Starclad-Hymn to Melqart

Excerpted from: The Dionysiaca of Nonnus
Language: Neo-Homeric Greek
Origin: (?) Panopolis, Egypt (Ancient Chmin, Modern Akhmim)
Date: Circa 650 C.E.

Description
Despite its late date of composition, the Dionysiaca endures as the elegiac swan-song of the classical Homeric genre. Its author, Nonnus of Panopolis, is said to have converted to Christianity at some point during or after its completion, yet this seems to have not had any great effect on the work’s transmission. A massive poem sprawling some 48 books in length, it is remarkable both for its mastery of the traditional Homeric style while also incorporating a rich and breathtaking depth of influence from the cosmopolitan and “orientalized” Hellenism of Nonnus’s own day, which is perhaps best exhibited in a vivid scene where the itinerant god Dionysos visits Tyre and calls upon its patron deity Melqart (here named Astrochiton Heracles, or “the Star-Clad Heracles”) with an elaborate and syncretic hymn, which forms the subject of our article.

While the language of this invocation is distinctly Hellenistic in its bombastic floridity and bears little resemblance to the indigenous Semitic style, it nevertheless provides an excellent exemplar of Late Antique hymnody, and remains the longest single piece of liturgy addressed to any Phoenician / Canaanite deity that has survived down to the modern day. Melqart himself, moreover, had been closely associated with Heracles for at least 1,000 years prior.

(Phoenician Image of Melqart wearing the lion-pelt of Heracles, Wikimedia)

Sources & Further Reading

Full Text & Translation
Nonnus Dionysiaca
Translated by W.H.D. Rouse
Harvard University Press 1940
Cambridge, MA

Translation (Adapted from Rouse)

[And Dionysos] went revelling into the temple of the Star-Clad, and there he called loudly upon the leader of the stars in mystic words:

“Star-Clad Heracles, lord of fire, prince of the universe! O Helios, long-shadowed shepherd of human life, coursing round the whole sky with shining disk and wheeling the twelve-monthed course of light, the son of Time! Circle after circle thou drivest, and from thy car is shaped the running life-space for youth and age! Nurse of wise birth, thou bringest forth the threefold image of the motherless Moon, while dewy Selene milks her imitative light from thy fruitful beam, while fills in her curving bull’s-horn.

“All-shining Eye of the heavens, thou bringest in thy four-horse chariot winter following autumn, and changest spring to summer. Night pursued by the shooting torch moves and gives place, when the first morning glimpse comes of thy straight-necked steeds drawing the silver yoke under thy lashes; when thy light shines, the varied heavenly meadow no longer shines brighter dotted with patterns of bright stars. From thy bath in the waters of the eastern Ocean thou shakest off the creative moisture from thy cool hair, bringing the fruitful rain, and discharging the early wet of the heavenly dew upon the prolific earth. With thy disk thou givest increase to the growth of harvest, irrigating the bounteous corn in the life-nourishing furrows.

“O Belos on the Euphrates, called Ammon in Libya, thou art Apis by the Nile, Arabian Cronos, Assyrian Zeus! On thy fragrant altar, that thousand-year-old wise bird the phoenix lays sweet-smelling woods with his curved claw, bringing the end of one life and the beginning of another; for there he is born again, self-begotten, the image of equal time renewed—he sheds old age in the fire, and from the fire takes in exchange youthful bloom.

“Be thou called Sarapis, the cloudless Zeus of Egypt; be thou Cronos, or Phaethon of many names, or Mithras the Sun of Babylon, in Hellas Delphic Apollo; be though Gamos, whom Love begat in shadowy dreams, fulfilling the deceptive desire of a mock union, when from sleeping Zeus, after he had sprinkled the damp seed over the earth with the self-wedding point of the sword, the heights brought forth by reason of the heavenly drops; be thou pain-quelling Paieon, or patterned Heaven; be thou called the Star-Clad since by night starry mantles illuminate the sky—O hear my voice graciously with friendly ears!” 

Such was the hymn of Dionysos.