1.

The Contexts of Ekphrasis

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
Copyright © 2009. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

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.


‘L’ancienne rhétorique: aide-mémoire’, Communications, 16 (1970):�
 �������������������������������������������������������
Roland Barthes, ���������������������������������������
183: ‘���������������������������������������������������������������������������������
Le discours étant sans but persuasif mais purement ostentatoire, se déstructure,
s’atomise en une suite lâche de morceaux brillants, juxtaposés selon un modèle rhapsodique.
Le principal de ces morceaux (il bénéficiait d’une très grosse cote) était la descriptio ou
ekphrasis. L’ekphrasis est un fragment anthologique, transférable d’un discours à 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 rhapsode’s 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. 76–7.
Webb, Ruth. Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion in Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Practice, Taylor & Francis
Group, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, [Link]
Created from universidadcomplutense-ebooks on 2024-03-12 [Link].

13
 14 Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion

The Context of Ancient Ekphrasis

The Progymnasmata which offer the definitions of ekphrasis as ‘a speech

that brings the subject matter vividly before the eyes’ belong to the first
centuries CE. The version by Ailios Theon is usually accepted as the
earliest and dated to the first century, while those by a certain Nikolaos are
dated to the fifth century. Between lie the third-century version wrongly
attributed in antiquity to the famous rhetorician Hermogenes of Tarsos and
those of Aphthonios from the fourth century. To the information offered
by the Progymnasmata can be added Quintilian’s discussion of enargeia and
the advice on the use of ekphrasis in the context of larger speeches to be
found in the more advanced rhetorical treatises by Hermogenes (second
century), Menander Rhetor (later third century), Sopatros Rhetor (fourth
century) and Syrianos (fifth century). All these authors are witnesses to
the rich rhetorical culture that flourished in the Greek-speaking areas of
the Roman Empire and survived in the Byzantine Middle Ages (to a far
greater extent than in the medieval West). Throughout this period the
study of rhetoric dominated the education of the elite and mastery both of
the Attic dialect and of rhetorical forms of exposition was a prerequisite
for many careers, even for acceptance as a male member of the elite, and a
central element in certain conceptions of Greekness.
For more humble families who could nevertheless afford to educate
their sons, a training in rhetoric offered a chance for the talented to improve
their social position. This is the picture drawn by the ‘autobiography’ of
the second-century Syrian Lucian, who depicts his young self torn between
Copyright © 2009. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

his own desire to study rhetoric (paideia) and his family’s demands that he
earn a living as a sculptor. Paideia personified offers fame, fortune and
travel to the young Lucian in contrast to a life of toil in the workshop.
The type of fame and fortune to which Lucian refers is exemplified in
Philostratos’ Lives of the Sophists, a collective portrait of the most famous
Greek exponents of the art of rhetoric in the second and early third centuries
(among whom Lucian is not counted). The accounts of charismatic star
teachers and speakers described by Philostratos, who coined the term
‘Second Sophistic’ to describe the phenomenon, give a vivid impression


See, for example, Theon, Progymnasmata, 118, l. 7: ἔκφρασίς ἔστι λόγoς περιηγηματικὸς
 �������������������������
ἐvαργῶς ὕπ’ ὄψιv ἄγωv τὸ δηλoύμεvov.

‘Theon and the history of the Progymnasmata’, GRBS, 43 (2002/3):
 ���������������������������������������������
Malcolm Heath, ������������������������������
129–60 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.

Lucian, The Dream or His Life, 1–13.
 ��������
Webb, Ruth. Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion in Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Practice, Taylor & Francis
Group, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, [Link]
Created from universidadcomplutense-ebooks on 2024-03-12 [Link].
 The contexts of ekphrasis 15

of the glamour and popularity of rhetorical display at the period: speakers

drew large audiences who adulated them but who could also be skilled
listeners able to criticize the performances they listened to.
Philostratos’ Sophists performed declamations (meletai), fictional
speeches that also formed part of the rhetorical training delivered
in schools. These meletai were speeches on imaginary cases in which
the speaker took on the persona of a character in a situation specially
formulated to pose a particular rhetorical problem. Many of the cases
were set in the classical Greek past (none post-date the death of Alexander
in 323 BCE) and involved characters such as Perikles or Demosthenes in
situations more or less loosely based on history. Others were imaginary but
involved a stock cast of characters drawn from the world of the classical
polis: the young hero, the rich man, the general, the tyrant, the orator.
Declamation demanded a certain dramatic talent from its exponents who
had to speak in persona (Philostratos mentions Polemo’s habit of leaping
up from his chair at the climax of his argument and of stamping on the
ground, while Herodes Attikos is said at one point to have had tears in
his eyes as he declaimed on a particularly emotive subject). But, above
all, it required precise skills of analysis and argumentation and a mastery
of presentation and style (all in irreproachable atticizing Greek). It was
the structures provided by this training (rather than the lack of them as
Barthes claims) that allowed the best declaimers to improvise lengthy and
complex speeches.
The other principle public activity of Philostratos’ sophists was
epideictic oratory: occasional speeches marking significant moments in
Copyright © 2009. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

citizens’ lives or in the life of the city. By the Roman period, the range
of occasions for such speeches was vast: they marked the arrivals and
departures of dignitaries or even pupils within a school, invitations to
governors, weddings, deaths and funerals and festivals. Nor was there
a complete absence of occasions for more obviously practical uses of
rhetoric: Philostratos mentions several cases where these rhetorical
performers and teachers had to use their art in their own defence in court,
and city councils – boulai – still provided a forum for debate among the
wealthy elite. In the fourth century, when power was concentrated more
directly in the person of the emperor, Libanios used his rhetorical skills
to try to persuade Theodosios of various changes that should be made in


