Simon Goldhill, WHAT IS EKPHRASIS FOR?
Simon Goldhill, WHAT IS EKPHRASIS FOR?
Simon Goldhill, WHAT IS EKPHRASIS FOR?
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1. A selection of studies of classical works might include Becker 1990, 1995; Barchiesi 1997b; Stanley
1993; Elsner 1991; Hardie 2002b; Laird 1996; Zeitlin 1989, 1994; and Goff 1988. For the most recent collection, see Elsner 2002b. All have further bibliographies.
2. I am referring to the standard and much-cited article of Fowler (1991).
3. See, e.g., Krieger 1992; Heffernan 1993; Mitchell 1994; Boehm and Pfotenhauer 1995; Hollander
1988, 1995; Scott 1994; P. Wagner 1996. For a bibliography of earlier works, see Goldhill and Osborne
1994, p. 305, n. 4.
4. But on Philostratus, do see Blanchard 1986; Bryson 1994; Elsner 2000; and the forthcoming volume
edited by Bowie and Elsner; and on Myrons Cow, see Gutzwiller 1998, 24550 (with further bibliography,
p. 245, n. 39).
5. Goldhill 1994. For a willful and ill-informed misreading of this piece, see Zanker 2004, 8284; it is
a pity that he thinks I use the word discourse to mean conversation.
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of the prime exemplars of ekphrastic writing. It takes its cue from epigrams
inscribed on graves and other monuments, which describe the monument or
the graves contents. But the epigrams become increasingly baroque, ctionalized, and sophisticated. In that earlier article, I looked in particular at poems
that try to decipher graves that have riddling, rebuslike signs on them, as
well as at poems offering particular analyses of famous artworks, and longer
poems showing women in front of art reading the images for usa parody
of the artistic discourse of the period. Certain key issues emerge from this
incredibly rich archive of material. First, what is dramatized in each of these
poems is the moment of looking as a practice of interpreting, of reading
a way of seeing meaning. There is some description, especially where the
artwork is unlikely to be known, but this is always subordinate to the work
of analysis, or to the work of responding. And it is a very particular sort
of analyzing and response. In the Hellenistic period, the viewer aims for
a clever, pointed, intellectualized revelation of the sediments of meaning.
It dramatizes not just an interpretation, but a sophosan educated wit
interpreting.
This leads to the second point. Many of the poems discuss how to look as
they do it. The poems dramatize the viewing subject seeing himself seeing.
This is all too often undervalued in discussions of ekphrasis. We see the
category of professional viewer being developed, contested, and competed
for. The critical gaze, which is the sign of the art historian, nds its institutional origin here.
This critical gaze, thirdly, is committed to a value-laden view of things.
It creates and regulates the viewing subjectboth by a selection of what to
look at and how to lookand by parallel exclusions too. The epigrams endemic concern for the discrete, pointed, witty surprise is part and parcel of
what is known as Hellenistic aesthetics. You must learn to look like this.
Fourth, this critical viewing is also part of a wider theorization of the visual.
As Michael Baxandall has written, seeing is a theory-laden activity. 6 There
is a highly developed discourse of viewing in Hellenistic culture, for which
the notion of phantasiaimpressionis crucial. It offers a philosophical and
physiological explanation of how viewing functions, and is related to psychological processes and the production of speech. This demands that ekphrasis
also be related to the idea of spectacle, displaying in art galleries, museums,
rhetorical performance, and so onthe culture of viewing and the culture of
display are mutually implicative and supportivea sociological and intellectual background all too often forgotten in literary analyses of ekphrasis.
In short, ekphrasis is designed to produce a viewing subject. We read to
become lookers, and poems are written to educate and direct viewing as a
social and intellectual process. When today the modern gallery visitor looks
at a painting, and feels the need to make an intelligent, precise, witty, public
remark to a friend, this visitor ishowever belatedly or unconsciouslyan
heir of the Hellenistic sophos and his epigrams.
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Longinus species that enargeia not only persuades but enslaves the listener.
That is its power. The danger, and I stress the word, is that the listener becomes
a slave, douloutai. This is the constant threat of rhetoricto emasculate,
defeat, humble its audience. A good listener knows to resist, to be critical.
