Webb, Ruth - Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion PDF

Ekphrasis, Imagination
and Persuasion in
Ancient Rhetorical
Theory and Practice
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Ekphrasis, Imagination
and Persuasion in
Ancient Rhetorical
Theory and Practice
Ruth Webb
Ruth Webb 2009

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.
Ruth Webb has asserted her moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988,
to be identified as the author of this work.
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Webb, Ruth, 1963
Ekphrasis, imagination and persuasion in ancient rhetorical theory and practice
1. Ekphrasis 2. Rhetoric, Ancient
I. Title
809.93357
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Webb, Ruth, 1963
Ekphrasis, imagination and persuasion in ancient rhetorical theory and practice / Ruth
Webb.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-7546-6125-2 (alk. paper)
1. Ekphrasis. 2. Rhetoric, Ancient. I. Title.
PN56.E45W43 2009
808.0481dc22
09ANSHT
2008035799
ISBN 978-0-7546-6125-2
EISBN 978-0-7546-9330-7
Contents
List of Tables
Abbreviations
Acknowledgements
Preface
Introduction
vii
ix
xi
xiii
1
1. The Contexts of Ekphrasis
13
2.Learning Ekphrasis: The Progymnasmata
39
3. The Subjects of Ekphrasis
61
4. Enargeia: Making Absent Things Present
87
5. Phantasia: Memory, Imagination and the Gallery of the Mind
107
6. Ekphrasis and the Art of Persuasion
131
7. The Poetics of Ekphrasis: Fiction, Illusion and Meta-ekphrasis
167
Conclusion
193
Appendix A: Translations
Appendix B: Subjects for Ekphrasis
Bibliography
Index
197
213
215
233
List of Tables
Table 2.1
The subjects of ekphrasis
56
Table 3.1
Comparison of the subjects for ekphrasis with the

parts of narration and the subjects for enkmion in the
surviving Progymnasmata
64
Abbreviations
AJP
American Journal of Philology
BAGB
Bulletin de lAssociation Guillaume Bud
BASP
Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists
BICS
Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies
BMGS
Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies
CP
Classical Philology
CQ
Classical Quarterly
DOP
Dumbarton Oaks Papers
GRBS
Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies
HSCP
Harvard Studies in Classical Philology
JRS
Journal of Roman Studies
JWCI
Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes
MD
Materiali e discussioni per lanalisi dei testi classici
Or. Oration
PCPS
Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society
REG
Revue des tudes grecques
RhMus
Rheinisches Museum fr Philologie
TAPA
Transactions of the American Philological

Association
Walz, Rhetores graeci
Rhetores graeci, ed. Christian Walz (9 vols,

Stuttgart: Sumptibus J.G. Cottae, 183236)
ZPE

Zeitschrift fr Papyrologie und Epigraphik
Acknowledgements
The length of time over which this project has been evolving means that
I owe a huge debt to a great many people, from my original supervisors
at the Warburg Institute, Jill Kraye and Liz McGrath, and Jean-Michel
Massing who first mentioned Philostratos to me, to colleagues at Kings
College London, Princeton and the Universit Paris X Nanterre. The
following people have made particular contributions through invitations
to contribute to conferences or to joint publications, by reading various
drafts or simply by being willing to discuss various aspects of the subject.
They are, in alphabetical order, Michael Baxandall, Susanna Braund, Averil
Cameron, Alejandro Coroleu, Sandrine Dubel, Ja Elsner, Christopher Gill,
Franoise Graziani, Liz James, Bob Kaster, Mario Klarer, Margaret Mullett,
Laurent Pernot, Stphane Rolet, Charlotte Rouech, Agns Rouveret,
Suzanne Sad, John Smedley, Oliver Taplin, Philip Weller, Barbara Zeitler
and Froma Zeitlin.
Preface
My work on ekphrasis in the Greek rhetorical tradition began with

the research for my Ph.D. thesis, The Transmission of the Eikones of
Philostratos and the Development of Ekphrasis from Late Antiquity to the
Renaissance (Warburg Institute, London, 1992). The thesis itself contained
a brief overview of the ancient theories of ekphrasis and enargeia as found
in the Progymnasmata and other rhetorical treatises and has provided
the core of the present book. The material on the subject contained in
the thesis has been greatly expanded: the treatment is in greater depth
and more sources are discussed. The plan of this book has undergone
several permutations over the years. In the end, I have opted for a smaller
chronological range (first to fifth centuries CE) and to restrict the study
mostly to the rhetorical handbooks. Regrettably, this has reduced the space
available for the discussion of Christian texts and of the later, Byzantine,
material. There is also less analysis of examples of ekphrasis than I had at
first planned. However, the elucidation of the main sources for the theory
of ekphrasis and enargeia, many of which are neither well known nor
easily approachable, seemed to me to be the priority. I hope to be able to
fill some of the lacunae I have identified at some point in the future.
A word about the transliteration of the Greek: I have tried to reproduce
as far as possible the Greek spellings (-os rather than -us, ai rather
than ae or e, k rather than c) but have kept the more familiar forms of
well-known names, such as Thucydides and Achilles. The result, as usual,
is not perfect.
Ruth Webb
Introduction
A speech that brings the subject matter vividly before the eyes
This is the definition of ekphrasis taught to students in the Greek schools

of the Roman Empire as they began their studies of rhetoric. It is a very
different definition from the one which has become familiar in modern
literary criticism for, however ekphrasis is defined in modern critical
discourse, it is usually seen as a text or textual fragment that engages with
the visual arts. Over the last few decades, ekphrasis has been defined as
the poetic description of a pictorial or sculptural work of art, the verbal
representation of visual representation or words about an image. For
all their variety, these definitions place a central importance on a certain
type of referent: the visual arts (a category which sometimes includes
and sometimes excludes buildings and monuments). But this was not its
ancient sense.
This book is an exploration of the range of meaning of the term as it was
used in antiquity. It is a positive attempt to understand and explain a set
of ideas about language and its impact on the listener that are expressed
in the rhetorical handbooks of the first centuries CE, when Greek rhetoric
reached a height of sophistication under the Roman Empire. Ideally
it ought to be possible to start straight away with this analysis, but the
popularity of the modern definition of the term makes it necessary to
include some preliminary remarks about what is and what is not included
in this book and why.
What This Book Is Not About
This is not a book about word and image, in the sense of words about
pictures. There was indisputably a strong tradition of describing real or
imaginary works of art in oratory, historiography, epigram, epic and other
poetry. But there is no evidence that these were considered to form a
Leo Spitzer, The Ode
on a Grecian Urn, or content vs. metagrammar, in Essays

on English and American Literature, ed. Anna Hatcher (Princeton, 1962); J.A.W. Heffernan,
Museum of Words (Chicago, 1993), p. 3; Shadi Bartsch and Ja Elsner, Introduction: eight
ways of looking at an ekphrasis, CP, 102 (2007): i.
See, in particular, Ja Elsner, The genres of Ekphrasis, in Elsner (ed.), The Verbal and
the Visual: Cultures of Ekphrasis in Antiquity = Ramus, 31 (2002): 118.
Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion
single genre, or that that genre had a name, still less that that name would
have been ekphrasis. Painting, sculpture and architecture certainly
were among the subjects of ekphrasis as it was conceived and defined in
antiquity: the Progymnasmata the elementary exercises in rhetoric which
contain the first definitions of ekphrasis mention the Shield of Achilles
in Iliad, 18 as an example and contain advice on describing sculptures,
paintings and buildings. Outside these elementary exercises, the Younger
Philostratos refers to his grandfathers Eikones as ekphraseis of works of
graphic art and many descriptions of such subjects seem clearly to fit the
ancient definition by describing their subjects in such vivid detail that the
reader does seem to see them. Such subjects certainly could be evoked in
ekphrasis, but they were not its defining feature.
I have argued elsewhere that the existence of this intermediate category
of ekphraseis (in the ancient sense) of works of art and architecture (like
Philostratos Eikones or Paul the Silentiarys verse ekphrasis of Hagia
Sophia) provided part of the impetus towards the modern definition
as scholars in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries focused
attention on this particular group of texts which then came to stand for the
whole category of ekphrasis. But at no point in antiquity (or Byzantium)
was ekphrasis confined to a single category of subject matter, nor can
every text about images be claimed as ekphrasis in the ancient sense.
There are, for example, many epigrams about sculptures which do not
seek to bring the subject matter before the eyes. The examples recently
analyzed by Simon Goldhill, for example, consider the act of viewing
and meditate on naturalism, but their function as comments on the act
of viewing is different from the central function of ekphrasis: making
the listener see the subject in their minds eye. An ekphrasis may itself
constitute a commentary on the act of viewing, but this common feature
is not central to the definition of ekphrasis that interests me here. So, the
epigrams, like certain passages of Pliny or Pausanias, while very relevant
to understanding constructions of viewing in antiquity, are at most only
tangentially relevant to the rhetorical practices that are the subject of this
book. For that reason they are not included.
As Graham Zanker, New light on the

ekphrastic epigram, ZPE, 143 (2003): 5962
points out, the term ekphrastic epigram is a modern coinage.
Philostratos the Younger, Eikones, Proem, 2.

See Ruth Webb, Ekphrasis ancient and modern: the invention of a genre, Word and
Image, 15: 718.
Simon Goldhill, The nave and knowing eye: ecphrasis and the culture of viewing
in the Hellenistic world, in Simon Goldhill and Robin Osborne (eds), Art and Text in
Ancient Greek Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 197223; What is
ekphrasis for?, CP, 102 (2007): 1619.
introduction
This study focuses on the rhetorical theory and practice of ekphrasis

for the simple reason that it is in the rhetoricians schools that ekphrasis
was defined, taught and practised and it is therefore in the domain of
rhetoric that we can find a substantial explanation of what ekphrasis was,
how it functioned and what its purpose was. This rhetorical technique
of ekphrasis can also be found in poetry, of course, but to study poetic
examples in detail would require a separate book.
Many of the poetic descriptions of works of art the Shield of Achilles,
the Hesiodic Shield of Herakles, Moschos Europa, Catullus 64, Virgils Shield
of Aeneas do fulfil the basic requirement of placing before the eyes and
seem to rival the visual arts, as ekphrasis should. It would therefore have
been possible to append a chapter to this book examining these usual
suspects from the perspective of rhetorical ekphrasis. But there are many
reasons why I decided against this. Firstly, these passages have already
been abundantly and fruitfully analyzed by others and I would have very
little to add to the existing studies. Secondly, the inclusion of a chapter
devoted to one type of subject matter would have created a serious
imbalance in the book as a whole. Since my analysis of the rhetorical sense
of ekphrasis stresses the inclusiveness of the term, such a final chapter
ought to analyze examples of poetic ekphrasis of all types of subject matter:
battles, people, animals, landscapes. Needless to say, this is a gargantuan
task that is far better undertaken in a series of separate studies of authors,
genres or categories of subject.
What This Book Is About
This book is an exploration of a particular phenomenon in ancient
rhetorical theory and practice: the use of language to try to make an
audience imagine a scene. It mines the rhetorical handbooks of the
first centuries CE in order to clarify as far as possible how a particular
phenomenon was understood and taught and how it fitted into the wider
system of rhetorical theory and practice. This means first of all analyzing
the (often frustrating) definitions of ekphrasis in the Progymnasmata and
supplementing their laconic comments by reference to more forthcoming
sources such as the first-century Roman rhetorician Quintilian, who
See, to name but three examples, Alessandro Perutelli, Linversione speculare: per
una retorica dellekphrasis, MD, 1 (1978): 8798; Andrew Laird, Sounding out ekphrasis: art
and text in Catullus 64, JRS, 83 (1993): 1830; Froma Zeitlin, The artful eye: vision, ekphrasis
and spectacle in Euripidean theatre, in Simon Goldhill and Robin Osborne (eds), Art and
Text in Ancient Greek Culture (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 13896.
See, for example, Jean-Pierre Aygon, Pictor in fabula: lecphrasis-descriptio dans les
tragdies de Snque (Brussels, 2004) and Janice Hewlett Koelb, The Poetics of Description:
Imagined Places in European Literature (New York, 2006).
supplements rhetorical precepts with accounts of his first-hand experience

in the courts. From this study there emerges a clear set of ideas about
the words ability to summon up images in the listeners mind and about
the ways in which an orator might need to make use of this technique in
very specific ways to bolster his case. The Progymnasmata, with the help
of Quintilians insights, help explain the uses of ekphrasis and similar
techniques discussed in the more advanced Greek rhetorical manuals on
epideictic (occasional speeches) and declamation (judicial and deliberative
speeches treating fictive cases). The use of ekphrasis in epideictic is familiar,
and Menander Rhetors manuals on the topic are relatively accessible in
their presentation of the topic. But the Greek technical handbooks on
declamation are a very different matter. Fortunately, recent studies and
translations by Donald Russell, Malcolm Heath, Michel Patillon, George
Kennedy and others have opened up this highly technical and specialized
field, making it possible to trace the uses of ekphrasis in declamation.
Looking at ekphrasis in the context of the rhetorical handbooks is
revealing. First of all, this approach underlines the close interconnections
between Quintilian and the Greek sources on rhetoric. It also shows that
the use of ekphrasis was certainly not confined to rhetoric, all our sources
make clear that it was used in history and poetry too. But, in the period we
are dealing with, rhetoric enjoyed great prestige; it was an active practice
studied by a large proportion of male members of the elite and was the
focus of much of their intellectual energy. In the case of rhetoric, we have
evidence for the methods of training in the handbooks while the surviving
examples of declamation and epideictic speeches show the direct results
of this training whose indirect results are also evident in other sorts of
composition.
It is also important to specify the type of relationship between
rhetorical theory and rhetorical practice that is assumed in this book. The
interest of the handbooks does not lie simply in the provision of a schema
against which finished compositions can be measured, identified and
judged.10 Instead, the rhetorical manuals reveal to the modern reader the
rich network of ideas and assumptions that underlay the composition and
See, in particular, Donald R. Russell, Greek Declamation (Cambridge, 1983); Lucia

Calboli Montefusco, La dottrina degli status nella retorica greca e romana (Hildesheim, 1986);
Michel Patillon, La Thorie du discours chez Hermogne le Rhteur: essai sur les structures
linguistiques de la rhtorique ancienne (Paris, 1988) and his translation and commentary
of Hermogenes: Hermogne: lart rhtorique (Paris, 1997); Malcolm Heath, Hermogenes on
Issues: Strategies of Argument in Later Greek Rhetoric (Oxford, 1995) and George A. Kennedy,
Hermogenes, Invention and Method: Two Rhetorical Treatises from the Hermogenic Corpus Translated
with Introduction and Notes (Atlanta, 2005).
10
For example, Francis Cairns, Generic Composition in Greek and Roman Poetry
(Edinburgh, 1972) represents a vitally important development in the study of ancient
introduction
reception of ancient texts. These assumptions are often very different from
our own, as might be expected when we take into consideration the fact
that the culture of the Imperial period was still very much an oral culture,
despite the importance of the written word. The phenomenon of ekphrasis
that emerges from this study belongs to a conception of the word as a
force acting on the listener, a conception that is familiar from Gorgias
Enkomion of Helen but which clearly continued to be active throughout
antiquity and beyond, into Byzantium. An investigation of ekphrasis in
this sense also reveals some of the energies that dwell within the texts
that, to us, are black words lying still on the white page but which, to
the ancient reader, were alive with rich visual and emotional effects. The
nature of ekphrasis, its defining quality of enargeia (or vividness), and the
role of the imagination in both mean that this is almost as much a study of
ancient psychology as of rhetoric.
The study of the ancient definition of ekphrasis is therefore far from
being the restrictive move that it is sometimes claimed (whether explicitly
or implicitly) to be. It is, I hope, a positive contribution which opens up
new perspectives on the rhetorical culture of the Imperial period and on
the attitudes to language and verbal representation that were current at
that time. The aim of focusing on the ancient definition is not to close
down discussion of the phenomenon of words about images either in
ancient or modern literature nor to brand certain usages of the word as
incorrect. Rather it is to create a space for the ancient definition and to
underline quite how different it and its underlying concepts are to our
own ideas about texts and literature.
The Modernity of the Modern Definition
In considering the difference between ancient and modern ekphrasis it
is important to bear in mind exactly how recent the modern definition
is. One searches in vain for any unambiguous use of the term to mean
description of a work of art in any source before the late nineteenth
century.11 It did not become current in critical discourse until the second
half of the twentieth century and only then was it applied regularly to
literature and its reception but tends to be over-prescriptive in its use of rhetorical theory. See
the general comments of Goldhill, What is ekphrasis for?, p. 7.
11
Ekphrasis is not used, to my knowledge, in Gotthold Ephraim Lessings seminal

work on painting and poetry, Laokoon. Paul Friedlnder, Johannes von Gaza und Paulus
Silentiarius: Kunstbeschreibungen Justinianischer Zeit (Leipzig and Berlin, 1912) uses the term
Bildbeschreibung [description of a picture] and reserves ekphrasis only for texts that fell
into the ancient category. Othmar Schissel von Fleschenberg, Die Technik des Bildeinsatzes,
Philologus, 72 (1913): 83114 and Jean Seznec, Flaubert and the graphic arts, JWCI, 8 (1945):
17590 also discuss the subject without recourse to the term ekphrasis.
modern literature as well as to Greek and Latin texts. In earlier periods, on

the rare occasions when the term was employed in the modern European
languages, it retained its ancient range of meaning.12 The modern usage
is the result of a series of transformations which took place gradually and
unevenly, with the result that it is possible to find scholars using the word
in different ways at the same period.
Broadly, it is possible to distinguish four types of usage. The first is
a simple transliteration from the Greek: ekphrasis (or its equivalents in
other European languages) is used in the same contexts and of the same
texts as the ancient Greek term. In the second, the term is used of those
ancient examples of ekphrasis that happen to describe works of art (and/
or architecture). One example of this second stage is J.D. Dennistons
definition of ekphrasis as the rhetorical description of a work of art, one
of the types of progymnasma, citing Philostratos Eikones, the lost Eikones
of Nikostratos, Lucians de Domo and Kallistratos ekphraseis of statues as
examples in the first edition of the Oxford Classical Dictionary, published
in 1949.13 The third usage includes any ancient texts about art and is
exemplified by Glanville Downeys entry on Ekphrasis published ten
years later in the Reallexikon fr Antike und Christentum, which starts from
the Shield of Achilles and includes descriptions of works of art from epic
and tragedy. The fourth sense in which the term is used is the far broader
words about art, conceived as encompassing texts of any genre from any
culture or period of history (though very often appealing to the Homeric
Shield of Achilles as the inescapable ur-ekphrasis).
These meanings are genetically related and it is possible to trace the
gradual and uneven process of evolution. I have argued elsewhere that
interest in texts like Philostratos Eikones (ekphraseis that have works of
12
The first usage of ecfrasi in Italian is a case in point. According to Battaglias Grande
dizionario della lingua italiana, the term occurs in Gregorio Comaninis Il Figino of 1591 (ed.
Barocchi, p. 310). The passage in question is taken directly from the Latin translation of the
Acts of the Council of Nicaea in Concilia omnia, ed. F.L. Sarius (Colonia Agrippina, 1567) vol.
3, p. 94 (Synodi Nicenae Secundae action quarta), which transliterates the term directly from
the Greek original. Although the ekphrasis in question is of paintings, it is not necessary to
assume that Comanini understood the term as referring to a genre specialized in this type of
description or of art criticism. The first usage in English, in the Edinburgh Review of 1815, is
similarly ambiguous. The anonymous author refers only to an ecphrasis of Libanius and,
as the fourth-century orator and teacher Libanios composed ekphraseis of the whole range
of subjects, it is far from sure that he was referring only to his ekphraseis of works of art,
as is assumed by Grant F. Scott, The rhetoric of dilation: ekphrasis and ideology, Word and
Image, 7 (1991): 30110 and The Sculpted Word: Keats, Ekphrasis, and the Visual Arts (Hanover,
NH, 1994) in what is otherwise an extremely perceptive analysis.
13
Koelb, The Poetics of Description, pp. 23, underlines the importance of Dennistons
new definition, which, as she points out, is contradicted by the entry on the Progymnasmata
in the same volume.
introduction
art as their subject) led to those particular ekphraseis coming to be seen

as representative of ekphrasis tout court.14 I shall retrace some aspects of
this process at the end of Chapter 1; here it is sufficient to cite one example
that reveals one way in which the process of restriction took place. The
origin of Dennistons definition of ekphrasis as a rhetorical description
of a work of art lies in the German Reallexikon des klassischen Altertums
published by Friedrich Lbker in 1914 which served as a model for the
first Oxford Classical Dictionary.15 Here ekphrasis is defined as rhetorical
description, mostly of a painting, one of the Progymnasmata (rhetorische
Beschreibung, zumeist eines Bildes, die man zu den Progymnasmata
zhlte) and illustrated by the same examples as in the OCD entry. Lbker
may overstate the importance of paintings among the ancient subjects of
ekphrasis but he makes clear that these ekphraseis are only part of a larger
group. Dennistons entry, however, leaves out the crucial adverb zumeist,
a simple change that turns ekphrasis into an ancient genre specializing
in the descriptions of paintings. A seemingly tiny detail of translation
in a work considered as authoritative may thus have contributed to the
transformation of ekphrasis.16
Ekphrasis and Description
If the only difference between the ancient and modern definitions were the
presence or absence of a certain category of subject matter, the question
would deserve a few lines of discussion at most. And, if the absence of
works of art meant that ekphrasis was fully assimilable to description as
commonly understood nowadays, there would also be little more to say.
But this is not the case. The most important difference between ekphrasis
and the category of descriptions of works of art lies not in the categories
of subject matter envisaged for each but in the criteria by which the two
groups are defined. It is the common type of referent the work of art
that makes it possible to classify an epigram on Myrons cow alongside
the Shield of Achilles and a passage from Pausanias (not to mention
Keats Ode). Yet in the ancient definition the referent is only of secondary
importance; what matters, as we have seen, is the impact on the listener.
The ancient and modern categories of ekphrasis are thus formed on
14
Webb, Ekphrasis ancient and modern.
Friedrich Lbker, Reallexikon des Klassischen Altertums (Leipzig and Berlin, 1914).
16
Koelb, The Poetics of Description, p. 2 suggests that Dennistons entry may have
inspired Leo Spitzers redefinition of ekphrasis in The Ode on a Grecian Urn, or content
vs. metagrammar, Comparative Literature, 7 (1955): 20325. For further discussion of Spitzers
article, see Chapter 1.
15
entirely different grounds, and are ultimately incommensurate, belonging

as they do to radically different systems.
If it seems natural to us now to group descriptions according to subject
matter it is probably because description itself is popularly conceived as
treating a particular class of referent: static objects or persons assimilated
to static objects. (
The neoclassical critical tradition had, moreover,
encouraged the idea that descriptions could and should be classified by
their subject matter.)17
As summed up by Don Fowler, narrative is about
people, description deals with things.18 This very basic distinction is
famously identified by Grard Genette as one of the main characteristics
of the modern conception of literature, and has naturally been refined and
questioned by many critics who have pointed out, among other things,
the practical difficulties involved in separating narration from description
once one begins to analyze a text.19 These
ideas the strict division

between narration and description and the association of description
with static, non-human or dehumanized referents are absent from the
ancient accounts. Instead we find a marked continuity between ekphrasis
and narration and explicit statements that the two modes share the same
group of referents, as set out in Chapter 3 below.
By contrast, the emphasis given in the ancient definitions of ekphrasis to
effect, over and above any formal or referential characteristics, is striking:
an ekphrasis can be of any length, of any subject matter, composed in
verse or prose, using any verbal techniques, as long as it brings its subject
before the eyes or, as one of the ancient authors says, makes listeners into
spectators. Mere words are credited with the ability to make absent things
seem present to the spellbound listeners, to control the contents of the
most intimate of faculties, the imagination. So, while the visual arts may
be literally absent from this definition of ekphrasis, and from most of the
discussions by ancient rhetoricians, the idea of the visual underpins this
17
See Jean-Michel Adam, La Description (Paris, 1993), pp. 329. Terms such as
chronographia and topographia do occur in ancient rhetorical treatises but, as we shall see,
were not central to the treatment of ekphrasis.
18
Don Fowler, Narrate and describe: the problem of ekphrasis, JRS, 81 (1991), p. 26
(with a useful survey). See also Philippe Hamon, Quest-ce quune description?, Potique,
112 (1972), p. 465; Mieke Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative (Toronto,
1985), p. 130: we will define a description as a textual fragment in which features are
attributed to objects; Georg Lukcs, Narrate or describe?, in Writer and Critic, ed. A. Kahn
(London, 1978), p. 127 points to the modernity of this conception of description when he
associates it with the objectification of humanity by capitalism.
19
Grard Genette, Frontires du rcit, in LAnalyse structurale du rcit (Paris, 1981), p.
162: Lopposition entre narration et description, dailleurs accentue par la tradition scolaire,
est un des traits majeurs de notre conscience littraire [The opposition between narration and
description, which, I should add, has been accentuated by traditional methods of teaching, is
one of the most important characteristics of our understanding of literature].
introduction
mode of speech which rivals the effects of painting or sculpture, creating

virtual images in the listeners mind.
It is these basic underpinnings of ancient ekphrasis that make it of
interest as well as distinguishing it from the modern usages of the term.
The aim of an investigation of ancient ekphrasis is, far from simply pointing
out how different the modern definition is, to set the ancient theory and
practice in its own context, one in which the concepts of literature and
art did not have their modern contours and in which language played
a different role. In this context, it is difficult to find exact equivalences
between modern literary terminology which was developed mainly for
the analysis of written texts (predominantly prose fiction and poetry) and
ancient categories of thought. Description is a case in point. Although it
is the nearest equivalent to ancient ekphrasis (descriptio in Latin) and
will be used frequently in this book as a translation,
its connotations are
very different, as is only to be expected of a term that has been defined
and discussed with reference to the written word rather than live, oral
performance.
Outline
Chapter 1 sets the scene and, after a brief overview of the cultural context
to which the ancient definition and use of ekphrasis belong, explores the
importance of the visual imagination in the ancient reception of texts of all
kinds. The chapter finishes with a more detailed analysis of the formation
of the modern meaning of the term which stresses the very different
cultural contexts within which this took place and the different interests
that motivated it. My exploration of the ancient conception of ekphrasis
begins in Chapter 2 with the definition of the term in the Progymnasmata
and continues in Chapter 3 which focuses on the range of subject matter
prescribed for ekphrasis. The interest of the subjects lies not only in their
variety (from battles to crocodiles, from figures to battlements) but in the
way in which the precise categories used serve to tie ekphrasis into the
broader rhetorical context.
These handbooks represent a stage in the students rhetorical training
(a point made by Paul Friedlnder) and give us a glimpse of a pedagogical
practice designed to instil certain habits in students.20 They present the
advantage of revealing the types of assumptions about language that were
assimilated by the student at a very early stage but, for the same reason,
there is a limit to what they can tell us in isolation. As textbooks they lack
the background of oral explanation, practice and example which would
20
See Ruth Webb, The Progymnasmata as practice, in Yun Lee Too (ed.), Education in
Greek and Roman Antiquity (Leiden, 2001), pp. 289316.
10
have complemented them in antiquity. As elementary exercises they do

not begin to answer questions such as how and why ekphrasis should be
used, or why it should be included in a rhetorical training at all.
If, however, one places the Progymnasmata in the wider contexts of
rhetorical training in general and of ancient assumptions about language
and psychology which were so widespread as to hardly need articulating,
a fuller picture emerges. Ekphrasis was a technique used to make the
audience feel involved in the subject matter, to make them feel as if
they were at the scene of a crime, or that they themselves witnessed the
achievements for which an emperor is being praised. Chapters 4 and 5
turn to the first-century Roman rhetorician Quintilian for an explanation
of the rhetorical uses of placing before the eyes and the psychological
background to enargeia and ekphrasis. In particular, ancient conceptions
of two closely linked faculties memory and imagination are essential to
the power of ekphrasis to appeal to the emotions, and also help to explain
why rhetoricians could be so confident about the effect vivid language
would have on an audience.
Chapter 6 analyses some examples of the use of ekphrasis in both
declamation and epideictic as prescribed by the more advanced Greek
handbooks of the Imperial period that represent the next stage in rhetorical
training after the Progymnasmata. This analysis shows first that ekphrasis
was indeed conceived as a means of achieving persuasion, of altering the
listeners perception of the subject in a way that helped the orator to win
their assent. Secondly, we see the close interconnections between ekphrasis
in the Greek tradition and Quintilians comments on enargeia and, finally,
ekphrasis in epideictic contexts is shown to have a persuasive function.
Rhetoricians stress the ability of the word to create illusions, for
obvious reasons. But their discussions are littered with phrases which
betray the as if-ness of both ekphrasis and enargeia and the ambiguous
status of the mental images they produce. The audience both sees
(metaphorically) and fails to see (literally) the subject matter. Ekphrasis
is therefore a powerful type of fiction and is central to the explorations of
the languages ability to create a universe of likeness that Barbara Cassin
has identified as typical of the Second Sophistic.21 Chapter 7 therefore
explores the fictional nature of ekphrasis by looking at instances outside
purely rhetorical texts, in the novel, for example, where authors seem to
draw attention to the fictional nature of their ekphraseis. It is also possible
to apply the reading of ekphrasis as fiction to properly rhetorical usages.
Declamations are themselves fictional speeches, a fact which makes the
ekphraseis they contain a fiction within a fiction, engaging the audience in
a complex combination of acquiescence to and awareness of the illusion.
21
Barbara Cassin, LEffet sophistique (Paris, 1995).
introduction
11
Even the uses of ekphrasis in epideictic speeches, referring as they do to

the world known to the audience, can be shown to rely to a certain extent
on the ultimate failure of the word to fulfil the task of placing before
the eyes. Loss and separation were recurring themes in the epideictic
speakers repertoire as his speeches marked the departures and arrivals,
births and deaths that punctuated the lives of the elite and of their cities.
The ekphraseis in epideictic in fact often rely for their effect on the
acknowledgement that the word cannot replace the actual presence of a
person or of a place.
Conclusion
It should be clear by now to anyone expecting to read about descriptions
of works of art (if they are still reading) that they have open
e
d the wrong
book. However, I hope that they will continue reading. Descriptions
of paintings, sculptures and buildings (even the Shield of Achilles) are
discussed as the context requires and there is much else that is relevant to
the study of the interaction of text and image. It is also important to stress
that this book is not based on the assumption that only ancient categories
can be used to analyze texts, simply that ancient categories are worthy
of interest in their own right, particularly if we wish to understand more
fully the contexts in which the texts we have were composed and some
of the ways in which they might have been received and understood by
contemporaries.
It is ironic that the modern meaning (which after all has been current for
only about half a century at the time of writing) should have almost totally
eclipsed the ancient meaning.22 The late-twentieth-century fascination with
the phenomenon of descriptions of works of art has proved extremely
fruitful, in particular in encouraging interdisciplinary exchanges between
classical scholars and specialists in other periods of literature and, to some
extent, between literary scholars and historians of art and archaeologists.
However, this achievement has been at the expense of the ancient meaning,
which is often acknowledged only to be ignored. The present book aims
to fill this lacuna.
22
Page DuBois, Reading the writing on the wall, CP, 102 (2007): 45 recalls a publishers
unwillingness to allow the term ekphrasis to be included in the title of a book because of its
unfamiliarity. Now it can be difficult to publish a book with the word ekphrasis in the title
that does not focus on descriptions of works of art.
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
and the interaction between rhetoric and literature in the case of the novel.
However, it is difficult, if not impossible, to
accept the characterization of
declamation as a disconnected series of passages after reading theoretical
works on the subject such as those by Hermogenes which reveal a highly
structured approach in which persuasion was still the main goal.
Roland Barthes,
Lancienne rhtorique: aide-mmoire, Communications, 16 (1970):
183:
Le discours tant sans but persuasif mais purement ostentatoire, se dstructure,
satomise en une suite lche de morceaux brillants, juxtaposs selon un modle rhapsodique.
Le principal de ces morceaux (il bnficiait dune trs grosse cote) tait la descriptio ou
ekphrasis. Lekphrasis est un fragment anthologique, transfrable dun discours un autre
[Since speeches had no persuasive purpose but were purely a matter of display, they lost
all structure and broke down into a loosely connected series of brilliant passages, strung
together like a rhapsodes song. The most important of these passages it was highly prized
was descriptio or ekphrasis. Ekphrasis is a select fragment, which can be transferred from
one speech to another ]. On the idiosyncrasies of Barthes overview of ancient rhetoric,
see David Cohen, Classical rhetoric and modern theories of discourse, in Ian Worthington
(ed.), Persuasion: Greek Rhetoric in Action (London, 1994), pp. 767.
14
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 Quintilians 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
his own desire to study rhetoric (paideia) and his familys 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: o

v v v ovov.
Malcolm Heath,
Theon and the history of the Progymnasmata, GRBS, 43 (2002/3):
12960 argues
for a much later date for Theon, identifying him with the fifth-century
rhetorician of the same name. I prefer to retain the earlier date because of the parallels with
Quintilian and the unusual use of Hellenistic historians while acknowledging that these are
by no means decisive criteria.
Lucian, The Dream or His Life, 113.
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 Polemos 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
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 Rhtorique de lloge dans le monde grco-romain (2 vols, Paris

, 1993)
and La Rhtorique dans lAntiquit (Paris, 2000), pp. 1047 (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).
16
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,
Augustines 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 Lucians 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 Basils 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
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): 27996.
Malcolm
Heath, Practical advocacy in Roman Egypt, in Michael J. Edwards and
Christopher Reid (eds), Oratory in Action (Manchester, 2004), pp. 6282.
Augustine, Confessions, II, iii (5) and III, iii (6) iv (7).
10
See, for example, Averil Cameron, Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire: The
Development of Christian Discourse (Berkeley, 1991);
Peter Brown, Power and Persuasion in Late
Antiquity: Towards a Christian Empire (Madison, 1992);
Eugenio Amato (ed.), Approches de la
Troisime Sophistique: hommages Jacques Schamp (Brussels, 2006).
11
See, for example, Maud Gleason, Making Men: Sophists and Self-presentation in Ancient
Rome (Princeton, 1995)
; Thomas Schmitz,
Bildung und Macht: Zur sozialen und politischen
Funktion der zweiten Sophistik in der griechischen Welt der Kaiserzeit (Munich,
1997); Tim
Whitmarsh, Greek Literature and the Roman Empire (Oxford, 2001).
12
See the seminal work of Ewen L. Bowie, Greeks and their past in the Second
Sophistic, in Moses I. Finley (ed.), Studies in Ancient Society (London, 1974), pp. 116209
and Paolo Desideri, Filostrato: la comtemporaneit del passato greco, in Fernando Gasc
and Emma Falque (eds), Pasado renacido: Uso y abuso de la tradicin clsica (Seville, 1992), pp.
5570.
17
and their contemporaries and was one of the principal media in which
relationships with Rome and the representatives of the Empire were
constructed.13
It is equally important not to lose sight of the more technical aspects of
the art of rhetoric and its continued utility as an intellectual training with
many applications. Malcolm Heath, for example, has recently stressed the
value of the rhetorical education offered in the schools of the Imperial
period and the very practical considerations that ensured its survival.14 He
has also shown the continuing vitality of the rhetorical tradition beyond
the second- and early-third-century period portrayed by Philostratos. The
Progymnasmata textbooks belong to this long history of rhetoric, spanning
as they do the first five centuries CE, and showing the continued processes
of adaptation and reflection that took place.
Rhetoric: Theory and Practice
The principle sources for the rhetorical conception of ekphrasis, the
Progymnasmata, consist primarily of a set of definitions and instructions
for the various exercises, of which ekphrasis was one. The value of these
exercises for us lies precisely in their elementary status. As the gateway
through which every rhetorically educated person passed (and the final
stage in the education of those who could not find the time or the money
to achieve a full rhetorical training), they reveal assumptions about
language and ways of reading exemplary classical authors which were
inculcated at an early age.15 In particular, the Progymnasmata represented
a process of transition from reading to speaking, the moment when the
schoolboy, whether in Egypt, Syria or Asia Minor, now primed with
examples and mastery of the classical Attic idiom still used in high-level
discourse, first began to put together his own compositions and to learn
to be heard as well as to listen. The most important thing that students
learned by working through the Progymnasmata was not rules as such but
13
See on this point Laurent
Pernot, La rhtorique
de lempire ou comment la
rhtorique
grecque a invent lempire romain, Rhetorica, 16 (1998): 13148.
14
Malcolm Heath, Menander: A Rhetor in Context (Oxford, 2004), esp. pp. 277331.
15
On ancient education and its social implications, see Robert A. Kaster, Guardians
of Language: The Grammarian and Society in Late Antiquity (Berkeley, 1988); Teresa
Morgan,
Literate Education in the Hellenistic and Roman Worlds (Cambridge, 1998)
; Yun
Lee Too (ed.),

Education in Greek and Roman Antiquity (Leiden
, 2001).
Raffaella Cribiore, The School of
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.
18
a set of practices and skills that could be put to use in (or transferred to)
the composition of full-scale speeches or other types of composition.16
The Progymnasmata were therefore neither abstract nor isolated from
the rest of the cultural context. Their purpose was to prepare students
for a life of speaking in which the failure to use the socially sanctioned
forms at the macro level of speeches or the micro level of grammar and
vocabulary could lead to serious embarrassment.17 They were also part of a
preparation for a life of critical and agonistic listening. The mention in the
definition of ekphrasis of placing the subject before the eyes (hupopsin) is
therefore far from theoretical. This was an effect that students were taught
to expect to feel for themselves when they read Homer or Thucydides,
the most frequently cited sources. But it did not end there. The point of
this reading was ultimately to enable students to work the same effect
on others as they themselves became active users of rhetoric, first of all
in their elementary ekphraseis and later in the full-scale speeches they
would compose and perform for their peers in the rhetorical schools and
in the wider world. The discussions of ekphrasis in the Progymnasmata
and in other rhetorical treatises show how future citizens were taught
to participate in its power both as readers or listeners and as speakers.
They thus learned to situate themselves as part of a continuous tradition
stretching from Homer to the Roman present and to see themselves as
involved in a reciprocal process, reproducing the effect that the classical
models had on them on their own audiences.
Above all, the rhetorical texts that form the basis of this study were
part of the living culture of their epoch. The definitions and classifications
that they contain were not the result of abstract theorizing in an antique
ivory tower but reflected and shaped actual practices. The Progymnasmata
in particular, poised as they are between the stage of reading and
speaking, also tell us about habits of reading that were deeply ingrained.
One particular habit derived from the schools, and also encouraged by the
surrounding culture, was a deep identification with texts of the past, their
authors and the events they relate, something that can be seen clearly in
the ways in which the Homeric poems are appropriated throughout Greek
and Roman culture, particularly in the way in which Homer himself is cast
as a teacher for the present.18 The rhetoricians discussions of ekphrasis, the
16
See, for example, Jean Bouffartigue, LEmpereur Julien et la culture de son temps (Paris,
1992), pp. 52333.
17
See, for example, Lucians 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 50250 (Oxford, 1996), pp.
4364.
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,
19
type of writing that places before the eyes, tell us about the imaginative
engagement that was expected.
Young readers were encouraged not to
approach texts as distanced artefacts with a purely critical eye, but to engage
with them imaginatively, to think themselves into the scenes and to feel as
if they were present at the death of Patroklos, the making of the Shield of
Achilles, or the Athenian disaster in Sicily during the Peloponnesian War.
This openness of the past to those with the educational attainments to read
the texts is clear from the uses of classical history in the declamations that
were set in the classical past. Whether performed by students in schools or
by professional sophists these speeches show a creative attitude towards
classical history. For all the reverence paid to the past, history was not a
fixed, inalterable object; events could be freely manipulated to serve the
needs of the present.19 This openness of history, its availability as matter for
manipulation, also underlies the irreverent re-imaginings of the classical
tradition by an author such as Lucian or the creative re-presentations of
moments from myth and tragedy in the Philostratean Heroikos, as well
as the better-known Eikones or Imagines. One particular manifestation of
this attitude towards the past is the habit of reading for the sensation of
being plunged into the scene or transported back into the moment, which
emerges clearly from the rhetoricians discussions of ekphrasis and is
evident in other sources as well. This habit of responding imaginatively
to the written or spoken word forms a vital part of the background to the
teaching and use of ekphrasis in rhetorical contexts and deserves to be
explored briefly here.
Seeing Words
Poets and prose writers, orators and historians were all credited with the
ability to place a subject before the audiences eyes. The many reports of
the visual impact of reading texts from classical antiquity make it clear
that intense imaginative involvement with the scenes described was
a common type of response to texts. As mentioned above, Homer and
Thucydides were the examples most often cited in the Progymnasmata and
their impact on the ancient reader is confirmed in other sources. These
1986) and Froma Zeitlin, Visions
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. 195266.
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 Sad (eds), Greeks
on Greekness: Viewing the Greek Past under the Roman Empire (Cambridge, 2006)
, pp. 2746. The
most famous ancient statement of this freedom is in Plutarchs Life of Solon, 27.1.
20
ancient writers often use language that is close to the terminology we find
in the technical definitions of ekphrasis which is credited with the ability
to place before the eyes (hupopsin) or to make listeners into spectators
(theatai). Plutarch, for example, writing in the late first or early second
century CE echoes the Progymnasmata in his judgement of Thucydides
ability to make his readers feel as if they were present at the events he
describes:
Thucydides is always striving for this vividness (enargeia) in his writing,
as he eagerly desires to make the listener a spectator, as it were, and to
produce in the minds of his readers the feelings of astonishment and
consternation which were experienced by those who witnessed the
events.
,

.
As this suggests, the visual impact is not an end in itself but has the further
effect of producing an emotional impact, involving the listener in the
events. The same enthusiasm for the visual impact of words is shown by
ps.-Longinos in his discussion of the sublime. Citing Herodotos account of
the journey from Elephantine to Meroe (26.2, cf. 9.6), he exclaims: do you
see, my friend, how he takes your soul and leads it through these places,
turning hearing into sight (tn akon opsin poin)? In these contexts, the
difference between Thucydides the dispassionate reporter and Herodotos
the teller of tall tales is nowhere to be seen. Instead, both are sources of
visual experience which transports the reader back to the events described,
involving him both imaginatively and emotionally.
Xenophon, too, was renowned for his ability to make his readers feel
that they were participating in the events of his history. Plutarch attributes
the same power to him as to Thucydides, claiming that the long account of
the battle of Cunaxa in which the younger Cyrus was killed (Anabasis, 1.8)
all but showed the events to the reader, making him feel that it was taking
place not in the distant past but before his very eyes, and that the reader
(akroats) was filled with emotion and shared in the danger.20 Lucian has
a fictional speaker in his Eikones attribute the same power to Xenophons
account of the nobility and fidelity of Pantheia, wife of Abradates
(Cyropaideia, 6.4.28), exclaiming that he feels as if he could actually see and
20
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
(gegen
mena), but as happening, using the present (gignomena).
21
all but (mononouchi) hear her arming her husband and sending him out to
battle and to his death.21 Here the exoticism of the character a non-Greek
woman acting in a manly fashion intensifies the effect of the passage
and the visual pleasure derived from it, as well as serving as a reminder
of the relentlessly masculine point of view of educated response. The
underlying erotic interest in the figure of Pantheia emerges clearly from
Lucians wider context a debate on the representability of the emperors
mistress and from Philostratos representation of Pantheias suicide over
Abradates body (Eikones, 2.9).
Philostratos treatment brings out a further habit of ancient readers
that of imaginatively elaborating upon the scenes presented in texts.
Philostratos takes Xenophon as his starting point, citing his source in the
opening lines of his description. He points out that Xenophon himself
did not describe the appearance of his heroine, but merely her character
(thos) (2.9.1) and claims that the painter of the picture he is describing
filled the gaps, painting Pantheia as he deduced her to be from her soul.
The painting that Philostratos goes on to describe therefore corresponds
to a way of reading in which a verbal account of a scene provokes a more
detailed visualization, a sensual response. In this case the beauty of
Pantheia remains tantalizingly elusive; only her posture as she lies over
her husbands body after her suicide is described in any specific detail.
Otherwise her appearance is described in only the most general of terms,
implying that for the full experience we must turn to the ever-invisible
painting and, by implication, to our imaginations.
The best-known and most explicit account of such imaginative
supplementation of a text is to be found in the compendious guide to the
whole rhetorical curriculum by the first-century CE Roman rhetorician
Quintilian, the Institutio oratoria. Citing a passage from the Verrine Orations
in which Cicero gave a brief tableau of Verres with his mistress, Quintilian
freely admits that the image that arises in his mind when he reads those
lines contains details that are not in the text.22 What is more, he presents
this response to Ciceros exemplary enargeia not just as normal but as
normative, introducing it with the question is there anyone so incapable
of (tam procul abest) forming images of things that he does not seem to see
? The passage and its implications for our understanding of ekphrasis
will be discussed below, for the moment I would just like to highlight
the way in which Quintilian presents his response as the norm: anyone
21
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, 8.3.645. For further discussion of this passage, see
Chapter 5.
22
who fails to respond as he does falls short of his readerly ideal. The same
confidence that imaginative involvement is the educated norm is shown
by the Augustan writer Dionysios of Halikarnassos in his discussion
of the enargeia of the fourth-century BCE Attic orator, Lysias. No one,
he claims, can be so clumsy, difficult to please, or slow-witted (skaios,
dusarestos kai bradus ton noun) that he will not feel that he can see what is
being shown (ta dloumena) actually happening and that he is conversing
with the characters introduced by the orator as if they were present.23
Like Quintilian, he has only pejorative terms to describe those who fail to
respond as he does.
In his discussion, acutely analysed by Graham Zanker,24 Dionysios
claims that Lysias enargeia made the reader feel as if he was in the presence
of the characters themselves, even able to converse with them (homilein).
This enargeia is a certain power to lead the things shown before the senses
(dunamis tis hupo tas aisthseis agousa ta dloumena).25 This definition of
enargeia is very close to the language used to define ekphrasis, which can be
literally translated as a speech (logos) which leads the thing shown vividly
before the eyes (hupopsin agon ta dloumena). The difference lies essentially
in the mention of the senses, where the Progymnasmata mention only sight,
the supreme sense. But, as we shall see, even the Progymnasmata definition
assumes that senses other than sight can be excited by the workings of
ekphrasis. Dionysios casts himself not as a distanced spectator but, like
those avid readers of battle narratives, as a participant who could almost
enter into the scene himself and converse with the characters. This is
partly the result of Lysias famed skill at conveying the character of the
litigants for whom he wrote through the language he gave them to speak,
but Dionysios language of showing and of vision makes clear that the
impact was felt as above all a visual one.
Readers of tragedy, too, felt drawn into the absent spectacle just by
reading the words. Several ancient commentators note the vividness
of tragic passages.26 Dio Chrysostom in the first century prefaces his
discussion of the three versions of Philoktetes by the three great tragedians
that were still extant in his day by saying that he was magnificently
entertained by the spectacle (thea) as he read (Or. 52.3). And ps.-Longinos
describes the sheer emotional force of merely reading certain passages
from tragedy. Vividness (enargeia) in poetry, he explains, has a shattering
23
The Augustan writer, Dionysios of Halikarnassos, Lysias 7.
Graham
Zanker, Enargeia in the ancient criticism of poetry, RhMus, 124 (1981):
297311.
25
Dionysios of Halikarnassos, Lysias 7.

26
See
Roos Meijering, Literary and Rhetorical Theories in Greek Scholia (Groningen, 1987),
esp. pp. 4952.
24
23
impact (ekplxis). 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
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.
See Webb,
The Progymnasmata as practice,
pp. 3012.
29
See especially Whitmarsh, Greek Literature and the Roman Empire; Joy Connolly,
Problems of the past in Imperial Greek education, in Yun Lee Too (ed.), Greek and Roman
Education (Leiden, 2001), pp. 33972; Schmitz, Bildung und Macht, in an otherwise brilliant
analysis of the social function of sophistic practices, places too much emphasis on the past as
an overwhelming burden that crushed the elite.
30
Jane P. Tompkins, The reader in history: the changing shape of literary response,
in Jane P. Tompkins (ed.), Reader-response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-structuralism
(Baltimore, 1980).
31
Tompkins, The reader in history, pp. 2023. See also

Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy:
The Technologizing of the Word (New York, 1988)
, Chapter 3.
28
24
not valued, theorized and articulated in the same way and do not have the
same social and cultural significance as, say, an Imperial Greek readers
response to his classical reading.
Discussions of visual response to words, as Tompkins points out,
are one area in which these differences emerge particularly acutely. As
Ellen Esrock has noted, readerly visuality has been neglected as a valid
response by modern criticism for a variety of reasons.32 Ancient critics,
by contrast, speak as if such imaginative responses to words were the
norm. In the case of Quintilian and Dionysios, failure to respond in this
way is even seen as a sign of a much greater moral deficiency. Those who
do not respond as they do are branded as slow, incapable, difficult to
please the language bristles with terms of distance and negation (abest,
dusarestos). Such confidence may seem surprising to us. It goes against
our own cultures tendency to assume that visualization in response to
reading is personal and variable in intensity and in content. An average
group of twentieth- or twenty-first-century readers will probably contain
individuals who admit to similar experiences when reading, and others
who claim never to see what they read. Many people assume that their
experience of reading is universal and seem genuinely surprised to find
that others have such different experiences of reading.33 This discrepancy
between modern experience and the claims of ancient critics raises the
question of whether we should discount the claims of ancient critics,
or whether the ancient experience of reading was very different from
our own. When Quintilian and Dionysios both ask who could fail to
respond in the ways they prescribe they open up the possibility that
some individuals may not have responded in this way but, at the same
time, they make clear what they consider the norm to be. The question of
whether this represents a real difference in response between ancient and
modern audiences has been raised by Ann Vasaly and I would agree with
her suggestion that things were different in the ancient world and that
ancient audiences were more consciously attuned to visual effects and did
see the subject of poems and speeches in their minds eye.34
The most striking difference does not perhaps reside in the elusive
domain of personal response but in the discussions of that response. It
32
Ellen J. Esrock, The Readers Eye: Visual Imaging as Reader Response (Baltimore, 1994).
These conclusions are the result of several discussions with small seminar groups
composed of graduate students and faculty at Princeton University. For a more scientific
approach, see
Jocelyn Penny
Small, Wax Tablets of the Mind: Cognitive Studies of Memory and
Literacy in Classical Antiquity (London, 1997), pp. 13031
on the work of Michel Denis.

33
34
Ann Vasaly, Representations: Images of the World in Ciceronian Oratory (Berkeley, 1993),
p.
99. On the question of how rhetors could predict the imaginative response of their audience,
which Vasaly raises here, see Chapters 4 and 5 below. I am leaving aside the question of what
the mental experience expressed by the claims to see actually might have been.
25
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 earguards 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
encouraged by their education. A discussion of reading aloud by the firstcentury 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 37F38B).