Philostratos, Lives of the Sophists, 537 and 574.
 ��������������

See Laurent Pernot, La Rhétorique de l’éloge dans le monde gréco-romain (2 vols, Paris��������
 �������������������
��������������� , 1993)
and La Rhétorique dans l’Antiquité (Paris, 2000), pp. 104–7 (on the survival of political rhetoric
after the battle of Chaeronea); John Ma, ‘Public speech and community in the Euboicus’, in
������������������������������������
Simon Swain (ed.), Dio Chrysostom: Politics, Letters, and Philosophy (Oxford, 2002)�.
Webb, Ruth. Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion in Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Practice, Taylor & Francis
Group, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, [Link]
Created from universidadcomplutense-ebooks on 2024-03-12 [Link].
 16 Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion

the administration of Antioch. Just as importantly, Malcolm Heath has

shown how the skills taught in the rhetorical schools could be put to use
in actual court cases.
The case of Augustine in fourth-century North Africa illustrates the
continued importance of a rhetorical education: though not wealthy,
Augustine’s family were determined to allow him to develop his talent
by sending him to Madauros and then to Carthage in the hope that
his studies would lead to a distinguished career as an advocate. His
trajectory is very similar to that depicted in Lucian’s Dream and illustrates
the uses to which a rhetorical training could be put in an increasingly
Christian context. Augustine was certainly not alone. In the Greek East
the fourth century saw the continuing importance of rhetorical training as
offered by men like Libanios and his rival teachers, many of whose pupils
were Christians. The talent of these Greek Christian rhetors of the fourth
century – Gregory of Nyssa, his brother Basil of Caesarea and Basil’s friend
Gregory Nazianzen, who studied rhetoric with him at Athens – has led to
them being identified as part of a ‘Third Sophistic’, a title that emphasizes
the continued value and relevance of rhetoric beyond the third century.10
Recent studies of the Second Sophistic have rightly emphasized the
social, political and cultural functions of rhetorical performance as���������
a means
of communicating power and negotiating identity.11 The predominance of
classical themes made declamation a means of asserting and exploring
Greek identity.12 So, while orators may no longer have been at the
forefront of politics, as in classical Athens or Republican Rome, rhetorical
performance provided an important forum for the Greek citizens of the
Copyright © 2009. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

Empire to assert their identity, to achieve social status among their peers


 ������������������������������������������������������������������������������
For one example, see Bernard Schouler, ‘Un enseignant face aux prisons de son
temps’, Pallas, 72 (2006): 279–96.

 ������������������������������������������������������������������������������
Malcolm ����������������������������������������������������������������������
Heath, ‘Practical advocacy in Roman Egypt’, in Michael J. Edwards and
Christopher Reid (eds), Oratory in Action (Manchester, 2004), pp. 62–82.

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
Troisième Sophistique: hommages à Jacques Schamp (Brussels, 2006).
11
 See, for example, Maud Gleason, Making Men: Sophists and Self-presentation in Ancient
Rome (Princeton, 1995)������������������
��������� Bildung und Macht: Zur sozialen und politischen
; Thomas Schmitz,
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. 116–209
and Paolo Desideri, ‘Filostrato: la comtemporaneità del passato greco’, in Fernando Gascó
and Emma Falque (eds), Pasado renacido: Uso y abuso de la tradición clásica (Seville, 1992), pp.
55–70.
Webb, Ruth. Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion in Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Practice, Taylor & Francis
Group, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, [Link]
Created from universidadcomplutense-ebooks on 2024-03-12 [Link].
 The contexts of ekphrasis 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
Copyright © 2009. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

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
 ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������
See on this point Laurent
��������������������������������������������������������������������
Pernot, ‘La rhétorique��������������������������������������
������������������������������������������������
de l’empire ou comment la �����������
rhétorique�
grecque a inventé l’empire romain’, Rhetorica, 16 (1998): 131–48.
14
 Malcolm Heath, Menander: A Rhetor in Context (Oxford, 2004), esp. pp. 277–331.
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
�������������������
Lee Too (ed.),
Education in Greek and Roman Antiquity (Leiden�����������������������������
Raffaella Cribiore, The School of
, 2001). ��������������������
Libanius in Late Antique Antioch (Princeton and Oxford, 2007), p. 146, suggests that for many
students the Progymnasmata would have represented the bulk of the rhetorical training they
received.
Webb, Ruth. Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion in Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Practice, Taylor & Francis
Group, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, [Link]
Created from universidadcomplutense-ebooks on 2024-03-12 [Link].
 18 Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion

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’ (hup’opsin) 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
Copyright © 2009. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

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, L’Empereur Julien et la culture de son temps (Paris,
 �������������������������������������
1992), pp. 523–33.
17
 ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������
See, for example, Lucian’s self-defence against an accusation that he misused an
Attic term in The Mistaken Critic (Pseudologista). See also Simon Swain, Hellenism and Empire:
Language, Classicism and Power in the Greek World, AD 50–250 (Oxford, 1996), pp. ������
43–64.
18
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,
Webb, Ruth. Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion in Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Practice, Taylor & Francis
Group, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, [Link]
Created from universidadcomplutense-ebooks on 2024-03-12 [Link].
 The contexts of ekphrasis 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.
Copyright © 2009. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

