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Direct Speech in Nonnus’ Dionysiaca is the first more extensive study of the use and functions of direct speech in Nonnus’ Dionysiaca (5th century AD). Its long soliloquies and scarcity of dialogues have often been pointed out as striking characteristics of Nonnus’ epic style, but nonetheless this fascinating subject received relatively little attention. Berenice Verhelst aims to reveal the poem’s constant interplay between the epic tradition and the late antique literary context with its clear rhetorical stamp. She focusses on the changed functions of direct speech and their implications for the presentation of the mythological story. Organized around six case studies, this book presents an in-depth analysis of a representative part of the vast corpus of the Dionysiaca’s 305 speeches. The digital appendix to this book (Database of Direct Speech in Greek Epic Poetry) can be consulted online at www.dsgep.ugent.be.

Nonnus of Panopolis in Context III, edited by Filip Doroszewski and Katarzyna Jażdżewska, explores both old and new questions about the poet and his works ‒ the grand mythological epic Dionysiaca and the hexameter Paraphrase of St. John’s Gospel.

The Egyptian Nonnus of Panopolis (5th century AD), author of both the ‘pagan’ Dionysiaca, the longest known poem from Antiquity (21,286 lines in 48 books, the same number of books as the Iliad and Odyssey combined), and a ‘Christian’ hexameter Paraphrase of St John’s Gospel (3,660 lines in 21 books), is no doubt the most representative poet of Greek Late Antiquity. Brill’s Companion to Nonnus of Panopolis provides a collection of 32 essays by a large international group of scholars, experts in the field of archaic, Hellenistic, Imperial, and Christian poetry, as well as scholars of late antique Egypt, Greek mythology and religion, who explore the various aspects of Nonnus’ baroque poetry and its historical, religious and cultural background.

Nonnus of Panopolis (fifth century CE) composed two poems once thought to be incompatible: the Dionysiaca, a mythological long epic with a marked interest in astrology, the occult, the paradox and not least the beauty of the female body, and a pious and sublime Paraphrase of the Gospel of St John. Little is known about the man, to whom sundry identities have been attached. The longer work has been misrepresented as a degenerate poem or as a mythological handbook. The Christian poem has been neglected or undervalued. Yet, Nonnus accomplished an ambitious plan, in two parts, aiming at representing world-history. This volume consists mainly of the Proceedings of the First International Conference on Nonnus held in Rethymno, Crete in May 2011. With twentyfour essays, an international team of specialists place Nonnus firmly in his time's context. After an authoritative Introduction by Pierre Chuvin, chapters on Nonnus and the literary past, the visual arts, Late Antique paideia, Christianity and his immediate and long-range afterlife (to modern times) offer a wide-ranging and innovative insight into the man and his world. The volume moves on beyond stereotypes to inaugurate a new era of research for Nonnus and Late Antique poetics on the whole.

Examining carefully the Egyptian epic hexameter production from the 3rd to the 6th centuries AD, especially that of the southern region (Thebaid), this study provides an image of three centuries in the history of the Graeco-Egyptian literature, in which authors and poetry are related directly to the social-economic, cultural and literary contexts from which they come. The training they could get and the books and authors they came in touch with explain that we know so many names and works, written in a language and metrics that enjoyed the greatest esteem, being considered proofs of the highest culture. Laura Miguélez Cavero demonstrates that the traditional image of a “school of Nonnos” is not justified ‐ rather, Triphiodorus, Nonnus, Musaeus, Colluthus, Cyrus of Panopolis and Christodorus of Coptos are just the tip of a literary iceberg we know only to some extent through the texts that papyri offer us.

Nonnos of Panopolis in Egypt, who lived in the fifth century of our era, composed the last great epic poem of antiquity. The Dionysiaca, in 48 books, has for its chief theme the expedition of Dionysus against the Indians; but the poet contrives to include all the adventures of the god (as well as much other mythological lore) in a narrative which begins with chaos in heaven and ends with the apotheosis of Ariadne's crown. The wild ecstasy inspired by the god is certainly reflected in the poet's style, which is baroque, extravagant, and unrestrained. It seems that Nonnos was in later years converted to Christianity, for in marked contrast to the Dionysiaca, a poem dealing unreservedly with classical myths completely redolent of a pagan outlook, there is extant and ascribed to him a hexameter paraphrase of St. John's Gospel.

'It will be read and re-read not as a treatise but as a story: one of the most extraordinary that has ever been written of the origins of Western self-consciousness' Simon Schama The marriage of Cadmus and Harmony was the last time the gods of Olympus feasted alongside mortals. What happened in the distant ages preceding it, and in the generations that followed, form the timeless tales of ancient Greek mythology. In this masterful retelling of the myths we think we know, Roberto Calasso illuminates the deepest questions of our existence. 'The kind of book one comes across only once or twice in one's lifetime' Joseph Brodsky 'A perfect work like no other' Gore Vidal

This book offers a new interpretation of Aeschylus’ tragic tetralogy Lycurgeia and Naevius’ tragedy Lycurgus, the two most important texts that shaped the tradition of the myth about Lycurgus’ resistance against the god Dionysus.

Readers of Eastern Christianity and Late Antique Philosophy will find a collection of authoritative papers from across the Neoplatonic and Eastern Christian traditions. It is only recently that scholars have started to take notice of the Eastern Christian engagement with late antique philosophical texts. This volume builds upon this new interest in order to show the dynamic nature of Neoplatonism and Eastern Christianity at a time when both faced a variety of challenges. The legacy of Greek philosophy in the Christian East fills the gap between the schools of Alexandria and Baghdad and brings into focus the intellectual history of the period. The aim of the volume is to stimulate interest in late antique philosophy and its reception in the Christian East.