But phantasia gets you where it is hardest to defend. It is most effective,
however, when it is linked to factual exposition. Factual exposition may
seem a surprising focus for these psychological effects, but Longinus expands
on this ability of visualization to overpower the listener in such factual cases
in quite extraordinary terms (15.1011):
ama ga;r t pragmatik ejpiceiren oJ rJhvtwr pefavntastai, dio; ka to;n tou peqein oron
uperbevbhke t lhvmmati. fuv sei dev pw ejn to toiouv toi apasin ae tou krettono akouvomen,
oqen apo; tou apodeiktikou perielkovmeqa e to; kata; fantasan ejkplhktikovn, to; pragmatiko;n ejgkruv ptetai perilampovmenon. ka tou t ouk apeikovtw pavscomen: duen ga;r
suntattomevnwn uf en, ae to; kretton e eJauto; th;n qatevrou duv namin perisp.
Here the orator uses a visualization actually in the moment of making his factual argument,
with the result that his thought has taken him beyond the limits of mere persuasiveness.
11. I have discussed phantasia (with extensive bibliography) in Goldhill 1994 and 2001a.
Now our natural instinct is, in all such cases, to attend to the stronger inuence, so that
we are diverted from the demonstration to the astonishment caused by the visualization, which by its very brilliance conceals the factual aspect. This is a natural reaction:
when two things are joined together, the stronger attracts to itself the force of the weaker.
12. The rhetorical treatises regularly use Thucydides description of a night battle as an example of
powerful ekphrasis. Plutarch is not alone in taking Thucydides as an exemplar.
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blinding the reader with his science, leading the reader away from analysis
into passion and confusion.
Rhetorical theory, then, suggests a stronger and more interesting sense of
what visualization is for. Phantasia relies on enargeia, as does ekphrasis.
It is a rhetorical weapon to get around the censor of the intellect, to cut the
listener off from the facts, to leave him not just as if a viewer at events,
but with the destabilizing emotions of that event. This sense of what rhetoric
makes of the power of enargeia seems to me to have been largely left out
of contemporary discussions of the ekphrastic mode. If rhetoric is to be a
guideand it seems to me it is an integral aspect of the horizon of expectation of ancient intellectualsthen the psychology of visualization and its
violent manipulation of an audience must also be considered.
When Longinus introduces the topic of phantasia, he writes, I use this
word phantasia for what some people call eidolopoiein, image production
(15.1)the very word Plutarch uses for the shared aim of poets and painters.
Longinus continues (15.1):
kaletai me;n ga;r koin fantasa pan to; oJpwsoun ejnnovhma gennhtiko;n lovgou paristavmenon: hdh d ejp touv twn kekravthke tounoma otan a levgei up ejnqousiasmou ka
pavqou blevpein dok ka up oyin tiq to akouv ousin.
The term phantasia is used generally for anything that in any way suggests a thought
productive of speech; but the word has also come into fashion for the situation in which
enthusiasm and emotion make the speaker see what he is saying and bring it visually
before his audience.
The language of sight here is familiar, and draws on the standard denitions
with which I began. Indeed, what Longinus calls the generally held denition is in fact a standard piece of Stoic philosophy. Phantasia is a central
category of Stoic psychology and optics, and the phrase a thought productive
of speech is straight out of the textbook. 13 Stoicism is in many ways the
lingua franca of the Roman Empirea pervasive intellectual discourse that
in weak form links the elite of the Roman governing class. But a further intellectual self-positioning is in evidence here, which can be seen in the marks
of debate and divisiveness around the critical vocabulary. Some people
like Plutarchblend eidolopoiein, image making, with phantasia and
enargeia. But in contemporary culture, he claims, a less philosophically
connected and more rhetorical sense of the term has prevailed. Here we see
a self-conscious awareness of shifting and different uses of rhetorical language of ekphrasis. The translation in fashion, or fashionable, which I
have taken from Russell and Winterbottom 1989, is spot on, and may even
have a slightly dismissive tone.
What is more, Longinus tries to distinguish between prose and verse (15.2):
wJ d eterovn ti hJ rJhtorikh; fantasa bouv letai ka eteron hJ para; poihta ouk an lavqoi
se, oud oti th me;n ejn poihvsei tevlo ejstn ekplhxi, th d ejn lovgoi ejnavrgeia, amfovterai
d omw tov te <paqhtiko;n> ejpizhtou si ka to; sugkekinhmevnon.
