Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
Cultura Documentos
and Persuasion in
Ancient Rhetorical
Theory and Practice
Ekphrasis, Imagination
and Persuasion in
Ancient Rhetorical
Theory and Practice
Ruth Webb
ISBN 978-0-7546-6125-2
EISBN 978-0-7546-9330-7
Contents
List of Tables
Abbreviations
Acknowledgements
Preface
Introduction
vii
ix
xi
xiii
1
13
39
61
87
107
131
167
Conclusion
193
Appendix A: Translations
Appendix B: Subjects for Ekphrasis
Bibliography
Index
197
213
215
233
List of Tables
Table 2.1
56
Table 3.1
64
Abbreviations
AJP
American Journal of Philology
BAGB
Bulletin de lAssociation Guillaume Bud
BASP
Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists
BICS
Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies
BMGS
Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies
CP
Classical Philology
CQ
Classical Quarterly
DOP
Dumbarton Oaks Papers
GRBS
Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies
HSCP
Harvard Studies in Classical Philology
JRS
Journal of Roman Studies
JWCI
Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes
MD
Materiali e discussioni per lanalisi dei testi classici
Or. Oration
PCPS
Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society
REG
Revue des tudes grecques
RhMus
Rheinisches Museum fr Philologie
TAPA
Transactions of the American Philological
Association
Walz, Rhetores graeci
Rhetores graeci, ed. Christian Walz (9 vols,
Stuttgart: Sumptibus J.G. Cottae, 183236)
ZPE
Zeitschrift fr Papyrologie und Epigraphik
Acknowledgements
The length of time over which this project has been evolving means that
I owe a huge debt to a great many people, from my original supervisors
at the Warburg Institute, Jill Kraye and Liz McGrath, and Jean-Michel
Massing who first mentioned Philostratos to me, to colleagues at Kings
College London, Princeton and the Universit Paris X Nanterre. The
following people have made particular contributions through invitations
to contribute to conferences or to joint publications, by reading various
drafts or simply by being willing to discuss various aspects of the subject.
They are, in alphabetical order, Michael Baxandall, Susanna Braund, Averil
Cameron, Alejandro Coroleu, Sandrine Dubel, Ja Elsner, Christopher Gill,
Franoise Graziani, Liz James, Bob Kaster, Mario Klarer, Margaret Mullett,
Laurent Pernot, Stphane Rolet, Charlotte Rouech, Agns Rouveret,
Suzanne Sad, John Smedley, Oliver Taplin, Philip Weller, Barbara Zeitler
and Froma Zeitlin.
Preface
Introduction
A speech that brings the subject matter vividly before the eyes
See, in particular, Ja Elsner, The genres of Ekphrasis, in Elsner (ed.), The Verbal and
the Visual: Cultures of Ekphrasis in Antiquity = Ramus, 31 (2002): 118.
single genre, or that that genre had a name, still less that that name would
have been ekphrasis. Painting, sculpture and architecture certainly
were among the subjects of ekphrasis as it was conceived and defined in
antiquity: the Progymnasmata the elementary exercises in rhetoric which
contain the first definitions of ekphrasis mention the Shield of Achilles
in Iliad, 18 as an example and contain advice on describing sculptures,
paintings and buildings. Outside these elementary exercises, the Younger
Philostratos refers to his grandfathers Eikones as ekphraseis of works of
graphic art and many descriptions of such subjects seem clearly to fit the
ancient definition by describing their subjects in such vivid detail that the
reader does seem to see them. Such subjects certainly could be evoked in
ekphrasis, but they were not its defining feature.
I have argued elsewhere that the existence of this intermediate category
of ekphraseis (in the ancient sense) of works of art and architecture (like
Philostratos Eikones or Paul the Silentiarys verse ekphrasis of Hagia
Sophia) provided part of the impetus towards the modern definition
as scholars in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries focused
attention on this particular group of texts which then came to stand for the
whole category of ekphrasis. But at no point in antiquity (or Byzantium)
was ekphrasis confined to a single category of subject matter, nor can
every text about images be claimed as ekphrasis in the ancient sense.
There are, for example, many epigrams about sculptures which do not
seek to bring the subject matter before the eyes. The examples recently
analyzed by Simon Goldhill, for example, consider the act of viewing
and meditate on naturalism, but their function as comments on the act
of viewing is different from the central function of ekphrasis: making
the listener see the subject in their minds eye. An ekphrasis may itself
constitute a commentary on the act of viewing, but this common feature
is not central to the definition of ekphrasis that interests me here. So, the
epigrams, like certain passages of Pliny or Pausanias, while very relevant
to understanding constructions of viewing in antiquity, are at most only
tangentially relevant to the rhetorical practices that are the subject of this
book. For that reason they are not included.
See Ruth Webb, Ekphrasis ancient and modern: the invention of a genre, Word and
Image, 15: 718.
Simon Goldhill, The nave and knowing eye: ecphrasis and the culture of viewing
in the Hellenistic world, in Simon Goldhill and Robin Osborne (eds), Art and Text in
Ancient Greek Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 197223; What is
ekphrasis for?, CP, 102 (2007): 1619.
introduction
See, to name but three examples, Alessandro Perutelli, Linversione speculare: per
una retorica dellekphrasis, MD, 1 (1978): 8798; Andrew Laird, Sounding out ekphrasis: art
and text in Catullus 64, JRS, 83 (1993): 1830; Froma Zeitlin, The artful eye: vision, ekphrasis
and spectacle in Euripidean theatre, in Simon Goldhill and Robin Osborne (eds), Art and
Text in Ancient Greek Culture (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 13896.
See, for example, Jean-Pierre Aygon, Pictor in fabula: lecphrasis-descriptio dans les
tragdies de Snque (Brussels, 2004) and Janice Hewlett Koelb, The Poetics of Description:
Imagined Places in European Literature (New York, 2006).
For example, Francis Cairns, Generic Composition in Greek and Roman Poetry
(Edinburgh, 1972) represents a vitally important development in the study of ancient
introduction
reception of ancient texts. These assumptions are often very different from
our own, as might be expected when we take into consideration the fact
that the culture of the Imperial period was still very much an oral culture,
despite the importance of the written word. The phenomenon of ekphrasis
that emerges from this study belongs to a conception of the word as a
force acting on the listener, a conception that is familiar from Gorgias
Enkomion of Helen but which clearly continued to be active throughout
antiquity and beyond, into Byzantium. An investigation of ekphrasis in
this sense also reveals some of the energies that dwell within the texts
that, to us, are black words lying still on the white page but which, to
the ancient reader, were alive with rich visual and emotional effects. The
nature of ekphrasis, its defining quality of enargeia (or vividness), and the
role of the imagination in both mean that this is almost as much a study of
ancient psychology as of rhetoric.
The study of the ancient definition of ekphrasis is therefore far from
being the restrictive move that it is sometimes claimed (whether explicitly
or implicitly) to be. It is, I hope, a positive contribution which opens up
new perspectives on the rhetorical culture of the Imperial period and on
the attitudes to language and verbal representation that were current at
that time. The aim of focusing on the ancient definition is not to close
down discussion of the phenomenon of words about images either in
ancient or modern literature nor to brand certain usages of the word as
incorrect. Rather it is to create a space for the ancient definition and to
underline quite how different it and its underlying concepts are to our
own ideas about texts and literature.
The Modernity of the Modern Definition
In considering the difference between ancient and modern ekphrasis it
is important to bear in mind exactly how recent the modern definition
is. One searches in vain for any unambiguous use of the term to mean
description of a work of art in any source before the late nineteenth
century.11 It did not become current in critical discourse until the second
half of the twentieth century and only then was it applied regularly to
literature and its reception but tends to be over-prescriptive in its use of rhetorical theory. See
the general comments of Goldhill, What is ekphrasis for?, p. 7.
11
The first usage of ecfrasi in Italian is a case in point. According to Battaglias Grande
dizionario della lingua italiana, the term occurs in Gregorio Comaninis Il Figino of 1591 (ed.
Barocchi, p. 310). The passage in question is taken directly from the Latin translation of the
Acts of the Council of Nicaea in Concilia omnia, ed. F.L. Sarius (Colonia Agrippina, 1567) vol.
3, p. 94 (Synodi Nicenae Secundae action quarta), which transliterates the term directly from
the Greek original. Although the ekphrasis in question is of paintings, it is not necessary to
assume that Comanini understood the term as referring to a genre specialized in this type of
description or of art criticism. The first usage in English, in the Edinburgh Review of 1815, is
similarly ambiguous. The anonymous author refers only to an ecphrasis of Libanius and,
as the fourth-century orator and teacher Libanios composed ekphraseis of the whole range
of subjects, it is far from sure that he was referring only to his ekphraseis of works of art,
as is assumed by Grant F. Scott, The rhetoric of dilation: ekphrasis and ideology, Word and
Image, 7 (1991): 30110 and The Sculpted Word: Keats, Ekphrasis, and the Visual Arts (Hanover,
NH, 1994) in what is otherwise an extremely perceptive analysis.
13
Koelb, The Poetics of Description, pp. 23, underlines the importance of Dennistons
new definition, which, as she points out, is contradicted by the entry on the Progymnasmata
in the same volume.
introduction
14
Friedrich Lbker, Reallexikon des Klassischen Altertums (Leipzig and Berlin, 1914).
16
Koelb, The Poetics of Description, p. 2 suggests that Dennistons entry may have
inspired Leo Spitzers redefinition of ekphrasis in The Ode on a Grecian Urn, or content
vs. metagrammar, Comparative Literature, 7 (1955): 20325. For further discussion of Spitzers
article, see Chapter 1.
15
See Jean-Michel Adam, La Description (Paris, 1993), pp. 329. Terms such as
chronographia and topographia do occur in ancient rhetorical treatises but, as we shall see,
were not central to the treatment of ekphrasis.
18
Don Fowler, Narrate and describe: the problem of ekphrasis, JRS, 81 (1991), p. 26
(with a useful survey). See also Philippe Hamon, Quest-ce quune description?, Potique,
112 (1972), p. 465; Mieke Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative (Toronto,
1985), p. 130: we will define a description as a textual fragment in which features are
attributed to objects; Georg Lukcs, Narrate or describe?, in Writer and Critic, ed. A. Kahn
(London, 1978), p. 127 points to the modernity of this conception of description when he
associates it with the objectification of humanity by capitalism.
19
Grard Genette, Frontires du rcit, in LAnalyse structurale du rcit (Paris, 1981), p.
162: Lopposition entre narration et description, dailleurs accentue par la tradition scolaire,
est un des traits majeurs de notre conscience littraire [The opposition between narration and
description, which, I should add, has been accentuated by traditional methods of teaching, is
one of the most important characteristics of our understanding of literature].
introduction
10
introduction
11
22
Page DuBois, Reading the writing on the wall, CP, 102 (2007): 45 recalls a publishers
unwillingness to allow the term ekphrasis to be included in the title of a book because of its
unfamiliarity. Now it can be difficult to publish a book with the word ekphrasis in the title
that does not focus on descriptions of works of art.
Interest in ancient art and aesthetics was a vital impetus to the creation
of the modern definition of ekphrasis. Another, altogether less positive,
factor was the general lack of curiosity in the first part of the twentieth
century about the rhetorical culture of the Roman period (particularly the
Greek rhetorical culture which could only be seen as a disastrous falling
off from the sublime heights of the classical period). It is this disdain that
may well have allowed so meticulous a linguist as Denniston to disregard
the ancient definition. The results of these combined phenomena can be
seen in the vision of both ekphrasis and the rhetoric of the Imperial period
in Roland Barthes overview of ancient rhetoric, published in 1970. Here
Barthes cites ekphrasis as the typical product of an age when, he claims,
rhetoric had given up any claim to persuasion and was purely for show.
Ekphrasis, defined as a self-contained, detachable fragment, was typical
of the type of discourse that resulted that is to say a loosely connected
patchwork of passages. Barthes picture derives from a once pervasive
view of the Greek rhetorical practice of the Roman period as the decadent
pastime of the disenfranchised who, without a proper forum in which to
flex their rhetorical muscles, engaged in sterile semblances of debate. The
picture offered by Barthes is a significantly updated version that rightly
stresses the role of improvisation in the rhetorical performance of the time
and the interaction between rhetoric and literature in the case of the novel.
However, it is difficult, if not impossible, to
accept the characterization of
declamation as a disconnected series of passages after reading theoretical
works on the subject such as those by Hermogenes which reveal a highly
structured approach in which persuasion was still the main goal.
Roland Barthes,
Lancienne rhtorique: aide-mmoire, Communications, 16 (1970):
183:
Le discours tant sans but persuasif mais purement ostentatoire, se dstructure,
satomise en une suite lche de morceaux brillants, juxtaposs selon un modle rhapsodique.
Le principal de ces morceaux (il bnficiait dune trs grosse cote) tait la descriptio ou
ekphrasis. Lekphrasis est un fragment anthologique, transfrable dun discours un autre
[Since speeches had no persuasive purpose but were purely a matter of display, they lost
all structure and broke down into a loosely connected series of brilliant passages, strung
together like a rhapsodes song. The most important of these passages it was highly prized
was descriptio or ekphrasis. Ekphrasis is a select fragment, which can be transferred from
one speech to another ]. On the idiosyncrasies of Barthes overview of ancient rhetoric,
see David Cohen, Classical rhetoric and modern theories of discourse, in Ian Worthington
(ed.), Persuasion: Greek Rhetoric in Action (London, 1994), pp. 767.
14
Malcolm Heath,
Theon and the history of the Progymnasmata, GRBS, 43 (2002/3):
12960 argues
for a much later date for Theon, identifying him with the fifth-century
rhetorician of the same name. I prefer to retain the earlier date because of the parallels with
Quintilian and the unusual use of Hellenistic historians while acknowledging that these are
by no means decisive criteria.
15
See Laurent
16
For one example, see Bernard Schouler, Un enseignant face aux prisons de son
temps, Pallas, 72 (2006): 27996.
Malcolm
Heath, Practical advocacy in Roman Egypt, in Michael J. Edwards and
Christopher Reid (eds), Oratory in Action (Manchester, 2004), pp. 6282.
Augustine, Confessions, II, iii (5) and III, iii (6) iv (7).
10
See, for example, Averil Cameron, Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire: The
Development of Christian Discourse (Berkeley, 1991);
Peter Brown, Power and Persuasion in Late
Antiquity: Towards a Christian Empire (Madison, 1992);
Eugenio Amato (ed.), Approches de la
Troisime Sophistique: hommages Jacques Schamp (Brussels, 2006).
11
See, for example, Maud Gleason, Making Men: Sophists and Self-presentation in Ancient
Rome (Princeton, 1995)
; Thomas Schmitz,
Bildung und Macht: Zur sozialen und politischen
Funktion der zweiten Sophistik in der griechischen Welt der Kaiserzeit (Munich,
1997); Tim
Whitmarsh, Greek Literature and the Roman Empire (Oxford, 2001).
12
See the seminal work of Ewen L. Bowie, Greeks and their past in the Second
Sophistic, in Moses I. Finley (ed.), Studies in Ancient Society (London, 1974), pp. 116209
and Paolo Desideri, Filostrato: la comtemporaneit del passato greco, in Fernando Gasc
and Emma Falque (eds), Pasado renacido: Uso y abuso de la tradicin clsica (Seville, 1992), pp.
5570.
17
and their contemporaries and was one of the principal media in which
relationships with Rome and the representatives of the Empire were
constructed.13
It is equally important not to lose sight of the more technical aspects of
the art of rhetoric and its continued utility as an intellectual training with
many applications. Malcolm Heath, for example, has recently stressed the
value of the rhetorical education offered in the schools of the Imperial
period and the very practical considerations that ensured its survival.14 He
has also shown the continuing vitality of the rhetorical tradition beyond
the second- and early-third-century period portrayed by Philostratos. The
Progymnasmata textbooks belong to this long history of rhetoric, spanning
as they do the first five centuries CE, and showing the continued processes
of adaptation and reflection that took place.
Rhetoric: Theory and Practice
The principle sources for the rhetorical conception of ekphrasis, the
Progymnasmata, consist primarily of a set of definitions and instructions
for the various exercises, of which ekphrasis was one. The value of these
exercises for us lies precisely in their elementary status. As the gateway
through which every rhetorically educated person passed (and the final
stage in the education of those who could not find the time or the money
to achieve a full rhetorical training), they reveal assumptions about
language and ways of reading exemplary classical authors which were
inculcated at an early age.15 In particular, the Progymnasmata represented
a process of transition from reading to speaking, the moment when the
schoolboy, whether in Egypt, Syria or Asia Minor, now primed with
examples and mastery of the classical Attic idiom still used in high-level
discourse, first began to put together his own compositions and to learn
to be heard as well as to listen. The most important thing that students
learned by working through the Progymnasmata was not rules as such but
13
Pernot, La rhtorique
de lempire ou comment la
rhtorique
grecque a invent lempire romain, Rhetorica, 16 (1998): 13148.
14
Malcolm Heath, Menander: A Rhetor in Context (Oxford, 2004), esp. pp. 277331.
15
On ancient education and its social implications, see Robert A. Kaster, Guardians
of Language: The Grammarian and Society in Late Antiquity (Berkeley, 1988); Teresa
Morgan,
Literate Education in the Hellenistic and Roman Worlds (Cambridge, 1998)
; Yun
18
a set of practices and skills that could be put to use in (or transferred to)
the composition of full-scale speeches or other types of composition.16
The Progymnasmata were therefore neither abstract nor isolated from
the rest of the cultural context. Their purpose was to prepare students
for a life of speaking in which the failure to use the socially sanctioned
forms at the macro level of speeches or the micro level of grammar and
vocabulary could lead to serious embarrassment.17 They were also part of a
preparation for a life of critical and agonistic listening. The mention in the
definition of ekphrasis of placing the subject before the eyes (hupopsin) is
therefore far from theoretical. This was an effect that students were taught
to expect to feel for themselves when they read Homer or Thucydides,
the most frequently cited sources. But it did not end there. The point of
this reading was ultimately to enable students to work the same effect
on others as they themselves became active users of rhetoric, first of all
in their elementary ekphraseis and later in the full-scale speeches they
would compose and perform for their peers in the rhetorical schools and
in the wider world. The discussions of ekphrasis in the Progymnasmata
and in other rhetorical treatises show how future citizens were taught
to participate in its power both as readers or listeners and as speakers.
They thus learned to situate themselves as part of a continuous tradition
stretching from Homer to the Roman present and to see themselves as
involved in a reciprocal process, reproducing the effect that the classical
models had on them on their own audiences.
Above all, the rhetorical texts that form the basis of this study were
part of the living culture of their epoch. The definitions and classifications
that they contain were not the result of abstract theorizing in an antique
ivory tower but reflected and shaped actual practices. The Progymnasmata
in particular, poised as they are between the stage of reading and
speaking, also tell us about habits of reading that were deeply ingrained.
One particular habit derived from the schools, and also encouraged by the
surrounding culture, was a deep identification with texts of the past, their
authors and the events they relate, something that can be seen clearly in
the ways in which the Homeric poems are appropriated throughout Greek
and Roman culture, particularly in the way in which Homer himself is cast
as a teacher for the present.18 The rhetoricians discussions of ekphrasis, the
16
See, for example, Jean Bouffartigue, LEmpereur Julien et la culture de son temps (Paris,
1992), pp. 52333.
17
See especially ps.-Plutarch, On the Life and Poetry of Homer; Robert Lamberton, Homer
the Theologian: Neoplatonist Allegorical Reading and the Growth of the Epic Tradition (Berkeley,
19
type of writing that places before the eyes, tell us about the imaginative
engagement that was expected.
Young readers were encouraged not to
approach texts as distanced artefacts with a purely critical eye, but to engage
with them imaginatively, to think themselves into the scenes and to feel as
if they were present at the death of Patroklos, the making of the Shield of
Achilles, or the Athenian disaster in Sicily during the Peloponnesian War.
This openness of the past to those with the educational attainments to read
the texts is clear from the uses of classical history in the declamations that
were set in the classical past. Whether performed by students in schools or
by professional sophists these speeches show a creative attitude towards
classical history. For all the reverence paid to the past, history was not a
fixed, inalterable object; events could be freely manipulated to serve the
needs of the present.19 This openness of history, its availability as matter for
manipulation, also underlies the irreverent re-imaginings of the classical
tradition by an author such as Lucian or the creative re-presentations of
moments from myth and tragedy in the Philostratean Heroikos, as well
as the better-known Eikones or Imagines. One particular manifestation of
this attitude towards the past is the habit of reading for the sensation of
being plunged into the scene or transported back into the moment, which
emerges clearly from the rhetoricians discussions of ekphrasis and is
evident in other sources as well. This habit of responding imaginatively
to the written or spoken word forms a vital part of the background to the
teaching and use of ekphrasis in rhetorical contexts and deserves to be
explored briefly here.
Seeing Words
Poets and prose writers, orators and historians were all credited with the
ability to place a subject before the audiences eyes. The many reports of
the visual impact of reading texts from classical antiquity make it clear
that intense imaginative involvement with the scenes described was
a common type of response to texts. As mentioned above, Homer and
Thucydides were the examples most often cited in the Progymnasmata and
their impact on the ancient reader is confirmed in other sources. These
1986) and Froma Zeitlin, Visions
Schmitz, Performing
history in the Second Sophistic, in M. Zimmermann (ed.), Geschichtsschreibung und politischer
Wandel im 3. Jh. N. Chr. (Stuttgart, 1999);
Ruth Webb, Fiction,
20
ancient writers often use language that is close to the terminology we find
in the technical definitions of ekphrasis which is credited with the ability
to place before the eyes (hupopsin) or to make listeners into spectators
(theatai). Plutarch, for example, writing in the late first or early second
century CE echoes the Progymnasmata in his judgement of Thucydides
ability to make his readers feel as if they were present at the events he
describes:
Thucydides is always striving for this vividness (enargeia) in his writing,
as he eagerly desires to make the listener a spectator, as it were, and to
produce in the minds of his readers the feelings of astonishment and
consternation which were experienced by those who witnessed the
events.
,
.
As this suggests, the visual impact is not an end in itself but has the further
effect of producing an emotional impact, involving the listener in the
events. The same enthusiasm for the visual impact of words is shown by
ps.-Longinos in his discussion of the sublime. Citing Herodotos account of
the journey from Elephantine to Meroe (26.2, cf. 9.6), he exclaims: do you
see, my friend, how he takes your soul and leads it through these places,
turning hearing into sight (tn akon opsin poin)? In these contexts, the
difference between Thucydides the dispassionate reporter and Herodotos
the teller of tall tales is nowhere to be seen. Instead, both are sources of
visual experience which transports the reader back to the events described,
involving him both imaginatively and emotionally.
Xenophon, too, was renowned for his ability to make his readers feel
that they were participating in the events of his history. Plutarch attributes
the same power to him as to Thucydides, claiming that the long account of
the battle of Cunaxa in which the younger Cyrus was killed (Anabasis, 1.8)
all but showed the events to the reader, making him feel that it was taking
place not in the distant past but before his very eyes, and that the reader
(akroats) was filled with emotion and shared in the danger.20 Lucian has
a fictional speaker in his Eikones attribute the same power to Xenophons
account of the nobility and fidelity of Pantheia, wife of Abradates
(Cyropaideia, 6.4.28), exclaiming that he feels as if he could actually see and
20
21
all but (mononouchi) hear her arming her husband and sending him out to
battle and to his death.21 Here the exoticism of the character a non-Greek
woman acting in a manly fashion intensifies the effect of the passage
and the visual pleasure derived from it, as well as serving as a reminder
of the relentlessly masculine point of view of educated response. The
underlying erotic interest in the figure of Pantheia emerges clearly from
Lucians wider context a debate on the representability of the emperors
mistress and from Philostratos representation of Pantheias suicide over
Abradates body (Eikones, 2.9).
Philostratos treatment brings out a further habit of ancient readers
that of imaginatively elaborating upon the scenes presented in texts.
Philostratos takes Xenophon as his starting point, citing his source in the
opening lines of his description. He points out that Xenophon himself
did not describe the appearance of his heroine, but merely her character
(thos) (2.9.1) and claims that the painter of the picture he is describing
filled the gaps, painting Pantheia as he deduced her to be from her soul.
The painting that Philostratos goes on to describe therefore corresponds
to a way of reading in which a verbal account of a scene provokes a more
detailed visualization, a sensual response. In this case the beauty of
Pantheia remains tantalizingly elusive; only her posture as she lies over
her husbands body after her suicide is described in any specific detail.
Otherwise her appearance is described in only the most general of terms,
implying that for the full experience we must turn to the ever-invisible
painting and, by implication, to our imaginations.
The best-known and most explicit account of such imaginative
supplementation of a text is to be found in the compendious guide to the
whole rhetorical curriculum by the first-century CE Roman rhetorician
Quintilian, the Institutio oratoria. Citing a passage from the Verrine Orations
in which Cicero gave a brief tableau of Verres with his mistress, Quintilian
freely admits that the image that arises in his mind when he reads those
lines contains details that are not in the text.22 What is more, he presents
this response to Ciceros exemplary enargeia not just as normal but as
normative, introducing it with the question is there anyone so incapable
of (tam procul abest) forming images of things that he does not seem to see
? The passage and its implications for our understanding of ekphrasis
will be discussed below, for the moment I would just like to highlight
the way in which Quintilian presents his response as the norm: anyone
21
Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 8.3.645. For further discussion of this passage, see
Chapter 5.