Seeing Words

Poets and prose writers, orators and historians were all credited with the
ability to ‘place a subject before the audience’s 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

�������������������������������������������������������������������
and revisions of Homer in the Second Sophistic’, in Simon
Goldhill, ed., Being Greek under Rome: Cultural Identity, the Second Sophistic and the Development
of Empire (Cambridge, 2001)��������������
, ������������
pp. 195–266.
19
 �������������������������������������������������������������������������������������
On the manipulation of the past in the declamations, see Thomas
����������������������������
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,
��������������������������������������
mimesis and the performance
of the Greek past in the Second Sophistic’, in David Konstan and Suzanne Saïd (eds), Greeks
on Greekness: Viewing the Greek Past under the Roman Empire (Cambridge, 2006)�����������������
, pp. 27–46. The
most famous ancient statement of this freedom is in Plutarch’s Life of Solon, 27.1.
Webb, Ruth. Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion in Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Practice, Taylor & Francis
Group, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, [Link]
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 20 Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion

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’ (hup’opsin) 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.

ὁ γοῦν Θουκυδίδης ἀεὶ τῷ λόγῳ πρὸς ταύτην ἁµιλλᾶται τὴν ἐνάργειαν, οἷον
θεατὴν ποιῆσαι τ�ν ἀκροατὴν καὶ τὰ γιν�μενα περὶ τοὺς ὁρῶντας ἐκπληκτικὰ
καὶ ταρακτικὰ πάθη τοῖς ἀναγινώσκουσιν ἐνεργάσασθαι λιχνευ�μενος.

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 (tēn akoēn opsin poiōn)?’ In these contexts, the
Copyright © 2009. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

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
(akroatēs) was filled with emotion and shared in the danger.20 Lucian has
a fictional speaker in his Eikones attribute the same power to Xenophon’s
account of the nobility and fidelity of Pantheia, wife of Abradates
(Cyropaideia, 6.4.2–8), exclaiming that he feels as if he could actually see and

20
Plutarch, Artaxerxes, 8.1. �������������������������������������������������������������
 ���������� Plutarch uses the same formula here as he did of Thucydides,
saying that both authors represent events not as having happened, using the perfect tense
ē����
mena), but as happening, using the present (gignomena).
(gegen�����
Webb, Ruth. Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion in Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Practice, Taylor & Francis
Group, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, [Link]
Created from universidadcomplutense-ebooks on 2024-03-12 [Link].
 The contexts of ekphrasis 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
Lucian’s wider context – a debate on the representability of the emperor’s
mistress – and from Philostratos’ representation of Pantheia’s 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
(ēthos) (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 husband’s 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
Copyright © 2009. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

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 Cicero’s 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
Lucian, Eikones, 10. On this passage, see Simon Goldhill, ������������������������
 �������� ‘The erotic eye: visual
stimulation and cultural conflict’, in Goldhill (ed.), Being Greek under Rome: Cultural Identity,
the Second Sophistic and the Development of Empire (Cambridge, 2001)���������
, p. 189.
22
Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 8.3.64–5. For further discussion of this passage, see
 ������������
Chapter 5.
Webb, Ruth. Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion in Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Practice, Taylor & Francis
Group, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, [Link]
Created from universidadcomplutense-ebooks on 2024-03-12 [Link].
 22 Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion

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 dēloumena) 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 aisthēseis agousa ta dēloumena).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 (hup’opsin agon ta dēloumena). 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
Copyright © 2009. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

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
The Augustan writer, Dionysios of Halikarnassos, Lysias 7.
 �������������������������������������������������
24
Zanker, ‘Enargeia in the ancient criticism of poetry’, RhMus, 124 (1981):
 ��������������������������������������������������������������
Graham �������������������������������������������������������
297–311.
25
Dionysios of Halikarnassos, Lysias 7.
 ���������������������������
26
Roos Meijering, Literary and Rhetorical Theories in Greek Scholia (Groningen, 1987),
 ��������������������
See ����������������
esp. pp. 49–52.
Webb, Ruth. Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion in Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Practice, Taylor & Francis
Group, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, [Link]
Created from universidadcomplutense-ebooks on 2024-03-12 [Link].
 The contexts of ekphrasis 23

impact (ekplēxis). In the mouths of Greek writers of the Roman period

these sentiments attest to the constant presence of the classical past. Dio
imagines himself as a classical producer, staging the three Philoktetes in
his head. But, as Froma Zeitlin has shown, it was a response not confined
to Greek readers in the case of Homer.27 Nor did the prestige of the past
necessarily imply the inadequacy of the present; Dio notes that he was
able to compare the tragedians’ plays in a way that would not have been
possible for a fifth-century Athenian. As has already been noted, what
is striking about the use of the classics throughout the Roman period is
the freedom with which the past could be remodelled and reworked. The
canonical classical texts, for all the respect paid to them, were not seen as
untouchable monuments but as sources of material, as spurs to emulation.
Even at the humble level of the rhetorical schoolroom, boys were taught
to undercut the epic heroes, finding fault with Achilles, or to argue with
the canonical stories.28 The past was exemplary but was part of a common
cultural property for all those who were educated, and thus open to
endless reworking as readers became speakers and writers in their turn.29
In her review of reader-response through the ages Jane Tompkins
notes this imaginative and emotional engagement of ancient readers.
She argues that ancient understandings of the relation between text
and reader were very different from the more analytical approaches
of modern reader-response criticism.30 In particular, she identifies this
involvement as a key difference between ancient criticism and modern
reader-oriented theories: rather than being concerned primarily with
deciphering meaning, ancient critics reveal a ‘concept of language as a
Copyright © 2009. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

