Nonnus

Nonnus of Panopolis (Greek: Νόννος ὁ Πανοπολίτης, Nónnos ho Panopolítēs) was a Greek epic poet of Hellenized Egypt of the Imperial Roman era. He was a native of Panopolis (Akhmim) in the Egyptian Thebaid and probably lived at the end of the 4th or in the 5th century. He is known as the composer of the Dionysiaca, an epic tale of the god Dionysus, and of the Metabole, a paraphrase of the Gospel of John. The epic Dionysiaca describes the life of Dionysus, his expedition to India, and his triumphant return to the west, it was written in Homeric dialect and in dactylic hexameter, and it consists of 48 books at 20,426 lines.

There is almost no evidence for the life of Nonnus. It is known that he was a native of Panopolis (Akhmim) in Upper Egypt from his naming in manuscripts and the reference in epigram 9.198 of the Palatine Anthology. Scholars have generally dated him from the end of the 4th to the central years of the 5th century. He must have lived after the composition of Claudian's Greek Gigantomachy (i.e., after AD 394–397) as he appears to be familiar with that work. Agathias Scholasticus seems to have followed him, with a mid-6th-century reference to him as a "recent author".

He is sometimes conflated with St Nonnus from the hagiographies of St Pelagia and with Nonnus, the bishop of Edessa who attended the Council of Chalcedon, both of whom seem to have been roughly contemporary, but these associations are probably mistaken.

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