22
who fails to respond as he does falls short of his readerly ideal. The same
confidence that imaginative involvement is the educated norm is shown
by the Augustan writer Dionysios of Halikarnassos in his discussion
of the enargeia of the fourth-century BCE Attic orator, Lysias. No one,
he claims, can be so clumsy, difficult to please, or slow-witted (skaios,
dusarestos kai bradus ton noun) that he will not feel that he can see what is
being shown (ta dloumena) actually happening and that he is conversing
with the characters introduced by the orator as if they were present.23
Like Quintilian, he has only pejorative terms to describe those who fail to
respond as he does.
In his discussion, acutely analysed by Graham Zanker,24 Dionysios
claims that Lysias enargeia made the reader feel as if he was in the presence
of the characters themselves, even able to converse with them (homilein).
This enargeia is a certain power to lead the things shown before the senses
(dunamis tis hupo tas aisthseis agousa ta dloumena).25 This definition of
enargeia is very close to the language used to define ekphrasis, which can be
literally translated as a speech (logos) which leads the thing shown vividly
before the eyes (hupopsin agon ta dloumena). The difference lies essentially
in the mention of the senses, where the Progymnasmata mention only sight,
the supreme sense. But, as we shall see, even the Progymnasmata definition
assumes that senses other than sight can be excited by the workings of
ekphrasis. Dionysios casts himself not as a distanced spectator but, like
those avid readers of battle narratives, as a participant who could almost
enter into the scene himself and converse with the characters. This is
partly the result of Lysias famed skill at conveying the character of the
litigants for whom he wrote through the language he gave them to speak,
but Dionysios language of showing and of vision makes clear that the
impact was felt as above all a visual one.
Readers of tragedy, too, felt drawn into the absent spectacle just by
reading the words. Several ancient commentators note the vividness
of tragic passages.26 Dio Chrysostom in the first century prefaces his
discussion of the three versions of Philoktetes by the three great tragedians
that were still extant in his day by saying that he was magnificently
entertained by the spectacle (thea) as he read (Or. 52.3). And ps.-Longinos
describes the sheer emotional force of merely reading certain passages
from tragedy. Vividness (enargeia) in poetry, he explains, has a shattering
23
Graham
Zanker, Enargeia in the ancient criticism of poetry, RhMus, 124 (1981):
297311.
25
See
Roos Meijering, Literary and Rhetorical Theories in Greek Scholia (Groningen, 1987),
esp. pp. 4952.
24
23
Zeitlin
, Visions and revisions of Homer in the Second Sophistic.
See Webb,
The Progymnasmata as practice,
pp. 3012.
29
See especially Whitmarsh, Greek Literature and the Roman Empire; Joy Connolly,
Problems of the past in Imperial Greek education, in Yun Lee Too (ed.), Greek and Roman
Education (Leiden, 2001), pp. 33972; Schmitz, Bildung und Macht, in an otherwise brilliant
analysis of the social function of sophistic practices, places too much emphasis on the past as
an overwhelming burden that crushed the elite.
30
Jane P. Tompkins, The reader in history: the changing shape of literary response,
in Jane P. Tompkins (ed.), Reader-response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-structuralism
(Baltimore, 1980).
31
24
not valued, theorized and articulated in the same way and do not have the
same social and cultural significance as, say, an Imperial Greek readers
response to his classical reading.
Discussions of visual response to words, as Tompkins points out,
are one area in which these differences emerge particularly acutely. As
Ellen Esrock has noted, readerly visuality has been neglected as a valid
response by modern criticism for a variety of reasons.32 Ancient critics,
by contrast, speak as if such imaginative responses to words were the
norm. In the case of Quintilian and Dionysios, failure to respond in this
way is even seen as a sign of a much greater moral deficiency. Those who
do not respond as they do are branded as slow, incapable, difficult to
please the language bristles with terms of distance and negation (abest,
dusarestos). Such confidence may seem surprising to us. It goes against
our own cultures tendency to assume that visualization in response to
reading is personal and variable in intensity and in content. An average
group of twentieth- or twenty-first-century readers will probably contain
individuals who admit to similar experiences when reading, and others
who claim never to see what they read. Many people assume that their
experience of reading is universal and seem genuinely surprised to find
that others have such different experiences of reading.33 This discrepancy
between modern experience and the claims of ancient critics raises the
question of whether we should discount the claims of ancient critics,
or whether the ancient experience of reading was very different from
our own. When Quintilian and Dionysios both ask who could fail to
respond in the ways they prescribe they open up the possibility that
some individuals may not have responded in this way but, at the same
time, they make clear what they consider the norm to be. The question of
whether this represents a real difference in response between ancient and
modern audiences has been raised by Ann Vasaly and I would agree with
her suggestion that things were different in the ancient world and that
ancient audiences were more consciously attuned to visual effects and did
see the subject of poems and speeches in their minds eye.34
The most striking difference does not perhaps reside in the elusive
domain of personal response but in the discussions of that response. It
32
Ellen J. Esrock, The Readers Eye: Visual Imaging as Reader Response (Baltimore, 1994).
These conclusions are the result of several discussions with small seminar groups
composed of graduate students and faculty at Princeton University. For a more scientific
approach, see
Jocelyn Penny
Small, Wax Tablets of the Mind: Cognitive Studies of Memory and
Literacy in Classical Antiquity (London, 1997), pp. 13031
34
Ann Vasaly, Representations: Images of the World in Ciceronian Oratory (Berkeley, 1993),
p.
99. On the question of how rhetors could predict the imaginative response of their audience,
which Vasaly raises here, see Chapters 4 and 5 below. I am leaving aside the question of what
the mental experience expressed by the claims to see actually might have been.
25
See also
Agns Rouveret
, Histoire et imaginaire de la peinture ancienne (Ve s. av. J.-C.Ier
s. ap. J.-C.) (Rome, 1989), p.
312.
38
Theon, Progymnasmata, section 13 (p. 103). This discussion of reading aloud comes
from the end of the work, which does not survive in the Greek manuscripts and is preserved
only in the Armenian translation.
36
26
in the persona of a character from the classical past, often an orator like
Demosthenes.39
Theons recommendations also help to explain the way in which
ancient readers of all types of text cast themselves as listeners. The term
translated reader in several of the examples above is akroats listener
and what is read is often referred to as a logos, with all its implications of
live speech. Despite the importance of the written word, and its culturally
crucial role in preserving the words of past eras, the reception of texts
remained an essentially aural experience. Active listening was considered
as an important activity in itself.40 As Theon shows, reading in the school
situation meant reading aloud to others, and even solitary readers are
known to have pronounced the words out loud, casting themselves
simultaneously as speaker and audience.41 This effacement of the written
medium brings the author, whether poet, historian or orator, into direct
proximity, casting the reader as a live audience member, like Dio at his
private performances of tragedy. All readers, even of the deadest of poets,
are thus assimilated to the audiences of a live performance.
The live audiences of spoken orations were also assumed to respond
in the same way to the effective use of vivid language. We have fewer
testimonies of individual response, but the whole treatment of ekphrasis
and enargeia by ancient rhetoricians is based on the assumption that
audiences can be made to respond imaginatively to a speech, placing
themselves in the situation described. Aristotle, in the Rhetoric (1411 b24
5), refers to the ability of certain metaphors to place the image before the
eyes pro ommatn and makes a distinction between metaphors that
evoke an image of motion (energeia) which have this effect, and others,
whose image is static, which do not. Quintilian (8.3.62) also makes clear
that the audience of a judicial speech should have the subject matter
displayed to the eyes of the mind, and that he regards success in this as
a vital ingredient of the persuasive force of the speech. The speech will
not have the power that it should (debet) have if the judge believes he is
hearing a simple narration, rather than having the facts displayed to his
minds eye, si narrari credit, non exprimi et oculis mentis ostendi.
Quintilians purpose in describing his own response to Cicero, or
picking out the vivid passages in the Aeneid is therefore to explain to his
39
See Brian Reardon, Courants littraires grecs des IIe et IIIe sicles aprs J.-C. (Paris,
1971);
Donald
Russell, Greek Declamation (Cambridge, 1983)
; Schmitz, Bildung und Macht and
Performing History
; and Webb, Fiction, mimesis and the performance of the Greek past.
40
See William
27
own readers how, and why, to work the same effect in their own speeches.
This practical orientation is shared by most ancient critics they aim to tell
us how to do it, not simply to analyse the qualities of a particular writer
or passage making ancient criticism a very different phenomenon
from modern literary criticism. Ancient critics were mostly practitioners
of rhetoric and their primary goal was to show others how to be active
practitioners and how to harness the power of language for their own
ends. Just as the ancient reader was simultaneously speaker and listener
as he read aloud, educated readers in general expected to become writers
and speakers in their turn.42
The elementary exercise of ekphrasis was one means by which students
were taught to appreciate the ability of words to spark an image in the mind
and to master this power for themselves. The discussions of ekphrasis can
therefore help us to understand how texts were read and what impact the
spoken word was thought to have upon an audience. They also reveal the
strength of the conception of language as a power acting upon the world
that was current throughout antiquity. As a special use of language to bring
the subject matter before the eyes of the listener, penetrating the mind
and acting on the most intimate of faculties, ekphrasis and enargeia also
lie at the intersection of word and image. Any examination of either has
to take account of ancient theories of psychology in which mental images
(phantasmata or phantasiai) played a vital part from the classical period
onwards. The plain, paradoxical statement we find in the Progymnasmata
and elsewhere that language places a subject before the eyes depended
on a body of assumptions about language and its impact on the human
mind. In turn, these ideas can point to the effects that words actually had
on their audiences, as their minds became the locus of interaction between
word and image.
The ancient discussions of ekphrasis define it as a type of speech
that creates immaterial images in the mind. The speaker of a successful
ekphrasis is therefore a metaphorical painter, the result of his words
is a metaphorical painting and this analogy emerges at certain points
in the discussions. The Byzantine scholar John Sardianos, for example,
commenting on the ancient rhetorical texts that were still in use in the
Greek Middle Ages, points out that ekphrasis works by imitating the
painters art.43 How this paradoxical feat could be accomplished, and why
it was considered useful for students of rhetoric, will be the subject of the
42
Harris, Ancient Literacy, pp. 2223 notes it may seem that only the exceptionally
inarticulate members of the Roman upper class refrained from literary composition. The
same can be said of the Greek elite in the Roman period, assuming that literary composition
includes rhetorical compositions.
43
28
Murray Krieger, Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign (Baltimore, 1992) and
James
A.W. Heffernan, Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (Chicago,
1993)
concentrate on examples drawn from poetry; John Hollander, The Gazers Spirit: Poems
Speaking to Silent Works of Art (Chicago and London, 1995) defines the subject of his work as
actual ecphrasis that is, poems written in response to real works of art (p. 4).
29
questions that led Henri Piot and Jacques Bompaire to focus on the special
category of ekphraseis of works of art while acknowledging that the sense
of the term was far wider in antiquity. Discussing
45
Henri Piot, Les Procds littraires de la IIe Sophistique chez Lucien: lecphrasis (Rennes,
1914), p.
22:
Lobjet de lecphrasis, dit Hermogne est
sens le
plus intressant est celui qui fait de lecphrasis doeuvre dart, sc. tableau, difice, lecphrasis
par excellence la littrature se nourrit dart
[The most interesting meaning is the one
which treats ecphrasis of works of art (paintings, buildings) as ecphrasis par excellence
literature is nourished by art]. Cf.
Louis Mridier, LInfluence de la Seconde Sophistique sur
luvre de Gregoire de Nysse (Paris, 1906)
, p. 150 (on Gregory of Nyssa).
47
Gautiers own writing has been described as a transposition crite du tableau.
See Georges Mator,
Le Vocabulaire de la prose littraire de 1835 1845: Thophile Gautier et
ses premires oeuvres en prose (Geneva and Lille, 1951), p. 142. In his poem LArt, Gautier
presents verbal and sculptural artistry as equivalent: Oui, loeuvre sort plus belle / Dune
forme au travail / Rebelle / Vers, marbre, onyx, mail [Yes, more beautiful pieces emerge
from forms that resist being worked: verse, marble, onyx, enamel].
30
The part played by such aesthetic doctrines in the shaping of the modern
conception of ekphrasis is shown clearly in the studies of Philostratos by
two earlier French scholars, the art historian Edouard Bertrand and the
philologist Auguste Bougot, both published in 1881. Both attempted to
move the study of the Eikones away from the question of whether the text
was archaeologically accurate or not, which had dominated the scholarship
up until then, particularly in Germany. Bertrand and Bougot attempted
instead to understand the cultural background to Philostratos though
Bertrands depiction of the Second Sophistic seems to owe a great deal
to late-nineteenth-century Parisian culture and identified Philostratos
as an art critic whose descriptions showed how art was perceived, an
approach that anticipated twentieth-century readings of the text.48
Bertrand and Bougot also took the step of placing the text within a
tradition of poetic descriptions of works of art, a type of text which
resonated with contemporary developments in French literature and arts.
Both, moreover, borrowed the term ekphrasis as a label for this tradition,
although the ways in which they introduced it into their discussions suggest
that they were far from confident about its usage.
Bertrand enigmatically
refers to the descriptions of works of art in authors of the Roman period
such as Catullus, Virgil, Statius, Martial, Apuleius and Lucian as belonging
to a fashionable genre which had its own name.49 The name turns out to
be ekphrasis. But Bertrand is curiously coy about saying so. He hides the
word itself in a footnote and leaves it in Greek letters. Most importantly,
however, he implies that Philostratos consciously saw himself as writing
within this tradition. In a passage bordering on historical fiction, Bertrand
imagines Philostratos as an ambitious writer, desperate to surpass these
predecessors, who suddenly one day had the idea of creating the new genre
of art criticism.50 Bougot, whose translation and substantial introduction
appeared just before Bertrands study, also brought the term ekphrasis
into his discussion rather ambiguously, entitling one section Lecphrasis
ou description des oeuvres dart, leaving open the question of whether
48
Bertrand, Un critique dart dans lantiquit, p. 49: cest un genre en faveur qui a un
nom particulier.
50
Bertrand, Un critique dart dans lantiquit, pp. 534: Tourment de la mme ambition,
Philostrate stait aussi cr un style singulier compos darchasmes et de nologismes. Mais
il eut un jour une pense neuve, et ce jour l il cra un genre qui lui survcut et suscita
des imitateurs: il cra la critique dart [Tormented by the same ambition, Philostratos also
developed a unique style combining archaisms and neologisms. But one day he had a new
idea and on that day he created a genre which outlived him and inspired imitators: he
created art criticism]. The use of unusual vocabulary which Bertrand underlines here was
also a characteristic of Parnassian poetics.
31
32
Friedlnder, Johannes von Gaza und Paulus Silentiarius, p. 83: Man pflegt heut
literargeschichtliche Fragen, wie sie uns beschftigen, mit dem Schlagwort rhetorische
Ekphrasis mehr scheinbar als wirklich zu beantworten und glaubt, dass hier die
Rhetorenschule schpferisch gewesen sei. See also his comments on descriptions of works
of art in the novel: ibid., pp. 47 and 545.
55
760
. The decision to group the
Elder and the Younger Philostratos Eikones together with Kallistratos ekphraseis of statues
in a single volume is in itself a significant step that divorces the Eikones from the Philostratean
corpus to place it in a context of descriptions works of art, rather than a wider rhetorical
context.
56
Interestingly, Jacobs notes in his introduction that he became interested in the Eikones
while working on Greek epigrams about art works some 30 years earlier. He therefore
approaches the text from an archaeological standpoint reflected in his use of the term
ekphrasis as the equivalent of description as he understood it, i.e. an accurate account of the
appearance of an object. This leads him to the ironic claim (pp. xvixvii) that Philostratos
33
in a footnote by Erwin Rohde who, in his study of the Greek novels, first
published in 1876, suggested that the roots of rhetorisch-sophistischen
ekphraseis of paintings and statues from the Second Sophistic lay in the
earlier poetic tradition.57 This note, too, mentions many of the standard
examples of what would now be called ekphrasis, from the Shield of
Achilles, through the Cloak of Jason in the Argonautica and Moschus
Europa, to Virgil, Catullus and Nonnus.
Like Friedlnders survey all these footnotes and comments served to
draw attention to the phenomenon of describing works of art in antiquity
but without applying the label ekphrasis to them. The term floats in the
vicinity of these discussions, but, unlike Bertrand and Bougot, the authors
do not apply it as a unifying label for writing on art nor do they suggest
that they are discussing or defining a genre. This explains why Schissel
von Fleschenberg, in his study of the use of descriptions of works of art
in the novel published in 1913, does not use it but invents instead the
term Bildeinsatz (inset painting) to designate what would now almost
automatically be termed ekphrasis.58 What Schissel von Fleschenbergs
article does show is the growing interest in this technique as a literary
phenomenon. In the same way, Bertrand and Bougot were inspired by
contemporary cultural debates in their refreshing attempt to wrest the
Eikones from the stale debates about the accuracy and reliability of the
descriptions and to show that Philostratos enterprise was something
different: a reflection of the place of art in society and, in Bertrands
account, the birth of art criticism.
As we have already seen, a parallel interest in Imperial ekphraseis of
paintings, sculpture and buildings as sources of information on lost works
also contributed to the process. However, almost all of the classical and
medieval studies acknowledge the ancient sense of the term and often take
their starting points from ekphraseis of works of art. The revolutionary step
of defining ekphrasis as an essentially poetic genre, totally divorced from
the rhetorical form of ekphrasis, was taken by Leo Spitzer in his famous
essay on Keats Ode on a Grecian Urn, first published in 1955. Here,
Spitzer identifies the ode as part of a long tradition called ekphrasis:
failed to produce proper ekphraseis and succumbed instead to the temptations of rhetorical
embellishment.
57
Erwin Rohde, Der griechische Roman und seine Vorlufer (Leipzig, 1900), p. 360n.
58
In a letter to Friedlndler written in 1913 and now in the Paul Friedlnder Collection,
UCLA Special Collections (Box 1). In the letter Schissel uses the term Bildbeschreibung but
not ekphrasis. Schissel von Fleschenberg criticizes his historicist approach as old-fashioned
(as well as taking great pleasure in pointing out various omissions of primary and secondary
sources). In his article Schissel justified his deliberate omission of any enquiry into the origins
of the Bildeinsatz by distinguishing his type of literary studies (Literaturwissenschaft) from the
(implicitly inferior) enterprise of literary history.
34
Spitzer does not give any source for his definition, perhaps not surprisingly,
and his calm assurance masks the innovation he was making. His mention
of the Parnassians and Gautier, to whom he erroneously attributes the
phrase transposition dart, do, however, reveal the intellectual currents
which shaped his interest in and conception of ekphrasis.60 A further
parallel with Bertrands and Bougots studies of Philostratos in particular
emerges later on in Spitzers discussion of Keats ode when he insists on
the poems function as a representation of the poets response to the sight
of the urn. Interestingly, he presents this as a particular development of
ekphrasis, which he appears to conceive of as simply a form of objective
description: The ekphrasis, the description of an objet dart by the
medium of the word, has here developed into an account of an exemplary
experience felt by the poet confronted with an ancient work of art 61
Spitzers achievement was to create a concept of a poetic genre that
triumphantly transcended both time and place. Homer, Theokritos, the
Parnassian poets and Rilke all partook of the same essence. The way in
which he introduces the first of the quotations gives the unsuspecting
reader no clue that he has just invented a genre, albeit one that had long
been waiting to happen. He presents it as an obvious generic statement, a
straightforward starting point for any study of Keats ode. His method is to
separate what might count as straightforward description (What exactly
... Keats [has] seen (or chosen to show us) depicted on urn he is describing
(pp. 723)) from the symbolic or metaphysical inferences drawn by the
poet from the visual elements he has apperceived (p. 73). The statement
that Keats poem is about an art object and that other such poems have
59
Leo Spitzer,
The
Ode on a Grecian Urn, or content vs. metagrammar,
in Essays
on English and American Literature, ed. Anna Hatcher (Princeton, 1962)
, p. 72.
60
Spitzer had previously published articles on descriptions of works of art in the poetry
of Mrike, Wiederum Mrikes Gedicht Auf eine Lampe, Trivium, 9 (1951): 20325 and
Garcilaso de la Vega
, Garcilaso, Third Eclogue, Lines 265271, Hispanic Review, 20 (1952):
2438.
The term ekphrasis appears once, buried in a footnote, in the latter of these. Given
Spitzers background in French and classics and his interest in the description of works of
art, it does seem likely that he knew the work of Bertrand, Bougot and Piot, not to mention
the Oxford Classical Dictionary. I am grateful to Alejandro Coroleu for drawing my attention
to the article on Garcilaso.
61
35
existed from antiquity onwards is, one would think, incontrovertible, and
gives Spitzer the basis for a brilliant analysis. But such a straightforward
statement hides the revolutionary nature of his claim for ekphrasis and
its implications of unity of poetic purpose across time and space. What
is a useful concept and a useful set of comparanda for the critic embarking
upon a reading of the Ode on a Grecian Urn is presented as literaryhistorical fact.
One can speculate on the attraction of such continuity in Western
culture for a refugee scholar like Spitzer.62 But the effect of his definition,
taken in isolation, was to obliterate cultural distinctions and to remove
rhetoric, particularly the rhetorical culture of the Roman period, entirely
from the picture. The term ekphrasis is restricted not only to descriptions
of works of art but to poetic descriptions of works of art and simultaneously
expanded to include all periods of Western culture. The rest is history.
Spitzers constitution of the new genre of ekphrasis catapulted the word
out of the specialized domain of classical and archaeology into the world
of English and Comparative Literature, sparking essays, books, colloquia,
redefinitions and counter-definitions.63 The popularity and influence
of Spitzers definition show more clearly than ever that his new genre
satisfied an intellectual need. Descriptions of works of art as a group had
attracted interest since the Renaissance.64 This interest emerges in the
grouping of Philostratos Eikones with Kallistratos Ekphraseis by Olearius,
in the archaeological debates about whether such descriptions were
62
One of the first to conceive of literary descriptions of works of art as a coherent group
was Erasmus. His rhetorical treatise, De Copia (II, 202),
includes a list of passages describing
paintings and sculptures: Statuarum item: qualis est in epistolis Plinianis signi senilis;
tabularum et imaginum: qualis est apud Lucianum Hercules Gallicus, apud Philostratum
varia picturarum argumenta; to this category belong also Ovids description of Arachnes
tapestry in Metamorphoses, the Homeric Shield of Achilles and its Virgilian descendent,
the Shield of Aeneas, ending ad haec navis, vestis, vo, machinae, currus, Colossi,
pyramidis, aut si quid est aliud rerum consimilium, quarum descriptio delectet.
36
records or mere rhetoric, in the fascination with the ways in which one
art represents another and the autonomy of the arts that this suggests.
Spitzers ekphrasis was a genre, or mode, in search of a label. The vogue
for New Criticism meant that Spitzers definition fell on particularly fertile
ground, as witnessed by Murray Kriegers study of Keats ode and of his
conception of ekphrasis.65
Since the mid twentieth century, ekphrasis, generally understood as the
description of works of art, usually in poetry, has become a familiar term,
though the basic definition has given rise to many different approaches,
which it is impossible to survey here. One such development that has been
fruitful in the study of classical literature is the reading of descriptions
of works of art as metapoetic commentaries on the literary work within
which they are found.66 Such developments reflect the linguistic turn
in twentieth-century approaches to literature, a development that freed
the study of description in particular from the expectation that language
should depict reality and underlined the problems involved in verbal
representation.67
This same development made possible a fresh appreciation of
rhetorical texts of all kinds, in particular the rhetoric of the Second
Sophistic, including its ekphraseis of works of art. However, the resulting
renaissance of interest in the Second Sophistic and later rhetoric has
tended to focus on those texts that most resemble modern literature,
such as dialogues and the novel, and, in the case of ekphrasis, a certain
subgroup of ekphraseis of works of art (such as Philostratos Eikones)
has come to stand as emblematic of the whole of ekphrasis. The fact that
this move misrepresents the category of ekphrasis as it was understood
in antiquity does not in any way undermine the interpretative value of
individual studies of individual literary texts. But, if we are interested in
the wider intellectual and cultural contexts in which these texts were read,
heard and composed, it is misleading to assume that ancient categories
and assumptions about language were identical to our own. Of course,
those ancient categories are irrecoverable in their entirety but there is still
a large amount of information that is still to be exploited in sources such
as scholia and rhetorical handbooks.68 This study aims to elucidate the
65
Murray Krieger, Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign (Baltimore, 1992).
See, in particular, the essays collected in Roland Barthes et al., Littrature et ralit
(Paris, 1982) and in Yale French Studies, 61 (1981).
68
37
38
the different role of the visual is key to the profound differences between
the conceptions underlying the two definitions. For the modern definition
the visual is a quality of the referent, which in some definitions is already
a representation of reality. For the ancient rhetoricians the impact of
ekphrasis is visual; it is a translation of the perceptible which mimics the
effect of perception, making the listener seem to see. The impact on the
audience is powerful and immediate as Plutarch claims for Xenophon
and Thucydides; it is a psychological effect, and, as I shall argue below,
what is imitated in ekphrasis and enargeia is not reality, but the perception
of reality. The word does not seek to represent, but to have an effect in the
audiences mind that mimics the act of seeing.