force acting on the world’.31 What Tompkins’ analysis underlines is the

contrast between ancient and modern attitudes to literature and language.
Where the modern professional reader, the critic, tends to treat his or her
subject as an object of analysis, the ancient critic stresses the impact of the
text. This does not, of course, mean that modern readers do not respond in
the ways described by ancient critics, but that these types of responses are

27
 ������������������������������������������������������������������
Zeitlin�����������������������������������������������������������
, ‘Visions and revisions of Homer in the Second Sophistic’.
28
‘The Progymnasmata as practice’,�����������
 ���������������
See Webb, ����� pp. 301–2.
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. 339–72; 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
Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy:
 �������������������������������������������������������������������
Tompkins, ‘The reader in history’, pp. 202–3. See also ������������
The Technologizing of the Word (New York, 1988)������������
, Chapter 3.
Webb, Ruth. Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion in Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Practice, Taylor & Francis
Group, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, [Link]
Created from universidadcomplutense-ebooks on 2024-03-12 [Link].
 24 Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion

not valued, theorized and articulated in the same way and do not have the
same social and cultural significance as, say, an Imperial Greek reader’s
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 culture’s 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
Copyright © 2009. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

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 mind’s 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 Reader’s Eye: Visual Imaging as Reader Response (Baltimore, 1994).
 �����������������
33
 ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������
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
Small��, Wax Tablets of the Mind: Cognitive Studies of Memory and
approach, see ���������������������
Jocelyn Penny��������
Literacy in Classical Antiquity (London, 1997), pp. 130–31
������������������������������������
on the work of Michel Denis.
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.
Webb, Ruth. Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion in Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Practice, Taylor & Francis
Group, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, [Link]
Created from universidadcomplutense-ebooks on 2024-03-12 [Link].
 The contexts of ekphrasis 25

is clear that visualization was valued and encouraged within ancient

education as part of a larger attitude to literature as a force able to
penetrate and shape the individual. The ability of words to affect the
imagination is allied to the idea that they can enter and dwell in the
soul, leading one authority, according to Plutarch, to suggest giving ear-
guards to the young to protect them from the wrong sort of language.35
Ancient education clearly placed a value on visualization as a response,
and created a vocabulary for the identification and expression of such
experiences. It is perhaps not surprising that in a culture such as our own,
where the attitude to visualization is sceptical and the activity considered
as an intensely individual matter, reports of experience should vary so
enormously. In antiquity, by contrast, such visualization could be a very
public and shared matter, as we shall see. In particular, it is clear that
educators expected and encouraged visualization. One area where we
have clear evidence of training in visualization in ancient schools is that of
memory techniques which relied on the conscious creation, manipulation
and storage of often bizarre images.36 And, as Small points out, in a culture
in which the technical difficulties involved in reading and writing made
memorization a vital skill it is conceivable that people were more prone to
use mental images in speaking and listening than we are.37
In all the examples cited above, the readers who felt that they were
in the presence of the subject matter were responding to a text from an
earlier period. They reveal a concept of classical texts as privileged points
of access to the experience of the past, which make not just the subjects
seem present but the authors as well. Again, this was clearly a practice
Copyright © 2009. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

encouraged by their education. A discussion of reading aloud by the first-

century rhetorician Theon of Alexandria recommends that the student
reading the text of a classical orator should think himself into the skin
of the original speaker – Demosthenes or Aeschines, for example – at the
original moment of performance. The point of this method acting is to
involve him totally in the text, emotionally as well as intellectually.38 Such
deep identification with the authors of the past continued in schools with
the exercise of declamation, in which students argued imaginary cases

35
Plutarch, On Listening to Lectures (Moralia 37F–38B).
 ����������
36
Rhetorica ad Herennium, 3.16.28–24.30. See also Cicero, De oratore, 2.354–60��������������
�������������������������������� ; Quintilian,
Institutio oratoria, 11.2; the seminal work of Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (London, 1966);�
and Small, Wax Tablets of the Mind.
37
����������, Histoire et imaginaire de la peinture ancienne (Ve s. av. J.-C.–Ier
 �������������������������
See also ����������������
Agnès Rouveret��
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.
Webb, Ruth. Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion in Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Practice, Taylor & Francis
Group, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, [Link]
Created from universidadcomplutense-ebooks on 2024-03-12 [Link].
 26 Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion

in the persona of a character from the classical past, often an orator like
Demosthenes.39
Theon’s 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 akroatēs – ‘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 ommatōn – and makes a distinction between metaphors that
Copyright © 2009. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

