From the City of Indians to Jerusalem. Nonnus of Panopolis’ Real and Imagined Cities

In this essay, I examine some examples of ekphrasis from two poems by Nonnus of Panopolis, the Dionysiaca and the Paraphrase of the Gospel of St John, to illustrate how this poet forged his representation of cities. I will focus on what Nonnus tried to make visible to his audience and not on what was visible in its time. It is well known that the ekphrasis of cities was a frequent rhetorical exercise in late antique scholastic education, consequently it is no surprise that Nonnian poetry has been influenced by the rhetorical theory of ekphrasis of his time. Nonnus’s verses present more emblematic cities than real portrayals: the city of the Indians, Tyre, and Berytus in the Dionysiaca, and Jerusalem, city of the Temple, in the Paraphrase are heuristic models to measure the extent to which iconographic subjects might have inspired Nonnian poetry. The construction of the ekphraseis of cities is a continuous interplay of memory and imagination; the digressions with apparently irrelevant details become necessary to the unfolding of the main narrative and allow the building of an evocative repertoire of references to literary and visual traditions aimed at eliciting reactions from the reader. The cities described by Nonnus make an imagined construct visible through symbols and words; they are useful models for political and religious discourses of legitimation. The cities of Nonnus’s works, with a description lying between myth and history, are narrative places (milieux): the keys to their interpretation lie in identifying the link between his ekphrastic verses, the mythical-literary tradition which represents the past, and their projection in the society of his own time.