As moderns we cannot hope to understand something like ekphrasis
entirely from an ancient perspective: the sources at our disposal represent
a fraction of the definitions and paradigms available to the ancient
rhetorician.69 I am fully aware that what I am proposing in the following
chapters is another modern interpretation of ancient ekphrasis. However,
it is one that is based on a more comprehensive study of the ancient
theoretical sources than has been undertaken before and therein, I hope,
lies its main interest.
69
40
the classical canon. Thus we find the term in Greek manuals of rhetoric
from the Roman period, like Hermogenes treatise On Types of Style (Peri
Iden Logou) and in the commentaries on his other work on declamation,
or the guide to epideictic speeches by Menander Rhetor. It is also used
in the commentaries on the classical texts which were read in schools.
The scholia to Homers Iliad, for example, identify a range of passages
as ekphrasis. Some of these overlap with the modern usage, like the
description of shields, while others are simply moments in the action in
which the commentator found particular appeals to the imagination.
All these texts scholia, Progymnasmata, and more advanced rhetorical
handbooks reflect the teaching dispensed in schoolrooms throughout the
Greek-speaking areas of the Roman Empire. They are often anonymous, or
wrongly attributed to some famous name (like Hermogenes or Dionysios
of Halikarnassos), and are difficult to date with any certainty. Taken
together, however, they do reflect a set of coherent ideas and doctrines
which make it possible to build up a picture of what ancient readers
and writers understood by a term like ekphrasis. The general ideas
underlying the treatments of ekphrasis in these technical sources were
not new. Effective poetry, and later prose, had always appealed to the
imagination. But what is particularly interesting about the Roman period
is that we can see a range of interconnecting attempts to identify and teach
this type of writing. We see which passages from the canonical classical
texts became widely accepted as models; we see attempts to explain why
and how these models should be absorbed and imitated. Finally, we can
often see the results of the teaching methods in finished compositions,
such as speeches or even in non-rhetorical works, so pervasive were the
effects of the rhetorical education.
As we have already seen, these technical, pedagogical sources, including
the commentaries on classical texts, had a very practical aim: teaching
students to express themselves effectively and in forms sanctioned by
the prestige of tradition (the two were not necessarily contradictory or
distinct). They are fragments of what was once a living and complex
process of training in which a great deal must have depended on oral
traditions and live interaction between teachers and students. As a result,
they give us a privileged glimpse behind the literary scenes. However, for
the very same reasons, they can be opaque.
Scholia graeca in Homeri Iliadem, ed. Hartmut Erbse (7 vols, Berlin, 196988) to 11.616
(shields); 15.2378 (the descent of Apollo, likened to a hawk); 18.610 (the armour made by
Hephaistos to go with the Shield of Achilles) and 23.232 (Achilles sinking into sleep).
See the remarks of Raffaella Cribiore, Gymnastics of the Mind: Greek Education in
Hellenistic and Roman Egypt (Princeton, 2001),
p. 143.
41
All the surviving versions of the Progymnasmata have been translated in George A.
Kennedy, Progymnasmata: Greek Textbooks of Prose Composition and Rhetoric (Atlanta, 2003). I
have supplied my own translations of the chapters on ekphrasis in Appendix A.
Charles S. Baldwin, Medieval Rhetoric and Poetic (New York, 1928), p. 38: Arid,
impersonal as arithmetic, pedantically over-classified, sometimes inconsistent, these rules
are nevertheless illuminating. They expose sophistic oratory. The patterns set forth for boys
are recognizably the patterns of the public oratory of men.
On the formation of habit in rhetorical education, see James J. Murphy, The key role
of habit in Roman rhetoric and education as described by Quintilian, in Toms Albaladejo et
al. (eds), Quintiliano: Historia y actualidad de la retrica (Logroo, 1998), pp. 14150.
Theon, Progymnasmata, ed.
and trans.
Michel Patillon and G. Bolognesi (Paris: Les
Belles Lettres, 1997), 70,
42
43
Theon calls this exercise prospopoiia, a term that is used elsewhere specifically of a
passage where words are attributed to an inanimate object, such as a city.
16
Suetonius, De grammaticis et rhetoribus, 25.4. See also the introduction to Theons
Progymnasmata by Michel Patillon (pp. xiiixiv). Robert Kaster in his edition of Suetonius
(Oxford, 1995) suggests on pp. 27980 that all the exercises had been relegated to the
grammatici by Suetonius time.
17
44
perhaps his own), though he makes no claim to have invented the exercises
themselves.18 Addressing himself to the teachers of rhetoric, he is the most
informative of all the authors concerning the ways in which the exercises
were to be taught, particularly in the discussion of pedagogical methods
which precedes the chapters devoted to the individual exercises.
A much shorter version of the Progymnasmata is transmitted with the
works of Hermogenes, a rhetorical theorist of the second century CE
whose writings on style and on argumentation came to form the core of
the Byzantine rhetorical curriculum.19 The ps.-Hermogenean text may
date to the third century.20 Its brevity led to complaints of obscurity
from Byzantine readers.21 Neither of these two treatises came close to the
popularity of the fourth-century version by Aphthonios, identified as a
pupil of Libanios.22 Aphthonios secured lasting popularity by appending
his own examples of each exercise, rather than simply referring to passages
in the ancient authors as his predecessors had done,23 but his instructions
are minimal. This deficiency in Aphthonios book was clearly felt by its
Byzantine users as several commentaries were composed, drawing on
Theon among other sources, to explain his laconic text phrase by phrase.
One of these is by John Sardianos, probably writing in the ninth century,
another by the eleventh-century scholar Doxapatres.24
One further ancient version of the Progymnasmata is by a certain
Nikolaos, who is placed by the Souda in the fifth century.25 Like Theon,
Nikolaos goes into each exercise in some detail and is a good deal more
18
Ps.-Hermogenes, Progymnasmata, in Opera, ed. Hugo Rabe (Leipzig, 1913), pp. 127.
The new edition of this text by Michel Patillon in Corpus Rhetoricum (Paris: Les Belles Lettres,
2008), pp. 180206 appeared too late for me to take account of it in this book.
20
Pierre Laurens, preface to Hermogne: lart rhtorique, trans. Michel Patillon (Paris,
1997), p. 41.
21
A scholiast quoted in RE 2, 1 col.2797 [s.v. Aphthonios] commented on the difficulty
of understanding the Progymnasmata attributed to Hermogenes, describing them as rather
unclear and difficult to comprehend ( ); cf. Doxapatres, Homiliae, p.
131.
22
Patillon (Paris, 2008) contains a new edition of this text on pp. 11262.
23
On the post-Antique popularity of Aphthonios, see Herbert Hunger, Die
hochsprachliche profane Literatur der Byzantiner (2 vols, Munich, 1978), vol. 1
, pp. 92120
and
Jean-Claude Margolin, La rhtorique dAphthonius et son influence au XVIe sicle, in
Raymond Chevallier (ed.), Colloque sur la rhtorique (Paris, 1979), pp. 23969.
24
Ioannes Sardianos, Commentarium in Aphthonium, ed. Hugo Rabe (Leipzig, 1928);
Doxapatres, Homiliae in Aphthonii Progymnasmata, in Walz, Rhetores graeci, 2. On Sardianos
and Doxapatres, see Alexander Kazhdan (ed.), The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium (New
York, 1991), pp. 1,067 and 660 respectively.
25
Nikolaos, Progymnasmata, ed. Joseph Felten (Leipzig, 1913). Souda, vol. 3, 469.
19
45
Nikolaos, Progymnasmata, p. 1.
Walz, Rhetores graeci, 3, pp. 5958.
28
On the evidence for the use of books in education, see Cribiore, Gymnastics of the
Mind, pp. 14356.
29
See Michel Patillon, introduction to Theon, Progymnasmata, pp. xciiixcvii; Webb,
The Progymnasmata as practice.
27
46
47
36
48
of cultural literacy.40 He also tells the recipient that he may keep this gift
for himself or pass it on to another as a favour for which he will, in turn,
receive gratitude (charis).
These remarks underline the role of the Progymnasmata in providing a
flexible set of skills that prepare the student for the more demanding task of
composing and performing epideictic speeches and for the immeasurably
more challenging task of mastering the art of declamation. As Sopatros
comment suggests, one of the most valuable aspects of the training offered
by the Progymnasmata was the mastery of topoi, places or kephalaia, heads
of argument which provided a basic framework for argumentation and
for praise and blame. Students learned how to construct a basic speech
of praise following the encomiastic topoi such as birth, education and
achievement.41 In the twin exercises of confirmation (kataskeu) and
refutation (anaskeu) the most important according to Aphthonios
the student learned to support or demolish a story by applying a set
of questions: is it plausible (pithanon)? is it impossible (adunaton)? is it
internally contradictory (machomenon)?42 This process of confirmation and
refutation was one to which all the exercises could be subject, according to
Theon. One could even use the same technique to demolish an ekphrasis,
as well as a narration, a reminder that the exercises were an interlinked
system and that each had, potentially, several levels of difficulty. So the
Progymnasmata formed a system of training that was directed towards the
inculcation of a set of habits and practices in the individual student and
only secondarily towards the production of compositions.
However, the authors of the Progymnasmata take most of this for granted.
In the case of ekphrasis, with the exception of a few lines in Nikolaos, they
pay no attention to the purpose of learning to place a subject before the
eyes. One of the most valuable aspects of Quintilians treatise is that it
provides the key to answering this question. His treatment of enargeia, in
so far as it coincides with the treatments of ekphrasis elsewhere, shows
how this type of composition had a fully rhetorical role, as an aid to
persuasion. And the more advanced Greek rhetorical treatises on epideictic
and declamation show how students were taught to put ekphrasis, and
the other preliminary exercises, to use in the context of a full-scale speech.
These clues to the rhetorical (in the technical sense) purpose of ekphrasis
help to explain its inclusion among the Progymnasmata. These elementary
exercises were, after all, directed towards the study of rhetoric. They aimed
40
49
50
51
52
53
enargeia which makes one almost see the subject, and for Nikolaos this
vividness is the distinguishing characteristic of ekphrasis.57 The author
of a Greek handbook of the Roman period, nicknamed Anonymous
Seguerianus by modern editors, in fact defined enargeia as a type of
speech using exactly the same formula as the Progymnasmata textbooks
used to define ekphrasis: o ' v v ovov (a speech
which brings the subject matter [or, more precisely, the thing shown]
before the eyes).58
Ekphrasis is therefore the exercise which taught students how to use
vivid evocation and imagery in their speeches. Enargeia itself raises further
questions which will be dealt with in Chapters 4 and 5 (as is evident already,
authorities differ in whether they define it as a type of speech, or a quality
of speech, as in Quintilian). The adjective enargs originally meant clearly
visible, so its later rhetorical use to designate speech which appeals to
the minds eye is itself metaphorical.59 This constant resort to metaphor in
the discussions of ekphrasis suggests that the ideas evoked exceeded in
complexity the technical language available to express them. But it may
also indicate something about ekphrasis itself: that it is an effect which
transcends categories and normal expectations of language. An awareness
of the inadequacy of these metaphors of sight and vision (an indication
that they are not, as Sardianos explains, to be taken literally) is evident
in the frequent use of disclaimers such as almost to introduce them. In
Theon, the listeners almost (schedon) see the subject;60 in Nikolaos they
all but (mononou) become spectators (theatai).61 The language of illusion,
approximation and semblance is deeply embedded in the discussions of
ekphrasis.
If the use of metaphor is significant in itself, so are the associations
conjured up by the various images which the authors of the Progymnasmata
draw on. The analogy which springs to mind most readily is that of the
visual arts: language which places before the eyes is comparable to
painting, as Sardianos notes.62 The connection between ekphrasis and the
idea of visual representation thus runs deep and is part of its very essence.
57
54
But this is just one of the analogies used by the rhetoricians in their attempts
to express the effects of ekphrasis. The words hupopsin agn (leading
before the eyes) suggest the dramatist who literally produces characters
and actions on stage, placing them before the eyes of the audience. And
the term used by Nikolaos to express the transformed role of the audience
of ekphrasis, theatai, more obviously refers to the spectators in a theatre
than to viewers of a work of art.63 Theatrical imagery is frequently used
elsewhere of vivid language, as in the scholia to the Shield episode in Iliad,
18 where Homer is said to roll out (ekkukle) the maker [Hephaistos] as if
onto a stage and show us his workshop in the open.64
The adjective perigmatikos, by contrast, casts the speaker as a guide
showing the listener around the sight to be described, as Pausanias
leads the reader around Greece in his Periegesis (which is not mentioned
by any of the rhetorical sources). The analogy between a speech and
a journey in which the speaker leads the audience through space is
frequent in the Greek vocabulary of discourse, in terms such as digsis
(telling, narrating, setting out) literally, a leading through the subject
or periodos for the circular journey of the periodic sentence.65 Perigsis
would therefore suggest a more elaborate form of telling, a winding path
instead of the direct through-route of digsis. Sardianos, before offering
the interpretation quoted above, explores the implications, explaining
that it is like (hoionei) taking a visitor around the city of Athens,
showing and commenting on the points of interest. While his ultimate
interpretation of perigmatikos makes it merely another way of saying
showing in words, the tenor of the metaphor adds to the composite
picture of ekphrasis: the guide not only shows, but directs his or her
audiences attention, adding order and meaning to the undifferentiated
mass of sights which is presented to the visitor. Ekphrasis, in some
cases, therefore does not only make visible the appearance of a subject,
but makes something about its nature intelligible, an idea which is
encompassed by the verb dlo which can mean to explain, to reveal to
the intellect, as well as to show.
Drawn as they are from different domains, these metaphors all suggest
slightly different relationships between speaker, addressee and referent:
the subject matter may be brought into the presence of the audience
63
The formula may derive from Isocrates, who claims at To Nikokles, 49 that drama, in
contrast to Homeric epic, makes the audience not only listeners but spectators (theatai). If so,
the later rhetorical tradition uses the contrast in a very different way.
64
Scholia graeca in Homeri Iliadem to 18.4767: ov v v v,
v v v v ov.
65
See, for example, Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 10.7.23: speech is like a journey out
from a harbour.
55
56
Author
Theon
ps.-Hermogenes
Aphthonios
Nikolaos
68
Aphthonios, Progymnasmata, p. 37; cf. Nikolaos, Progymnasmata, p. 69, ll. 1217 (on
figures in art).
69
Libanios, Progymnasmata, pp. 46064.
70
Ibid., pp. 47982.
57
71
Ps.-Hermogenes, Progymnasmata, p. 23, ll. 1112: vo vooo
o v. See Michel Patillons comment on ps.-Hermogenes in
Hermogne: lart rhtorique (Paris, 1997), p. 148, n. 6: Notre auteur se contente de mtaphores
et ne nous apporte pas dindications techniques sur les procds du style [Our author
is content to use metaphors and does not provide any technical information on the use of
style ].
72
58
59
Conclusion
Read in isolation as disembodied fragments of doctrine, the Progymnasmata
are less than illuminating. Their lack of practical recommendations
is startling: it is difficult to see how one would arrive at anything
approaching Aphthonios model exercises on the basis of his precepts
alone. It is not surprising, then, to read Philippe Hamons statement that
classical rhetoric is little help in defining description, or to find critics such
as Palm rejecting their definition of ekphrasis altogether as inadequate.76
But these elementary treatments of ekphrasis were never intended as
isolated definitions. They were an integral part of a far wider network of
ideas and practices. Though the Progymnasmata may not offer anything
approaching a clearly articulated theory of description, they represent the
elementary introduction to a notion of representation in language, which
becomes clearer from the cumulative evidence of other rhetorical sources,
particularly in their treatment of enargeia.
But, before considering the exercise of ekphrasis as part of a wider
rhetorical system, it is also worth examining its place within the smaller
system of the elementary exercises themselves. One way to explore the
relation of ekphrasis to the other Progymnasmata and to the system of ancient
rhetoric in general is through the range of subject matter proposed. There
may be no single defining type of subject matter for ancient ekphrasis but,
taken as a group, the categories named are significant in themselves.
76
Philippe Hamon, Quest-ce quune description?, Potique, 112 (1972): 465; Jonas
Palm, Bemerkungen zur Ekphrase in der griechischen Literatur, Kungliga Humanististiska
Vetenskapssamfundet i Uppsala, rsbok (196566): 116.
Introduction
The most striking aspect of the subjects for ekphrasis for the modern reader
is the variety: we find battles, crocodiles, cities, buildings, people and
festivals. However, the lists of subjects offered by the authors are by no
means as random as they may appear to be at first sight and many of their
constituent elements are familiar from other exercises and from elsewhere in
the rhetorical system. They thus provide important clues to the relationship
between ekphrasis and other exercises. To begin with the earliest version of
the Progymnasmata, Theon identifies as potential subjects persons (prospa),
events (pragmata) such as a battle, a plague or an earthquake, places (topoi)
such as a harbour or a city, and times (chronoi) such as the seasons, and
also the manner (tropos) [in which something is done]. The later authors
have some variations on Theons list, as is clear from the List of Subjects
(Appendix B) and Table 2.1, the greatest difference being the word used
for times which is sometimes chronoi and sometimes kairoi. There is, as
usual, no consistency in usage, but a general distinction is made between
the regular rhythms of nature (the seasons) and culture (festivals) on the
one hand and man-made circumstances (war and peace) or temporary and
unpredictable states of affairs (famine) on the other. Elsewhere there is also
a degree of fluidity in the categorization: subjects which are subsumed
under one category in one author (such as animals or festivals) appear as
independent categories in another. Nikolaos feels free to add a discussion
of types of subject (paintings and sculptures) which do not even appear in
his main list. That classification by subject is not of crucial importance is
also suggested by the way in which Theon simply mentions examples of
ekphrasis in the prologue to his work which do not correspond neatly to his
list of subjects, without making any reference to category.
The model ekphraseis by Aphthonios, Libanios and Nikolaos only
increase the sense of variety in subject matter, though, unlike the examples
from classical texts, they are all relatively substantial in length. Aphthonios
example is a description of the Alexandrian acropolis (corresponding to the
category of place). Some of the examples in Libanios corpus show a closer
correspondence to the various instructions. They include ekphraseis of battles
on land and sea, a harbour, a season (the ekphrasis of spring) and a festival
62
(the Kalends) as well as a hunt, a drunken man and three paintings showing
landscapes with figures and buildings and a mythological scene. There is a
temple of Tyche and an intriguing ekphrasis of beauty (kallos), in which the
narrator describes the effect on him of the sight of a girl at her window. The
rest of the models, attributable to Nikolaos or another, are mainly of statues
representing mythological persons (goddesses, Herakles, a Trojan woman)
or beasts (such as the Chimaira). (These statue ekphraseis are appropriately
attributed to Nikolaos and follow his advice on the description of statues;
they also provide a means of describing the type of poetic, mythological
themes which are typical of the other model Progymnasmata and a sign of
their place in the curriculum between poetry and rhetoric.)
In addition to the principal categories, the authors recognize a further
category of mixed ekphrasis, such as the night battle in Thucydides (7.43
4) which is both an ekphrasis of an action (the battle) and of a time (night).
This mixed ekphrasis may look like another example of a rhetoricians
mania for classification, but it does reflect a recognition that classification
by subject is not the most important feature of ekphrasis and that there
will always be examples which cannot be reduced to fit a neat schema.
Hermogenes hints at this openness when he finishes his list of subjects by
adding and many other things, as does Nikolaos when he simply begins to
tell his readers how to write ekphraseis of paintings and statues. There was
clearly space for ekphraseis of all types of subject matter, including works
of art; the categories are neither exhaustive nor exclusive, and are very
different from the rigid classifications of types of description set out in neoclassical textbooks from the renaissance to the nineteenth century. Instead,
they point to the place of ekphrasis in the wider system of ideas about
rhetorical composition reflected in the Progymnasmata, and in particular
represent the interface between ekphrasis and the exercise of narration.
Ekphrasis and Narration: The Significance of the Subjects
Amid this variety and the apparently constant reorganization and
substitution, four categories of subject matter emerge as stable elements:
persons (prospa), places (topoi), times (kairoi or chronoi) and events
Foerster in Libanios, Progymnasmata (Opera, vol. 8), pp. 4389 accepts only the
ekphraseis of the battle, the three paintings, the Kalends, the drunken man and spring as
by Libanios.
Aphthonios, Progymnasmata, p. 37, ll. 1720 (the night battle in Sicily); Hermogenes,
Progymnasmata, p. 22, ll. 1518 (identified by Rabe as Thucydides, 3.22 the attempt to break
out of the besieged city of Plataia by night). The anonymous scholia to Aphthonios in Walz,
Rhetores graeci, 2, p. 57, ll. 811 note that the Byzantine scholar Geometres also classified
ekphraseis of sea battles as mixed, since the sea is a place.
63
(pragmata). The rhetors students would easily have recognized this group
as four of what Theon calls elements of narration (stoicheia ts digses):
the who, what, when and where of the ancient rhetorical schools (see Table
3.1). When they learned how to compose a simple narration, or to analyse
a poetic narrative, students were taught to break down the story into the
action (pragma) performed by the person (prospon), the place (topos) in
which it occurred and the time (chronos) when it occurred as well as the
manner (tropos) in which the action was carried out and its cause (aitia).
One function of these elements was to help students to organize their
own narrations. The immediate application was to the composition of the
narrative section of a speech in which the speaker had to set out clearly
his own version of events. However, there were clearly applications to
other genres many of Theons examples of digsis are drawn from
historiography (Thucydides, Philistos, Herodotos) and Homeric epic, as
well as from orators such as Demosthenes.
More importantly, these elements of narration, also known as
peristaseis or peristatika (Latin, circumstantia), represented the conceptual
framework within which the speaker could organize the complexities of
the events in question (Patillon aptly terms them the micro-universe of
the rhetoricians.) As one Latin rhetorician explains, they were the means
by which students of rhetoric were taught to impose intellectual order
onto the mass of material which faced them in a legal case. This statement
brings out clearly the role of the peristaseis as a conceptual grid, a pattern
for organizing experience and verbal accounts of that experience. The
reader of the Progymnasmata who came to ekphrasis well versed in the
doctrine of the peristaseis would therefore immediately recognize persons,
places, times and events as rhetorician-speak for practically everything
(regardless of how easily individual examples fitted in). One conclusion
Theon does however use the Odyssey as an example in his chapter on digsis, showing
that a continuity was seen between the technical narration of judicial rhetoric and narration
in the broader literary sense.
Patillon in Theon, Progymnasmata, p. xlv.
See Heinrich Lausberg, Handbook of Literary Rhetoric: A Foundation for Literary
Study, trans. Matthew T. Bliss et al. (Leiden, 1998), p. 139. Lausberg quotes Fortunatianus,
Ars Rhetorica, 2.1, in Rhetores latini minores, p. 102, l. 21 p. 103, l.2, who identifies the
circumstantia (person, deed, cause, time, place, manner, material/equipment) as the divisions
which the student should use to analyse the case once he has considered it in general: prius
universam causam confuse considerare debemus, tunc omnia, quae reperta sunt, capitulatim
quaestionibus ordinare [First we should consider the overall case in no particular order, then
we should organize everything we have found under headings, using these questions].
The peristaseis refer both to elements of discourse and to their referents: the pragma can
be both an action and a verbal account of that action. For an example of the use of the peristaseis
in the criticism of literary texts, see ps.-Plutarch, On the Life and Poetry of Homer, 76.
64
we can draw from this is that the subjects of ekphrasis are unlimited; the
other is that the subjects named by the manuals, far from constituting a
random selection that can be altered at will, are part of the wider system
of rhetoric.
Table 3.1
Author
Theon
ps.-Hermogenes
Aphthonios
Nikolaos
Subjects for
ekphrasis
Events,
persons,
places, times,
tropoi
Persons,
events, places,
states of affairs
(kairoi), times
Persons,
events,
seasons,
places, mute
animals and
plants
Places,
seasons,
persons,
festivals,
events,
paintings and
statues
Parts of narration
Person, event,
place, time,
manner (tropos),
cause
[Persons and
inanimate objects/
abstracts]
Persons, abstract
entity (pragmata),
mute animals,
plants, mountains
and rivers
Person, event,
place, time,
manner (tropos),
cause
Persons, events,
seasons, places,
mute animals and
plants
Person, event,
place, time,
manner (tropos),
cause.
Persons, abstract
or concrete entities
pragmata
65
it (and there are also ekphraseis of the tropos) suggests that it was an
answer to an anticipated question in the mind of the reader who, hearing
the first four peristaseis mentioned, might well have been wondering about
the remaining two. None of the Progymnasmata texts makes any reference
to the cause (aitia) in the discussion of ekphrasis (with the important
exception of Nikolaos discussion of ekphraseis of statues and paintings,
discussed below). But it is mentioned by an anonymous Byzantine
commentator on the Progymnasmata who notes all the peristaseis can be
the subject of ekphrasis, except the cause (aitia).12 The reasons for its
absence are explained by Sardianos who points out that a cause is never
apparent by itself but [becomes apparent] from the action.13 Indeed, an
abstract notion like cause hardly lends itself to being placed before the
eyes. Hermogenes, in his discussion of a famous ekphrasis of a storm by
the second-century star sophist Aristeides, points to a further motivation
when he notes that the omission of the cause in ekphraseis of natural
phenomena lends solemnity (semnots) to a discourse.14 An ekphrasis was
concerned, by definition, with perceptible phenomena and their effects.
In the case of the storm, the phenomena are all the more awe-inspiring if
their cause is unexplained, or left open to interpretation. In fact, as we will
see, many ekphraseis in oratory serve to point towards the cause of the
state of affairs described, demanding that the audience fill in the missing
peristasis for themselves, an example of how the Progymnasmata reflect
only an elementary level of a far more complex practice.
