horse. The fall of Crete, the fall of Mycenae, the fall of Troy, the rise of Athens: the heroes put their seal on the key events, then disappeared. Swiftness was of their essence. It is as if the Greeks had wanted to concentrate all the stories whose consequences they would live among into the shortest possible time. The age of the heroes was brief, overcrowded, cruel. And the earth groaned: “oppressed by the weight of humankind, while there was no devotion left among them.”
If, in Greek eyes, the origin of all historic crimes could be traced back to the Trojan War, the origin of the war itself was far from clear. Helen, who was the only witness to the whole thing and the pivot of the scales, attributed the cause to a double-edged plan of Zeus: to unburden the earth and give glory to Achilles. These goals are seemingly unconnected: on the one hand, we have the slaughter of hundreds of heroes, as if they were a mere nameless number, an excess ballast of feet trampling the belly of the earth; on the other, the exaltation of a single person, likewise a hero, and not so much his strength, which was brief and thrust upon him, but his name pure and simple, the sound of his glory. And all this was to be achieved via a single artifice: Helen, and not even Helen herself but her “breathing phantom,” her “name.” By examining the nature of this fatal artifice, we begin to see the unity of Zeus’s design, how it converges on a single goaclass="underline" to scoop out a vacuum in the material world, to lighten its density, to fashion a sounding box between skin and shade. The fullness of the Homeric word, effortlessly bringing into existence whatever it names, is the last heritage of an earth filled and oppressed by the heroes, by their amorous and cruel trampling. What follows is a new story, in which something has been taken away from the density of the body to house the vacuum of the word.