13. See in particular Long 1971a; Sandbach 1971; Watson 1988; Frede 1983; Imbert 1980; and for the
best historical overview, Rispoli 1985.
It will not escape you that rhetorical visualization has a different intention from that of
the poets: in poetry the aim is astonishment, in oratory it is vividness. Both, however,
seek emotion and excitement.
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and is always a site of social difference and exclusion, as well as empowerment and comprehension. Theory not only provokes a complex negotiation
in and by practice, but also is part of practice. In the regime of the visual,
theory performs too.
My second area of theoretical concern is gender. The simple question here
is, To what degree is the viewing subject gendered within the ekphrastic
tradition? This may be a simple question to ask, but its ramicationsand
its answersare extremely complex, and the political and intellectual implications of such a discussion extend far beyond the Hellenistic moment
with which I am primarily concerned.
In recent years, there has been some extremely important and insightful
work on the gendering both of the voice and of the gaze; classical scholars
have learned a great deal from other elds and have themselves made signicant contributions to what is one of the most intense of contemporary
debates. 14 In classics, the question of a female voice usually starts with
Sappho, but different genres and registers of linguistic usage have also been
fascinatingly explored. Similarly Sappho has been central to discussions of
the female gaze, but both the texts of the Classical city and, in particular,
later Greek and Roman writings have been intently analyzed with regard
to the viewing subject. 15 Feminist scholarship has been to the fore here,
and much good work on the culture of viewing was initially stimulated by
critiques of the male gaze in art history and cultural studies. 16
The nineteenth century has provided a particularly stimulating test case for
the gendering of the viewing subject. The range and quality of the evidence
for this period is especially rich, and has been particularly well mined for
England and France. It is clear enough that women of different backgrounds
did look at art, and that women of varying status wrote about art in various
public and private media. There can be no doubt that institutionally the
practice of viewing was gendered: men could look at the Secret Museum of
Pompeii, for example, but women (and children) were not allowed to visit
lest they be corrupted by such sights. 17 Similarly, there was a long-running
argument about the presence of women at life classes as artists, and about
the morality of life classes per se, and the subsequent display of images of
nude women. 18 The neur was a man. 19 There is also an extensive psychological and physiological literature on the act of seeing, set against the background of the new technologies of photography and x-rays. 20 It is possible,
14. A huge bibliography could be given here. In classics, see especially McLure 1999; Lardinois and
McLure 2001; Rabinowitz and Richlin 1993; Holst-Warhaft 1992; Stehle 1997; Foley 2001; Snyder 1997,
each with further bibliography.
15. Apart from the works cited in n. 14, see, e.g., Williamson 1995; Stehle 1981; Winkler 1981; Greene
1996; Elsner 1995; Goldhill 1998; Morales 2004; Bartsch 2006; Elsner 2007.
16. See, e.g., Rose 1986; Kaplan 1983a, 1983b; Kappeler 1986; Berger 1972; Silverman 1988; Gallagher
1998; Ghose 1998; Gibson and Gibson 1993; Jay 1993; Nixon 1996; Penley 1988; Solomon-Godeau 1997.
17. Kendrick 1996.
18. See Smith 1996, esp. chap. 6, and Smith 1999.
19. Benjamin 1973, with Buck-Morss 1989, for exhaustive intellectual background. Pollock (1988)
makes the point that the neur is entirely the experiences of men, and is not really refuted by Wilson,
who argues (1992, 101) that In the department store, a woman, too, could become a neur.
20. See, e.g., Crary 1990; Clark 1984; Flint 2000; Nochlin 1989; Tagg 1988.
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does the existence of female ekphrastic poets necessarily indicate that there
is a viewing subject that is marked as female over and against a subject
privileged as male? The lines of the argument inevitably rehearse a familiar
debate in the politics of gender. Can we nd here a positive denition of the
female viewing subject, where women write as women? Or are ekphrastic
poets, male and female, most strongly linked by shared class, education,
and cultural and intellectual expectations? In the circle of Hellenistic Greek
society, to what degree is it possible to speak from elsewhere, to what degree
does anyone try to speak about viewing from a subject position that is not
within the cultured poses of the educated Hellenistic elite?