The standard set of subjects recommended for ekphrasis are therefore
not random, but belong to a system for analysing events and their verbal
representation, and provide the point of contact with the practice of
narration. This close connection between the subjects of ekphrasis and
the elements of narration explains why the authorities mentioned by ps.Hermogenes recommended teaching ekphrasis as a part of the exercise of
narration, rather than as a separate exercise. The individual elements of
a narration could be expanded by means of ekphrasis for any element or
combination of elements of a story could be narrated ekphrastically, that is
to say with the vividness necessary to appeal to the audiences imagination.
of the manner emerges in his translation of the rest of the sentence but the choice of objects to
render this first use of tropos shifts the focus away from the action as a subject of ekphrasis.
12
Anonymous scholion to Aphthonios, Progymnasmata, in Walz, Rhetores graeci 2, p. 55:
ov v , v .
13
Sardianos, Commentarium in Aphthonii Progymnasmata, p. 217, ll. 223: oo
v o o v. Some examples of the way in which the cause
could be implicit in the event or action described will be discussed in Chapter 6.
14
Hermogenes, On Types of Style, 2445. See also the definition of aphgsis cited above
(Chapter 2, n. 67) in which diatupsis is contrasted to digsis which is specifically described
as being meta tn aitin (with, or including, causes).
66
67
See Andrew Laird, Ut figura poiesis: writing art and the art of writing in Augustan
poetry, in Ja Elsner (ed.), Art and Text in Roman Culture (Cambridge, 1996), p. 93. Theon,
Progymnasmata, 119, l. 33 warns against spending time on useless details (achrsta).
20
Grard Genette, Frontires du rcit, in LAnalyse structurale du rcit (Paris: Seuil,
1981), pp. 1624; cf. Jean Molino, Logiques de la description, Potique, 91 (1992): 36382
and Perrine Galand-Hallyn, Le Reflet des fleurs: description et mtalangage potiques dHomre
Erasme (Geneva, 1994), pp. 910. On the category of description of action, see Adam, La
Description, pp. 7689.
68
Roland Barthes, Leffet de rel, in Barthes et al. (eds), Littrature et ralit (Paris,
1982), p. 84.
23
Libanios, Progymnasmata, pp. 4779; cf. Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1417a1624.
69
70
71
72
73
Although he does not use the Greek term, Quintilians conception of the
vivid account is very close to Nikolaos conception of ekphrasis: both
conceive of the vivid, detailed version as the result of the expansion of a
basic statement of fact whether the city has fallen or the Athenians and
Spartans went to war.
35
See George M. Paul, Urbs capta: sketch of an ancient literary motif, Phoenix, 36
(1982): 14455.
74
75
define description on the basis of the nature of the subject matter. See Hamon, Quest-ce
quune description? and Du descriptif.
41
Theon, Progymnasmata, ed. Patillon, p. 149 n. 323; Wilhelm Geissler, Ad descriptionum
historiam symbola (Leipzig, 1916), p. 26. On explicatio in the Elder Seneca, see Janet Fairweather,
Seneca the Elder (Cambridge, 1981), p. 211. Fairweather, ibid., p. 210, also notes that Senecan
descriptio is not invariably an extended set piece but is sometimes merely an extra-vivid
piece of narration.
42
Liddell and Scott, GreekEnglish Lexicon, peri F IV; cf. Demetrios, On Style, 19 on
periagg. Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 2.4.3 uses the image of the sinuous path to convey the
effect of excessive description.
43
Anonymous Seguerianus, 96, p. 26 introduces his definition of enargeia by stating
that it contributes to persuasion ( ).
44
Nikolaos, Progymnasmata, p. 70, ll. 23 states clearly that ekphrasis is an exercise
which prepares for the composition of judicial digseis.
76
77
Although Theon does not use the term ekphrasis in this context, his
example shows why the teachers alluded to by ps.-Hermogenes thought
it appropriate to teach ekphrasis as part of the exercise koinos topos.
Nikolaos, in his discussion of the same exercise, does use the term
ekphrasis interchangeably with both hupotupsis and diatupsis when he
comes to discuss the inclusion of such vivid evocations of actions.47
However, what ps.-Hermogenes comment masks is the fact that the
relation between ekphrasis and koinos topos is different from that between
ekphrasis and the narrative exercises, digsis and muthos. Ekphrasis
(or hupotupsis, or diatupsis) stands to koinos topos as part to whole; it
is a passage that can be inserted to increase the dramatic effect of the
amplification. But with respect to digsis, ekphrasis can be considered
to be an expansion of a basic narrative, a process applied to it, as in
Quintilians image of opening up the idea of the sack of a city, or the
46
47
78
48
Patillon, introduction to Theon, Progymnasmata, pp. xxviiixxxi and Ruth Webb, The
Progymnasmata as practice, in Yun Lee Too (ed.), Education in Greek and Roman Antiquity
(Leiden, 2001), pp. 289316.
49
Festival time (heort) had figured in Theons chapter on ekphrasis (118, l. 21) as a
sub-type of times (chronoi).
79
50
80
introductory phrase stating I love the spring more than the other seasons
(hrai) and wish to tell (digomai) what it is like.54
Sardianos commentary on Aphthonios reflects the increased importance
of epideictic. He is very clear about the uses of ekphrasis in enkmia (i.e.
epideictic speeches) citing several types of subject typical of epideictic
speeches: in enkmia you will describe places made by men, harbours,
colonnades and the like (p. 215, ll. 1819). Significantly, he is either less
confident or less interested in its use in the other genres; discussing judicial
speeches he can only suggest that we might need to describe the place of the
crime, while in deliberative oratory, he says vaguely, following Nikolaos,
we often need to describe the subject of our speech in order to be more
persuasive. Epideictic, and epideictic needs, have become the norm and,
although Byzantine homilies often display the use of ekphrasis of events,
they did not feature as a genre in didactic handbooks. The effects of the rise
of epideictic on the surviving corpus of Progymnasmata are hardly perceptible
on the surface, hence the reputation earned by these exercises as being
unchanging. But at the level of details like the subjects for ekphrasis there
were subtle changes within the prescriptions for ekphrasis which recognized,
however belatedly, the changing demands of rhetorical practice and which
altered the relation of the exercise of ekphrasis to the other Progymnasmata.
It is, however, important to note that within the teaching of rhetoric
the rise of epideictic was relative, not absolute, and it did not eclipse
declamation, at least up until the sixth century.55 A certain Athanasios went
so far as to subordinate all the other exercises to enkmion in his version
of the Progymnasmata.56 But the experiment cannot have been attractive
enough to ensure Athanasios immortality among the rhetoricians since
his work does not survive and is cited as a curiosity. Among the surviving
progymnasmatists, even Aphthonios did not share this view of the
primacy of enkmion. He emphasizes the importance of the exercises in
confirmation and refutation, essential skills for the law court, claiming
that they contain the whole skill of this art and the Progymnasmata were
still a preparation for declamation. At the same time, enkmion clearly had
a place in Theons system, and the type of use of ekphrasis in the service
of enkmion that we see in Aphthonios and Libanios model ekphraseis is
54
81
See Alex Hardie, Statius and the Silvae: Poets, Patrons and Epideixis in the Graeco-Roman
World (Liverpool, 1983). The lack of prose sources for the period makes it impossible to judge
how close Statius poems were to contemporary prose enkmia.
58
Sardianos, Commentarium in Aphthonii Progymnasmata, p. 219, ll. 1225. Doxapatres,
Homiliae in Aphthonii Progymnasmata, p. 512, ll. 1220 makes the same point about
representations of persons.
82
83
and Athena, the same method is applied to the depiction of their natures
and spheres of influence through their attributes. This is known as a mode
of reading statues as is shown in Porphyrys work on statues preserved in
Eusebios Praeparatio evangelica.61 It may also be related to a type of school
exercise mentioned by Quintilian (
2.4.26)
in which students of rhetoric
were asked to explain the details of the iconography of Venus or Cupid.
The three ekphraseis of paintings which Foerster accepts as genuine
works of Libanios are similar in that they describe details of gesture (two
are of scenes in the countryside, peopled with figures in action; the third
is a scene from epic, the foot-race from Patroklos funeral games). The
accounts of these details are often accompanied by the authors guess as
to the meaning, introduced by a phrase like as [seems] likely (hs eikos)
or a verb of meaning (mnu, semain).62
One motivation for including ekphraseis of paintings and statues
among the examples of Progymnasmata may well have been the opportunity
such subjects provided for describing figures and scenes from mythology
which are prominent in the examples of the other exercises. In this sense,
describing a statue of Hera or Ajax is a means of describing the character.
However, as is clear from Nikolaos discussion, the idea of representation
introduces new elements into these ekphraseis: the artists intention and
the task of interpretation attributed to the viewer/speaker.63 As I will
suggest below, there is a sense in which these particular ekphraseis are
programmatic, making explicit the active role of the audience of any
ekphrasis who are prompted to supply further details from their own
imaginations.
There is, of course, a further and much deeper affinity between visual
representation and the task of rhetorical ekphrasis, as Sardianos makes
clear in his statement that enargeia imitates [the actions and effects of]
the art of painting.64 In this sense, any ekphrasis rivals the visual arts in
that it seeks to imitate their visual impact. The connection lies thus at the
level of effect rather than residing in the subject matter and means that
any ekphrasis is haunted by the idea of the work of art and, even more
61
See Aline Rousselle, Images as education in the Roman Empire, in Yun Lee Too
(ed.), Education in Greek and Roman Antiquity (Leiden, 2001), pp. 373403.
62
For a translation of one of these ekphraseis, see Michael Baxandall, Patterns of Intention:
On the Historical Explanation of Pictures (New Haven, 1985), p. 2. The Elder Philostratos uses
such terms frequently in his Eikones.
63
Andrew S. Becker, The Shield of Achilles and the Poetics of Ekphrasis (Lanham, 1995), pp.
424 proposes four levels within ekphraseis of works of art: the referent (the subject matter);
the physical object; the artist and the interpreter.
64
Sardianos, Commentarium, p. 217, ll. 36.
84
85
influence of poetry and history has been cited in support of this point
of view.66 But, as I will argue in more detail in Chapter 6, ps.-Dionysios
complaint needs to be read in the context of the use of ekphrasis in
declamation in general: he seems to be criticizing the relevance and the extent
of these passages (just as he criticizes over-lengthy narrations elsewhere in
his treatise) as well as the special status of ekphrasis in declamation, where
there is no agreed basis in fact and therefore no limit to the description.
Quintilian (2.4.3) makes a similar remark about students tendencies to
indulge in elaborate descriptions. For Quintilian, this is a phase students
go through, their youthful exuberance needs to be tempered as they learn;
in fact, he finds this excess more promising than its opposite since it is
easier to restrain existing practices than to create abilities that have never
been developed. Quintilians use of the verb lascivire paints this danger
in a moral light, like Theons warning against useless detail (achrstos, the
term he uses, being highly morally charged). But it is a question of degree.
Ekphrasis in oratory should be discreet and not easy to identify (Lysias
narrations are often full of vivid detail, but it would be difficult to cut out
any passage to show students as an example). It is possible that poetic and
historiographical examples were favoured for this very reason. They had
the advantage not only of being familiar to the students at this stage of
their studies, but of being easy to identify and show to beginning students
as models.
The Progymnasmata therefore give us an elementary overview of
ekphrasis as it was taught in the first stages of rhetorical education, to
students who had just finished, or were still completing, their study of
grammar. Reading the instructions for ekphrasis alongside the other
exercises, and in comparison with other treatises, reveals a conception
of ekphrasis as a process to be carried out on a basic statement of fact
(digsis), making the subject, whether an action, a person, a season or
a place, visible to the minds eye of the audience. Ekphrasis is therefore
part of an intimate communication between speaker and addressee which
has an impact on the recipient which is always imaginative, and often
emotional. So it is not surprising that the terms in which it is defined are
very different from the terms in which modern description is defined;
above all, it does not only have objects existing in space as its referent but
has a temporal dimension. In fact, it is interesting to compare Aristotles
claim in his discussion of metaphor in Rhetoric (1411b 245) that subjects
in action (energeia) are more vivid (pro ommatn) it seems that there was
an association between movement, and its rendering of space through
66
See, for example, Graham Zanker, Realism in Alexandrian Poetry: A Literature and Its
Audience (London,1987), p. 40 and Alessandra Manieri, Limmagine poetica nella teoria degli
antichi: phantasia ed enargeia (Pisa, 1998), p. 153.
86
67
See Lucia Calboli Montefusco, v et v: levidence dune dmonstration
qui signifie les choses en acte, in Mireille Armisen Marchetti (ed.), Demonstrare: voir et faire
voir: forme de la dmonstration Rome (Toulouse, 2005), pp. 4358; Manieri, Limmagine poetica,
pp. 1014; Guido Morpurgo-Tagliabue, Linguistica e stilistica di Aristotele (Rome, 1967), pp.
25666.
Lana, Quintiliano, Il Sublime e gli Esercizi preparatori di Elio Teone and Ian
Henderson,
Quintilian and the Progymnasmata, Antike und Abendland, 37 (1991): 8299.
Rhetorica ad Herennium, 4.39.51. For further discussion, see below.
88
See Georges
89
See Dionysios of Halikarnassos, Lysias, 7 and Graham Zanker, Enargeia in the ancient
criticism of poetry, RhMus, 124 (1981): 297311.
90
means of
Kathy Eden, Poetic and Legal Fiction in the Aristotelian Tradition (Princeton, 1986)
, pp.
723 and 912. This does not mean, of course, that the practice of enargeia did not exist in
poetry prior to any theoretical developments. On vividness as a kind of proof in Ciceronian
oratory, see also Vasaly, Representations, p. 25 and pp. 2545 and Innocenti, Towards
a theory
of vivid description, p.
374.
91
Here, the main event, the party, is conveyed through the description of
different elements: the actions (pragmata) of the people who had been
involved and the appearance of the place (topos) in which it had occurred,
just as the account of the sacked city mentions the ruined and burning
buildings, the distraught inhabitants and the victors. In the case of the
party, the event is described not as it unfolds but through the signs which
the speaker claims to have witnessed, and which he aims to make the
audience witness as he describes them, a special type of effect which
will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 6. In both cases, however, the
peristaseis, the parts of narration which play such an important role in the
Greek exercise of ekphrasis, would have been a useful aid in teaching
students how to achieve a similar effect in their own compositions.
Other authors also mention the inclusion of details as productive of
enargeia. Dionysios of Halikarnassos attributes Lysias vividness to his
92
exception.
Quintilian does the same when he asks of Ciceros description of the
10
Demetrios, On Style, 217. See Roos Meijering, Literary and Rhetorical Theories in Greek
Scholia (Groningen, 1987), p. 41. As this example shows, sight is not the only sense involved
in enargeia.
12
Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 8.3.63: est igitur unum genus, quo tota rerum imago
quodammodo verbis depingitur. On this type of image, see
Alessandra Manierii, Limmagine
poetica, pp. 1414.
13
Innocenti, Towards a theory of vivid description
, p. 360.
93
party: what more would anyone who had actually entered the room have
seen?14 Like Demetrios, he leaves aside the question of selection, though
it is clear that any impact derives largely from the nature of the precise
details Cicero includes. At the same time, Quintilians remark completely
elides the distinction between the words and their imaginative effect, and
between that effect and the perception of reality.15 These evasions reveal
the extent to which the conception of words as provokers of images could
overshadow attention to the more formal aspects of a text. To account for
the effect of these passages we might prefer to focus on the use of figures,
on the choice of vocabulary and the arrangement of words. But this is not
the case for the ancient critics. Despite the fact that Quintilians accounts
of the party and the sacked city occur in his discussion of style in oratory,
he pays no attention to the language.16 Instead, he is astonishingly vague,
saying simply of the latter, If one opens up [the idea of the sack] there will
appear , as if through an act of verbal conjuring. No reference is made
to the verbal medium except as a portrait of what appears. At the same
time, he seems to assume that the orators imagination (the scene that
appears to him as he opens up the brief statement), its verbal expression
and the image which appears in the audiences mind as a result of these
words are both simultaneous and identical, and that this image can be
equivalent to the direct perception of a thing.
Enargeia and Phantasia
The vagueness about the linguistic aspects of enargeia and the confidence
in its powers displayed by rhetoricians are significant. They point to the
complexities of a phenomenon which goes beyond the normal functions of
language and which can often only be expressed, as in the case of ekphrasis
itself, by recourse to metaphor and simile.17 They are also a consequence of
14
The figures of speech used in this example (as Aphthonios advised for ekphrasis)
are all passed over in silence, despite the fact that Quintilian will go on to enumerate several
of them in the course of Books 8 and 9: use of accumulation (sunathroismos a technique of
amplification discussed by Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 8.4.27) underlined by polysundeton
(breathless repetition of et 9.3.51) and homoioptton (9.3.78). It is also worth noting that,
according to Tiberios, De figuris Demosthenicis, 43, some authorities differed on whether
diatupsis was a figure of speech or a figure of thought.
17
94
the way in which language and image were thought to interact in the mind
of both speaker and listener. Quintilians understanding of the process
emerges more clearly earlier in the Institutio oratoria when, in Book 6, he
discusses the production of enargeia from the orators point of view and
discloses his understanding of the psychological processes involved. In
his discussion of how to arouse emotion in a murder case he suddenly
breaks into a display of enargeia which is close in subject matter and in
some of its details to Theons example of the vivid evocation of a murder
to be used as part of a common place (109.311, cited in Chapter 3, above),
a subject that seems to have been a schoolmasters favourite:
When I am lamenting a murdered man will I not have before my eyes
all the things which might believably have happened in the case under
consideration? Will the assailant not suddenly spring out, will the
victim not be terrified when he finds himself surrounded and cry out or
plead or run away? Will I not see the blow and the victim falling to the
ground? Will his blood, his pallor, his dying groans not be impressed on
my mind? This gives rise to v, which Cicero calls illustratio and
evidentia, by which we seem to show what happened rather than to tell
it; and this gives rise to the same emotions as if we were present at the
event itself.
Hominem occisum queror: non omnia quae in re praesenti accidisse
credibile est in oculis habebo? non percussor ille subitus erumpet?
non expauescet circumuentus, exclamabit uel rogabit uel fugiet? non
ferientem, non concidentem uidebo? non animo sanguis et pallor
et gemitus, extremus denique expirantis hiatus insidet? Insequetur
v, quae a Cicerone inlustratio et euidentia nominatur, quae non
tam dicere uidetur quam ostendere, et adfectus non aliter quam si rebus
ipsis intersimus sequentur. (6.2.312)
95
See Mireille
96
to assume that the texts they read were the products of others powers of
visualization. All this must have encouraged an awareness of visualization
as an important element of both reading or listening to others work and
creating ones own.
Communicating Images: Enargeia and Phantasia
In his own examples of enargeia (the murder and the sacked city of Book 8)
Quintilian assumes a live performance situation in which the transmission
of mental images and their concomitant emotions between a speaker
and his audience is a vital part of rhetorical interaction in the forum or
school. Ps.-Longinos describes the process in a similar way, with similar
vocabulary, explaining phantasia as resulting when, under the effects of
inspiration and passion, you seem to see what you are speaking about and
bring it before the eyes of your listeners [v ' voo
o v o ' v o oov].19
This formulation rolls the distinct moments of Quintilians account into
one single process, termed phantasia. Both make more specific the vague,
uncontextualized reference in the Progymnasmata to the eyes (opsis) to
which the subject of an ekphrasis (to dloumenon) is displayed. These are
the minds eyes of the audience to whom the speech is addressed and who
form the equivalent of a painting, or rather a set of moving impressions,
in their imagination.
Ps.-Longinos use of the single term phantasia to encompass the
authors imagination, the words he utters and the resulting impression
in the listeners mind reveals the intimate connections between mental
images and the words that both result from and create them. Words and
mental images are not the only phenomena to be fused in this way, for
both Quintilian and ps.-Longinos assume that what the audience will feel
that they can see is the same as what the orator sees and that the listener
or reader will share the vision that he has created in his mind. In this way,
the speakers visual image is assumed to be transmitted to the audience
through the medium of words and to give rise to a comparable image in
their minds.
Accessing the Authors Imagination
Both Quintilian and ps.-Longinos write as if vivid language can actually
give access to the mind which gave rise to it. That is, if enargeia arises
from mental images, it must be possible to work back up the chain and
to reconstruct the creative process, or rather the original mental image
which gave rise to the words that prompt the readers own mental image.
19
97
v' o v v. ' v, o v o
oov vv. As Armisen, La
Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 6.2.33: non idem poeta penitus ultimi fati concepit
imaginem, ut diceret: Et dulces moriens reminiscitur Argos? (Aeneid, 10, 782).
20
22
98
The implication is that vivid language reaches different parts of the mind,
penetrating more deeply into the listener to reach the minds eye (the Latin
distinguishes between inner and outer senses of sight, where our Greek
sources do not). The distinction between words which stay on the surface
of the body, by which Quintilian presumably means plain statements of
fact and arguments, and those which penetrate inside to appeal to the
eyes of the mind, reveals a conception of the human body as permeable
and of words as a quasi-physical force, both of which are familiar from
24
Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London and New York,
1988), pp.
312.
26
99
27
Even at the elementary level of the Progymnasmata, Theon (72.12) recommends that
students should aspire to make their words dwell in the mind of their listeners. Plutarch,
Moralia, 37F38B recommends ear-guards to protect the young. The eyes were considered
particularly vulnerable openings see below on the effect of the sight of the beloved upon
the viewer. On words as physical entities in Stoic thought, see Catherine
Atherton, The
Stoics on Ambiguity (Cambridge, 1993),
p. 44 on Diogenes Laertios, 7.556. See also
Gorgias
corporeal logos (Encomium of Helen, 8).
28
Ps.-Longinos, On the Sublime, 15.9. The further comments about the potentially
overwhelming impact of phantasia in rhetoric at 15.11 need to be read in this context.
30
Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 8.3.67: in adfectus minus penetrat brevis hic velut
nuntius. In Theon, Progymnasmata, 71, ll. 312, too, it is words that are vivid (enargs) that
will inhabit the listeners minds.
100
cities.32 Even when the effect is not what we might strictly speaking call
emotional, the physical understanding of the impact of enargeia means
that a reader/listener who conceives an image of any kind in his or her
mind is still undergoing a pathos of some kind as he or she experiences the
words effect.33
Enargeia and the Feeling of Presence
Quintilians discussion of enargeia in Book 6 grows out of a broader
discussion of emotion and is introduced as a means to an end. The use of
visualization is first introduced as a means of ensuring that the speaker
is appropriately involved in the version of events he is presenting. For,
Quintilian claims, in order to move an audience, the speaker must himself
be moved (6.2.26; cf. Horace, Ars Poetica, 102). He draws an analogy with
actors whom, he says, he has seen leaving the stage in tears because of
their intense involvement in the plot (6.2.278
and 35)
. In terms of the
effect on the audience of judicial oratory or declamation, the analogy
with the actor is particularly apt for, like the audience in the theatre, they
are made to be witnesses of events from the past. Quintilian
emphasizes
this time-warping action of enargeia in a further discussion of the art
of placing before the eyes (sub oculos subiectio) in Institutio oratoria,
9.2.401 (here he treats vivid presentation as a figure called variously
evidentia, hupotupsis and diatupsis). Because of its capacity to make the
audience feel present at past and future events, this effect is also called
translatio temporum or, in Greek, metastasis or metathesis (a transference
[of time]) (9.2.41).34 The listener may be transported either to the past, or
to a hypothetical future, as is shown in the passage Quintilian cites from
Ciceros Pro Milone (33) which paints a picture of the future consequences
32
See Meijering, Literary and Rhetorical Theories, p. 42. The Greek term metastasis appears
in modern editions of Quintilian, but Isidore of Seville, De rhetorica, 34 uses metathesis in
this sense: Metathesis est [figura] quae mittit animos iudicum in res praeteritas aut futuras
[Metathesis is [the figure] which sends the minds of judges to past or future events] (the
examples are an appeal to remember the sack of a city and the evocation of future troubles
from Pro Milone, 33, an example also used by Quintilian). I will follow Isidore in using
metathesis in the sense of transference of time to avoid confusion with the technical sense of
metastasis in declamation to mean transference of blame.
101
35
Ps.-Longinos, On the Sublime, 15.9 cites a similar attempt to play lets suppose from
Demosthenes, 24.208 (also from the end of a speech). These examples correspond to the
third type of diatupsis identified by Tiberios, De figuris Demosthenicis, 43 (the evocation of
hypothetical events).
36
102
o v v o o v v v,
v, v v ov, o v
ov ov v ...38
As Roos Meijering points out, poets have a greater freedom than orators
in that they are able to place before the eyes scenes that are fantastic and
impossible in the real world (such as Furies or Phaethons heavenly ride
in the chariot of the Sun) as well as scenes that are lifelike.39 For orators to
pretend to see Furies (as ps.-Longinos claims contemporary speakers do)
is an absurdity that he condemns as inappropriate. As the first contrast
between poetry and rhetoric suggests, a further difference lies in the
effect on the listener of such visualization. While poets need only create
a stunning impact (ekplxis) on the listener, orators need to shape and
control both the subject matter and its presentation, subordinating it to
the specific requirements of the speech. Firstly, the subjects of rhetorical
enargeia must be like truth (enalths). In this, rhetorical visualization does
have the connotations of direct perception that are present in the root
sense of the terms enargeia and enargs: they are at least close to the world
that is the object of that perception.40 But this closeness is only relative, in
comparison to the fantastic subjects of poetic phantasia.