Rhetorica ad Herennium, 3.16.2824.30.
See also Cicero, De oratore, 2.35460

; 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
See also
Agns Rouveret
, Histoire et imaginaire de la peinture ancienne (Ve s. av. J.-C.Ier
s. ap. J.-C.) (Rome, 1989), p.
312.
38
Theon, Progymnasmata, section 13 (p. 103). This discussion of reading aloud comes
from the end of the work, which does not survive in the Greek manuscripts and is preserved
only in the Armenian translation.
36
26
in the persona of a character from the classical past, often an orator like
Demosthenes.39
Theons recommendations also help to explain the way in which
ancient readers of all types of text cast themselves as listeners. The term
translated reader in several of the examples above is akroats listener
and what is read is often referred to as a logos, with all its implications of
live speech. Despite the importance of the written word, and its culturally
crucial role in preserving the words of past eras, the reception of texts
remained an essentially aural experience. Active listening was considered
as an important activity in itself.40 As Theon shows, reading in the school
situation meant reading aloud to others, and even solitary readers are
known to have pronounced the words out loud, casting themselves
simultaneously as speaker and audience.41 This effacement of the written
medium brings the author, whether poet, historian or orator, into direct
proximity, casting the reader as a live audience member, like Dio at his
private performances of tragedy. All readers, even of the deadest of poets,
are thus assimilated to the audiences of a live performance.
The live audiences of spoken orations were also assumed to respond
in the same way to the effective use of vivid language. We have fewer
testimonies of individual response, but the whole treatment of ekphrasis
and enargeia by ancient rhetoricians is based on the assumption that
audiences can be made to respond imaginatively to a speech, placing
themselves in the situation described. Aristotle, in the Rhetoric (1411 b24
5), refers to the ability of certain metaphors to place the image before the
eyes pro ommatn and makes a distinction between metaphors that
evoke an image of motion (energeia) which have this effect, and others,
whose image is static, which do not. Quintilian (8.3.62) also makes clear
that the audience of a judicial speech should have the subject matter
displayed to the eyes of the mind, and that he regards success in this as
a vital ingredient of the persuasive force of the speech. The speech will
not have the power that it should (debet) have if the judge believes he is
hearing a simple narration, rather than having the facts displayed to his
minds eye, si narrari credit, non exprimi et oculis mentis ostendi.
Quintilians purpose in describing his own response to Cicero, or
picking out the vivid passages in the Aeneid is therefore to explain to his
39
See Brian Reardon, Courants littraires grecs des IIe et IIIe sicles aprs J.-C. (Paris,
1971);
Donald
Russell, Greek Declamation (Cambridge, 1983)
; Schmitz, Bildung und Macht and
Performing History
; and Webb, Fiction, mimesis and the performance of the Greek past.
40
See Theon, Progymnasmata, section 14 and Plutarch, On Listening to Lectures (Moralia

37C48D).
41
See William
Harris, Ancient Literacy (Cambridge, MA, 1989), pp.

356 with further
bibliography.
27
own readers how, and why, to work the same effect in their own speeches.
This practical orientation is shared by most ancient critics they aim to tell
us how to do it, not simply to analyse the qualities of a particular writer
or passage making ancient criticism a very different phenomenon
from modern literary criticism. Ancient critics were mostly practitioners
of rhetoric and their primary goal was to show others how to be active
practitioners and how to harness the power of language for their own
ends. Just as the ancient reader was simultaneously speaker and listener
as he read aloud, educated readers in general expected to become writers
and speakers in their turn.42
The elementary exercise of ekphrasis was one means by which students
were taught to appreciate the ability of words to spark an image in the mind
and to master this power for themselves. The discussions of ekphrasis can
therefore help us to understand how texts were read and what impact the
spoken word was thought to have upon an audience. They also reveal the
strength of the conception of language as a power acting upon the world
that was current throughout antiquity. As a special use of language to bring
the subject matter before the eyes of the listener, penetrating the mind
and acting on the most intimate of faculties, ekphrasis and enargeia also
lie at the intersection of word and image. Any examination of either has
to take account of ancient theories of psychology in which mental images
(phantasmata or phantasiai) played a vital part from the classical period
onwards. The plain, paradoxical statement we find in the Progymnasmata
and elsewhere that language places a subject before the eyes depended
on a body of assumptions about language and its impact on the human
mind. In turn, these ideas can point to the effects that words actually had
on their audiences, as their minds became the locus of interaction between
word and image.
The ancient discussions of ekphrasis define it as a type of speech
that creates immaterial images in the mind. The speaker of a successful
ekphrasis is therefore a metaphorical painter, the result of his words
is a metaphorical painting and this analogy emerges at certain points
in the discussions. The Byzantine scholar John Sardianos, for example,
commenting on the ancient rhetorical texts that were still in use in the
Greek Middle Ages, points out that ekphrasis works by imitating the
painters art.43 How this paradoxical feat could be accomplished, and why
it was considered useful for students of rhetoric, will be the subject of the
42
Harris, Ancient Literacy, pp. 2223 notes it may seem that only the exceptionally
inarticulate members of the Roman upper class refrained from literary composition. The
same can be said of the Greek elite in the Roman period, assuming that literary composition
includes rhetorical compositions.
43
Sardianos, Commentarium, p. 217, ll. 35.
28
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 terms
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
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 Lucians 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,
1993)
concentrate on examples drawn from poetry; John Hollander, The Gazers Spirit: Poems
Speaking to Silent Works of Art (Chicago and London, 1995) defines the subject of his work as
actual ecphrasis that is, poems written in response to real works of art (p. 4).
29
questions that led Henri Piot and Jacques Bompaire to focus on the special
category of ekphraseis of works of art while acknowledging that the sense
of the term was far wider in antiquity. Discussing
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 Lucians 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 Piots use of the phrase transpositions dart
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 Thophile Gautier
who attempted to translate the sensual

beauty of art into words. For Gautier, doyen of the doctrine of lart pour
lart, the verbal and graphic artist shared the task of representing reality
through the workings of art.47
45
Henri Piot, Les Procds littraires de la IIe Sophistique chez Lucien: lecphrasis (Rennes,
1914), p.
22:
Lobjet de lecphrasis, dit Hermogne est
de mettre sous les yeux la chose quon

veut montrer. Elle a des rapports trs troits avec les transpositions dart 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 dart
beloved of the Alexandrians].
46
Jacques Bompaire, Lucien crivain: imitation et cration (Paris, 1958), p.

707: le
sens le
plus intressant est celui qui fait de lecphrasis doeuvre dart, sc. tableau, difice, lecphrasis
par excellence la littrature se nourrit dart
[The most interesting meaning is the one
which treats ecphrasis of works of art (paintings, buildings) as ecphrasis par excellence
literature is nourished by art]. Cf.
Louis Mridier, LInfluence de la Seconde Sophistique sur
luvre de Gregoire de Nysse (Paris, 1906)
, p. 150 (on Gregory of Nyssa).
47
Gautiers own writing has been described as a transposition crite du tableau.
See Georges Mator,
Le Vocabulaire de la prose littraire de 1835 1845: Thophile Gautier et
ses premires oeuvres en prose (Geneva and Lille, 1951), p. 142. In his poem LArt, Gautier
presents verbal and sculptural artistry as equivalent: Oui, loeuvre sort plus belle / Dune
forme au travail / Rebelle / Vers, marbre, onyx, mail [Yes, more beautiful pieces emerge
from forms that resist being worked: verse, marble, onyx, enamel].
30
The part played by such aesthetic doctrines in the shaping of the modern
conception of ekphrasis is shown clearly in the studies of Philostratos by
two earlier French scholars, the art historian Edouard Bertrand and the
philologist Auguste Bougot, both published in 1881. Both attempted to
move the study of the Eikones away from the question of whether the text
was archaeologically accurate or not, which had dominated the scholarship
up until then, particularly in Germany. Bertrand and Bougot attempted
instead to understand the cultural background to Philostratos though
Bertrands depiction of the Second Sophistic seems to owe a great deal
to late-nineteenth-century Parisian culture and identified Philostratos
as an art critic whose descriptions showed how art was perceived, an
approach that anticipated twentieth-century readings of the text.48
Bertrand and Bougot also took the step of placing the text within a
tradition of poetic descriptions of works of art, a type of text which
resonated with contemporary developments in French literature and arts.
Both, moreover, borrowed the term ekphrasis as a label for this tradition,
although the ways in which they introduced it into their discussions suggest
that they were far from confident about its usage.
Bertrand enigmatically
refers to the descriptions of works of art in authors of the Roman period
such as Catullus, Virgil, Statius, Martial, Apuleius and Lucian as belonging
to a fashionable genre which had its own name.49 The name turns out to
be ekphrasis. But Bertrand is curiously coy about saying so. He hides the
word itself in a footnote and leaves it in Greek letters. Most importantly,
however, he implies that Philostratos consciously saw himself as writing
within this tradition. In a passage bordering on historical fiction, Bertrand
imagines Philostratos as an ambitious writer, desperate to surpass these
predecessors, who suddenly one day had the idea of creating the new genre
of art criticism.50 Bougot, whose translation and substantial introduction
appeared just before Bertrands study, also brought the term ekphrasis
into his discussion rather ambiguously, entitling one section Lecphrasis
ou description des oeuvres dart, leaving open the question of whether
48
See, for example,

Ja
Elsner, Art and the Roman Viewer: The Transformation of Art from
the Pagan World to Christianity (Cambridge, 1995).
49
Bertrand, Un critique dart dans lantiquit, p. 49: cest un genre en faveur qui a un
nom particulier.
50
Bertrand, Un critique dart dans lantiquit, pp. 534: Tourment de la mme ambition,
Philostrate stait aussi cr un style singulier compos darchasmes et de nologismes. Mais
il eut un jour une pense neuve, et ce jour l il cra un genre qui lui survcut et suscita
des imitateurs: il cra la critique dart [Tormented by the same ambition, Philostratos also
developed a unique style combining archaisms and neologisms. But one day he had a new
idea and on that day he created a genre which outlived him and inspired imitators: he
created art criticism]. The use of unusual vocabulary which Bertrand underlines here was
also a characteristic of Parnassian poetics.
31
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 Friedlnders 1912 edition of two Late Antique
ekphraseis of monuments: Paul the Silentiarys ekphrasis of Hagia Sophia
and John of Gazas ekphrasis of a bath building. Friedlnders 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, Lucians
Calumny of Apelles, Euripides Ion, Greek and Latin epigrams. But while
Friedlnders 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 lAncien, pp. 1 and 171.

Antonio Muoz, Le nella letteratura bizantina e i loro rapporti con larte
figurata, in Recueil dtudes ddies la mmoire 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.
223 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
Friedlnder, Johannes von Gaza und Paulus Silentiarius, pp. 845. In his
1939
edition of Prokopios of Gazas ekphrasis of a painting, Fried
lnder
still used the term
52
32
The reputation that Friedlnders 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, Friedlnder 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 Friedlnder, 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
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
Friedlnder, Johannes von Gaza und Paulus Silentiarius, p. 83: Man pflegt heut
literargeschichtliche Fragen, wie sie uns beschftigen, mit dem Schlagwort rhetorische
Ekphrasis mehr scheinbar als wirklich zu beantworten und glaubt, dass hier die
Rhetorenschule schpferisch gewesen sei. See also his comments on descriptions of works
of art in the novel: ibid., pp. 47 and 545.
55
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. xvixvii) that Philostratos
33
in a footnote by Erwin Rohde who, in his study of the Greek novels, first
published in 1876, suggested that the roots of rhetorisch-sophistischen
ekphraseis of paintings and statues from the Second Sophistic lay in the
earlier poetic tradition.57 This note, too, mentions many of the standard
examples of what would now be called ekphrasis, from the Shield of
Achilles, through the Cloak of Jason in the Argonautica and Moschus
Europa, to Virgil, Catullus and Nonnus.
Like Friedlnders survey all these footnotes and comments served to
draw attention to the phenomenon of describing works of art in antiquity
but without applying the label ekphrasis to them. The term floats in the
vicinity of these discussions, but, unlike Bertrand and Bougot, the authors
do not apply it as a unifying label for writing on art nor do they suggest
that they are discussing or defining a genre. This explains why Schissel
von Fleschenberg, in his study of the use of descriptions of works of art
in the novel published in 1913, does not use it but invents instead the
term Bildeinsatz (inset painting) to designate what would now almost
automatically be termed ekphrasis.58 What Schissel von Fleschenbergs
article does show is the growing interest in this technique as a literary
phenomenon. In the same way, Bertrand and Bougot were inspired by
contemporary cultural debates in their refreshing attempt to wrest the
Eikones from the stale debates about the accuracy and reliability of the
descriptions and to show that Philostratos enterprise was something
different: a reflection of the place of art in society and, in Bertrands
account, the birth of art criticism.
As we have already seen, a parallel interest in Imperial ekphraseis of
paintings, sculpture and buildings as sources of information on lost works
also contributed to the process. However, almost all of the classical and
medieval studies acknowledge the ancient sense of the term and often take
their starting points from ekphraseis of works of art. The revolutionary step
of defining ekphrasis as an essentially poetic genre, totally divorced from
the rhetorical form of ekphrasis, was taken by Leo Spitzer in his famous
essay on Keats Ode on a Grecian Urn, first published in 1955. Here,
Spitzer identifies the ode as part of a long tradition called ekphrasis:
failed to produce proper ekphraseis and succumbed instead to the temptations of rhetorical
embellishment.
57
Erwin Rohde, Der griechische Roman und seine Vorlufer (Leipzig, 1900), p. 360n.
58
In a letter to Friedlndler written in 1913 and now in the Paul Friedlnder Collection,
UCLA Special Collections (Box 1). In the letter Schissel uses the term Bildbeschreibung but
not ekphrasis. Schissel von Fleschenberg criticizes his historicist approach as old-fashioned
(as well as taking great pleasure in pointing out various omissions of primary and secondary
sources). In his article Schissel justified his deliberate omission of any enquiry into the origins
of the Bildeinsatz by distinguishing his type of literary studies (Literaturwissenschaft) from the
(implicitly inferior) enterprise of literary history.
34
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 Thophile Gautier, une transposition
dart, the reproduction, through the medium of words, of sensuously
perceptible objets dart (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 dart, do, however, reveal the intellectual currents
which shaped his interest in and conception of ekphrasis.60 A further
parallel with Bertrands and Bougots studies of Philostratos in particular
emerges later on in Spitzers discussion of Keats ode when he insists on
the poems function as a representation of the poets response to the sight
of the urn. Interestingly, he presents this as a particular development of
ekphrasis, which he appears to conceive of as simply a form of objective
description: The ekphrasis, the description of an objet dart by the
medium of the word, has here developed into an account of an exemplary
experience felt by the poet confronted with an ancient work of art 61
Spitzers achievement was to create a concept of a poetic genre that
triumphantly transcended both time and place. Homer, Theokritos, the
Parnassian poets and Rilke all partook of the same essence. The way in
which he introduces the first of the quotations gives the unsuspecting
reader no clue that he has just invented a genre, albeit one that had long
been waiting to happen. He presents it as an obvious generic statement, a
straightforward starting point for any study of Keats ode. His method is to
separate what might count as straightforward description (What exactly
... Keats [has] seen (or chosen to show us) depicted on urn he is describing
(pp. 723)) from the symbolic or metaphysical inferences drawn by the
poet from the visual elements he has apperceived (p. 73). The statement
that Keats poem is about an art object and that other such poems have
59
Leo Spitzer,
The
Ode on a Grecian Urn, or content vs. metagrammar,
in Essays
on English and American Literature, ed. Anna Hatcher (Princeton, 1962)
, p. 72.
60
Spitzer had previously published articles on descriptions of works of art in the poetry
of Mrike, Wiederum Mrikes Gedicht Auf eine Lampe, Trivium, 9 (1951): 20325 and
Garcilaso de la Vega
, Garcilaso, Third Eclogue, Lines 265271, Hispanic Review, 20 (1952):
2438.
The term ekphrasis appears once, buried in a footnote, in the latter of these. Given
Spitzers background in French and classics and his interest in the description of works of
art, it does seem likely that he knew the work of Bertrand, Bougot and Piot, not to mention
the Oxford Classical Dictionary. I am grateful to Alejandro Coroleu for drawing my attention
to the article on Garcilaso.
61
Spitzer, The Ode
on a Grecian Urn, p. 89.
35
existed from antiquity onwards is, one would think, incontrovertible, and
gives Spitzer the basis for a brilliant analysis. But such a straightforward
statement hides the revolutionary nature of his claim for ekphrasis and
its implications of unity of poetic purpose across time and space. What
is a useful concept and a useful set of comparanda for the critic embarking
upon a reading of the Ode on a Grecian Urn is presented as literaryhistorical fact.
One can speculate on the attraction of such continuity in Western
culture for a refugee scholar like Spitzer.62 But the effect of his definition,
taken in isolation, was to obliterate cultural distinctions and to remove
rhetoric, particularly the rhetorical culture of the Roman period, entirely
from the picture. The term ekphrasis is restricted not only to descriptions
of works of art but to poetic descriptions of works of art and simultaneously
expanded to include all periods of Western culture. The rest is history.
Spitzers constitution of the new genre of ekphrasis catapulted the word
out of the specialized domain of classical and archaeology into the world
of English and Comparative Literature, sparking essays, books, colloquia,
redefinitions and counter-definitions.63 The popularity and influence
of Spitzers definition show more clearly than ever that his new genre
satisfied an intellectual need. Descriptions of works of art as a group had
attracted interest since the Renaissance.64 This interest emerges in the
grouping of Philostratos Eikones with Kallistratos Ekphraseis by Olearius,
in the archaeological debates about whether such descriptions were
62
Spitzer himself makes an autobiographical comment in the article, describing

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): 297316
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 Ovids description of Arachnes
tapestry in Metamorphoses, the Homeric Shield of Achilles and its Virgilian descendent,
the Shield of Aeneas, ending ad haec navis, vestis, vo, machinae, currus, Colossi,
pyramidis, aut si quid est aliud rerum consimilium, quarum descriptio delectet.
36
records or mere rhetoric, in the fascination with the ways in which one
art represents another and the autonomy of the arts that this suggests.
Spitzers ekphrasis was a genre, or mode, in search of a label. The vogue
for New Criticism meant that Spitzers definition fell on particularly fertile
ground, as witnessed by Murray Kriegers study of Keats ode and of his
conception of ekphrasis.65
Since the mid twentieth century, ekphrasis, generally understood as the
description of works of art, usually in poetry, has become a familiar term,
though the basic definition has given rise to many different approaches,
which it is impossible to survey here. One such development that has been
fruitful in the study of classical literature is the reading of descriptions
of works of art as metapoetic commentaries on the literary work within
which they are found.66 Such developments reflect the linguistic turn
in twentieth-century approaches to literature, a development that freed
the study of description in particular from the expectation that language
should depict reality and underlined the problems involved in verbal
representation.67
This same development made possible a fresh appreciation of
rhetorical texts of all kinds, in particular the rhetoric of the Second
Sophistic, including its ekphraseis of works of art. However, the resulting
renaissance of interest in the Second Sophistic and later rhetoric has
tended to focus on those texts that most resemble modern literature,
such as dialogues and the novel, and, in the case of ekphrasis, a certain
subgroup of ekphraseis of works of art (such as Philostratos Eikones)
has come to stand as emblematic of the whole of ekphrasis. The fact that
this move misrepresents the category of ekphrasis as it was understood
in antiquity does not in any way undermine the interpretative value of
individual studies of individual literary texts. But, if we are interested in
the wider intellectual and cultural contexts in which these texts were read,
heard and composed, it is misleading to assume that ancient categories
and assumptions about language were identical to our own. Of course,
those ancient categories are irrecoverable in their entirety but there is still
a large amount of information that is still to be exploited in sources such
as scholia and rhetorical handbooks.68 This study aims to elucidate the
65
Murray Krieger, Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign (Baltimore, 1992).
See, for example,

Perrine Galand-Hallyn, Le Reflet des fleurs: description et mtalangage
potique dHomre 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., Littrature et ralit
(Paris, 1982) and in Yale French Studies, 61 (1981).
68
Two notable examples of such an approach are

Roos Meijering, Literary and Rhetorical
Theories in Greek Scholia (Groningen, 1987) and Michel Patillon, La Thorie du discours chez
66
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
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 Spitzers
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
Hermogne le Rhteur: essai sur les structures linguistiques de la rhtorique ancienne (Paris, 1988).
38
the different role of the visual is key to the profound differences between
the conceptions underlying the two definitions. For the modern definition
the visual is a quality of the referent, which in some definitions is already
a representation of reality. For the ancient rhetoricians the impact of
ekphrasis is visual; it is a translation of the perceptible which mimics the
effect of perception, making the listener seem to see. The impact on the
audience is powerful and immediate as Plutarch claims for Xenophon
and Thucydides; it is a psychological effect, and, as I shall argue below,
what is imitated in ekphrasis and enargeia is not reality, but the perception
of reality. The word does not seek to represent, but to have an effect in the
audiences mind that mimics the act of seeing.
As moderns we cannot hope to understand something like ekphrasis
entirely from an ancient perspective: the sources at our disposal represent
a fraction of the definitions and paradigms available to the ancient
rhetorician.69 I am fully aware that what I am proposing in the following
chapters is another modern interpretation of ancient ekphrasis. However,
it is one that is based on a more comprehensive study of the ancient
theoretical sources than has been undertaken before and therein, I hope,
lies its main interest.
69
See the remarks of Don Fowler in his essay

Narrate and describe: the problem of
ekphrasis, JRS, 81 (1991): 2535.
2. Learning Ekphrasis: The Progymnasmata
Ancient Usages and Contexts

As we have seen in Chapter 1, the restriction of the term ekphrasis to texts
on art is a relatively modern development, inspired by modern disciplines
and fields of interest. If we turn to the ancient usages of the word we
find ourselves in a very different intellectual world from that inhabited
by the literary critics, art historians and archaeologists who contributed
in their various ways to the invention of the modern genre of ekphrasis.
Although the ancient usages of the term which are most familiar to us
are from texts like the Younger Philostratos Eikones, to ancient readers it
would most probably have brought back memories of their schooldays.
Ekphrasis and the related verb ekphraz were used overwhelmingly in
technical, rhetorical contexts: in handbooks for students and teachers of
rhetoric, like the Progymnasmata, and in learned commentaries on classical
texts. The first recorded usage is preserved in the writings of the Augustan
critic Dionysios of Halikarnassos. He criticizes the historian Philistos for
failing to use an appropriate style in his ekphraseis of places, battles and
the like. But since the passage in question comes from a later epitome it
is impossible to ascribe its usage with any certainty to Dionysios himself.
It was however certainly well established in the vocabulary of school texts
by the first century CE when Theon wrote his Progymnasmata, which may
therefore contain the earliest extant usage.
As a post-classical term, it was generally avoided in finished speeches
written in Attic Greek. When authors needed to refer to the act of
describing in their works they preferred other terms, such as hermneuo
(to express in words) or simply digoumai (to relate, to go through), as
Dionysios of Halikarnassos does in the parallel passage to the section of
the epitome in which the term ekphrasis occurs. Ekphrasis, in contrast,
was mostly restricted to the vocabulary of the classroom, the tools of the
teachers trade, used to teach composition and to dissect the works of
Dionysios of Halikarnassos, On Imitation, 3.8.

See Wilhelm Geissler, Ad descriptionum historiam symbola (Leipzig, 1916), p. 12. The
usages of the verb ekphraz in Euripides and Sophocles which are cited in the older editions
of Liddell and Scotts GreekEnglish Lexicon have now been rejected as later variants.

Dionysios of Halikarnassos, Letter to Pompeios Geminos, 5.6.
40
the classical canon. Thus we find the term in Greek manuals of rhetoric
from the Roman period, like Hermogenes treatise On Types of Style (Peri
Iden Logou) and in the commentaries on his other work on declamation,
or the guide to epideictic speeches by Menander Rhetor. It is also used
in the commentaries on the classical texts which were read in schools.
The scholia to Homers Iliad, for example, identify a range of passages
as ekphrasis. Some of these overlap with the modern usage, like the
description of shields, while others are simply moments in the action in
which the commentator found particular appeals to the imagination.
All these texts scholia, Progymnasmata, and more advanced rhetorical
handbooks reflect the teaching dispensed in schoolrooms throughout the
Greek-speaking areas of the Roman Empire. They are often anonymous, or
wrongly attributed to some famous name (like Hermogenes or Dionysios
of Halikarnassos), and are difficult to date with any certainty. Taken
together, however, they do reflect a set of coherent ideas and doctrines
which make it possible to build up a picture of what ancient readers
and writers understood by a term like ekphrasis. The general ideas
underlying the treatments of ekphrasis in these technical sources were
not new. Effective poetry, and later prose, had always appealed to the
imagination. But what is particularly interesting about the Roman period
is that we can see a range of interconnecting attempts to identify and teach
this type of writing. We see which passages from the canonical classical
texts became widely accepted as models; we see attempts to explain why
and how these models should be absorbed and imitated. Finally, we can
often see the results of the teaching methods in finished compositions,
such as speeches or even in non-rhetorical works, so pervasive were the
effects of the rhetorical education.
As we have already seen, these technical, pedagogical sources, including
the commentaries on classical texts, had a very practical aim: teaching
students to express themselves effectively and in forms sanctioned by
the prestige of tradition (the two were not necessarily contradictory or
distinct). They are fragments of what was once a living and complex
process of training in which a great deal must have depended on oral
traditions and live interaction between teachers and students. As a result,
they give us a privileged glimpse behind the literary scenes. However, for
the very same reasons, they can be opaque.

Scholia graeca in Homeri Iliadem, ed. Hartmut Erbse (7 vols, Berlin, 196988) to 11.616
(shields); 15.2378 (the descent of Apollo, likened to a hawk); 18.610 (the armour made by
Hephaistos to go with the Shield of Achilles) and 23.232 (Achilles sinking into sleep).

See the remarks of Raffaella Cribiore, Gymnastics of the Mind: Greek Education in
Hellenistic and Roman Egypt (Princeton, 2001),
p. 143.
Learning Ekphrasis: The Progymnasmata
41
The Progymnasmata textbooks for example were probably never

intended to be a source of definitive statements of theory, but were keys to
an educational process. As even C.S. Baldwin grudgingly admitted, they
can give us some idea of the compositional categories in which students
were taught to conceptualize their writings, as well as of habits of thought
and analysis inculcated in the young. Theon certainly speaks as if this
were the effect of the training he recommends. By offering examples of his
own composition, the teacher will imprint them (tupo) on his students
minds, so that they in turn can imitate (mimeisthai) them. The two verbs
reveal strikingly how Theon wished to think of the educational process he
was representing: through his compositions, he shapes, even brands, the
students minds.10 The student, in turn, learns by imitation, by aping the
actions of his master until he is able to produce an analogous work of his
own. In this way, he learns to imitate the processes, not merely the forms,
of composition. As described by Theon, it is an intellectual formation
which takes root at the level of habit.
So the Progymnasmata reflect a stage in the shaping of the literary
consciousness (to borrow Genettes phrase) of the elite students who
studied rhetoric, rather than being critical tools for the analysis of texts.
They also derived their full utility and significance from their wider
cultural and intellectual context. The Progymnasmata are most likely to
prove useful if read, as far as possible, against that context, as I will try
to do in the next chapters, by setting them in their larger educational
context and by investigating the ideas about vividness in language and
about the relationship of mind, language, memory and emotion which
are presupposed by the authors of the Progymnasmata. Though the
Progymnasmata certainly do not suffice to explain works like the ancient
All the surviving versions of the Progymnasmata have been translated in George A.
Kennedy, Progymnasmata: Greek Textbooks of Prose Composition and Rhetoric (Atlanta, 2003). I
have supplied my own translations of the chapters on ekphrasis in Appendix A.

Charles S. Baldwin, Medieval Rhetoric and Poetic (New York, 1928), p. 38: Arid,
impersonal as arithmetic, pedantically over-classified, sometimes inconsistent, these rules
are nevertheless illuminating. They expose sophistic oratory. The patterns set forth for boys
are recognizably the patterns of the public oratory of men.

On the formation of habit in rhetorical education, see James J. Murphy, The key role
of habit in Roman rhetoric and education as described by Quintilian, in Toms Albaladejo et
al. (eds), Quintiliano: Historia y actualidad de la retrica (Logroo, 1998), pp. 14150.

Theon, Progymnasmata, ed.
and trans.
Michel Patillon and G. Bolognesi (Paris: Les
Belles Lettres, 1997), 70,
l. 30 71, l. 2. Examples of such models are included in the corpus

of Libanios, in Opera, vol. 8.
10
Libanios, Letter 337 similarly refers to a grammarian who is able to make the poets
dwell in students souls. On ancient images of education as moulding and shaping, see
Teresa Morgan, Literate Education in the Hellenistic and Roman Worlds (Cambridge, 1998), pp.
25960.
42
novels, Philostratos Eikones or even a declamation, they can provide one

set of clues to the cultural and intellectual background of a work and to
the basic assumptions about language and representation which inform
the text. It is not surprising that the general influence of the Progymnasmata
is detectable sometimes quite patently, sometimes in a more subtle form
in poetry, historiography and other types of writing.
Ekphrasis and the Progymnasmata
As exercises, the Progymnasmata were a keystone of the education
process of the elite, marking the transition from grammar to rhetoric and
presenting the student with a set of literary, linguistic and ethical concepts
at a formative stage in his career.11 With these exercises, students had their
first taste of composition and their first opportunity to engage creatively
with the literary traditions they had absorbed from the grammarians.
The rhetorical skills they taught were the badge of the adult educated
male.12 While some exercises, like the chreia (a discussion of a saying
attributed to some famous figure such as Diogenes the Cynic) might
include grammatical exercises (demanding that the students rewrite a
simple sentence in different grammatical forms), others were primarily
aimed at developing skills of presentation and argumentation.13 In the
form in which they have come down to us, these exercises range from a
fable (muthos), using animal characters to illustrate a moral, and a simple
narrative (digma), usually taken from mythology,14 through exercises
in praise (enkmion) and blame (psogos), to the systematic discussion of
a general question such as whether one should marry (thesis) and the
introduction of a law (nomou eisphora). Other exercises include the chreia;
11
See Theon, Progymnasmata, 70, ll. 2932. On the curriculum, see
Robert A. Kaster,
Guardians of Language: The Grammarian and Society in Late Antiquity (Berkeley, 1988)
; Malcolm
Heath, Menander: A Rhetor in Context (Oxford, 2004) and, on Progymnasmata in particular, see
Morgan, Literate Education, pp. 1912; Cribiore, Gymnastics of the Mind, pp. 22044 and The
School of Libanius in Late Antique Antioch (Princeton, 2007), pp. 1437; and Ruth Webb, The
Progymnasmata as practice, in Yun Lee Too (ed.), Education in Greek and Roman Antiquity
(Leiden, 2001), pp. 289316.
12
Public speaking was understood as a masculine activity, and in consequence I will
assume that students and teachers were male. On female education, see Ewen Bowie,
The
readership of Greek novels in the ancient world, in James Tatum (ed.), The Search for the
Ancient Novel (Baltimore, 1994), pp. 43559 and Cribiore, Gymnastics of the Mind, pp. 74101.
13
On the chreia, see Ronald Hock and Edward ONeil, The Chreia in Ancient Rhetoric:
Volume I. The Progymnasmata (Atlanta, 1986) and Volume 2: Classroom Exercises (Atlanta,
2002).
14
These narrative exercises, particularly digma, prepared for the narrative section of
a speech (digsis).
43
kataskeu and anaskeu, the confirmation or refutation of a story on the basis

of certain criteria like probability; koinos topos (common place), a rehearsal
of the commonly held opinions about a certain type of person (such as
a murderer or a temple-robber); synkrisis, or comparison, in which one
thing is proved better or worse than another by systematic comparison
of the qualities of both; prospopoiia or thopoiia, a speech in the words
of a character in a certain situation (such as Ajax when he had lost the
contest for the arms of Achilles, or Niobes lament for her children)15 and
the composition of an ekphrasis.
Quintilian (Institutio oratoria, 1.9) mentions some of these exercises
and notes that in first-century CE Rome this part of the curriculum was
being taken over by the grammarians. The discussion of these exercises
by Suetonius suggests that by the late first or early second century they
were no longer taught by the rhetors at all, and were presumably taught
entirely in the grammarians schools.16 However, Quintilian warns us
against assuming that this was a universal phenomenon. He attributes
some of the blame for this situation to the Roman rhetors, many of
whom considered such elementary teaching to be beneath them, and
he contrasts their behaviour to that of their Greek counterparts who, he
claims, recognized the value of the Progymnasmata and did not disdain to
teach them. Theons Progymnasmata may therefore represent an attempt
to ensure that these exercises continued to be taught as a coherent
whole within the Greek schools of rhetoric, in contrast to the haphazard
approach of the Latin-speaking teachers. It seems that in Greek schools
up to the end of antiquity and beyond the Progymnasmata continued to
be taught as part of rhetorical studies and were not generally taken over
by grammarians (though practice must have varied considerably). The
fact that, in the fourth century, Libanios composed fair copies of these
exercises suggests that he still saw them all as falling within his duties as
a rhetor, as Raffaella Cribiore has recently emphasized.17
The Sources for the Progymnasmata
Theon claims to be the first to provide definitions (horoi) of the exercises (so
the definition of ekphrasis found in all the versions of the Progymnasmata is
15
Theon calls this exercise prospopoiia, a term that is used elsewhere specifically of a
passage where words are attributed to an inanimate object, such as a city.
16
Suetonius, De grammaticis et rhetoribus, 25.4. See also the introduction to Theons
Progymnasmata by Michel Patillon (pp. xiiixiv). Robert Kaster in his edition of Suetonius
(Oxford, 1995) suggests on pp. 27980 that all the exercises had been relegated to the
grammatici by Suetonius time.
17
Cribiore, The School of Libanius, pp. 1437.
44
perhaps his own), though he makes no claim to have invented the exercises
themselves.18 Addressing himself to the teachers of rhetoric, he is the most
informative of all the authors concerning the ways in which the exercises
were to be taught, particularly in the discussion of pedagogical methods
which precedes the chapters devoted to the individual exercises.
A much shorter version of the Progymnasmata is transmitted with the
works of Hermogenes, a rhetorical theorist of the second century CE
whose writings on style and on argumentation came to form the core of
the Byzantine rhetorical curriculum.19 The ps.-Hermogenean text may
date to the third century.20 Its brevity led to complaints of obscurity
from Byzantine readers.21 Neither of these two treatises came close to the
popularity of the fourth-century version by Aphthonios, identified as a
pupil of Libanios.22 Aphthonios secured lasting popularity by appending
his own examples of each exercise, rather than simply referring to passages
in the ancient authors as his predecessors had done,23 but his instructions
are minimal. This deficiency in Aphthonios book was clearly felt by its
Byzantine users as several commentaries were composed, drawing on
Theon among other sources, to explain his laconic text phrase by phrase.
One of these is by John Sardianos, probably writing in the ninth century,
another by the eleventh-century scholar Doxapatres.24
One further ancient version of the Progymnasmata is by a certain
Nikolaos, who is placed by the Souda in the fifth century.25 Like Theon,
Nikolaos goes into each exercise in some detail and is a good deal more
18
Theon, Progymnasmata, 59, ll. 1920.
Ps.-Hermogenes, Progymnasmata, in Opera, ed. Hugo Rabe (Leipzig, 1913), pp. 127.
The new edition of this text by Michel Patillon in Corpus Rhetoricum (Paris: Les Belles Lettres,
2008), pp. 180206 appeared too late for me to take account of it in this book.
20
Pierre Laurens, preface to Hermogne: lart rhtorique, trans. Michel Patillon (Paris,
1997), p. 41.
21
A scholiast quoted in RE 2, 1 col.2797 [s.v. Aphthonios] commented on the difficulty
of understanding the Progymnasmata attributed to Hermogenes, describing them as rather
unclear and difficult to comprehend ( ); cf. Doxapatres, Homiliae, p.
131.
22
Aphthonios, Progymnasmata, ed. Hugo Rabe (Leipzig: Teubner, 1926). Corpus

Rhetoricum, ed. Michel
Patillon (Paris, 2008) contains a new edition of this text on pp. 11262.
23
On the post-Antique popularity of Aphthonios, see Herbert Hunger, Die
hochsprachliche profane Literatur der Byzantiner (2 vols, Munich, 1978), vol. 1
, pp. 92120
and
Jean-Claude Margolin, La rhtorique dAphthonius et son influence au XVIe sicle, in
Raymond Chevallier (ed.), Colloque sur la rhtorique (Paris, 1979), pp. 23969.
24
Ioannes Sardianos, Commentarium in Aphthonium, ed. Hugo Rabe (Leipzig, 1928);
Doxapatres, Homiliae in Aphthonii Progymnasmata, in Walz, Rhetores graeci, 2. On Sardianos
and Doxapatres, see Alexander Kazhdan (ed.), The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium (New
York, 1991), pp. 1,067 and 660 respectively.
25
Nikolaos, Progymnasmata, ed. Joseph Felten (Leipzig, 1913). Souda, vol. 3, 469.
19
45
informative than either Aphthonios or ps.-Hermogenes. Nikolaos claims

that his aim was to compile rather than to compose a new treatise, and one
senses the weight of tradition upon his shoulders when he remarks that
the quantity of work left behind by the dead makes it impossible to invent
anything new all he can do is gather information.26 In fact, his compilation
contains some valuable and unique passages which contribute a great deal
to the overall picture of the Progymnasmata and their place in rhetorical
education. Our ignorance of so many of his sources makes it impossible
to say whether Nikolaos modesty was false or not, but in relation to the
surviving sources he shows originality, in some cases making explicit an
idea which was only implicit in the shorter treatises, in others reflecting
new developments. In particular he is the only one to introduce works
of art into the theoretical literature as a subject matter for ekphrasis (see
below, pp. 813). Finally, there is an anonymous Byzantine treatise on the
Progymnasmata, preserved in several manuscripts and printed in Walzs
Rhetores graeci, which presents some interesting developments.27
Exactly how these exercises were taught is unclear: some papyrus
fragments of written compositions survive (though not, to my knowledge,
any examples of a school ekphrasis), but Theons introduction shows
that the compositions were also recited in a first step towards rhetorical
performance.28 Even when written, the exercises may later have been
committed to memory. So these were not just exercises in prose composition
the way we would understand it. They were part of a cumulative training
in the techniques and processes of rhetorical performance. In Theons
system, in particular, texts, whether composed by the student or the
teacher, were not closed literary forms, but open to endless manipulation,
elaboration and discussion: students were taught to subject the content
of stories, sayings, even ekphraseis, to a process of confirmation and
refutation, arguing for or against their likelihood.29
The Progymnasmata were eminently practical texts, shaped to fulfil a
particular role within the ancient curriculum. The surviving examples
do represent a remarkably unified group, especially bearing in mind the
centuries which elapsed between Theon and Nikolaos. But they were far
from being a static or abstract system. The conformity which strikes the
modern reader is the result of centuries of selection in which many other
versions were lost along the way, such as those by several authors mentioned
26
Nikolaos, Progymnasmata, p. 1.
Walz, Rhetores graeci, 3, pp. 5958.
28
On the evidence for the use of books in education, see Cribiore, Gymnastics of the
Mind, pp. 14356.
29
See Michel Patillon, introduction to Theon, Progymnasmata, pp. xciiixcvii; Webb,
The Progymnasmata as practice.
27
46
in the Souda.30 We get glimpses of such alternative systems in some of the

remarks about what others say or do, particularly in ps.-Hermogenes and
Nikolaos. And at some point the order in which the exercises were taught
underwent a change. The manuscripts of all four versions preserve the
same order, beginning with muthos, but Theons introduction shows that
he originally prescribed a different order, beginning with chreia, and that
the text was later rearranged to conform to accepted practice.31 But even
the surviving Progymnasmata were more responsive to change than they
are sometimes said to be.32 Nikolaos acknowledgement (albeit belated)
of statues and paintings as a category of subject matter for ekphrasis
is one case in point. There is also a clear shift in emphasis from Theon
to Aphthonios which reflects developments in rhetorical fashion and
practice over the intervening centuries, particularly the rise in importance
of epideictic rhetoric. Aphthonios remarks about ekphrasis and other
exercises are much more oriented towards the composition of epideictic
speeches, while Theon, like his contemporary Quintilian, seems more
interested in the type of presentation and argumentation needed in the
law courts.33 Change was slow and is often difficult to perceive, but it
is detectable in the details, and this is true in the case of ekphrasis (see
below, pp. 7880).
In addition to these sets of instructions, some examples of model
Progymnasmata have survived to complement the examples which
Aphthonios added to his own instructions. Theon had advised teachers
to compose their own models in certain cases and to use passages from
classical texts,34 but the surviving examples date from a much later
period and are ascribed in the manuscripts to Libanios and Nikolaos.35
Foerster identified seven of the ekphraseis as the work of Libanios, while
other ekphraseis of sculptures in the collection conform quite closely to
Nikolaos precepts, but there may be further anonymous and undatable
30
See the fragments collected in Rabes edition of Aphthonios, Progymnasmata, pp.

5370.
31
See Italo Lana, I Progimnasmi di Elio Teone I: La storia del testo (Turin, 1959); Patillon,
Hermogne: lart rhtorique. Theons text also originally contained further exercises.
32
Jacques Bompaire, Lucien crivain: imitation et cration (Paris, 1958), p. 100 defines
such scholastic material as being daucun temps ni daucun lieu [of no particular time or
place].
33
See Italo Lana, Quintiliano, Il Sublime e gli Esercizi preparatori di Elio Teone: ricerca
sulle fonti grece di Quintiliano e sullautor Del Sublime (Turin, 1951).
34
Theon, Progymnasmata, p. 15, ll. 326 and p. 9, ll. 3032.
35
Libanios, Opera, vol. 8, pp. 460546. Some Byzantine model Progymnasmata are
printed in Walz, Rhetores graeci, 1. Those by Nikephoros Basilakes (which do not include any
ekphraseis) have been edited separately by Adriana Pignani (Naples, 1983). See also Hunger,
Die hochsprachliche profane Literatur der Byzantiner, vol. 1, pp. 92120.
47
schoolmasters work in this group.36 These fair copies have many

interesting features, but as a group they reflect a very late stage in the
ancient history of ekphrasis.
The Progymnasmata in Relation to Other Treatises
It is important to consider the Progymnasmata both as a system of
interrelated exercises and as one stage in a far larger educational process.
In particular, the authors of the more advanced treatises on epideictic and
declamation assumed that they could appeal to their users knowledge
of the Progymnasmata.37 The way in which they refer to this preparatory
training is revealing. They do not seem to consider the exercises as a
product, as a set of ready-made patches to be sewn together, but seem
rather to think of them as part of a formative process which has provided
students with flexible skills and with a stock of commonly accepted
things to say and ways to say them.38 Sopatros the Rhetor in his work
On the Division of Questions (Diareseis Ztmatn) refers to the places
(topoi) which the student will have learned from the exercise of koinos
topos against an adulterer and which he can now adapt (enarmosai) to the
speech in question (the defence of a woman who has killed her adulterous
husband in a reversal of classical cultural norms).39 In his discussion of
the wedding speech, the author of a treatise on epideictic attributed to
Dionysios of Halikarnassos refers his addressee, a former pupil of his, to
his earlier experience of writing theseis on the topic should one marry?
This exercise has made available (prokecheiristai) a stock of things to say
and forms of argument that can be put to use in praise of marriage. This
training is referred to as a gift (dron), which has the effect of ensuring
that the speaker is not inexperienced in the things that it is customary to
say, underlining the role of such education as the provider of a vital form
36
Bernhard D. Hebert, Sptantike Beschreibung von Kunstwerken: Archologischer

Kommentar zu den Ekphraseis des Libanios und Nikolaos (Graz, 1983), pp. 89.
37
It may well be the case that some individuals followed a different route before
embarking on declamation, but it is hardly conceivable that they started this complex
training without some preliminary training in composition.
38
Baldwin, Medieval Rhetoric and Poetic, p.

18 conceives the relation of progymnasma
to finished speech as follows: Apparently a boy could carry this peacock [composed as an
example of the exercise of ekphrasis] from school to the platform and continue to use it with
merely verbal variations.
Compare Roland Barthes characterization of Second Sophistic
rhetoric as une suite lche de morceaux brillants [a loose sequence of brilliant parts],
Lancienne rhtorique: aide-mmoire, Communications, 16 (1970), p. 183.
39
Sopatros, On the Division of Questions, in Walz, Rhetores graeci, 8, p. 249, ll. 2021.
48
of cultural literacy.40 He also tells the recipient that he may keep this gift
for himself or pass it on to another as a favour for which he will, in turn,
receive gratitude (charis).
These remarks underline the role of the Progymnasmata in providing a
flexible set of skills that prepare the student for the more demanding task of
composing and performing epideictic speeches and for the immeasurably
more challenging task of mastering the art of declamation. As Sopatros
comment suggests, one of the most valuable aspects of the training offered
by the Progymnasmata was the mastery of topoi, places or kephalaia, heads
of argument which provided a basic framework for argumentation and
for praise and blame. Students learned how to construct a basic speech
of praise following the encomiastic topoi such as birth, education and
achievement.41 In the twin exercises of confirmation (kataskeu) and
refutation (anaskeu) the most important according to Aphthonios
the student learned to support or demolish a story by applying a set
of questions: is it plausible (pithanon)? is it impossible (adunaton)? is it
internally contradictory (machomenon)?42 This process of confirmation and
refutation was one to which all the exercises could be subject, according to
Theon. One could even use the same technique to demolish an ekphrasis,
as well as a narration, a reminder that the exercises were an interlinked
system and that each had, potentially, several levels of difficulty. So the
Progymnasmata formed a system of training that was directed towards the
inculcation of a set of habits and practices in the individual student and
only secondarily towards the production of compositions.
However, the authors of the Progymnasmata take most of this for granted.
In the case of ekphrasis, with the exception of a few lines in Nikolaos, they
pay no attention to the purpose of learning to place a subject before the
eyes. One of the most valuable aspects of Quintilians treatise is that it
provides the key to answering this question. His treatment of enargeia, in
so far as it coincides with the treatments of ekphrasis elsewhere, shows
how this type of composition had a fully rhetorical role, as an aid to
persuasion. And the more advanced Greek rhetorical treatises on epideictic
and declamation show how students were taught to put ekphrasis, and
the other preliminary exercises, to use in the context of a full-scale speech.
These clues to the rhetorical (in the technical sense) purpose of ekphrasis
help to explain its inclusion among the Progymnasmata. These elementary
exercises were, after all, directed towards the study of rhetoric. They aimed
40
Ps.-Dionysios of Halikarnassos, On Epideictic, 261 (translation in Menander Rhetor,

On Epideictic, pp. 3656).
41
See, for example, Aphthonios, Progymnasmata, p. 21, l. 20 p. 22, l. 9.
42
See Theon, Progymnasmata, 93, l. 5 96, l. 14 with Patillons introductory comments
on pp. xciiixcvii.
49
to produce students who could speak effectively, or in a manner which

was accepted as effective, whether in real cases, in the mock cases of the
declamations, or simply in their dealings with others. Though the extant
Progymnasmata textbooks frequently use examples drawn from history
and poetry in their treatment of all the exercises, these are submitted to
rhetorical categorization and treatment. A literary interest in description,
as important as this may have been, would not have been sufficient in
itself to prompt the inclusion of ekphrasis among the Progymnasmata. Nor
was the composition of history or poetry the main aim of the training
they offered, though it might be a by-product, an added advantage,
as suggested by Theons remark that ekphrasis is a useful skill for the
historian to master.43 One cannot imagine that the promise that their sons
would learn to describe nicely as an end itself would have cut much ice
with the ambitious fathers seeking to enrol them in Theons school. The
skills they wanted their sons to acquire were rhetorical.
I stress this point because the Progymnasmata are often assumed to have
provided a type of generalized literary training. Theon does indeed state
that his exercises are useful for writing history, poetry, or other types of
literature. But this statement needs to be read against the overwhelmingly
rhetorical focus of the education of which the Progymnasmata were part.
The ability to speak eloquently, persuasively and appropriately, according
to grammatical and rhetorical norms, was the aim of elite education.
Relatively few of the students who passed through the rhetorical schools
would have gone on to write history or poetry. But everyone who was able
to continue their studies past the elementary stages would have gone on
to learn how to argue court cases, through the exercise of declamation,
and how to compose epideictic speeches. By mentioning the applicability
of the training he offers to other types of composition Theon is surely
trying to find as many ways as he can to make it attractive to potential
customers.
Ekphrasis in the Progymnasmata
The Progymnasmata were therefore a system of practical exercises which
were interrelated. The order in which they were taught was the subject of
much discussion in the commentaries on Aphthonios. Ekphrasis is one of
the last of the Progymnasmata in the order preserved in the manuscripts.
It is followed only by the more discursive thesis (discussion of a question)
and eisphora nomou (introduction of a law). One Byzantine commentator
explains that this is because it was considered one of the more difficult
43
50
and elaborate exercises.44 But in the original sequence of Theons exercises,

ekphrasis was the fifth exercise, coming immediately after koinos topos
(common place).45 The perceived difficulty and status of ekphrasis in
relation to the other exercises therefore seems to have changed over
time. Exactly when this happened is unclear, but ps.-Hermogenes and
Nikolaos reveal that the arrangement of the Progymnasmata, and the
place of ekphrasis in particular, continued to be debated in the centuries
immediately following Theon. Nikolaos simply points out that some
prefer to teach ekphrasis immediately after synkrisis (comparison) because
both use the aneimenos (relaxed or simple) style.46
The question raised by ps.-Hermogenes is far more substantial. In his
treatment of both synkrisis and ekphrasis he notes that certain (unnamed)
authors prefer not to treat these two as separate exercises on the grounds
that they can be subsumed within other Progymnasmata. Synkrisis could be
included within koinos topos, enkmion (praise) and psogos (blame), while
ekphrasis had a still wider application, being contained within muthos,
digma and koinos topos as well as enkmion. Such comments remind us
both how interconnected the various exercises were and how flexible
ekphrasis was: the techniques it taught could be put to use in a variety
of contexts. In particular, the connections between ekphrasis and the four
exercises mentioned by ps.-Hermogenes are worth exploring as they can
reveal a great deal about how ekphrasis and its role were conceived. This
question will be addressed in the next chapter; for the moment we will
consider the presentation of the exercise of ekphrasis and some of the
many questions it raises.
The Chapters on Ekphrasis
The chapters on ekphrasis follow a standard pattern: the one-line definition
is followed by a list of categories of subject matter and then, in accordance
with Theons advice to the teacher to select examples from literature, the
authors go on to illustrate each category of ekphrasis by citing passages
from classical texts. They then add some general remarks about linguistic
style and how to link ekphrasis into a larger context. Aphthonios ends
44
Anonymous scholia to Aphthonios, Progymnasmata, in Walz, Rhetores graeci, 2, p. 55
(text and translation in Appendix A). Aphthonios order is: muthos, digma, chreia, gnm,
anaskeu, kataskeu, koinos topos, enkmion, psogos, synkrisis, thopoiia, ekphrasis, thesis, nomou
eisphora. He differs from ps.-Hermogenes and Nikolaos in presenting the pairs anaskeu and
kataskeu and enkmion and psogos as separate exercises.
45
Theon simply calls this exercise topos but I will use the more usual term throughout
for the sake of clarity.
46
Nikolaos, Progymnasmata, p. 67, l. 16 p. 68, l. 5. The short treatise on this style,
Romanos, Peri aneimenou, ed. Walter Camphausen (Leipzig, 1922), p. 2, ll. 1921, also
associates it with ekphrasis.
51
with his model ekphrasis of the Alexandrian acropolis; Nikolaos concludes

with advice about the use of ekphrasis within the three genres of oratory:
judicial, deliberative and epideictic.
The Definition
The definition varies little between the four sets of instructions. As we
saw in the introduction, Theons version reads as follows:
o v v v ovov [Ekphrasis is
a descriptive (perigmatikos) speech which brings (literally leads) the
thing shown vividly (enargs) before the eyes].47 Ps.-Hermogenes and
Aphthonios repeat this definition almost word for word, with some minor
variations, ps.-Hermogenes adding a diffident as they say, as he does
elsewhere in his Progymnasmata.48 Only Nikolaos changes the vocabulary
slightly, using the adjective aphgmatikos instead of perigmatikos. This
phrase, like the other definitions, was probably learned by rote and
recited in response to the masters questions,49 but what did it mean?
One of the most striking features of this definition, as was noted above,
is the role of the audience. Where the other Progymnasmata are defined
in far more formal terms (digma, for example, is a speech which sets
out events which have happened or are of the sort which might happen)
ekphrasis is defined primarily in terms of its effect on the listener. This
exercise therefore drew the students attention more explicitly than did
the others to the communicative function of rhetorical discourse and to
the live interaction between speaker and audience which it supposed.
As we have seen, the idea of placing before the eyes goes back in
rhetorical theory to Aristotle who discusses the power of metaphor to place
its subject pro ommatn,50 and the definition makes ekphrasis synonymous
with other rhetorical terms for vivid description, such as enargeia,
diatupsis, diagraph (descriptio, or explicatio in Latin, or simply sub
oculos subiectio, placing before the eyes). In some contexts, rhetoricians
draw fine distinctions between the meanings of the different terms for
vivid language.51 Elsewhere, however, they may be used interchangeably
47
For the moment I have translated perigmatikos as descriptive; its literal meaning,
however, is leading around. For further discussion, see below.
48
Hermogenes, Progymnasmata, p. 22, l. 10; cf. p. 4, l. 6 (digma).
49
An example of this question and answer format is preserved on a papyrus fragment.

