This chapter examines the peculiar practice, common in late antique epic poetry, of comparing a character to a divinity stripped of their visual attributes. From the works of Claudian, Nonnus, and Colluthus it analyzes three case studies that epitomize this form of comparison and illustrate its use in a specific literary and cultural context. Such comparisons are shown to rely on the reader’s familiarity with visual representations of the pagan gods and to reflect a growing interest in and engagement with the visual arts in late antique literature. In defining characters by attributes they do not possess, the poets draw attention to their visual ambiguity and vulnerability, and allow internal and external audiences to gaze at them uninhibitedly. Female characters in particular are thus proffered as objects of the lusting gaze and are denied individual visual identities and narrative agency. This literary emphasis on artistic beauty, stripped of its attributes and, by extension, divine power, resembles contemporary Christian attempts to de-contextualize pagan artworks by removing their religious attributes and associations, reframing them as purely aesthetic objects.

We ended with first words. Let us start there again. And with a startling beginning.

Let us return to eternity, which in truth we have not ever fully left since the opening chapter.

Beginning with a striking passage in which the Sibylline narrator asserts her intellectual ownership of Homer’s work, I point out its Theogonic framing, before surveying other thematic and stylistic invocations of Hesiod across the Sibylline corpus. I argue that Hesiod, without being named, is given programmatic importance as a Classicizing alternative to Homeric authority and wisdom. I then distinguish three strategies of Sibylline transformation of Biblical material in Homeric colouring into apocalyptic visions: amplification of scenes of destruction, cosmic revision of individual action, and the countering of heroic epic values with monotheistic principles. In each of these, ideas of ‘the Hesiodic’ generated by its ancient reception provide a cipher for the critique of the Homeric cosmos implied by Sibylline rewriting of Jewish and Christian scriptures in the direction of universal history. I conclude by offering comparanda for future studies.

To enter the world of Nonnus’ Dionysiaca, the greatest and most influential Greek poem of the fifth century CE, is to enter an echo chamber of Greek literature and engage with a swirling repertoire of mythic narratives. The erotic narratives of Dionysus and his entourage have to be read through this formative poetics – and so it is here, with poetics, that I will begin my travel towards one of ancient poetry’s most bizarre scenes of lustful, fondling, inappropriate desire in action. If any writer of late antiquity reforms the form of epic, from within, as it were, it is Nonnus, whose forty-eight books add up to the forty-eight books of the Iliad and Odyssey combined, but whose narrative discourse, narrative structuring and even verse forms radically disrupt and remould what is understood by the tradition of epic.

First words, we know, matter. The Iliad’s mênin, ‘wrath’, the Odyssey’s andra, ‘man’, set the thematic focus of the narrative to come, the central question of each epic. What is more, the Odyssey’s silence in its opening sentence about the name of its hero and its periphrastic concealment and revelation of its subject is itself programmatic, in its form, for its hero’s performative strategies of deception as well as the narrative’s engagement with the ethics of identity.1 Homer’s beginnings are echoed and transformed throughout Greek writing. Sophocles’ Antigone – tragedy is a machine for rewriting Homer for the fifth-century polis – opens with Ô koinon, ‘O shared’: and the play goes on obsessively to dramatize not just the conflicting claims of commonality in the city and family, but also the dangerous power of the appeals to such commonality.2 Euripides memorably starts his Medea, eith’ ôphelon mê, ‘If only not’, and the play never escapes the lure of the counterfactual narrative, the wishing things were otherwise.