In underlining the need for the images used by orators to be in
accordance with truth, ps.-Longinos echoes other sources on enargeia and
related terms.
Several times Quintilian repeats the key advice that, when
summoning up an image to be conveyed in words, the speaker should be
careful to confine himself to what is like truth or what usually happens
or what is credible.41 His attribution of power to the orator who is
euphantasitos (6.2.30) contains the important qualification that the images
must be secundum uerum, in accordance with truth.
This requirement
is not surprising. Probability and verisimilitude (distinct ideas but with
a considerable amount of overlap in practice) were the hallmarks of the
38
Carlos
Lvy and Laurent Pernot (eds), Dire lvidence: philosophie et rhtorique antiques (Paris, 1997),
pp. 1529; On
the meanings of the term, see Manieri, Limmagine poetica, pp. 10512
and
Juliette Dross
,
De la philosophie la rhtorique: la relation entre phantasia et enargeia dans le
trait Du sublime et lInstitution oratoire, Philosophie antique, 4 (2004): 6193.
41
Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 6.2.30, the speaker should visualize secundum verum
[according to truth]; 6.2.31 omnia quae in re praesenti accidisse credibile est [everything
that could credibly have happened in the present case]. In his discussion of diaskeu in On
Invention, 3.15 (p. 167, ll. 1117), ps.-Hermogenes similarly emphasizes the need for such
depictions to be credible (pithanos) and probable (eikos).
39
103
Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 4.2.31 treats the terms uerisimilis, probabilis and
credibilis as interchangeable. On these terms, see, for example, Claude Moussy, Signum et
les noms latins de la preuve: lhritage de divers termes grecs, in Jacqueline Dangel (ed.),
Grammaire et rhtorique: notions de Romanit (Strasbourg, 1994).
43
104
to the illusion involved in enargeia and to the way in which verbal depiction
creates a feeling like that of presence which is not presence.
A further analogy, which similarly conveys both the power of enargeia
and the unreality of its creations, is with the stage. When Nikolaos
compares the audience of ekphrasis to spectators, the term he uses, theatai,
implies the theatre just as much as the visual arts. Quintilians suggests an
even closer link to the stage with his comparison of the orator who uses
phantasia to arouse his own emotions with the actor who is so involved in
his role that he cries real tears (6.2.278
and 35)
. In this respect the orator
and the actor both share the paradoxical state of feeling imaginary things
as if they were real, a state which they are able to induce in their audiences
as well.44
Quintilian attributes some of the force of the speakers display of feeling
to the fact that he is speaking of real events in which he is to some extent
involved (indirectly as advocate, if not directly), but he makes clear that
fictional events can affect the listener equally. He even recommends that
schoolboy declaimers should think themselves into the roles they assume
in their exercises, advice which assumes that emotional involvement in
a fictional situation is both possible and desirable (6.2.36). Some sources
reveal a certain anxiety about this identification: the Elder Seneca, for
example, records anecdotes about orators who lost the ability to distinguish
between their own mental images, their phantasiae, and reality and fell
into a state of madness akin to that of Orestes.45 It may be to distinguish
the type of phantasia involved in rhetorical enargeia from the uncontrolled
hallucinations of a madman that Quintilian chose to compare the orators
imaginings with daydreams, which remain under the dreamers conscious
control.46 However, it is noticeable that the loss of ability to distinguish
between visualization and reality is not attributed to the audience, nor
is it a common idea in the Greek sources. The difference may reflect the
different contexts of Greek and Roman rhetorical practice for, while the
Greek theorists wrote for speakers who, in theory at least, discussed and
evoked events that had occurred to them, the Roman practice of using an
advocate meant that speakers in judicial cases were commonly required to
become emotionally and imaginatively involved in events that concerned
their clients rather than themselves.
44
105
47
Armisen, La notion dimagination chez les anciens II, pp. 1314 makes the same
point about phantasia in rhetoric.
48
Philippe
Hamon, Quest-ce quune description?, Potique, 112 (1972): 46585 and
Introduction lanalyse du descriptif (Paris, 1981), subsequently reissued under the title Du
descriptif (Paris, 1993). I cite the later edition here and elsewhere.
For a critique of Hamons
approach to description, see
Jean Molino, Logiques de la description, Potique, 91 (1992):
36382.
106
a formal
level, Hamons definition of description is comparable to Quintilians idea
of unfolding. Just as striking, however, are
the radical differences in
orientation and in the basic assumptions about language which underpin
the two approaches. Quintilian is almost perverse in his refusal to analyse
the linguistic aspects of enargeia, but his insistence on the imaginative
engagement of both speaker and listener draws attention to a factor which
is left out of Hamons account of description. In this, Hamon typifies the
modern critical neglect of imaginative response. What Hamon does share
with the ancient rhetorical discussions of enargeia is an interest in the role
of the reader/audience and the contribution demanded of them. But, for
Hamon, description engages the lexical competence of the reader.51 The
two differ so radically in their approaches that it is clear they are speaking
from very different worlds. Where Hamon sees only words, Quintilian
sees words as the communicable aspect of mental images which are
crucial to the formation and reception of those words. Quintilian and
Hamon are working with radically different conceptions of language, and
of the relation of words to external reality on the one hand, and to their
speakers and audiences on the other.52 In order to understand the ancient
rhetoricians perspective a little better, it is necessary to move on to the
theories of imagination and memory on which enargeia and ekphrasis
are predicated. These explain some of the questions raised by the use of
enargeia in rhetoric while shining a spotlight onto some of the paradoxes
involved in making absent things present.
49
See the remarks of Claude Calame, Quand dire cest faire voir: lvidence dans la
rhtorique antique, Etudes de lettres, 4 (1991): 1314 on the differences between enargeia and
description.
50
Enargeia in Oratory
Enargeia, the quality that makes an ekphrasis an ekphrasis and distinguishes
it from a plain report of the facts, is thus a paradoxical phenomenon. It
is able to arouse emotions through immaterial semblances of scenes that
are not present to the listener and may never have taken place. It uses
the medium of language to create an impact on the world, the power of
which is expressed in physical terms most strikingly, as we have seen,
by ps.-Longinos metaphor of enslavement. A question that remains to
be answered is how a speaker could be so confident of his effect on the
most intimate recesses of his listeners minds. Quintilian cites several
examples of emotional appeals involving props and extras (particularly
children) falling disastrously flat, but he never betrays any doubts about
the predictable power of enargeia. This is despite the fact that, as Ann
Vasaly has noted, enargeia would seem to have depended on one of the
least predictable factors in the equation: the individuals unique and
personal visualization. The listeners emotional response to enargeia
was, moreover, crucial to its function within a speech, which raises the
further question of how orators could hope to predict and control such a
seemingly individual and subjective process.
As Vasaly points out, orators clearly expected their listeners to make
their own, personal contributions to the word pictures they heard and to
flesh out the details mentioned with further details supplied from their
own imagination. Quintilians account of his own response to Ciceros
portrait of Verres does show that he assumed listeners would contribute
actively to the images provoked by verbal enargeia and that these
contained a personal input. Describing the effect this passage worked on
his imagination, Quintilian is happy to admit that his own mental image
Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 6.1.3742. But see Libanios, Autobiography (Or. 1), 41,
discussed below, for an example of the failure of an ekphrasis in an epideictic speech.
Ann Vasaly, Representations: Images of the World in Ciceronian Oratory (Berkeley, 1993),
pp. 989. Interestingly, the modern theoretician of rhetoric Chaim Perelman, in LEmpire
rhtorique: rhtorique et argumentation (Paris, 1977), p. 49, expresses reservations about his
ancient predecessors advice to use physical props (such as Quintilians swords), which may
distract the audience, but seems to share their confidence in the verbally created sense of
presence.
108
Where Ciceros text provides only the barest of outlines, giving details
of posture, clothing and situation, Quintilian supplies for himself
further details of appearance, a response which has been termed slow
realisation by way of synecdoche. The mental image which he describes
to us includes the detail of Verres eyes, and the figures are set in motion,
caressing each other in an external display of desire. Quintilian the reader
also attributes feelings to the internal audience that presumably mirror his
own response to the scene playing in his mind. This passage sheds light
on the extravagant claim that Quintilian made for another Ciceronian
passage, the description of the aftermath of the party discussed above
(8.3.66; see p. 913). When he asks what more would anyone who had
actually entered the room have seen? it may well be that he is not referring
to the sparse details provided by Ciceros text but to the quality of his
own, far fuller visualization of the scene sparked by the words. In the case
of the passage from the Verrines, where the larger context survives, it is
Quintilian, Insitutio oratoria, 8.3. 645. My italics. This part of the Verrines was not
delivered in court, a detail which Quintilian ignores. Beth Innocenti, Towards a theory of
vivid description as practised in Ciceros Verrine Orations, Rhetorica, 12 (1994): 35581 argues
that the text that we have of the actio secunda does represent Ciceros oratorical practice.
Robert Cockcroft, Fine-tuning Quintilians doctrine of rhetorical emotion: seven
types of enargeia, in Toms Albaladejo et al. (eds), Quintiliano: Historia y actualidad de la
retrica (Logroo, 1998), p. 504.
Phantasia
109
clear that Quintilian is taking cues from the attack on Verres in the rest of
the work.
Moreover, as we have already seen in the discussion of ekphrasis, the
passages that were thought to have this immediate effect of placing before
the eyes did not necessarily evoke static scenes. Quintilians accounts
of the murder and of the sacked city are full of details of human action;
Ciceros evocation of the room after a party begins with the comings and
goings of the drunken guests, and even his tableau of Verres leaning on
his mistress contains within it the aftermath of action (nixus) which is
sufficient for Quintilian to supply further movements and emotions to his
own imaginative rendering of the scene.
The question still remains of how an orator could control such creative
visualization and interpretation of words on the part of his audience.
Quintilian interacts with Ciceros text in exactly the way that Iser envisages
the reader interacting with a work of literature, filling in the gaps left by
the text. But where Iser places emphasis on the variable and individual
response of each reader, Quintilians account assumes a predictable
response, or at least a restricted range of responses. For him, this is far
from a merely theoretical issue: he is purporting to be able to teach his
readers how to guide their audiences responses in practical situations, and
implying that he himself has wielded this power in the courtroom. One
Ibid., p. 55: each individual reader will fill in the gaps in his own way, thereby
excluding the various other possibilities; as he reads, he will make his own decisions as to
how the gap is to be filled.
Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 8.3.71: facillime enim recipiunt animi quod agnoscunt.
110
See Webb, Imagination and the arousal of the emotions in Greco-Roman rhetoric, in
S. Braund and C. Gill (eds), The Passions in Roman Thought and Literature (Cambridge, 1997),
pp. 1223.
10
Rhetorica ad Herennium, 3.16.2824.30; Cicero, De oratore, 2.35460; Quintilian,
Institutio oratoria, 11.2. Aristotle also makes a brief mention of the use of mental images in
memory techniques in On the Soul, 427b 1820. See, in general, Frances Yates, The Art of
Memory (London, 1966) and Jocelyn Penny Small, Wax Tablets of the Mind: Cognitive Studies of
Memory and Literacy in Classical Antiquity (London, 1997).
Phantasia
111
13
Aristotle, On Memory and Recollection, 450a 3032; see Richard Sorabji, Aristotle on
Memory (London, 1972), p. 11. Aristotles writings on memory and phantasia raise immensely
complex issues. In what follows I am concerned only to provide a bare outline of the general
features that are relevant to rhetorical phantasia and enargeia.
112
the image of the beloved enters through the eyes and then remains in
the lovers soul.14 This idea runs throughout the Ekphrasis of Beauty
attributed to Libanios whose author claims that, once he had glimpsed
the beautiful girl at her window, his soul became a painter so that the
resulting ekphrasis is the verbal expression of that impact.15
Aristotle and others frequently appeal to analogies with the visual
arts to express the nature of the impressions made by sense perception
upon the soul and their lingering form as memories. Famously, Aristotle
compares the impact of sense perception on the soul to the impression
(tupos) made by a signet ring on wax.16 This idea of imprinting is evident in
the Greek terms for visual language, diatupsis and hupotupsis, implying
that such language has an effect analogous to that of direct sensation. In
the same passage, memory is compared to a painting (hoion zgraphma),
an analogy which Aristotle also uses in On the Soul (427b 214) to explain
the activity of contemplating an internal image (phantasma).17 Like the
image of the impression in wax, this idea of the mind as a gallery of
paintings left behind by sensation has a long afterlife. Ps.-Plutarch extends
the metaphor further when he compares the fleeting images produced
by ordinary sensation with the enduring soul-painting impressed on the
soul by the sight of the beloved, which is like a painting burned on with
encaustic (Moralia, 759C). Aristotle himself uses the graphic analogy to
illustrate the way in which we can think of these internal images either
as what they represent or as images of what they represent (On Memory,
450b 20 451a 2). In this they are just like the images created in the mind
by enargeia, which create an impression like that of sensation and can be
contemplated either as equivalent to what they represent, or as likenesses.
And, like the writers on enargeia, Aristotle also emphasizes the physicality
14
See, for example, Chariton, Chaireas and Kallirhoe, 6.57; ps. Plutarch, Ertikos, 759C
with further discussion below. Achilles Tatios, Leukippe and Kleitophon, 1.9 offers the further
development that the flowing of the image of the beloved into the lovers soul leads to a form
of copulation. See also Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1370b1922 on the special importance of memory
to the lover and Apollonios of Rhodes, Argonautika, 3.4536. Cicero, De oratore, 2.357 also
refers to this theory in his discussion of memory.
15
Libanios, Progymnasmata, pp. 5416.
16
Aristotle, On Memory and Recollection, 450a 2532. See Sorabji, Aristotle on Memory, 3;
Gerard Watson, Phantasia in Classical Thought (Galway, 1988), p. 25. Quintilian, 11.2.4 refers
to the analogy between memory and the imprint of the ring on wax as something that many
people think, a sign of the pervasiveness of the Aristotelian image.
17
Malcolm Schofield, Aristotle on the imagination, in Jonathan Barnes et al. (eds),
Articles on Aristotle 4: Psychology and Aesthetics (London, 1979), p. 119 cautions, however,
that Aristotelian phantasmata are not always to be understood as mental images outside On
Memory and Recollection. Nevertheless, in On the Soul, 429a 35 Aristotle derives both terms
from phaos [light], reflecting the role of sight as the primary sense.
Phantasia
113
of these images which are impressed on the body itself.18 There are thus
many parallels between the effects of enargeia and the effects of direct
perception which further help to explain the ease with which Quintilian
can blur the distinction between the two.
For what lies behind vivid speech is the gallery of mental images
impressed by sensation in the speakers mind. The souls of both speaker
and listener are stocked with internal images of absent things, and these
provide the raw material with which each party can paint the images that
ekphrasis puts into words. This idea surfaces in the rhetorical handbooks
in the shape of warnings about describing shameful or inappropriate
subject matter. In his chapter on the koinos topos, for example, Nikolaos
warns against including too much detail in ekphraseis of subjects such as
adulterers or a seducer of young boys, for in describing such things we
will slander ourselves more than him [i.e. the adulterer].19 More striking
still is the caution urged by Menander Rhetor when he discusses the
ekphrasis of the bride and groom in his discussion of the wedding speech
(epithalamion).20 Unless it is socially acceptable for the speaker to have seen
her (if he is close relative, for example), a verbal description will lay him
open to suspicions of harbouring an illicitly acquired memory image of
her in his mind. So verbal representation is clearly thought not just to
betray knowledge of words (of the lexicography of adultery or of beauty,
as in Hamons definition of description), but to derive from an internal
image of what is being described.21 This image resides deep within the
speakers mind and may itself derive from perception. As in the case of the
passages of Euripides and Virgil analysed by ps.-Longinos and Quintilian
respectively, the verbal evocation allows a glimpse into the mind of the
describer, which can be fraught with risk for an orator who is bound to his
audience through social ties.
Thinking and Speaking with Pictures
Words, in Quintilians discussion of enargeia, serve simply to communicate
the orators internal image, his phantasia, of a scene to the audience. His
insistence on the visual source and effect of vivid language, and his relative
18
Aristotle, On Memory and Recollection, 453a 1416. See Watson, Phantasia in Classical
Thought, p. 31.
19
Nikolaos, Progymnasmata, 45.16: ov ov o vov
ov.
20
Menander Rhetor, On Epideictic, Treatise II, 404. 1114.
21
Philippe Hamon, Du descriptif (Paris, 1993), p. 42 stresses the way in which description
appeals to the readers memory and knowledge, but the relevant competence is above all
lexical (p. 43).
114
neglect of the linguistic details, reflect ideas about thought, memory and
language in general which are to be found in Aristotles writings, but are
also pervasive in the texts of later periods, in scholia, in novels and essays,
as well as in the rhetorical theory of phantasia. For Aristotle, thought itself
(noein) is inseparable from the mental images, the phantasmata, which
stock our minds, and cannot take place without them.22
The resulting connection between phantasia and language was explored
in far greater detail by the Stoics. It is worth exploring Stoic theory in a little
more detail here because it helps to illustrate the profound connections
between mental images and language in ancient thought. A source cited
by Diogenes Laertios (7.49) shows that phantasia was thought to be at
the root of language through the functioning of thought (dianoia): for
the impression (phantasia) arises first, and then thought (dianoia), which
has the power of talking, expresses in language what it experiences by
the agency of the impression.23 Phantasia is the basis of language and,
as in the rhetorical theory of enargeia, language serves as the medium
by which phantasiai are communicated from the speakers mind to that
of the listener.24 The rhetoricians enargeia is therefore far from being an
anomalous form of language, rather it is a heightened example of the way
that all verbal communication could be thought to work, transmitting an
internal impression from one mind to the other.
Phantasia and Paraphrasis in Theon
That various different forms of words could serve to transmit what
was essentially the same phantasia is suggested by a passage in Theons
Progymnasmata where the author discusses the practice of paraphrasis.
Rather than being a purely stylistic exercise, paraphrase in Theons
conception is the reworking of the same thought in different ways. The
same phantasia hitting the same mind, or different minds, will give rise
to different utterances. The examples he cites include Demosthenes
account of the destruction of Phokis (19.65), mentioned by Nikolaos in his
discussion of ekphrasis, and Aeschines similar account of the destruction
of Thebes (Against Ktesiphon, 157), which are both identified as paraphrases
of the account of the sack of a city embedded within Phoenixs speech
22
Aristotle, On Memory and Recollection, 449b 30 and On the Soul, 427b 1416 and 432a 7.
See Sorabji, Aristotle on Memory, p. 6; Schofield, Aristotle on the imagination, p. 128; Mireille
Armisen, La notion dimagination chez les anciens I: les philosophes, Pallas 27 (1979): 29.
23
Translation from Anthony A. Long and David N. Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers
(Cambridge, 1987), Chapter 33 D. See also Anthony A. Long, Hellenistic Philosophy: Stoics,
Epicureans, Sceptics (Berkeley, 1986), p. 125.
24
See Catherine Atherton, The Stoics on Ambiguity (Cambridge, 1993), p. 43.
Phantasia
115
25
Theon, Progymnasmata, 62, l. 32 63, l. 13. See Michel Patillon, La Thorie du discours
chez Hermogne le Rhteur: essai sur les structures linguistiques de la rhtorique ancienne (Paris,
1988), pp. 30911 and his notes to this passage of Theon.
26
Anthony Long, Stoic Studies (Cambridge, 1996), p. 271.
27
See Jean-Baptiste Gourinat, Les Stociens et lme (Paris, 1996), pp. 3662.
116
Theon, Progymnasmata, 63, ll. 1322 citing Thucydides, 2.45; Theopompos, FgrH II,
115, 395 and Demosthenes, 18.135.
29
See, for example, the account of Diogenes Laertios, 7.49 (= Long and Sedley, The
Hellenistic Philosophers, 39 A). The Stoic terminology therefore differs from the usage of
Aristotle for whom phantasmata are any kind of internal image, with no implications about
their truth status. On Stoic thought on phantasia and truth, see further Long and Sedley, The
Hellenistic Philosophers, Chapter 40; Gourinat, Les Stociens et lme, pp. 4042.
30
Long and Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, vol. 1, p. 249.
31
Some authorities distinguished between two different types of illusion in that
Orestes-like hallucinations were based on the mis-recognition of an object (he saw Elektra
but thought he saw a Fury) while others were based on no perceptible object. See Sextus
Empiricus, Against the Professors, 7.24752 (= Long and Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers,
40 E).
32
Ps.-Longinos, On the Sublime, 15.8:
, , .
33
Sextus Empiricus, Against the Professors, 7.25360 (= Long and Sedley, The Hellenistic
Philosophers, 40 K).
34
Sextus Empiricus, Against the Professors, 7.257 (= Long and Sedley, The Hellenistic
Philosophers, 40 K). Juliette Dross
, De
Phantasia
117
118
See Matthew Leigh, Quintilian on the emotions, JRS, 94 (2004): 12240 on the gulf
between Stoic ideals and Quintilians theory of the emotions.
39
Orestes visions of Furies, treated by ps.-Longinos as an example of poetic phantasia,
are one of the stock examples of empty phantasmata cited by the Stoics. See, for example,
Sextus Empiricus, Against the Mathematicians, 7.249 (= Long and Sedley, The Hellenistic
Philosophers, 40 E).
40
Ps.-Longinos, On the Sublime, 15.8.
41
See below, Chapter 7, however, for examples of writers in other genres playing on
the gap between the impressions created by enargeia and truth.
42
I do not therefore recognize the claim, attributed to me by Simon Goldhill, What is
ekphrasis for?, p. 7 that the fashionable sense of phantasia and the Stoic philosophical sense
are discrete usages, if by discrete we are to understand unrelated, entirely different.
I do think that they are distinct but related, and that the exact nature of the relationship
needs to be decided in each case. It is unfortunate that Goldhill does not provide a footnote
to support his assertion.
43
See the remarks of Dross, Phantasia et enargeia, pp. 768.
Phantasia
119
120
See Gioia Rispoli, Lo spazio del verisimile: il racconto, la storia e il mito (Naples, 1988).
Phantasia
121
Scholia in Euripidem, vol. 2, 32.15 cited by Roos Meijering, Literary and Rhetorical Theories
in Greek Scholia (Groningen, 1987), p. 51: v o o o
. vv vo (o v) v ovv ovovo
ov o o ov v v ov. The scholiast elides the
transition from image to its verbal expression here. It is surely the mental images, not their
verbal expression, which stir up Phaedras desire, but it is only through the word-painting
that we have access to the imaginings.
50
In the same way, the ps.-Libanian Ekphrasis of Beauty presents itself as a verbal
expression of the image painted by sight on the speakers soul. See Libanios, Progymnasmata,
pp. 5416, esp. p. 545, l. 22 p. 546, l. 5.
122
Phantasia
123
Cf. Roger P. Hinks, Myth and Allegory in Ancient Art (London, 1939), p. 12. Some
ancient allegories do make use of enargeia in the presentation of an image. But allegory is
not a necessary characteristic of ekphrasis and this overview of the workings of enargeia that
I have sketched here suggests that allegorical decoding demands a very different type of
reception than that assumed for ekphrasis and enargeia by our rhetorical sources.
56
Eden, Poetic and Legal Fiction, p. 92.
124
Phantasia
125
different
associations.
Failed Ekphrasis and Cultural Dissonance
By contrast, the failed ekphrasis to which Libanios refers in his
Autobiography (Oratio, 1.41) is an example from antiquity of what can
occur when speaker and audience do not share the same values and
assumptions. Libanios recounts an incident when a rival of his, a certain
Bemarchios, gave a repeat performance of a speech he had composed some
time previously for the emperor Constantius for which he had been richly
rewarded. Despite the fact that Bemarchios, like Libanios, was pagan, the
speech celebrated a new church in Antioch. It contained, naturally enough
for this type of speech, an ekphrasis of the building which Libanios claims
62
The quotation is from Richard Lacayo writing in Time magazine, 14 November 1994
(available online at www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,981806,00.html).
126
64
Libanios, Autobiography, ed. and trans. A.F. Norman (Oxford, 1965), 41: vo
o ov v o v vov o o o
o
Phantasia
127
are not defined but are common and general.65 As Patillon suggests, this
points to the general nature of ekphrasis, providing a further hint as to
the nature of ekphrasis: that it is not a description of specific scenes in all
their individual particularities, but more a general characterization.66 And
ekphrasis did not necessarily refer to a specific reality, but could draw
on generally accepted ideas. A remark by the Byzantine commentator
Doxapatres shows that some authorities interpreted Aphthonios advice
to completely imitate (mimeisthai) the events described to mean that one
should not confine oneself to known facts, but should supplement them
by the addition of details that are acceptable or possible (endechomena),
and which therefore accord with audience expectations whether of reality
or of a particular genre.67
Enargeia and Mimesis
The interweaving of memory and mental images that lies behind enargeia
points to a further characteristic of the latter. For what enargeia, and thus
ekphrasis, seek to imitate is not so much an object, or scene, or person
in itself, but the effect of seeing that thing, as Elaine Scarry says of the
modern reader: imagining is an act of perceptual mimesis.68 By activating
the images already stored in the listeners mind, the speaker creates a
65
128
Phantasia
129
discussions of both
ekphrasis and enargeia reveal a conception of language as a dynamic force
that effects a change in the listener or readers mental state and this is a
phenomenon that is fundamentally rhetorical, that is if one understands
the goal of rhetoric as to bring about such a mental change.70 To emphasize
the rhetorical nature of ekphrasis is also to draw attention to the vestigial
orality of the phenomenon, the way in which the discussions of both
ekphrasis and enargeia assume a live interaction between speaker and
audience, with language passing like an electrical charge between them.