See Aphthonios, Progymnasmata, pp. 525.
50
Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1411b 245.
51
The account of the destruction at Phokis in Demosthenes, 19.65, for example, is
defined as a diatupsis, which is then contrasted to ekphrasis, in the Scholia Demosthenica,
vol. 2, p. 28 (157c), but cited as an example of ekphrasis by Nikolaos (see below, p. 76).
On the fluidity of ancient rhetorical terminology, which is not surprising given the ad hoc
52
in the same text, as in the case of Menander Rhetor (see Chapter 6) or

given identical definitions.52 Ekphrasis, though, is always the term used
in Greek sources for the elementary exercise of placing before the eyes,
a distinction which may confer a slightly more scholastic flavour on the
term in some contexts.
The rest of the definition offers little concrete explanation; even the
type of communicative situation and the nature of the audience are left
vague. Instead and this is another of the striking features the authors
resort to purely metaphorical language to define their subject: ekphrasis
is a speech which leads [the audience] around; it is a form of language
which achieves the linguistically impossible, appealing to the sense of
sight, and bringing the referent into the presence of the audience. In the
body of their chapters the authors make similar claims: the audience
should almost see;53 one should try to make listeners into spectators.54
The language used to define ekphrasis clearly puzzled later readers of
Aphthonios version of the Progymnasmata. Sardianos explains patiently
that perigmatikos is to be taken metaphorically to mean relating
(aphgoumenos) and displaying (deiknus) everything about a subject.55
His choice of the verb aphgeomai to gloss perigmatikos may well have
been influenced by Nikolaos alternative adjective, which expresses the
same idea of leading and guiding. With refreshing lucidity, Sardianos
also points out that the visual effect of ekphrasis is in the mind: it makes
people conceive of the subject in their mind (noein) and produces a tupos
and phantasia, or mental impression, because for language literally to
bring anything before the eyes is clearly impossible. As he goes on
to explain: even if the speech were ten thousand times vivid (muriakis
enargs) this bringing the thing shown, i.e. described, before the eyes
would be an impossibility.56 Sardianos comment also identifies enargeia,
vividness, as the key to the definition of ekphrasis. For Theon, too, it is
and personal nature of ancient education, see Jean Cousin, Etudes sur Quintilien (2 vols,
Amsterdam, 1967), vol. 2, p. 2.
52
Tiberius, De figuris Demosthenicis, 43 defines diatupsis as leading the subject before
the eyes (epi tn thean) in a close echo of the language used to define ekphrasis in the
Progymnasmata.
53
Theon, Progymnasmata, 119, ll. 312: v v
v o v v.
54
Nikolaos, Progymnasmata, p. 68, ll. 1112: [] o oov
.
55
Sardianos, Commentarium, p. 216, ll. 1316: o ov o, v
o o o oo ovo <> v
vo. See also Appendix A.
56
Ibid., p. 216, 224: v v o, vov ' v v
ovov o vov. See also Appendix A.
53
enargeia which makes one almost see the subject, and for Nikolaos this
vividness is the distinguishing characteristic of ekphrasis.57 The author
of a Greek handbook of the Roman period, nicknamed Anonymous
Seguerianus by modern editors, in fact defined enargeia as a type of
speech using exactly the same formula as the Progymnasmata textbooks
used to define ekphrasis: o ' v v ovov (a speech
which brings the subject matter [or, more precisely, the thing shown]
before the eyes).58
Ekphrasis is therefore the exercise which taught students how to use
vivid evocation and imagery in their speeches. Enargeia itself raises further
questions which will be dealt with in Chapters 4 and 5 (as is evident already,
authorities differ in whether they define it as a type of speech, or a quality
of speech, as in Quintilian). The adjective enargs originally meant clearly
visible, so its later rhetorical use to designate speech which appeals to
the minds eye is itself metaphorical.59 This constant resort to metaphor in
the discussions of ekphrasis suggests that the ideas evoked exceeded in
complexity the technical language available to express them. But it may
also indicate something about ekphrasis itself: that it is an effect which
transcends categories and normal expectations of language. An awareness
of the inadequacy of these metaphors of sight and vision (an indication
that they are not, as Sardianos explains, to be taken literally) is evident
in the frequent use of disclaimers such as almost to introduce them. In
Theon, the listeners almost (schedon) see the subject;60 in Nikolaos they
all but (mononou) become spectators (theatai).61 The language of illusion,
approximation and semblance is deeply embedded in the discussions of
ekphrasis.
If the use of metaphor is significant in itself, so are the associations
conjured up by the various images which the authors of the Progymnasmata
draw on. The analogy which springs to mind most readily is that of the
visual arts: language which places before the eyes is comparable to
painting, as Sardianos notes.62 The connection between ekphrasis and the
idea of visual representation thus runs deep and is part of its very essence.
57
Nikolaos, Progymnasmata, p. 68, ll. 910 and p. 70, ll. 36.

Anonymous Seguerianus, Art of Rhetoric, 96, p. 26.
59
Pierre Chantraine, Dictionnaire tymologique de la langue grecque: histoire des mots (Paris,
1968), s.v. v; Barbara Cassin, Procdures sophistiques pour construire lvidence, in
Carlos Lvy and Laurent Pernot (eds), Dire lvidence: philosophie et rhtorique antiques (Paris,
1997), pp. 1529; Alessandra Manieri, Limmagine poetica nella teoria degli antichi: phantasia ed
enargeia (Pisa, 1998), pp. 11322.
60
61
Nikolaos, Progymnasmata, 70, ll. 56: ovovo v [].
62
Sardianos, Commentarium in Aphthonii Progymnasmata, p. 217, ll. 35.
58
54
But this is just one of the analogies used by the rhetoricians in their attempts
to express the effects of ekphrasis. The words hupopsin agn (leading
before the eyes) suggest the dramatist who literally produces characters
and actions on stage, placing them before the eyes of the audience. And
the term used by Nikolaos to express the transformed role of the audience
of ekphrasis, theatai, more obviously refers to the spectators in a theatre
than to viewers of a work of art.63 Theatrical imagery is frequently used
elsewhere of vivid language, as in the scholia to the Shield episode in Iliad,
18 where Homer is said to roll out (ekkukle) the maker [Hephaistos] as if
onto a stage and show us his workshop in the open.64
The adjective perigmatikos, by contrast, casts the speaker as a guide
showing the listener around the sight to be described, as Pausanias
leads the reader around Greece in his Periegesis (which is not mentioned
by any of the rhetorical sources). The analogy between a speech and
a journey in which the speaker leads the audience through space is
frequent in the Greek vocabulary of discourse, in terms such as digsis
(telling, narrating, setting out) literally, a leading through the subject
or periodos for the circular journey of the periodic sentence.65 Perigsis
would therefore suggest a more elaborate form of telling, a winding path
instead of the direct through-route of digsis. Sardianos, before offering
the interpretation quoted above, explores the implications, explaining
that it is like (hoionei) taking a visitor around the city of Athens,
showing and commenting on the points of interest. While his ultimate
interpretation of perigmatikos makes it merely another way of saying
showing in words, the tenor of the metaphor adds to the composite
picture of ekphrasis: the guide not only shows, but directs his or her
audiences attention, adding order and meaning to the undifferentiated
mass of sights which is presented to the visitor. Ekphrasis, in some
cases, therefore does not only make visible the appearance of a subject,
but makes something about its nature intelligible, an idea which is
encompassed by the verb dlo which can mean to explain, to reveal to
the intellect, as well as to show.
Drawn as they are from different domains, these metaphors all suggest
slightly different relationships between speaker, addressee and referent:
the subject matter may be brought into the presence of the audience
63
The formula may derive from Isocrates, who claims at To Nikokles, 49 that drama, in
contrast to Homeric epic, makes the audience not only listeners but spectators (theatai). If so,
the later rhetorical tradition uses the contrast in a very different way.
64
Scholia graeca in Homeri Iliadem to 18.4767: ov v v v,
v v v v ov.
65
See, for example, Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 10.7.23: speech is like a journey out
from a harbour.
55
(speaker as theatrical producer), or the audience may be led around

the subject (speaker as tour guide). The individual metaphors are hardly
definitive statements, but represent attempts to express various aspects
of ekphrasis to an audience of students. One thing they share in common
is the emphasis on vision. They also insist on the agency of the speaker
as performer or producer, whether he is leading his audience on a virtual
tour or conjuring up the subject matter on a virtual stage. The models
of communication which these metaphors evoke will come in and out
of focus throughout this study of ekphrasis in the rhetorical tradition,
and may on occasion become more or less concrete. The metaphor of
perigsis, for example, becomes an organizing principle in many of the
city descriptions in epideictic speeches, as in Aphthonios own model
ekphrasis of the Alexandrian acropolis which is structured as a tour
around the building.
Nikolaos choice of the alternative adjective, aphgmatikos, is intriguing.
As noted above, it retains the idea of the speaker as guide. Nikolaos uses
the noun aphgsis in his chapter on ekphrasis in a sense that is close
to digsis, narration, when he distinguishes ekphrasis from a plain
narration (psil aphgsis).66 Elsewhere in his Progymnasmata Nikolaos uses
the adjective once to distinguish a type of narration (digsis) that is told
in the narrators persona (his example is Pindar) as opposed to a dramatic
narration told by a character, as in comedy and tragedy.67 The sense is thus
close to Platos definition of digsis in the Republic 392c394d where it is
contrasted to the quotation of direct speech (mimsis). In the context of the
rhetorical definition of ekphrasis, what is of interest here is the apparent
emphasis on the speakers role as origin of the account.
Composing Ekphraseis
The authors of the Progymnasmata then move on to the subjects for ekphrasis
(see Table 2.1 and Appendix B). These are a varied list including human
figures, seasons, events such as battles, places and animals. As mentioned
above, works of art (paintings and statues) are mentioned by Nikolaos,
but are not central to the definition. The significance of the subjects and,
in particular, the links that they indicate between ekphrasis and the other
exercise will be explored in detail in the next chapter. For the moment,
66
Nikolaos, Progymnasmata, 70, l. 3. The distinction between ekphrasis and narration
will be explored in the next chapter.
67
Nikolaos, Progymnasmata, p. 12, ll. 911. Perhaps under the influence of Nikolaos
use of the term in his chapter on ekphrasis, aphgsis is defined in a comment on Aphthonios
as a diatupsis i.e., a type of vivid writing in contrast to digsis which states the cause.
See Walz, Rhetores graeci, 2, p. 578, ll. 23: v v v, o
o . See further below.
56
it is sufficient to note the sheer variety in the subjects proposed before

we move on to the rest of the discussions. However, in contrast to the
richness of the tantalizing metaphors contained within the definitions of
ekphrasis, these sections are far from illuminating, particularly with regard
to how and why language should place before the eyes. The practical
advice can be resumed in a few sentences. In terms of organization, the
authors recommend starting from first things and working through to the
last, so that in the case of a figure one should move methodically from
head to toe or, in the case of an event, start from the events which led
up to an action and follow up with the consequences.68 Libanios model
ekphrasis of a battle follows this pattern to the letter, beginning with the
diplomatic prelude to hostilities (in which each citys rhetors naturally
play a vital role) and ending with the celebrations in the victorious city
and retribution in the defeated one.69 Aphthonios is the only one to give
advice about the description of places. Despite the fact that his model
ekphrasis is of a place, the Alexandrian acropolis, his instructions are brief
to the point of obscurity. In describing places, as well as periods of time,
one should include the surroundings (ta periechonta) and contents (ta en
autois huparchonta). Some indication as to what this means can perhaps be
obtained from Libanios again: his ekphrasis of Spring lists the activities
and sensations which occur in that season.70 Further, Theon and ps.Hermogenes note that one should take care to link the ekphrasis into the
surrounding context. Nikolaos comments on ekphraseis of statues and
paintings are among the more interesting passages and will be discussed
below.
Table 2.1
The subjects of ekphrasis
Author
Subjects for ekphrasis
Theon
Events, persons, places, times, the manner in which

something is done (tropos)
ps.-Hermogenes
Persons, events, places, states of affairs (kairoi), times
Aphthonios
Persons, events, seasons, places, mute animals and plants
Nikolaos
Places, seasons, persons, festivals, events, paintings and

statues
68
Aphthonios, Progymnasmata, p. 37; cf. Nikolaos, Progymnasmata, p. 69, ll. 1217 (on
figures in art).
69
Libanios, Progymnasmata, pp. 46064.
70
Ibid., pp. 47982.
57
The Language of Ekphrasis

With respect to language, the medium of ekphrasis, we are told that
the style should be relaxed or simple (aneimenos). Aphthonios adds the
advice to use a variety of figures and to imitate (apomimeisthai) the thing
described completely. In the light of ps.-Hermogenes statement that the
style of the language should be similar to (sunexomoiousthai) the subject
matter,71 it seems most likely that Aphthonios means that the qualities
of the language should somehow reflect those of the subject. Sardianos
interpreted Aphthonios phrase as a reference to style and, like ps.Hermogenes, he goes on to explain that the language should share the
characteristics of the subject matter, so that if one is describing a meadow
the language should be flowery, and so on.72 Dionysios of Halikarnassos
criticism of Philistos for using language which was inappropriate to the
subject matter shows how important the fit between language and subject
matter was felt to be. In other sources the use of onomatopoiia is said to be
a cause of vividness.73 But it is less than clear that our sources have any
objectively observable stylistic criteria in mind. In fact, it seems rather that
such judgements were often based on the referent, so that the presence
of terms referring to flowers and related things would suffice to make a
flowery style. A passage in the real Hermogenes treatise On Types of Style
where sweetness (glukuts) in language is said to result from the quality
of the subject (p. 331, l. 5ff) rather suggests that the latter may have been
the case, particularly as several of the examples he cites are ekphraseis
of things that are pleasant to the senses. These examples are Sappho, fr.
4 (Around the apple branches flows cold water), the opening of Platos
Phaedrus and the account of the miraculous growth of soft grass beneath
Hera and Zeus in Iliad, 14.3478.74
71
Ps.-Hermogenes, Progymnasmata, p. 23, ll. 1112: vo vooo
o v. See Michel Patillons comment on ps.-Hermogenes in
Hermogne: lart rhtorique (Paris, 1997), p. 148, n. 6: Notre auteur se contente de mtaphores
et ne nous apporte pas dindications techniques sur les procds du style [Our author
is content to use metaphors and does not provide any technical information on the use of
style ].
72
Sardianos, Commentarium, p. 225.

An unusually ironic scholiast in Walz, Rhetores graeci, 2, p. 652 notes I suppose
one ought to grunt (grulizein) when talking about piglets. The author of the Byzantine
Progymnasmata in Walz, Rhetores graeci, 3, p. 598, ll. 16 recommends using harsh,
onomatopoeic vocabulary in an ekphrasis of a battle; his example includes terms with a
predominance of kappa, gamma and chi such as smarag, klang, chremetismos, kraug. Cf.
Anon. Peri tn tessarn mern tou teleiou logou in Walz, Rhetores graeci, 3, p. 579, l. 29 p. 580,
l. 10.
74
Hermogenes, On Types of Style, 3312.
73
58
Ps.-Hermogenes puts a particular stress on the impact of the language

of ekphrasis when he claims that the hermneia must almost bring about
(schedon mchanasthai) sight through sound. The sense of hermneia here is
that of style, as the expression of thought. Language translates (hermneuei)
thought into words, and, in the case of ekphrasis, it translates the visible
into words which somehow communicate a visual experience to the
audience. As the further connotations of hermneia suggest, this translation
involves a certain degree of interpretation, so that ps.-Hermogenes (who
might have phrased his statement differently if he had been concerned
with all these implications) does not imply a transparent, unmediated
communication of a sight. As we shall see, and as is already hinted at
by Nikolaos use of aphgmatikos, the speakers role in the description is
key, and when ekphraseis describe subject matter which exists outside
the text (ekphraseis of buildings, for example) the selection of details and
the speakers explicit comments do add a great deal of interpretation and
demand some interpretative effort from the listener in turn. These laconic
statements on the language of ekphrasis leave many questions to be
answered, but they do point to the intimate relation between words and
their referents, and to the role of the speaker, all of which will be explored
in more detail below.
Within the context of the Progymnasmata, however, the remarks
on language seem less than illuminating. In the ancient and Byzantine
schoolrooms, these written instructions must have been only a small
aspect of the whole teaching of ekphrasis, or the other Progymnasmata. The
commentaries give an idea of the type of verbal supplements provided
by teachers. But the most important method of teaching must have
been from examples. Theon is very clear about the value of examples,
whether drawn from classical literature or composed by the teacher.
In both cases the students are expected to internalize them so that they
can then produce their own imitations (mimeisthai). However, even the
examples of ekphrasis chosen from classical literature present no formal
unity and vary as greatly in treatment as they do in subject matter. Some,
such as the descriptions of Thersites (Iliad, 2, 217 and 219) and Eurybates
(Odyssey, 19, 246) used to illustrate ekphraseis of people, take up only one
or two lines of epic verse, while others are of considerable length (like
the Shield of Achilles or the night battle in Thucydides, 7). Some, such as
the night battle, have obvious dramatic appeal, while others, such as the
description of the harbour of Cheimerion in Thucydides, 2 or Ekbatana in
the first book of Herodotos histories, appear to the modern reader to be
dry accounts of layout (schma).75
75
On the night battle, see Andrew D. Walker, Enargeia and the spectator in Greek
historiography, TAPA, 123 (1993): 35377.
59
Conclusion
Read in isolation as disembodied fragments of doctrine, the Progymnasmata
are less than illuminating. Their lack of practical recommendations
is startling: it is difficult to see how one would arrive at anything
approaching Aphthonios model exercises on the basis of his precepts
alone. It is not surprising, then, to read Philippe Hamons statement that
classical rhetoric is little help in defining description, or to find critics such
as Palm rejecting their definition of ekphrasis altogether as inadequate.76
But these elementary treatments of ekphrasis were never intended as
isolated definitions. They were an integral part of a far wider network of
ideas and practices. Though the Progymnasmata may not offer anything
approaching a clearly articulated theory of description, they represent the
elementary introduction to a notion of representation in language, which
becomes clearer from the cumulative evidence of other rhetorical sources,
particularly in their treatment of enargeia.
But, before considering the exercise of ekphrasis as part of a wider
rhetorical system, it is also worth examining its place within the smaller
system of the elementary exercises themselves. One way to explore the
relation of ekphrasis to the other Progymnasmata and to the system of ancient
rhetoric in general is through the range of subject matter proposed. There
may be no single defining type of subject matter for ancient ekphrasis but,
taken as a group, the categories named are significant in themselves.
76
Philippe Hamon, Quest-ce quune description?, Potique, 112 (1972): 465; Jonas
Palm, Bemerkungen zur Ekphrase in der griechischen Literatur, Kungliga Humanististiska
Vetenskapssamfundet i Uppsala, rsbok (196566): 116.
3. The Subjects of Ekphrasis
Introduction
The most striking aspect of the subjects for ekphrasis for the modern reader
is the variety: we find battles, crocodiles, cities, buildings, people and
festivals. However, the lists of subjects offered by the authors are by no
means as random as they may appear to be at first sight and many of their
constituent elements are familiar from other exercises and from elsewhere in
the rhetorical system. They thus provide important clues to the relationship
between ekphrasis and other exercises. To begin with the earliest version of
the Progymnasmata, Theon identifies as potential subjects persons (prospa),
events (pragmata) such as a battle, a plague or an earthquake, places (topoi)
such as a harbour or a city, and times (chronoi) such as the seasons, and
also the manner (tropos) [in which something is done]. The later authors
have some variations on Theons list, as is clear from the List of Subjects
(Appendix B) and Table 2.1, the greatest difference being the word used
for times which is sometimes chronoi and sometimes kairoi. There is, as
usual, no consistency in usage, but a general distinction is made between
the regular rhythms of nature (the seasons) and culture (festivals) on the
one hand and man-made circumstances (war and peace) or temporary and
unpredictable states of affairs (famine) on the other. Elsewhere there is also
a degree of fluidity in the categorization: subjects which are subsumed
under one category in one author (such as animals or festivals) appear as
independent categories in another. Nikolaos feels free to add a discussion
of types of subject (paintings and sculptures) which do not even appear in
his main list. That classification by subject is not of crucial importance is
also suggested by the way in which Theon simply mentions examples of
ekphrasis in the prologue to his work which do not correspond neatly to his
list of subjects, without making any reference to category.
The model ekphraseis by Aphthonios, Libanios and Nikolaos only
increase the sense of variety in subject matter, though, unlike the examples
from classical texts, they are all relatively substantial in length. Aphthonios
example is a description of the Alexandrian acropolis (corresponding to the
category of place). Some of the examples in Libanios corpus show a closer
correspondence to the various instructions. They include ekphraseis of battles
on land and sea, a harbour, a season (the ekphrasis of spring) and a festival
Theon, Progymnasmata, 118, ll. 911: v ov v

v vv v v .

62
(the Kalends) as well as a hunt, a drunken man and three paintings showing
landscapes with figures and buildings and a mythological scene. There is a
temple of Tyche and an intriguing ekphrasis of beauty (kallos), in which the
narrator describes the effect on him of the sight of a girl at her window. The
rest of the models, attributable to Nikolaos or another, are mainly of statues
representing mythological persons (goddesses, Herakles, a Trojan woman)
or beasts (such as the Chimaira). (These statue ekphraseis are appropriately
attributed to Nikolaos and follow his advice on the description of statues;
they also provide a means of describing the type of poetic, mythological
themes which are typical of the other model Progymnasmata and a sign of
their place in the curriculum between poetry and rhetoric.)
In addition to the principal categories, the authors recognize a further
category of mixed ekphrasis, such as the night battle in Thucydides (7.43
4) which is both an ekphrasis of an action (the battle) and of a time (night).
This mixed ekphrasis may look like another example of a rhetoricians
mania for classification, but it does reflect a recognition that classification
by subject is not the most important feature of ekphrasis and that there
will always be examples which cannot be reduced to fit a neat schema.
Hermogenes hints at this openness when he finishes his list of subjects by
adding and many other things, as does Nikolaos when he simply begins to
tell his readers how to write ekphraseis of paintings and statues. There was
clearly space for ekphraseis of all types of subject matter, including works
of art; the categories are neither exhaustive nor exclusive, and are very
different from the rigid classifications of types of description set out in neoclassical textbooks from the renaissance to the nineteenth century. Instead,
they point to the place of ekphrasis in the wider system of ideas about
rhetorical composition reflected in the Progymnasmata, and in particular
represent the interface between ekphrasis and the exercise of narration.
Ekphrasis and Narration: The Significance of the Subjects
Amid this variety and the apparently constant reorganization and
substitution, four categories of subject matter emerge as stable elements:
persons (prospa), places (topoi), times (kairoi or chronoi) and events
Foerster in Libanios, Progymnasmata (Opera, vol. 8), pp. 4389 accepts only the
ekphraseis of the battle, the three paintings, the Kalends, the drunken man and spring as
by Libanios.

Aphthonios, Progymnasmata, p. 37, ll. 1720 (the night battle in Sicily); Hermogenes,
Progymnasmata, p. 22, ll. 1518 (identified by Rabe as Thucydides, 3.22 the attempt to break
out of the besieged city of Plataia by night). The anonymous scholia to Aphthonios in Walz,
Rhetores graeci, 2, p. 57, ll. 811 note that the Byzantine scholar Geometres also classified
ekphraseis of sea battles as mixed, since the sea is a place.
On these, see Jean-Michel Adam, La Description (Paris, 1993), pp. 347.
The Subjects of Ekphrasis
63
(pragmata). The rhetors students would easily have recognized this group
as four of what Theon calls elements of narration (stoicheia ts digses):
the who, what, when and where of the ancient rhetorical schools (see Table
3.1). When they learned how to compose a simple narration, or to analyse
a poetic narrative, students were taught to break down the story into the
action (pragma) performed by the person (prospon), the place (topos) in
which it occurred and the time (chronos) when it occurred as well as the
manner (tropos) in which the action was carried out and its cause (aitia).
One function of these elements was to help students to organize their
own narrations. The immediate application was to the composition of the
narrative section of a speech in which the speaker had to set out clearly
his own version of events. However, there were clearly applications to
other genres many of Theons examples of digsis are drawn from
historiography (Thucydides, Philistos, Herodotos) and Homeric epic, as
well as from orators such as Demosthenes.
More importantly, these elements of narration, also known as
peristaseis or peristatika (Latin, circumstantia), represented the conceptual
framework within which the speaker could organize the complexities of
the events in question (Patillon aptly terms them the micro-universe of
the rhetoricians.) As one Latin rhetorician explains, they were the means
by which students of rhetoric were taught to impose intellectual order
onto the mass of material which faced them in a legal case. This statement
brings out clearly the role of the peristaseis as a conceptual grid, a pattern
for organizing experience and verbal accounts of that experience. The
reader of the Progymnasmata who came to ekphrasis well versed in the
doctrine of the peristaseis would therefore immediately recognize persons,
places, times and events as rhetorician-speak for practically everything
(regardless of how easily individual examples fitted in). One conclusion

Theon does however use the Odyssey as an example in his chapter on digsis, showing
that a continuity was seen between the technical narration of judicial rhetoric and narration
in the broader literary sense.

Patillon in Theon, Progymnasmata, p. xlv.

See Heinrich Lausberg, Handbook of Literary Rhetoric: A Foundation for Literary
Study, trans. Matthew T. Bliss et al. (Leiden, 1998), p. 139. Lausberg quotes Fortunatianus,
Ars Rhetorica, 2.1, in Rhetores latini minores, p. 102, l. 21 p. 103, l.2, who identifies the
circumstantia (person, deed, cause, time, place, manner, material/equipment) as the divisions
which the student should use to analyse the case once he has considered it in general: prius
universam causam confuse considerare debemus, tunc omnia, quae reperta sunt, capitulatim
quaestionibus ordinare [First we should consider the overall case in no particular order, then
we should organize everything we have found under headings, using these questions].

The peristaseis refer both to elements of discourse and to their referents: the pragma can
be both an action and a verbal account of that action. For an example of the use of the peristaseis
in the criticism of literary texts, see ps.-Plutarch, On the Life and Poetry of Homer, 76.
64
we can draw from this is that the subjects of ekphrasis are unlimited; the
other is that the subjects named by the manuals, far from constituting a
random selection that can be altered at will, are part of the wider system
of rhetoric.
Table 3.1
Comparison of the subjects for ekphrasis with the parts

of narration and the subjects for enkmion in the surviving
Progymnasmata
Author
Theon
ps.-Hermogenes
Aphthonios
Nikolaos
Subjects for
ekphrasis
Events,
persons,
places, times,
tropoi
Persons,
events, places,
states of affairs
(kairoi), times
Persons,
events,
seasons,
places, mute
animals and
plants
Places,
seasons,
persons,
festivals,
events,
paintings and
statues
Parts of narration
Subjects for enkmion
Person, event,
place, time,
manner (tropos),
cause
[Persons and
inanimate objects/
abstracts]
Persons, abstract
entity (pragmata),
mute animals,
plants, mountains
and rivers
Person, event,
place, time,
manner (tropos),
cause
Persons, events,
seasons, places,
mute animals and
plants
Person, event,
place, time,
manner (tropos),
cause.
Persons, abstract
or concrete entities
pragmata
Theon mentions two further elements of narration in his discussion of

the exercise digsis: the manner (tropos) in which the deed was done (how)
and the cause (aitia) (why).10 This explains the presence of Theons unique
category of ekphrasis of the tropos.11 The way in which he introduces
10
Other discussions of the circumstantia or peristaseis mention further materia/hul
(e.g. Anonymous Scholion in Walz, Rhetores graeci, 7, 2, p. 921, l. 4) and facultas (= quibus
adminiculis; see, e.g., Augustine, De rhetorica, 5.7, in Rhetores latini minores; Marius Victorinus,
Explicationum in Rhetoricam M. Tullii Ciceronis libri II, in ibid., p. 207, ll. 12) which do not
feature directly in the discussions of ekphrasis.
11
George Kennedy, Progymnasmata: Greek Textbooks of Prose Composition and Rhetoric
(Atlanta, 2003), p. 46 translates tropn ekphraseis as ecphrases of objects. The importance
65
it (and there are also ekphraseis of the tropos) suggests that it was an
answer to an anticipated question in the mind of the reader who, hearing
the first four peristaseis mentioned, might well have been wondering about
the remaining two. None of the Progymnasmata texts makes any reference
to the cause (aitia) in the discussion of ekphrasis (with the important
exception of Nikolaos discussion of ekphraseis of statues and paintings,
discussed below). But it is mentioned by an anonymous Byzantine
commentator on the Progymnasmata who notes all the peristaseis can be
the subject of ekphrasis, except the cause (aitia).12 The reasons for its
absence are explained by Sardianos who points out that a cause is never
apparent by itself but [becomes apparent] from the action.13 Indeed, an
abstract notion like cause hardly lends itself to being placed before the
eyes. Hermogenes, in his discussion of a famous ekphrasis of a storm by
the second-century star sophist Aristeides, points to a further motivation
when he notes that the omission of the cause in ekphraseis of natural
phenomena lends solemnity (semnots) to a discourse.14 An ekphrasis was
concerned, by definition, with perceptible phenomena and their effects.
In the case of the storm, the phenomena are all the more awe-inspiring if
their cause is unexplained, or left open to interpretation. In fact, as we will
see, many ekphraseis in oratory serve to point towards the cause of the
state of affairs described, demanding that the audience fill in the missing
peristasis for themselves, an example of how the Progymnasmata reflect
only an elementary level of a far more complex practice.
The standard set of subjects recommended for ekphrasis are therefore
not random, but belong to a system for analysing events and their verbal
representation, and provide the point of contact with the practice of
narration. This close connection between the subjects of ekphrasis and
the elements of narration explains why the authorities mentioned by ps.Hermogenes recommended teaching ekphrasis as a part of the exercise of
narration, rather than as a separate exercise. The individual elements of
a narration could be expanded by means of ekphrasis for any element or
combination of elements of a story could be narrated ekphrastically, that is
to say with the vividness necessary to appeal to the audiences imagination.
of the manner emerges in his translation of the rest of the sentence but the choice of objects to
render this first use of tropos shifts the focus away from the action as a subject of ekphrasis.
12
Anonymous scholion to Aphthonios, Progymnasmata, in Walz, Rhetores graeci 2, p. 55:
ov v , v .
13
Sardianos, Commentarium in Aphthonii Progymnasmata, p. 217, ll. 223: oo
v o o v. Some examples of the way in which the cause
could be implicit in the event or action described will be discussed in Chapter 6.
14
Hermogenes, On Types of Style, 2445. See also the definition of aphgsis cited above
(Chapter 2, n. 67) in which diatupsis is contrasted to digsis which is specifically described
as being meta tn aitin (with, or including, causes).
66
The commentators on Aphthonios discuss this, pointing out that ekphrasis

provides practice in a special form of narration which is more elaborate.15
They adopt a tripartite classification of types of narration which is set out
in the handbook On Invention, attributed to Hermogenes in which the
plain (hapl) narration is distinguished from the elaborate (endiaskeuos)
and the confirmatory (enkataskeuos).16 The second of these, the elaborate, is
associated with ekphrasis. One anonymous Byzantine treatise on rhetoric
describes endiaskeuos digsis as ekphrastic and all but placing the actions
before the eyes. The treatise is particularly interesting in that its author
provides examples of each type, retelling the story of Ajaxs slaughter of
the Greek cattle in each mode. The ekphrastic endiaskeuos version is told
with attention to the appearance of persons (the look in Ajaxs eyes, the
quality of his movements) and things (his sword glinting in the darkness),
and to the details of the actions (Ajaxs movements, his violent attack and
its aftermath).17
All the examples of ekphrasis cited in the Progymnasmata are taken
from larger narrative contexts and represent passages where the author
elaborates on the appearance of a setting, a character, or the time at which
some event occurred. Keeping such ekphraseis within their narrative
settings was a concern to Theon and ps.-Hermogenes. They both advise
their readers to ensure that ekphrasis is connected to the surrounding
context.18 For Theon, this is particularly important in the case of ekphraseis
of places, times, the manner in which and persons precisely the types
of ekphrasis which recall the common modern conception of description
as a separate block inserted into the flow of a narrative. (He notes the way
Homer ties the arms of Achilles into the narrative context by describing
their effect on the internal audience.) The supporting role which seems
to be attributed to these ekphraseis in setting the scene corresponds to
the conception of description as the faithful ancilla narrationis identified
by Genette as one of the characteristics of the modern conception of
description. And, as has often been noted, ancient critics warned against the
danger of these types of ekphrasis becoming over-lengthy and irrelevant:
15
Doxapatres, Homiliae in Aphthonii Progymnasmata, in Walz, Rhetores graeci, 2, p. 509;
Anonymous scholia to Aphthonios, in Walz, Rhetores graeci, 2, p. 55. See Appendix A for texts
and translations.
16
Ps.-Hermogenes, On Invention (Peri eurses), 2.7, p. 122. See also below, pp. 712, on
ps.-Hermogenes treatment of diaskeu.
17
Anon., Peri tn tessarn mern tou teleiou logou, Walz, Rhetores graeci, 3, p. 576, l. 21 p.
578, l. 27. Text and translation in Appendix A. A reference to Michael Psellos as a model of
style provides a terminus post quem of the late eleventh century for the treatise as a whole;
however, it is quite possible that the author compiled material from sources of different
dates.
18
Ps.-Hermogenes, Progymnasmata, p. 23, ll. 68; Theon, Progymnasmata, 119, ll. 2530.
67
Lucian, On Writing History, 20, complained about historians who revel in

pointless ekphraseis of places, and Horace, Ars poetica, famously warned
against purple patches.19
However, if some types of ekphrasis correspond to the descriptionas-opposed-to-narration which Genette identified as characteristic of
modern conceptions of literature, others blur the boundaries to such an
extent that it is clear that these two types of discourse and the relation
between them were conceived quite differently in ancient rhetorical
thought. When the rhetoricians do articulate the difference between
ekphrasis and digsis they do so in entirely different terms. This is most
evident in the treatment of two types of subject matter: pragmata (events,
actions, found in all the versions of the Progymnasmata) and tropos (the
manner in which something is done or made, found in Theon alone).
As Genette notes, the distinction between description and narration is
relatively recent and the two are more difficult to separate in practice than
in theory.20 For the ancient rhetoricians, ekphrasis could be applied not
only to the background to action (time, place, manner, perpetrator) but
to the action itself. An ekphrasis was distinguished from a digsis not by
the nature of the subject matter, but by the degree of reference to visible
phenomena and the effect it had on the audience. These phenomena can
be things, but also the actions themselves.
Ekphraseis of Actions (Pragmata)
The category of actions or events (pragmata) is central to the subjects
of ekphrasis in all the versions of the Progymnasmata. It is clear from
the examples cited, as well as from the context, that of all the possible
meanings of the Greek term, that of actions or events is foremost, and
the authors advise their readers to follow a temporal sequence, starting
from what led up to the main event, in this case the battle, and what
followed.
The category of pragmata seems to have perplexed some modern
readers of the Progymnasmata who come to it with a strong conception
of description as distinct from narration, a type of text whose referent
is characteristically an object. Some readers, whether consciously or
19
See Andrew Laird, Ut figura poiesis: writing art and the art of writing in Augustan
poetry, in Ja Elsner (ed.), Art and Text in Roman Culture (Cambridge, 1996), p. 93. Theon,
Progymnasmata, 119, l. 33 warns against spending time on useless details (achrsta).
20
Grard Genette, Frontires du rcit, in LAnalyse structurale du rcit (Paris: Seuil,
1981), pp. 1624; cf. Jean Molino, Logiques de la description, Potique, 91 (1992): 36382
and Perrine Galand-Hallyn, Le Reflet des fleurs: description et mtalangage potiques dHomre
Erasme (Geneva, 1994), pp. 910. On the category of description of action, see Adam, La
Description, pp. 7689.
68
unconsciously, have written actions out of their accounts of ancient

ekphrasis, thus making it conform more closely to description. The
entry on ekphrasis in the third edition of the Oxford Classical Dictionary,
for example, translates pragmata as objects, which is within the range
of meaning of the Greek but difficult to reconcile with the example of a
battle, not to mention the absence of any example that would obviously
correspond to our notion of object.21 In what seems to be a more deliberate
act of philological sleight of hand, Roland Barthes spirited this category
away altogether and replaced it with works of art.22 By this simple move
he made ekphrasis conform to accepted modern definitions of description
and remedied the rhetoricians omission of works of art as a prime type
of subject matter (rather than an afterthought in one late author). This
small and seemingly insignificant adjustment changes the whole balance
of ekphrasis and its relation to the other Progymnasmata.
The recommendations to begin an ekphrasis of a pragma like a battle
with the events leading up to it and to go on to include the consequences
make clear that such ekphraseis could involve temporal progression.
Indeed, they could be conceived as a type of narration distinguished only
by the inclusion of details, as in the example of the ekphrastic elaborate
version of the story of Ajax (see above and Appendix A). So while some
ekphraseis might, like descriptions as broadly defined in modern terms,
constitute a narrative pause, or a separable passage, even when woven
into their contexts, others, such as Thucydides night battle, or Libanios
ekphraseis of the Kalends or the hunt, constitute narratives (in the sense of
accounts of actions unfolding in time) in themselves. Libanios ekphrasis of
drunkenness is a particularly interesting example: rather than describing
a drunken man as an object of fascination and disgust, he depicts his state
through his actions at the drinking party and on his way home, depicting
character through actions which betray moral choice (proairesis), as
Aristotle recommends for judicial narrations.23 Ekphrasis is therefore not
by definition separable from narration, nor does it by definition constitute a
digression. Some examples may do so, whether their subjects are narrative
or not (the making of the Shield of Achilles being a prime example of a
narrative ekphrasis that interrupts a larger framing narrative), but this is
not a necessary characteristic of ekphrasis as a whole as it was conceived
in ancient rhetoric.
21
Simon Hornblower and Antony Spawforth (eds), Oxford Classical Dictionary (Oxford,
1996), p. 515. A similar idea of description may well underlie Kennedys choice of object as
a translation for tropos in Theon mentioned above, n. 11.
22
Roland Barthes, Leffet de rel, in Barthes et al. (eds), Littrature et ralit (Paris,
1982), p. 84.
23
Libanios, Progymnasmata, pp. 4779; cf. Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1417a1624.
69
Ekphraseis of the Tropos

Another class of subject matter which abolishes any strict boundary
between objects and actions is the tropos. This category of ekphraseis
of the manner in which something is made or done is found only in
the earliest version of the Progymnasmata by Theon. Though customs or
manners is within the range of the Greek term, as one of the peristaseis it
has a precise meaning that is illustrated by Theons examples. These are
accounts of how equipment and arms were made: Thucydides accounts
of the fortification of Plataia and of the construction of a siege machine
(Book 4.100) and the account in the ninth book of Ktesias Persika of a
strategy involving the use of effigies by Cyrus during his siege of Sardis
to make the defending forces believe that Persian troops had already
stormed the battlements.24 It is interesting to see how the influence of the
modern association between description and ekphrasis has affected the
interpretation of this passage of Theons text. In their translations, Patillon
and Kennedy both identify Thucydides account of the fortification of
Plataia as 3.21, a brief description of the finished construction. This passage
does seem to be the one indicated in Theons introduction where he
mentions the plague in the second book and the fortification of Plataia in
the third book as examples of ekphrasis in Thucydides History.25 However,
the term Theon uses, periteichismos, would seem to refer more naturally
to the process of construction rather than to a constructed object so that
2.758, a vivid account of the construction of the fortifications, fits Theons
argument much better: the passage describes the offensive and defensive
measures taken by the Spartans and the besieged Plataeans in narrative
form (Thucydides use of the verb periteichiz at 2.78.1 adds further support
to this identification). Although none of Theons immediate followers
mentioned the tropos in their chapters on ekphrasis, the idea was clearly
not lost. The ekphrastic version of the Ajax story expands principally on
the manner in which the deed was done, and the technique of describing a
monument through a narrative of its construction is a frequent technique
in epideictic rhetoric.26 Doxapatres also discusses the ekphrasis of the
24
Ktesias, Persika, F9b, ed. Dominique Lenfant (Paris, 2004), p. 114.

26
See Ruth Webb, The aesthetics of sacred space: narrative, metaphor and motion
in ekphraseis of church buildings, DOP, 53 (1999): 5974 and
Ekphrasis, amplification
and persuasion in Procopius Buildings, Antiquit tardive, 8 (2000)
: 6771 and below. It is
interesting to note that Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (New
York, 1988), pp. 423 identifies the representation of objects in a total context of human
action as one of the characteristics of oral discourse. His examples are drawn from Homeric
epic, but the examples of ekphrasis of the tropos show that this tendency survived throughout
antiquity.
25
70
tropos in his commentary on Aphthonios, distinguishing ekphraseis

of the finished appearance (schma) from ekphraseis of the process, the
same distinction as the famous one between Homers approach to the
description of the shield of Achilles as an account of the manufacture and
Virgils presentation of the shield of Aeneas as finished object.27
Theons discussion of the ekphrasis of the tropos is also notable as
the only place in the Progymnasmata where the Shield of Achilles, the
ur-ekphrasis in the modern construction of the term, gets a mention.
Theon could hardly be further from treating it as a description of an
objet dart, or even as a work of poetry. He simply lists the passage
alongside other accounts of how military equipment and machines
were made a categorization which was suggested by the ancient term
for the Shield, Hoplopoiia (Making of the Arms), with its stress on the
narrative organization as an account of manufacture. Neither art nor
object figure as ideas in his analysis. Strange as this categorization may
seem from a literary perspective, it does recognize a key feature of the
Shield: its narrative form. But there is nothing definitive about Theons
classification; it does not recur and seems rather like an ad hoc attempt to
include a familiar passage which was clearly recognizable as an example of
ekphrasis within the framework of rhetorical categories of subject matter
which Theon was using. But his ability to place what is for us the seminal
example of a description of a work of art in such company does show how
different his preoccupations and organizing schemes were from those of a
twentieth-century critic like Spitzer.
The Distinction between Ekphrasis and Digsis
So, not only was ekphrasis not understood in antiquity as a term for
description of a work of art, it was not even understood in the same terms
as our description. The subject matter is not a factor in the definition;
instead an ekphrasis is distinguished by qualities of the language and,
most importantly, its effect on the listener. Ancient students of rhetoric
were taught to recognize a distinction between ekphrasis and digsis, but
that distinction was expressed in quite different terms from those we might
expect. The key term enargeia is central to the distinction. Explaining why
the adjective enargs is included in the definition of ekphrasis, Nikolaos
says:
27
Doxapatres, Homiliae in Aphthonii Progymnasmata, in Walz, Rhetores graeci, 2, p. 513, l.

33 p. 514, l. 5. Text and translation in Appendix A. See also Jean-Pierre Aygon, Lecphrasis
et la notion de description dans la rhtorique antique, Pallas, 41 (1994): 49. Modern theorists
have recognized this liminal category with the term Homeric description: see Philippe
Hamon, Du descriptif (Paris, 1993), pp. 18998; Adam, La Description, pp. 7781.
71
Vividly is added because it is in this respect particularly that ekphrasis

differs from digsis (narration). The latter sets out the events plainly,
while the former tries to make the listeners into spectators.
v, oo .
v v v v, o oov
.28
An ekphrasis is distinguished from narration (digsis) by the quality of

enargeia, vividness. The distinction between ekphrasis and digsis is
therefore not a question of the type of referent but resides in the effect on
the listener. However, this definition raises a new question of distinction:
when is a narrative vivid enough to be an ekphrasis? Nikolaos illustrates
what he understood by vividness by a very basic example clearly inspired
by Thucydides:
It is [characteristic] of diegesis to say the Athenians and the Peloponnesians
went to war, but of ekphrasis [to say] that each side made such and such
preparations and equipped itself in this manner (tropos).
v v v ov vo oovvo.
, o o o vo
.
A narration therefore simply gives the information that the Athenians

fought the Peloponnesians, while an ekphrasis tells how, with what
preparations (so that much of Thucydides history would be, according to
this definition, ekphrasis).29 The definition of ekphrasis therefore depends
on the amount of perceptible detail conveyed by the verbal account, the
exact quantity remaining to be determined by subjective judgement, or by
convention.30
Degrees of Narration
The distinction between plain and visually elaborate (i.e. ekphrastic)
accounts is found in several sources, with different vocabularies. It
appears in the contrast between simple (hapl) and elaborate (endiaskeuos)
narration mentioned above, in which it is clear that the elaboration resides
in the description of actions as well as of persons and objects. The author
28
Nikolaos, Progymnasmata, 68, ll. 910.