In an earlier piece, I looked at Herodas 4 and Theocritus 15, two poems
in which women are represented (by male poets) looking at art. In both,
the women use the language of art criticism. 25 In Herodas, I argued that the
women were mocked by the authors satire: the women in the temple were
like his women in a dildo shop. 26 Theocritus is a more complex drama, where
it is much harder to evaluate the language of criticism, and where, typically
for Theocritus, the reader nds him- or herself implicated in the represented
world of pretension and scrutiny. But in both poems the women as viewers
were seen, I argued, as Aristotle denes a womanas a deformed man. The
womens voices were marked as female only insofar as they were mocked
from the privileged viewpoint of the supposed audience. The representation of
the female voice and female gaze was a source of comedy and ironic distance,
as so often in male literature.
This view of Theocritus has recently been challenged by Marilyn Skinner,
who builds her case on the work of Kathryn Gutzwiller, Ellen Greene, and
Sylvia Barnardand her argument opens a fascinating window into the general questions I have been sketching. 27 She argues that women were able
to articulate gender-specic responses to the changing political and sexual
climate 28 of the mid-fourth to third centuries b.c.e. by writing epigrams, and
that this constitutes a specic female voice, which is testimony to a specic
female gaze. Theocritus, in Skinners view, recognizes this female tradition,
and wants to privilege the female voice as a model for sophisticated viewers.
For her, Theocritus uses women not ironically but positively as models for
viewing and thereby afrms the feminine ekphrastic tradition. 29 If Skinner
were right and there is a specically feminine ekphrastic tradition, it would
be a very important conclusion not just for our understanding of Hellenistic
culture, and for the history of ekphrasis, but also and most importantly for
the positive denition of a female viewing subject.
25. Goldhill 1994.
26. It is extraordinary that Zanker (2004, 104) thinks that this poem simply demonstrates Hellenistic
viewers responses to such statuary in general.
27. Skinner 2001; Gutzwiller 1997, 1998; Greene 2000; Barnard 1991; see also Skinner 1987, 1991;
Gutzwiller 2002.
28. Skinner 2001, 202.
29. Skinner 2001, 216. Skinner does not distinguish explicitly between feminine and female. I take
feminine here to mean not merely poetry written by women but poetry marked by values and/or qualities
associated with the female, and recognized as different from masculine values. I shall use female
throughout to indicate both the gender of the poets in question and the relevant values/attributes of their
poetry.
11
How does Skinner make this case? She starts with Erinna, whose single
ekphrastic epigram (Anth. Pal. 6.352.14) she takes to be inaugural of a
female tradition:
Ex atalan ceirn tavde gravmmata: l ste Promaqeu ,
enti ka anqrwpoi tn oJmalo sofan:
tauv tan goun ejtuvmw ta;n parqevnon osti egrayen,
a kauda;n potevqhk, h k gaqarc ola.
This picture is the work of sensitive hands. My good Prometheus,
there are even human beings equal to you in skill.
At least, if whoever painted this maiden so truly
had just added a voice, you would be Agatharchis entirely.
Skinner claims that this is the earliest extant ekphrastic epigram. 30 She nds
the female viewing subject in the fact that the poets rsthand testimony
is crucial to the appraisal of the artistic value of the portrait: As a female
viewer . . . she stands in a privileged position with respect to the reader of
the epigram, for she alone can assure him of the pictures delity to life. 31
This, she argues, is the positing of a female viewing subject. But it is hard
here to see any specic linguistic markers of a female viewing subject. Each
and every aspect of this poems language, structure, and argument is easily
paralleled in ekphrastic writing produced by men: the praise of skillful handiwork, the address to Prometheus, the emphasis on sophia, the language of
accuracy (etumos), the conceit of adding a voice to a picture, and, above all,
the concern with verisimilitude/lifelikeness (assur[ing the reader] of the
pictures delity to life). 32 So is she a female viewer merely because she
is a woman who views (although she writes like a man)? Or can she never
write like a man because she is a womanthat is, is the language of authoritative viewing necessarily different if it comes from the mouth of a woman?
(Answering these questions is not just an issue of Hellenistic poetics, but
also a matter of the modern politics of gender.) In short, what would it take
to mark this poem as the performance of a specically female viewing
subject?