This does not mean, in the ancient context, that ekphrasis and enargeia
are not equally at home in other types of discourse. As was emphasized
in Chapter 1, ancient readers saw enargeia as a positive quality in history
writing and poetry, as well as rhetoric. These genres had much that was
rhetorical about them in the broadest sense that they were often intended
for live performance and made use of many of the same resources as
rhetoric.71 Plutarchs description of Thucydides writing as transporting
the reader/listener to the events of the Peloponnesian War is one example
(see Chapter 1 above) and the many comments on the sense of presence
70
910.
See Cham Perelman, LEmpire rhtorique: rhtorique et argumentation (Paris, 1977), pp.
71
See, for example, Ruth Webb, Rhetoric and poetry, in Stanley Porter (ed.), Handbook
of Classical Rhetoric in the Hellenistic Period (330 B.C.A.D. 400) (Leiden, 1997); William H.
Race, Rhetoric and lyric poetry, in Ian Worthington (ed.), A Companion to Greek Rhetoric
(Oxford, 2007), pp. 50925.
130
132
133
use of language. The rigour of this training and the energy expended
on refining it are both evident from Hermogenes handbook and the
commentaries by Syrianos (fifth century) and others, and from Sopatros
manual Diaireseis ztmatn (On the Division of Questions) (fourth century).
These Greek texts repay closer examination as they reveal the mechanics
of declamation, and sometimes the role of ekphrasis in persuasion, in a
way which the Elder Senecas more familiar catalogue of highlights from
declamations does not. Seneca, by concentrating on fragments, omits
the analytical and argumentative backbone of the art, simply assuming
knowledge of it among his readers.
As well as developing into a performance art in its own right,
as Philostratos Lives of the Sophists shows, declamation remained a
preparation for judicial oratory and for speaking in the city councils.
As noted above (Chapter 1), the professional declaimers described
by Philostratos are often said to have spoken in court cases, and other
recipients of this training did go on to speak in court. While declamation
clearly cannot have been a mirror to practical judicial oratory, the
analytical processes and techniques of presentation which it taught must
have been put to use to varying degrees.
Epideictic Oratory
The third-century handbooks attributed to Menander Rhetor and
Dionysios of Halikarnassos show the range of epideictic speeches in
A composite commentary by Syrianos, Sopatros and Markellinos is published in
volume 4 of Walz, Rhetores graeci. Syrianos comments have been published separately by
H. Rabe (Leipzig, 189293). Sopatros the Rhetors On the Division of Questions is published in
volume 8 of Walzs Rhetores graeci. On the text, see Doreen Innes and Michael Winterbottom,
Sopatros the Rhetor: Studies in the Text of the Diairesis Ztmatn (London, 1988).
Michael Winterbottom, Schoolroom and courtroom, in Brian Vickers (ed.), Rhetoric
Revalued (Binghampton, 1982). See also the comments of Robert Kaster, Controlling reason:
declamation in rhetorical education at Rome, in Yun Lee Too (ed.), Education in Greek and
Roman Antiquity (Leiden, 2001), p. 321 on what we miss when we read Seneca.
Malcolm Heath, Menander: A Rhetor in Context (Oxford, 2004) stresses the continuing
practical relevance of this rhetorical training. On examples of sophists speaking in court,
see Laurent Pernot, La Rhtorique de lloge dans le monde grco-romain (Paris, 1993), p. 74;
John A. Crook, Legal Advocacy in the Roman World (London, 1995) gives a thorough analysis
of the role of advocates in Roman legal practice and concludes that the rhetorical training
described by Quintilian would indeed have been of practical advantage. Dominic Berry and
Malcolm Heath, Oratory and declamation, in Stanley E. Porter (ed.), Handbook of Classical
Rhetoric in the Hellenistic Period 330 B.C.A.D. 400 (Leiden, 1997), pp. 393420 explore the
interface between theory and practice.
134
the later Empire. Under this heading came speeches celebrating the
events which punctuated civic life and the family life of the elite: visits
by governors, departures of friends and officials, appeals for aid to the
emperor after an earthquake, athletic victories, weddings, birthdays and
deaths. The various genres described by Menander Rhetor and others
reflect the variety of social events marked by such speeches.10 If anything
unifies the types of speech treated as epideictic, it is their engagement
with the visible and invisible fabric of their occasions.
Aristotles characterization of epideictic as the rhetoric of praise and
blame and the minor place which he assigns to it do not therefore do
justice to the role of the genre in the second century CE and later.11 The
term epideixis, display, places the spotlight on one aspect of this type of
rhetoric, which was not absent from declamation or even courtroom and
judicial oratory. Part of the speakers aim was to display his own skills,
something that Lucian certainly recognizes in the implicit comparison
between himself and the peacock.12 The other ancient term for this type
of rhetoric, pangurikos logos, reflects its embeddedness in occasion.13
Though panegyric strictly refers only to speeches composed for festivals
(pangureis), its meaning was extended in antiquity to cover all types of
celebratory speeches and draws attention to the fact that these speeches
were composed to mark particular occasions (not just festivals). They
were therefore grounded in a specific time and place, even if they were
then written down and circulated in a textual afterlife.14 These ideas of
display-piece and occasional speech reflect aspects of epideictic, but the
individual speeches were often more complex, and the epideictic genre as
On the date of the ps.-Dionysian handbook, see Menander Rhetor, On Epideictic, ed.
Donald A. Russell and Nigel G. Wilson (Oxford, 1981), p. 362.
Donald A. Russell, Rhetors at the wedding, PCPS, 205 (1979): 10417. On departures
as poignant moments in the life of the elite, see Libanios, Autobiography, passim.
10
On the interconnection between genre and social setting, see Richard Martin, The
Language of Heroes: Speech and Performance in the Iliad (Ithaca, 1989), pp. 434.
11
Pernot, La Rhtorique de lloge has undertaken an extensive re-evaluation of epideictic
rhetoric, particularly in the Second Sophistic, questioning the validity of Aristotles dismissive
comments for the appreciation of the role of epideictic in later periods of antiquity. In
particular, he has pointed out the role of argumentation and persuasion in these speeches.
12
Lucian, The Hall, 11. Cf. Dio Chrysostom, 12.23.
13
On the terminology, see Pernot, La Rhtorique de lloge, pp. 3640 and Donald A.
Russell, The panegyrists and their teachers, in Mary Whitby (ed.), The Propaganda of Power:
The Role of Panegyric in Late Antiquity (Leiden, 1998), pp. 2021.
14
On the recording and circulation of epideictic speeches, see Pernot, La Rhtorique
de lloge, pp. 46575. As ever, we can never know to what extent the texts we have reflect
the speech as performed, but I will take the surviving texts as representative of epideictic
practice.
135
whole was far more varied in its compass than either of these labels would
suggest.
The Rhetorical Treatises on Epideictic
The elementary exercise of enkmion taught the basic starting points for
such speeches, the encomiastic topoi of birth, education, achievement
which provided a basic structure for an epideictic speech (though these
topoi could also be used in speeches of other types which called for the
praise or blame of a person). The more advanced handbooks give detailed
recommendations for various types of speech, suggesting an array of
alternative strategies to suit the particular circumstances of each speech,
or to circumvent difficulties (such as an honorands less than illustrious
birth or inadequate education). It is somewhat misleading to refer to their
contents as rules. Their tone is often prescriptive (the use of the second
person future indicative to tell the reader what he will do in his speech
is frequent), but essentially they offer flexible models for their readers
to adapt to the particular circumstances in which they find themselves.15
These handbooks appear to be aimed at adult users who are called upon to
speak at various events, though the individual to whom the ps.-Dionysian
handbook is addressed is clearly a novice, about to give a speech at a
wedding.16 Students in the rhetorical schools seem to have composed
practice speeches, but an equally important source of instruction would
have been their personal experience of listening to speeches both in
the schools, where rhetors often composed speeches for the deaths and
departures of students, and outside, at special occasions, or during the
competitions in epideictic that were part of the programme in many local
festivals in the Greek world.17
These speeches of praise (or less usually blame) referred directly to their
time and place, praising the addressee(s), or the space in which they were
pronounced, so that, unlike in declamation, the speakers here and now
were shared by the audience. As the genre most closely bound up with
the present moment, epideictic was the genre in which Greek responses to
the present conditions of Roman rule, entirely absent from declamation,
15
136
grecque a
invent lempire romain, Rhetorica, 16 (1998): 13148.
19
Dio Chrysostom, Oration, 32.357. See Michael B. Trapp, Sense
of place in the
orations of Dio Chrysostom, in D. Innes et al. (eds), Ethics and Rhetoric: Classical Essays for
Donald Russell on His Seventy-fifth Birthday (Oxford, 1995).
20
Philostratos, Lives, 535.
21
Heath, Menander: A Rhetor in Context.
137
ekphrasis could be one of the means used by orators to offer proof of the
assertions they made in praise of their subjects.
The Progymnasmata and the More Advanced Treatises
As we saw in Chapter 1, both Sopatros and ps.-Dionysios seem to
assume that the student will have acquired from the elementary exercises
techniques and material to rework in his speech, rather than prefabricated
set pieces to be inserted at will. Poor or inexperienced orators may well
have resorted to prepared passages of all types, but there is no evidence
that this was the rule.22 The result, as far as ekphrasis is concerned, is that
within a speech or other composition the application of ekphrasis can be
difficult to spot, especially since it is neither distinguished by a special
type of subject matter, nor does it necessarily constitute a narrative
pause that stops the reader in his or her tracks or a digression that calls
for interpretation. One example is provided by the comparison between
Libanios model ekphrasis of the New Year festival of the Kalends and the
enkmion of the same festival (Or. 9), delivered in front of his students.23 The
ekphrasis is entirely made up of detailed accounts of the festival activities
and the experiences of the participants, from the feeling of impatience on
the day before, to the preparations, the exchanges of gifts, the revelry, role
reversal and public entertainments, ending with the sense of calm at the
end of the festival. Many of the same elements are evoked in the enkmion
but here they are interspersed with general reflections on the festival. The
ekphrasis does not stand in a simple relation of part to whole, nor is it
easy to isolate the use of ekphrasis within the enkmion. Students who
followed the lost versions of the Progymnasmata in which ekphrasis was
subsumed within other exercises (muthos, digsis, enkmion and koinos
topos) would have understood it from the very first as a flexible technique,
a means of expanding material in a vivid, engaging manner which could
be exploited in various ways and to various ends.24 Even the authors of the
surviving Progymnasmata are keen to stress that ekphrasis should grow
out of its context (see above, pp. 667) and that it is essentially a part
of a larger speech whose function depends on the rhetorical context, as
Nikolaos makes clear.
22
Quintilian, for example, advises against the insertion of ready-made common places
at Institutio oratoria, 2.4.289.
23
Jean Martin, in volume 2 of the Bud edition of Libanios speeches (Paris, 1988),
prints a French translation of the ekphrasis alongside Or. 9.
24
Discussing the endiaskeuos type of narration (which is related to ekphrasis), ps.Hermogenes, On Invention, 2.7, pp. 1245 notes that in actual forensic speeches it tends to be
used in combination with the simple and confirmatory types.
138
25
139
This phenomenon has been identified by Michael Roberts, The Jeweled Style: Poetry
and Poetics in Late Antiquity (Ithaca, 1989) as typical of Late Antique aesthetics. In rhetoric,
however, the practice of emphasizing details instead of the whole is less striking than in the
poetic examples studied by Roberts.
28
Libanios, Progymnasmata, pp. 4604.
29
Anon., Peri tn oktn mern tou rhtorikou logou in Walz, Rhetores Graeci, 3, p. 595, l.
18.
30
Ps.-Dionysios of Halikarnassos, On Mistakes in Declamation, 17, p. 372, ll. 56.
140
to the desire to rival (zlos) history and poetry, which both in their own
way bring on the appearances (opseis) of whatever they need to for the
listeners. This historical and poetic practice of evoking appearances is
contrasted with the use of the same technique in judicial or mock-judicial
debates (agnes), which must be measured to fit the needs of the case (pros
tn chreian).31 It is important to note, however, that he does not deny the
appropriateness of vivid language to declamation and states clearly that
in the essential points of the debates (agnes) themselves there is sufficient
movement of the imagination (phantasia).32 The problem, as he sees it,
is that many declaimers do not realize this and so think that they need
to wheel on images (phantasias) with words from the outside.33 Ps.Dionysios is referring to the practice of debate, when in the moment, or
from concentration on the case itself, the speaker manages to appeal to
the imagination, without the use of the over-elaborate prepared passages
which he associates with the school exercise of ekphrasis. It is possible
that his remarks were directed at the consequences of the teaching of
ekphrasis in the schools and, more specifically, at the type of practices
encouraged by the inclusion of ekphrasis as an independent exercise. It is
certainly noticeable that the inappropriate subjects he singles out are, for
the most part, subjects mentioned by the Progymnasmata.
Ps.-Dionysios comments are thus comparable to Lucians observations
in On How to Write History. While at one point he criticizes an anonymous
historians inept use of ekphraseis of caves and landscapes, elsewhere
he nevertheless recommends enargeia, stating that the listener, like
Quintilians judge, should think he is seeing the events rather than
hearing about them (51). Further on he advises the writer to show selfcontrol (sphrone) in his descriptions (hermneiai) of landscapes (57). As
Franco Montanari has pointed out, Lucian thus attacks what he presents
as an abuse of ekphrasis, rather than the principle of using enargeia in
31
The Greek is extremely elliptical here. The use of the particles men and de suggests
that he is referring to opseis in history and poetry on the one hand (which are themselves
distinct) and in oratory on the other. Ps.-Hermogenes, On Invention, in his discussion of
diaskeu at 3.15, p. 168, ll. 13, notes that this type of discourse rivals poetry; he does not,
however, seem to consider that this disqualifies it from being used in oratory.
32
The term I have translated, following Russell, as essential points (ta epikaira) may
also mean the moment, implying the (improvised) practice of declamation.
33
141
142
143
144
down to compete at the games but, on hearing that his city was at war,
returned home before the start of the games and distinguished himself
fighting on behalf of his city. The aristeus now wishes to compete in the
games. However, there is a law forbidding anyone who has put their name
down but does not compete from entering the games again. The declaimer
in this exercise has to argue the hero-athletes case. Here again the student
is advised to include in the epilogue an elaborate account (diaskeu) of his
acts of bravery and ekphraseis of the battle, the burial of the dead, and the
victory, as well as thopoiiai, all to convince the audience of his worthiness
to compete, despite the letter of the law.42
These uses of ekphrasis are therefore equivalent to the other methods
of arousing emotion at the end of a speech which often involved props
or the introduction of family members into the court to arouse pity.43 A
particularly dramatic example from an actual declamation is the end
of Lucians Tyrannicide, a declamation in which the speaker claims the
reward reserved for the killers of tyrants despite the fact that he only
provoked the tyrants suicide by killing his son. In the dramatic epilogue
Lucian imagines the speaker brandishing a sword, even addressing it as
his accomplice. Using both ekphrasis and thopoiia he then evokes the last
moments of the tyrants life, imagining his lamentations over his sons
body and the way in which he withdrew the speakers sword from the
fatal wound in order to kill himself with the same weapon, making its
owner his indirect assassin.44
Like Sopatros, the ancient commentators on Hermogenes On Issues
frequently associate the use of ekphrasis with the arousal of indignation
and other emotions (to deinon).45 However, this arousal of emotion is
used for very precise rhetorical ends as is clear from one example of the
use of ekphrasis in a deliberative type of speech discussed by Syrianos.
As Nikolaos says, deliberative orators often need to use ekphrasis to
persuade or dissuade. Syrianos agrees and associates the use of ekphrasis
with one in particular of the standard heads of deliberative rhetoric
(the telika kephalaia): advantage (to sumpheron). The precise position of
the ekphrasis, he explains,
145
146
49
See Syrianos, Commentaria, vol. 2, p. 135 for an example of ekphrasis as one means
(among others) of creating a chrma.
50
Russell, Greek Declamation, p. 58; Heath, Hermogenes, On Issues, pp. 21, 5051. In
Hermogenes classification this argument would strictly be sungnom, as there was no third
party who could be blamed. Ibid., p. 76.
51
Sopatros, On the Division of Questions, p. 224, ll. 1920: ov v v,
v. Innes and Winterbottom, Sopatros the Rhetor, p. 171 compare the
anonymous scholia to Hermogenes in Walz, Rhetores graeci, 7, p. 365, ll. 279 where Isocrates
is characterized as huptios in contrast to Demosthenes.
147
v o o ovo,
voov o vv o vo ,
o ovo , ov o o
, v, vo, ov o, v
v ov o o.52
148
56.
The sack of Thebes is narrated briefly in Arrian, Anabasis, 1.8 and Plutarch, Alexander,
58
Cicero, De inventione, 10.7; Rhetorica ad Herennium, 4.39.51; Quintilian, Institutio
oratoria, 8.3.679.
59
Sopatros, On the Division of Questions, p. 209, l. 10 p. 210, l. 6.
149
Alas, what misfortunes! What dramas have I seen Thebes suffer! They
surpass even the tragedy of Mount Kithairon itself.60 One man was
mourning his wife on Kithairon, another was weeping for his family,
yet another mourned a friend. A woman was fleeing from the fighting
and, desperate to rescue her loved ones, was turning back towards the
enemy, overwhelmed by the event ? But what words could suffice to
describe (ekphrasai) the misfortunes of the Thebans? The suffering (path)
on Kithairon is little compared to the disaster that has now happened
there, no one could bear the extremity of the present misfortunes.
ov v. oo v v. o v
, v vo o v vv; v
vo v voov. o vo v, o v ov
o. v o oo v, v oov
o oo v, v v vo v
ov o. v o o v
; vo vv v
o o v vo v ov v vv vv v.61
Mount Kithairon was the mythical setting for the exposure of the baby Oidipous and
the deaths of Aktaion and Pentheus, among other tragedies.
61
Sopatros, On the Division of Questions, p. 210, l. 20 p. 211, l.1.
62
Sopatros, On the Division of Questions, p. 210, l. 10: ov vv o
v v.
150
63
Quintilian, Major Declamations, 5.16; translation from Lewis A. Sussman, The Major
Declamations Ascribed to Quintilian: A Translation (Frankfurt, 1987), p. 63.
151
the state of mind that made him cross this particularly sensitive boundary.64
He does so by giving a brief and allusive ekphrasis of the mental images
that motivated his decision:
For I saw that, as our troops strength was waning and that of the enemy
increasing, the situation required me to come up with a clever stratagem
and, picturing (anaplasas) in my mind the capture of the city, I thought
of all the terrible things that capture usually (eithe) brings with it, and,
most bitter of all, the outrages that enemies usually (sunth) commit
when they take a city, defiling bridal chambers, raping unmarried girls,
not sparing young boys.
ov ov vv o o, v o
vvo v o , v v ov v
o voov ov ,
vv ov, v v v v ovv v
v, vovv, vo ovv, v o
ovv.
Although only the detailing of the enemies likely actions at the very end of
the passage counts strictly as ekphrasis, the passage is of interest because
of the way it exploits the mechanics of ekphrasis and enargeia and plays on
the audiences familiarity with the traditional accounts of sacks of cities: it
is almost enough for the speaker to refer to what usually happens for the
audience to share the mental image to which he refers. And, once they have
understood his state of mind they will understand equally his decision to
adopt his unlikely disguise and to conceal his true nature (phusis) to fulfil
his duty of protecting the women and young people of the city.
In this
particular example, then, ekphrasis communicates the speakers state of
mind, the sight he feared and acted to avoid.
In all these examples, ekphrasis plays an important role alongside
argumentation in making the audience share the speakers perspective.
It also serves to alter their perception of certain events and their relation
to the present: the generals action was the only course open to him; the
failure of Demosthenes to crown Alexander was an honourable and
patriotic gesture rather than dereliction of duty; the father had no choice
but to save the weaker son, given the horror of his captivity, and the
general was driven by his sense of manly duty to protect the virtue of the
young to adopt his feminine disguise. As a means of creating such a gloss
(chrma) on events, ekphrasis had a full part to play in the argumentative
64
152
strategy of the speech and could be a vital means of ensuring that the
audience assented to the speakers thesis.
Demosthenes, Phokis and the Rhetoric of Signs
In this context, it is worth analysing in more detail the only passage from an
Attic orator to be cited in the treatments of ekphrasis in the Progymnasmata:
Demosthenes account of the scene of devastation he found at Phokis,
cited by Nikolaos as an example of how ekphrasis can be used in judicial
oratory to amplify a given topic:
The manner (tropos) in which the wretched Phokians have been destroyed
can be seen not just from the decrees [of the Amphictyonic Council] but
also from the deeds which have been done (ha pepraktai), a terrible and
pitiful spectacle, Athenians. For just now when we were travelling to
Delphi we could not help but see all of it: ruined houses, defensive walls
razed to the ground, the land bereft of young men, just women, a few
little children and some pitiful old men. No one could express in words
the terrible state of affairs there now.
v v ovv ov o o ov, o vov v
ov ov v v, v v ,
vv, v vo, vv. vv o
o, v v v v v, o v,
v, v ov v v , v ,
vo oo. o v v v
v vv vv.65
Demosthenes, 19.645.
On the background, see Timothy T.B. Ryder, Demosthenes and Philip II, in Ian
Worthington (ed.), Demosthenes: Statesman and Orator (London, 2000), pp. 6370
66
153
sketches a few details which stand for the whole event and bring to mind
a vivid scene of devastation. The passage serves to arouse pity for the
widows and orphans whose suffering is mentioned, accompanied by a
sense of indignation against Philip. This in itself was not as straightforward
as it might seem because the Phocians stood accused of committing
sacrilege. But what is most noticeable is that Philip and his actions are not
described directly. Instead of evoking the sack itself (as Quintilian does
in his example), the violence and destruction are indicated by the visible
traces they have left behind. So this particular examples passage relies for
its ultimate effect on what is not directly stated: the actions which led to
the devastation witnessed and described by Demosthenes.
In cases like this, the audience has a further task: to imagine the events
that led to the state of the affairs that is directly evoked in the ekphrasis.
Quintilians first example of the achievement of enargeia through detail (ex
pluribus) at 8.3.66, discussed in Chapter 4, works in exactly this way. In his
evocation of a wild party, Cicero avoids direct description of the events
themselves As with the descriptions of the sacks of cities, the audience
have to infer the events from their aftermath, supplying the details from
their own imaginative resources and cultural knowledge. The workings
of this type of ekphrasis are thus far more complex intellectually and
temporally than the brief precepts of the Progymnasmata could ever
suggest. From a few well-chosen and unambiguous signs the audience is
expected to fill in the rest.67 In the case of Ciceros description of Verres,
the rest is the further details, while in the case of these descriptions of the
aftermath of an event, it is the past events which have left these traces that
are brought to mind and, ultimately, the perpetrator and his character.
The audience are thus required to bring to mind two slightly different
moments in time: the moment when the signs were seen by the witness,
the internal viewer, and the preceding events. It is the latter which are
really in question, and the audience makes these events present through
their own effort of interpretation.
The examples of the use of ekphrasis from Sopatros show how ekphrasis
could be put to use to aid the semblance of persuasion: description,
rather than being a useless form of dilation, could be used to involve the
audience, to make them feel sympathy for the participants in some event,
or to present the visible traces of some past action. In this last case, verbal
evocation takes the
place of physical evidence. In so doing, the speaker
is prompting the audience to imagine
, to supply images and judgements
from their cultural knowledge and their knowledge of probable outcomes.
67
154
The effect of the words which prompt these imaginings can be compared
to that of a painting, the difference being that the images are supplied
from the audiences own memory.
Declamation and Fiction
All these examples show how ekphrasis within declamation could be
used to add to the persuasive effect of a speech, in appeals for sympathy
or, above all, in attempts to make the audience understand the state of
affairs in which the speaker found himself, or his state of mind. It is an
integral part of declamation and, in the precise cases in which its use is
recommended, has an important role to play in inducing the audience to
assent to the speakers argument. There are therefore strong reasons not
to take too literally ps.-Dionysios claims that ekphrasis has no place in
declamation (or that it represents a perversion).
Ps.-Dionysios goes on to make the further point that ekphrasis in
declamation is particularly problematic because the speakers are not
thinking of some actual referent, but invent (anaplattousi) for themselves
the appearances of plagues and famines and storms and wars, which have
not happened in the way they describe (or, indeed, at all). Here, ironically,
he contrasts declamation with history and poetry which both relate events
that have occurred (ta sumbebkota) thus placing the content of poetry on
a par with historical facts.68 It is a rhetorical move designed to underline
what is special about the case of declamation in which arguments were
based on fictional events. In the context of competitive declamation,
where speakers argued both sides of the case, disputes could arise about
the nature of the non-existent event. It is this that he defines as a useless
waste of words.