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
mind’s eye, ‘si narrari credit, non exprimi et oculis mentis ostendi’.
Quintilian’s 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 littéraires grecs des IIe et IIIe siècles après J.-C. (Paris,
Russell, Greek Declamation (Cambridge, 1983)�����������
1971);�����������������
Donald ��������� ; Schmitz, Bildung und Macht and
‘Performing History����������������������������������������������������������������������
’; and Webb, ‘Fiction, mimesis and the performance of the Greek past’.
40
See Theon, Progymnasmata, section 14 and Plutarch, On Listening to Lectures (Moralia
 �����������
37C–48D).
41
Harris��, Ancient Literacy (Cambridge, MA, 1989), pp.�������������������
 ��������������������
See William
����������������
�������� 35–6 with further
bibliography.
Webb, Ruth. Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion in Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Practice, Taylor & Francis
Group, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, [Link]
Created from universidadcomplutense-ebooks on 2024-03-12 [Link].
 The contexts of ekphrasis 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
Copyright © 2009. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

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. 222–3 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
Sardianos, Commentarium, p. 217, ll. 3–5.
 �����������
Webb, Ruth. Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion in Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Practice, Taylor & Francis
Group, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, [Link]
Created from universidadcomplutense-ebooks on 2024-03-12 [Link].
 28 Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion

next chapters. Before addressing these questions, I would like to return to

the modern definition to trace the processes by which the definition took
on its familiar modern contours. I believe it is particularly important to
try to identify the various ideas and interests that gave rise to the modern
definition since the intellectual climate in which it developed was radically
different from the world of the ancient rhetors.

Ancient and Modern Ekphrasis

As outlined above, the basic modern definition grew out of the ancient one
by a double process of restriction and expansion, resulting in a concept
that is related to but radically different from the ancient meaning that is the
subject of this book. First, attention was focused on those ekphraseis that
described paintings, sculptures and monuments, leading to an association
of the term with that restricted range of subject matter; then the term’s
frame of reference was expanded to include other texts, both ancient
and modern, referring to the arts. The end result of this process was a
genre of writing about art that is often considered to be best exemplified
by poetic examples.44 In antiquity, by contrast, ekphrasis was part of a
rhetorical training. The authors of the Progymnasmata adduced examples
from poetry, like the Shield of Achilles or descriptions of characters from
epic, but they were part of a system in which the reading of poetry was
largely subordinated to the study of rhetoric. It is ironic that an ancient
rhetorical technique should have metamorphosed into an essentially
poetic phenomenon, but this contrast reveals one of the key differences
Copyright © 2009. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

between the culture of Roman period and modern aesthetic interests.

This dual process of restriction and expansion that resulted in the
modern definition was motivated by diverse intellectual currents: interest
in the aesthetic problems of describing the arts in words and archaeological
curiosity and controversy about the realities lying behind Philostratos’
Eikones and other ekphraseis. Although this process culminated in the
mid twentieth century, before which time the term ekphrasis was mainly
restricted to studies of Imperial literature and often relegated to obscure
footnotes, it was the result of centuries of interest in verbal accounts of
the arts.
Two French studies of Lucian’s works show the general state of affairs
in the earlier part of the twentieth century. It was their interest in aesthetic

44
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,
concentrate on examples drawn from poetry; John Hollander, The Gazer’s Spirit: Poems
1993) �����������������������������������������������������������
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).
Webb, Ruth. Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion in Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Practice, Taylor & Francis
Group, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, [Link]
Created from universidadcomplutense-ebooks on 2024-03-12 [Link].
 The contexts of ekphrasis 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
�����������������������������������
the ancient definition,
Piot points out that any ekphrasis (of whatever type of subject) in some
sense rivals the graphic arts and is thus an example of the art of literature
attempting to appropriate to itself the function of another art.45 Bompaire,
����������
writing in the 1950s, also acknowledged that ekphrasis in Lucian’s day
was not conceived as a genre dedicated to the work of art but explained
that he chose to focus on this type of ekphrasis simply because it was the
most intrinsically interesting, showing as it did the interaction between
literature, graphic arts and architecture.46
The precise language used by these two scholars suggests that
their interest in ekphraseis of works of art was stimulated as much by
contemporary aesthetic concerns as by the popularity of works of art and
architecture as subjects for ekphrasis among Lucian and his contemporaries.
This is particularly clear in Piot’s use of the phrase ‘transpositions d’art’
which recurs frequently in discussions of ekphrasis in its restricted sense
from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The phrase was
coined by Huysmans in the early 1880s to express the way in which
Odilon Redon seemed to capture in his paintings the atmosphere of Poe
and Baudelaire, but it also summed up the enterprise of French decadent
poets such as Théophile Gautier
�����������������������������������������������
who attempted to translate the sensual
beauty of art into words. For Gautier, doyen of the doctrine of ‘l’art pour
l’art’, the verbal and graphic artist shared the task of representing reality
through the workings of art.47
Copyright © 2009. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