Nikolaos reference to the tropos seems to be a direct reminiscence of Theon.
30
As noted by Aygon, Lecphrasis et la notion de description, p. 48 and Sophie Rabau,
Narration et description: lexigence de dtails, Lalies, 15 (1995): 27390.
29
72
of the ps.-Hermogenean treatise On Invention mentions the three types of

narration, of which these are two, in his discussion of narration at 2.7 and
then returns in Book 3 to the elaborate account, which he terms diaskeu.31
This diaskeu has similarities to ekphrasis, as is pointed out by a scholiast
who defines it as being as if depicting (diazgraphein) and describing
(ekphrazein) the subject and as if bringing it before the listeners eyes.32
Ps.-Hermogenes himself defines diaskeu as a form of diatupsis and
compares it in two places to poetry.33 The action (pragma) is central to ps.Hermogenes conception of diaskeu; moreover, he notes that the cause is
absent, as is the case with ekphrasis. Of particular interest is his emphasis
on the tropos, the manner in which the act took place, which is central
to the elaboration required of the diaskeu and this is something that is
well illustrated by the Byzantine example of the elaborate digsis of Ajax
(see Appendix A). I would therefore suggest that ekphrasis may also be
considered, in some contexts, to be a process of elaboration that is applied
to a basic statement of facts, adding details in order to place the subject
before the eyes. This explains the close affinity between ekphrasis and the
exercise of digma noted by the commentators on Aphthonios. In terms
of judicial oratory, both contribute to the narrative section of a speech, as
Nikolaos himself points out in his Progymnasmata.34
Enargeia in Quintilian
A similar relationship between the basic statement of facts and the vivid
version that could be termed ekphrastic is to be found in Quintilian. In his
discussion of enargeia in Book 8 of the Institutio oratoria Quintilian draws
a distinction between a detailed account of an event related with enargeia,
which ensures that the audience seem to see it unfolding before their
eyes, and the brief statement, which simply conveys the information, as
31
Ps.-Hermogenes, On Invention (Peri Heureses), 3.15, p. 166, l. 20 p. 170, l. 18. Michel
Patillon, Hermogne: lart rhtorique (Paris, 1997), p. 274 identifies this chapter as originally
belonging to a section discussing the epilogue. Diaskeu certainly can be used in epilogues
(see Chapter 6 below for examples in Sopatros the Rhetor) but there is, as Kennedy points
out, no mention of the epilogue in this chapter and the discussion points rather to a link with
narration and the endiaskeuos digsis of 2.7. See George A. Kennedy, Invention and Method:
Two Rhetorical Treatises from the Hermogenic Corpus Translated with Introduction and Notes
(Atlanta, 2005), p. 127.
32
Walz, Rhetores graeci, 7, p. 717, l. 17 p. 718, l. 3: vv
v vv v v: o o v
ov ooovov oov v v,
v v o o.
As noted above, the endiaskeuos form of narration may also be
termed ekphrastic.
33
Ps.-Hermogenes, On Invention, 3.15, p. 167, l. 1 and p. 167, l. 21 p. 168, l. 2.
34
Nikolaos, Progymnasmata, p. 70, ll. 23.
73
in Nikolaos definition of digsis. Quintilians example is different: he uses

the sack of a city, one of the stock subjects of rhetoric and historiography
alike, which he illustrates with his own circumstantial account of the
event, describing the destruction of buildings and the distress of the
inhabitants.35 Such a tableau is created, he explains, by opening up the
brief statement of facts and exploring the implications:
Doubtless, if one says that the city has been taken one implies everything
which such a fate entails, but, like a brief announcement, this penetrates
the emotions less. If instead you open up the things which were included
within the single phrase, there will appear flames pouring through
houses and temples, the crash of roofs falling and the sound made up
of the cries of many individuals, some hesitating as they flee, others
clinging to their loved ones in a last embrace, the wailing of women and
children and old men lamenting that fate has preserved them for such
a terrible destiny. Then there will be the plunder of sacred and profane
property and people running to and fro carrying booty and prisoners
each driven in front of his captor, and a mother trying to keep hold of her
child, and fighting among the victors wherever the booty is greatest.
Sine dubio enim qui dicit expugnatam esse civitatem complectitur
omnia quaecumque talis fortuna recipit, sed in adfectus minus penetrat
brevis hic velut nuntius. At si aperias haec quae verbo uno inclusa
erant, apparebunt effusae per domus ac templa flammae et ruentium
tectorum fragor et ex diversis clamoribus unus quidam sonus, aliorum
fuga incerta, alii extremo complexu suorum cohaerentes et infantium
feminarumque ploratus et male usque in illum diem servati fato senes:
tum illa profanorum sacrorumque direptio, efferentium praedas
repetentiumque discursus, et acti ante suum quisque praedonem
catenati, et conata retinere infantem suum mater, et sicubi maius lucrum
est pugna inter victores. (8.3.679)
Although he does not use the Greek term, Quintilians conception of the
vivid account is very close to Nikolaos conception of ekphrasis: both
conceive of the vivid, detailed version as the result of the expansion of a
basic statement of fact whether the city has fallen or the Athenians and
Spartans went to war.
35
See George M. Paul, Urbs capta: sketch of an ancient literary motif, Phoenix, 36
(1982): 14455.
74
Quintilians Enargeia and the Greek Tradition of Ekphrasis

Several parallels are labelled as ekphrasis in Greek manuals. The most
frequently cited evocation of enemy destruction in classical Greek oratory is
Demosthenes description of Phokis (19.65), cited by Nikolaos as an example
of ekphrasis in judicial oratory and by the author of the ps.-Hermogenean
On Invention as an example of endiaskeuos digsis.36 Moreover, in a Greek
instruction manual on declamation by Sopatros the Rhetor, an account of
a sacked city which is comparable to Quintilians example is referred to as
ekphrasis.37 This passage, which is a reworking of the Demosthenic model
(the speaker is Demosthenes himself), and its implications for the function of
ekphrasis, will be discussed in Chapter 6. The apparent absence of ekphrasis
from Quintilians treatment of the preliminary exercise has been noted, but
his treatment of enargeia shows that he was familiar with the doctrines and
procedures of ekphrasis as we find them in the Greek manuals. There is
therefore no need to look for ekphrasis in Quintilians treatment of digressio or
excursus, as has been suggested, again under the assumption that ekphrasis
is characteristically digressive; instead it is his discussion of enargeia that
comes closest to the Greek discussions of ekphrasis.38
Ekphrasis: Telling in Full
Nikolaos example also shows us the force of the preposition ek in
ekphrasis. It does not refer to the separable nature of the descriptive passage,
to the way in which it stands out ek from the narrative background (an
idea grounded in the common conceptions about description identified
by Hamon).39 Instead, the preposition has an intensive force, meaning
in full, utterly. So to compose an ek-phrasis, is to tell in full, to give
all the details.40 The closest parallel in Latin to ekphrasis is therefore not
36
Nikolaos, Progymnasmata, p. 71 ll. 35; ps.-Hermogenes, On Invention, 2.7, p. 124, ll.
914. This passage is also cited by Alexandros, Peri Schmatn, in Walz, Rhetores graeci, 7, p.
456 and in the Scholia Demosthenica, 157c as a diatupsis and in other scholia to Demosthenes
(157a and b) as diaskeu and endiaskeuos digsis, while in Apsines, Art of Rhetoric, 3.27 (p.
134, ll. 213) it is mentioned as an example of hupograph. The corresponding description
of Thebes in Aeschines, Against Ktesiphon (3.157) is termed ekphrasis by Herodian, Peri
schematn, in Walz, Rhetores graeci, 8, p. 603, l. 12 (see Aygon, Lecphrasis et la notion de
description, p. 47). Compare also the Rhetorica ad Herennium,
4.39.51
on descriptio.
37
Sopatros the Rhetor, On the Division of Questions, p. 210, l. 20. See Chapter 6 for
further discussion.
38
Ian H. Henderson, Quintilian and the Progymnasmata, Antike und Abendland, 37
(1991): 90.
39
Philippe Hamon,Quest-ce quune description?, Potique, 112 (1972), p. 465.
40
As Perrine Galand-Hallyn, Le Reflet des fleurs, p. 14 has noted, this conception
of ekphrasis as a development of a basic idea is close to Philippe Hamons definition of
description as the exploration of the lexical field and likewise does away with the need to
75
descriptio but explicatio, unfolding.41 Similarly, the preposition peri, as in

perigmatikos, may also serve primarily to convey the idea of elaboration.42
To lead someone around (perigeisthai) a subject is to relate it more fully, in
more detail than simply to lead someone through it (digeisthai). Perigsis
and its related terms do not therefore necessarily imply that the referent
is an object around which a person or an eye can wander, any more than
the subject of a digsis has to be spatial. It is a mode of verbal presentation
which evokes perceptible details of the subject matter, the aim of which,
the Progymnasmata tell us, is to bring the subject before the eyes, to make
the listener see the subject described in his or her minds eye. It is this
detail and the visual impact which should flow from it, not the type of
subject matter, which make an ancient ekphrasis an ekphrasis.
Ekphrasis, Muthos and Digma
The subjects for ekphrasis, particularly the category of pragmata, help to
clarify what ps.-Hermogenes meant when he said that some people taught
ekphrasis within the two narrative exercises: muthos and digma. Rather
than being an optional extra which could be inserted into a narrative,
ekphrasis was a process which could be applied to it, in which the basic
idea was expanded by reference to its perceptible characteristics. The object
of the exercise was to have an imaginative impact on the viewer which, in a
rhetorical context, meant contributing to the persuasive effect of a speech.43
The close link between ekphrasis and the exercise of digma points to the
rhetorical function of ekphrasis. It could be used in the narrative section
(digsis or narratio) of a judicial speech, to lend extra force and credibility to
the speakers version of events.44 The inevitably partial nature of rhetorical
digsis, in which plausibility was far more important than truth, means that
ekphrasis is part of a fictional creation which is far from neutral or innocent.
define description on the basis of the nature of the subject matter. See Hamon, Quest-ce
quune description? and Du descriptif.
41
Theon, Progymnasmata, ed. Patillon, p. 149 n. 323; Wilhelm Geissler, Ad descriptionum
historiam symbola (Leipzig, 1916), p. 26. On explicatio in the Elder Seneca, see Janet Fairweather,
Seneca the Elder (Cambridge, 1981), p. 211. Fairweather, ibid., p. 210, also notes that Senecan
descriptio is not invariably an extended set piece but is sometimes merely an extra-vivid
piece of narration.
42
Liddell and Scott, GreekEnglish Lexicon, peri F IV; cf. Demetrios, On Style, 19 on
periagg. Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 2.4.3 uses the image of the sinuous path to convey the
effect of excessive description.
43
Anonymous Seguerianus, 96, p. 26 introduces his definition of enargeia by stating
that it contributes to persuasion ( ).
44
Nikolaos, Progymnasmata, p. 70, ll. 23 states clearly that ekphrasis is an exercise
which prepares for the composition of judicial digseis.
76
The speakers hermneia, or interpretation of events, is all important, an idea

that is perhaps implicit in Nikolaos use of the adjective aphgmatikos.
Nikolaos on the Function of Ekphrasis
Of all the authors of Progymnasmata, Nikolaos is the only one to include
any explicit discussion of the function of ekphrasis in the context of a
speech. As well as noting that ekphrasis is an exercise that prepares for the
narrative section of a speech, he goes through each of the standard three
rhetorical genres in turn and, as he does so, brings back into focus the
response of the audience which was so central to all the authors definition
of ekphrasis. In deliberative (political) oratory, the ekphrasis of the
subject helps the speaker persuade his audience (to either accept or reject
the subject); in judicial speeches, ekphrasis is a means of amplification
(auxsis: the technique of emphasising the importance of something, such
as the heinousness of the crime); while in epideictic the ekphrasis need
only create a sense of pleasure (hdon) in the audience. And a little further
on, he cites the example of Demosthenes evocation of the destruction at
Phokis to illustrate the use of ekphrasis as a means of achieving auxsis, the
rhetorical underlining of a particular subject and deinsis (the arousal of
indignation). The effect of ekphrasis was therefore varied and depended
on context and occasion. Nikolaos account of it is further nuanced by the
treatments of the various types of oratory in more advanced treatises as
will be discussed in Chapter 6.
Ekphrasis and Common Place
Nikolaos reference to the use of ekphrasis in amplification, making the
audience feel the necessary emotion about some class of person or act,
also helps to explain ps.-Hermogenes claim that ekphrasis could be
studied as part of the exercise of koinos topos (common place). This was
the exercise which contained a rehearsal of commonly accepted opinions
about certain categories of person whether heroes or villains such as
tyrants, adulterers, the desecrators of temples and murderers.45 The
exercise provided the students with a wealth of ready-made assertions
about each type of person to be used as necessary to expand upon the
45
Theon, Progymnasmata, 106, ll. 67. o o ooovo
o o o vo [Topos is a speech which amplifies an action,
whether a crime or a good deed, that is not in dispute]. Theon calls this exercise simply topos.
See Laurent Pernot, Lieu et lieu commun dans la rhtorique antique, BAGB (1986): 25384;
Malcolm Heath, Invention, in S. Porter, Handbook of Classical Rhetoric in the Hellenistic Period
(330 B.C.A.D. 400) (Leiden, 1997), p. 95.
77
vices or virtues of a category of person or action. Thus, a speech accusing

someone of adultery could include a section dwelling on the heinous
nature of the crime and the wickedness of those who commit it. One
technique which students were taught to use within the koinos topos was
the vivid description of the crime or good deed. Theon gives the example
of a murder described as an action unfolding, which is to be used in the
koinos topos against a murderer:
For example we shall describe (diagraph) the perpetrator in the act of
committing (ergazomenos) the murder, how cruelly and mercilessly he
became, though a human being himself, the murderer of another human
being, and drawing the sword and inflicting the wound and, to ensure
that the wound was fatal, striking again and again and being spattered
with the murdered mans blood, and [we will describe] the victims
cries, as he at one time begged the murderer for mercy and at another
time called out for help from men and from the gods and all kinds of
things of this sort.46
ov oo v v vo v vov, v
vvo vo vo v, o vo, v
v v, o vov,
oovo, vvo o ovovo, o
vo v , oo v o ov vo, oo oo
ovo, vv v vo, vv o o,
o.
Although Theon does not use the term ekphrasis in this context, his
example shows why the teachers alluded to by ps.-Hermogenes thought
it appropriate to teach ekphrasis as part of the exercise koinos topos.
Nikolaos, in his discussion of the same exercise, does use the term
ekphrasis interchangeably with both hupotupsis and diatupsis when he
comes to discuss the inclusion of such vivid evocations of actions.47
However, what ps.-Hermogenes comment masks is the fact that the
relation between ekphrasis and koinos topos is different from that between
ekphrasis and the narrative exercises, digsis and muthos. Ekphrasis
(or hupotupsis, or diatupsis) stands to koinos topos as part to whole; it
is a passage that can be inserted to increase the dramatic effect of the
amplification. But with respect to digsis, ekphrasis can be considered
to be an expansion of a basic narrative, a process applied to it, as in
Quintilians image of opening up the idea of the sack of a city, or the
46
47

78
distinction between the simple (hapl) and elaborate (endiaskeuos) types of

narration. If we move from the Progymnasmata to the aspects of the larger
speech for which they prepare, there is a comparable variety in the uses of
ekphrasis. Used as part of a narration of events in dispute, ekphrasis may
serve to establish the speakers version (see below on the rhetorical uses of
enargeia); used as part of a koinos topos, its purpose is first and foremost to
arouse the appropriate emotions as part of a larger amplification.
Ekphrasis and Enkmion in the Progymnasmata
Despite the apparent uniformity of the surviving Progymnasmata, there
are differences in detail which reflect major differences in orientation
and suggest a gradual shift over time in perceptions of ekphrasis. This
is apparent in the role of confirmation and refutation in Theon, who
treats these most argumentative of exercises not as one exercise among
many, but as processes which can be applied to all the other exercises.
Thus one writes a simple narration or ekphrasis at one stage, and later
learns to argue that the details of the story or the ekphrasis are or are not
plausible.48 Of all the authors, Theon seems to have his eye most firmly
fixed on the courtroom as a venue for the skills he is teaching, a concern
he shares with his contemporary Quintilian. This judicial orientation is
also evident in the subjects he singles out for ekphrasis, which correspond
closely to the parts of narration, even including the tropos, the manner
in which something is done. Narration was a vital element of judicial
speeches, which revolve around past actions. This close relation between
ekphrasis and digma in Theon, alongside the references to ekphrasis in
Greek handbooks on declamation, such as that of Sopatros, points to a
function for ekphrasis in judicial rhetoric.
The later versions of the Progymnasmata, however, reflect a shift towards
epideictic, which is visible in the treatment of ekphrasis and its relation
to enkmion, the exercise which prepared directly for epideictic oratory.
The demands of epideictic are evident in some small but significant
changes in the list of subject matter proposed for ekphrasis. Nikolaos
introduces festivals (pangureis) into his list, which otherwise reproduces
the standard schema of person, place, time and event.49 Libanios provides
an example of this kind of subject in his model ekphrasis of the festival
48
Patillon, introduction to Theon, Progymnasmata, pp. xxviiixxxi and Ruth Webb, The
Progymnasmata as practice, in Yun Lee Too (ed.), Education in Greek and Roman Antiquity
(Leiden, 2001), pp. 289316.
49
Festival time (heort) had figured in Theons chapter on ekphrasis (118, l. 21) as a
sub-type of times (chronoi).
79
of the Kalends.50 But a far more telling example is Aphthonios puzzling

addition of plants and dumb animals to his list (see Table 3.1).51 Plants
and animals are a rather incongruous addition to the peristaseis and no
examples of these interlopers are given in the discussion which follows;
nor does Aphthonios identify any models from classical texts (although
Theon had included descriptions of exotic beasts and birds under the
heading of prospa). However, the motivation for this alteration is clear
from Aphthonios precepts for other Progymnasmata. It makes his list of
subjects for ekphrasis identical with that for enkmion, as the table shows.
To find examples of plants and dumb animals we have to go to the earlier
chapter where the horse, the ox, the olive and the vine are suggested as
objects of praise.52 The exact subjects suggested by each author are thus
a further indication of the connections between ekphrasis and the other
exercises. As a comparison between the subjects identified for ekphrasis
shows (see Table 3.1), between Theon and Aphthonios there was a
perceptible change from seeing ekphrasis as closely allied to narration
towards an emphasis on its links with enkmion.
Enkmion, like digma and koinos topos, was one of the other exercises
which, according to ps.-Hermogenes, could encompass the practice of
ekphrasis. The model enkmia by Libanios show how the two exercises were
interconnected, and how the appearance of a subject, where appropriate,
could be evoked as an integral part of the praise. The model enkmion of
the ox alludes to the beasts beauty and the appearance of the date palm is
described.53 Lucians ludic Enkmion of the Fly also lingers over the insects
shape, texture and the way its carapace shines in the sun, like a peacock.
Conversely, the models of ekphrasis by Aphthonios and Libanios have
unmistakably encomiastic aims. Their approach to the subject is in itself
encomiastic. Aphthonios description (which takes the form of a detailed
verbal tour around the building) is prefaced by a discussion of the utility of
the acropolis (p. 38) and ends with what comes to be the almost obligatory
statement that its beauty is more than can be expressed in words (p. 41).
The encomiastic features of Libanios ekphrasis of spring are clear from his
50

Aphthonios, Progymnasmata, p. 37: , o o,
o oo .
52
Aphthonios, Progymnasmata, p. 21: ov , o
o, o oo . Hermogenes also mentions plants and animals
as subjects of an enkomion, alongside abstractions such as justice (classed as pragmata) and
places. Libanios model enkmia include the ox (pp. 26773), the date palm and the apple tree
(pp. 2737).
53
Libanios, Progymnasmata, p. 479, ll. 1119.
51
80
introductory phrase stating I love the spring more than the other seasons
(hrai) and wish to tell (digomai) what it is like.54
Sardianos commentary on Aphthonios reflects the increased importance
of epideictic. He is very clear about the uses of ekphrasis in enkmia (i.e.
epideictic speeches) citing several types of subject typical of epideictic
speeches: in enkmia you will describe places made by men, harbours,
colonnades and the like (p. 215, ll. 1819). Significantly, he is either less
confident or less interested in its use in the other genres; discussing judicial
speeches he can only suggest that we might need to describe the place of the
crime, while in deliberative oratory, he says vaguely, following Nikolaos,
we often need to describe the subject of our speech in order to be more
persuasive. Epideictic, and epideictic needs, have become the norm and,
although Byzantine homilies often display the use of ekphrasis of events,
they did not feature as a genre in didactic handbooks. The effects of the rise
of epideictic on the surviving corpus of Progymnasmata are hardly perceptible
on the surface, hence the reputation earned by these exercises as being
unchanging. But at the level of details like the subjects for ekphrasis there
were subtle changes within the prescriptions for ekphrasis which recognized,
however belatedly, the changing demands of rhetorical practice and which
altered the relation of the exercise of ekphrasis to the other Progymnasmata.
It is, however, important to note that within the teaching of rhetoric
the rise of epideictic was relative, not absolute, and it did not eclipse
declamation, at least up until the sixth century.55 A certain Athanasios went
so far as to subordinate all the other exercises to enkmion in his version
of the Progymnasmata.56 But the experiment cannot have been attractive
enough to ensure Athanasios immortality among the rhetoricians since
his work does not survive and is cited as a curiosity. Among the surviving
progymnasmatists, even Aphthonios did not share this view of the
primacy of enkmion. He emphasizes the importance of the exercises in
confirmation and refutation, essential skills for the law court, claiming
that they contain the whole skill of this art and the Progymnasmata were
still a preparation for declamation. At the same time, enkmion clearly had
a place in Theons system, and the type of use of ekphrasis in the service
of enkmion that we see in Aphthonios and Libanios model ekphraseis is
54
Ibid., p. 479, ll. 1718.

Chorikios declamations show that the art of judicial and deliberative speaking was
still being taught by this method in sixth-century Gaza, and the Hermogenean Corpus,
which is almost entirely devoted to declamation, was the basis of the Byzantine rhetorical
curriculum. Malcolm Heath, Menander: A Rhetor in Context (Oxford, 2004) mounts a vigorous
challenge to the thesis that epideictic eclipsed declamation after the second century.
56
See Aphthonios, Progymnasmata, p. 53 and Pernot, La Rhtorique de lloge, pp. 5960.
55
81
well represented in Statius occasional poetry and probably had a long

history in Hellenistic prose and verse.57
Ekphraseis of Works of Art
One type of subject matter for ekphrasis that was particularly useful in
epideictic contexts was cities and buildings, which could be included
under the traditional heading of places, and it is surely no accident that
Aphthonios model ekphrasis is of such a place: the Alexandrian acropolis.
If architecture is easily subsumed within the standard treatments of
ekphrasis, the same is not true, at first sight at least, of the central subjects
of modern ekphrasis: painted and sculpted representations. In a way, the
absence of these from the rhetorical manuals is neither surprising nor
particularly significant. It is clear that the subjects proposed for ekphrasis
by the various authors of the Progymnasmata, far from being randomly
chosen, formed a coherent group that reveals the interrelationship of
ekphrasis with other preliminary exercises and points to its place within
the larger system of rhetoric. But, though the list of subjects has a precise
meaning, this never appears to have been exclusive: the list of the peristaseis
and the various additions combined with the emphasis on enargeia in the
definition left open the possibility that vivid accounts of any subject,
including statues and paintings, could be counted as ekphraseis. Such
subjects may not have been central to the ancient definition of ekphrasis,
but nor were they ever excluded, as Theons reference to the Shield of
Achilles suggests. The Byzantine commentators on Aphthonios remark
on the absence of paintings and sculptures from his discussion. Sardianos
(who cites Philostratos Eikones among the principal models for ekphrasis
to be followed by students) explains that ekphraseis of images should be
classified according to their subject matter: images of persons are to be
considered as persons, images of events as events.58 This solution looks
like a typical commentators attempt to avoid apparent discrepancies in his
source, but it does correspond to an observable quality of many ekphraseis
of paintings, in particular, which describe the subject matter rather than
confining themselves to what could be shown in a single image.
The marginality of these subjects from the rhetoricians point of
view helps to explain the extraordinarily casual way in which they are
57
See Alex Hardie, Statius and the Silvae: Poets, Patrons and Epideixis in the Graeco-Roman
World (Liverpool, 1983). The lack of prose sources for the period makes it impossible to judge
how close Statius poems were to contemporary prose enkmia.
58
Sardianos, Commentarium in Aphthonii Progymnasmata, p. 219, ll. 1225. Doxapatres,
Homiliae in Aphthonii Progymnasmata, p. 512, ll. 1220 makes the same point about
representations of persons.
82
introduced into the discussion of ekphrasis by Nikolaos, the only author

to make explicit reference to works of art as a category. Nikolaos makes no
reference to these subjects in the list at the beginning of his chapter but, after
his explanation of the difference between ekphrasis and digsis, makes
some general comments about achieving enargeia, which he identifies as
being particularly relevant to ekphraseis of paintings and sculptures:
We must, particularly when we describe statues for example or paintings
or things of this sort, try to add reasons (logismoi) why the painter or
sculptor depicted things in certain ways, such as, for example, that
he depicted the character as angry for such and such a cause (aitia) or
happy, or we will mention some other emotion (pathos) resulting from
the story about the person being described. Reasons contribute greatly
to enargeia in other types of ekphrasis as well.59
, v v v v v
o ooov, oo ov o oo oo
o o o, oov v vov
v v v vov, o o ov vov
o ovo o. v v o o oo
vov vv.
Nikolaos seems here to consider only images of human figures, such as

the examples of statue ekphraseis by Kallistratos or many of Philostratos
Eikones. He emphasizes the importance of the narrative context and its
concomitant emotions to the impact of such ekphraseis: it is reference to
these, rather than the description of the physical features of the image
alone, that brings the necessary enargeia.
It is striking that this is the only place in the Progymnasmata chapters
on ekphrasis where the notion of the cause (aitia) is invoked explicitly.
What Nikolaos means is perhaps best illustrated by the examples of statue
ekphraseis which are transmitted under his name. The author of these
model ekphraseis describes the image piece by piece, reading each detail of
facial expression, gesture and dress as a sign of emotion or character (thos).
Both the figure of Medea and that of the captive Trojan woman turn their
heads away, the first so as not to look at her children, the second because
she cannot bear to see that her city has fallen; the bronze Ajaxs eyes dart
wildly here and there; each detail of Prometheus face reveals his pain and
the manner (tropos) in which he suffers.60 In the case of the goddesses Hera
59

Nikolaos (?), model Progymnasmata in Libanios, Opera, 8, p. 506, ll. 46; p. 525, ll.
911; p. 512, l. 16 p. 513, l. 3.
60
83
and Athena, the same method is applied to the depiction of their natures
and spheres of influence through their attributes. This is known as a mode
of reading statues as is shown in Porphyrys work on statues preserved in
Eusebios Praeparatio evangelica.61 It may also be related to a type of school
exercise mentioned by Quintilian (
2.4.26)
in which students of rhetoric
were asked to explain the details of the iconography of Venus or Cupid.
The three ekphraseis of paintings which Foerster accepts as genuine
works of Libanios are similar in that they describe details of gesture (two
are of scenes in the countryside, peopled with figures in action; the third
is a scene from epic, the foot-race from Patroklos funeral games). The
accounts of these details are often accompanied by the authors guess as
to the meaning, introduced by a phrase like as [seems] likely (hs eikos)
or a verb of meaning (mnu, semain).62
One motivation for including ekphraseis of paintings and statues
among the examples of Progymnasmata may well have been the opportunity
such subjects provided for describing figures and scenes from mythology
which are prominent in the examples of the other exercises. In this sense,
describing a statue of Hera or Ajax is a means of describing the character.
However, as is clear from Nikolaos discussion, the idea of representation
introduces new elements into these ekphraseis: the artists intention and
the task of interpretation attributed to the viewer/speaker.63 As I will
suggest below, there is a sense in which these particular ekphraseis are
programmatic, making explicit the active role of the audience of any
ekphrasis who are prompted to supply further details from their own
imaginations.
There is, of course, a further and much deeper affinity between visual
representation and the task of rhetorical ekphrasis, as Sardianos makes
clear in his statement that enargeia imitates [the actions and effects of]
the art of painting.64 In this sense, any ekphrasis rivals the visual arts in
that it seeks to imitate their visual impact. The connection lies thus at the
level of effect rather than residing in the subject matter and means that
any ekphrasis is haunted by the idea of the work of art and, even more
61
See Aline Rousselle, Images as education in the Roman Empire, in Yun Lee Too
(ed.), Education in Greek and Roman Antiquity (Leiden, 2001), pp. 373403.
62
For a translation of one of these ekphraseis, see Michael Baxandall, Patterns of Intention:
On the Historical Explanation of Pictures (New Haven, 1985), p. 2. The Elder Philostratos uses
such terms frequently in his Eikones.
63
Andrew S. Becker, The Shield of Achilles and the Poetics of Ekphrasis (Lanham, 1995), pp.
424 proposes four levels within ekphraseis of works of art: the referent (the subject matter);
the physical object; the artist and the interpreter.
64
Sardianos, Commentarium, p. 217, ll. 36.
84
perhaps, by the idea of theatrical representation which is also present in

the reference to the listener as spectator (theats).
Theory and Practice: Developments in Ekphrasis
Nikolaos inclusion of statues and paintings, like Aphthonios linkage of
ekphrasis and enkmion, shows that the tradition of ekphrasis as outlined in
the surviving Progymnasmata instructions is far from unified or simple, though
the loss of other texts prevents us from seeing precisely when changes may
first have been introduced, or how long it took for practice to affect precept. It
is clear, however, that the authors of the handbooks were receptive
t
o change
and accommodated it as far as possible within the traditional frameworks
of the didactic genres. Such changes are hardly perceptible to the naked eye
and only become apparent when studied against the wider context of the
relation of each progymnasma to the other exercises in the series and to the
more advanced treatises. Despite the occasional comments by ancient critics
(particularly Romans in the early Empire) on the distance between the schools
and the cut and thrust of real rhetorical practice, the educational process was
shaped in many ways by the demands of adult life.65
If we look at all the uses of ekphrasis that the student encountered
in his more advanced study of rhetoric, the sense of diversity already
encountered in the Progymnasmata is only reinforced. Some ekphraseis are
of works of art, most are not; some are laudatory (most clearly the model
ekphraseis of Libanios and Aphthonios), many are not. Some correspond
to our notion of description, simply defined, in that they describe static,
spatial entities, many do not. Any single statement that attempts to define
ekphrasis in terms of subject or function (or lack of function) will apply
to some cases, but will ultimately fall far short of a complete picture. Each
case needs to be considered individually in its context.
Ekphrasis as Rhetorical Technique
Given the rhetorical uses of ekphrasis, it is curious that there are not more
examples from oratory cited in the Progymnasmata. The predominance of
examples drawn from history and poetry could be taken as a sign that
ekphrasis was originally non-rhetorical and was only later adopted by
orators. A complaint by ps.-Dionysios of Halikarnassos that declaimers
waste words on ekphraseis of plagues, battles and the like under the
65
See E. Patrick Parks, The Roman Rhetorical Schools as a Preparation for the Courts under
the Early Empire (Baltimore, 1945). John A. Crook, Legal Advocacy in the Roman World (London,
1995) and Malcolm Heath, Practical advocacy in Roman Egypt, in Michael J. Edwards and
Christopher Reid (eds), Oratory in Action (Manchester, 2004), pp. 6282.
85
influence of poetry and history has been cited in support of this point
of view.66 But, as I will argue in more detail in Chapter 6, ps.-Dionysios
complaint needs to be read in the context of the use of ekphrasis in
declamation in general: he seems to be criticizing the relevance and the extent
of these passages (just as he criticizes over-lengthy narrations elsewhere in
his treatise) as well as the special status of ekphrasis in declamation, where
there is no agreed basis in fact and therefore no limit to the description.
Quintilian (2.4.3) makes a similar remark about students tendencies to
indulge in elaborate descriptions. For Quintilian, this is a phase students
go through, their youthful exuberance needs to be tempered as they learn;
in fact, he finds this excess more promising than its opposite since it is
easier to restrain existing practices than to create abilities that have never
been developed. Quintilians use of the verb lascivire paints this danger
in a moral light, like Theons warning against useless detail (achrstos, the
term he uses, being highly morally charged). But it is a question of degree.
Ekphrasis in oratory should be discreet and not easy to identify (Lysias
narrations are often full of vivid detail, but it would be difficult to cut out
any passage to show students as an example). It is possible that poetic and
historiographical examples were favoured for this very reason. They had
the advantage not only of being familiar to the students at this stage of
their studies, but of being easy to identify and show to beginning students
as models.
The Progymnasmata therefore give us an elementary overview of
ekphrasis as it was taught in the first stages of rhetorical education, to
students who had just finished, or were still completing, their study of
grammar. Reading the instructions for ekphrasis alongside the other
exercises, and in comparison with other treatises, reveals a conception
of ekphrasis as a process to be carried out on a basic statement of fact
(digsis), making the subject, whether an action, a person, a season or
a place, visible to the minds eye of the audience. Ekphrasis is therefore
part of an intimate communication between speaker and addressee which
has an impact on the recipient which is always imaginative, and often
emotional. So it is not surprising that the terms in which it is defined are
very different from the terms in which modern description is defined;
above all, it does not only have objects existing in space as its referent but
has a temporal dimension. In fact, it is interesting to compare Aristotles
claim in his discussion of metaphor in Rhetoric (1411b 245) that subjects
in action (energeia) are more vivid (pro ommatn) it seems that there was
an association between movement, and its rendering of space through
66
See, for example, Graham Zanker, Realism in Alexandrian Poetry: A Literature and Its
Audience (London,1987), p. 40 and Alessandra Manieri, Limmagine poetica nella teoria degli
antichi: phantasia ed enargeia (Pisa, 1998), p. 153.
86
time, and vividness; between energeia and enargeia.67 There is a certain

associative logic in the way in which ekphrasis is both a force acting upon
a listener and a means of depicting actions in words, while description,
whose domain is (theoretically) confined to the object, is itself treated
as object, to be dissected and analysed by the critic. What this contrast
points to is the very different assumptions about language which underlie
each definition. Ekphrasis, as is particularly clear from the discussions of
enargeia which will be the subject of Chapters 4 and 5, belongs to a concept
of language as a force, with the power to affect the listener.
67
See Lucia Calboli Montefusco, v et v: levidence dune dmonstration
qui signifie les choses en acte, in Mireille Armisen Marchetti (ed.), Demonstrare: voir et faire
voir: forme de la dmonstration Rome (Toulouse, 2005), pp. 4358; Manieri, Limmagine poetica,
pp. 1014; Guido Morpurgo-Tagliabue, Linguistica e stilistica di Aristotele (Rome, 1967), pp.
25666.
4. Enargeia: Making Absent Things Present
Introduction: Ekphrasis and Enargeia

The surviving Greek sources on ekphrasis show how it was taught at the
elementary stage of rhetorical training and, as we will see in Chapter 6,
help us to understand how ekphrasis could be put to use in the context
of a larger speech. The basic information they provide about the use of
ekphrasis in rhetorical contexts is invaluable, but they largely leave aside
the reasons why an orator might need to use this technique. To find explicit
discussion of these questions we need to turn to a Latin source, the Institutio
oratoria of Quintilian, Theons contemporary. Quintilian covers the whole
range of the rhetorical curriculum, reflecting the traditional teaching of
Roman schools, theoretical sources and his own extensive experience of
forensic pleading. He was clearly familiar with Greek rhetorical theory
and many details of his teaching can be directly compared with Greek
examples. What Quintilian adds in particular is the practical, personal
perspective of the seasoned speaker, telling us how vivid language could
actually be used, and what he knew its effect on an audience could be.
The connections between Quintilians discussion of early rhetorical
education and the Greek Progymnasmata have been explored, particularly
by Italo Lana. Several of the elementary exercises he mentions have direct
equivalents in the Progymnasmata, though nothing corresponds directly
to the exercise of ekphrasis. (An earlier Latin treatise, once ascribed to
Cicero, the Rhetorica ad Herennium, devotes a section to descriptio, which
does correspond in many ways to the Greek treatments of ekphrasis, but
this is presented as a technique to be used in a finished speech, not as an
exercise.) In Quintilians handbook, something corresponding to the Greek
ekphrasis is to be found but not in his discussion of elementary exercises;
nor is ekphrasis identifiable with any single figure or trope. Instead, it is
to be found in his various treatments of enargeia (Latin evidentia), the
On Quintilians sources, see Jean
Cousin, Etudes sur Quintilien (2 vols, Amsterdam,

1967).
For a direct comparison with Theon, see Italo
Lana, Quintiliano, Il Sublime e gli

Esercizi preparatori di Elio Teone: ricerca sulle fonti grece di Quintiliano e sullautor Del Sublime
(Turin, 1951)
. On the uses of enargeia in Cicero, see
Ann Vasaly, Representations: Images of the
World in Ciceronian Oratory (Berkeley, 1993)
and
Beth Innocenti, Towards a theory of vivid
description as practised in Ciceros Verrine Orations, Rhetorica, 12 (1994): 35581.
Lana, Quintiliano, Il Sublime e gli Esercizi preparatori di Elio Teone and Ian
Henderson,
Quintilian and the Progymnasmata, Antike und Abendland, 37 (1991): 8299.

Rhetorica ad Herennium, 4.39.51. For further discussion, see below.
88
quality of language that appeals to the audiences imagination, in precisely

the way that ekphrasis is said to do, and which is central to the definition
of ekphrasis.
Enargeia in Quintilian
We saw in the previous chapter how Quintilians distinction between
a plain statement of facts (narratio) and a narration with enargeia
corresponds to Nikolaos distinction between digsis and ekphrasis. In
Book 4 of the Institutio oratoria, Quintilian includes some remarks on this
quality of vividness in his treatment of the statement of facts (narratio).
This placement suggests that, rather like the authors of the lost Greek
Progymnasmata mentioned by ps.-Hermogenes, he considered enargeia as
a quality to be added to various types of discourse.
In addition to this brief
mention of enargeia under the heading of narration, Quintilian discusses
it at two further main points in his treatise: as a means of arousing the
emotions (Book 6) and as a figure of speech which has the particularly
vital role of ensuring that the listener is swayed by the speakers case (Book
8.3.679, cited above). These passages are of vital importance as Quintilian
provides much of the information missing from the extant Greek treatises,
explaining how enargeia contributes to the overall persuasive effect of a
speech. He shows how important the ability to place before the eyes was
for the orator who wished to make his audience feel involved in the events
of the case. More than that, he explains how the orator should achieve
enargeia through the use of mental images (phantasiai). The way in which
he describes this harnessing of the power of the imagination provides the
missing link between language and sight and explains a great deal about
how enargeia was thought to work. In particular, Quintilians explanation
of the role of phantasia in both the creation and the reception of vivid
language helps to explain why it was reasonable for him and other ancient
theoreticians to speak of languages ability to make visible its subject
matter, a claim that has been subjected to ridicule by at least one modern
critic.
The nature of phantasia, and its close association in ancient thought
with the sense perceptions stored in memory, also help to explain how
rhetoricians could be so seemingly sure of the precise impact of their
See Georges
Molini, Dictionnaire de rhtorique (Paris, 1992)

, p. 145 (s.v. vidence):
Par-del de la navet linguistique de la prsentation traditionnelle (cette fameuse et ridicule
suppression de lcran du discours, avec lide que lauditeur est transform en spectateur),
on sera particulirement sensible au caractre social de cette qualit [Beyond the linguistic
naivety of the traditional formula (the notorious and ridiculous suppression of the screen that of
discourse, with the idea that the listener becomes a spectator), it is important to note the social
and cultural aspects of this quality] (my italics).
Enargeia: Making Absent Things Present
89
appeals to the imagination, which is to us the most untrammelled and

individual of faculties. This chapter and the next will therefore explore the
theories of language, memory and the imagination which underlie the use
of enargeia and thus of ekphrasis in rhetoric. Though the focus of this
study is on the rhetorical contexts for ekphrasis, much of this theoretical
background is relevant to the use of ekphrasis in other genres such as
history or poetry for the type of imaginative response which Quintilian
assumes in an audience was considered typical of readers of different
types of text.
Enargeia and Persuasion
As we have seen, Quintilian makes the same distinction as does Nikolaos
between a plain statement of facts (di
sis/narratio) and a developed

account which makes the audience feel present at the events described
and emotionally involved in them. In forensic oratory this effect has two
main functions. One is related to the orators duty to inform his audience
of the facts of his case (naturally, the facts as he would like them to be seen,
rather than as they necessarily happened). This can be achieved through
a plain statement of facts, but a vivid account has the advantage of
capturing the audiences attention, of being more immediately memorable
and comprehensible, like the paintings which Quintilian (6.1.32) says
were sometimes displayed in courtrooms. To mention just some examples
from classical Greek oratory, Lysias, identified as a master of enargeia
by Dionysios of Halikarnassos, includes fast-moving yet vivid accounts
of the domestic arrangements in the house of Euphiletos, who stands
accused of murdering his wifes lover, in his first oration (914), and of the
murder of his brother in the twelfth oration, Against Eratosthenes (616).
Demosthenes often cited evocation of the devastation wreaked on Phokis
has already been mentioned. Another example is his carefully constructed
narrative of the response in Athens to the news of the fall of Elatea, which
similarly involves the reader through the inclusion of details such as the
time of day (It was the evening ) and the preparations for the emergency
meeting of the Assembly. Kathy Eden has argued persuasively that
theories of enargeia were in fact developed originally in classical Greece
for such forensic contexts in which the narrator set out to reproduce the
vividness of ocular proof through language in the absence of physical
evidence. Only later was this theory applied to discussions of poetry and
See Dionysios of Halikarnassos, Lysias, 7 and Graham Zanker, Enargeia in the ancient
criticism of poetry, RhMus, 124 (1981): 297311.
Demosthenes, De Corona, 169171 (which is cited as an example of diatupsis in

Tiberios, De figuris Demosthenicis, 43).
90
other forms of literature. Enargeia in historiography or poetry can create

similar effects, as was outlined in Chapter 1, but in forensic oratory it has
the additional function of making the audience into virtual witnesses by
making them seem to see the events described by the speaker.
In this,
enargeia attempts to achieve the unattainable ideal of a judge who has
witnessed the crime and thus can reach a decision that is certain and not
subject to the vagaries of interpretation and probability.
Inseparable from this representational and informative function of
enargeia is its ability to move the audience and to make them feel the
emotions appropriate to the events described. This it shares with the
pieces of physical evidence which were sometimes brought into Roman
courtrooms: the swords, blood-spattered cloaks, fragments of bone and
wounds which served both to confirm the speakers version of events and to
arouse the emotions of the audience (6.1.30). In fact, Quintilians treatment
of enargeia in Book 6 of the Institutio oratoria is part of a broader discussion
of emotional appeals, and this combination of a feeling of presence and the
arousal of the appropriate emotions is the key to the rhetorical function
of ekphrasis: the audience should feel not just that they understood the
facts and arguments intellectually, but that they were with the speaker,
whether Demosthenes learning the fate of Elatea or Euphiletos, the
wronged husband of Lysias 1, finding his wife in bed with her lover. Some
examples of the use of ekphrasis in judicial and deliberative oratory as
reflected in the Greek treatises on declamation as well as epideictic will
be examined in greater detail in Chapter 6. Here, I want to explore some
of the questions that are raised by the rhetoricians references to placing
before the eyes, in particular to see whether Quintilian can provide some
of the information, missing from the Progymnasmata, about how this effect
can be achieved.
Achieving Enargeia
Quintilians activities as critic are subordinate to his role as a teacher and
practitioner of rhetoric: his concern is not just to analyse texts, but to show
his readers how to achieve those same effects. In the case of enargeia his
advice varies between the enigmatic and the illuminating. One
means of

Kathy Eden, Poetic and Legal Fiction in the Aristotelian Tradition (Princeton, 1986)
, pp.
723 and 912. This does not mean, of course, that the practice of enargeia did not exist in
poetry prior to any theoretical developments. On vividness as a kind of proof in Ciceronian
oratory, see also Vasaly, Representations, p. 25 and pp. 2545 and Innocenti, Towards
a theory
of vivid description, p.
374.
See Franoise Desbordes, Largumentation dans la rhtorique antique: une

introduction, Lalies, 8 (1990), p. 87: Pour le juge, lidal est le flagrant dlit : il voit que X
est coupable [For the judge, the ideal is for the criminal to be caught in the act : he can
see that X is guilty.]
91
achieving enargeia which he and others mention is through the inclusion

of details, and therefore corresponds to the definition of ekphrasis as
an expanded and developed narration offered by Nikolaos. Quintilian
provides the example of the sacked city cited in Chapter 3 to illustrate the
enargeia that results from details (ex pluribus, 8.3.66). The statement the
city has fallen may communicate the basic facts perfectly well, as he says
(8.3.67), but in order to have an emotional effect on the listener, to penetrate
the emotions, the speaker needs to open up this basic statement and
to describe the constituent actions: the flames, the collapsing roofs, the
flight and lamentation of the inhabitants. Quintilians other example of
enargeia ex pluribus is a passage from a lost speech by Cicero describing
the aftermath of a drunken party, in which the event is described through
a selection of its visible consequences (Institutio oratoria, 8.3.66):
Videbar uidere alios intrantis, alios autem exeuntis, quosdam ex
uino uacillantis, quosdam hesterna ex potatione oscitantis. Humus
erat inmunda, lutulenta uino, coronis languidulis et spinis cooperta
piscium.
I seemed to see some coming, others going, some staggering with the
effect of the wine, some yawning from the previous days drinking. The
floor was filthy, smeared with wine, covered with wilting wreaths and
fish bones.
Here, the main event, the party, is conveyed through the description of
different elements: the actions (pragmata) of the people who had been
involved and the appearance of the place (topos) in which it had occurred,
just as the account of the sacked city mentions the ruined and burning
buildings, the distraught inhabitants and the victors. In the case of the
party, the event is described not as it unfolds but through the signs which
the speaker claims to have witnessed, and which he aims to make the
audience witness as he describes them, a special type of effect which
will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 6. In both cases, however, the
peristaseis, the parts of narration which play such an important role in the
Greek exercise of ekphrasis, would have been a useful aid in teaching
students how to achieve a similar effect in their own compositions.
Other authors also mention the inclusion of details as productive of
enargeia. Dionysios of Halikarnassos attributes Lysias vividness to his
On the use of the peristaseis in this passage, see

Piet Schrijvers, Invention, imagination
et thories des motions chez Cicron et Quintilien, in Actus: Festschrift H.L.W. Nelson
(Utrecht, 1982),
p. 403. See also Jean-Pierre Aygon
, Lecphrasis et la notion de description
dans la rhtorique antique, Pallas, 41 (1994), p.
48.
92
inclusion of attendant circumstances (ta parakolouthounta) (Lysias, 7), by

which he may mean the incidents which play no direct part in the case,
such as the wifes teasing of her husband in Lysias 1, but which play
a vital role in establishing character, making us feel that we know the
speaker. For the first-century BCE critic Demetrios, enargeia results from
reference to detail (akribologia).10 For him, enargeia also derives from the
attendant circumstances (ta sumbainonta), illustrated by the description by
an unknown author of the sound of a farmers footsteps as he approaches,
which conveys through a single detail the gait and demeanour of the
character: it was, for instance, once said of a countrymans walk that
the noise of his feet had been heard from afar as he approached, the
suggestion being that he was not walking at all but stamping the ground,
so to say.11
The inclusion of telling detail is also important to the other type of
enargeia which Quintilian mentions in Book 8. This is a brief sketch in
which an image of the whole is somehow depicted.12 The examples are
the boxing match from the Aeneid (5.426) and the brief description of
Verres with his mistress from Ciceros Verrine Orations, which Quintilian
says affected him particularly as a reader. The difference between this and
the previous type (ex pluribus) may be that this second type expands the
depiction of one element of narration (an action and persons, respectively),
while the party and the sacked city both include references to the visual
appearance of persons, places and actions.
But, in the end, as Innocenti notes, these practical suggestions on how
to achieve enargeia in the rhetorical handbooks are less than satisfying.13
Demetrios claim that enargeia is achieved by leaving nothing out and
cutting nothing short (to paralipein mden md ektemnein, On Style, 209)
appears to ignore the drastic selection of details which is entailed by
any verbal account of any subject, his own examples being
no
exception.
Quintilian does the same when he asks of Ciceros description of the
10
Demetrios, On Style, 20910, trans. W. Rhys Roberts. Demetrios other examples, a

Homeric simile of a man diverting water to irrigate a garden (Iliad, 21.257) and a passage
from the funeral games in Iliad, 23.37981 (Diomedes pursuit of Eumelos in the chariot race)
correspond to the type of scene-painting we are talking about. Some of the examples he goes
on to discuss suggest a different sense of enargeia, as a type of verbal emphasis. See Manieri,
Limmagine poetica, pp. 1337.
11
Demetrios, On Style, 217. See Roos Meijering, Literary and Rhetorical Theories in Greek
Scholia (Groningen, 1987), p. 41. As this example shows, sight is not the only sense involved
in enargeia.
12
Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 8.3.63: est igitur unum genus, quo tota rerum imago
quodammodo verbis depingitur. On this type of image, see
Alessandra Manierii, Limmagine
poetica, pp. 1414.
13
Innocenti, Towards a theory of vivid description
, p. 360.
93
party: what more would anyone who had actually entered the room have
seen?14 Like Demetrios, he leaves aside the question of selection, though
it is clear that any impact derives largely from the nature of the precise
details Cicero includes. At the same time, Quintilians remark completely
elides the distinction between the words and their imaginative effect, and
between that effect and the perception of reality.15 These evasions reveal
the extent to which the conception of words as provokers of images could
overshadow attention to the more formal aspects of a text. To account for
the effect of these passages we might prefer to focus on the use of figures,
on the choice of vocabulary and the arrangement of words. But this is not
the case for the ancient critics. Despite the fact that Quintilians accounts
of the party and the sacked city occur in his discussion of style in oratory,
he pays no attention to the language.16 Instead, he is astonishingly vague,
saying simply of the latter, If one opens up [the idea of the sack] there will
appear , as if through an act of verbal conjuring. No reference is made
to the verbal medium except as a portrait of what appears. At the same
time, he seems to assume that the orators imagination (the scene that
appears to him as he opens up the brief statement), its verbal expression
and the image which appears in the audiences mind as a result of these
words are both simultaneous and identical, and that this image can be
equivalent to the direct perception of a thing.
Enargeia and Phantasia
The vagueness about the linguistic aspects of enargeia and the confidence
in its powers displayed by rhetoricians are significant. They point to the
complexities of a phenomenon which goes beyond the normal functions of
language and which can often only be expressed, as in the case of ekphrasis
itself, by recourse to metaphor and simile.17 They are also a consequence of
14
Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 8.3.67: quid plus videret qui intrasset?
See the comments of

Eleanor Leach, The Rhetoric of Space: Literary and Artistic
Representations of Landscape in Republican and Augustan Rome (Princeton, 1988), p.
17, who
notes that The spectator sees far more, since the orators selection and balance has conferred
a neat and stylized order upon the chaotic picture of degeneracy he wants to evoke.
16
The figures of speech used in this example (as Aphthonios advised for ekphrasis)
are all passed over in silence, despite the fact that Quintilian will go on to enumerate several
of them in the course of Books 8 and 9: use of accumulation (sunathroismos a technique of
amplification discussed by Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 8.4.27) underlined by polysundeton
(breathless repetition of et 9.3.51) and homoioptton (9.3.78). It is also worth noting that,
according to Tiberios, De figuris Demosthenicis, 43, some authorities differed on whether
diatupsis was a figure of speech or a figure of thought.
17
Manieri, Limmagine poetica, p. 148 notes that v una nozione difficilmente

racchiudibile negli schemi della precettistica retorica [enargeia is a notion that was difficult
to encompass within the schemes of rhetorical theory].
15
94
the way in which language and image were thought to interact in the mind
of both speaker and listener. Quintilians understanding of the process
emerges more clearly earlier in the Institutio oratoria when, in Book 6, he
discusses the production of enargeia from the orators point of view and
discloses his understanding of the psychological processes involved. In
his discussion of how to arouse emotion in a murder case he suddenly
breaks into a display of enargeia which is close in subject matter and in
some of its details to Theons example of the vivid evocation of a murder
to be used as part of a common place (109.311, cited in Chapter 3, above),
a subject that seems to have been a schoolmasters favourite:
When I am lamenting a murdered man will I not have before my eyes
all the things which might believably have happened in the case under
consideration? Will the assailant not suddenly spring out, will the
victim not be terrified when he finds himself surrounded and cry out or
plead or run away? Will I not see the blow and the victim falling to the
ground? Will his blood, his pallor, his dying groans not be impressed on
my mind? This gives rise to v, which Cicero calls illustratio and
evidentia, by which we seem to show what happened rather than to tell
it; and this gives rise to the same emotions as if we were present at the
event itself.
Hominem occisum queror: non omnia quae in re praesenti accidisse
credibile est in oculis habebo? non percussor ille subitus erumpet?
non expauescet circumuentus, exclamabit uel rogabit uel fugiet? non
ferientem, non concidentem uidebo? non animo sanguis et pallor
et gemitus, extremus denique expirantis hiatus insidet? Insequetur
v, quae a Cicerone inlustratio et euidentia nominatur, quae non
tam dicere uidetur quam ostendere, et adfectus non aliter quam si rebus
ipsis intersimus sequentur. (6.2.312)
As in Theons version, the showing is not subjected to any form of

linguistic analysis. But it is clear from this passage why this is the case:
enargeia is conceived of as the result of an internal, psychological process.
For Quintilian, the first step in producing enargeia in a speech was for
the orator to imagine the subject for himself. To borrow Quintilians own
image from Book 8, the idea of murder is opened up in the orators own
mind and some key phases of the action are organized into a temporal
sequence, from the aggressors first appearance on the scene to the victims
dying breath. His account of the scene is presented as a description of the
mental process in the form of a series of rhetorical questions describing
the visual and aural details he would summon up for himself. Quintilian
makes no explicit comment on his use of language, preferring instead
95
to enact the production of enargeia. And, in the very act of verbalizing

his exercise in visualization, he demonstrates enargeia, like the magician
pulling the rabbit out of his hat. His seamless progression from precept to
practice, combined with his reticence about language, suggests that words
are important to this process only as the means by which an internal,
mental image is conveyed from speaker to listener.18
Immediately before this display of enargeia in action Quintilian had
given more details about the speakers mental processes. The speaker is
said to summon up his own vision of the scene by means of phantasiai, a
Greek term glossed in Latin as visiones. It is a process which he compares
to the spontaneous habit of daydreaming (he mentions travelling, fighting
and possessing wealth as common fantasies) and which, he claims, the
speaker can cultivate in himself as part of his training as an orator:
What the Greeks call phantasiai (we shall call them visiones, if you
will,) are the means by which images of absent things are represented to
the mind in such a way that we seem to see them with our eyes and to
be in their presence. Whoever has mastery of them will have a powerful
effect on the emotions. Some people say that this type of man who can
imagine in himself things, words and deeds well and in accordance with
truth is good at imagining (euphantasitos).
Quas v Graeci uocant (nos sane uisiones appellemus), per quas
imagines rerum absentium ita repraesentantur animo, ut eas cernere
oculis ac praesentes habere uideamur, has quisquis bene ceperit, is erit
in adfectibus potentissimus. Quidam dicunt vov, qui sibi res
uoces actus secundum uerum optime finget. (6.2.2930)
For Quintilian, therefore, effective enargeia in oratory and in poetry, as

he goes on show is the result of a controlled and conscious process of
visualization. He seems to believe that, although this ability, like the others
required by the speaker, varied from individual to individual, it could be
developed by training. So it does seem, as suggested in Chapter 1, that the
expectation of visual response was far more widespread and developed
among ancient audiences than among modern readers. Not only was it
talked about and theorized, but students were encouraged to imagine and
18
See Mireille
Armisen, La notion dimagination chez les anciens II: la rhtorique,

: Tout en passant par le logos, crit ou parl, la phantasia rhtorique
Pallas, 26 (1980), p. 14
annule cet intermdiaire et se rsout en une nouvelle reprsentation mentale qui est lcho
dans lesprit de lauditeur de limage initiale conue par lorateur [Even as it is transmitted
by the word (whether written or spoken) rhetorical phantasia cancels out this intermediary
and takes the form of a new mental image which is the echo, in the listeners mind, of the
initial image conceived by the orator].
96
to assume that the texts they read were the products of others powers of
visualization. All this must have encouraged an awareness of visualization
as an important element of both reading or listening to others work and
creating ones own.
Communicating Images: Enargeia and Phantasia
In his own examples of enargeia (the murder and the sacked city of Book 8)
Quintilian assumes a live performance situation in which the transmission
of mental images and their concomitant emotions between a speaker
and his audience is a vital part of rhetorical interaction in the forum or
school. Ps.-Longinos describes the process in a similar way, with similar
vocabulary, explaining phantasia as resulting when, under the effects of
inspiration and passion, you seem to see what you are speaking about and
bring it before the eyes of your listeners [v ' voo
o v o ' v o oov].19
This formulation rolls the distinct moments of Quintilians account into
one single process, termed phantasia. Both make more specific the vague,
uncontextualized reference in the Progymnasmata to the eyes (opsis) to
which the subject of an ekphrasis (to dloumenon) is displayed. These are
the minds eyes of the audience to whom the speech is addressed and who
form the equivalent of a painting, or rather a set of moving impressions,
in their imagination.
Ps.-Longinos use of the single term phantasia to encompass the
authors imagination, the words he utters and the resulting impression
in the listeners mind reveals the intimate connections between mental
images and the words that both result from and create them. Words and
mental images are not the only phenomena to be fused in this way, for
both Quintilian and ps.-Longinos assume that what the audience will feel
that they can see is the same as what the orator sees and that the listener
or reader will share the vision that he has created in his mind. In this way,
the speakers visual image is assumed to be transmitted to the audience
through the medium of words and to give rise to a comparable image in
their minds.
Accessing the Authors Imagination
Both Quintilian and ps.-Longinos write as if vivid language can actually
give access to the mind which gave rise to it. That is, if enargeia arises
from mental images, it must be possible to work back up the chain and
to reconstruct the creative process, or rather the original mental image
which gave rise to the words that prompt the readers own mental image.
19
Ps.-Longinos, On the Sublime, 15.1.
97
Both authors make comments to this effect with reference to examples

of enargeia in poetry. Ps.-Longinos (15.2) remarks that Euripides, when
he wrote Orestes, 2557 (Mother, I beg you, do not set upon me the
bloodstained, snakelike virgins! Here they come, pressing upon me!),
must have seen the Furies who Orestes imagined were tormenting him.
Here, he claims, the poet saw the Furies himself and compelled the
audience to almost see what he imagined (ephantasth).20 In his discussion
of enargeia in Virgil, Quintilian likewise asks, had the poet not thoroughly
(penitus) conceived an image (imago) of death to be able to say [of the
Argive Antores] and, dying, he remembered sweet Argos?21 These claims
rely on the assumption that the poet himself worked by creating mental
images that he then expressed in words (as Aristotle recommended to the
tragic poet for other reasons in the Poetics, 1455a) and that these same
words can therefore allow the reader to access and share this image. So
it is with the orator: both the speaker and the listener are involved in the
creation of mental images and both are metaphorical painters of these
immaterial images.
In both these examples of poetic enargeia the evocation of a characters
perceptions Orestes hallucination and Antores final memories plays a
vital role. In the second example, as Jean-Pierre Aygon has noted, Quintilian
has in mind a passage several lines long.22 But the single line quoted does
seem to bear a special significance: Antores death is conveyed by the
briefest of evocations of the final thoughts and images that passed through
his mind, while Orestes words contain direct allusions to the appearance
of the Furies. In both cases, the poets mental image, to which the reader
has access through the text, is itself a representation of the characters
mental image.23 There is thus a chain of images which ultimately allows
the reader or listener both to share in the experience of the character and
to admire the skill of the poet.
v' o v v. ' v, o v o
oov vv. As Armisen, La
notion dimagination chez les anciens II

