NONNUS

A Greek poet of Panopolis in Egypt, belonging to the 5th century A.D. As a pagan, he wrote with poetic talent, and in a spirited though highly rhetorical style, a vast epic, called the Dionysiaca, in forty-eight books, one of the chief sources for our knowledge of the Dionysiac cycle of legends. As a Christian, he composed a paraphrase of the Gospel of St. John in Greek hexameters.