Some of the speeches analyzed above help to explain his concerns. It
would be possible, for example, for an opponent to produce a counterekphrasis of the storm in Sopatros speech claiming that it was by no
means serious enough to excuse the generals action. A debate that turned
on the magnitude of an imaginary storm would indeed be a waste of
words. In this particular case, however, the Arginoussai story, in which
the magnitude of the storm was not questioned, provided something
approaching a common set of facts that were not in dispute, a reminder
of the utility of historical themes in which the characteristics of the basic
events and characters were well known to all parties. An example from
an entirely fictional case shows the potential problems of ekphrasis if the
physical qualities of a fictional object are given too much importance in
the speech. With regard to a case mentioned by Hermogenes in which a
68
155
hero is suspected of collaborating with the enemy after they set up a statue
in his honour, the composite commentary contains the following advice.69
In order to emphasize the importance of this alleged sign of the heros
treachery, the speaker must use amplification (auxsis) by elaborating
(diaskeuaz) the peristaseis, dwelling, for example, on the place (topos)
in which the statue was set up, on the significance of the act (pragma) of
setting it up and so on. The commentators then add that it is possible
to elaborate on the material (hul) of the statue, if it is made of gold, for
example again something that could be contradicted in a useless waste of
words by the declaimers opponent. To a great extent, then, ps.-Dionysios
unease about ekphrasis in declamation is caused by the fictional nature of
the themes themselves.
Declamation and the Uses of Ekphrasis
The technical sources on declamation show that ekphrasis and related
techniques had a distinct role to play in the art of persuasion. They could
aid persuasion by arousing the appropriate emotions in the listener but, far
more importantly, they could serve to colour the audiences perceptions
of the events in question and were thus particularly useful when the case
revolved around the interpretation of facts. The examples from declamation
help to clarify ps.-Longinos statement about the power of phantasia when
used in combination with arguments: alone, the generals ekphrasis of
the storm or Demosthenes ekphrasis of the sack of Thebes would merely
create an impression in the minds eye, but as part of a larger argument
they have the potential to create assent. The same examples also reveal the
cognitive complexity of ekphrasis and the nature of the demands made
on the audience. More surprisingly, these features of ekphrasis are also
visible in epideictic contexts and it is to these that we turn now.
Ekphrasis and Epideictic in Menander Rhetor
The range of types of ekphrasis mentioned in the treatise on epideictic
attributed to Menander Rhetor is closer to the modern understanding
of ekphrasis: monuments, places and even a statue figure prominently.
The city and its standard attributes, its public buildings, porticoes, its
geographical situation, are ever present in these treatises. The first of the
two treatises attributed to Menander offers little information on the use of
ekphrasis, although topics familiar from the Progymnasmata harbours,
bays and seasons are mentioned as typical subjects of epideictic speeches.
The first Menandrian treatise also reminds readers that a single part of a
city might be the subject of a speech, or that they might need to write a
69
156
157
158
(Menander does not tell us whether this warning reflects bitter experience
or merely excessive caution.) As in the case of Nikolaos advice about
describing the act of adultery in the exercise of koinos topos, the contents of
the description of the bride are assumed to betray the impressions stamped
in the speakers mind. The mere possibility that the mental portrait of the
bride, the phantasia in the speakers mind, might derive from illicit sense
perception was enough to concern Menander.
As a special display, an ambitious (philotimoumenos) speaker could also
include mythological tableaux of divinities or personifications associated
with marriage like Gamos (marriage) or Eros.79 This type of ekphrasis
belonged, according to Menander, in the thesis section of the speech,
where arguments in favour of marriage were presented, so that ekphrasis
is once again used as an auxiliary to argumentation. Ps.-Dionysios advice
on wedding speeches likewise suggests a function for vivid language
which surpasses the decorative digression and which takes us back to
declamation. He advises a prophetic description (diatupsis) of the couples
future life with their children combined with reminders of their own
happy childhoods.80 Here verbal evocation of the future is presented as a
parallel to personal memories of the past. Vivid language serves to show
the listener a future eventuality (one which is unambiguously positive
within the value system reflected in the epithalamion). The equivalent
method for evoking past time is the appeal to remember so that memory
images correspond to those that are verbally evoked (and presumably
contribute to them). Such use of language to prompt the interaction of
memory and anticipation of the future is entirely appropriate to mark the
transitional nature of the wedding.
Places and persons are not the only types of subject for ekphrasis which
Menander discusses. Ekphraseis of battles and military actions had a role
in epideictic, as well as in the historico-fantasy world of declamation, as the
discussion of the Basilikos logos, or Imperial Oration, shows. As part of his
account of the actions (praxeis) accomplished by the emperor, the speaker
speech. Menander expresses similar reservations about describing the physical appearance
of a young pupil in the Propemptikos logos (398.1423).
79
Ibid., 404, l. 29 405, l. 4: o o oov v v v v
, o , ' o o v , vo v o,
v v v ov, v, ov vo, ov ov v
v v v. o o v o o v v
o o .
80
ov v vv v
vv v o o v. v o
v
vvv, v o
v v ov.
v v v
v v vv.
159
81
160
161
the bodily eyes, of Carthage, suggest how the speaker might have had
to approach this task.88 For the audience who did not know the city, the
ekphrasis must have been general enough to allow the invitee to create
a mental picture on the basis of prior knowledge (just as each tropical
beach is sufficiently standardized to allow us to project our ready-made
fantasies onto it, while still representing a specific location).
Menander goes on to make an important distinction: the approach
will depend on the previous experience of the addressee. If the addressee
has actually visited the city before, he explains, there is no need to evoke
its advantages in a full-blown ekphrasis. Instead, it will be sufficient
simply to remind him of what he has already seen with his own eyes.89
Menanders practical advice relies on the assumption that the experience
of the city has left a mental image firmly lodged in the visitors memory
(just as Augustine was convinced that his long exposure to Carthage
had left that city engraved in his mind). The effect of ekphrasis on the
person who has never seen the city is therefore equivalent to the effect of
a memory image in the mind of the person who has seen it. In this case,
ekphrasis is described as having an emotive and persuasive function,
spurring the listener to wish to see the sight described with the eyes of
the body. Menander is quite specific about the emotion which this appeal
to memory should arouse: the speaker is advised to assimilate the former
visitors desire to revisit the city to the erotic longing (pothos) of a lover
(erasts) who is far from his beloved.90
Menanders discussion of the Kltikos logos shows how, within epideictic
rhetoric too, ekphrasis can perform a specific function and cannot be
reduced to gratuitous decoration or to the display of the orators talents.
Ekphrasis here is still thought of as working on the mind of the listener
and even as producing concrete results. Of course, a Roman dignitarys
decision whether or not to visit a certain city was governed by rather
more practical considerations. But it is significant that a form of rhetorical
persuasion played a part in the elaborate choreography of relations
between Greek cities and their Roman governors and that ekphrasis
contributed to this persuasion.
Ekphrasis and the Emperors Tears
Evidence for actual audience response to epideictic is rare (Libanios
anecdote about his rivals disastrous performance being one exception),
but Philostratos does record the dramatic effect of a letter written by
Aelios Aristeides on the emperor Marcus Aurelius. The letter was a
88
162
plea, addressed to Marcus Aurelius and Commodus, for help after the
earthquake which devastated the city of Smyrna in 177 or 178.91 Marcus
Aurelius in particular, says Philostratos, was so moved by the letter that
he shed tears on the page. Aid for the stricken city was immediately
forthcoming, and Aristeides (rather than the emperors) gained a reputation
as the founder of the city.92According to Philostratos, the words of the
master sophist were enough, even at a distance, to cause real cities to rise
again. The letter survives and corresponds to the type of speech which
Menander calls Presbeutikos Logos, or Ambassadors Speech.93 According
to Menander, the Ambassadors Speech should contain a diatupsis and
an elaborate account (diaskeu) of the destruction suffered by the city. He
advises the speaker to pay particular attention to the impact on monuments
such as baths and aqueducts that were most likely to interest the emperor
(and to attract Imperial funding for repairs).94 Aristeides handles this in
an interesting way which takes us back to Menanders advice on the
invitation speech. For he does not describe the former splendour of the
city (as he had done in his Seventeenth Oration on the city) but instead
asks his audience to remember their own experience of it.
Remember what you said when you looked upon it as you arrived,
remember what you said when you entered, how you were disposed,
what dispositions you made was there a view which did not make
you more cheerful? Which sight did you behold in silence and not praise
as befits you? These are things which even after your departure you did
not forget. The people were celebrating the Theoxenia, and you rested
as if in the most civilized of your possessions. What did your gaze touch
upon that did not make you happier? What, of all that you saw, did you
pass by in silence and not with the words of praise that befit you? All this
you remembered even after your departure. Now it all lies in the dust.
vv v o v v. vv
v v, , . o v ov ov,
v o o v v. o oo
o o ov; v vv o
o v ; v o v vov. vv
v v v.95
91
See Ailios Aristeides, The Complete Works, trans. Charles A. Behr (Leiden, 1981), vol.
2, p. 358, n. 1.
92
Philostratos, Lives of the Sophists, 582.
93
On epideictic in letter form, see Pernot, La Rhtorique de lloge, pp. 4357.
94
163
The memory image again can stand in for the image which, in other
circumstances, Aristeides would have had to convey in words. In the
lines which follow, Aristeides proceeds to enumerate some of the sights
following each immediately with the statement of its loss:
The harbor, like an eye, is closed, the beauties of the market place are
gone, the adornments of the streets have disappeared, the gymnasia
together with the men and boys have been destroyed, some of the
temples have fallen, others have sunk beneath the ground. The most
beautiful of cities to behold, renowned for its beauty among all men,
is the ugliest of spectacles: a hill of ruins and corpses. The west winds
blow through a waste land.
o , o
v v,
v vo v, o
o v , vo
o v
v,
o
v.
v o v o o vo
vo v ov v ov, ov v
vv, o v vo.96
Ibid., 3.
Deinarchos, fr. F 3: ov v v v v.
Apsines, Art of Rhetoric 31, ed. and trans. Mervin R. Dilts and George A. Kennedy (Leiden,
1997), p. 220 cites Deinarchos line as a means of making present (paristmi) the desolation
of the city.
97
164
98
Menander Rhetor, Treatise II, 368, ll. 47 (Basilikos Logos): v ooovv
v ovv v , ov oov ovov
v voov ov v
99
Ibid., 373, ll. 1628.
100
Ibid., v v v ov, v
vo, v, v v o v, oo
, , , o. Julian, Panegyric of Constantius, I, 3436 explains
the qualities illustrated by the preceding account of Constantius campaigns.
101
See Pernot, La Rhtorique de lloge, pp. 659724 and Ruth Webb,
Praise and
persuasion: argumentation and audience response in epideictic oratory, in Rhetoric in
Byzantium, ed. Elizabeth Jeffreys (Aldershot, 2003), pp. 12735.
165
Introduction
The rhetorical handbooks practical orientation makes them valuable
sources. However, this same practical focus also places limitations on
what their authors are willing to tell us. With the exception of the passing
allusion to the philosophical sense of phantasia in ps.-Longinos On the
Sublime (which is any case an exception that cannot easily be classified as
a rhetorical handbook), their authors are rarely interested in exploring
the philosophical implications of enargeia and phantasia. Nor, on the
whole, do they pay attention to the paradoxes inherent in enargeia that
emerge clearly when one compares the rhetorical usage of the term with
the earlier meaning of directly perceptible to the senses. As teachers, the
rhetoricians emphasize the practical over the speculative and, as vendors
of a particular method, they are interested first and foremost in stressing
the power that the word is able to wield through enargeia and ekphrasis.
This chapter therefore looks beyond the explicit discussions of
ekphrasis in the handbooks to consider just some of the questions raised
by the practice of ekphrasis. As it is not possible in the space available to
explore all the implications of ekphrasis, nor to do justice to the complex
questions raised, I have chosen to focus on two main areas. First, I will
discuss some of the questions raised by the rhetoricians own claims for
ekphrasis in both epideictic and declamation. In the case of epideictic, the
particular relationship of the speech to the time and place of its delivery
raises some important questions about the interaction of the orators visual
evocations with the audiences personal knowledge and memory and with
their perceptions of their surroundings. In particular, the requirements of
epideictic oratory often demanded that the speaker describe sights that
were literally before the audiences eyes as they listened to the speech.
The fictive nature of the events debated and described in declamation,
by contrast, raises problems of a different nature, in that, as the author of
On Mistakes in Declamation points out, the events described are imaginary.
Moreover, the fact that the audience of a declamation, like the readers
of a novel, were fully aware of the fictive nature of the events that they
Laurent Pernot, La Rhtorique de lloge dans le monde grco-romain (Paris, 1993), pp.
4413.
168
169
an awareness that these worlds are not real. Schaeffers analysis, which
takes into account all types of fiction and imaginative activity, from
daydreaming to the novel, cinema and video games, has the advantage of
revealing the complexity of our responses to fiction, in which immersion
in the fictive situation does not involve the loss of awareness of reality.
The closest ancient category to our notion of fiction that is to be found
in the surviving sources is the rhetoricians plasmata. This category of
narratives that had not occurred but which were like truth (unlike the
fantastic mythological tales of the Furies, centaurs and winged chariots)
was particularly associated with rhetoric. A plasma is modelled (platt;
cf. Latin fingere) from the pre-existing material provided by reality and
thus occupies an intermediate position between truth and lies. Nikolaos,
for example, in his chapter on the exercise of narration, defines plasmata
as being similar to the fabulous tales of myth in that both were invented
but different in that plasmata could have occurred. There is therefore
an intimate connection between the conception of enargeia, which is the
product of a mental image that is modelled by the orator from elements of
experience, and the project of fiction itself. And, like fiction, the products
of enargeia and ekphrasis are themselves both present in the imagination
and absent from the world perceived by the senses.
Ekphrasis and Absence
I will start with some examples from Menander Rhetor himself which
rely for their rhetorical effect on the ultimate inability of the word and
the mental images it provokes adequately to replace the sense of sight
for some of the uses of vivid evocation in epideictic play on absence
and emphasize the differences between past, present and future. The
difference between memory images and direct perception is alluded to
by Menander Rhetor in his comments on the Speech of Arrival (epibatrios
logos) to be made by the visitor:
Immediately after the prooemia, which are based on joy, you will
develop a head (kephalaion) containing an amplification of the opposite
See John R. Morgan, Make-believe and make believe, in Christopher Gill and T.P.
Wiseman (eds), Lies and Fiction in the Ancient World (Exeter, 1993) and Barbara Cassin,
LEffet sophistique (Paris, 1995), pp. 44960. Cassin stresses the close relationship between
declamation and fiction.
Nikolaos, Progymnasmata, p. 13, ll. 913: ovv o
o , v, v ,
vo, v v, o o o vovo o v o v.
This analogy does not mean that fabulous things, like the Furies, cannot be presented
with enargeia.
170
Here, memory images are described as falling far short of direct perception,
as mere shadows compared to the experience of seeing the city itself. By
implication, the effect of ekphrasis, which is comparable to these shadow
images, therefore also fails to substitute for reality. This passage sheds
a different light on the account of the Invitation Speech (Kltikos logos)
analysed in the previous chapter. In Menanders discussion of this speech,
the ekphrasis, or personal memory image, of the city to be visited is
intended as a spur to action, a lure to arouse the listeners desire to enjoy
the spectacle for himself through direct sensory perception. The persuasive
impact of the speech thus resides ultimately in the lack of identity between
the image and the result of direct perception and the inability of the verbal
evocation to substitute for reality.
One particular class of epideictic discourse places special emphasis on
the distinction between the mental images produced by ekphrasis and
the perception of reality. These are the monodies for the dead, usually
those who have died young, or for cities destroyed by earthquake or other
disasters. As we saw above in the case of Aristeides Letter to the Emperors,
the careful use of visual evocation could have an intense emotional impact
on the listener, but that impact was achieved precisely because of the gulf
between the imagined or remembered beauties of the person or city and
the present, visible state of ruin. In such speeches the use of ekphrasis, or
of the appeals to remember that may substitute for ekphrasis, takes place
within a specific temporal economy which constantly moves between
past, present and future as the monody juxtaposes the life which existed
in the past, the present state of loss and destruction and the future that, in
171
the case of a person, will never be.10 Within this, ekphrasis has a complex
role to play. Menander advises the reader about to deliver a monody for
a young person as follows: Then you will describe (diatupo) his physical
appearance, what he was like, what beauty he has lost, the blush of his
cheeks We might suppose that one effect of such diatupsis could be
consolatory, to substitute in some way for the loss of the person evoked.
But the advice that Menander goes on to give suggests rather that these
evocations of beauty were part of an enactment of that loss. Each element
of the intensely sensual description is in fact used as part of an extended
contrast between past and present:
what beauty he has lost, the blush of his cheeks, what a tongue has
been stilled, the soft bloom on his cheeks is clearly wilted, the locks
of his hair will no longer be admired, the radiance of his eyes and the
pupils now sleeping, his curved lashes curved no more, all destroyed.
o o o. oo v, oov o o,
v v , o v, oo oo v
v, oo o o
ov o, v
o v o, v
o
,
.11
Each sign of beauty is no sooner named than declared lost, as the diatupsis
oscillates between past and present, exploiting the poetic capacity of
language to evoke absent things which are contrasted systematically
with the present. The effect is, in miniature, the same as that achieved
by Aristeides in his Letter to the Emperors in which the image of Smyrna,
carefully constructed by verbal evocation and appeals to memory images,
is replaced by the image of wind-blown desolation of the present.
But, whereas in other contexts, making absent things present is the
unproblematic achievement of enargeia, in the type of monody envisaged
by Menander, the accent is on the gulf between the verbal image and
reality: between the sensuous detail with which the beauty of the youth is
enumerated and the corpse. It is highly likely that in the ritual context of
the performance of the monody, which is conceived as a brief, spontaneous
lament, the body of the deceased was visible to the speaker and his
audience.12 These passages therefore involved a juxtaposition of two levels
of perception for the mourners: their direct perception of the present fact
10
172
of death and their memory of the deceased as he was in his lifetime. The
effect is comparable to that of affixing a portrait of the dead as they were
in life to their mummy, superimposing one moment on another.
Ekphrasis and the Danger of Superfluity
The fact that the referents of epideictic ekphrasis were often known to the
audience, or even visible as the speaker pronounced his discourse, led to
a different type of problem. Ekphrasis in epideictic thus ran the risk of
being superfluous when the audience actually had before their physical
eyes the sight which the orator was supposed to bring before the eyes of
the mind. Speakers were themselves aware of this problem (and of the fact
that their speeches were likely to be circulated later to different audiences),
and none more acutely than Lucian whose elaborate prolalia (introductory
talk) The Hall is almost entirely devoted to a discussion of the problems
faced by a speaker performing in sumptuous surroundings. The speech
begins with praise for the beauty of the hall, presented as inspiring to the
speaker:
Seeing a hall immense in its proportions, surpassing all others in its
beauty, gleaming with light, sparkling with gold, beautifully adorned
with paintings, would one not desire to make speeches within it, if this
were ones occupation, and to enhance ones reputation and distinction
and fill it with sound and, as far as possible, to become part of its beauty
oneself ?
oov v ov ov ov
vov vov o v o
v , o oo v, vo
v o v o o
o o v.13
This model of inspiration and of the assimilation of the speaker with his
venue is immediately contrasted with the behaviour of the uncultivated
viewer who stares in mute wonder.14 In language that refers directly to the
theories of vision and memory underlying ekphrasis and enargeia, Lucian
13
173
174
both arguments merge to modify each other (the first speaker claims that
the opposing logos has been interrupting him throughout). But significant
tensions remain. Indeed, the first speech is itself acutely ambiguous in its
enthusiasm for the sight. It opens by comparing the speakers situation
with that of Alexander who is said to have been so seduced by the sight
of the river Kydnos that he would have still plunged into it even if he
had known in advance that it would lead to his death, and goes on to
compare the speaker to two animals, the horse (10) and the peacock (11),
and the Hall itself to the notoriously deceptive and treacherous sea (12). If,
in the end, the first speaker prevails it is not without doubts being raised
concerning his confident claims of an unproblematic union between
speaker, audience and context.
Monuments and Meanings
The Hall thus raises an important question. Ekphraseis of places in
epideictic are frequently prefaced with disclaimers announcing the
speakers inadequacy to the task.18 The ritual nature of this topos makes
it no less pertinent as an observation of the impossibility of rendering a
full account of any sight in words. However, if a full verbal account of
any sight is an impossible task, an ekphrasis can still suggest imaginary
supplements that may interact with the audiences perception or memory
of the subject. Examples are to be found in Aristeides Smyrnaean Oration
(Or. 17) where the relatively brief periegesis of the city is interspersed with
similes: the city is compared to an embroidered robe (chitn) and then to a
necklace made up of separate elements each of which attracts the viewers
gaze. These supplements to the ekphrasis serve to introduce other values
and associations into the description of the city: both have connotations
of craftsmanship, wealth and an ordered opulence which enrich the
ekphrasis and both appeal to the analogy of the city with the human body
that we have already encountered in the discussion of the monody.
In other cases, ekphrasis can also be used to make explicit the spiritual
and political meanings that may have been implicit in their subjects, as I
have suggested elsewhere.19 In particular, several ekphraseis of buildings
(whether originally pronounced within the building, for example Paul the
Silentiarys ekphrasis of Hagia Sophia, or not, for example Prokopios of
Caesareas account of the same church in his Buildings) effectively organize
the description around the manner (tropos) in which the monument was
18
amplification and
persuasion in Procopius Buildings, Antiquit tardive, 8 (2000): 6771.
19
175
176
177
his ekphrasis to make his audience feel as if they shared his experience.
By responding to the ekphrasis the listeners were in a sense placing
themselves imaginatively in the situation of the purported classical
addressees of the speech. In this case they were not just imagining that
they were caught up in the storm at sea with the classical general but
imagining that they were classical Athenian citizens imagining the scene.
Moreover, their involvement in the scene could coexist with the critical
awareness that it was a fiction and, specifically, that it was a fiction based
on particular historical sources. A striking example from one of the few
surviving declamations from the Second Sophistic is to be found in the
sophist Polemos speech in the persona of the father of Kunaigeiros, the
hero of Marathon who held onto a Persian ship even as his hands were
being cut off by the enemy. In support of his argument that his sons death
was more glorious than that of another hero, Kallimachos (whose body
was shot with so many arrows that it remained standing after his death),
the father gives an ekphrasis full of bloody detail, describing how first one
hand, then the other, was cut off and remained holding onto the ship as he
died on land. Polemo fully exploits the potential for paradox and startling
imagery, comparing the soldiers mutilated body to a victory monument
and stating how, as Kunaigeiros remained on land, his hand continued to
grasp the ship so that in the end he lay dead, a single man who served
on both elements with his limbs, divided between land and sea.26 This
paradox cannot fail to draw attention to the role of the Roman sophist
and is thus in tension with the invitation to visualize the heros death and
to enter into the classical moment evoked. Such a duality of response is
typical of declamation, and of all fiction. In the present case, awareness
of the long-standing historical tradition surrounding Marathon would
have added a further layer to the listeners response; indeed, this tradition
took the place, in the context of declamation, of the common cultural
references to which the real orator in a real case could appeal. Ekphrasis
in declamation exploited a set of shared images and associations that were
familiar from the schools, from texts and also from images (as in the case
of Marathon which was depicted in art). It is thus a phenomenon in which
intertextuality plays a significant role, but intertextuality of a particular
type. As we saw in the first chapter, the type of historical sources which
provided the basic material for declamation scenarios were not considered
simply as words on a page but as provokers of images in themselves.
26
Polemo, Declamation 1, 1011 in The Severed Hand and the Upright Corpse: The
Declamations of Marcus Antonius Polemo, ed. William W. Reader (Atlanta, 1996), pp. 1045:
v o o o v o, vo.
178
179
Danielle Maeder, Au seuil des Romans grecs: effets de rel et effets de cration, in
Groningen Colloquia on the Novel 4 (Groningen, 1991), pp. 133. See also Jean-Philippe Guez,
Achille Tatius ou le paysage-monde, in B. Pouderon and D. Crismani (eds), Lieux, dcors et
paysages de lancien roman des origines Byzance (Lyon, 2005), pp. 299307 who suggests that
the painting contains in nuce the main themes of the novel.
180
31
Franoise Ltoublon, Les Lieux communs du roman: strotypes grecs daventure et
damour (Leiden, 1993), p. 100.
32
Ailios Aristeides, Egyptian Discourse, 96.
181
33
See, on this contrast, John J. Winkler, The mendacity of Kalasiris and the narrative
strategy of Heliodorus Aithiopika, Yale Classical Studies, 27 (1982)
: 1012, though Winkler
does not recognize Heliodoros passage as an ekphrasis.
34
R. Morgan, Reader
and audiences in the Aithiopika of Heliodoros, Groningen Colloquia on the Novel 4 (Groningen,
1991), pp. 85104.
182
view, rather than through the partial and uncomprehending eyes of the
bandits through whom the opening scene is focalized.35
A further example of the type of connections between passages
that become apparent when we apply the ancient criteria of ekphrasis
involves the account of the siege of Syene in Heliodoros Aithiopika, 9.3.
The method used by the Ethiopian king, Hydaspes, to surround Syene
(Aswan) with water is very similar to Julians account of the historical
siege of Nisibis by the Persians in 350 CE and this similarity provides
the main evidence for a fourth-century date for the novel.36 The parallel
with epideictic also underlines the function of the account as a portrait
of the Ethiopian king (who at this point is unaware that he is the father
of the heroine, Charikleia). The tropos of the
works
See Pierre Chuvin, Chronique des derniers paens (Paris, 2004), pp. 3215 and Glen
Bowersock, Fiction as History: Nero to Julian (Berkeley, 1994), pp. 14960.