, p. 15 notes,
Euripides passage works less by the description of details than by its emotional intensity, as
revealed by the viewers response. On this passage, see also Jean-Louis Labarrire, Faut voir
voir! Considrations pseudo-Longiniennes, Mtis, n.s. 4 (2006): 7193.
21
Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 6.2.33: non idem poeta penitus ultimi fati concepit
imaginem, ut diceret: Et dulces moriens reminiscitur Argos? (Aeneid, 10, 782).
20
22
Jean-Pierre Aygon, Imagination et description chez les rhteurs, Latomus, 63

(2004), pp. 11819.
23
Although it is not stated by Virgil,
it is likely that Quintilian assumed that Antores

memory of his homeland itself took the form of a visual image, given the close association
between sense perceptions and memory in ancient thought, on which, see below.
98
The Impact on the Listener

Quintilians discussion of enargeia reveals a conception of language as an
active force.24 Both he and ps.-Longinos use powerful, physical imagery to
express the impact of vivid speech on the listener, a reminder that theirs is
still a predominantly oral conception of language.25 For Quintilian, vivid
language penetrates the emotions, while for ps.-Longinos rhetorical
phantasia, the end result of which is enargeia, not only persuades but
enslaves the listener [o v ov vov, oo].26
When, in Book 8 of the Institutio oratoria, Quintilian contrasts the plain
statement of facts (narratio) with the vivid version of the same events he
distinguishes the effect of the two types of discourse in terms of their
physical impact on the listener. The plain statement reaches only the ears
while the vivid version, the equivalent of ekphrasis, displays the subject
to the eyes of the mind:
It is a great skill to be able to speak of our subject matter clearly and so
that it seems visible. For the speech is not sufficiently effective, nor does
it have as complete a control as it should if it merely reaches the ears so
that the judge thinks that the facts of the case are being told to him and
not expressed in full and displayed to his minds eye.
Magna uirtus res de quibus loquimur clare atque ut cerni uideantur
enuntiare. Non enim satis efficit neque, ut debet, plene dominatur
oratio, si usque ad aures ualet, atque ea sibi iudex de quibus cognoscit
narrari credit, non exprimi et oculis mentis ostendi. (8.3.62)
The implication is that vivid language reaches different parts of the mind,
penetrating more deeply into the listener to reach the minds eye (the Latin
distinguishes between inner and outer senses of sight, where our Greek
sources do not). The distinction between words which stay on the surface
of the body, by which Quintilian presumably means plain statements of
fact and arguments, and those which penetrate inside to appeal to the
eyes of the mind, reveals a conception of the human body as permeable
and of words as a quasi-physical force, both of which are familiar from
24
As noted by Molini, Dictionnaire de rhtorique, p. 145: [Le discours] est apprhend

ainsi comme acte, come dynamisme qui peut mme modifier la ralit de la situation
existentielle, concrte, des partenaires dans la relation oratoire [[Speech] is thus perceived
as an action, as a dynamic force which can even change the reality of the actual situation in
which the partners in the rhetorical exchange find themselves].
25
On an understanding of language as power and action as typical of oral cultures,

see Walter
Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London and New York,
1988), pp.
312.
26
99
other ancient sources.27 The difference is more than a technical distinction

between showing and telling. Instead, it lies in the way each mode of
discourse is received by the listener: enargeia derives from the innermost
recesses of the speakers mind and works its way inside the listener to
produce its intense effect.
So the judge must be made to feel not just that he is hearing the facts
of the case, but that he can actually see the events playing out before his
eyes.28 Such a display is by no means sufficient by itself. It is clear from
Quintilians discussion that rhetorical enargeia is just one weapon in the
orators arsenal and this is echoed by ps.-Longinos when he introduces an
important qualification to the dominating power of enargeia in oratory: it
is only when used in combination with factual arguments that phantasia
works this effect. When an orator does manage to combine the two he is,
by implication, invincible.29 Both supply a term that was missing from
most of discussions of ekphrasis in the Progymnasmata: the emotion which
accompanies the mental image placed before the eyes.
For ps.-Longinos,
phantasia, whether in poetry or oratory, aims for emotive effect (to pathtikon)
and to stir the listener (to sunkekinmon).30 For Quintilian, a brief statement
(brevis nuntius, digsis) in a speech conveys the basic information
adequately but penetrates the emotions less than the expanded version
(narration with enargeia, ekphrasis).31 Indeed,
the mental image itself is

almost superfluous. Its function is to arouse the desired feeling in the
listener, whether the vague feeling of pleasure (hdon) that Nikolaos
ascribed to ekphrasis in epideictic contexts or the feeling of indignation
(deinsis) or its concomitant, pity, associated with accounts of the fall of
27
Even at the elementary level of the Progymnasmata, Theon (72.12) recommends that
students should aspire to make their words dwell in the mind of their listeners. Plutarch,
Moralia, 37F38B recommends ear-guards to protect the young. The eyes were considered
particularly vulnerable openings see below on the effect of the sight of the beloved upon
the viewer. On words as physical entities in Stoic thought, see Catherine
Atherton, The
Stoics on Ambiguity (Cambridge, 1993),
p. 44 on Diogenes Laertios, 7.556. See also
Gorgias
corporeal logos (Encomium of Helen, 8).
28
Leach, The Rhetoric of Space, p. 15 interprets Quintilians words as implying the

production of a static image, but Quintilians wording allows for events to be displayed as
developing scenarios, as the parallel with narratio suggests. See also above on the association
between enargeia and movement in the scene described.
29
Ps.-Longinos, On the Sublime, 15.9. The further comments about the potentially
overwhelming impact of phantasia in rhetoric at 15.11 need to be read in this context.
30

31
Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 8.3.67: in adfectus minus penetrat brevis hic velut
nuntius. In Theon, Progymnasmata, 71, ll. 312, too, it is words that are vivid (enargs) that
will inhabit the listeners minds.
100
cities.32 Even when the effect is not what we might strictly speaking call
emotional, the physical understanding of the impact of enargeia means
that a reader/listener who conceives an image of any kind in his or her
mind is still undergoing a pathos of some kind as he or she experiences the
words effect.33
Enargeia and the Feeling of Presence
Quintilians discussion of enargeia in Book 6 grows out of a broader
discussion of emotion and is introduced as a means to an end. The use of
visualization is first introduced as a means of ensuring that the speaker
is appropriately involved in the version of events he is presenting. For,
Quintilian claims, in order to move an audience, the speaker must himself
be moved (6.2.26; cf. Horace, Ars Poetica, 102). He draws an analogy with
actors whom, he says, he has seen leaving the stage in tears because of
their intense involvement in the plot (6.2.278
and 35)
. In terms of the
effect on the audience of judicial oratory or declamation, the analogy
with the actor is particularly apt for, like the audience in the theatre, they
are made to be witnesses of events from the past. Quintilian
emphasizes
this time-warping action of enargeia in a further discussion of the art
of placing before the eyes (sub oculos subiectio) in Institutio oratoria,
9.2.401 (here he treats vivid presentation as a figure called variously
evidentia, hupotupsis and diatupsis). Because of its capacity to make the
audience feel present at past and future events, this effect is also called
translatio temporum or, in Greek, metastasis or metathesis (a transference
[of time]) (9.2.41).34 The listener may be transported either to the past, or
to a hypothetical future, as is shown in the passage Quintilian cites from
Ciceros Pro Milone (33) which paints a picture of the future consequences
32
Demosthenes, 19.65 is cited by Nikolaos as an example of the use of ekphrasis to

achieve deinsis (see above, Chapter 3, p. 76). See also the Rhetorica ad Herennium, 4.39.51 and
Cicero, De inventione, 1.54.104 and 107.
33
Phantasia itself was understood as a type of pathos. See Frdrique Ildefonse,
Evidence sensible et discours dans le stocisme, in Carlos Lvy and Laurent Pernot (eds),
Dire lvidence (Paris, 1997), p. 116.
34
See Meijering, Literary and Rhetorical Theories, p. 42. The Greek term metastasis appears
in modern editions of Quintilian, but Isidore of Seville, De rhetorica, 34 uses metathesis in
this sense: Metathesis est [figura] quae mittit animos iudicum in res praeteritas aut futuras
[Metathesis is [the figure] which sends the minds of judges to past or future events] (the
examples are an appeal to remember the sack of a city and the evocation of future troubles
from Pro Milone, 33, an example also used by Quintilian). I will follow Isidore in using
metathesis in the sense of transference of time to avoid confusion with the technical sense of
metastasis in declamation to mean transference of blame.
101
of an action.35 Metathesis is more than a simple switch in the time referred

to in the speech. Instead, the speaker is said to transport his audience in
imagination back or forward to the events in questions, making use of the
ability of enargeia to make them feel as if they were present.
Enargeia, as discussed by Quintilian, shares this power with poetry (as is
evident from his frequent use of poetic examples and from ps.-Longinos)36
and with historiography. The subtlest discussion of the similarities and
differences between enargeia in oratory and poetry is to be found in ps.Longinos, who gives serious consideration to the nature and function of
visualization in poetry, unlike the rhetoricians who, on the whole, use
poetic examples for their own ends. As we have seen, he states that both
aim to move and stir the reader or listener, but this statement is prefaced
by an attempt to explain the differences between what he terms phantasia
in poetry and oratory:
It will not escape your attention that rhetorical phantasia has one aim
while, when used by poets, it has another nor that the goal of phantasia
in poetry is astonishment (ekplxis) while that of rhetoric is enargeia,
though both seek to create an emotional effect and excitement.37
v o v o ov o
o v o , o v v o o v , v
o v, <v> o
vvov.
Longinos attribution of enargeia to rhetoric alone is unusual in that the

term is frequently used elsewhere of vividness in poetry. He makes his
distinction clearer at the end of his discussion of phantasia when he returns
to its use in rhetorical contexts after an extended discussion of passages
from tragedy:
Nevertheless, in the poets, phantasia involves a type of exaggeration that
is more suitable to myth and, as I have said, goes beyond the bounds
of credibility, while the best form of rhetorical phantasia respects the
possible (emprakton) and the true (enalthes)
35
Ps.-Longinos, On the Sublime, 15.9 cites a similar attempt to play lets suppose from
Demosthenes, 24.208 (also from the end of a speech). These examples correspond to the
third type of diatupsis identified by Tiberios, De figuris Demosthenicis, 43 (the evocation of
hypothetical events).
36
As noted in Chapter 3 above, ps.-Hermogenes also compares diaskeu to poetry.

37
102
o v v o o v v v,
v, v v ov, o v
ov ov v ...38
As Roos Meijering points out, poets have a greater freedom than orators
in that they are able to place before the eyes scenes that are fantastic and
impossible in the real world (such as Furies or Phaethons heavenly ride
in the chariot of the Sun) as well as scenes that are lifelike.39 For orators to
pretend to see Furies (as ps.-Longinos claims contemporary speakers do)
is an absurdity that he condemns as inappropriate. As the first contrast
between poetry and rhetoric suggests, a further difference lies in the
effect on the listener of such visualization. While poets need only create
a stunning impact (ekplxis) on the listener, orators need to shape and
control both the subject matter and its presentation, subordinating it to
the specific requirements of the speech. Firstly, the subjects of rhetorical
enargeia must be like truth (enalths). In this, rhetorical visualization does
have the connotations of direct perception that are present in the root
sense of the terms enargeia and enargs: they are at least close to the world
that is the object of that perception.40 But this closeness is only relative, in
comparison to the fantastic subjects of poetic phantasia.
In underlining the need for the images used by orators to be in
accordance with truth, ps.-Longinos echoes other sources on enargeia and
related terms.
Several times Quintilian repeats the key advice that, when
summoning up an image to be conveyed in words, the speaker should be
careful to confine himself to what is like truth or what usually happens
or what is credible.41 His attribution of power to the orator who is
euphantasitos (6.2.30) contains the important qualification that the images
must be secundum uerum, in accordance with truth.
This requirement
is not surprising. Probability and verisimilitude (distinct ideas but with
a considerable amount of overlap in practice) were the hallmarks of the
38
Meijering, Literary and Rhetorical Theories, pp. 712.

40
See Barbara Cassin, Procdures sophistiques pour construire lvidence, in
Carlos
Lvy and Laurent Pernot (eds), Dire lvidence: philosophie et rhtorique antiques (Paris, 1997),
pp. 1529; On
the meanings of the term, see Manieri, Limmagine poetica, pp. 10512
and
Juliette Dross
,
De la philosophie la rhtorique: la relation entre phantasia et enargeia dans le
trait Du sublime et lInstitution oratoire, Philosophie antique, 4 (2004): 6193.
41
Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 6.2.30, the speaker should visualize secundum verum
[according to truth]; 6.2.31 omnia quae in re praesenti accidisse credibile est [everything
that could credibly have happened in the present case]. In his discussion of diaskeu in On
Invention, 3.15 (p. 167, ll. 1117), ps.-Hermogenes similarly emphasizes the need for such
depictions to be credible (pithanos) and probable (eikos).
39
103
rhetorical presentation of facts.42 The reasons seem obvious: a narrative

needs to conform to an audiences expectations of what is likely or probable
and to their experience of the world if it is to be believed. As Quintilian
notes (4.2.34), the question of truth is a different matter: many true things
are not credible, whereas untrue things can be like truth (uerisimilia). It
is this discussion that leads to Quintilians first mention of enargeia (4.2.63
5), where he insists, in opposition to some other nameless authorities, that
a false story needs to be as vivid (euidens, enarg
s) as possible if it is to
be convincing. He thus makes clear that likeness to truth is a quality that
results from the orators presentation of his story, rather than from the
underlying facts themselves.43 The concern for verisimilitude that we see
in the discussions of enargeia is one indication of its rhetorical function for
the quality of likeness to truth was vital in narrations just as the ideas
of probability and credibility played a vitally important role in rhetorical
argumentation. The multiple interconnections of enargeia and ekphrasis
with these notions will be explored further in the next chapter. But before
moving on to this, it is important to note another, rather different aspect
of enargeia.
Enargeia and Illusion
Ultimately, whether in poetry, rhetoric or historiography, whether it
represents credible or incredible things, verbally produced enargeia is
always a matter of illusion. It thus exists in a constant tension between
presence and absence. The fact that enargeia produces an illusion is present
in the terms for likeness which are used everywhere, as in the terms of
approximation (all but) we find in the discussions of ekphrasis. For
Plutarch, the reader of Thucydides is merely like a spectator; Quintilians
ideal audience are made to feel as if (quam si) they were present at
the murder. Moreover, even as Plutarch stresses the overwhelming sense
of involvement in the events of Athenian history created by Thucydides
narrative (Moralia, 346F; see Chapter 1, above), he underlines the illusion
involved by referring to Simonides comparison of poetry to painting, the
art of visual representation. The comparison of enargeia to the visual arts,
made explicitly by Plutarch and implicitly elsewhere, also draws attention
42
Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 4.2.31 treats the terms uerisimilis, probabilis and
credibilis as interchangeable. On these terms, see, for example, Claude Moussy, Signum et
les noms latins de la preuve: lhritage de divers termes grecs, in Jacqueline Dangel (ed.),
Grammaire et rhtorique: notions de Romanit (Strasbourg, 1994).
43
I would therefore not agree with Cockcroft, Fine-tuning Quintilians doctrine of

rhetorical emotion, p. 503, who suggests that Quintilian would be likely to favour a literal
and unambiguous factual representation of that res originally taken into his mind and now
again visualised.
104
to the illusion involved in enargeia and to the way in which verbal depiction
creates a feeling like that of presence which is not presence.
A further analogy, which similarly conveys both the power of enargeia
and the unreality of its creations, is with the stage. When Nikolaos
compares the audience of ekphrasis to spectators, the term he uses, theatai,
implies the theatre just as much as the visual arts. Quintilians suggests an
even closer link to the stage with his comparison of the orator who uses
phantasia to arouse his own emotions with the actor who is so involved in
his role that he cries real tears (6.2.278
and 35)
. In this respect the orator
and the actor both share the paradoxical state of feeling imaginary things
as if they were real, a state which they are able to induce in their audiences
as well.44
Quintilian attributes some of the force of the speakers display of feeling
to the fact that he is speaking of real events in which he is to some extent
involved (indirectly as advocate, if not directly), but he makes clear that
fictional events can affect the listener equally. He even recommends that
schoolboy declaimers should think themselves into the roles they assume
in their exercises, advice which assumes that emotional involvement in
a fictional situation is both possible and desirable (6.2.36). Some sources
reveal a certain anxiety about this identification: the Elder Seneca, for
example, records anecdotes about orators who lost the ability to distinguish
between their own mental images, their phantasiae, and reality and fell
into a state of madness akin to that of Orestes.45 It may be to distinguish
the type of phantasia involved in rhetorical enargeia from the uncontrolled
hallucinations of a madman that Quintilian chose to compare the orators
imaginings with daydreams, which remain under the dreamers conscious
control.46 However, it is noticeable that the loss of ability to distinguish
between visualization and reality is not attributed to the audience, nor
is it a common idea in the Greek sources. The difference may reflect the
different contexts of Greek and Roman rhetorical practice for, while the
Greek theorists wrote for speakers who, in theory at least, discussed and
evoked events that had occurred to them, the Roman practice of using an
advocate meant that speakers in judicial cases were commonly required to
become emotionally and imaginatively involved in events that concerned
their clients rather than themselves.
44
See Schrijvers, Invention, imagination et thories des motions chez Cicron et

Quintilien, pp. 395408.
45
See Juliette Dross, De limagination lillusion: quelques aspects de la phantasia

chez Quintilien et dans la rhtorique impriale, Incontri triestini di filologia classica, 4 (2004
2005): 27390.
46
Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 6.2.30. Quintilian describes these reveries as a vice of

the soul (animi vitium).
105
Different texts play in different ways on the paradoxes of enargeia, on

the simultaneous presence of the absent and absence of presence that
are produced. Some examples of the ways in which authors of epideictic
oratory and creators of the fictional worlds of declamation and the Greek
novel exploit the ambiguities of the illusions they create will be discussed
in further detail in Chapter 7. For the moment, however, what concerns
us is the rhetorical use of ekphrasis and enargeia as a means of persuasion.
While never losing sight of the illusion involved, rhetoricians tend to
place emphasis on the ability of words to create presence, rather than the
problematic nature of that presence. This emphasis is hardly surprising,
and particularly appropriate to the communicative situation of oratory,
where the audience is caught up in the immediacy of the speech and its
performance, with little time to reflect critically on the nature of their
experience.
Conclusions
Enargeia is therefore far more than a figure of speech, or a purely linguistic
phenomenon.47 It is a quality of language that derives from something
beyond words: the capacity to visualize a scene. And its effect also goes
beyond words in that it sparks a corresponding image, with corresponding
emotional associations, in the mind of the listener. This process lies
behind the uses of enargeia and ekphrasis in oratory and in other types
of text. The discussions of enargeia in rhetorical sources are particularly
interesting because of the very careful attention paid to audience response
and the question of how an audiences verbally induced imaginings can
be predictable, as they must be if the speech is to be successful.
On the surface, the ancient orators model of opening up and
developing a basic statement of fact into a detailed and vivid account
bears some similarities with the theory of description proposed by
Philippe Hamon in his article of 1972, further developed in his book of
1981.48 Hamon proposes a definition of description as the exploration of
the lexical field in which an introductory theme or pantonyme, such
as garden or house gives rise to the enumeration of a series of sub-
47
Armisen, La notion dimagination chez les anciens II, pp. 1314 makes the same
point about phantasia in rhetoric.
48
Philippe
Hamon, Quest-ce quune description?, Potique, 112 (1972): 46585 and
Introduction lanalyse du descriptif (Paris, 1981), subsequently reissued under the title Du
descriptif (Paris, 1993). I cite the later edition here and elsewhere.
For a critique of Hamons
approach to description, see
Jean Molino, Logiques de la description, Potique, 91 (1992):
36382.
106
themes (rose, chimney) and predicates (snow, smoking).49 This strictly

linguistic approach has the advantage of breaking with the long-standing
tradition of defining description by its subject matter and the further
advantage of removing the representation of reality from the equation
(since description is seen as a purely lexical phenomenon).50 On
a formal
level, Hamons definition of description is comparable to Quintilians idea
of unfolding. Just as striking, however, are
the radical differences in
orientation and in the basic assumptions about language which underpin
the two approaches. Quintilian is almost perverse in his refusal to analyse
the linguistic aspects of enargeia, but his insistence on the imaginative
engagement of both speaker and listener draws attention to a factor which
is left out of Hamons account of description. In this, Hamon typifies the
modern critical neglect of imaginative response. What Hamon does share
with the ancient rhetorical discussions of enargeia is an interest in the role
of the reader/audience and the contribution demanded of them. But, for
Hamon, description engages the lexical competence of the reader.51 The
two differ so radically in their approaches that it is clear they are speaking
from very different worlds. Where Hamon sees only words, Quintilian
sees words as the communicable aspect of mental images which are
crucial to the formation and reception of those words. Quintilian and
Hamon are working with radically different conceptions of language, and
of the relation of words to external reality on the one hand, and to their
speakers and audiences on the other.52 In order to understand the ancient
rhetoricians perspective a little better, it is necessary to move on to the
theories of imagination and memory on which enargeia and ekphrasis
are predicated. These explain some of the questions raised by the use of
enargeia in rhetoric while shining a spotlight onto some of the paradoxes
involved in making absent things present.
49
Hamon, Quest-ce quune description?, pp. 4746; Du descriptif, p. 128.
See particularly Hamon, Du descriptif, p. 91.

51
Ibid., pp. 412.

52
See the remarks of Claude Calame, Quand dire cest faire voir: lvidence dans la
rhtorique antique, Etudes de lettres, 4 (1991): 1314 on the differences between enargeia and
description.
50
5. Phantasia: Memory, Imagination and the Gallery

of the Mind
Enargeia in Oratory
Enargeia, the quality that makes an ekphrasis an ekphrasis and distinguishes
it from a plain report of the facts, is thus a paradoxical phenomenon. It
is able to arouse emotions through immaterial semblances of scenes that
are not present to the listener and may never have taken place. It uses
the medium of language to create an impact on the world, the power of
which is expressed in physical terms most strikingly, as we have seen,
by ps.-Longinos metaphor of enslavement. A question that remains to
be answered is how a speaker could be so confident of his effect on the
most intimate recesses of his listeners minds. Quintilian cites several
examples of emotional appeals involving props and extras (particularly
children) falling disastrously flat, but he never betrays any doubts about
the predictable power of enargeia. This is despite the fact that, as Ann
Vasaly has noted, enargeia would seem to have depended on one of the
least predictable factors in the equation: the individuals unique and
personal visualization. The listeners emotional response to enargeia
was, moreover, crucial to its function within a speech, which raises the
further question of how orators could hope to predict and control such a
seemingly individual and subjective process.
As Vasaly points out, orators clearly expected their listeners to make
their own, personal contributions to the word pictures they heard and to
flesh out the details mentioned with further details supplied from their
own imagination. Quintilians account of his own response to Ciceros
portrait of Verres does show that he assumed listeners would contribute
actively to the images provoked by verbal enargeia and that these
contained a personal input. Describing the effect this passage worked on
his imagination, Quintilian is happy to admit that his own mental image
Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 6.1.3742. But see Libanios, Autobiography (Or. 1), 41,
discussed below, for an example of the failure of an ekphrasis in an epideictic speech.

Ann Vasaly, Representations: Images of the World in Ciceronian Oratory (Berkeley, 1993),
pp. 989. Interestingly, the modern theoretician of rhetoric Chaim Perelman, in LEmpire
rhtorique: rhtorique et argumentation (Paris, 1977), p. 49, expresses reservations about his
ancient predecessors advice to use physical props (such as Quintilians swords), which may
distract the audience, but seems to share their confidence in the verbally created sense of
presence.
108
contains details not even mentioned by Cicero. What is more, he presents

such elaboration as the norm:
Is there anyone so incapable of forming images of things that, when
he reads the passage in the Verrines, The praetor of the Roman people
stood on the shore dressed in slippers, wearing a purple cloak and long
tunic, leaning on this worthless woman, he does not only seem to see
them, the place, their appearance, but even imagines for himself some of
those things which are not mentioned. I for my part certainly seem to see his
face, his eyes, the unseemly caresses of both and the silent loathing and
frightened shame of those who were present.
An quisquam tam procul a concipiendis imaginibus rerum abest ut non,
cum illa in Verrem legit: stetit soleatus praetor populi Romani cum
pallio purpureo tunicaque talari muliercula nixus in litore, non solum
ipsos intueri uideatur et locum et habitum, sed quaedam etiam ex iis quae
dicta non sunt sibi ipse adstruat? Ego certe mihi cernere uideor et uultum
et oculos et deformes utriusque blanditias et eorum qui aderant tacitam
auersationem ac timidam uerecundiam.
Where Ciceros text provides only the barest of outlines, giving details
of posture, clothing and situation, Quintilian supplies for himself
further details of appearance, a response which has been termed slow
realisation by way of synecdoche. The mental image which he describes
to us includes the detail of Verres eyes, and the figures are set in motion,
caressing each other in an external display of desire. Quintilian the reader
also attributes feelings to the internal audience that presumably mirror his
own response to the scene playing in his mind. This passage sheds light
on the extravagant claim that Quintilian made for another Ciceronian
passage, the description of the aftermath of the party discussed above
(8.3.66; see p. 913). When he asks what more would anyone who had
actually entered the room have seen? it may well be that he is not referring
to the sparse details provided by Ciceros text but to the quality of his
own, far fuller visualization of the scene sparked by the words. In the case
of the passage from the Verrines, where the larger context survives, it is

Quintilian, Insitutio oratoria, 8.3. 645. My italics. This part of the Verrines was not
delivered in court, a detail which Quintilian ignores. Beth Innocenti, Towards a theory of
vivid description as practised in Ciceros Verrine Orations, Rhetorica, 12 (1994): 35581 argues
that the text that we have of the actio secunda does represent Ciceros oratorical practice.

Robert Cockcroft, Fine-tuning Quintilians doctrine of rhetorical emotion: seven
types of enargeia, in Toms Albaladejo et al. (eds), Quintiliano: Historia y actualidad de la
retrica (Logroo, 1998), p. 504.
Phantasia
109
clear that Quintilian is taking cues from the attack on Verres in the rest of
the work.
Moreover, as we have already seen in the discussion of ekphrasis, the
passages that were thought to have this immediate effect of placing before
the eyes did not necessarily evoke static scenes. Quintilians accounts
of the murder and of the sacked city are full of details of human action;
Ciceros evocation of the room after a party begins with the comings and
goings of the drunken guests, and even his tableau of Verres leaning on
his mistress contains within it the aftermath of action (nixus) which is
sufficient for Quintilian to supply further movements and emotions to his
own imaginative rendering of the scene.
The question still remains of how an orator could control such creative
visualization and interpretation of words on the part of his audience.
Quintilian interacts with Ciceros text in exactly the way that Iser envisages
the reader interacting with a work of literature, filling in the gaps left by
the text. But where Iser places emphasis on the variable and individual
response of each reader, Quintilians account assumes a predictable
response, or at least a restricted range of responses. For him, this is far
from a merely theoretical issue: he is purporting to be able to teach his
readers how to guide their audiences responses in practical situations, and
implying that he himself has wielded this power in the courtroom. One
indication as to how he could be so confident of a predictable response

is provided by his insistence that the orator had to remain within certain
bounds if he was to create the desired effect. A particularly significant
passage in this respect is to be found in the conclusion to his discussion of
enargeia in Book 8. Here, he advises the orator to follow nature (naturam
sequeamur) (8.3.71). But the remark that immediately follows makes it
clear that the idea of nature is largely conventional, for it is vital that the
audience should be able to recognize what they hear: [peoples] minds
he says accept (recipiunt) most easily things which they recognize.
This suggests that the easiest visualisations to communicate will therefore
not be new creations (whatever that might mean), or representations of
See Lucia Calboli Montefusco, v et v: levidence dune dmonstration

qui signifie les choses en acte, in Mireille Armisen Marchetti (ed.), Demonstrare: voir et faire
voir: forme de la dmonstration Rome (Toulouse, 2005), pp. 4358.

Wolfgang Iser, The reading process: a phenomenological approach, in Jane P.
Tompkins (ed.), Reader-response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-structuralism (Baltimore,
1980), pp. 5069.
Ibid., p. 55: each individual reader will fill in the gaps in his own way, thereby
excluding the various other possibilities; as he reads, he will make his own decisions as to
how the gap is to be filled.

Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 8.3.71: facillime enim recipiunt animi quod agnoscunt.
110
idiosyncrasies, but will correspond to the audiences expectations and

prior experience.
Quintilians account of his response to the portrait of Verres also
provides vital clues to how an orator might be able predict his audiences
response. The values and emotions which Quintilian attributes to the
scene (and which he seems to have shared himself) are carefully controlled
by the use of significant details. Cicero contrasts Verres official status
(praetor populi Romani, praetor of the Roman people) with the details
of his shoes, the purple cloak (pallium) which, as a Greek style of dress
coloured with oriental dye, would have had strong connotations of unRoman luxury, not to mention his unmanly stance, as he leans (nixus) on
his mistress. Such details would no doubt have been so loaded, so telling,
for Roman readers like Quintilian that they might not themselves have
been fully aware of the amount of decoding involved in their response.
This example reveals the extent to which what must have been immediate,
practically unconscious, associations for the original audience were in
fact culturally specific and demanded a degree of what one might call
cultural competence from both speaker and audience if they were to be
fully successful.
Imagination, Memory and Knowledge
Quintilians remark about familiar things being most apt to lodge
themselves in the mind points to the close relationship between memory
and imagination in ancient thought. Moreover, much knowledge was
thought of as being stored in visual form so that the type of imagining
called for in oratory was closely related to memory: the orator uses
his own visual resources to call up images which already exist in the
audiences mind. The close connection between visualization and
memory in ancient thought is further underlined by the importance of
visual images in ancient theories and techniques of memorization. The
artificial memory techniques discussed by the author of the Rhetorica ad
Herennium, by Cicero and (with reservations) by Quintilian relied heavily
on mental images.10 The images which the Auctor ad Herennium suggests
the orator use in order to remind himself of the order and content of the
See Webb, Imagination and the arousal of the emotions in Greco-Roman rhetoric, in
S. Braund and C. Gill (eds), The Passions in Roman Thought and Literature (Cambridge, 1997),
pp. 1223.
10
Rhetorica ad Herennium, 3.16.2824.30; Cicero, De oratore, 2.35460; Quintilian,
Institutio oratoria, 11.2. Aristotle also makes a brief mention of the use of mental images in
memory techniques in On the Soul, 427b 1820. See, in general, Frances Yates, The Art of
Memory (London, 1966) and Jocelyn Penny Small, Wax Tablets of the Mind: Cognitive Studies of
Memory and Literacy in Classical Antiquity (London, 1997).
Phantasia
111
parts of his speech were intentionally bizarre so as to be as memorable

as possible. These might function by suggesting words to the orator (the
image of a testicle, testiculus, testis, could serve to remind the speaker
to mention a witness, testis) as in a rebus puzzle.11 But other images bore
a more direct, visual resemblance to the subject the orator was supposed
to remember: the testicle-witnesses in this example were involved in a case
of disputed inheritance in which a wealthy man is supposed to have been
poisoned. He should also be pictured lying ill in bed in a direct illustration
of the narrative. Interestingly, the orators own memory seems to play an
important part here: if he did not know the man in question personally,
he is advised not to invent an image of some unknown person, but to
choose someone known to him so that the image will spring quickly to
mind.12 The memory is therefore the readiest source of images for use in
such mnemonic systems, and of the architectural backgrounds to place
the images in.
Memory and the Gallery of the Mind
As this suggests, images derived from sense perception were also thought
to be the basis of natural memory, and this model had a long and enduring
history in Greek and Roman thought. These memory images resulted from
impressions received on the mind or soul through the senses. Gorgias
refers to the process in his Encomium of Helen (17) when he states that
sight engraves upon the mind images (eikonas) of actions (pragmata) which
have been seen. It was Aristotle who developed this idea in ways which
were influential on later centuries. He explains that sense impressions
(aisthmata) gathered in daily life somehow impressed themselves on the
soul to create memory-images (phantasmata).13 This basic model endured
into the Imperial period and underlies much discussion of sight and
memory, as well as the theory of enargeia and phantasia. Because it was
so familiar it usually needed no explanation for ancient readers. There is
one context, however, where the Aristotelian model becomes clear. This is
the special case of the heightened perception of lovers: novels and other
discussions of love from the Imperial period tell us time and again how
11
Rhetorica ad Herennium, 3.20.33.

Ibid. The reader is also advised not to choose a person of low social standing (de
minimo loco) to figure in their tableau. The implication is that such a person would not be
sufficiently individualized quite literally distinguished for the orator to call him to mind
quickly and easily.
12
13
Aristotle, On Memory and Recollection, 450a 3032; see Richard Sorabji, Aristotle on
Memory (London, 1972), p. 11. Aristotles writings on memory and phantasia raise immensely
complex issues. In what follows I am concerned only to provide a bare outline of the general
features that are relevant to rhetorical phantasia and enargeia.
112
the image of the beloved enters through the eyes and then remains in
the lovers soul.14 This idea runs throughout the Ekphrasis of Beauty
attributed to Libanios whose author claims that, once he had glimpsed
the beautiful girl at her window, his soul became a painter so that the
resulting ekphrasis is the verbal expression of that impact.15
Aristotle and others frequently appeal to analogies with the visual
arts to express the nature of the impressions made by sense perception
upon the soul and their lingering form as memories. Famously, Aristotle
compares the impact of sense perception on the soul to the impression
(tupos) made by a signet ring on wax.16 This idea of imprinting is evident in
the Greek terms for visual language, diatupsis and hupotupsis, implying
that such language has an effect analogous to that of direct sensation. In
the same passage, memory is compared to a painting (hoion zgraphma),
an analogy which Aristotle also uses in On the Soul (427b 214) to explain
the activity of contemplating an internal image (phantasma).17 Like the
image of the impression in wax, this idea of the mind as a gallery of
paintings left behind by sensation has a long afterlife. Ps.-Plutarch extends
the metaphor further when he compares the fleeting images produced
by ordinary sensation with the enduring soul-painting impressed on the
soul by the sight of the beloved, which is like a painting burned on with
encaustic (Moralia, 759C). Aristotle himself uses the graphic analogy to
illustrate the way in which we can think of these internal images either
as what they represent or as images of what they represent (On Memory,
450b 20 451a 2). In this they are just like the images created in the mind
by enargeia, which create an impression like that of sensation and can be
contemplated either as equivalent to what they represent, or as likenesses.
And, like the writers on enargeia, Aristotle also emphasizes the physicality
14
See, for example, Chariton, Chaireas and Kallirhoe, 6.57; ps. Plutarch, Ertikos, 759C
with further discussion below. Achilles Tatios, Leukippe and Kleitophon, 1.9 offers the further
development that the flowing of the image of the beloved into the lovers soul leads to a form
of copulation. See also Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1370b1922 on the special importance of memory
to the lover and Apollonios of Rhodes, Argonautika, 3.4536. Cicero, De oratore, 2.357 also
refers to this theory in his discussion of memory.
15
16
Aristotle, On Memory and Recollection, 450a 2532. See Sorabji, Aristotle on Memory, 3;
Gerard Watson, Phantasia in Classical Thought (Galway, 1988), p. 25. Quintilian, 11.2.4 refers
to the analogy between memory and the imprint of the ring on wax as something that many
people think, a sign of the pervasiveness of the Aristotelian image.
17
Malcolm Schofield, Aristotle on the imagination, in Jonathan Barnes et al. (eds),
Articles on Aristotle 4: Psychology and Aesthetics (London, 1979), p. 119 cautions, however,
that Aristotelian phantasmata are not always to be understood as mental images outside On
Memory and Recollection. Nevertheless, in On the Soul, 429a 35 Aristotle derives both terms
from phaos [light], reflecting the role of sight as the primary sense.
Phantasia
113
of these images which are impressed on the body itself.18 There are thus
many parallels between the effects of enargeia and the effects of direct
perception which further help to explain the ease with which Quintilian
can blur the distinction between the two.
For what lies behind vivid speech is the gallery of mental images
impressed by sensation in the speakers mind. The souls of both speaker
and listener are stocked with internal images of absent things, and these
provide the raw material with which each party can paint the images that
ekphrasis puts into words. This idea surfaces in the rhetorical handbooks
in the shape of warnings about describing shameful or inappropriate
subject matter. In his chapter on the koinos topos, for example, Nikolaos
warns against including too much detail in ekphraseis of subjects such as
adulterers or a seducer of young boys, for in describing such things we
will slander ourselves more than him [i.e. the adulterer].19 More striking
still is the caution urged by Menander Rhetor when he discusses the
ekphrasis of the bride and groom in his discussion of the wedding speech
(epithalamion).20 Unless it is socially acceptable for the speaker to have seen
her (if he is close relative, for example), a verbal description will lay him
open to suspicions of harbouring an illicitly acquired memory image of
her in his mind. So verbal representation is clearly thought not just to
betray knowledge of words (of the lexicography of adultery or of beauty,
as in Hamons definition of description), but to derive from an internal
image of what is being described.21 This image resides deep within the
speakers mind and may itself derive from perception. As in the case of the
passages of Euripides and Virgil analysed by ps.-Longinos and Quintilian
respectively, the verbal evocation allows a glimpse into the mind of the
describer, which can be fraught with risk for an orator who is bound to his
audience through social ties.
Thinking and Speaking with Pictures
Words, in Quintilians discussion of enargeia, serve simply to communicate
the orators internal image, his phantasia, of a scene to the audience. His
insistence on the visual source and effect of vivid language, and his relative
18
Aristotle, On Memory and Recollection, 453a 1416. See Watson, Phantasia in Classical
Thought, p. 31.
19
Nikolaos, Progymnasmata, 45.16: ov ov o vov
ov.
20
Menander Rhetor, On Epideictic, Treatise II, 404. 1114.
21
Philippe Hamon, Du descriptif (Paris, 1993), p. 42 stresses the way in which description
appeals to the readers memory and knowledge, but the relevant competence is above all
lexical (p. 43).
114
neglect of the linguistic details, reflect ideas about thought, memory and
language in general which are to be found in Aristotles writings, but are
also pervasive in the texts of later periods, in scholia, in novels and essays,
as well as in the rhetorical theory of phantasia. For Aristotle, thought itself
(noein) is inseparable from the mental images, the phantasmata, which
stock our minds, and cannot take place without them.22
The resulting connection between phantasia and language was explored
in far greater detail by the Stoics. It is worth exploring Stoic theory in a little
more detail here because it helps to illustrate the profound connections
between mental images and language in ancient thought. A source cited
by Diogenes Laertios (7.49) shows that phantasia was thought to be at
the root of language through the functioning of thought (dianoia): for
the impression (phantasia) arises first, and then thought (dianoia), which
has the power of talking, expresses in language what it experiences by
the agency of the impression.23 Phantasia is the basis of language and,
as in the rhetorical theory of enargeia, language serves as the medium
by which phantasiai are communicated from the speakers mind to that
of the listener.24 The rhetoricians enargeia is therefore far from being an
anomalous form of language, rather it is a heightened example of the way
that all verbal communication could be thought to work, transmitting an
internal impression from one mind to the other.
Phantasia and Paraphrasis in Theon
That various different forms of words could serve to transmit what
was essentially the same phantasia is suggested by a passage in Theons
Progymnasmata where the author discusses the practice of paraphrasis.
Rather than being a purely stylistic exercise, paraphrase in Theons
conception is the reworking of the same thought in different ways. The
same phantasia hitting the same mind, or different minds, will give rise
to different utterances. The examples he cites include Demosthenes
account of the destruction of Phokis (19.65), mentioned by Nikolaos in his
discussion of ekphrasis, and Aeschines similar account of the destruction
of Thebes (Against Ktesiphon, 157), which are both identified as paraphrases
of the account of the sack of a city embedded within Phoenixs speech
22
Aristotle, On Memory and Recollection, 449b 30 and On the Soul, 427b 1416 and 432a 7.
See Sorabji, Aristotle on Memory, p. 6; Schofield, Aristotle on the imagination, p. 128; Mireille
Armisen, La notion dimagination chez les anciens I: les philosophes, Pallas 27 (1979): 29.
23
Translation from Anthony A. Long and David N. Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers
(Cambridge, 1987), Chapter 33 D. See also Anthony A. Long, Hellenistic Philosophy: Stoics,
Epicureans, Sceptics (Berkeley, 1986), p. 125.
24
See Catherine Atherton, The Stoics on Ambiguity (Cambridge, 1993), p. 43.
Phantasia
115
in Iliad, 9.5934.25 All these passages, despite their apparent differences

(Demosthenes describes the desolate condition of a specific city after
the attack whereas Kleopatra, the speaker in Phoenixs speech, describes
details of the action, presented as a general warning of what happens on
such occasions), are therefore thought of as verbalizations of the same
underlying phantasia.
Phantasia: Philosophy and Rhetoric
The various theories of phantasia that were current in the philosophical
schools of the Hellenistic and Roman periods have affinities with the
basic concept of the mental image, transmitted by words, that we find
in Quintilian and ps.-Longinos. In both the philosophical and rhetorical
accounts of phantasia, a particular state of mind gives rise to words. The
philosophers emphasis on the relationship between the phantasia in the
speakers mind and his perceptions of the outside world helps to clarify
the type of imagination that is in play in rhetorical visualization: it is an
imagination based on previously acquired sense perceptions.
There are, however, some important differences between the
rhetoricians accounts of enargeia and the role of phantasia in Stoic linguistic
theory, as is only to be expected given the different contexts in which they
were developed. First of all, when Quintilian and ps.-Longinos speak
of a phantasia, they clearly mean an image of something perceptible,
and the corresponding phantasia that results in the audiences mind is
similarly akin to sensation. The Stoics phantasia, by contrast, could be
a more abstract phenomenon than either Aristotles phantasmata or the
rhetoricians phantasia in that it could be, as Anthony Long points out, a
representation of sensory or non-sensory objects.26 As such, Stoic phantasia
is often translated impression or presentation.27 Theons conception of
phantasia in his discussion of paraphrasis was similarly broad. While the
example of the sacked city constitutes a tableau that is familiar from other
rhetorical sources, the other examples he offers are of abstract ideas which
had been expressed in different ways by different authors (or, in the case
of the prolific Demosthenes, by the same author.) Thus he treats comments
25
Theon, Progymnasmata, 62, l. 32 63, l. 13. See Michel Patillon, La Thorie du discours
chez Hermogne le Rhteur: essai sur les structures linguistiques de la rhtorique ancienne (Paris,
1988), pp. 30911 and his notes to this passage of Theon.
26
Anthony Long, Stoic Studies (Cambridge, 1996), p. 271.
27
See Jean-Baptiste Gourinat, Les Stociens et lme (Paris, 1996), pp. 3662.
116
by Thucydides, Theopompos and Demosthenes on the nature of jealousy

(phthonos) as different expressions of the same thought (phantasthen).28
The Stoics theory of phantasia, moreover, was central to their reflection
on epistemology, which distinguished phantasiai deriving from the
perception of some real object or from reasoning (termed katalptikai)
from figments such as dreams or the illusions of madness, which can be
termed phantasmata.29 The ideal of kataleptic phantasia reflected the Stoic
belief that true knowledge of the world was possible and that the wise man
was able to distinguish between accurate representations, which formed a
correct basis for action, and those that did not derive from reality.30 Classic
illustrations of the latter were dreams or the illusions of the deranged,
such as Orestes hallucination of the Furies.31 This is interestingly handled
in ps.-Longinos who, as we have seen, uses the common Stoic example of
Orestes hallucinations as an example of phantasia in poetry, which is able
to allow itself, as he explains a little further on, to include fantastic and
impossible scenes.32 There is thus an interesting correlation between his
poetic phantasia and the Stoics empty attraction, just as there is between
his account of the ineluctable force of rhetorical enargeia, when it is mixed
with arguments based on facts, and the impact of kataleptic phantasia when
there is no impediment to its acceptance (as there was, for example, for
Admetos who, on seeing Alcestis really returned from the dead, refused
to accept that his phantasia represented reality).33 Unimpeded kataleptic
phantasia, according to Sextus Empiricus, was said by later Stoics to all but
seize us by the hair and drag us to assent.34 Significantly, this unimpeded
kataleptic phantasia is qualified by Sextus as enargs, in the root sense of the
28
Theon, Progymnasmata, 63, ll. 1322 citing Thucydides, 2.45; Theopompos, FgrH II,
115, 395 and Demosthenes, 18.135.
29
See, for example, the account of Diogenes Laertios, 7.49 (= Long and Sedley, The
Hellenistic Philosophers, 39 A). The Stoic terminology therefore differs from the usage of
Aristotle for whom phantasmata are any kind of internal image, with no implications about
their truth status. On Stoic thought on phantasia and truth, see further Long and Sedley, The
Hellenistic Philosophers, Chapter 40; Gourinat, Les Stociens et lme, pp. 4042.
30
Long and Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, vol. 1, p. 249.
31
Some authorities distinguished between two different types of illusion in that
Orestes-like hallucinations were based on the mis-recognition of an object (he saw Elektra
but thought he saw a Fury) while others were based on no perceptible object. See Sextus
Empiricus, Against the Professors, 7.24752 (= Long and Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers,
40 E).
32
Ps.-Longinos, On the Sublime, 15.8:
, , .
33
Sextus Empiricus, Against the Professors, 7.25360 (= Long and Sedley, The Hellenistic
Philosophers, 40 K).
34
Sextus Empiricus, Against the Professors, 7.257 (= Long and Sedley, The Hellenistic
Philosophers, 40 K). Juliette Dross
, De
la philosophie la rhtorique: la relation entre phantasia
Phantasia
117
term. The difference is that Longinos rhetorical phantasia is said to need

the support of factual arguments to achieve its effect, while the power of
kataleptic phantasia is such that it need only be free of impediments.
In general, however, the rhetoricians use the term in a looser way than
do the Stoics to mean any mental image (or, in the case of ps.-Longinos, the
transmission of mental images through words) and imply no automatic
judgement as to the truth of that image or its relation to reality.35 What
matters primarily to the rhetoricians is that the speech or poem should
have the desired impact on the listener; for this to be achieved what is
important is conformity to culturally accepted truth (i.e. probability,
verisimilitude in the domain of rhetoric). There are therefore differences
between rhetorical and Stoic phantasia, and ps.-Longinos says as much
when he distinguishes the usual meaning of any thought productive
of language (a phrase which is straight out of the textbook, as Simon
Goldhill has pointed out) from the now fashionable sense in which he
chooses to use it:36
The term phantasia is used generally (koins) for anything which in any
way suggests a thought productive of speech; but the word has come
into fashion for the situation in which inspired by enthusiasm and
emotion you seem to see what you are talking about and place it before
the eyes of the audience.
v ov v v ov vv vvv
o vov. ' ov ovo v
voo o v o v o oov.37
et enargeia dans le trait Du sublime et lInstitution oratoire, Philosophie antique, 4 (2004), p. 77

has made the same connection between the two passages.
35
The failure to distinguish rhetorical phantasia from the specialized Stoic sense of the
word leads Elsner, Art and the Roman Viewer: The Transformation of Art from the Pagan World to
Christianity (Cambridge, 1995), p. 27, for example, to claim that ekphrasis tells the truth.
As we will see, ekphrasis and enargeia are concerned with verisimilitude, not truth.
36
Simon Goldhill, What is ekphrasis for?, p. 6. See also Dross, Phantasia et enargeia,
p. 68.
37
Ps.-Longinos, On the Sublime, 15.1. Lucian was also able to refer to the notion of
phantasia as part of his satire of Stoics in Philosophies for Sale, 21, indicating that it was
generally familiar to an educated audience. Dross, Phantasia et enargeia, p. 76 suggests
that ps.-Longinos use of the term koins indicates that the Stoic idea may have become so
widespread that many people were familiar with it without necessarily knowing its origins.
Goldhill, What is ekphrasis for?, p. 7 interprets ps.-Longinos distinction as a sign of an
argument brewing over the fashionable sense of phantasia and the Stoic philosophical sense.
I would prefer to his remark as a sign of a desire for clarity in the face of the variety of usages
current in his day.
118
Ps.-Longinos appears to be applying patterns of thought that appear in

