NONNUS

flourished 5th century AD, ; b. Panopolis, Egypt the most notable Greek epic poet of the Roman period. His chief work is the Dionysiaca, a hexameter poem in 48 books; its main subject, submerged in a chaos of by-episodes, is the expedition of the god Dionysus to India. Nonnus' fertile inventiveness and felicitous descriptive fantasy, which are well served by a unique command of the language and his vast literary knowledge, made him the often-imitated leader of the last Greek epic school. His style, with its ever-recurring, often daring metaphors and unremittingly bombastic tone, appealed to the taste of the time. Later in life he was converted to Christianity and composed a hexameter paraphrase of St. John's Gospel (Metabole), which shows all his earlier stylistic faults without his compensatory descriptive ability.