45
Henri Piot, Les Procédés littéraires de la IIe Sophistique chez Lucien: l’ecphrasis (Rennes,
1914), p.��������������������������������������������
22:����������������������������������������
‘L’objet de l’ecphrasis, dit Hermogène “est��������������������������������������������
de mettre sous les yeux la chose qu’on
veut montrer”. Elle a des rapports très étroits avec les transpositions d’art en honneur chez
les Alexandrins’� [The
�������������������������������������������������������������������������
aim of ecphrasis, according to Hermogenes, ‘is to place the subject
which one wishes to display before the eyes’. It is closely related to the ‘transpositions d’art’
beloved of the Alexandrians].
46
Jacques Bompaire, Lucien écrivain: imitation et création (Paris, 1958), p.������������������
 ������������������� 707: ‘le
������������
sens le
plus intéressant est celui qui fait de l’ecphrasis d’oeuvre d’art, sc. tableau, édifice, l’ecphrasis
par excellence … la littérature se nourrit d’art�������������������������������������������
’ [The most interesting meaning is the one
which treats ecphrasis of works of art (paintings, buildings) as ecphrasis par excellence …
Louis Méridier, L’Influence de la Seconde Sophistique sur
literature is nourished by art]. Cf. ����������������
l’œuvre de Gregoire de Nysse (Paris, 1906)�������������������������������
, p. 150 (on Gregory of Nyssa).
47
 Gautier’s own writing has been described as a ‘transposition écrite du tableau’.
�������� Le Vocabulaire de la prose littéraire de 1835 à 1845: Théophile Gautier et
See Georges Matoré,
ses premières oeuvres en prose (Geneva and Lille, 1951), p. 142. In his poem ‘L’Art’, Gautier
presents verbal and sculptural artistry as equivalent: ‘Oui, l’oeuvre sort plus belle / D’une
forme au travail / Rebelle / Vers, marbre, onyx, émail’ [Yes, more beautiful pieces emerge
from forms that resist being worked: verse, marble, onyx, enamel].
Webb, Ruth. Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion in Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Practice, Taylor & Francis
Group, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, [Link]
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 30 Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion

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
Bertrand’s 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
Copyright © 2009. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

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 Bertrand’s study, also brought the term ekphrasis
into his discussion rather ambiguously, entitling one section ‘L’ecphrasis
ou description des oeuvres d’art’, leaving open the question of whether

48
Elsner,� Art and the Roman Viewer: The Transformation of Art from
 ������������������������������
See, for example, ������������
Jaś���������
the Pagan World to Christianity (Cambridge, 1995)�.
49
Bertrand, Un critique d’art dans l’antiquité, p. 49: ‘c’est un genre en faveur qui a un
 �����������
nom particulier’.
50
Bertrand, Un critique d’art dans l’antiquité, pp. 53–4: ‘Tourmenté de la même ambition,
 �����������
Philostrate s’était aussi créé un style singulier composé d’archaïsmes et de néologismes. Mais
il eut un jour une pensée neuve, et ce jour là il créa un genre qui lui survécut et suscita
des imitateurs: il créa la critique d’art’ [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.
Webb, Ruth. Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion in Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Practice, Taylor & Francis
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 The contexts of ekphrasis 31

ekphrasis is to be understood as equivalent to description generally, or

to descriptions of works of art in particular. He took the constitution of
the genre of ekphrasis one step further, however, by extending its frame
of reference backwards in time to include descriptions of works of art in
Homer and tragedy.51
All these studies illustrate the process by which ekphraseis of works
from the Second Sophistic were gradually detached from their wider
rhetorical background and from the broader definition of ekphrasis current
in antiquity and placed within a different context: the description of works of
art generally. ��������������������������������������������������������������������
Just as literary scholars’ interest in the enterprise of describing
the work of art in words led them to detach ekphraseis of works of art from
ekphrasis in general and place it in its new context, archaeologists followed
precisely the same process in their study of texts like the Eikones and the
Late Antique and Byzantine ekphraseis of works of art and architecture.
They isolated these texts from their rhetorical background, treating them as
precious sources of information about lost monuments.52
The major step in this direction was, of course, the great survey of
descriptions of art and architecture in classical literature that forms the
introduction to Paul Friedländer’s 1912 edition of two Late Antique
ekphraseis of monuments: Paul the Silentiary’s ekphrasis of Hagia Sophia
and John of Gaza’s ekphrasis of a bath building. Friedländer’s survey
was to become the ultimate definition of the genre of ekphrasis (in the
sense of descriptions of works of art and architecture) in ancient literature
and includes all���������������������������������������������������������
the standard examples: the Shield of Achilles, Lucian’s
Calumny of Apelles, Euripides’ Ion, Greek and Latin epigrams. But while
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Friedländer’s introduction was the most thorough review of ancient

literary descriptions of works of art, he did not take the further step of
defining these texts as members of a single genre, still less of reifying that
genre by giving it a name. Instead, he was extremely careful to use the
term ‘ekphrasis’ only when discussing texts like the Philostratean Eikones
or Byzantine ekphraseis of works of art which fell into the intersection of
the ancient and modern definitions or which were discussed as examples
of ekphrasis in antiquity.53

51
Bougot, Philostrate l’Ancien, pp. 1 and 171.
 ��������
52
 Antonio Muñoz, ‘Le ἐκφράσεις nella letteratura bizantina e i loro rapporti con l’arte
figurata’, in Recueil d’études dédiées à la mémoire de N.P. Kondakov (Prague, 1926) focused
attention onto Byzantine ekphraseis of monuments and icons as a source of information
on lost works. As Henry Maguire, Art and Eloquence in Byzantium (Princeton, 1981), pp.
22–3 has noted, the concentration on ekphraseis of monuments and works of art for their
archaeological information has had the effect of distracting attention from other types of
ekphrasis.�
53
Friedländer,� Johannes von Gaza und Paulus Silentiarius, pp. 84–5. In his ����� 1939
edition of Prokopios of Gaza’s ekphrasis of a painting, Fried���������������������������
länder���������������������
still used the term
Webb, Ruth. Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion in Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Practice, Taylor & Francis
Group, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, [Link]
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 32 Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion

The reputation that Friedländer’s survey has acquired as the first

definitive survey of ekphrasis is particularly ironic in the light of his
own deep concern about the correct use of terminology. In particular,
he criticizes those anonymous scholars who have seized on the term
‘ekphrasis’ to explain texts like those of the Philostratoi. The rhetorical
exercise, Friedländer explains, cannot in itself explain the existence of
such texts; instead they should be seen against the wider background
of the tradition of describing works of art and architecture in ancient
literature.54 His survey makes an important point, that clearly there was
such a tradition and that texts discussing or describing the arts are to be
found in many classical genres from epic to epigram, from historiography
to the magpie-like miscellany of a Pliny. But he does not present these
passages as a genre and sees them as distinct from the ancient practice of
ekphrasis.
In collecting together these passages Friedländer, like Bertrand and
Bougot, was following the lead of earlier scholarship on Philostratos: in
1709 Gottfried Olearius had included in his edition of the Philostratoi and
Kallistratos a discussion of the works’ origin and speculated that all three
of the later writers had found a common inspiration in the Homeric Shield
of Achilles.55 Another German editor of Philostratos and Kallistratos,
Jacobs (who published his edition jointly with Welcker in 1825), had taken
this exploration of the origin of the Eikones one step further, noting the
poetic precedents and citing not just Homer but also Hesiod, Theocritus,
Apollonius Rhodius, Moschus, Quintus Smyrnaeus, Catullus, Virgil,
Ovid and Statius. However, he did not take the further step of naming
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these descriptive passages ‘ekphraseis’ (the term is used, in Greek, in

the general sense of ‘description’) or of claiming that they constituted a
genre.56 But the nucleus of the modern genre is here, as it would later be

‘Bildbeschreibung’.
54
Friedländer, Johannes von Gaza und Paulus Silentiarius, p. 83: ‘Man pflegt heut
 �������������
literargeschichtliche Fragen, wie sie uns beschäftigen, mit dem Schlagwort “rhetorische
Ekphrasis” mehr scheinbar als wirklich zu beantworten und glaubt, dass hier die
‘Rhetorenschule’ schöpferisch gewesen sei.’ See also his comments on descriptions of works
of art in the novel: ibid., pp. 47 and 54–5.
55
Philostratos, Opera, ed. Olearius (Leipzig, 1709), p.
 �������������� ����������������������������������
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. xvi–xvii) that Philostratos
Webb, Ruth. Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion in Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Practice, Taylor & Francis
Group, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, [Link]
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 The contexts of ekphrasis 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 Friedländer’s 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 Fleschenberg’s
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 Bertrand’s
account, the birth of art criticism.
As we have already seen, a parallel interest in Imperial ekphraseis of
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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 Vorläufer (Leipzig, 1900), p. 360n.
 ��������������
58
 ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������
In a letter to Friedländler written in 1913 and now in the Paul Friedländer 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.
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Group, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, [Link]
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 34 Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion

it [the ode] belongs to the genre, known to Occidental literature from

Homer and Theocritus to the Parnassians and Rilke, of the ekphrasis,
the poetic description of a pictorial or sculptural work of art, which
description implies, in the words of Théophile Gautier, ‘une transposition
d’art,’ the reproduction, through the medium of words, of sensuously
perceptible objets d’art (‘ut pictura poesis’).59

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 d’art’, do, however, reveal the intellectual currents
which shaped his interest in and conception of ekphrasis.60 A further
parallel with Bertrand’s and Bougot’s studies of Philostratos in particular
emerges later on in Spitzer’s discussion of Keats’ ode when he insists on
the poem’s function as a representation of the poet’s 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 d’art 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
Spitzer’s 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
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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. 72–3)) 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 Mörike, ‘Wiederum Mörikes Gedicht “Auf eine Lampe”’, Trivium, 9 (1951): 203–25 and
, ‘Garcilaso, Third Eclogue, Lines 265–271’, Hispanic Review, 20 (1952):
Garcilaso de la Vega���������������������������������������������
243–8.��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������
The term ekphrasis appears once, buried in a footnote, in the latter of these. Given
Spitzer’s 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
 ��������������
Spitzer, ‘The “Ode
�������������������������������
on a Grecian Urn”’, p. 89.
Webb, Ruth. Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion in Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Practice, Taylor & Francis
Group, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, [Link]
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 The contexts of ekphrasis 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 literary-
historical 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.
Spitzer’s 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 Spitzer’s 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
 �����������������������������������������������������������������������������
Spitzer himself makes an autobiographical comment in the article, describing
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himself as ‘a European born scholar, nurtured in a centuries-old tradition of both scholarly