Stoicism to the criticism of poetry and rhetoric with the vital difference that
there are no cognitive or moral implications.38 The reader who allows him
or herself to all but see the Furies as a result of the poets phantasia is in no
way morally or cognitively deficient but is experiencing the impact of the
sublime. In particular, though Longinos first example of phantasia recalls
the Stoics notions of phantasma, it is used for different ends: ps.-Longinos
is interested in the effect on the listener, rather than the ontological
status of the subject of the vision.39 The contemporary declaimers who,
ps.-Longinos claims, speak as if they could see the Furies are guilty of
overstepping the boundaries that separate poetic from rhetorical phantasia
and unwittingly imitating a madman.40 Their mistake is one of generic
appropriateness rather than one of cognition. Most importantly, rhetorical
phantasiai need only be like truth: their subjects may no more have existed
than did the Furies seen by Orestes, but they derive their power from their
verisimilitude and from the larger context of the speeches in which they are
found. This is because the rhetoricians interests are ultimately practical:
for both poets and orators, it is sufficient to create the desired impact upon
the listener.41 Ps.-Longinos thus illustrates both the similarities and the
differences between rhetorical and Stoic conceptions of phantasia.42
It might be best to consider the rhetorical and Stoic conceptions
of phantasia as different, but related, specializations of the same basic
model.43 What the two definitions cited by ps.-Longinos certainly do share
in common is the idea that a mental impression of some kind is intimately
bound up with the production of language. The role of phantasiai as
the internal equivalents of words is expressed most clearly by a fourthcentury North African steeped in traditional rhetorical and philosophical
38
See Matthew Leigh, Quintilian on the emotions, JRS, 94 (2004): 12240 on the gulf
between Stoic ideals and Quintilians theory of the emotions.
39
Orestes visions of Furies, treated by ps.-Longinos as an example of poetic phantasia,
are one of the stock examples of empty phantasmata cited by the Stoics. See, for example,
Sextus Empiricus, Against the Mathematicians, 7.249 (= Long and Sedley, The Hellenistic
Philosophers, 40 E).
40
41
See below, Chapter 7, however, for examples of writers in other genres playing on
the gap between the impressions created by enargeia and truth.
42
I do not therefore recognize the claim, attributed to me by Simon Goldhill, What is
ekphrasis for?, p. 7 that the fashionable sense of phantasia and the Stoic philosophical sense
are discrete usages, if by discrete we are to understand unrelated, entirely different.
I do think that they are distinct but related, and that the exact nature of the relationship
needs to be decided in each case. It is unfortunate that Goldhill does not provide a footnote
to support his assertion.
43
See the remarks of Dross, Phantasia et enargeia, pp. 768.
Phantasia
119
doctrine, St Augustine. He explains that when he wishes to speak the

name Carthage he first finds within him an image (phantasia) created
by the senses.44 The pervasiveness of this basic idea, which we find from
Aristotle to Augustine, helps to explain why Quintilian is able to slide from
speaking of mental images to speaking of the language used to express
them and back again, apparently without feeling any incongruity.
Painting in the Mind
Stoic kataleptic phantasiai, like Aristotles phantasmata, derive from sense
perception and are thus a kind of memory.45 It is this close connection to
memory that helps to explain both the nature of the mental images that
the speaker draws upon and the predictability of the audiences visual
response. If we draw the analogy with rhetorical phantasia, the speakers
visualization of the scene he wants to place before his audiences eyes
draws on elements already residing in his memory and, unless it is a
scene he has witnessed himself, is a composite of existing images. The fact
that memory images do not remain inert but are subject to manipulation
means phantasiai or phantasmata are not to be understood as limited to the
quasi-photographic reproduction of things seen.46 By various processes,
images that derive from experience can form the raw material of new
composites. Stoic linguistic theory certainly allowed for abstract thought
to be derived from perception by a number of procedures including
resemblance, analogy, synthesis and transposition.47 If we apply this idea
to rhetorical phantasia we find that it is possible to visualize things that
one has never seen by applying the same procedures to existing mental
images. Mythical and fantastic beasts can be imagined through a process
of synthesis, putting together man and horse, or in Lucians ironically
named True History (1.136) the fantastic composite warriors made out of a
44
Augustine, De Trinitate, 8.6.9.6870: et Carthaginem quidem cum eloqui uolo apud

me ipsum quaero ut eloquar, et apud me ipsum inuenio phantasiam Carthaginis. See Gerard
ODaly, Augustines Philosophy of Mind (London, 1987), p. 113.
45
See Long and Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 39 DF and Watson, Phantasia in
Classical Thought, p. 45.
46
Daniel Babut, Sur la notion dimitation dans les doctrines esthtiques de la
Grce classique, REG, 98 (1985): 7292 makes an analogous argument that the Platonic and
Aristotelian notion of mimesis is less reproductive and more creative than is often supposed.
He argues that Philostratos definition (Life of Apollonius, 6.19) of phantasia as able to create
what it has never seen (in contrast to mimesis which is simply reproductive) is therefore not
as revolutionary an idea as is often claimed. See also Manieri, Limmagine poetica, pp. 5051
who traces the gradual evolution of the term.
47
Diogenes Laertios, 7.523. See Watson, Phantasia in Classical Thought, p. 47; Manieri,
Limmagine poetica, pp. 479.
120
combination of animal and vegetable elements. The whole system of visual

mnemonics discussed by the Auctor ad Herennium and Quintilian relies
on such mental synthesis, placing familiar objects in striking combinations,
or against equally familiar architectural backgrounds. Thus, Quintilians
phantasia of the murder need not itself derive from direct perception but
can be synthesized from a variety of knowledge derived from the senses
as well as from cultural expectations. Comparison with Theons murder
scene in his discussion of common place (see above) in fact shows how
conventional Quintilians imagination was. For those with access to them,
the visual arts were also a possible source of mental images. Whatever the
source, the raw visual materials were already there, residing as phantasiai
in the speakers mind.
Again, the figure of the lover is of particular interest as it embodies
a heightened version of perception in which the intimate connection
between sense perception, memory, imagination and speech is clearly
visible. Despite the analogy with painting, the lovers memory-images in
the ps.-Plutarchan Ertikos (759C) do not remain as inert reproductions of
sensation but are starting points for imaginative elaboration. They move
and speak in the lovers mind as he imagines himself conversing with and
embracing the person. The active role of the rememberer is also clear in
the account of the love-struck king in Charitons Chaireas and Kallirhoe. His
mental image of the heroine is more vivid than his actual surroundings:
He saw only Kallirhoe, though she was not there and heard her, though
she did not speak (6.5). Prompted by Eros, he likens her to Homers
Nausikaa, (Odyssey, 6.1024) and painting (anazgraphn) and modelling
(anaplattn) this sight, he burned with passion (6.7). The image of modelling
is particularly apt in that it conveys the way in which a given body of
material can be reshaped, like clay, creating a new image out of existing
material, just as a plausible fiction (plasma) of the type that an orator was
often called upon to present is worked out of existing material.48 If we take
these examples as heightened examples of all imagining, they show how
imagination is thought to work by a process of recombination, rather than
creation ex nihilo. The imagination involved in the production of ekphrasis
and enargeia is therefore conceived as neither entirely free and creative, nor
as simply reproductive of sensation, but lies between these two poles.
A further stage in the process the verbalization of these combined
images is added by a scholiasts reading of Phaedras delirious
expression of her desire to go outside to the mountains and the hunting
grounds of her beloved in Euripides Hippolytos. The scholiast interprets
her cry take me to the mountain and her evocation of what she would
see and do there as revealing her imagination (literally, remembering,
48
See Gioia Rispoli, Lo spazio del verisimile: il racconto, la storia e il mito (Naples, 1988).
Phantasia
121
hupomnsis) of what she desires. Her words are a verbalization of her

erotically inspired visualizations and reveal the contents of her mind. By
attributing to Phaedra a detailed ekphrasis of her desires, the scholiast
says, Euripides has superbly imitated the character of the lover. For by
remembering the things they desire and all but painting (zgraphountes)
these things in their words lovers stir their desire to greater intensity, just
as Charitons king does.49 The scholiast understands Phaedras ekphrasis
of what she imagines herself doing on the mountains to betray her most
intimate phantasies.50 This casual reference reveals the role of ekphrasis
as the verbalization of an internal image created from visual memories,
which itself has an emotive power over its creator. It also reveals the
potentially dangerous role of ekphrasis as speech that may give access to
the visual contents of the speakers mind.
Reception and Imagination
This detour through the heightened memory-images of ancient lovers
reveals the connection between perception, memory and language which
underlies the rhetorical theories of enargeia. Language derives ultimately
from mental images. The speaker, as we saw in Quintilians account of
the murder in Book 6 of the Institutio oratoria, makes use of knowledge
(visually stored) of what usually happens derived from experience of
analogous events and from shared cultural knowledge. This visualization
is expressed in words. At the receiving end the audience goes through a
similar process. They, too, have souls stocked with images, derived from
sense perception, or from shared cultural knowledge. The speakers words
act as triggers for the retrieval of stored images which are recombined as
necessary, with the addition of related features, as Quintilians account of
his response to the description of Verres shows.
So far, I have pieced this process together from a wide variety of sources.
But Augustine gives a uniquely clear account of how the listener calls
upon existing visual traces in response to verbal descriptions.
He explains
that when he hears a description of Alexandria, a city he has never seen
49
Scholia in Euripidem, vol. 2, 32.15 cited by Roos Meijering, Literary and Rhetorical Theories
in Greek Scholia (Groningen, 1987), p. 51: v o o o
. vv vo (o v) v ovv ovovo
ov o o ov v v ov. The scholiast elides the
transition from image to its verbal expression here. It is surely the mental images, not their
verbal expression, which stir up Phaedras desire, but it is only through the word-painting
that we have access to the imaginings.
50
In the same way, the ps.-Libanian Ekphrasis of Beauty presents itself as a verbal
expression of the image painted by sight on the speakers soul. See Libanios, Progymnasmata,
pp. 5416, esp. p. 545, l. 22 p. 546, l. 5.
122
for himself, he imagines it as best he can by drawing on his knowledge of

the closest sight within his experience, the city of Carthage.51 He adopts
from the Stoics the distinction between the image which results from
direct experience (and therefore corresponds to reality), which he terms
phantasia, and the phantasma, which does not. He knows that his phantasma
of Alexandria, cobbled together as it is from features of another city, does
not correspond to actuality and claims that he would be astonished if
someone were to tell him it was indeed accurate. But it represents the best
that the listener can do to create a mental image of something he has not
seen, as orators audiences were so often required to do. While, from the
philosophers point of view, such phantasmata were to be distinguished
from truth, they were sufficient for the orators purpose of creating an
immediate impact.
Augustines remarks are vitally important because they confirm the
close association between memory and imagination in the audiences
response to description. This suggests that there is more than just a logical
concern for credibility behind Quintilians concern that the speakers
visualizations be like truth. For the more a scene corresponds to the
empirical, or culturally acquired, knowledge stored in the audiences
minds, the easier it will be for them to supply the images suggested by
the orators words, and the easier it will be for the orator to predict the
audiences response.
In order to be effective then, enargeia, and thus ekphrasis itself, must
therefore be a re-presentation of familiar and accepted material it is
this very familiarity which gives the speech its evocative and emotive
power. If we believe the rhetoricians, the impact of enargeia is immediate,
leaving any intellectual judgement of the credibility of the images to a
later moment.52 The orator does not have the time to wait for a readers
more leisurely process of deciphering. To be effective his scenes must
be instantly recognizable, common place.53 As Tompkins pointed out,
the type of reader response assumed by ancient critics is an immediate
reaction to the impact of words at the level of the imagination.54 Although
it would be wrong to assume that no process of decoding, of interpreting
51
Augustine, De Trinitate, 8.6.6889.

The analogy would be the difference between feeling an emotion and assenting to it
in Stoic theory of the emotions.
53
In a very different discipline, Synesios, On Dreams, 1819 noted what a hard task it
was to describe dreams, with their strange juxtapositions, to another person. He therefore
recommended it as an exercise demanding the highest skill in rhetoric.
54
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).
52
Phantasia
123
the signs constituted by the ekphrasis, is involved in this process, this

type of response is very different from the careful, intellectual decoding
demanded by, for example, descriptions of allegorical images.55
Enargeia and Argument
The philosophical discussions of phantasia and the vital role it plays
in cognition and the storage of knowledge point to a further aspect of
rhetorical visualization. Kathy Eden has pointed out that the imagination
is a faculty which shares certain properties with both perception and
thinking with the result that the image represents the conjunction of
sensation and intellection.56 The type of knowledge appealed to by
imagery is not therefore wholly intellectual (a store of statements of
what usually happens against which a particular image can be judged).
But neither are the images themselves devoid of propositional content.
Ciceros portrait of Verres implies a series of statements about the
character and actions of the accused, and these statements in turn form
part of an implicit argument about Verres, based on common assumptions
about character and probability: a man who acts in this manner is morally
deficient. Verres acted in this manner (according to the image seared
into the listeners mind by Ciceros enargeia), therefore Verres is morally
deficient and, furthermore, likely to be guilty.
There is therefore an affinity between the image that is like truth and
the arguments based on probability that the orator may use elsewhere in
his speech. A particularly interesting example of the way in which vivid
illustration can complement argumentation is to be found in Lysias 1, On
the Murder of Eratosthenes, analyzed by Anne-Marie Chanet in a brief but
highly illuminating article. Here, the explicit arguments from probability
put forward by the speaker, Euphiletos, in support of his claim that he
killed his wifes lover on the spur of the moment without premeditation
are backed up by the vivid and probable narration that precedes them.
In his compelling evocation of the events that preceded his discovery
of the adultery, Euphiletos emerges as a slightly simple and naive, but
fundamentally honest, man who has often in the past been the dupe of
his cunning wife. Here plausible, detailed narration and argumentation
complement each other. What is more, Euphiletos self-presentation itself
55
Cf. Roger P. Hinks, Myth and Allegory in Ancient Art (London, 1939), p. 12. Some
ancient allegories do make use of enargeia in the presentation of an image. But allegory is
not a necessary characteristic of ekphrasis and this overview of the workings of enargeia that
I have sketched here suggests that allegorical decoding demands a very different type of
reception than that assumed for ekphrasis and enargeia by our rhetorical sources.
56
Eden, Poetic and Legal Fiction, p. 92.
124
contains an implicit (and therefore all the more effective) argument: If I

acted in this way I must be a simple, honest man; I cannot therefore be
guilty of organizing a plot to kill Eratosthenes.57 It is tempting to assume
that it is just this sort of strategy that Dionysios of Halikarnassos had in
mind when he noted the power of Lysias narrations to help induce assent
without us being aware of it.58
Verisimilitude and Cultural Competence
These mental representations, furthermore, were far from neutral
reflections of reality. Among other things they would have been attached
to a web of associations for the audience. This is true of physical images
such as photographs or paintings, which have a connotative function
beyond their representational function, as Barthes showed in his analysis
of an apparently simple image used to advertise food in the early 1960s.59
It is still more true in the case of immaterial mental images, which are so
closely associated with words and ideas. Some of these associations appear
natural or universal, such as the pity or indignation that are assumed in
ancient rhetorical sources as standard responses to the description of a
sacked city.60 Again, Philippe Hamons analysis of description provides
a close parallel that differs in one important respect from the ancient
system. For, although Hamon emphasizes the importance of the readers
competence and cultural knowledge to the reception of description, this
knowledge is largely derived from texts and encoded in language.61 The
contrast with the vital role of the visual in ancient theories of knowledge,
memory and verbal representation is important in that it underlines once
more the different orientation between the modern theoretician and the
ancient rhetorician.
In practice, however, modern describers may well make as much use
of knowledge that is stored in visual form (whether in personal mental
images or in the imagery of popular culture) as Quintilians readers. One
modern example of a false story that initially proved convincing is the case
of Susan Smith, the South Carolina woman whose false account of how her
two children were abducted in a carjacking sparked a huge manhunt until
57
Anne-Marie Chanet, Lysias, Discours I (Sur le meurtre dEratosthne), Lalies, 8 (1990):
100104.
58
Dionysios of Halikarnassos, Lysias 18: v v
vov.
59
Roland Barthes, Rhtorique de limage, Communications, 4 (1964): 4051.
60
Charity appeals for aid after earthquakes, for example, still rely upon such responses
to photographic images of destruction and misery.
61
Hamon, Du descriptif, pp. 4851.
Phantasia
125
she confessed to their murder. Her description of the alleged attacker, a

young black man, was convincing precisely because it corresponded in its
details to her audiences knowledge (residents claimed that she modelled
her description on a known individual) and because it appealed to deeply
rooted stereotypes.62 Her truth-like story was remarkably effective in
inducing belief and sympathy in her audience, until the evidence finally
told against it. She seems to have known instinctively what Quintilian tells
his readers: that an audience will accept most easily stories and images
that fit their preconceptions.
The example of Susan Smiths convincing lie also shows what sort of
truth is resembled in effective enargeia. She needed to produce a picture
of an attacker that not only corresponded in its details with familiar
individuals or types, but one which sparked a range of useful associations
for its audience, in this case the association of young black males with
violent crime. The production of enargeia involved a competence which
was more than simply lexical; rather it was a cultural competence, a
familiarity with the key values of a culture and the images attached to
them. At the time, one journalist, in a perceptive analysis, noted that Susan
Smith didnt have to use much imagination. She just had to reach for the
available nightmares. If her story convinced her audience at first, it was
precisely because she appealed to stereotypes shared by the dominant
culture.63 The audiences own cultural competence was, and still is, a
crucial factor in the reception of enargeia and means that we, as modern
readers with our own array of potent images, will not always find ancient
examples as vivid and compelling as the original audience might have
done, possessing as we do a different visual vocabulary with
different
associations.
Failed Ekphrasis and Cultural Dissonance
By contrast, the failed ekphrasis to which Libanios refers in his
Autobiography (Oratio, 1.41) is an example from antiquity of what can
occur when speaker and audience do not share the same values and
assumptions. Libanios recounts an incident when a rival of his, a certain
Bemarchios, gave a repeat performance of a speech he had composed some
time previously for the emperor Constantius for which he had been richly
rewarded. Despite the fact that Bemarchios, like Libanios, was pagan, the
speech celebrated a new church in Antioch. It contained, naturally enough
for this type of speech, an ekphrasis of the building which Libanios claims
62
See the contemporary news reports at www.teleplex.net/shj/Smith/ninedays/

ninedays.html. This case also inspired Richard Prices novel Freedomland, published in 1998.
63
The quotation is from Richard Lacayo writing in Time magazine, 14 November 1994
(available online at www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,981806,00.html).
126
not to have understood at all.

According to his account, the members
of the audience were left glancing at each other in utter confusion as
Bemarchios rambled on about pillars, trellised courts, and intercrossing
paths which came out heaven knows where.64 It is surely significant that
this incident occurred at a time of intense contestation of images and
values, as Christian visual and architectural forms replaced those of the
pagan past to which Libanios remained faithful. While Libanios may be
trying on the surface to question his rivals rhetorical skill, the failure of
this ekphrasis reveals what can happen when speaker and audience do not
share the same images and values. For the most part, however, authors of
rhetorical treatises could assume that an audience, whether in the Roman
courtroom or in the Greek theatres in which the sophists performed their
declamations, or the elite beneficiaries of epideictic discourses, would
share a certain, predictable repertoire. In fact, one of the most important
functions of rhetorical education itself was to ensure that this was so.
Ekphrasis and Common Place
Quintilians discussion of enargeia also helps to shed light on a curious
feature of his contemporary Theons discussion of ekphrasis. Quintilian
made clear that enargeia worked most effectively if the details of the
account conformed to the commonly accepted views of the audience.
In
this respect, r
h
etorical enargeia has much in common with koinos topos
(common place) which occupies the same gap between truth and fiction
as does enargeia in Quintilians account: the statements may not be true
in every detail, but they represent a set of values and associations that
would conform to dominant ideology and would thus be familiar to the
audience.
One way in which ekphrasis and koinos topos were connected was, as
was mentioned above (Chapter 2), through the use of vivid evocations
variously referred to as ekphraseis, hupotupseis or diatupseis within the
koinos topos. But this relation of part to whole was not the only connection
between the two. Theon refers to the similarities between ekphrasis and
koinos topos in a puzzling passage of his chapter on ekphrasis, puzzling that
is, until one takes into account the similarities in approach outlined above.
He states: this exercise has a certain affinity with the previous one [koinos
topos]; they are alike in that they are both concerned with subjects which
64
Libanios, Autobiography, ed. and trans. A.F. Norman (Oxford, 1965), 41: vo
o ov v o v vov o o o
o
Phantasia
127
are not defined but are common and general.65 As Patillon suggests, this
points to the general nature of ekphrasis, providing a further hint as to
the nature of ekphrasis: that it is not a description of specific scenes in all
their individual particularities, but more a general characterization.66 And
ekphrasis did not necessarily refer to a specific reality, but could draw
on generally accepted ideas. A remark by the Byzantine commentator
Doxapatres shows that some authorities interpreted Aphthonios advice
to completely imitate (mimeisthai) the events described to mean that one
should not confine oneself to known facts, but should supplement them
by the addition of details that are acceptable or possible (endechomena),
and which therefore accord with audience expectations whether of reality
or of a particular genre.67
Enargeia and Mimesis
The interweaving of memory and mental images that lies behind enargeia
points to a further characteristic of the latter. For what enargeia, and thus
ekphrasis, seek to imitate is not so much an object, or scene, or person
in itself, but the effect of seeing that thing, as Elaine Scarry says of the
modern reader: imagining is an act of perceptual mimesis.68 By activating
the images already stored in the listeners mind, the speaker creates a
65
Theon, Progymnasmata, 68, 68: vv v v oo

ov. v ov vo v , ov o,
o.
66
See Patillons introduction to Theon, Progymnasmata, pp. xliixliv.
67
Doxapatres, Homiliai, p. 524, l. 30 525, l. 8: oo o v o vv, ov
v vov ov, vv v, vv v
v vv. oov ov ov, vov v vov ,
o vo o, o vv o
ovv o o, o , v, vovo, vvov
v v, v v vovo [Some people have interpreted this to mean that is
necessary in ekphraseis to relate not only the things which happened but also things which
did not happen but are accepted as happening, so that in describing a battle we do not just
say how the troops met and how one side overcame the other and so on, but that before the
engagement there were clouds and darkness fell and loud peals of thunder rang out and
things of this sort, for they say that even if these things did not happen it is still permissible
to say they happened because they are accepted as happening].
68
Elaine Scarry, Dreaming by the Book (New York, 1999), p. 6: We habitually say of
images in novels that they represent or are mimetic of the real world. But the mimesis
is perhaps less in them than in our seeing of them. In imagining [Emily Bronts] Catherines
face, we perform a mimesis of actually seeing a face; in imagining the sweep of the wind
across the moors, we form a mimesis of actually hearing the wind. Imagining is an act of
perceptual mimesis.
128
feeling like that of direct perception, a simulacrum of perception itself.69

It is the act of seeing that is imitated, not the object itself, by the creation
of a phantasia that is like the result of direct perception (cf. Aristotle, On
the Soul, 432a 910). In communicating through words his own mental
image of a murder or a sacked city, Quintilian is not primarily attempting
to convey information about a specific reality, but rather to prompt his
audience to re-enact internally the act of seeing such a sight, and therefore
to achieve an approximation of what an actual witness might have felt.
The ancient theory of enargeia thus sidesteps the problem of how to
represent the visual through the non-visual medium of language because
of the connection that is assumed between words and mental images.
Words do not directly represent their subjects, but are attached to a mental
representation of that subject. Consequently, the theory of enargeia also
provides one way of avoiding the problems involved in representing an
external reality through the medium of language: it is not reality itself, but
the impact of the perception of reality that is represented. And, although
language is in itself a non-iconic medium, its production and reception
both activate images stored in the speaker or listeners mind. What is
translated into words is not an object, residing in the material world, but
a mental representation of that object, of the type that was thought in
antiquity to lie behind all speech.
Conclusions: Enargeia and Ekphrasis
Enargeia, the quality which makes an ekphrasis an ekphrasis, therefore
belongs to a conception of language as a quasi-physical force which
penetrates into the mind of the listener, stirring up the images that are
stored there. The
pronouncements
of the ancient theorists make full

sense only when considered against the background of contemporary
ideas about the soul and the importance of images to both thought and
language. In this context it becomes clear that, rather than attempting
the paradoxical task of representing the visual through the non-iconic
medium of language, enargeia acted upon the mind to recreate the effect
of perception, activating traces of perception which were stored there. So
the theory of enargeia which underlies the treatment of ekphrasis in the
69
Watson, Phantasia in Classical Thought, p. 25 notes that phantasia is like perception.
Schofield, Aristotle on the imagination, p. 106 notes that Aristotles use of the term phantasia
encompasses experiences so diverse as dreams and the interpreting of indistinct or puzzling
sense data, which may be held to resemble the paradigm of successful sense perception in one
way or another, yet patently lack one or more of its central features, and so give rise to the
sceptical, cautious or non-committal phainetai (my italics). See also Ruth Webb, Mmoire et
imagination: les limites de lenargeia dans la thorie rhtorique grecque, in Carlos Lvy and
Laurent Pernot (eds), Dire levidence: philosophie et rhtorique antiques (Paris, 1997).
Phantasia
129
Progymnasmata bypasses the dilemmas posed by realistic description, by

insisting on the mind and its images as the point of mediation between
material reality and language.
This enargeia had its place in all kinds of writing, and most probably
in everyday speech
, an area upon which our rhetorical sources rarely
touch. But in rhetoric it had the special functions of making the listeners
into witnesses of the speakers story, of engaging them emotionally in his
account and effecting a change in their mental disposition. To be effective,
such appeals to the visual and to the emotions had to correspond to what
an audience was prepared to accept as probable, or like truth, and to be
backed up by corresponding arguments. When these conditions are met,
the effect of enargeia is described by ps.-Longinos as contributing to the
enslavement of the listener one more reminder of the conception of
language as force that underlies the theory.
All this helps to explain why an exercise like ekphrasis was included by
some, if not all, teachers in a set of exercises designed to prepare students
for the study of rhetoric, and why ekphrasis was an integral part of the
training they received in judicial and deliberative oratory (through the
practice of declamation) and in epideictic oratory. The
discussions of both
ekphrasis and enargeia reveal a conception of language as a dynamic force
that effects a change in the listener or readers mental state and this is a
phenomenon that is fundamentally rhetorical, that is if one understands
the goal of rhetoric as to bring about such a mental change.70 To emphasize
the rhetorical nature of ekphrasis is also to draw attention to the vestigial
orality of the phenomenon, the way in which the discussions of both
ekphrasis and enargeia assume a live interaction between speaker and
audience, with language passing like an electrical charge between them.
This does not mean, in the ancient context, that ekphrasis and enargeia
are not equally at home in other types of discourse. As was emphasized
in Chapter 1, ancient readers saw enargeia as a positive quality in history
writing and poetry, as well as rhetoric. These genres had much that was
rhetorical about them in the broadest sense that they were often intended
for live performance and made use of many of the same resources as
rhetoric.71 Plutarchs description of Thucydides writing as transporting
the reader/listener to the events of the Peloponnesian War is one example
(see Chapter 1 above) and the many comments on the sense of presence
70
910.
See Cham Perelman, LEmpire rhtorique: rhtorique et argumentation (Paris, 1977), pp.
71
See, for example, Ruth Webb, Rhetoric and poetry, in Stanley Porter (ed.), Handbook
of Classical Rhetoric in the Hellenistic Period (330 B.C.A.D. 400) (Leiden, 1997); William H.
Race, Rhetoric and lyric poetry, in Ian Worthington (ed.), A Companion to Greek Rhetoric
(Oxford, 2007), pp. 50925.
130
created by Homers poems are another. Only a very narrow definition

of rhetoric as pure argumentation (which never existed in practice in
antiquity) would distinguish it entirely from poetry. Instead, any speaker
always needed to depict character, situations, events in such a way that
they seemed present to their audiences, who would be drawn to assent.
Conversely, ancient poetry was as much directed towards the audience
and their response as was oratory.
So, although I am focusing here and in the following chapter on
ekphrasis and enargeia as strictly rhetorical techniques, exploring their
use and definition in the rhetorical handbooks that are our best source of
information on the reception of texts of all types, the observations about
the relationship between text and audience may well also apply to other
types of text, a question that I do not intend to address here. It is equally
the case that the examples of rhetorical composition that are analysed in
the next chapters are not strictly rhetorical, if one understands the term in
the strictest sense of a live speech whose aim is to persuade an audience
of something and to provoke them to make a decision with direct impact
on the real world. The declamations I will be discussing are, of course,
simulacra of such speeches, and all the speeches we are now able to
analyse had a textual afterlife after their original performance, meaning
that, amongst other things, we can never be sure to what extent the written
version reflects that performance. More importantly, the chemistry of the
interaction between the words, the occasion and the audience would have
been different on subsequent readings (even on subsequent performances
by the author as suggested by Libanios anecdote about the unfortunate
Bemarchios). The next chapter will therefore read the sources as relatively
unproblematic evidence for rhetorical technique while Chapter 7 will
explore some of the paradoxes, particularly the depiction of time and
space in the speeches in relation to their various audiences.
6. Ekphrasis and the Art of Persuasion
Quintilians discussions of enargeia and phantasia explain the functions

of vivid language in a rhetorical context as well as providing insights
into the psychological processes involved in both the production and
reception of such language. The rhetorical functions of enargeia to make
the audience feel involved in the events in question point to the reasons
why the art of placing before the eyes was considered a useful part of
an orators preliminary training. Quintilian is a valuable source because
he is infinitely more forthcoming than the Greek sources. Of these, the
Progymnasmata are somewhat laconic, as we have seen, while the more
advanced treatises tend to be highly technical and do not provide the type
of explanation or personal insight we find in Quintilian. As we have seen,
there are significant parallels between Quintilians treatment of enargeia
and the discussions of ekphrasis in the Progymnasmata, and the same is
true of the treatment of ekphrasis and its synonyms in the treatises that
deal with the more advanced stages of the curriculum. In this chapter I will
explore the uses of ekphrasis as a rhetorical technique as it appears in the
more advanced Greek treatises on rhetoric that represent the next stage in
rhetorical training after the introductory exercises of the Progymnasmata.
On declamation, the art of composing fictitious judicial and deliberative
speeches, the most useful sources for our purposes are Sopatros the
Rhetors treatise On the Division of Questions and the commentaries on
Hermogenes work On Issues (Peri Stasen). Both of these contain detailed
recommendations on how to construct a speech and tell us how, where,
when and why ekphrasis should be used. In the domain of epideictic, the
second treatise attributed to Menander Rhetor contains several examples
of the use of ekphrasis and its synonyms. All of these sources provide
an insight into the rich possibilities of ekphrasis in full-scale speeches.
These functions were hinted at by Nikolaos in his Progymnasmata when
he mentioned the use of ekphrasis in deliberative speeches to bolster the
speakers argument for or against a course of action and its contribution to
amplification (auxsis) and the arousal of indignation (deinsis) in judicial
speeches, a way of increasing the impact of the subject described. In
epideictic, he claims, it could produce a sense of pleasure, hdon, in the
listeners. These uses of ekphrasis all correspond to Quintilians discussion
of enargeia, but an exploration of the Greek sources on declamation and
epideictic reveals a more complex set of practices. In this chapter I will
132
focus on the uses of ekphrasis to help achieve persuasion, the passages

in question illustrate ps.-Longinos remarks about the power of enargeia
when it is combined with arguments.
Declamation
Studied in depth, declamation, the art of constructing fictional speeches
based on fictional or vaguely historical cases, taught a wide range of skills,
as is clear from the Greek handbooks on the art. Through the use of stasis
(or issue) theory it taught analytical skills, as the student was required
to decide exactly what was at issue in a particular case. This system for
analysing questions was developed by Hermagoras of Temnos in the
second century BCE and was further developed by Hermogenes in his
work On Issues (Peri stasen), which became the standard text in later
antiquity and Byzantium. Stasis-theory provided a system for classifying
the type of issue involved in a particular case. As Hermogenes explains,
the first question to ask is whether the act is clear or unclear, as in the
example of a man found burying a murder victim, for though it is clear
that a murder has taken place, it is unclear who committed the crime.
In this case the issue is one of conjecture (stochasmos). If, however, the
facts are not in dispute the student has further decisions to make: the
issue may be one of definition (horos) (is a man who has stolen private
property from a temple guilty of robbery or the far more serious offence
of temple robbery?) or quality (poiots), in which the justice, legality or
advantageousness of the act is at question. Hermogenes then sets out a
choice of strategies for making the case and establishes a set of headings
under which the argument could be developed.
Producing a full-length declamation also required a thorough training
in argumentation and in exposition, subjects that are treated by the
ps.-Hermogenean treatise On Invention and in Hermogenes On Types
of Style. It was thus a multifaceted training that combined analysis and
argumentation with skills that we would consider to be literary such as
the mastery of style, characterization, narration and, of course, the vivid

See Malcolm Heath, Hermogenes on Issues: Strategies of Argument in Later Greek Rhetoric
(Oxford, 1995); George A. Kennedy, Greek Rhetoric under Christian Emperors (Princeton, 1983),
pp. 7386; Donald Russell, Greek Declamation (Cambridge, 1983), Chapter 3. A reference to
staseis has been noted in Lysias 12.34 which would put the origins of the system as early as
the late fifth century. See Michael J. Edwards and Stephen Usher, Greek Orators I: Antiphon
and Lysias (Warminster, 1985), ad loc.
Hermogenes, On Issues, 36, 10ff.

Hermogenes, On Issues, 37. Both Kennedy, Greek Rhetoric under Christian Emperors, p.
83 and Bernard Schouler, Personnes, faits et tats de la cause dans le systme dHermogns,
Lalies, 8 (1990): 11127 set out Hermogenes scheme in the form of flow charts.
Ekphrasis and the Art of Persuasion
133
use of language. The rigour of this training and the energy expended
on refining it are both evident from Hermogenes handbook and the
commentaries by Syrianos (fifth century) and others, and from Sopatros
manual Diaireseis ztmatn (On the Division of Questions) (fourth century).
These Greek texts repay closer examination as they reveal the mechanics
of declamation, and sometimes the role of ekphrasis in persuasion, in a
way which the Elder Senecas more familiar catalogue of highlights from
declamations does not. Seneca, by concentrating on fragments, omits
the analytical and argumentative backbone of the art, simply assuming
knowledge of it among his readers.
As well as developing into a performance art in its own right,
as Philostratos Lives of the Sophists shows, declamation remained a
preparation for judicial oratory and for speaking in the city councils.
As noted above (Chapter 1), the professional declaimers described
by Philostratos are often said to have spoken in court cases, and other
recipients of this training did go on to speak in court. While declamation
clearly cannot have been a mirror to practical judicial oratory, the
analytical processes and techniques of presentation which it taught must
have been put to use to varying degrees.
Epideictic Oratory
The third-century handbooks attributed to Menander Rhetor and
Dionysios of Halikarnassos show the range of epideictic speeches in

A composite commentary by Syrianos, Sopatros and Markellinos is published in
volume 4 of Walz, Rhetores graeci. Syrianos comments have been published separately by
H. Rabe (Leipzig, 189293). Sopatros the Rhetors On the Division of Questions is published in
volume 8 of Walzs Rhetores graeci. On the text, see Doreen Innes and Michael Winterbottom,
Sopatros the Rhetor: Studies in the Text of the Diairesis Ztmatn (London, 1988).

Michael Winterbottom, Schoolroom and courtroom, in Brian Vickers (ed.), Rhetoric
Revalued (Binghampton, 1982). See also the comments of Robert Kaster, Controlling reason:
declamation in rhetorical education at Rome, in Yun Lee Too (ed.), Education in Greek and
Roman Antiquity (Leiden, 2001), p. 321 on what we miss when we read Seneca.

Malcolm Heath, Menander: A Rhetor in Context (Oxford, 2004) stresses the continuing
practical relevance of this rhetorical training. On examples of sophists speaking in court,
see Laurent Pernot, La Rhtorique de lloge dans le monde grco-romain (Paris, 1993), p. 74;
John A. Crook, Legal Advocacy in the Roman World (London, 1995) gives a thorough analysis
of the role of advocates in Roman legal practice and concludes that the rhetorical training
described by Quintilian would indeed have been of practical advantage. Dominic Berry and
Malcolm Heath, Oratory and declamation, in Stanley E. Porter (ed.), Handbook of Classical
Rhetoric in the Hellenistic Period 330 B.C.A.D. 400 (Leiden, 1997), pp. 393420 explore the
interface between theory and practice.
134
the later Empire. Under this heading came speeches celebrating the
events which punctuated civic life and the family life of the elite: visits
by governors, departures of friends and officials, appeals for aid to the
emperor after an earthquake, athletic victories, weddings, birthdays and
deaths. The various genres described by Menander Rhetor and others
reflect the variety of social events marked by such speeches.10 If anything
unifies the types of speech treated as epideictic, it is their engagement
with the visible and invisible fabric of their occasions.
Aristotles characterization of epideictic as the rhetoric of praise and
blame and the minor place which he assigns to it do not therefore do
justice to the role of the genre in the second century CE and later.11 The
term epideixis, display, places the spotlight on one aspect of this type of
rhetoric, which was not absent from declamation or even courtroom and
judicial oratory. Part of the speakers aim was to display his own skills,
something that Lucian certainly recognizes in the implicit comparison
between himself and the peacock.12 The other ancient term for this type
of rhetoric, pangurikos logos, reflects its embeddedness in occasion.13
Though panegyric strictly refers only to speeches composed for festivals
(pangureis), its meaning was extended in antiquity to cover all types of
celebratory speeches and draws attention to the fact that these speeches
were composed to mark particular occasions (not just festivals). They
were therefore grounded in a specific time and place, even if they were
then written down and circulated in a textual afterlife.14 These ideas of
display-piece and occasional speech reflect aspects of epideictic, but the
individual speeches were often more complex, and the epideictic genre as

On the date of the ps.-Dionysian handbook, see Menander Rhetor, On Epideictic, ed.
Donald A. Russell and Nigel G. Wilson (Oxford, 1981), p. 362.

Donald A. Russell, Rhetors at the wedding, PCPS, 205 (1979): 10417. On departures
as poignant moments in the life of the elite, see Libanios, Autobiography, passim.
10
On the interconnection between genre and social setting, see Richard Martin, The
Language of Heroes: Speech and Performance in the Iliad (Ithaca, 1989), pp. 434.
11
Pernot, La Rhtorique de lloge has undertaken an extensive re-evaluation of epideictic
rhetoric, particularly in the Second Sophistic, questioning the validity of Aristotles dismissive
comments for the appreciation of the role of epideictic in later periods of antiquity. In
particular, he has pointed out the role of argumentation and persuasion in these speeches.
12
Lucian, The Hall, 11. Cf. Dio Chrysostom, 12.23.
13
On the terminology, see Pernot, La Rhtorique de lloge, pp. 3640 and Donald A.
Russell, The panegyrists and their teachers, in Mary Whitby (ed.), The Propaganda of Power:
The Role of Panegyric in Late Antiquity (Leiden, 1998), pp. 2021.
14
On the recording and circulation of epideictic speeches, see Pernot, La Rhtorique
de lloge, pp. 46575. As ever, we can never know to what extent the texts we have reflect
the speech as performed, but I will take the surviving texts as representative of epideictic
practice.
135
whole was far more varied in its compass than either of these labels would
suggest.
The Rhetorical Treatises on Epideictic
The elementary exercise of enkmion taught the basic starting points for
such speeches, the encomiastic topoi of birth, education, achievement
which provided a basic structure for an epideictic speech (though these
topoi could also be used in speeches of other types which called for the
praise or blame of a person). The more advanced handbooks give detailed
recommendations for various types of speech, suggesting an array of
alternative strategies to suit the particular circumstances of each speech,
or to circumvent difficulties (such as an honorands less than illustrious
birth or inadequate education). It is somewhat misleading to refer to their
contents as rules. Their tone is often prescriptive (the use of the second
person future indicative to tell the reader what he will do in his speech
is frequent), but essentially they offer flexible models for their readers
to adapt to the particular circumstances in which they find themselves.15
These handbooks appear to be aimed at adult users who are called upon to
speak at various events, though the individual to whom the ps.-Dionysian
handbook is addressed is clearly a novice, about to give a speech at a
wedding.16 Students in the rhetorical schools seem to have composed
practice speeches, but an equally important source of instruction would
have been their personal experience of listening to speeches both in
the schools, where rhetors often composed speeches for the deaths and
departures of students, and outside, at special occasions, or during the
competitions in epideictic that were part of the programme in many local
festivals in the Greek world.17
These speeches of praise (or less usually blame) referred directly to their
time and place, praising the addressee(s), or the space in which they were
pronounced, so that, unlike in declamation, the speakers here and now
were shared by the audience. As the genre most closely bound up with
the present moment, epideictic was the genre in which Greek responses to
the present conditions of Roman rule, entirely absent from declamation,
15
Compare the remarks by Heath, Menander: A Rhetor in Ccontext, p. 17 on the function

of the teaching of declamation.
16
See Chapter 1 above on the reference to the Progymnasmata in this work.
17
At the festival at Oinoanda in Asia Minor, for example, a competition in encomiastic
speeches took place on the second day of contests. See Stephen Mitchell, Festivals, games
and civic life in Roman Asia Minor, JRS, 80 (1990): 18393. See also Pernot, La Rhtorique de
lloge, pp. 8492.
136
could be expressed.18 The audience of epideictic were involved in far more

complex ways than Aristotles characterization of them as judges of the
speakers skill would suggest (except, perhaps, in the competitions, about
which we know very little). They were gratified, consoled, persuaded,
moved by speakers who played on shared knowledge of past and present
and the interaction between the two. This array of knowledge, the
unspoken background to the speeches, is largely lost to us, but some hint
of it is given by Menanders comment that the Basilikos Logos, the speech in
praise of an emperor, will contain only the good things pertaining to the
emperor. The audience would presumably have been well aware of what
was being left out. Shared knowledge of the conventions also added to the
understanding of a speech, and the omission of a standard topos of praise
would not go unnoticed. Dio Chrysostom relies on the predictability of
audience expectations to turn the tables on his Alexandrian audience,
breaking off a conventional praise of the citys location to shock them out
of their complacency by pointing out that the city is being praised and not
its unworthy inhabitants.19 Similarly, the omission of a speech of praise
from an occasion where it would have been the norm could be used to
send a powerful message. A speaker arriving in a new city would deliver
speech of praise on arrival to win the goodwill of the inhabitants. But
Philostratos recounts how Polemo, the most self-confident of sophists,
deliberately failed to pronounce an enkmion of Athens on his first visit
there on the grounds that the Athenians opinion of themselves was high
enough as it was.20
One effect of the rise in importance of epideictic rhetoric in the Roman
period is the reorientation of the exercise of ekphrasis in Aphthonios
Progymnasmata towards its use in epideictic contexts. However, as was
noted in the discussion of the Progymnasmata, the rise of epideictic in late
antiquity and Byzantium was relative. In late antiquity it did not eclipse
declamation and, indeed, as Malcolm Heath has argued our view of
the relative importance of epideictic and declamation in later rhetorical
theory and practice has been influenced by the available sources which
often reflect later preoccupations.21 To this should be added the fact the
epideictic itself was not devoid of argumentation; the encomiasts claims
needed to be credible and needed to be proved. As I shall suggest below,
18
See Laurent Pernot, La
rhtorique
de lempire ou comment la rhtorique
grecque a
invent lempire romain, Rhetorica, 16 (1998): 13148.
19
Dio Chrysostom, Oration, 32.357. See Michael B. Trapp, Sense
of place in the
orations of Dio Chrysostom, in D. Innes et al. (eds), Ethics and Rhetoric: Classical Essays for
Donald Russell on His Seventy-fifth Birthday (Oxford, 1995).
20
Philostratos, Lives, 535.
21
Heath, Menander: A Rhetor in Context.
137
ekphrasis could be one of the means used by orators to offer proof of the
assertions they made in praise of their subjects.
The Progymnasmata and the More Advanced Treatises
As we saw in Chapter 1, both Sopatros and ps.-Dionysios seem to
assume that the student will have acquired from the elementary exercises
techniques and material to rework in his speech, rather than prefabricated
set pieces to be inserted at will. Poor or inexperienced orators may well
have resorted to prepared passages of all types, but there is no evidence
that this was the rule.22 The result, as far as ekphrasis is concerned, is that
within a speech or other composition the application of ekphrasis can be
difficult to spot, especially since it is neither distinguished by a special
type of subject matter, nor does it necessarily constitute a narrative
pause that stops the reader in his or her tracks or a digression that calls
for interpretation. One example is provided by the comparison between
Libanios model ekphrasis of the New Year festival of the Kalends and the
enkmion of the same festival (Or. 9), delivered in front of his students.23 The
ekphrasis is entirely made up of detailed accounts of the festival activities
and the experiences of the participants, from the feeling of impatience on
the day before, to the preparations, the exchanges of gifts, the revelry, role
reversal and public entertainments, ending with the sense of calm at the
end of the festival. Many of the same elements are evoked in the enkmion
but here they are interspersed with general reflections on the festival. The
ekphrasis does not stand in a simple relation of part to whole, nor is it
easy to isolate the use of ekphrasis within the enkmion. Students who
followed the lost versions of the Progymnasmata in which ekphrasis was
subsumed within other exercises (muthos, digsis, enkmion and koinos
topos) would have understood it from the very first as a flexible technique,
a means of expanding material in a vivid, engaging manner which could
be exploited in various ways and to various ends.24 Even the authors of the
surviving Progymnasmata are keen to stress that ekphrasis should grow
out of its context (see above, pp. 667) and that it is essentially a part
of a larger speech whose function depends on the rhetorical context, as
Nikolaos makes clear.
22
Quintilian, for example, advises against the insertion of ready-made common places
at Institutio oratoria, 2.4.289.
23
Jean Martin, in volume 2 of the Bud edition of Libanios speeches (Paris, 1988),
prints a French translation of the ekphrasis alongside Or. 9.
24
Discussing the endiaskeuos type of narration (which is related to ekphrasis), ps.Hermogenes, On Invention, 2.7, pp. 1245 notes that in actual forensic speeches it tends to be
used in combination with the simple and confirmatory types.
138
Ekphrasis: The Effect of the Progymnasmata on Practice

However, the elevation of ekphrasis to the status of a separate exercise,
as we see in the surviving Progymnasmata, may well have encouraged its
expansion and development. It is certainly difficult to imagine a student
required to compose an ekphrasis of a person or a sacked city as an
exercise being able to get away with a mere two lines of physical detail,
as in the Homeric and Demosthenic examples cited in the handbooks.
Libanios model exercises presumably represent the type of end result
that the student was supposed to aspire to and these are all fairly
substantial pieces. So the training provided by the surviving versions of
the Progymnasmata may well have encouraged a conception of ekphrasis
as an extended set piece within a larger composition. The growing use of
ekphrasis as an independent form of composition, noted by Nikolaos, may
be the end result of this tendency and may have further encouraged the
expansion of the exercise.25 More significantly perhaps, the treatments of
the exercise of ekphrasis in the surviving Progymnasmata tend to place all
the elements of narration on the same plane. This means that ekphraseis of
places, times and persons were given the same attention and importance
as the ekphrasis of the action. In the conception of narration from which
these elements or peristaseis derive, however, the person (prospon) and
the action (pragma) took pride of place while the others designated the
attendant circumstances of the action. This is clear in Theons chapter on
digsis in which he identifies the elements of narration as the person
and the action carried out by the person, and the place in which the act
took place, and the time at which the act took place, and the manner of the
act and sixth the reason for these.26 By treating all these elements equally,
the exercise of ekphrasis destabilized the hierarchy inherent in the system
of the peristaseis, giving equal weight to accounts of places and times that
is, to the types of ekphrasis that correspond most easily to the modern
conception of description and that evoke the same kinds of criticisms, as
we see in the cases of Lucian and ps.-Dionysios discussed below.
The training offered by the Progymnasmata may also have affected
the conception of ekphrasis and its relation to the elusive quality of
enargeia. Judging from some of the models that have survived (and which
therefore must have been admired sufficiently to be copied) it seems
that a methodical breaking down of the subject into parts was often
25

Theon, Progymnasmata, 78, ll. 1821: ov v
o oo, o v , vo v , o ,
ov ov .
26
139
considered sufficient.27 This is the method followed by the author of the

collection of statue ekphraseis passed down under the names of Nikolaos
and Libanios, in which the details of posture, gesture and clothing are
laboriously catalogued. A comparable example is Libanios own model
ekphrasis of a battle, which the speaker claims to have seen with his own
eyes. As prescribed by Aphthonios and others, the ekphrasis begins with
the opening of hostilities and preparations before launching into the battle
itself. Here the actions are broken down into a series of antitheses, marked
by the particles men de, creating a sense of proliferation and representing
in sequential form the synchronous actions of the fighting: one mans
hand was cut off, anothers eye was knocked out. the brave were struck
in the chest, the cowardly in the back one man died after killing many,
another after killing only a few.28 The description culminates in the final
antithesis of victors and defeated. Such a conception of ekphrasis as
a catalogue of parts is particularly evident in one Byzantine version of
the Progymnasmata. Here, the term enargs (vividly) is omitted from the
definition and replaced by the words in detail (kata lepton),29 emphasizing
the procedure instead of the effect.
Ekphrasis in Ps.-Dionysios, On Mistakes in Declamation
In this way, education may have had an effect on practice, tending to
replace the ideal of enargeia with a practice of enumeration, supplemented
by references to the sense of sight which signal to the reader this is an
ekphrasis. This unintended consequence of the training offered by the
Progymnasmata may help to explain the apparent rejection of ekphrasis
by the author of another ps.-Dionysian treatise, On Mistakes in Declamatio,
briefly discussed above (p. 27). The author, a particularly bad-tempered
teacher of declamation, complains among other things about the overuse
of ekphraseis of storms, plagues, famines, battles and deeds of valour.30
He singles out the use of so-called ekphraseis, which he defines as
painting (graphein) storms, plagues, famines, battles and deeds of valour
everywhere. This practice is inappropriate, he claims, because it does not
address the issue of the case. He goes on to attribute this fault (hamartma)
27
This phenomenon has been identified by Michael Roberts, The Jeweled Style: Poetry
and Poetics in Late Antiquity (Ithaca, 1989) as typical of Late Antique aesthetics. In rhetoric,
however, the practice of emphasizing details instead of the whole is less striking than in the
poetic examples studied by Roberts.
28
29
Anon., Peri tn oktn mern tou rhtorikou logou in Walz, Rhetores Graeci, 3, p. 595, l.
18.
30
Ps.-Dionysios of Halikarnassos, On Mistakes in Declamation, 17, p. 372, ll. 56.
140
to the desire to rival (zlos) history and poetry, which both in their own
way bring on the appearances (opseis) of whatever they need to for the
listeners. This historical and poetic practice of evoking appearances is
contrasted with the use of the same technique in judicial or mock-judicial
debates (agnes), which must be measured to fit the needs of the case (pros
tn chreian).31 It is important to note, however, that he does not deny the
appropriateness of vivid language to declamation and states clearly that
in the essential points of the debates (agnes) themselves there is sufficient
movement of the imagination (phantasia).32 The problem, as he sees it,
is that many declaimers do not realize this and so think that they need
to wheel on images (phantasias) with words from the outside.33 Ps.Dionysios is referring to the practice of debate, when in the moment, or
from concentration on the case itself, the speaker manages to appeal to
the imagination, without the use of the over-elaborate prepared passages
which he associates with the school exercise of ekphrasis. It is possible
that his remarks were directed at the consequences of the teaching of
ekphrasis in the schools and, more specifically, at the type of practices
encouraged by the inclusion of ekphrasis as an independent exercise. It is
certainly noticeable that the inappropriate subjects he singles out are, for
the most part, subjects mentioned by the Progymnasmata.
Ps.-Dionysios comments are thus comparable to Lucians observations
in On How to Write History. While at one point he criticizes an anonymous
historians inept use of ekphraseis of caves and landscapes, elsewhere
he nevertheless recommends enargeia, stating that the listener, like
Quintilians judge, should think he is seeing the events rather than
hearing about them (51). Further on he advises the writer to show selfcontrol (sphrone) in his descriptions (hermneiai) of landscapes (57). As
Franco Montanari has pointed out, Lucian thus attacks what he presents
as an abuse of ekphrasis, rather than the principle of using enargeia in
31
The Greek is extremely elliptical here. The use of the particles men and de suggests
that he is referring to opseis in history and poetry on the one hand (which are themselves
distinct) and in oratory on the other. Ps.-Hermogenes, On Invention, in his discussion of
diaskeu at 3.15, p. 168, ll. 13, notes that this type of discourse rivals poetry; he does not,
however, seem to consider that this disqualifies it from being used in oratory.
32
The term I have translated, following Russell, as essential points (ta epikaira) may
also mean the moment, implying the (improvised) practice of declamation.
33
Ps.-Dionysios of Halikarnassos, On Mistakes in Declamation, 17, p. 372, ll. 310: vo

vo , ov , oo v v oo
o . o v o v , v v
v o v. oo v
ov o v ov. voov
ov, o v
o v vv o oov ov, v v
v v.
141
historical narratives. Interestingly, it is descriptions of static entities, such

as landscapes or equipment, which attract his criticisms. So both Lucian
and ps.-Dionysios agree in arguing for descriptions which are integral to
their context, not wheeled onto the stage from the outside to quote ps.Dionysios theatrical metaphor.
However, the apparent contradiction between ps.-Dionysios claim
that ekphrasis properly belongs in history and Lucians seeming exclusion
of it from history is a further warning against placing too much emphasis
on isolated statements by individual critics. In particular, we need to be
cautious about accepting such polemical statements as representations of
literary historical fact. It is important to read ps.-Dionysios complaint in
the broader context of theory on declamation in the Imperial period for, as
we shall see, the frequent references to the use of ekphrasis within these
speeches show that it was more usually considered an integral part of
declamation. In this context ps.-Dionysios statement emerges as a reaction
to a widespread practice, comparable to his other complaints for example
the inclusion of overlong narrations (Chapter 14) and on the need to adapt
proofs to the case in hand (Chapter 6). What the author attributes to the
influence of history and poetry is not the practice of placing before the
eyes as such, but what he claims is the indiscriminate use made of it in
school declamations under the direction of other teachers. His association
of ekphrasis with poetry and history may well reflect the high proportion
of examples drawn from these two genres in the Progymnasmata, in
which case he reflects a perception that some teachers fail to explain the
transition between the elementary level of training and what is required
of a declaimer.
The Uses of Ekphrasis in Declamation
To return to the positive evidence for the use of ekphrasis, one of the
most informative Greek sources on the uses of ekphrasis in declamation
is Sopatros the Rhetors Diaireseis Ztmatn (On the Division of Questions),
which shows how ekphrasis could be used to achieve the rhetorical aim
of the speech and how selectively and carefully this was done. Sopatros
himself was probably active in the fourth century, but the instructions
he preserves must represent a tradition that was by then centuries old.
His general procedure is to give a brief account of the case and then to
identify the type of issue involved and to proceed to a detailed outline
of the speech. Rather than composing a complete model declamation, he
intersperses instructions with illustrative examples. The work often shows
how the student was supposed to put into practice the skills acquired
142
from his elementary rhetorical studies.34 Sopatros uses of ekphrasis can

be paralleled in earlier handbooks and model declamations by both
Greek and Latin authors, and his comments are often illuminated by
the commentaries on Hermogenes On Issues. Hermogenes himself only
refers to ekphrasis once, in his work on style, Peri Iden Logou. Its absence
from his work on issues is not surprising, given that here he focuses on
the argumentative substructure of declamation with less emphasis on its
presentation, a gap that is filled by his commentators. Together, all these
works reveal a lesser-known facet of the use of ekphrasis in rhetoric and,
by showing how ekphrasis could function within the context of a larger
speech, help explain ps.-Longinos reference to the impact of rhetorical
enargeia in combination with a wider argument.
Types of Ekphrasis in Sopatros
The ekphraseis Sopatros mentions often coincide with the type of subjects
prescribed for ekphrasis in the Progymnasmata. As mock-judicial or
deliberative speeches, examining whether a certain person committed
a certain act, or should pursue a certain course of action, declamation
themes naturally focused on persons and actions (pragmata), so it is not
surprising that most of the ekphraseis mentioned by Sopatros evoke
pragmata.35 Historical themes demanded ekphraseis of battles: a hero
(aristeus) describes battles, with the use of diaskeu, ekphrasis and thopoiia.36
A loosely historical speech in which Perikles is required to defend his
military record in front of the Athenians (after he has unnecessarily burnt
their crops) required ekphraseis of his achievements: the campaign and
the cities sacked on the way.37 In another of Sopatros historical themes,
Demosthenes describes the scene at Thebes after its sack by Alexander in
a passage which has parallels with Quintilians description of the sacked
city (8.3.679) and, above all, with the real Demosthenes evocation of the
destruction of Phokis (19.65). In a further speech based on a historical
incident, the student has to take on the persona of an Athenian general
who evokes the storm at sea which forced him to throw the bodies of the
dead overboard.38 An ekphrasis of objects is required in one case: a miser
makes use of diaskeu, and ekphrasis this time in combination with diatupsis,
34
Innes and Winterbottom, Sopatros the Rhetor, pp. 23.

