In this article, I offer some interpretative notes on the hymnic address to Athena which Nonnos puts into the mouth of Erechtheus in Book 37 of the Dionysiaca. I discern the following points in the passage: the seemingly paradoxical marking of Erechtheus’ ‘inner’ speech with ‘loud’ verbs represents the oscillation between the (private) rivalry of the two charioteers and the (loud) communal agōn, in which the competitors Erechtheus and Skelmis assume the roles of Athena and Poseidon. This is made possible by the transformative power of hymnic language, which is capable of wresting mortals from their earthly, everyday context and transporting them into the sphere of the divine. Against a somewhat unusual narrative backdrop, the poet exploits this power to lend symbolic weight to the agon. In a typical Nonnian ‘flux’ of identity, it then turns out that Erechtheus-Athena and Skelmis-Poseidon are not what they seem: by ‘Dionysising’ this agonistic scene, with Dionysus and Zeus entering into the equation, Nonnos presents us with a textual manifestation of the leading thematic principle of the entire epic, the agon of two reigns: Dionysus’ new reign, the reign of the grapevine, and the established reign of the Olympians, symbolised by Zeus-Athena’s olive tree. I argue that this interpretation is further supported by the compositional approach at the level of Book 37: together with the passage 37.640–643 (Erechtheus’ address to Boreas), Erechtheus’ speech forms a characteristic Nonnian diptych scene derived from the Homeric archetype. Unlike the passage in question, the other ‘panel’ of the diptych is structured in a distinctly non-hymnic manner, which reflects the distribution of symbolic weight between the two scenes on a linguistic level.
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