and aesthetic interpretation, especially in the classical and the French fields’, as he laments
the divide between ‘scholars’ and ‘critics’ in US English departments: ‘The “Ode on a Grecian
Urn”’, p. 68.
63
See, for example, James A.W. Heffernan, ‘Ekphrasis and representation’, New Literary
 ������������������������������������������������������������������������
��������������������������������
History, 22 (1991): 297–316�����
and Museum of Words. Jean Hagstrum, The Sister Arts: The Tradition
of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry from Dryden to Gray (Chicago����������������������
, 1958), p. 18, n. 34
proposed his own definition: ‘I use the noun “ecphrasis” and the adjective “ecphrastic” in a
more limited sense to refer that special quality of giving voice and language to the otherwise
mute art object.’ Hagstrum
�������������������������������������������������������������������������������
is keen to provide ancient justification for his idiosyncratic usage,
claiming that ‘my usage is etymologically sound since the Greek noun and adjective come
from ekphrazein, which means “to speak out”, “to tell in full”.’ �������������������������������
On the function of the ‘ek’ in
ekphrasis, see below, Chapter 3 (p. 74).
64
 ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������
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 Ovid’s description of Arachne’s
tapestry in Metamorphoses, the Homeric Shield of Achilles and its Virgilian descendent,
the Shield of Aeneas, ending ‘ad haec navis, vestis, παvoπλίας, machinae, currus, Colossi,
pyramidis, aut si quid est aliud rerum consimilium, quarum descriptio delectet.’
Webb, Ruth. Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion in Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Practice, Taylor & Francis
Group, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, [Link]
Created from universidadcomplutense-ebooks on 2024-03-12 [Link].
 36 Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion

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.
Spitzer’s ekphrasis was a genre, or mode, in search of a label. The vogue
for New Criticism meant that Spitzer’s definition fell on particularly fertile
ground, as witnessed by Murray Krieger’s 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
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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).
 ����������������
66
Perrine Galand-Hallyn, Le Reflet des fleurs: description et métalangage
 �����������������������������������������
See, for example, �����������������������
poétique d’Homère à Erasme (Geneva, 1994)��������������������
and Andrew Becker, The Shield of Achilles and the
Poetics of Ekphrasis (Lanham, 1995)�.
67
See, in particular, the essays collected in Roland Barthes et al., Littérature et réalité
 �������������������������������������������������������������������
(Paris, 1982) and in Yale French Studies, 61 (1981).
68
Roos Meijering, Literary and Rhetorical
 �������������������������������������������������������������
Two notable examples of such an approach are ����������������
Theories in Greek Scholia (Groningen, 1987) and Michel Patillon, La Théorie du discours chez
Webb, Ruth. Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion in Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Practice, Taylor & Francis
Group, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, [Link]
Created from universidadcomplutense-ebooks on 2024-03-12 [Link].
 The contexts of ekphrasis 37

ancient category of ekphrasis and the assumptions that underlay it by

appealing to a wider range of rhetorical texts and discovering what could
be called the poetics of ancient rhetorical theory.
It is important to note, too, the radical differences between the interests
and assumptions that drove the modern structuralist and linguistic
approaches to literature and the ancient rhetorical theories that are the
subject of this book. The ancient rhetoricians assume a live audience upon
whom the speaker can exert an impact and their orientation is first and
foremost practical (despite the appearance of obsessive categorization
and subcategorization that often strikes the modern reader on first
encountering their work). It is not, therefore, surprising if their ways of
approaching discourses of all kinds are different from those of a modern
critic whose task is to analyze a written text. We have already seen the
emphasis placed by ancient readers on their imaginative and emotional
responses to certain passages, precisely the type of response that is
largely ignored by structuralist and post-structuralist approaches. It is
remarkable that even reception theory privileges the hermeneutic mode
of reading which casts the reader as interpreter engaged in a patient act of
decoding. Though such approaches to texts – and images – certainly did
exist in antiquity, they were not at the heart of the ancient phenomenon
of ekphrasis.

Conclusion

The purpose of this excursus into the modern redefinition of the term
Copyright © 2009. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

ekphrasis is to show the intellectual interests that shaped it. Though

Spitzer, for example, presents his category of ekphrasis as a transcendent
phenomenon that has existed throughout literary history, it is very much
contingent on a particular time and place and on a particular narrative of
‘Occidental Literature’ which leaps blithely over those aspects of ancient
culture that are less readily assimilable to modern ideas of literature than
are Homeric epic or Theocritean pastoral poetry. The ancient conception
of ekphrasis is just as much a product of its time and its culture.
Clarity is vital precisely because of the ultimate closeness of Spitzer’s
definition of ekphrasis to the ancient one. We have seen how the isolation
of ancient ekphraseis of works of art from ekphraseis in general was
accompanied by the gathering together of poetic precedents for the
description of works of art from various genres, leading to this collection
of illustrative examples being understood as a genre in itself. There is
therefore a genealogical connection between the ancient and modern
definitions, a connection reflected in the primacy of the visual in both. But

Hermogène le Rhéteur: essai sur les structures linguistiques de la rhétorique ancienne (Paris, 1988).�
Webb, Ruth. Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion in Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Practice, Taylor & Francis
Group, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, [Link]
Created from universidadcomplutense-ebooks on 2024-03-12 [Link].
 38 Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion

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
audience’s 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.
Copyright © 2009. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

69
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See the remarks of Don Fowler in his essay ��������������������������������������
‘Narrate and describe: the problem of
ekphrasis’, JRS, 81 (1991): 25–35.
Webb, Ruth. Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion in Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Practice, Taylor & Francis
Group, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, [Link]
Created from universidadcomplutense-ebooks on 2024-03-12 [Link].