See Schouler, Personnes, faits et tats de la cause.
36
Sopatros, On the Division of Questions, p. 353.
37
Sopatros, On the Division of Questions, p. 198. See Richard Kohl, De Scholasticarum
declamationum argumentis ex historia petitis (Paderborn, 1915), p. 28 on this and related
themes.
38
On the popularity of this theme, see Susan A. Stephens, The Arginusae theme in
Greek rhetorical Theory and practice, BASP, 20 (1983): 17180. Hermogenes, On Types of
35
143
to describe the treasure and other trappings of wealth which eluded

his grasp when he sold a plot of land, unaware that there was treasure
buried on it. This last example is a figured speech (eschmatismenos logos)
where the miser ostensibly seeks his own death through self-denunciation
(prosangelia) but hopes instead that his extreme action will convince the
judge that the treasure was rightfully his.39
Sopatros seems to have been aware that inappropriate use of ekphrasis
was a danger, and that students might unthinkingly seize on every
opportunity to develop a familiar subject into an ekphrasis. In one theme,
a variation on the myth of Menoikeus set in a generic classical past, a
plague-stricken city sends a general to consult an oracle. He is told to
sacrifice his son but on his return reveals only that he was told to make a
sacrifice. On learning the truth, the son commits suicide and the plague
abates. The general is then put on trial and the speech is his defence. As
plagues were one of the stock subjects for ekphrasis mentioned in the
Progymnasmata, the students first impulse on hearing the outline of this
case may well have been to look for an opportunity to work such a passage
into the speech. But Sopatros has other advice (8.233.1621): we should not
describe the plague, since reminding the audience of its severity would
harm the generals case, given his unwillingness to do what was required
to bring it to an end.40 Sopatros treatment of this last example shows that
the use of ekphrasis had to be carefully judged and that it was thought to
have an impact on an audience.
The Rhetorical Functions of Ekphrasis
In the cases where Sopatros readers are advised to use ekphrasis it is
often for emotive effect, particularly to elicit sympathy for the speaker.
Accordingly, the epilogue, as the place for emotive recapitulations, is a
favourite position. The misers description (termed diaskeu, ekphrasis and
diatupsis) of the money, wealth, attendants and t
h
e like which the lost
treasure could have bought him belongs in the epilogue.41 In the case of
the aristeus and the Olympic Games, the hero had previously put his name
Style, 2445 admired Aelius Aristeides storm ekphrasis in a lost speech on the Arginoussai
theme.
39
See Sopatros, On the Division of Questions, p. 308, ll. 1415. A similar case is treated
in Libanios, Declamation 31, translated in Donald A. Russell, Libanius: Imaginary Speeches
(London, 1996), pp. 13545.
40
Sopatros, On the Division of Questions, p. 233, ll. 1621. A similar case, attributed to
Quintilian, in which an uncharacteristically generous tyrant kills himself to rid his city of the
plague does include a brief description, justified by the different outcome. Quintilian, Minor
Declamations, 329.17 with Winterbottoms note ad loc.
41
Sopatros, On the Division of Questions, p. 309, ll. 79: oo v
v v , v, oo, ov v oov.
144
down to compete at the games but, on hearing that his city was at war,
returned home before the start of the games and distinguished himself
fighting on behalf of his city. The aristeus now wishes to compete in the
games. However, there is a law forbidding anyone who has put their name
down but does not compete from entering the games again. The declaimer
in this exercise has to argue the hero-athletes case. Here again the student
is advised to include in the epilogue an elaborate account (diaskeu) of his
acts of bravery and ekphraseis of the battle, the burial of the dead, and the
victory, as well as thopoiiai, all to convince the audience of his worthiness
to compete, despite the letter of the law.42
These uses of ekphrasis are therefore equivalent to the other methods
of arousing emotion at the end of a speech which often involved props
or the introduction of family members into the court to arouse pity.43 A
particularly dramatic example from an actual declamation is the end
of Lucians Tyrannicide, a declamation in which the speaker claims the
reward reserved for the killers of tyrants despite the fact that he only
provoked the tyrants suicide by killing his son. In the dramatic epilogue
Lucian imagines the speaker brandishing a sword, even addressing it as
his accomplice. Using both ekphrasis and thopoiia he then evokes the last
moments of the tyrants life, imagining his lamentations over his sons
body and the way in which he withdrew the speakers sword from the
fatal wound in order to kill himself with the same weapon, making its
owner his indirect assassin.44
Like Sopatros, the ancient commentators on Hermogenes On Issues
frequently associate the use of ekphrasis with the arousal of indignation
and other emotions (to deinon).45 However, this arousal of emotion is
used for very precise rhetorical ends as is clear from one example of the
use of ekphrasis in a deliberative type of speech discussed by Syrianos.
As Nikolaos says, deliberative orators often need to use ekphrasis to
persuade or dissuade. Syrianos agrees and associates the use of ekphrasis
with one in particular of the standard heads of deliberative rhetoric
(the telika kephalaia): advantage (to sumpheron). The precise position of
the ekphrasis, he explains,
will depend on the nature of the case. One

example is a deliberative speech in which
the orator seeks to persuade the
42
Ibid., p. 353, ll. 57: o oo oo, ov v ,

, v vovv, v v o oo.
43
See, for example, Aeschines, On the Embassy, 179 and the comments of Edith Hall,
Lawcourt dramas: the power of performance in Greek forensic oratory, BICS, 40 (1995):
3958.
44
Lucian, Tyrannicide, 1921. Translation and analysis in Heath, Hermogenes, On Issues,
pp. 178 and 1889.
45
Walz, Rhetores graeci, 4, p. 694.
145
people of Sicily to abandon their island and move elsewhere because of

the frequent earthquakes. If the speakers proposal is difficult to accept (as
in this case), the ekphrasis should be placed first, as its evocation of the
terrible consequences of the earthquakes will make the speakers other
arguments in favour (kataskeuai) easier to accept: if [the listeners] have
been reminded of the horrors [of earthquakes] by the use of ekphrasis they
will become more liable (euaggoteroi) to be persuaded.46 Ekphrasis here
is therefore used in close connection with argumentation, as suggested by
ps.-Longinos for rhetorical enargeia. Syrianos assessment of the impact
is milder the listener is easier to persuade, rather than enslaved but
ekphrasis still has an active power to influence, or to help to lead (ag)
the audience towards the acceptance of the speakers thesis.
Ekphrasis and Interpretation
If we look more closely at the types of speech in which ekphrasis is used,
a distinct pattern emerges suggesting that the arousal of emotion and
the creation of a sense of involvement in the audience through ekphrasis
are used in very precise ways. The majority of the cases in which the use
of ekphrasis is advised involve situations where the interpretation of a
deed is at issue. The Tyrannicide theme and the case of thwarted Olympic
athlete are both examples. The former is a well-known example, with many
variations, of a question of definition (horos): does the person indirectly
responsible for the tyrants death deserve to be considered a tyrannicide
and to receive the reward prescribed by law? In his commentary on a
version of the Tyrannicide theme in which an orator persuades the tyrant
to kill himself, Syrianos recommends the use of ekphrasis of the current
peace and prosperity in the city to remind the audience of the benefits
brought by the death of the tyrant and for which the speaker claims
ultimate responsibility.47 In Lucians Tyrannicide, the histrionic epilogue has
the very precise effect of making the audience into witnesses of a version
of the tyrants death in which the speakers responsibility is emphasized
as much as possible. The hero-athletes case is an example of the conflict
between letter and intent (rhton kai dianoia): by withdrawing from the
games the first time the speaker has technically disqualified himself so he
must argue that the law in question was not aimed at persons like himself.
The commentators on Hermogenes similarly recommend ekphrasis in
such cases.48 Its function is not only to arouse emotion but to place before
the eyes of the audience a particular version of events and thus to cast a
46
Syrianos, Commentaria, vol. 2, p. 180 (commenting Hermogenes, On Issues, 77):
ovv v ov o v vov.
47
Syrianos, Commentaria, vol. 2, p. 108.
48
811, ll. 2025 (Markellinos commenting Hermogenes, On Issues, 823).
146
particular light (or chrma, colour or gloss) on the supposed breach of

the law.49
Ekphrasis and the Transference of Blame
Usually, Sopatros simply instructs his readers to include an ekphrasis at
such and such a point, but there are two examples which he demonstrates
in more detail. Both are subjects with a long tradition in the Greek and
Latin rhetorical schools: the sack of the city of Thebes and the storm at
sea. The latter ekphrasis is worked into the defence of a general who has
been hauled before the courts for throwing the bodies of the war dead
overboard during a storm at sea. This imaginary case is based on the
story of the Athenian generals failure to pick up survivors after the battle
of Arginoussai in 406 BCE. At their trial, according to Xenophon, they
blamed their failure on the sudden storm which blew up, a type of strategy
which Sopatros calls metastasis, or transfer of blame to some unavoidable
circumstance.50 As in this historical precedent, Sopatros general had to
convince his audience that the circumstances were compelling and that,
placed in the same situation, they would have no option but to make the
same choice. The speaker must acknowledge the act, but place emphasis
on the circumstances. So Sopatros advises the student orator to include
a stirring ekphrasis of the event: Then describe the storm, not in a flat
manner (huptis), but in a manner suited to a debate (agnistiks).51
Like Quintilian in his account of the murder, Sopatros slips effortlessly
from precept to practice, from the persona of the teacher to that of the
character as he provides his example:
On one side the wave was towering over me, on the other the rest of the
sea was rivalling the mountains and drowning my voice with its noise,
resounding even more loudly than the heavens themselves, and the sea
was churning with all its expanse of waves. Seeing this, witnessing this,
I yielded to the stronger and complied in all things with the demands
of the moment.
49
See Syrianos, Commentaria, vol. 2, p. 135 for an example of ekphrasis as one means
(among others) of creating a chrma.
50
Russell, Greek Declamation, p. 58; Heath, Hermogenes, On Issues, pp. 21, 5051. In
Hermogenes classification this argument would strictly be sungnom, as there was no third
party who could be blamed. Ibid., p. 76.
51
Sopatros, On the Division of Questions, p. 224, ll. 1920: ov v v,
v. Innes and Winterbottom, Sopatros the Rhetor, p. 171 compare the
anonymous scholia to Hermogenes in Walz, Rhetores graeci, 7, p. 365, ll. 279 where Isocrates
is characterized as huptios in contrast to Demosthenes.
147
v o o ovo,
voov o vv o vo ,
o ovo , ov o o
, v, vo, ov o, v
v ov o o.52
The example, if it is meant to be a full model of the ekphrasis the student

should produce, is brief and to the point, if somewhat hyperbolic in its
comparisons.53 Ailios Aristeides storm ekphrasis, part of a lost speech
based on the historical
case
of the ten Athenian generals, was a particularly

accomplished example mentioned by Hermogenes.54 Aristeides presented
arguments against a proposal that the generals should not be buried after
their execution and in it he returned to the storm that prevented them
from picking up the Athenian casualties. The ekphrasis is not quoted in its
entirety but what little is preserved suggests that it was restrained: after
a short introduction emphasizing the role of the storm as a mitigating
factor, Aristeides begins: Almost as soon as the battle had begun, the sea
began to swell and a strong wind blowing from the Hellespont swooped
down on them.55 Hermogenes commends this passage particularly for its
concentration on evoking the grandeur of natural phenomena, which, he
says, lend solemnity (semnots) to a speech. In this case he notes that the
lack of discussion of the causes makes this example particularly suitable
for oratory (politikos).56 Sopatros general, like the speaker in Aristeides
defence, needs only to evoke the idea of the storm, a familiar enough event
from both life and literature, in a few details. Both add the crucial detail of
the effect of the event on those who were present, a detail which both adds
to the impact of the description and ties it in to the central argument of the
speech that the generals acted as they did under compulsion.
In both Sopatros example and Aristeides lost speech, the impact of the
phenomenon described upon a human perceiver was all important: the
audience were not just to see the event, but were supposed to feel as the
52
Sopatros, On the Division of Questions, p. 224, ll. 2026. See Innes and Winterbottom,
Sopatros the Rhetor, p. 171 on the language (though my translation differs slightly from theirs).
I have attempted to translate the text as printed by Walz but it may well be corrupt.
53
Compare Janet Fairweather, Seneca the Elder (Cambridge, 1981), p. 211 on the brevity
of some of Senecas explicationes.
54
Hermogenes, Peri Iden, I, p. 244, l. 17 p. 245, l. 3. The speech is also mentioned in
Philostratos,Lives of the Sophists, 584.
55
Ibid. Translation from Wooten, p. 20. It is difficult to believe that Hermogenes short
quotation represents the whole of the ekphrasis, though Aristeides in general does not tend
to be expansive.
56
On Hermogenes use of politikos to mean oratory, see Ian Rutherford, Canons of Style
in the Antonine Age: Idea-Theory in Its Literary Context (Oxford, 1998), p. 37.
148
speaker did. The focalization of description through a viewer, emphasized

by the repeated verbs of seeing in the ekphrasis (horn, themenos), was
therefore important to this type of rhetorical ekphrasis. Moreover, these
ekphraseis are a means of making the audience enter into the state of mind
of the viewer at the moment of viewing, transporting the listener into the
scene for a very precise purpose: to make them see the defendants actions
in a new light and to accept their argument that they had no alternative
but to do what they did.
Sopatros other developed example of ekphrasis works in a similar
way. Like the storm, the ekphrasis of the sack of Thebes is also used in
an example of metastasis, or transference of blame, again loosely based on
Athenian history. The speaker is none other than Demosthenes himself
who, in this historical fantasy, had been sent to present an honorific crown
to Alexander on behalf of the Athenians. Upon discovering the ruins of
Thebes still smouldering from the destruction visited upon them by
Alexanders troops he refused to accomplish his mission.57 On his return
to Athens, he is called to account and has to explain his failure. The aim of
the speech is again to convince the audience that the speaker took the best
possible course of action in the circumstances: Alexanders action was so
terrible that no representative of the city of Athens could have honoured
him. From the outset Sopatros states that the aim of the speech has to be
to arouse intense emotion (pathos) for Thebes. More precisely, pity for the
inhabitants of the city and the corresponding sense of indignation against
Alexander are essential to the argument, and an ekphrasis of the sacked
city was the standard way to achieve this effect, as Cicero and the Auctor
ad Herennium, as well as Quintilian, point out.58
Sopatros ekphrasis is woven into a narration as Demosthenes tells how
he approached the area full of expectation, turning over in his mind how
he would address Alexander, even running through a practice speech.59
This attention to the speakers state of mind is carried over into the next
section of the narrative as he describes the first signs of destruction: the
smoke rising from the city, the sounds of lamentation in the mountains,
and his meeting with survivors who tell him the news (p. 210, ll. 720).
And, as Quintilian advised, the statement of the event is not enough; the
catastrophe must be placed before the eyes so Sopatros continues: Then
describe (ekphrason) the misfortune to a reasonable extent (metris). He
then breaks into a demonstration with the following words:
57
56.
The sack of Thebes is narrated briefly in Arrian, Anabasis, 1.8 and Plutarch, Alexander,
58
Cicero, De inventione, 10.7; Rhetorica ad Herennium, 4.39.51; Quintilian, Institutio
oratoria, 8.3.679.
59
Sopatros, On the Division of Questions, p. 209, l. 10 p. 210, l. 6.
149
Alas, what misfortunes! What dramas have I seen Thebes suffer! They
surpass even the tragedy of Mount Kithairon itself.60 One man was
mourning his wife on Kithairon, another was weeping for his family,
yet another mourned a friend. A woman was fleeing from the fighting
and, desperate to rescue her loved ones, was turning back towards the
enemy, overwhelmed by the event ? But what words could suffice to
describe (ekphrasai) the misfortunes of the Thebans? The suffering (path)
on Kithairon is little compared to the disaster that has now happened
there, no one could bear the extremity of the present misfortunes.
ov v. oo v v. o v
, v vo o v vv; v
vo v voov. o vo v, o v ov
o. v o oo v, v oov
o oo v, v v vo v
ov o. v o o v
; vo vv v
o o v vo v ov v vv vv v.61
This ekphrasis is part of a strategy to amplify the suffering of the Thebans

as much as possible.62 As in the previous example, the speaker as witness
serves as an internal narrator whose reactions to the sights that meet
him guide his audiences response (just as in both Arrian and Plutarch
the enormity of the event is conveyed through the account of the Greeks
responses, rather than through details of the sack itself). In a speech like
this one, the narrators reactions to the sight are more than a narrative
device; they are an integral part of the case since in this hypothetical
situation the speaker is himself on trial, not Alexander, the perpetrator
of the crime. Arousing pity for the Thebans is a means of ensuring
sympathy for decision of Demosthenes not to honour Alexander. Again
the ekphrasis aims to induce the audience to share the speakers state of
mind by placing them imaginatively in his position.
The combination of circumstances in this particular case mean that the
ekphrasis serves a more complex function than Quintilians example of
the sacked city, where enargeia aroused pity for the victims. Here, it is
presented as a means to explain the viewers state of mind as much as
his actions. Another striking example comes from the Latin declamations
60
Mount Kithairon was the mythical setting for the exposure of the baby Oidipous and
the deaths of Aktaion and Pentheus, among other tragedies.
61
Sopatros, On the Division of Questions, p. 210, l. 20 p. 211, l.1.
62
Sopatros, On the Division of Questions, p. 210, l. 10: ov vv o
v v.
150
attributed to Quintilian. Here, a father who has to justify leaving behind

one son when he rescued the other from the pirates lair in which both
were being held captive paints a vivid picture of the scene (he is now
being sued by the abandoned son who later escaped):
No mortal fear, no ingenuity of human conception can fully or adequately
imagine what I saw there. Beneath a huge rock cliff lay a hole excavated
in the ground by the pirates cunning, with a night far deeper than
any kind of natural darkness. Circling it was the entire vastness of the
sea, and on all sides the violent surf dashed and beat violently against
the overhanging rocks, causing fear that the entire mass would topple
down. It bristled everywhere with torture racks.
non possunt humani metus humanarum cogitationum ingenia satis
habundeque concipere quae vidi. Iacet sub immensae rupis abrupto
tristis et ultra naturalem <modum> profundae caliginis nocte[m] mersus
piraticis artibus specus, quem tota circumfusi vastitas maris et undique
minantibus scopulis illis a tempestas terrore ruiturae molis everberat.
Horrent cuncta crucibus, 63
This dramatic evocation of a scene, worthy of a novel, might seem to be the

kind of description that might attract accusations of needless elaboration.
But it has a precise function within the economy of the speech: once again
to put the audience into the speakers position at a precise time and place
and to make them understand why he chose to save one son (who was ill)
rather than the other.
Ekphrasis may thus serve to depict the speakers state of mind at a
particular point in the past by making the audience share their perceptions.
In the cases analysed above, the
audience are encouraged to see in their

minds eye the scene that the speaker claims to have witnessed directly. A
striking variation on this occurs in Chorikios speech of the general who
dressed as a woman (Declamation 11). This speech is given by a victorious
general who has saved his city by dressing as a woman to fool the enemy
troops. It is the imaginary tradition in this imaginary polis to commemorate
victories in an honorific painting, recording for posterity the manner in
which the victory was won. Our generals rival (whose previous failure to
defeat the enemy by traditional military means had forced the speaker to
take his drastic action) has proposed this embarrassing reward and the
general now has to argue against it. In one passage the speaker elaborates on
63
Quintilian, Major Declamations, 5.16; translation from Lewis A. Sussman, The Major
Declamations Ascribed to Quintilian: A Translation (Frankfurt, 1987), p. 63.
151
the state of mind that made him cross this particularly sensitive boundary.64
He does so by giving a brief and allusive ekphrasis of the mental images
that motivated his decision:
For I saw that, as our troops strength was waning and that of the enemy
increasing, the situation required me to come up with a clever stratagem
and, picturing (anaplasas) in my mind the capture of the city, I thought
of all the terrible things that capture usually (eithe) brings with it, and,
most bitter of all, the outrages that enemies usually (sunth) commit
when they take a city, defiling bridal chambers, raping unmarried girls,
not sparing young boys.
ov ov vv o o, v o
vvo v o , v v ov v
o voov ov ,
vv ov, v v v v ovv v
v, vovv, vo ovv, v o
ovv.
Although only the detailing of the enemies likely actions at the very end of
the passage counts strictly as ekphrasis, the passage is of interest because
of the way it exploits the mechanics of ekphrasis and enargeia and plays on
the audiences familiarity with the traditional accounts of sacks of cities: it
is almost enough for the speaker to refer to what usually happens for the
audience to share the mental image to which he refers. And, once they have
understood his state of mind they will understand equally his decision to
adopt his unlikely disguise and to conceal his true nature (phusis) to fulfil
his duty of protecting the women and young people of the city.
In this
particular example, then, ekphrasis communicates the speakers state of
mind, the sight he feared and acted to avoid.
In all these examples, ekphrasis plays an important role alongside
argumentation in making the audience share the speakers perspective.
It also serves to alter their perception of certain events and their relation
to the present: the generals action was the only course open to him; the
failure of Demosthenes to crown Alexander was an honourable and
patriotic gesture rather than dereliction of duty; the father had no choice
but to save the weaker son, given the horror of his captivity, and the
general was driven by his sense of manly duty to protect the virtue of the
young to adopt his feminine disguise. As a means of creating such a gloss
(chrma) on events, ekphrasis had a full part to play in the argumentative
64
Chorikios, Declamation 11, 33 (p. 486, l. 19 p. 487, l. 2).
152
strategy of the speech and could be a vital means of ensuring that the
audience assented to the speakers thesis.
Demosthenes, Phokis and the Rhetoric of Signs
In this context, it is worth analysing in more detail the only passage from an
Attic orator to be cited in the treatments of ekphrasis in the Progymnasmata:
Demosthenes account of the scene of devastation he found at Phokis,
cited by Nikolaos as an example of how ekphrasis can be used in judicial
oratory to amplify a given topic:
The manner (tropos) in which the wretched Phokians have been destroyed
can be seen not just from the decrees [of the Amphictyonic Council] but
also from the deeds which have been done (ha pepraktai), a terrible and
pitiful spectacle, Athenians. For just now when we were travelling to
Delphi we could not help but see all of it: ruined houses, defensive walls
razed to the ground, the land bereft of young men, just women, a few
little children and some pitiful old men. No one could express in words
the terrible state of affairs there now.
v v ovv ov o o ov, o vov v
ov ov v v, v v ,
vv, v vo, vv. vv o
o, v v v v v, o v,
v, v ov v v , v ,
vo oo. o v v v
v vv vv.65
The passage illustrates two characteristics of the use of ekphrasis and

enargeia in oratory. Firstly, it is used here as a means of amplification:
the destruction of Phokis is not a matter for debate in this speech but a
given whose elaboration adds emotive effect to Demosthenes strategy
of attacking Philip and his allies. Secondly, and above all, it adds to
Demosthenes portrayal of his own arch-enemy, Aeschines, as complicit
in the betrayal of the Phocians.66 Demosthenes uses the ekphrasis, in
combination with argumentation and the use of inartistic proofs such as
documents, in order to create a particular version of events.
It is also interesting to consider how this ekphrasis functions in its
context. For, instead of narrating Philips actions, Demosthenes simply
65
Demosthenes, 19.645.
On the background, see Timothy T.B. Ryder, Demosthenes and Philip II, in Ian
Worthington (ed.), Demosthenes: Statesman and Orator (London, 2000), pp. 6370
66
153
sketches a few details which stand for the whole event and bring to mind
a vivid scene of devastation. The passage serves to arouse pity for the
widows and orphans whose suffering is mentioned, accompanied by a
sense of indignation against Philip. This in itself was not as straightforward
as it might seem because the Phocians stood accused of committing
sacrilege. But what is most noticeable is that Philip and his actions are not
described directly. Instead of evoking the sack itself (as Quintilian does
in his example), the violence and destruction are indicated by the visible
traces they have left behind. So this particular examples passage relies for
its ultimate effect on what is not directly stated: the actions which led to
the devastation witnessed and described by Demosthenes.
In cases like this, the audience has a further task: to imagine the events
that led to the state of the affairs that is directly evoked in the ekphrasis.
Quintilians first example of the achievement of enargeia through detail (ex
pluribus) at 8.3.66, discussed in Chapter 4, works in exactly this way. In his
evocation of a wild party, Cicero avoids direct description of the events
themselves As with the descriptions of the sacks of cities, the audience
have to infer the events from their aftermath, supplying the details from
their own imaginative resources and cultural knowledge. The workings
of this type of ekphrasis are thus far more complex intellectually and
temporally than the brief precepts of the Progymnasmata could ever
suggest. From a few well-chosen and unambiguous signs the audience is
expected to fill in the rest.67 In the case of Ciceros description of Verres,
the rest is the further details, while in the case of these descriptions of the
aftermath of an event, it is the past events which have left these traces that
are brought to mind and, ultimately, the perpetrator and his character.
The audience are thus required to bring to mind two slightly different
moments in time: the moment when the signs were seen by the witness,
the internal viewer, and the preceding events. It is the latter which are
really in question, and the audience makes these events present through
their own effort of interpretation.
The examples of the use of ekphrasis from Sopatros show how ekphrasis
could be put to use to aid the semblance of persuasion: description,
rather than being a useless form of dilation, could be used to involve the
audience, to make them feel sympathy for the participants in some event,
or to present the visible traces of some past action. In this last case, verbal
evocation takes the
place of physical evidence. In so doing, the speaker
is prompting the audience to imagine
, to supply images and judgements
from their cultural knowledge and their knowledge of probable outcomes.
67
Seneca, Controversiae, 3, pr. 7 commends the explicationes of Cassius Severus which

were neither lengthy nor inane (non lentas nec vacuas) but instead hinted at more than was
actually expressed in words (plus sensuum quam verborum habentes).
154
The effect of the words which prompt these imaginings can be compared
to that of a painting, the difference being that the images are supplied
from the audiences own memory.
Declamation and Fiction
All these examples show how ekphrasis within declamation could be
used to add to the persuasive effect of a speech, in appeals for sympathy
or, above all, in attempts to make the audience understand the state of
affairs in which the speaker found himself, or his state of mind. It is an
integral part of declamation and, in the precise cases in which its use is
recommended, has an important role to play in inducing the audience to
assent to the speakers argument. There are therefore strong reasons not
to take too literally ps.-Dionysios claims that ekphrasis has no place in
declamation (or that it represents a perversion).
Ps.-Dionysios goes on to make the further point that ekphrasis in
declamation is particularly problematic because the speakers are not
thinking of some actual referent, but invent (anaplattousi) for themselves
the appearances of plagues and famines and storms and wars, which have
not happened in the way they describe (or, indeed, at all). Here, ironically,
he contrasts declamation with history and poetry which both relate events
that have occurred (ta sumbebkota) thus placing the content of poetry on
a par with historical facts.68 It is a rhetorical move designed to underline
what is special about the case of declamation in which arguments were
based on fictional events. In the context of competitive declamation,
where speakers argued both sides of the case, disputes could arise about
the nature of the non-existent event. It is this that he defines as a useless
waste of words.
Some of the speeches analyzed above help to explain his concerns. It
would be possible, for example, for an opponent to produce a counterekphrasis of the storm in Sopatros speech claiming that it was by no
means serious enough to excuse the generals action. A debate that turned
on the magnitude of an imaginary storm would indeed be a waste of
words. In this particular case, however, the Arginoussai story, in which
the magnitude of the storm was not questioned, provided something
approaching a common set of facts that were not in dispute, a reminder
of the utility of historical themes in which the characteristics of the basic
events and characters were well known to all parties. An example from
an entirely fictional case shows the potential problems of ekphrasis if the
physical qualities of a fictional object are given too much importance in
the speech. With regard to a case mentioned by Hermogenes in which a
68
Ps.-Dionysios of Halikarnassos, On Mistakes in Declamation, 17, p. 372, ll. 1016.
155
hero is suspected of collaborating with the enemy after they set up a statue
in his honour, the composite commentary contains the following advice.69
In order to emphasize the importance of this alleged sign of the heros
treachery, the speaker must use amplification (auxsis) by elaborating
(diaskeuaz) the peristaseis, dwelling, for example, on the place (topos)
in which the statue was set up, on the significance of the act (pragma) of
setting it up and so on. The commentators then add that it is possible
to elaborate on the material (hul) of the statue, if it is made of gold, for
example again something that could be contradicted in a useless waste of
words by the declaimers opponent. To a great extent, then, ps.-Dionysios
unease about ekphrasis in declamation is caused by the fictional nature of
the themes themselves.
Declamation and the Uses of Ekphrasis
The technical sources on declamation show that ekphrasis and related
techniques had a distinct role to play in the art of persuasion. They could
aid persuasion by arousing the appropriate emotions in the listener but, far
more importantly, they could serve to colour the audiences perceptions
of the events in question and were thus particularly useful when the case
revolved around the interpretation of facts. The examples from declamation
help to clarify ps.-Longinos statement about the power of phantasia when
used in combination with arguments: alone, the generals ekphrasis of
the storm or Demosthenes ekphrasis of the sack of Thebes would merely
create an impression in the minds eye, but as part of a larger argument
they have the potential to create assent. The same examples also reveal the
cognitive complexity of ekphrasis and the nature of the demands made
on the audience. More surprisingly, these features of ekphrasis are also
visible in epideictic contexts and it is to these that we turn now.
Ekphrasis and Epideictic in Menander Rhetor
The range of types of ekphrasis mentioned in the treatise on epideictic
attributed to Menander Rhetor is closer to the modern understanding
of ekphrasis: monuments, places and even a statue figure prominently.
The city and its standard attributes, its public buildings, porticoes, its
geographical situation, are ever present in these treatises. The first of the
two treatises attributed to Menander offers little information on the use of
ekphrasis, although topics familiar from the Progymnasmata harbours,
bays and seasons are mentioned as typical subjects of epideictic speeches.
The first Menandrian treatise also reminds readers that a single part of a
city might be the subject of a speech, or that they might need to write a
69
Walz, Rhetores graeci, 4, p. 365, ll. 1124.
156
speech celebrating the building of a bath or a harbour, or the restoration

of an area of the city.70 Examples exist both in poetry and prose and are
familiar from traditional surveys of ekphrasis in its modern sense (Paul
the Silentiarys verse ekphrasis celebrating the repair of Hagia Sophia is
one example; Prokopios of Caesareas ekphrasis of the same church in
Book 1 of his Buildings is another). Aphthonios model ekphrasis of the
Alexandrian acropolis represents the type of training given for this type
of speech at the level of the Progymnasmata, as do the model ekphraseis of
a harbour and a temple of Tyche in the Libanian corpus (8.52931).
The second Menandrian treatise gives more direct information about
the role of ekphrasis on a wider range of occasions. In his detailed
instructions on how to compose each type of speech, from birthday
greetings to festival orations, the author often mentions the need to
describe. The term ekphrasis and the verb ekphraz appear several times,
as do synonyms such as the verb diagraph and the noun diatupsis. The
fluidity of the technical terminology is such that these terms are often used
interchangeably. The treatment of the arrival speech (Epibatrios logos)
addressed to a dignitary upon his arrival in the city illustrates some of
the uses of ekphrasis, and the fluidity of the vocabulary used. In a speech
of this type one should describe (ekphraz and chrographe) the arriving
dignitarys country of origin; one may also include an account (diatupsis)
of the misfortunes of the people under the previous governor (while
carefully avoiding attributing any blame to him).71 If the speech is to be
made by the person arriving (the type of display which Polemo refused to
give at Athens), it should include an ekphrasis of the country in which the
city in question is situated.72 He should describe (ekphraz) the beauty of
the plains, rivers, harbours and mountains. The epilogue should contain
more description (the verb used here is diagraph) and a fuller account
of the city itself including its architectural glories, the visible signs of
its status as a city stoas, temples and baths.73 Similarly, when inviting
a dignitary to visit ones city in an invitation speech (Kltikos logos) one
70
Menander Rhetor, On Epideictic: Treatise I (How to Praise Cities),365, ll. 18823:

' vo vov, ov o vov. oo vo
v vooov ovv. These recommendations
are echoed in the ps.-Dionysian treatise on epideictic in the instructions for composing a
panegyric (I.3): again one should praise temples, offerings, public and private buildings.
71
Menander Rhetor, On Epideictic: Treatise II, 379, ll. 58; 378, ll. 1721. Diatupsis does
appear to be used of the more emotive types of description, specifically designed to evoke
pity as here and in the Ambassadors Speech.
72
Menander Rhetor, Treatise II, 383, ll. 1315.
73
Ibid., 386, ll. 2129 (p. 110). Pausanias, 10.4.1 expresses surprise that a place without
any of the usual public buildings could call itself a city. For a critique of this material
definition of a citys worth, see Dio Chrysostom, Or. 32.37.
157
should include ekphraseis of the city to be honoured, as well as the sights

that the addressee would see on his journey there.74
Among the types of speech discussed in the second Menandrian
treatise, the Sminthiac Oration (for the festival of Apollo Smintheus,
apparently in Alexandria) contains the most detailed prescriptions for
ekphrasis of monuments.75 As well as describing the festival itself, one
should also describe the temple of the god and then his statue (ekphrasis
and ekphraz are used throughout). Menander provides detailed advice
on how to procede: one should compare the temple to an acropolis and
praise its gleaming appearance; and one should compare the statue to
that of Zeus at Olympia or that of Athena on the Athenian acropolis with
suitably hyperbolic remarks such as ascribing it to the hand of a Daidalos
or supposing that it must have fallen from the heavens.76 (One should
then go on the describe the surroundings.) The formulaic suggestions
give a good idea of how much autopsy and criticism might be involved in
producing an average speech of this type.
Another type of speech in which ekphrasis figures prominently belongs
more to the private domain of the elite household, though the civic world
is by no means absent. This is the wedding speech of which Menander
and ps.-Dionysios distinguish two types, marking different stages in the
ceremony: the public celebrations and the more intimate bedroom speech
pronounced outside the bridal chamber. In the public speech (which
Menander calls Epithalamios and other rhetoricians, such as ps.-Dionysios,
call Gamlios) one should describe (diagraph and ekphraz) the appearance
of both bride and groom.77 As noted in the previous chapter, Menander
warns his reader to be particularly careful with the ekphrasis of the bride
who would have been a carefully protected member of a wealthy family.
Unless the speaker is a close relative he should be careful not to appear
to know too much about her appearance; it is better to attribute any
knowledge to hearsay anything else might lead to malicious gossip.78
74
Menander Rhetor, Treatise II, 427, ll. 1013 (p. 188): v

ov ov | ov|, v v , v v v v
v o, , .
75
On the location of the speech envisaged by Menander, see Donald Russell and Nigel
Wilson, Menander Rhetor, p. 351.
76
77
Ibid., 404, ll. 8 and 12.
78
Again the verbs ekphraz and diagraph are used interchangeably:
v vvv oo v, oo v, o, oo oo,
v. vo vo o o v, v
v v <o, > o vov v v
. Menanders reservations are not shared by Himerios who, in the protheoria to his
Epithalamium to Severus, mentions the ekphrasis of the bride as an important feature of the
158
(Menander does not tell us whether this warning reflects bitter experience
or merely excessive caution.) As in the case of Nikolaos advice about
describing the act of adultery in the exercise of koinos topos, the contents of
the description of the bride are assumed to betray the impressions stamped
in the speakers mind. The mere possibility that the mental portrait of the
bride, the phantasia in the speakers mind, might derive from illicit sense
perception was enough to concern Menander.
As a special display, an ambitious (philotimoumenos) speaker could also
include mythological tableaux of divinities or personifications associated
with marriage like Gamos (marriage) or Eros.79 This type of ekphrasis
belonged, according to Menander, in the thesis section of the speech,
where arguments in favour of marriage were presented, so that ekphrasis
is once again used as an auxiliary to argumentation. Ps.-Dionysios advice
on wedding speeches likewise suggests a function for vivid language
which surpasses the decorative digression and which takes us back to
declamation. He advises a prophetic description (diatupsis) of the couples
future life with their children combined with reminders of their own
happy childhoods.80 Here verbal evocation of the future is presented as a
parallel to personal memories of the past. Vivid language serves to show
the listener a future eventuality (one which is unambiguously positive
within the value system reflected in the epithalamion). The equivalent
method for evoking past time is the appeal to remember so that memory
images correspond to those that are verbally evoked (and presumably
contribute to them). Such use of language to prompt the interaction of
memory and anticipation of the future is entirely appropriate to mark the
transitional nature of the wedding.
Places and persons are not the only types of subject for ekphrasis which
Menander discusses. Ekphraseis of battles and military actions had a role
in epideictic, as well as in the historico-fantasy world of declamation, as the
discussion of the Basilikos logos, or Imperial Oration, shows. As part of his
account of the actions (praxeis) accomplished by the emperor, the speaker
speech. Menander expresses similar reservations about describing the physical appearance
of a young pupil in the Propemptikos logos (398.1423).
79
Ibid., 404, l. 29 405, l. 4: o o oov v v v v
, o , ' o o v , vo v o,
v v v ov, v, ov vo, ov ov v
v v v. o o v o o v v
o o .
80
Ps.-Dionysios, Ars rhetorica, 2.6 (p. 264): ov oov ovvov,

oo v o v v voo, vo o v o voo ov,
ov v vv v
vv v o o v. v o
v
vvv, v o
v v ov.
v v v
v v vv.
159
should describe (diagraph) the physical appearance of the places in which

the emperor performed military feats, mentioning rivers and harbours
and mountains and plains.81 But he should also describe (ekphraz) the
military actions themselves: You will describe the ambushes and traps
laid for the enemy by the emperor, and by the enemy for him. You will
also describe the battles.82 Examples of this are to be found in the first
panegyric of Constantius by his cousin, the future emperor Julian, which
contains substantial ekphraseis of the battles won in the West and in the
East as well as the extraordinary strategy used by the Persians to take
the city of Nisibis by diverting a river to surround it.83 Their role in the
commemoration of military victories makes these ekphraseis equivalent
to the visual monuments trophies, inscriptions, reliefs and paintings
which made the same events visible to the citizens.
We therefore find the whole range of subjects for ekphrasis, and not just
persons and places, in Menander Rhetor and in epideictic speeches. Some
of the surviving monodies for earthquake-stricken cities, for example,
contain detailed narratives of the actual event. Aristeides Rhodian Oration
recounts, in order, the silence that preceded the quake (19), the tidal wave
that followed (20), the ensuing panic among the citizens (which borrows
motifs from the sack of the city) and the different ways in which the dead
met their end (2223).84 The ekphrasis of the event itself culminates in a
spectacular and gruesome sequence of paradoxes expressing a scene of
devastation in which every type of order, religious, social and civic has
been overthrown: Thrown together were dead bodies, altars, ceilings,
rubble, blood, utensils, roofs, foundations, slaves, masters, limbs torn
from bodies, images, sacrificial victims, tombs, feasts.85 Libanios monody
for the temple of Apollo at Daphne, after it was either struck by lightning
or set on fire by a Christian fanatic in 362, describes both his memory of
the appearance of the statue it had contained and how the priestess came
running into the city and the citizens gathered round helplessly as the
temple collapsed.86
81

Ibid., 373, ll. 2022: o v o v
ov v vvv o . v o .
83
Julian, Panegyric of Constantius, I, 1619; 2122; 25; 2930; cf. ibid., II, 1113.
84
For the arguments supporting Aristeides authorship, see Christopher P. Jones, The
Rhodian Oration ascribed to Aelius Aristides, CQ, 40 (1990): 51422.
85
Ailios Aristeides, Rhodian Oration, 25: vvvo v vo, o, ,
v, , , oo, , o, , v, v, , o,
v.
86
Libanios, Or. 60.12, in Opera, 4, pp. 31920.
82
160
Presence and Persuasion

The uses of ekphrasis and its synonyms in the monody in particular
demonstrate the emotional effect that such imagery could have on the
listener. In other c
o
ntexts, sensual pleasure, the hdon identified by
Nikolaos as the typical result of ekphrasis in epideictic, was no doubt one
of the effects of listening to a successful evocation of a building, a person
or the interweaving of descriptions of divinities, idealized portraits and
quotations from Sappho that Menander suggests for the wedding speech.87
But the examples discussed by Menander reveal a far more complex set
of responses than Nikolaos implies. Some types of speech discussed by
Menander did involve an element of persuasion, or at least demanded that
the speaker go through the motions of persuasion, and used ekphrasis to
achieve their end. Once we are aware of this use of ekphrasis in epideictic
to persuade, which echoes its uses in judicial speeches as reflected in
declamation, we may wish to look again at some other types of ekphrasis
in epideictic where the persuasive element is present, even if it is not made
so explicit.
The element of persuasion through the appeal to the listeners
imagination is particularly evident in Menander Rhetors treatment of
two types of speech: the speech of invitation (Kltikos logos) and in the
Ambassadors Speech (Presbeutikos logos). Both play on the theme of
the city description; with the second, we return to the theme of the city
destroyed, not by imaginary or long-dead invaders, but by the very real
threat of natural disaster which plagued the cities of the East. Both of
these speeches use ekphrasis and its impact on the audience to affect the
addressees mental disposition and thus to bring about (in theory at least)
a change in the real outcome of events.
Imagination, Memory and Persuasion in the Kltikos Logos
In Menanders discussion of the Invitation Speech (Kltikos logos)
ekphrasis is clearly thought to play a persuasive role in the speech. As
we have seen, Menander suggests that the speaker faced with the task of
inviting a Roman governor to visit his city should give an ekphrasis of the
lands he will see on his journey and of the city itself with its attractions
the rhetorical equivalent of the photographs of tropical beaches on
display in northern European cities in the winter months. Quintilians
comments about the need for vivid language to conform to expectations,
combined with Augustines account of how he imagined the unknown
city of Alexandria on the basis of his real knowledge, acquired through
87
Syrianos, Commentaria, vol. 1, p. 14, 2332 discussing Hermogenes, On Types of Style,
219 (glukuts) cites Sapphos poetry as an example of sensuous pleasure through ekphrasis.
161
the bodily eyes, of Carthage, suggest how the speaker might have had
to approach this task.88 For the audience who did not know the city, the
ekphrasis must have been general enough to allow the invitee to create
a mental picture on the basis of prior knowledge (just as each tropical
beach is sufficiently standardized to allow us to project our ready-made
fantasies onto it, while still representing a specific location).
Menander goes on to make an important distinction: the approach
will depend on the previous experience of the addressee. If the addressee
has actually visited the city before, he explains, there is no need to evoke
its advantages in a full-blown ekphrasis. Instead, it will be sufficient
simply to remind him of what he has already seen with his own eyes.89
Menanders practical advice relies on the assumption that the experience
of the city has left a mental image firmly lodged in the visitors memory
(just as Augustine was convinced that his long exposure to Carthage
had left that city engraved in his mind). The effect of ekphrasis on the
person who has never seen the city is therefore equivalent to the effect of
a memory image in the mind of the person who has seen it. In this case,
ekphrasis is described as having an emotive and persuasive function,
spurring the listener to wish to see the sight described with the eyes of
the body. Menander is quite specific about the emotion which this appeal
to memory should arouse: the speaker is advised to assimilate the former
visitors desire to revisit the city to the erotic longing (pothos) of a lover
(erasts) who is far from his beloved.90
Menanders discussion of the Kltikos logos shows how, within epideictic
rhetoric too, ekphrasis can perform a specific function and cannot be
reduced to gratuitous decoration or to the display of the orators talents.
Ekphrasis here is still thought of as working on the mind of the listener
and even as producing concrete results. Of course, a Roman dignitarys
decision whether or not to visit a certain city was governed by rather
more practical considerations. But it is significant that a form of rhetorical
persuasion played a part in the elaborate choreography of relations
between Greek cities and their Roman governors and that ekphrasis
contributed to this persuasion.
Ekphrasis and the Emperors Tears
Evidence for actual audience response to epideictic is rare (Libanios
anecdote about his rivals disastrous performance being one exception),
but Philostratos does record the dramatic effect of a letter written by
Aelios Aristeides on the emperor Marcus Aurelius. The letter was a
88
Augustine, De Trinitate, 8.6.6889. See Chapter 5, above.