37
Julian, Panegyric of Constantius, I, 22, ll. 15; 1112 and 25.
38
On the structuring role of the Nile in the novel, see Tim Whitmarsh, The writes of
passage: cultural initiation in Heliodorus Aethiopica, in Richard Miles (ed.), Constructing
Identities in Late Antiquity (London, 1999).
183
thus have been acutely aware of the aporetic nature of this scene, identified
by Jack Winkler. This is not the only example where the reader seems to
be invited not just to imagine the scene evoked by the novelist but also
to reflect upon the practice and conventions of ekphrasis and enargeia. It
is possible to identify other uses of ekphrasis by both Achilles Tatios and
Heliodoros that play on the conventions of ekphrasis and, sometimes, call
into question the rhetoricians claims for ekphrasis in different ways.
Some of the most interesting instances of ekphrasis in the novel are
cases in which the ekphrasis is addressed by one character to another,
allowing the impact on the internal audience to be depicted. The account
of the death of Charikles mentioned above is one example. In this case,
the response is by the book: the listeners react emotionally to tragic news,
presented in suitably tragic fashion. In other cases, however, the reactions
are subject to more developed treatment that ultimately raises questions
about the nature of the mental images provoked by the word and their
relationship to the reality that is the fictional world of the novel.
In Achilles Tatios novel, two separate male characters fall in love with
the heroine, Leukippe, solely on the basis of reports of her beauty, without
having seen her for themselves. The young Kallisthenes at the beginning of
the novel and the older Thersandros, the main rival of the hero Kleitophon
at the end, fall in love after merely hearing about Leukippes beauty. The
idea is a topos of the novel but, in Achilles Tatios, it is developed in ways
that ask interesting questions about the representational power of the
word. Kallisthenes is described as in love at first hearing (ex akos erasts),
a state which the narrator condemns as the sign of an unstable and
uncontrollable nature (2.13.1). He is said to torment himself by picturing
(anaplattn) Leukippes beauty and imagining (phantazomenos) what
he has never seen. His state of mind is thus a particularly acute case of
imaginative supplementation, an exaggerated depiction of the state of any
addressee of an ekphrasis who is prompted by words to create a mental
image of the subject. Thersandros is similarly portrayed as susceptible
to imaginary beauties. His passion for Leukippe is kindled when his
servant reports her appearance, singing the praises (katatragdountos) of
her beauty, with the result that Thersander is filled with an apparition
(phantasma) as if of beauty (6.4.4). As we have seen, the term phantasma
could be used to distinguish mental images that did not derive from sense
perception from those that did: it is the term used by Augustine to qualify
the image of Alexandria that he built up from his knowledge of Carthage
and by the Stoics to characterize the mental image based on illusion (like
Orestes vision of the Furies). So, here, the choice of the term to designate
a word-induced mental image does seem to be a deliberate reference to
Stoic theories.
184
185
are: Where on earth are they? Show me, by the gods.41 In the context of
the story, Knemons response, and Kalasiris reaction, are at least partly
explained by the fact that Knemon knows the couple, and can thus judge
his imaginings against his own memory image of them, and that Kalasiris
knows that Knemon expects them to arrive at any moment. But Hardie
aptly notes the doubt as to the plenitude of vision that creeps into the
exchange as Kalasiris tells Knemon that he has probably not seen them as
they were on the day he was describing.42
The exchange between Kalasiris and Knemon thus plays with the
conventions of ekphrasis and enargeia, pointing out the limitations of the
power of the word to make present and to place before the eyes. Knemon
is comparable to the phantasy
lovers
of Kleitophon and Leukippe in his real
response to description. But a crucial difference between the episodes lies
in the respective role of the reader. Whereas Achilles Tatios reader does
not hear the evocations of Leukippe that have such a dramatic effect on
their audiences, Heliodoros reader shares every detail of the sumptuous
ekphrasis of events at Delphi with Knemon, the internal audience. At the
moment of the highest imaginative involvement, the reader is brought up
short by a reminder of the limitations of evocation, even for the listener
with direct personal knowledge of the subject. The irony is that this
reminder is issued by the reference, in the exchange between Kalasiris and
Knemon, to the literal sense of placing before the eyes, from which the
verbal evocation falls far short. The passage thus gives the readers cause
for reflection on their own sensuous involvement and its limitations, not
only through the distanced depiction of characters responses, but through
the sharing of those responses.43
Descriptions of Works of Art as Meta-ekphrasis
Ekphraseis of all types of subjects, and not only those that present works of
art, may therefore have a meta-fictional function in the novel, causing the
reader not only to reflect upon the nature of his or her experience of fiction
but also, through the dialectic of engagement and distance set in place
in the episodes analysed above, making him or her experience in various
ways the disjunction between the fictional world and reality. In a similar
41
186
[Nikolaos], in Libanios, Progymnasmata, p. 505. For further discussion, see Ruth Webb,
The model ekphraseis of Nikolaos the Sophist as memory images, in Michael Grnbart
(ed.), Theatron: Rhetorische Kultur in Sptantike un Mittelalter (Berlin, 2007), pp. 46375.
187
188
thus several levels of time involved: the time of the visit to the gallery;
the later moment at which the whole is remembered and the speeches are
repeated; the mythical time represented in the paintings and, occasionally,
the moment at which the artist made his painted representation. The
speaker is no more to be identified with the author, Philostratos, than is
Kalasiris with his creator, Heliodoros. The audience is also doubled, rather
as in thopoiia, or declamation, because the original descriptions are said to
have been addressed to the boys in front of the paintings while the text we
read is presented as a later report of that event for an external audience of
readers or listeners who are not in front of the paintings. The ekphraseis
are thus constantly dual: within the fictional setting of the gallery they
interpret a painting, which is real and visible to the internal audience, part
of their present surroundings, but for the external audience of readers
the words alone create the paintings, the speaker and his audience. The
paintings, as described by the Sophist, are so dazzling that we forget to
question the Sophists own existence, or that of his internal audience, or
to see that both the painting and his interpretation are creations of his
words, as he in turn is a creation of the historical Philostratos.
Rather as our sense of imaginative immersion in the procession at
Delphi as described by Kalasiris in the Aithiopika is abruptly broken by
Knemons literal response (or rather, Kalasiris literal interpretation of
Knemons response to the enargeia of the performance), Philostratos
too invites his reader to distance him or herself from the enthusiastic
submission to illusion expressed by our Sophist-guide. At the moments
of most heightened involvement on the part of the speaker, the reader
is
reminded of his or her own physical distance from the gallery and the
paintings it contains, a distance that is otherwise collapsed by the use of
direct discourse to quote the Sophists lectures. Most
dramatically, in a
passage that has been much commented on, the Sophist invites the boy to
step forward and to catch the dripping blood of the dying Menoikeus in
the fold of his garment (1.4.4).
Here the reader is confronted with his or
her distance from the scene and reminded that the scenes he or she sees
are in imagination.
It is with the image of Narcissus, with its concentration on the themes
of representation and illusion, that the impact is greatest. The whole Eikon
can be read as a meditation on the theme of illusion in the visual arts, as
the Sophist comments on a bee which may be painted or real that is
deceived (exapattheisa) by the painted flower on which it rests. Moving
on to the figure of Narcissus himself, enrapt by his own image, he starts
to address the young man directly, berating him for his absorption in the
image in the pool. By now we are used to this enthusiasm, this desire to
enter into the world of the painting; the Sophist has already invited the
boy to stretch out the fold of his garment to catch the blood of the dying
189
Menoikeus. But the mise en abme set up at the opening of Narcissus alerts
us to the irony of the situation: a man speaking to a painted youth, telling
him he is wasting his time on a mere image.
In a very similar passage in the Hunters (1.28) the Sophist interrupts
himself, observing that he has been deceived by the painting, but here he
simply observes that Narcissus cannot hear him because he is so absorbed
in the pool (and not because he is a fiction). The Sophist may be an
unselfconscious viewer, but Philostratos, who has staged the whole scene
within a scene, is drawing our attention to the seduction of illusion. With
those words, our own involvement in the scene as readers is disrupted if,
that is, we note the irony of a grown man speaking out loud to address a
painted boy and to tell him that his painted reflection cannot hear him. As
the Sophist continues his address to his internal audience with a catalogue
of details of Narcissus posture (and of the characteristics his hair does
not have) we cannot help but be aware of the fictitiousness of the whole
scene.
It is surely responses like that of the Sophist in front of Menoikeus or
Narcissus that the Younger Philostratos has in mind when he tells us in
the proem to his own Eikones that there is no shame in the deception (apat)
inherent in art, and that there is no harm in being in front of things which
do not exist as if they existed and being led by
them
190
191
Conclusion
194
Conclusion
195
movement, the frozen moment and its wider context, are much more
emphatically present. Buildings form another prominent class of subject
matter for ekphrasis that is shared by both the ancient and some, at least,
of the modern definitions. Here, too, the visible details of the building can
be used to point towards the invisible attributes of the building, whether
the actions of the patron which the speaker wishes to associate with the
building or its unseen, spiritual qualities.
The Uses of Ekphrasis
The ancient definition may seem frustratingly vague and elusive, but its
interest lies precisely in this lack of formal precision. The identification of
any passage as an ekphrasis is only a first step in its analysis. Each case
needs to be studied in its context to reveal its particular qualities and its
function, and what is true of one ekphrasis will not necessarily be true of
another. Where the unity is to be found is in the underlying ideas and the
wider conceptions of reading, or the individuals relation to the word and
of the interaction between language, memory and imagination. The study
of ekphrasis and enargeia provides important information about ancient
habits of reading and deeply rooted attitudes towards texts, which are
seen as inviting imaginative and emotional involvement. These ancient
modes of reading can be surprisingly different to our own: in the case of
Thucydides history, ancient readers saw not a dispassionate and objective
account of events but a window onto the violent and turbulent events
of the past. In these rhetorically oriented readings, the text opens up to
the readers imagination: the words on the page dissolve into images as
they impact upon the mind. This does not mean that ekphraseis, or any
other type of ancient text, can only be read according to these ancient
frameworks, nor that modern insights into, say, description cannot be
fruitfully applied to individual examples far from it. But it does mean
that we cannot assume that ancient readers and writers shared our modes
of reading and our ways of categorizing texts. Sources like the humble
Progymnasmata provide precious insights into the practices that shaped
ancient and medieval writing and reading habits.
Appendix A
Translations
198
APPENDIX A
199
already said, as I think that this type of exercise falls into the category of
refutations and confirmations of narratives (digseis).
.
.
, , , , .
, , , .
. , ,
, , , . , , ,
, , . , , ,
.
, ,
,
, .
, .
,
[p. 119] .
,
, .
, , .
,
, ,
,
.
,
, ,
, ,
, , , ,
,
, .
,
,
,
, .
,
,
, [p. 120] ,
200
,
.
,
. .
,
.
Ps.-Hermogenes, on ekphrasis from Progymnasmata, in Opera, ed. Hugo Rabe
(Leipzig: Teubner, 1913), pp. 223
22 Ekphrasis is a descriptive speech, as they say, which is vivid and brings
the subject shown before the eyes.
There are ekphraseis of persons, events, states of affairs (kairoi), places,
times (chronoi) and many other things; of persons, as in Homer: he was
bandy-legged and lame in one leg ;12 of events such as an ekphrasis of
a land battle or sea battle; of states of affairs such as peace, war; of places
such as harbours, seashores, cities; of times such as spring, summer,
festival time.
There may also be mixed ekphraseis, like the night battle in Thucydides;
for night is a time (kairos) while the battle is an event (praxis).
In ekphraseis of events we will deal with what preceded them and
what happened in them and the consequences; [23] for example, if we are
pronouncing an ekphrasis of a war we will first tell what happened before
the war, the enlisting of troops, the expenditure, the peoples fears, then
the military engagements, the slaughter, the deaths, then the trophy, then
the victory songs of the victors, and the tears and the enslavement of the
other side. If we are describing places or times (chronoi) or persons, we
will find some justification (logos) both from the narrative and from the
beautiful or the useful or the unexpected.
The virtues of ekphrasis are above all clarity and vividness (enargeia);
for the expression (hermneia) should almost bring about sight through the
sense of hearing. One should also make the style (phrasis) like the subject
matter (pragma): if the subject is flowery, the language should be the same;
if the subject is harsh the language should be likewise.
One should note that some of the more rigorous authorities (akribesteroi)
did not make ekphrasis into an exercise on the grounds that it is already
included in fable, narration, common place and enkmion; for, they
say, there too we describe places and rivers13 and events and persons.
12
Iliad, 2.217.
An odd subject to single out here. Rabe suggests kairoi or chronoi.
13
APPENDIX A
201
202
Thucydides, 1.46.
Thucydides, 7.425.
16
APPENDIX A
203
204
Demosthenes, 19.65.
APPENDIX A
205
.
,
,
.
, [p. 70] , ,
, , , ,
, ,
,
, .
,
,
,
, ,
,
.
, .
,
[p. 71]
, ,
.
II. Extracts from the Byzantine Commentaries on Aphthonios Sardianos,
Commentarium in Aphthonii Progymnasmata
On the definition (p. 216, l. 8 p. 217, l. 5):
Perigmatikos: Instead of as in a painting (graphikos), surveying
(periodeutikos), giving a detailed account (diexodikos); as if seeming to go
around in the speech and as if showing; just as if someone took a recent
arrival in Athens and guided him around the city, showing him the
gymnasia, the Peiraeus and each of the rest [of the sights]; metaphorically,
therefore, the speech which relates (aphgeomai) everything in order,
relating to both the action and the person and showing [it] in detail is
called perigmatikos.
206
This extremely intriguing sentence is unfortunately unclear and may be corrupt. The
distinction appears to be drawn between direct perception on the one hand and the tupos
kai phantasia on the other, but it is unclear how this distinction is thought to relate to the
definition of ekphrasis.
20
Rabe prints in his text. I have adopted the tentative suggestion made in the
apparatus criticus.
APPENDIX A
207
senses (lian phaneron) and lies before the eyes is vivid; if then the speech
is clear and vivid, it almost transfers its subject from the sense of hearing
into the eyes; for the speech, in contemplating (thern) the things shown,
traces (hupographei) the impression (tupon) of it for (or with) the eyes and
paints the truth for (or with) the imagination (phantasia).21
,
.
208
gives us practice in the final one, the elaborate type. Others place it after
common place;22 however, Aphthonios and the more accurate authorities
among his predecessors place it after thopoiia. For if ekphrasis is to be
placed alongside digma because it is of the narrative type, then thesis
and the introduction of a law should be placed before common place, if,
at any rate, they belong to the argumentative section while common place
belongs to the epilogue. At all events, even if both of these, that is digma
and ekphrasis, contribute to the narrative sections of speeches (digseis),
it is nevertheless the case that since digma contributes to the plainer and
simpler kinds (tropoi) of narration these would be the ones that relate the
events (pragmata) in a condensed form (pachumers) it has been placed
earlier since it is easier. Ekphrasis, by contrast, has been placed much later
[in the sequence] since it is more complex and requires greater mastery
(hexis) in as much as it gives us practice in the more complex kind of
narration, the elaborate one (endiaskeuos).
Hermogenes in his book On Invention deals with narrations and
the kinds of narration and explains how to compose the confirmatory
(enkataskeuos) and the simple (haplous) kind but does not explain the
expansion (platusmos) of the elaborate narration at the same time, but
rather at the end of the third book.23 In just the same way, Aphthonios
places many other exercises after the exercise of digma that prepares
us partly for the simple kind of narration, because the events are told in
condensed form, and partly for the confirmatory kind, because of the use
of both the cause and other elements of narration, before finally coming to
ekphrasis, which belongs to the elaborate type.
. , ,
, , ,
, .
24 ,
o. ,
,
.
, . ,
,
, ,
. ,
Walz prints ovv ov.
Ps.-Hermogenes, On Invention, 2 and 3.15.
24
Walz prints . I have emended this to .
22
23
APPENDIX A
209
.
, .
[510] ,
, ,
,
,
,
,
.
Examples of simple and elaborate (endiaskeuos) narrations: Anonymous, Peri
tn tessarn mern tou teleiou logou, Walz, Rhetores graeci, 3, p. 576, l. 21
p. 578, l. 5
There are three ways to write narratives: simple, elaborate (endiaskeuos),
and confirmatory (enkataskeuos). The simple narrative is the one that just
sets out the facts in a plain manner and obviously without adornment.
The elaborate narrative is the ekphrastic one that recounts everything in
detail and all but brings the actions before the eyes while the confirmatory
is the one that gives the causes for the actions and states the reason for
each thing that occurred. The writer (zgraphos) will use each and every
one of these at the right moment: the simple one when it is the time for
an unaffected (apheleia) and truth-like style; the elaborate in debates and
when amplifying the subjects. You can even combine the confirmatory
with the elaborate type whenever you wish to bring the subject before the
eyes and to amplify it. However, the plain narrative is not mixed with the
others as it is not possible for the same thing to be both plain and complex
(poikilos).
In the case of the preliminary exercise of narration, for the most part
the rhetoricians recommend that it should be simple; however, it is not
unreasonable to introduce more complexity on occasion and expand it to
provide a more challenging exercise in rhetoric. So then, as an example I
will give you a narrative presented in three ways; let this be the story of
the madness of Ajax.
The plain narrative:
Ajax, having been defeated in the contest for the arms of Achilles, was
angry with the victor, Odysseus, and plotted his revenge against the sons
of Atreus who had made the choice. During the night he advanced on
them with hostile intent, his sword at the ready, but Athena confused both
his mind and his sight, and the hero fell upon the flocks and stabbed some
210
as if they were men and drove the others to his tent and, after whipping
them severely, killed them. Finally, having recovered from his madness,
he sentenced himself to death by his own hand.
The elaborate narrative:
Ajax, having been defeated in the contest for the arms of Achilles, carried
a burning rage in his heart against those who had awarded the prize to
the man from Ithaka, the sons of Atreus. He indicated (mnuei) his inner
feelings by his wild appearance, by the ruthless and hot-blooded look in
his eyes as well as by his fast and deep breathing. During the night he set
out against them, his sword in his hand, a sword that was sharp, a sword
that was shining, glinting in the darkness of the night. He moved at one
moment with stealthy control and at the next he moved quickly in his
rage long was the stride of the gigantic hero but Athena diverted both
his mind and his eyes, darkness fell on his inner and his outer vision. The
night stalker fell upon the flocks fold and cut down the dumb animals
as if they were men; one he slashed in two, another he pierced through;
the head of another he separated from the body, into the belly of another
he plunged his sword; here were streams of blood, there spilled guts,
everywhere piles of corpses; here, those that were still breathing tried to
leap away but the fold stopped them, the wolf was inside, the guard dogs
slept soundly, they were soon avenged, the hero, recovering his senses,
fell, becoming the victim of his own sword.25
, ,
,
,
,
,
,
,
[p. 577] ,
,
,
.
25
There follows an example of a confirmatory, enkataskeuos, narration in which reasons
are given for each part of the action.
APPENDIX A
211
,
, ,
, ,
,
.
, ,
, ,
,
, , ,
,
, ,
, ,
, ,
, ,
,
[p. 578] , ,
, ,
, ,
.
Appendix B
Subjects for Ekphrasis
Topoi:
Chronoi:
*Tropoi:
Ps.-Hermogenes:
Prospa:
Pragmata:
Kairoi:
Topoi:
Chronoi:
Aphthonios:
Prospa:
Pragmata:
214
Nikolaos:
Topoi:
Chronoi:
Prospa:
*Pangureis:
Nikolaos:
Doxapatres:
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226
Bibliography
227
228
Bibliography
229
230
Bibliography
231
232
Index
battles
inepideictic 164
as subject of ekphrasis inthe
Progymnasmata 5658, 62, 139
Bemarchios 1256, 130
buildings see ekphrasis
Callistratus see Kallistratos
character, depiction of 15, 22, 43, 68,
823, 92, 121, 123, 130, 132, 153,
176, 182, 184, 203
Cicero 21, 91, 923, 94, 100101,
107110, 123, 148, 153, 179, 187
circumstantia see peristaseis
city, description of 545, 61, 734,
913, 96, 109, 11415, 1212,
124, 128, 142, 145, 1489, 1557,
159, 16063, 170, 174, 179, 205
common place see koinos topos
competence, cultural 110, 1245
confirmation (elementary exercise) 43,
45, 48, 78, 80, 199
Constantius 125, 159, 164 n.100, 182
n.37
crocodiles 9, 61, 180, 181, 197
declamation 4, 10, 13, 15, 1617, 19,
256, 80, 100, 12930, 1313
ekphrasis in74, 78, 85, 139152
and fiction 1545, 1757
relation to Progymnasmata 479
deinsis 76, 99100, 131
deliberative oratory 4, 51, 76, 80, 129,
131, 142, 1445, 203
Demetrios, On Style 75 n.42, 923
Demosthenes 25, 63, 11516
indeclamation 15, 26, 142, 1489,
151, 155, 176
Or. 18.169171: 89, 90
234
Index
Hippolytos 1201, 180
Orestes 97, 113
explicatio 51, 75, 147 n.53, 153 n.67
fiction 104, 120
declamation and 15, 1545, 1757
ekphrasis and 10, 756, 1689,
17885, 1879, 194
see also plasma
Friedlnder, Paul 11, 313
funeral oration see monody
Furies 97, 102, 116, 118, 169, 183
gamlios logos 157; see also wedding
speech
Gautier, Thophile 29, 34
Gorgias 5, 111
grammar, teaching of 423, 85
Hamon, Philippe 74, 1056, 124; see
also description
Heliodoros, Aithiopika 168, 178,
18183, 18485, 188
Hermogenes 4 n.9, 13, 14, 40
On Issues 131, 132, 1545
commentaries on 133, 142, 144,
145, 155
On Types of Style 57, 65, 132, 142,
147
Hermogenes, ps.
On Invention 66, 72, 132
Progymnasmata 44, 46, 50, 51, 56,
578, 62, 64, 65, 66, 75, 767, 79,
200201
Herodes Attikos 15
Herodotos 20, 58, 63, 180, 198
Hippolytos 180; see also Euripides
historiography 1, 32, 42, 63, 73, 90,
101, 103, 129, 140141, 154;
see also Herodotos, Ktesias,
Philistos, Theopompos,
Thucydides, Xenophon
Homer 18, 23, 34, 37, 40, 54, 63, 120,
130, 180, 197, 200, 201; see also
Shield of Achilles
Horace, Ars Poetica 67, 100
235
236
Index
Polemo 136, 156, 177
pragma 61, 63, 64, 678, 72, 75, 79 n.52,
91, 111, 138, 142, 155, 181, 198,
200, 206, 208, 213
presbeutikos logos (Ambassadors
Speech) 160, 162
Progymnasmata
nature of 1719, 412, 456, 489
order of 4950
relation to fullscale speeches
479, 137
inrhetorical curriculum 423, 459,
62
see also Aphthonios, confirmation,
ekphrasis, thopoiia, ps.
Hermogenes, koinos topos,
Libanios, Nikolaos, refutation,
Theon
Prokopios of Caesarea 156, 1745
proof (inoratory) 8990, 137, 141, 152,
163, 164, 165, 175
Quintilian, 34, 10, 14, 267, 46, 48, 78,
87130 passim, 131
Institutio oratoria
1.9: 43
2.4.3: 85
2.4.26: 83
2.4.289: 137 n.22
2.10.8: 176
4.2.34: 103
4.2.635: 103, 168
6.1.30: 90
6.1.3132: 89, 94
6.1.3742: 107
6.2.268: 100, 104
6.2.2930: 95, 102, 104, 121, 168
6.2.33: 97
6.2.35: 100, 104
6.2.36: 104
8.3.62: 26, 98
8.3.63: 92
8.3.645: 212, 24, 107110
8.3.66: 91, 1089, 153
8.3.679: 724, 88, 93, 99, 142,
148
8.3.71: 109
237
9.2.401: 100
11.2: 25 n.36, 110
Quintilian [?]
Major Declamations 150
Minor Declamations 143 n 40
reading 1726, 28, 96, 1823, 195
refutation (elementary exercise) 43,
45, 48, 78, 80, 199
Rhetorica ad Herennium 25 n.36, 74
n.36, 87, 100 n.32, 11011, 120,
148
Sardianos see John Sardianos
Second Sophistic 10, 1417, 30, 33,
36, 177; see also declamation;
epideictic
Seneca, the Elder 75 n.41, 104, 133, 147
n.53
Shield of Achilles 23, 6, 7, 11, 19, 28,
31, 32, 33, 40 n.4, 54, 58, 66, 68,
70
Sminthiac Oration 157
Smith, Susan 1245
Smyrna 162, 171, 174
Sopatros the Rhetor 14, 478, 74, 131,
133, 137, 1419, 153, 154
Sophokles 180
Souda 44, 46
Spitzer, Leo 3335, 37
stasis theory 132; see also declamation;
Hermagoras; Hermogenes;
Sopatros
Statius 30, 32, 81
Statue see ekphrasis of works of art,
Kallistratos; Nikolaos, model
ekphraseis
indeclamation 155
inepideictic 157
storm see ekphrasis
sub oculos subiectio 51, 100
Syrianos 14, 133 n.5, 1445
telika kephalaia (heads of purpose) 144
theatre, as analogy 54, 100, 104, 176,
194
238