A Christian's Defense of Paganism: The Efforts of Nonnus of Panopolis to Recapture the Receding Paganism of the Late Antique East
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The 5th century poet, Nonnus of Panopolis, forces us to re-think our understanding of late-antique culture. This Egyptian Poet, now understood to be a Christian, was responsible for two striking works of verse, the Paraphrase of St. John, and the Dionysiaca. The former is a nuanced re-writing of St. John’s gospel into epic metre; the latter, a grand tour of the ancient world, modelled on Homer, paying special attention to the myriad of cults and myths in their physical context. The Dionysiaca has for a long time been understood as the last gasp of Greek Epic literature, a final episode in the literary tradition started over a millennium before by Homer and Hesiod. Writing at a time when the Church was vigilant in working to defend a perceived ‘Orthodoxy’, Nonnus’ work cannot be easily understood in our current framework. With an old-fashioned acceptance of the Christian/Pagan Binary, it makes no sense that a Christian writer should contribute such a monolithic work to the Pagan tradition. I hope to instead rehabilitate Nonnus’ Dionysiaca as a work that was very much a product of its time. The attentions of my presentation shall be focused on this second work and the way in which, by giving Pagan myth a geographic location, Nonnus showed a concern for the homogenizing influences of a Christian binary. It can be argued that Nonnus sought to accommodate Christianity within the broader Hellenic tradition, at a point when the future image of Christianity in the Mediterranean was unsure.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".