Hello and welcome to Literature and History, Episode 96, The Last Pagan Epic.

In this program we will read the first half of Knowness's Dianisieca, the longest surviving

poem from Greco-Roman Antiquity produced sometime in the 5th century CE. Scholars have often

theorized the first few decades of the 400s, though its safest to simply say the 400s.

The Dianisieca, a 48-book long epic of more than 20,000 lines in Greek examiner, is substantially

longer than any other extant epic poem from the ancient Mediterranean world. And it tells

the story of the god Dianisie's legendary journey to India. The saga of the wine god's journey

to the east, however, is given both an enormous preface and a long epilogue, and along the way

is woven together with dozens of embedded narratives, from brief aside to book-length excursions.

Gigantic, meandering, and dense, the Dianisieca is one of the strangest and most unique works in

literary history, important within the small world of late antique studies, but seldom discussed,

or even known about, beyond this. When we think about the first few decades of the 400s CE,

if we think about these decades at all, Greek epic poetry isn't the first thing that usually

comes to mind. This period encompassed many of the great works of St. Jerome and Augustine,

and following the death of St. Ambrose in 397, popes and bishops had successfully

politiced their ways into Roman imperial courts. The first few decades of the 400s also encompassed

the beginning of the Western Empire's death spiral, with Visigoths and vandals in particular

sweeping through the territories of Italy, Gaul, and later North Africa. So when we think about

these decades we think of Jerome finishing the Volgate, or Augustine riding the city of God,

of Alleric the Visigoths sacking Rome, of Britannia, and then Gaul slipping out of Roman control.

We do not think about Homer, or Greek myths. We don't think about these things, but late antique

Greek poets still continue to. Knowness, our author for this and the next episode,

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