Skinner offers clearer answers to these questions with her treatment of
Anyte, one of the most interesting gures of Hellenistic culture. Anyte lived
at the beginning of the third century b.c.e. in Tegea in Arcadia. We have
about twenty epigrams transmitted under her name, and a few others where
authorship is dubious. Most of the epigrams we have are transmitted in the
Greek Anthology, and, as far as we can tell, she was the rst person to write
epigrammatic epitaphs for pets (a minor genre, of which we have also some
30. Dating of Erinna depends on the Suda, and the transmission of epigrams is dependent on anthologization in the main, so it is always hard to prove the protos heuretes. But there is no reason to doubt that
this is a very early example of ekphrastic epigram.
31. Skinner 2001, 209.
32. For this language, etumos in particular in art criticism, see Pollitt 1974; for the pervasiveness of the
tropes of realism, see Zanker 1987 (nice joke on this topos at Anth. Pal. 9.215); for Prometheus reference,
cf. Anth. Pal. 9.724; for the soft hands, cf. Anth. Pal. 9.544; the proclamations of techne and sophia are
multiform, see Goldhill 1994.
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later examples). She also wrote some epigrams that praise pastoral temple
groves and similar scenes, which leads Skinner to hail her as the acknowledged inventor of the pastoral epigram. 33 Gutzwiller indeed celebrates Anyte
as the rst epigrammatist to present a distinct literary persona, 34 and the
rst to write a book of epigrams as such. 35 In the hunt for a female viewing
subject, Anyte is the linchpin between Sappho and gures like Nossisa
female line of female poets with a specic female voice.
Skinner offers several paths towards a positive denition of Anyte as a
specically female viewing subject. Anytes most important contribution
to the construction of the female viewer is her introspective approach to
ekphrases of paintings and statues. 36 As Gutzwiller writes, Anyte presents
for us, not an accurate description of an artwork, but an imaginative interpretation that arises from her own unique perspective on the represented gure. 37
Nossis is no less innovative, adds Skinner, because her poems express
the speakers reaction to the sight of painted portraits and other temple
offerings made by women. 38 This argument again shows how difcult it is
to develop a specic positive denition of what makes up the female voice/
the female viewing subject. For the vast majority of ekphrastic epigrams are
written by men, and the vast majority of ekphrastic epigrams offer an
imaginative interpretation based on a unique perspective, just as the vast
majority of ekphrastic epigrams dramatizing an encounter with a picture
express the speakers reaction, and there are innumerable epigrams on
female dedications by male poets ( just as female poets write about spears,
hunting animals, and other objects that would routinely be associated with
the male sphere). The attempt to dene the specically female viewing subject
again runs up against the fact that the language, form, subject matter, and
structure of the epigrams are common to male and female writers.
Skinner offers three more attempts to nd a positive denition of the specically female viewer in Anytes work, but each of these arguments struggles
unconvincingly in its search. First, she declares that there is in Anyte a female
aesthetic: the qualities for which particular votive offerings are admired
chiey the neness of the workmanshipdene a specically female aesthetic
that may be traced back, again, to Erinna. 39 If praise for the neness of
workmanship is specically female, then almost all ekphrastic writers
back to Homer and forward to the Christian epigrammatists would share in
this aesthetic. Fineness of workmanship simply cannot be treated as a
specically female criterion. For the general point here, the contrast
with the Victorian material is perhaps useful. In Victorian writing a female
aesthetic is recognized explicitly: there are long discussions, for example,
of the lady novelist, of a womans particular sense of sympathy and emotion
33. Skinner 2001, 209; see Gutzwiller 1998, 5474, for the most detailed discussion of Anyte.
34. Gutzwiller 1998, 55.
35. These grandest claims are criticized by Hunter (1998).
36. Skinner 2001, 209; see also Skinner 1989.
37. Gutzwiller 1998, 68.
38. Skinner 2001, 209.
39. Skinner 2001, 211.
13
as a reader and writer, along with repeated examples of the denigration of the
female as falling short of the male. 40 But there is no such discussion in the
ancient material, nor even hints of a discussion now lost to us. In the face
of such silence, it will always be extremely difcult to dene a specically
female aestheticand dangerous to read back from the nineteenth century
to the ancient world. 41
Second, Skinner claims that the subject matters chosen by Anyte (and
Nossis) are specically female: in particular, poems on pets mark a womans
voice because of their sympathetic approach to dogs and other animals. 42
There are many ways that women and animals are linked in the Greek cultural imagination, but the locus classicus for someone letting slip a tear over
the death of a beloved animal is Odysseus in the Odyssey with his dog Argus.
Anytes poem on the dead dog is not included in the Hellenistic anthologies
but is quoted by Pollux (5.48), who precedes it with a quatrain by Simonides
that also mentions the dogs grave. It is in a section on famous dogs,
which gives no indication that remembering dogs (or other pets) with
emotion is a female preserve. What is more, her poem on the little girl Myro
burying her pet locust and cicada is attributed to Anyte or Leonidas by
the manuscripts and is imitated by Marcus Argentarius (Anth. Pal. 7.364).
It would be hard to claim that there is any ancient recognition of anything
specically female in these poems.
Third, Skinner imagines that these poems were performed in what she
calls a community of women, a female voice speaking . . . to an audience
of female listeners. 43 We should, that is, read this poetry as womens talk
as opposed to mens talk, women around the loom rather than men at the
symposium. There is, however, no evidence offered for such a special female
community for new poetry 44 (although there is fascinating evidence in the
Hellenistic period for female poets performing in the most public of all
genres, epic), 45 and since most of Anytes epigrams are in public genres 46
epitaphs and the likeit is extremely hard to see them as being produced for
any particular group. Indeed, such a hypothesis would require us to ignore
the evidence we do havethe extensive collection of poems and other
40. See Helsinger, Sheets, and Veeder 1983, vol. 3, esp. pp. 378. Showalter 1977 remains basic here.
41. The most famous example of anachronistic searches for a female aesthetic is Samuel Butlers argument
that the Odyssey must have been written by a woman because of its interest in perfume and jewelry.
42. Barnard (1991) puts this most navely; Gutzwiller (1998) more cautiously.
43. Skinner 2001, 210; of Nossis she speaks even more strongly (1991, 21): writing directed exclusively
towards a relatively small, self-contained female communitydespite the poems being in the form of
public dedications.
44. Skinner suggests (2001, 211) that the rst-person plural in Nossis 4 indicates a female community.
But if it is not a generalizing plural, it indicates a group of women visiting a shrine, a choros or theoria,
and indicates nothing of the necessary audience: cf Alcman, where the female chorus refer to themselves as
we, but where there is no suggestion that the audience is solely female. Men do write in the rst-person
plural in the persona of a woman (Anth. Pal. 9.418), and more regularly in rst-person singular (Anth. Pal.
7.493, 6.74, 9.254, 9.260); even, with pleasing irony, referring to what may not be talked of by men
(Anth. Pal. 6.210).
45. I am thinking of Aristodama (IG 9.2.62, 9.12.740), who was awarded citizenship rights for her performances of epic poetry.
46. See Stehle 2001.
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15
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So, second, what do they do? They all respond to the work by offering
tropes of verisimilitude. This cow looks so real that . . . is the starting point
for nearly all of them. So Demetrius of Bithynia (Anth. Pal. 9.730), in the
voice of the cow, writes: If a calf sees me, it will low; a bull will mount me,
and the herdsman will drive me to the herd. Or Anth. Pal. 9.720 by Antipater
of Sidon: If Myron had not xed my feet to this stone, I would have gone
to pasture with the other cows. But the twists on this are multiform. In particular, the ekphrastic poets love to play with the very language of art history
to create specic intellectual games on the theme of verisimilitude. So Evenus
(Anth. Pal. 9.717, 718) offers two contrasting poems:
H to; devra cavlkeion olon boi td ejpkeitai
ektoqen, h yuch;n endon oJ calko; ecei.
Either a complete bronze hide lies on this cow
On the outside, or the bronze has a soul in it.
Auto; ejre tavca touto Muv rwn: ouk eplasa tauv tan
ta;n davmalin, tauv ta d ekovn aneplasavmhn.
Perhaps Myron himself will say this: I did not fashion
This heifer, but I fashioned the image of her.
This is a neat twist on the falseness of art. Pseudomai is the technical term
for arts deceptiveness and often associated negatively with the ctive quality
of art, for which plasso is the proper termto fashion or mold, as in
Anth. Pal. 9.718 also. 53 Here the vertiginous conceit of the poet is that the
cow really is real, and therefore she accuses the artist of lying and not
fashioningor so the lying poet fashions.
Anth. Pal. 9.798, by Julian the Prefect, also plays with the vocabulary of
art history:
17
Myron should bear up. Art (techne) has defeated him. The work is lifeless. Julian wittily reverses the expectations of the narrative of realism. As
Art comes from Nature, Art cannot invent Nature. This is a more philosophically loaded response than the others I have considered so far. It playfully
manipulates the opposition of phusis and techne (as does Daphnis and Chloe),
but still comforts Myron for his failure to produce a breathing sculpture.
These epigrams do not merely play with the notion of lifelikeness, but
do so through and with the technical language of art history to create a specically intellectualized and sophisticated response, and, crucially, this
response is not to art but to the tropes of verisimilitude. It is far from clear
that any one of these poets from around the world had to have seen the
sculpture in Athens. But they all have read each others ekphrastic poetry
and some art history.
The third point is that each poem is constructed as a specic type of scene
or exchange. Each dramatizes an inherent you might have thought, or you
might say, only to trump it with a more pointed, cleverer retort. So Antipater in Anth. Pal. 9.722 tells the cowherd not to whistle at the sculpture:
Ta;n davmalin, bouforbev, parevrceo mhd apavneuqe
sursd: mast povrtin upekdevcetai.
Pass by the heifer, cowherd, and do not whistle to her
from afar. She is expecting the calf to suckle.
The presupposition is the cowherd might be about to. . . . But Antipater then
adds the surprising reason: her calf is going to suckleas if a baby cow, the
sculpture, and maybe even the poet himself are fooled by the realism. The
rst suggestion of a misplaced realismthe country cowherd shouldnt
whistle at a sculptureturns out to be a foil for a more baroque hyperrealism where even the sculpture itself shares in the illusion.
The scene can be the poets own reactionas in Anth. Pal. 9.724 by
Antipater:
davmali, dokevw, mukhvsetai: h rJ oJ Promhqeu;
ouc movno, plavttei empnoa ka suv , Muv rwn.
I think the heifer will moo. Truly, Prometheus is not the only one
To fashion living things, but you too, Myron.
The familiar appeal to realism is immediately framed by a mythological, intellectual point. Myron is like Prometheus, artistic creativity incarnate.
At very least, each poem imagines some sort of exchange: the cow
addresses the reader; the poet addresses a herdsman; the poet addresses an
interlocutor. We are here in the world of the pepaideumenos, the cultivated
intellectual about town with his pals. Each epigram performs what Lucian,
18
Simon Goldhill
19
Finally, we must consider how these epigrams may relate to the rhetorical
theory with which I began. The agonistic and normative force of the epigrams is perhaps one place where we can see these little poems touching on
the rhetorical theorists claims that visualization is a means of violent distraction of the audience away from facts or proof and towards emotion.
Such epigrams are not, of course, the grand emotional displays of Thucydides
or the masters of the courtroom. But wonder and astonishment are repeatedly the basis of response here too, and they are certainly persuasive, and
within their brief scope epigrams do try to summon feelings in the reader of
awe, or fear or surprise or erotic desire (as Gutzwiller has discussed briey
but pertinently). 55 They want you to see things in a particular way and feel
things in a particular way. But even if we do recognize thus an echo of that
theory in these works, the different level of instantiation is also striking and
emphatic. Ekphrastic epigrams are a privileged mode of ekphrasis in this
period, but they do not t comfortably into the grander rhetorical theories
of visualization. There is a gap between the theory of the rhetorical handbooks and the practice of these epigrammatists. The poems echo with the
language of rhetorical training and art history but do not simply conform to
the rules promoted by either discipline. The development of a regime of the
visual works in this gap between theory and practice. The viewing subject
of Hellenistic culture is produced in the interrelations between the grand
set pieces of history and oratory, the deliberately small-scale epigrams, the
studied theory that gives an intellectual frame for such worksall set in
the social world of display and ceremonial. The interconnections here,
which I have so summarily outlined, must be built into any account of how
ekphrasis functions in Hellenistic culture.
The reading and production of ekphrastic epigram is part of a system that
functions to produce a cultivated and cultured citizen of Empire, who knows
how to perform in the world of culture and who knows thus how to play the
game of competitive self-scrutiny as a performer in culture. And that is what
I think ekphrasis is for. 56
Kings College, Cambridge
55. Gutzwiller 2002, 94104.
56. This article was rst developed for the Passmore Edwards conference on ekphrasis in Oxford (2003).
Thanks to Ja Elsner for the invitation and subsequent editorial advice, to Richard Hunter for comments,
and also to Helen Morales for extended discussion.