90
Ibid., ll. 1215.
89
162
plea, addressed to Marcus Aurelius and Commodus, for help after the
earthquake which devastated the city of Smyrna in 177 or 178.91 Marcus
Aurelius in particular, says Philostratos, was so moved by the letter that
he shed tears on the page. Aid for the stricken city was immediately
forthcoming, and Aristeides (rather than the emperors) gained a reputation
as the founder of the city.92According to Philostratos, the words of the
master sophist were enough, even at a distance, to cause real cities to rise
again. The letter survives and corresponds to the type of speech which
Menander calls Presbeutikos Logos, or Ambassadors Speech.93 According
to Menander, the Ambassadors Speech should contain a diatupsis and
an elaborate account (diaskeu) of the destruction suffered by the city. He
advises the speaker to pay particular attention to the impact on monuments
such as baths and aqueducts that were most likely to interest the emperor
(and to attract Imperial funding for repairs).94 Aristeides handles this in
an interesting way which takes us back to Menanders advice on the
invitation speech. For he does not describe the former splendour of the
city (as he had done in his Seventeenth Oration on the city) but instead
asks his audience to remember their own experience of it.
Remember what you said when you looked upon it as you arrived,
remember what you said when you entered, how you were disposed,
what dispositions you made was there a view which did not make
you more cheerful? Which sight did you behold in silence and not praise
as befits you? These are things which even after your departure you did
not forget. The people were celebrating the Theoxenia, and you rested
as if in the most civilized of your possessions. What did your gaze touch
upon that did not make you happier? What, of all that you saw, did you
pass by in silence and not with the words of praise that befit you? All this
you remembered even after your departure. Now it all lies in the dust.
vv v o v v. vv
v v, , . o v ov ov,
v o o v v. o oo
o o ov; v vv o
o v ; v o v vov. vv
v v v.95
91
See Ailios Aristeides, The Complete Works, trans. Charles A. Behr (Leiden, 1981), vol.
2, p. 358, n. 1.
92
Philostratos, Lives of the Sophists, 582.
93
On epideictic in letter form, see Pernot, La Rhtorique de lloge, pp. 4357.
94

95
Ailios Aristeides, Letter to the Emperors (Or. 19), 2.
163
The memory image again can stand in for the image which, in other
circumstances, Aristeides would have had to convey in words. In the
lines which follow, Aristeides proceeds to enumerate some of the sights
following each immediately with the statement of its loss:
The harbor, like an eye, is closed, the beauties of the market place are
gone, the adornments of the streets have disappeared, the gymnasia
together with the men and boys have been destroyed, some of the
temples have fallen, others have sunk beneath the ground. The most
beautiful of cities to behold, renowned for its beauty among all men,
is the ugliest of spectacles: a hill of ruins and corpses. The west winds
blow through a waste land.
o , o
v v,
v vo v, o
o v , vo
o v
v,
o
v.
v o v o o vo
vo v ov v ov, ov v
vv, o v vo.96
It is the culmination of this passage which is supposed to have reduced

Marcus Aurelius to tears: the image of the wind whistling through the
ruins. Aristeides potent and compressed image is reminiscent of a line
by the fourth-century orator Deinarchos, who described the sacked city
of Thebes in the following terms: swallows fly around the city of the
wretched Thebans.97 It gains its effect from the preceding passages, which
moved from the invitation to recall the beauties and pleasures to the stark
juxtaposition of the memory of its monuments with their present state
of devastation. It seems that Aristeides was well aware of the potential
impact of his culminating image for he follows it immediately with his
appeal to the emperors for the help that he hopes will be motivated by
their sense of pity.
In certain cases, therefore, the uses of ekphrasis, combined with appeals
to the personal memory images of the audience, could have a persuasive
effect inducing a state of mind conducive to the action sought by the speaker.
In one final type of epideictic speech, ekphrasis contributes to persuasion
in a way that is closer to its function in some types of judicial speeches: by
providing a type of proof of the speakers claims about his subjects.
96
Ibid., 3.
Deinarchos, fr. F 3: ov v v v v.
Apsines, Art of Rhetoric 31, ed. and trans. Mervin R. Dilts and George A. Kennedy (Leiden,
1997), p. 220 cites Deinarchos line as a means of making present (paristmi) the desolation
of the city.
97
164
Ekphrasis, Proof and Persuasion in the Imperial Oration

The Imperial Oration (Basilikos logos), one of the most long-lived of the
genres discussed by Menander Rhetor, does not, at first sight, seem
to require any persuasion. It is, as Menander makes clear, a generally
agreed amplification of the good things pertaining to the emperor and
allows no ambivalent or disputed features.98 As such it might seem to be
the last place that we might expect to find any sort of argumentation or
attempt at persuasion. However, even here, the orator could not simply
state the achievements of the emperor but needed to offer some proof
of his claims. This is the function of the ekphraseis of battles and other
military actions whose inclusion Menander advises.99 The audience thus
become virtual witnesses of these deeds, through the orators evocation of
the events. These are to be treated once more as signs, in this case of the
emperors military prowess and wisdom, but this is not to be left to the
audience to interpret. Menander instructs his reader to link up a passage
on the emperors wisdom, saying that he was himself the planner, the
commander, the discoverer of the moment for battle, a marvellous
counsellor, champion, general, orator 100
Menanders discussion shows that epideictic speeches, rather than
being a catalogue of platitudes, had a persuasive function as well and
that ekphrasis, along with appeals to more tangible forms of proof such as
victory monuments and processions, played a role in this.101 This aspect
of epideictic oratory also helps to underline the relevance to epideictic
of the training in techniques of argumentation provided by the study of
declamation and suggests that the growth in importance of epideictic
in late antiquity did not necessarily mean a decline in declamation or in
skills of argumentation.
98
Menander Rhetor, Treatise II, 368, ll. 47 (Basilikos Logos): v ooovv
v ovv v , ov oov ovov
v voov ov v
99
Ibid., 373, ll. 1628.
100
Ibid., v v v ov, v
vo, v, v v o v, oo
, , , o. Julian, Panegyric of Constantius, I, 3436 explains
the qualities illustrated by the preceding account of Constantius campaigns.
101
See Pernot, La Rhtorique de lloge, pp. 659724 and Ruth Webb,
Praise and
persuasion: argumentation and audience response in epideictic oratory, in Rhetoric in
Byzantium, ed. Elizabeth Jeffreys (Aldershot, 2003), pp. 12735.
165
Conclusion: Ekphrasis as a Rhetorical Technique

I have largely limited this analysis of the use of ekphrasis as a persuasive
technique to the theoretical sources which are of particular interest in
that they reveal some of the functions of ekphrasis in the context of larger
speeches. In declamation it served frequently to present facts in a certain
light (chrma) and was one means of inducing the audience to assent to
the orators version of events. In particular, we have seen how it could be
used to make the audience share the experience and the emotions of the
speaker and thus to accept the wider argument that, in the circumstances,
his actions were reasonable. The examples analysed also help to explain
ps.-Longinos comments about the power of rhetorical phantasia. This
can enslave the listener on condition that it is used in combination with
proofs and arguments.
In epideictic oratory, the wide variety of functions served by ekphrasis
reflects the range of topics evoked from gods to battles, from persons
to cities and the infinite variety of different relationships between the
orator, his addressee and the subject matter of the ekphrasis. Whereas
judicial oratory needs above all to evoke moments from the past, epideictic
ranges over past, present and future, combining verbal evocation with
the personal memory images of the addressees, sometimes to achieve
an intense emotional impact. Far from being ready-made passages to be
transferred from one speech to the next as displays of the orators skills,
successful ekphraseis needed to be carefully adapted to their context, to
their subject and to their listeners.
The comments on ekphrasis to be found in the treatises on declamation
and epideictic show how it fitted into the wider rhetorical system and
what an elementary training in ekphrasis prepared the student for. They
also reveal how ekphrasis belongs to a particular way of understanding
and using language. The uses of ekphrasis as a means of persuasion that
we see in the handbooks on epideictic and declamation correspond to
Quintilians conception of the use of enargeia and to ps.-Longinos remarks
on the role of phantasia in rhetoric. But these are practical manuals, not
works of literary criticism. The only work that could, perhaps, deserve
this title is On the Sublime and even there the analyses of ancient and
contemporary texts are made with a view to producing new compositions
that will have the elusive quality of sublimity. There is therefore a great
deal that they leave aside. In particular, in their practical emphasis on
the ability of the word to create images, and on the ways in which those
images can be exploited to help create assent, they largely ignore the
paradoxes of enargeia outlined in Chapters 4 and 5. The next chapter will
therefore explore some of these paradoxes as they are found in rhetoric
and in other prose texts of the period.
7. The Poetics of Ekphrasis: Fiction, Illusion and

Meta-ekphrasis
Introduction
The rhetorical handbooks practical orientation makes them valuable
sources. However, this same practical focus also places limitations on
what their authors are willing to tell us. With the exception of the passing
allusion to the philosophical sense of phantasia in ps.-Longinos On the
Sublime (which is any case an exception that cannot easily be classified as
a rhetorical handbook), their authors are rarely interested in exploring
the philosophical implications of enargeia and phantasia. Nor, on the
whole, do they pay attention to the paradoxes inherent in enargeia that
emerge clearly when one compares the rhetorical usage of the term with
the earlier meaning of directly perceptible to the senses. As teachers, the
rhetoricians emphasize the practical over the speculative and, as vendors
of a particular method, they are interested first and foremost in stressing
the power that the word is able to wield through enargeia and ekphrasis.
This chapter therefore looks beyond the explicit discussions of
ekphrasis in the handbooks to consider just some of the questions raised
by the practice of ekphrasis. As it is not possible in the space available to
explore all the implications of ekphrasis, nor to do justice to the complex
questions raised, I have chosen to focus on two main areas. First, I will
discuss some of the questions raised by the rhetoricians own claims for
ekphrasis in both epideictic and declamation. In the case of epideictic, the
particular relationship of the speech to the time and place of its delivery
raises some important questions about the interaction of the orators visual
evocations with the audiences personal knowledge and memory and with
their perceptions of their surroundings. In particular, the requirements of
epideictic oratory often demanded that the speaker describe sights that
were literally before the audiences eyes as they listened to the speech.
The fictive nature of the events debated and described in declamation,
by contrast, raises problems of a different nature, in that, as the author of
On Mistakes in Declamation points out, the events described are imaginary.
Moreover, the fact that the audience of a declamation, like the readers
of a novel, were fully aware of the fictive nature of the events that they

Laurent Pernot, La Rhtorique de lloge dans le monde grco-romain (Paris, 1993), pp.
4413.
168
were being asked to imagine adds an extra layer of complexity to their

response.
Second, I will discuss some examples of uses of ekphrasis in texts that,
while not primarily rhetorical, play on the rhetorical theory and, in their
various ways, offer an indirect comment upon the rhetoricians claims. This
group contains two main types of source: the Greek novels, particularly
Achilles Tatios Kleitophon and Leukippe and Heliodoros Aithiopka, and
certain ekphraseis of works of art, notably Philostratos Eikones. I suggest
that these texts contain references to the rhetorical theory discussed in
the previous chapters and invitations to reflect upon the ambiguities and
paradoxes of enargeia, the art of making absent things seem present that is
central to the project of fiction.
Ekphrasis as Fiction
Though the rhetoricians make confident claims for the power of ekphrasis
and enargeia to recreate experience, they themselves clearly recognize the
limitations of enargeia. Time and time again, as we have seen, their claims
are qualified by the vocabulary of approximation and likeness: ekphrasis
makes the audience almost (schedon) see or tries to turn listeners into
spectators. The effects of ekphrasis and enargeia thus belong to the
domain of likeness, of semblance, just as much as the scenes they attempt
to convey, which are, as we have seen, characterized by their likeness to
truth (secundum verum, enalthes). This is entirely appropriate to the
rhetorical context given that rhetoric dealt in likeness to truth and in
verisimilitude and plausibility (to eikos, to pithanon). As we have seen,
Quintilians first reference to enargeia comes in his discussion of this type
of narrative and its need for the vividness that will make it come alive.
In its fundamental like-ness, enargeia is intimately related to fiction;
it evokes sights, sounds and sensations of absent things that, moreover,
have the power to make us feel as if we can perceive them and share
the associated emotions. Enargeia thus invokes the fundamental duality
of fiction, which demands of its audience a state of mind that has been
described by Jean-Marie Schaeffer as split (scind). The audience
(whether readers, listeners, viewers or spectators) combine a state of
imaginative and emotional involvement in the worlds represented with
Theon, Progymnasmata, 119, l. 32; Nikolaos, Progymnasmata, p. 70, ll. 56.

Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 6.2.30; ps.-Longinos, On the Sublime, 15.8.

On enargeia and fiction, see, in particular, Barbara Cassin, Procdures sophistiques
pour produire lvidence, in Carlos Lvy and Laurent Pernot (eds), Dire lvidence (Paris,
1997), pp. 1529.
Jean-Marie Schaeffer, Pourquoi la fiction? (Paris, 1999), p. 190.
The Poetics of Ekphrasis
169
an awareness that these worlds are not real. Schaeffers analysis, which
takes into account all types of fiction and imaginative activity, from
daydreaming to the novel, cinema and video games, has the advantage of
revealing the complexity of our responses to fiction, in which immersion
in the fictive situation does not involve the loss of awareness of reality.
The closest ancient category to our notion of fiction that is to be found
in the surviving sources is the rhetoricians plasmata. This category of
narratives that had not occurred but which were like truth (unlike the
fantastic mythological tales of the Furies, centaurs and winged chariots)
was particularly associated with rhetoric. A plasma is modelled (platt;
cf. Latin fingere) from the pre-existing material provided by reality and
thus occupies an intermediate position between truth and lies. Nikolaos,
for example, in his chapter on the exercise of narration, defines plasmata
as being similar to the fabulous tales of myth in that both were invented
but different in that plasmata could have occurred. There is therefore
an intimate connection between the conception of enargeia, which is the
product of a mental image that is modelled by the orator from elements of
experience, and the project of fiction itself. And, like fiction, the products
of enargeia and ekphrasis are themselves both present in the imagination
and absent from the world perceived by the senses.
Ekphrasis and Absence
I will start with some examples from Menander Rhetor himself which
rely for their rhetorical effect on the ultimate inability of the word and
the mental images it provokes adequately to replace the sense of sight
for some of the uses of vivid evocation in epideictic play on absence
and emphasize the differences between past, present and future. The
difference between memory images and direct perception is alluded to
by Menander Rhetor in his comments on the Speech of Arrival (epibatrios
logos) to be made by the visitor:
Immediately after the prooemia, which are based on joy, you will
develop a head (kephalaion) containing an amplification of the opposite
See John R. Morgan, Make-believe and make believe, in Christopher Gill and T.P.
Wiseman (eds), Lies and Fiction in the Ancient World (Exeter, 1993) and Barbara Cassin,
LEffet sophistique (Paris, 1995), pp. 44960. Cassin stresses the close relationship between
declamation and fiction.

Nikolaos, Progymnasmata, p. 13, ll. 913: ovv o
o , v, v ,
vo, v v, o o o vovo o v o v.

This analogy does not mean that fabulous things, like the Furies, cannot be presented
with enargeia.
170
emotion as follows: I was distressed, as is only natural, in the past and

mourned because I was deprived of the sight (atheamn) of such beauties
and of the city which is the most beautiful city upon which the sun looks
down. But when I saw her, I put aside my grief, I shook off distress; I see
the spectacle (thea) of everything I longed for, not as images in dreams or
like the shadowy reflections in a glass, but the very shrines themselves,
the acropolis itself, the temples, harbours and colonnades.
oov oo v ov ov
vvo v o. vov ov v v
vov vv v v v oov , v
vv v v o o. ov, v
, v v vv, v v ov v v, o
vv v o v , v, v
v ov, o o v v o.
Here, memory images are described as falling far short of direct perception,
as mere shadows compared to the experience of seeing the city itself. By
implication, the effect of ekphrasis, which is comparable to these shadow
images, therefore also fails to substitute for reality. This passage sheds
a different light on the account of the Invitation Speech (Kltikos logos)
analysed in the previous chapter. In Menanders discussion of this speech,
the ekphrasis, or personal memory image, of the city to be visited is
intended as a spur to action, a lure to arouse the listeners desire to enjoy
the spectacle for himself through direct sensory perception. The persuasive
impact of the speech thus resides ultimately in the lack of identity between
the image and the result of direct perception and the inability of the verbal
evocation to substitute for reality.
One particular class of epideictic discourse places special emphasis on
the distinction between the mental images produced by ekphrasis and
the perception of reality. These are the monodies for the dead, usually
those who have died young, or for cities destroyed by earthquake or other
disasters. As we saw above in the case of Aristeides Letter to the Emperors,
the careful use of visual evocation could have an intense emotional impact
on the listener, but that impact was achieved precisely because of the gulf
between the imagined or remembered beauties of the person or city and
the present, visible state of ruin. In such speeches the use of ekphrasis, or
of the appeals to remember that may substitute for ekphrasis, takes place
within a specific temporal economy which constantly moves between
past, present and future as the monody juxtaposes the life which existed
in the past, the present state of loss and destruction and the future that, in
Menander Rhetor, Treatise II, 382, l. 31 383, l. 9
171
the case of a person, will never be.10 Within this, ekphrasis has a complex
role to play. Menander advises the reader about to deliver a monody for
a young person as follows: Then you will describe (diatupo) his physical
appearance, what he was like, what beauty he has lost, the blush of his
cheeks We might suppose that one effect of such diatupsis could be
consolatory, to substitute in some way for the loss of the person evoked.
But the advice that Menander goes on to give suggests rather that these
evocations of beauty were part of an enactment of that loss. Each element
of the intensely sensual description is in fact used as part of an extended
contrast between past and present:
what beauty he has lost, the blush of his cheeks, what a tongue has
been stilled, the soft bloom on his cheeks is clearly wilted, the locks
of his hair will no longer be admired, the radiance of his eyes and the
pupils now sleeping, his curved lashes curved no more, all destroyed.
o o o. oo v, oov o o,
v v , o v, oo oo v
v, oo o o
ov o, v
o v o, v
o
,
.11
Each sign of beauty is no sooner named than declared lost, as the diatupsis
oscillates between past and present, exploiting the poetic capacity of
language to evoke absent things which are contrasted systematically
with the present. The effect is, in miniature, the same as that achieved
by Aristeides in his Letter to the Emperors in which the image of Smyrna,
carefully constructed by verbal evocation and appeals to memory images,
is replaced by the image of wind-blown desolation of the present.
But, whereas in other contexts, making absent things present is the
unproblematic achievement of enargeia, in the type of monody envisaged
by Menander, the accent is on the gulf between the verbal image and
reality: between the sensuous detail with which the beauty of the youth is
enumerated and the corpse. It is highly likely that in the ritual context of
the performance of the monody, which is conceived as a brief, spontaneous
lament, the body of the deceased was visible to the speaker and his
audience.12 These passages therefore involved a juxtaposition of two levels
of perception for the mourners: their direct perception of the present fact
10

Menander Rhetor, Treatise II, 436, ll.1521.
12
This is the implication of Lucian, On Mourning, 13, which alludes directly to the
custom of uttering a monody over the body.
11
172
of death and their memory of the deceased as he was in his lifetime. The
effect is comparable to that of affixing a portrait of the dead as they were
in life to their mummy, superimposing one moment on another.
Ekphrasis and the Danger of Superfluity
The fact that the referents of epideictic ekphrasis were often known to the
audience, or even visible as the speaker pronounced his discourse, led to
a different type of problem. Ekphrasis in epideictic thus ran the risk of
being superfluous when the audience actually had before their physical
eyes the sight which the orator was supposed to bring before the eyes of
the mind. Speakers were themselves aware of this problem (and of the fact
that their speeches were likely to be circulated later to different audiences),
and none more acutely than Lucian whose elaborate prolalia (introductory
talk) The Hall is almost entirely devoted to a discussion of the problems
faced by a speaker performing in sumptuous surroundings. The speech
begins with praise for the beauty of the hall, presented as inspiring to the
speaker:
Seeing a hall immense in its proportions, surpassing all others in its
beauty, gleaming with light, sparkling with gold, beautifully adorned
with paintings, would one not desire to make speeches within it, if this
were ones occupation, and to enhance ones reputation and distinction
and fill it with sound and, as far as possible, to become part of its beauty
oneself ?
oov v ov ov ov
vov vov o v o
v , o oo v, vo
v o v o o
o o v.13
This model of inspiration and of the assimilation of the speaker with his
venue is immediately contrasted with the behaviour of the uncultivated
viewer who stares in mute wonder.14 In language that refers directly to the
theories of vision and memory underlying ekphrasis and enargeia, Lucian
13
Lucian, The Hall, 1.

See the analyses of Simon Goldhill, The erotic eye: visual stimulation and cultural
conflict, in S. Goldhill (ed.), Being Greek under Rome: Cultural Identity, the Second Sophistic and
the Development of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) and Zahra Newby,
Testing the boundaries of ekphrasis, in Ja Elsner (ed.), The Verbal and the Visual: Cultures of
Ekphrasis in Antiquity = Ramus, 31, 12 (2002): 12635.
14
173
then goes on to propose a direct relationship of cause and effect between

seeing and speaking, claiming that beauty flows into the soul through the
eyes and then sends out words in its image.15
But the speaker of this passage is soon interrupted by an imaginary
objector, a personified logos, who puts forward an alternative position (14):
the hall distracts the audience and the speaker himself from the speech.
The opposing speaker subverts the language of ekphrasis when he claims
that the audience become spectators instead of listeners (18), for here
the seeing is literal rather than the metaphorical, mental image brought
about through ekphrasis. Its speaker implies that the impact of physical
sight is far stronger than the mental imagery created through words, so
in place of the union between vision and speech on the one hand and
speaker and audience on the other proposed by the first speaker, we are
presented with a model of antagonism in which direct perception through
sight prevails over the word.16
This second speaker goes on to illustrate this point through his
description of the paintings inside the hall. Introduced by the disclaimer
painting in words is a bald (psilos) thing (21), these ekphraseis are indeed
bald; the pictures are treated for the most part in a cursory manner, as
if to prove the objectors point. Anyone familiar with the rich possibilities
of ekphrasis of paintings as demonstrated by Philostratos, for example,
would have been well aware that this speaker was not making full use of
the power of the word and that his introductory statement marks a selffulfilling prophecy.
Taken as a whole, The Hall can be read as an elaborate captatio
benevolentiae and an elegant introduction to the main performance which
was to follow in which Lucian manages to draw attention to his own skill
and to the beauty of the setting, which presumably was to the credit of the
community, his audience. Rather than present a straightforward enkmion,
or enkomiastic ekphrasis (in the manner of his Hippias, an ekphrasis of a
bath building presented as a periegesis of the building), he discusses the
issues raised by the idea of achieving sight through words in general and
in particular by the epideictic practice of describing and praising sights
which were present to the audience. The dialogue, in typical Lucianic
fashion, serves to raise questions, to signal awareness of the problems rather
than proposing any single solution or point of view.17 The result is that
15
Lucian, The Hall, 4.

Ibid., 20, citing Herodotos, 1.8.3.
17
On Lucians personae, see Suzanne Sad, Le je de Lucien, in Marie-Franoise
Baslez et al. (eds), LInvention de lautobiographie: dHsiode Saint Augustin (Paris, 1993), pp.
25370; Sandrine Dubel, Dialogue et autoportrait: les masques de Lucien, in Alain Billault
(ed.), Lucien de Samosate (Lyon, 1994), pp. 1926.
16
174
both arguments merge to modify each other (the first speaker claims that
the opposing logos has been interrupting him throughout). But significant
tensions remain. Indeed, the first speech is itself acutely ambiguous in its
enthusiasm for the sight. It opens by comparing the speakers situation
with that of Alexander who is said to have been so seduced by the sight
of the river Kydnos that he would have still plunged into it even if he
had known in advance that it would lead to his death, and goes on to
compare the speaker to two animals, the horse (10) and the peacock (11),
and the Hall itself to the notoriously deceptive and treacherous sea (12). If,
in the end, the first speaker prevails it is not without doubts being raised
concerning his confident claims of an unproblematic union between
speaker, audience and context.
Monuments and Meanings
The Hall thus raises an important question. Ekphraseis of places in
epideictic are frequently prefaced with disclaimers announcing the
speakers inadequacy to the task.18 The ritual nature of this topos makes
it no less pertinent as an observation of the impossibility of rendering a
full account of any sight in words. However, if a full verbal account of
any sight is an impossible task, an ekphrasis can still suggest imaginary
supplements that may interact with the audiences perception or memory
of the subject. Examples are to be found in Aristeides Smyrnaean Oration
(Or. 17) where the relatively brief periegesis of the city is interspersed with
similes: the city is compared to an embroidered robe (chitn) and then to a
necklace made up of separate elements each of which attracts the viewers
gaze. These supplements to the ekphrasis serve to introduce other values
and associations into the description of the city: both have connotations
of craftsmanship, wealth and an ordered opulence which enrich the
ekphrasis and both appeal to the analogy of the city with the human body
that we have already encountered in the discussion of the monody.
In other cases, ekphrasis can also be used to make explicit the spiritual
and political meanings that may have been implicit in their subjects, as I
have suggested elsewhere.19 In particular, several ekphraseis of buildings
(whether originally pronounced within the building, for example Paul the
Silentiarys ekphrasis of Hagia Sophia, or not, for example Prokopios of
Caesareas account of the same church in his Buildings) effectively organize
the description around the manner (tropos) in which the monument was
18
See, for example, Ailios Aristeides, On Rome, 613.

Ruth Webb, The aesthetics of sacred space: narrative, metaphor and motion in
ekphraseis of church buildings, DOP, 53 (1999): 5974 and Ekphrasis,
amplification and
persuasion in Procopius Buildings, Antiquit tardive, 8 (2000): 6771.
19
175
constructed. Thus, Prokopios

credits Justinian with the discovery of the
solution to the architectural problem posed by the dome of Hagia Sophia,
attributing the emperors inspiration to a divine source at 1.1.71 with the
result that the monument becomes a sign of the emperors intelligence
and of divine favour. This type of ekphrasis serves the same purpose as
do the ekphraseis of military victories that are to be included as proof of
the emperors qualities in the Basilikos logos.20 In this way, the monuments
themselves can be presented as a type of proof of the qualities ascribed to
the builder which was clearly visible to all.
The anthropologist Alfred Gell has underlined the ways in which
artefacts of all types can serve as objective embodiments of power. They
thus work an effect on the viewer who is prompted to speculate on the
origins of the object and on the processes that produced it and to see it
as an embodiment of its creators agency.21 Those ekphraseis of buildings
that describe the construction process would seem to reflect this type
of response, making explicit the sources of agency that are to be seen
as embodied within the building. However, the orator who presented
a monument in this way was not simply using the audiences existing
perception of the building to affect their perception of the emperor, but
might also be attempting to alter their understanding of the building itself
by attaching narratives to it and thereby suggesting new associations
that might influence the listeners future responses to it. So speakers like
Prokopios reflect a habit of reading artefacts and also, I would suggest,
attempt to exploit this habit by attempting to associate one particular origin
narrative with the monument so that the latter comes to be understood by
the listener as a sign of the patrons action.
Declamation
If the problems posed by epideictic ekphrasis derive from the close
proximity of the speech as performance and its subject matter, declamation
raised the opposite problem. As ps.-Dionysios made clear, the subjects of
declamatory ekphrasis were largely imaginary events that were supposed
to have taken place in the distant past. Like the actor, the declaimer took
on a role and created an imaginary world around him through words. If
the boundary between orator and actor was always in need of restatement
and reinforcement, so much the more so the boundary between acting
20
See Webb, Ekphrasis, amplification and persuasion, pp. 6771 and Ja Elsner, The
rhetoric of buildings in the De Aedificiis of Procopius, in Liz James (ed.), Art and Text in
Byzantine Culture (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 3357.
21
Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford, 1998)

, pp. 2021 and
6872.
176
and declamation which Quintilian had likened to stage display or the

ravings of a madman if it was practised for its own sake.22
The analogy with the actor is also relevant to the relationship of
the declaimer to his adopted persona. Like the actor, he occupied an
intermediate state between being an orator engaged in declamation and
being Demosthenes, Perikles or Themistokles, roles that he adopted
temporarily for the purposes of his performance.23 Like the audience
of a play (or the readers of a novel), the listeners were simultaneously
invited to enter into the world created by the declaimer and able
to retain an awareness that they were indeed listening to an orator
pretending.24 Declamation need not, in this interpretation, be seen as
a sign of nostalgia for the past nor need we assume that the speakers
identity was entirely supplanted by that of his adopted persona, any more
than the actor is consumed by his or her role. However, the role of the
audience in the make-believe of declamation was different from that of
the theatre audience. Michel Patillons analysis of the complex enunciative
situation created by the exercise of thopoiia opens up the dynamics of
impersonation in declamation: the speakers dual identity, he points out,
created a dual audience, the reader/audience and the notional audience
to whom the character addressed him or herself.25 In the same way, when
a declaimer spoke in the persona of a character from the Greek past he
cast the audience of his speech in a dual role. They were addressed as if
they were classical Athenians listening to their imaginary Demosthenes
or Themistokles, a role into which they may have actively entered in
imagination, yet they clearly retained an acute awareness that they were
listening to a contemporary sophist whose performance they were called
upon to judge.
In such a context, the subjects of ekphrasis were doubly fictive. The
student or performer who described the storm at sea was speaking as if he
were a general in classical Athens who was, in turn, attempting through
22
Quintilian, 2.10.8: nam si foro non praeparat, aut scaenicae ostentationi aut furiosae
vociferationi simillimum est. On orators and actors, see Elaine R. Fantham, Orator and /
et actor, in Patricia E. Easterling and Edith Hall (eds), Greek and Roman Actors: Aspects of an
Ancient Profession (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 36276 and Ismene Lada-Richards, Silent Eloquence:
Lucian and Pantomime Dancing (London, 2007), pp. 13551.
23
See, for example, Richard Schechner, Performance Theory (New York, 1988), p.
179. Aelius Aristeides, Or. 28 (On a remark in passing) uses the verb hupokrin of his
impersonation of figures from the past.
24
For further discussion, see Ruth Webb, Fiction, mimesis and the performance of
the Greek past in the Second Sophistic, in David Konstan and Suzanne Sad (eds), Greeks on
Greekness: Viewing the Greek Past under the Roman Empire (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 2746.
25
Michel Patillon, La Thorie du discours chez Hermogne le Rhteur: essai sur les structures
linguistiques de la rhtorique ancienne (Paris, 1988), pp. 3023.
177
his ekphrasis to make his audience feel as if they shared his experience.
By responding to the ekphrasis the listeners were in a sense placing
themselves imaginatively in the situation of the purported classical
addressees of the speech. In this case they were not just imagining that
they were caught up in the storm at sea with the classical general but
imagining that they were classical Athenian citizens imagining the scene.
Moreover, their involvement in the scene could coexist with the critical
awareness that it was a fiction and, specifically, that it was a fiction based
on particular historical sources. A striking example from one of the few
surviving declamations from the Second Sophistic is to be found in the
sophist Polemos speech in the persona of the father of Kunaigeiros, the
hero of Marathon who held onto a Persian ship even as his hands were
being cut off by the enemy. In support of his argument that his sons death
was more glorious than that of another hero, Kallimachos (whose body
was shot with so many arrows that it remained standing after his death),
the father gives an ekphrasis full of bloody detail, describing how first one
hand, then the other, was cut off and remained holding onto the ship as he
died on land. Polemo fully exploits the potential for paradox and startling
imagery, comparing the soldiers mutilated body to a victory monument
and stating how, as Kunaigeiros remained on land, his hand continued to
grasp the ship so that in the end he lay dead, a single man who served
on both elements with his limbs, divided between land and sea.26 This
paradox cannot fail to draw attention to the role of the Roman sophist
and is thus in tension with the invitation to visualize the heros death and
to enter into the classical moment evoked. Such a duality of response is
typical of declamation, and of all fiction. In the present case, awareness
of the long-standing historical tradition surrounding Marathon would
have added a further layer to the listeners response; indeed, this tradition
took the place, in the context of declamation, of the common cultural
references to which the real orator in a real case could appeal. Ekphrasis
in declamation exploited a set of shared images and associations that were
familiar from the schools, from texts and also from images (as in the case
of Marathon which was depicted in art). It is thus a phenomenon in which
intertextuality plays a significant role, but intertextuality of a particular
type. As we saw in the first chapter, the type of historical sources which
provided the basic material for declamation scenarios were not considered
simply as words on a page but as provokers of images in themselves.
26
Polemo, Declamation 1, 1011 in The Severed Hand and the Upright Corpse: The
Declamations of Marcus Antonius Polemo, ed. William W. Reader (Atlanta, 1996), pp. 1045:
v o o o v o, vo.
178
Ekphrasis and the Greek Novel

This consideration of declamation has brought us to the subject of fiction,
and some of the same questions apply to the use of ekphrasis in the prose
fiction of antiquity. The use of ekphrasis in the novel has been well explored,
particularly when it comes to those ekphraseis that describe works of art.
Shadi Bartsch has offered sophisticated reinterpretations of these passages
in Heliodoros and Achilles Tatios, pointing out the interpretative work
and play involved in the ekphraseis of works of art and of other subjects in
these novels.27 More recently, Helen Morales has pointed out the shifting
interactions between the fictional world of Achilles Tatios novel and the
various types of visual representation in images and in dreams, in the
course of a stimulating exploration of the theme of vision.28 My purpose
here is to underline some passages that I believe make deliberate reference
to the theory of ekphrasis as we find it in the rhetorical handbooks and
to discuss some passages that are not usually considered in surveys of
ekphrasis in the novel, but which the handbooks encourage us to include
in this category.
That ekphrasis is central to the novel is clear from its prominent role
at the beginning of the works by Achilles Tatios, Longos and Heliodoros,
whether in the form of ekphraseis of works of art, as in the case of the
first two, or of an enigmatic scene in the case of Heliodoros. Both Achilles
Tatios Kleitophon and Leukippe and Longos Daphnis and Chloe begin with
a first-person account of a painting in its setting which serves to set the
narrative in motion. Achilles Tatios lushly detailed ekphrasis of the
painting of the rape of Europa serves, among other things, to prompt
the narration by the hero, Kleitophon, that forms the body of the novel,
while Longos minimalist evocation of a painting and the grove in which
it stood provides the pretext for his novel, which is presented as a verbal
response to the visual artefact.29 As the first of a series of descriptions
of art works, Achilles opening ekphrasis serves many other functions,
27
Shadi Bartsch, Decoding the Ancient Novel: The Reader and the Role of Description in
Heliodorus and Achilles Tatius (Princeton, 1989).
28
Helen Morales, Vision and Narrative in Achilles Tatius Leucippe and Clitophon
(Cambridge, 2005). On ekphraseis of persons (or their absence) in the novels, see also
Sandrine Dubel, La beaut romanesque ou le refus du portrait dans le roman grec dpoque
impriale, in Bernard Pouderon (ed.), Les Personnages du roman grec (Lyon, 2001), pp. 2958;
Tim Whitmarsh, Written on the body: ekphrasis, perception and deception in Heliodorus
Aethiopica,
in Ja Elsner (ed.), The Verbal and the Visual: Cultures of Ekphrasis in Antiquity =
Ramus, 31, 12 (2002): 11125
and Koen de Temmerman, Blushing beauty: characterizing

blushes in Charitons Callirhoe, Mnemosyne, 60 (2007): 23552.
29
It is debatable whether Longos brief description of the painting counts as an
ekphrasis in itself.
179
tempting the reader to speculate on the paintings relation to the events

of the plot that follows and constantly requiring the reader to revise his
or her interpretation as the events unfold. Most importantly, as Danielle
Maeder has argued, these opening ekphraseis serve the twin purpose of
drawing the reader imaginatively into the universe of the novel while
simultaneously proclaiming the artificiality of the work.30 They thus
explore the duality that is at the heart of fiction and underline the tensions
involved in ekphrasis itself as a discourse that embodies likeness. In this
way, the project of ekphrasis and enargeia to make the reader/listener feel
as if he or she is in the presence of persons, places, events and moments
that are absent and may never have occurred at all is central to the novel
as genre.
I would also add a further tension in these descriptions of works of art,
between the temptation to immerse oneself imaginatively in the world
evoked by the painting and the awareness of the interpretative need to
find a link between the painting and the novel. Though by no means
incompatible, these are two different attitudes to the text. In the former,
the role of ekphrasis in creating an illusion of perception is predominant
and the reader or listener is immersed in the fictional world, while, in
the latter, the reader is engaged as critic, deciphering details, attempting
to predict how the painting will relate to the narrative that follows. Far
from seeing this latter response as typical of ekphrasis, I see it as a special
problem posed by particular examples of ekphraseis of works of art in
particular contexts. The type of interpretation required by Achilles Tatios
paintings, or other descriptions of allegorical images, is very different
from the type of instantaneous imaginative supplementation that we saw
at work in the case of Quintilians reading of Cicero. The treatments of
ekphrasis and enargeia in the rhetorical sources, as well as the responses to
vivid language discussed at the very beginning of this study, encourage
us to assume that imaginative engagement was valued by the ancient
authors and readers of the novels.
Achilles Tatios novel is rich in ekphraseis of all types: paintings, statues,
animals (4.2, 4, 19), a garden (1.15), the city of Alexandria (5.1) and events
such as the hyperbolic ekphrasis of the storm at sea (3.15). One example
that has not attracted attention, most probably because it does not conform
to modern expectations of description, is the ekphrasis of the death of
Charikles, a minor character who dies in a riding accident at the beginning
30
Danielle Maeder, Au seuil des Romans grecs: effets de rel et effets de cration, in
Groningen Colloquia on the Novel 4 (Groningen, 1991), pp. 133. See also Jean-Philippe Guez,
Achille Tatius ou le paysage-monde, in B. Pouderon and D. Crismani (eds), Lieux, dcors et
paysages de lancien roman des origines Byzance (Lyon, 2005), pp. 299307 who suggests that
the painting contains in nuce the main themes of the novel.
180
of the novel (1.12). The event is presented in a type of messenger speech,

which suggests a generic allusion to tragedy, and Franoise Ltoublon has
connected this incident with the (false) account of the death of Orestes in
a chariot race in Sophokles Elektra.31 A further tragic intertext is the death
of Hippolytos in Euripides play (ll. 121348), which in fact presents more
similarities with Achilles Tatios episode: in both the accident results from
the horse being startled, in both the setting is the wilds rather than the
organized time and space of a race. The novelists extended metaphor of
the bucking horse as a rough sea also helps to associate the scene with the
death of Hippolytos on the shore. The thematic connection is also clear:
all that the reader knows about Charikles is that he prefers homoerotic
love and this rejection of women is comparable to Hippolytos rejection of
all erotic relationships. It is particularly significant that both passages are
ekphrastic, as is usually the case with messenger speeches, for this means
that the visual imagination plays a part in the recognition of the allusion:
the image evoked by Achilles Tatios corresponds to the image evoked in
the past and stored in the memory by the text of Euripides play. There is
thus a form of imaginative intervisuality in play in which the secondary
images of water (evoked by Achilles Tatios metaphor) play almost as
important a role as the images of the principal event.
Other examples of ekphrasis in Kleitophon and Leukippe conform more
closely to modern assumptions about description that is, they evoke
static subjects and constitute a pause in the development of the action.
Of this group, the ekphraseis of Egyptian animals described in Book 4 are
particularly interesting in that they are textbook examples of ekphrasis,
corresponding to Theons use of Herodotos animal descriptions as
examples. I do not believe that this is an accident: Achilles Tatios is calling
attention to the artifice of his verbal account by peopling his Egypt
with the stock attributes of classical Greek visions of the exotic land. It is
interesting to compare Ailios Aristeides remarks in his Egyptian Oration,
which is concerned with truth and lies about Egypt and the shortcomings
of the accounts by Herodotos and Homer. Criticizing one classical travel
writer in particular, Aristeides singles out crocodiles and hippopotami as
typical elements that a writer might add to his account to make his fiction
(plasma) seem like truth.32 In this case, therefore, Achilles Tatios seems
to refer explicitly to the textbook accounts of ekphrasis in order to draw
attention to the artifice of his verbal creation, to the fact that this is a plasma
and that his Egypt is a world of words.
31
Franoise Ltoublon, Les Lieux communs du roman: strotypes grecs daventure et
damour (Leiden, 1993), p. 100.
32
Ailios Aristeides, Egyptian Discourse, 96.
181
The uses of ekphrasis in Heliodoros Aithiopika are often harder to

isolate, though this novel, too, is full of vivid evocations. The difference in
approach is well illustrated by the contrasting descriptions of crocodiles
for, whereas Achilles Tatios gives us a breakdown of the appearance of
the beast in motion and at rest (4.19), Heliodoros describes in a few words
the impression of its movement as it crosses the path of Knemon and
Kalasiris. This latter passage is no less an ekphrasis, as the reader shares
the characterss partial view of the creature and understands Knemons
alarm. Between them the two descriptions illustrate the contrast between
the scholastic breakdown (kata lepton) and the vivid evocation.33 The
dramatic tableau with which the Aithiopika opens is also an accomplished
example of ekphrasis that slowly reveals to the reader the perplexing
scene of devastation on the Egyptian shore through the eyes of a group of
uncomprehending bandits.
Jack Winkler has pointed out the aporetic nature of this opening
which leaves the reader in ignorance of the events that led to this scene
of devastation until the middle of the novel.34 Until then, we share the
bandits ignorance. The opening scene of the Aithiopika, with its bodies,
its overturned tables and signs of a feast violently interrupted, is directly
comparable to the ekphraseis of aftermaths that we have encountered
in the study of rhetorical ekphrasis. Seen from this perspective, the
paradoxical nature of Heliodoros approach is all the more evident for
he choses a scene where (in rhetorical terms) the act (pragma) is clear but
the perpetrator (prospon) and his motivation (aitia) are not. The answer
to what resembles a declaimers conundrum, when it is revealed several
books later, turns out to be a surprise a fact that says a great deal about
the limitations of conjecture and of the very special nature of the probable
in this novel.
It is also worth noting that the account of the events that led up to
the mysterious scene of devastation with which the novel opens is just
as much an ekphrasis as the opening scene, but this time of the event
itself, rather than its aftermath. Analysed in rhetorical terms, this section
finally allows the viewer to see the action (pragma), the manner in which
the action took place (tropos) and the reason (aitia). Significantly, too, it is
told from a standpoint of full knowledge by a witness who had a clear
33
See, on this contrast, John J. Winkler, The mendacity of Kalasiris and the narrative
strategy of Heliodorus Aithiopika, Yale Classical Studies, 27 (1982)
: 1012, though Winkler
does not recognize Heliodoros passage as an ekphrasis.
34
See, on this scene, Winkler, The mendacity of Kalasiris and John
R. Morgan, Reader
and audiences in the Aithiopika of Heliodoros, Groningen Colloquia on the Novel 4 (Groningen,
1991), pp. 85104.
182
view, rather than through the partial and uncomprehending eyes of the
bandits through whom the opening scene is focalized.35
A further example of the type of connections between passages
that become apparent when we apply the ancient criteria of ekphrasis
involves the account of the siege of Syene in Heliodoros Aithiopika, 9.3.
The method used by the Ethiopian king, Hydaspes, to surround Syene
(Aswan) with water is very similar to Julians account of the historical
siege of Nisibis by the Persians in 350 CE and this similarity provides
the main evidence for a fourth-century date for the novel.36 The parallel
with epideictic also underlines the function of the account as a portrait
of the Ethiopian king (who at this point is unaware that he is the father
of the heroine, Charikleia). The tropos of the
works
reveals the character

and manners (tropoi) of their originator. Heliodoros stresses the measure
and order involved in Hydaspes works as he divides up (katanemei) the
circumference of the city walls and allots (apoklrsas) each section of ten to
a group of ten men. These qualities emerge more clearly still in comparison
with Julians account of the Persian forces as a confused mass containing
women, old men, children and servants. Julians far vaguer references to
the body of water created around Nisibis also contrast with Heliodoros
meticulous account of the shape of the channel dug around Syene, which
further contributes to the portrayal of Hydaspes.37 Moreover, the extended
ekphrasis of the siege works forms a pendant to the ekphrasis with which
the novel begins, both of these scenes, dominated as they are by water,
thus underline the rivers function as an organizing principle for the action
of the novel and the linear movement of its hero and heroine from the
Egyptian shore to the land of Ethiopia which is their final destination.38
The Novel and the Limits of Ekphrasis
The way in which the opening scene of the Aithiopika exploits the
conventions of rhetorical ekphrasis, requiring the reader to search for
supplements which he or she is unable to find, invites reflection on the
act of reading an ekphrasis of this type and on the normally automatic
processes of decoding involved. The rhetorically trained reader would
35
Similarly, the ekphrasis of Leukippes fake death at Kleitophon and Leukippe, 3.15 is
later supplemented by the ekphrasis of the tropos when Satyros explains how it was done
at 3.2021.
36
See Pierre Chuvin, Chronique des derniers paens (Paris, 2004), pp. 3215 and Glen
Bowersock, Fiction as History: Nero to Julian (Berkeley, 1994), pp. 14960.
37
Julian, Panegyric of Constantius, I, 22, ll. 15; 1112 and 25.
38
On the structuring role of the Nile in the novel, see Tim Whitmarsh, The writes of
passage: cultural initiation in Heliodorus Aethiopica, in Richard Miles (ed.), Constructing
Identities in Late Antiquity (London, 1999).
183
thus have been acutely aware of the aporetic nature of this scene, identified
by Jack Winkler. This is not the only example where the reader seems to
be invited not just to imagine the scene evoked by the novelist but also
to reflect upon the practice and conventions of ekphrasis and enargeia. It
is possible to identify other uses of ekphrasis by both Achilles Tatios and
Heliodoros that play on the conventions of ekphrasis and, sometimes, call
into question the rhetoricians claims for ekphrasis in different ways.
Some of the most interesting instances of ekphrasis in the novel are
cases in which the ekphrasis is addressed by one character to another,
allowing the impact on the internal audience to be depicted. The account
of the death of Charikles mentioned above is one example. In this case,
the response is by the book: the listeners react emotionally to tragic news,
presented in suitably tragic fashion. In other cases, however, the reactions
are subject to more developed treatment that ultimately raises questions
about the nature of the mental images provoked by the word and their
relationship to the reality that is the fictional world of the novel.
In Achilles Tatios novel, two separate male characters fall in love with
the heroine, Leukippe, solely on the basis of reports of her beauty, without
having seen her for themselves. The young Kallisthenes at the beginning of
the novel and the older Thersandros, the main rival of the hero Kleitophon
at the end, fall in love after merely hearing about Leukippes beauty. The
idea is a topos of the novel but, in Achilles Tatios, it is developed in ways
that ask interesting questions about the representational power of the
word. Kallisthenes is described as in love at first hearing (ex akos erasts),
a state which the narrator condemns as the sign of an unstable and
uncontrollable nature (2.13.1). He is said to torment himself by picturing
(anaplattn) Leukippes beauty and imagining (phantazomenos) what
he has never seen. His state of mind is thus a particularly acute case of
imaginative supplementation, an exaggerated depiction of the state of any
addressee of an ekphrasis who is prompted by words to create a mental
image of the subject. Thersandros is similarly portrayed as susceptible
to imaginary beauties. His passion for Leukippe is kindled when his
servant reports her appearance, singing the praises (katatragdountos) of
her beauty, with the result that Thersander is filled with an apparition
(phantasma) as if of beauty (6.4.4). As we have seen, the term phantasma
could be used to distinguish mental images that did not derive from sense
perception from those that did: it is the term used by Augustine to qualify
the image of Alexandria that he built up from his knowledge of Carthage
and by the Stoics to characterize the mental image based on illusion (like
Orestes vision of the Furies). So, here, the choice of the term to designate
a word-induced mental image does seem to be a deliberate reference to
Stoic theories.
184
Here, Stoic cognitive theory does seem to be acutely relevant as the

reader is invited to reflect on his or her own imaginative response to the
novel and to consider this, too, as an example of phantasma, in that it, like the
phantasms of Leukippe, is evoked purely by words rather than resulting
from direct perception. However, these two characters are very different
from the reader, however immersed in the fictional situation, in that they
not only allow themselves to respond emotionally as if to a reality but
even act upon their desires. As such, they are fictional paradigms of the
opposite to the Stoic sage: characters who act on an illusion. In Kallisthenes
case, the folly of this decision is demonstrated in comical fashion when he
kidnaps the wrong woman, illustrating the failure of his mental image
to correspond to reality. Later on, Thersandros failed attempts to rape
Leukippe reveal his moral and cognitive failings. Both are thus contrasted
with Kleitophon who, though far from a perfect hero, at least falls in love
as a result of seeing Leukippe, a process which is emphasized throughout
the novel in the many discussions of vision and the eye.
Heliodoros novel contains a similar invitation to the reader to reflect
upon the nature of his or her imaginative involvement in the story. In a
passage that has been much discussed, Heliodoros wily internal narrator,
the Egyptian sage Kalasiris, who is responsible for much of the narration
of first half of the novel, provides his listener, Knemon, with an ekphrasis
of the occasion on which the hero and heroine, Theagenes and Charikleia,
first met and fell in love in Delphi. The festival and its procession are
described at length, at the request of Knemon who demands to be made
a spectator (theats) of the event by Kalasiris speech (logos) (3.1). This
is not the only echo of the technical vocabulary of ekphrasis for, a little
further on, as Kalasiris gives a detailed account of the costume worn by
Charikleia, Knemon interrupts exclaiming, Its them! Its Charikleia and
Theagenes! A few lines further on, he attributes his response explicitly
to the enargeia of Kalasiris account (digsis): I thought I could see them
even though they are not here, so vividly and exactly as I have seen them
myself did your account show them.39 This naive exclamation contributes
to the characterization of Knemon as a listener avid for spectacle; he
represents a type of sensuous involvement in the narrative that would
probably not have seemed as incongruous to the ancient reader as it did
to Winkler and which is not necessarily incompatible with the type of
hermeneutic reading he brilliantly describes.40 In fact, the wily Kalasiris
is himself caught in the net of his own ekphrastic skills as he responds
to Knemons first exclamation by begging to be told where the couple
39
Heliodoros, Aithiopika, 3.4.7: v o v v o v
o o v o v.
40
Winkler, The mendacity of Kalasiris, p. 143.
185
are: Where on earth are they? Show me, by the gods.41 In the context of
the story, Knemons response, and Kalasiris reaction, are at least partly
explained by the fact that Knemon knows the couple, and can thus judge
his imaginings against his own memory image of them, and that Kalasiris
knows that Knemon expects them to arrive at any moment. But Hardie
aptly notes the doubt as to the plenitude of vision that creeps into the
exchange as Kalasiris tells Knemon that he has probably not seen them as
they were on the day he was describing.42
The exchange between Kalasiris and Knemon thus plays with the
conventions of ekphrasis and enargeia, pointing out the limitations of the
power of the word to make present and to place before the eyes. Knemon
is comparable to the phantasy
lovers
of Kleitophon and Leukippe in his real
response to description. But a crucial difference between the episodes lies
in the respective role of the reader. Whereas Achilles Tatios reader does
not hear the evocations of Leukippe that have such a dramatic effect on
their audiences, Heliodoros reader shares every detail of the sumptuous
ekphrasis of events at Delphi with Knemon, the internal audience. At the
moment of the highest imaginative involvement, the reader is brought up
short by a reminder of the limitations of evocation, even for the listener
with direct personal knowledge of the subject. The irony is that this
reminder is issued by the reference, in the exchange between Kalasiris and
Knemon, to the literal sense of placing before the eyes, from which the
verbal evocation falls far short. The passage thus gives the readers cause
for reflection on their own sensuous involvement and its limitations, not
only through the distanced depiction of characters responses, but through
the sharing of those responses.43
Descriptions of Works of Art as Meta-ekphrasis
Ekphraseis of all types of subjects, and not only those that present works of
art, may therefore have a meta-fictional function in the novel, causing the
reader not only to reflect upon the nature of his or her experience of fiction
but also, through the dialectic of engagement and distance set in place
in the episodes analysed above, making him or her experience in various
ways the disjunction between the fictional world and reality. In a similar
41
Heliodoros, Aithiopika, 3.4.7: o oo; v v.

Philip Hardie, A reading of Heliodorus, Aithiopika, 3.4.15.2, in Richard Hunter
(ed.), Studies in Heliodorus (Cambridge, 1998), p. 31.
43
Shadi Bartsch, Wait a moment, phantasia: ekphrastic interference in Seneca and
Epictetus, CP, 102 (2007): 835 analyses some similar instances where Stoic philosophers
make use of enargeia to invite the reader to participate imaginatively in a scene only to
disrupt that involvement in order to provoke reflection.
42
186
way, I would suggest that certain examples of ekphrasis of paintings and

sculptures perform their own commentary on the nature of ekphrasis in
the broad sense of the word. If all ekphrasis, of whatever subject, is like a
painting or sculpture in its aim to place before the eyes, an ekphrasis of
visual representation is doubly ekphrastic. This is not the place for a full
investigation of this phenomenon which has been much discussed, but
I would simply like to stress here that I see these ekphraseis of works of
art as a special category of ekphrasis, and to discuss briefly two examples
that, in very different ways, can be read as commentaries on the practice
of rhetorical ekphrasis that is at the centre of this book. The first of these
examples is the collection of ekphraseis of statues attributed to Nikolaos,
the second is the Eikones of the Elder Philostratos. They are both works
that are firmly rooted in the rhetorical culture of the Imperial period but
they show very different approaches to the project of describing.
Statues and Signs
As noted above (Chapters 3 and 6), Nikolaos method of describing statues
is by the book. After a brief introduction, which often notes the place of
the sculpture in a chain of artistic transmission that has led from the event
to its literary or dramatic representation and then to its representation in
bronze, the author proceeds to break down the figure into its parts and to
propose a meaning for each expression, posture or ges
t
ure. The technique
seems to show what Nikolaos meant by the reasons (logismoi) why the
artist represented the figure as he did, and, indeed, the artists intention
figures prominently in these ekphraseis. In the ekphrasis of the Trojan
woman after the fall of Troy, for example, we are told that the fact that she
is shown sitting on a chair shows (smain) that she is unable to stand when
her city had fallen, that her bare head indicates her loss of shame but the
fact that her hair is held back in a band shows that this loss is not total.44
The laborious cataloguing of parts illustrates the technique of ekphrasis
kata lepton, which I suggested above was a result of the school tradition
of teaching ekphrasis. The result is hard to define as vivid, but it does
seem that these curious ekphraseis serve to lay bare and to demonstrate
to readers one of the important aspects of ekphrasis in a rhetorical context.
We saw in the previous chapter how the significance of a scene such as the
destruction at Phokis or the aftermath of a Roman party could lie in the
implicit narrative of the events that preceded. Nikolaos statue ekphraseis
demonstrate exactly that process, identifying each visible detail of the
sculpture as the result of the prior action so that the text not only makes
44
[Nikolaos], in Libanios, Progymnasmata, p. 505. For further discussion, see Ruth Webb,
The model ekphraseis of Nikolaos the Sophist as memory images, in Michael Grnbart
(ed.), Theatron: Rhetorische Kultur in Sptantike un Mittelalter (Berlin, 2007), pp. 46375.
187
explicit a certain way of reading images but also provides a commentary

on rhetorical ekphrasis in general. Moreover, in their attention to details
of appearance, these ekphraseis also pay attention to the way in which
the description of external characteristics (as in Ciceros portrait of
Verres) could serve to portray inner feelings.45 Just as in that example, the
knowledge appealed to is of a generic, cultural kind: Nikolaos statues are
all of figures or events familiar from literature, so that the role ascribed to
the artist is that of preserving and transmitting this tradition.
Philostratos Eikones
The Eikones of the Elder Philostratos are immeasurably more sophisticated
than these statue ekphraseis (as are the statue ekphraseis of Kallistratos).
They are also unmistakeably vivid, by any definition of the term, as
every description is packed with concrete nouns, adjectives and verbs of
movement, all denoting perceptible features. The description of Amphion
and his lyre (1.10), to take just one example, provides details of the lyres
construction: the dark horns with their jagged edges, the smoothness of
the boxwood, the pattern of the tortoiseshell. As so often in the Eikones,
the description evokes the particulars of the young mans beauty, the way
his hair with its golden highlights falls on his forehead and onto the down
on his cheek, and the iridescent shimmering of his multicoloured cloak.
But it is not just visual information that is evoked, as Alessandra Manieri
has emphasized.46 Sounds, such as Amphions song, are mentioned, as
is the fragrance of a garden (1.6.1) or of the smoke rising from an altar
(2.27.3). Within the Sophists discourse, the ability to perceive the sounds
and scents of the painting is an important aspect of the perceptual world
of the gallery. In addition, there are many appeals to the senses of touch
and of taste. The pictures are thus placed before our eyes, along with the
synaesthetic response that they elicit from the viewer. As was first noted
by Bougot, a large part of the interest of the Eikones lies in their depiction
of intense imaginative response to the visual arts.
Philostratos text is often seen as a prime example, if not the example,
of the ekphrasis of works of art. However, its sophistication makes it a
special use of ekphrasis that should be ranked alongside the novels for its
conscious play with fiction for Philostratos descriptions are presented
as the direct quotation of discourses made in front of the paintings and
addressed to an internal audience of young men and one boy. There are
45
See, in this connection, the discussion of diathesis, which can mean both external
and internal disposition, in Roos Meijering, Literary and Rhetorical Theories in Greek Scholia
(Groningen, 1987), p. 41, pp. 313.
46
Alessandra Manieri, Colori, suoni e profumi nelle Imagines: principi dellestetica
filostratea, Quaderni urbinati di cultura classica, n.s. 63/3 (1999): 11121.
188
thus several levels of time involved: the time of the visit to the gallery;
the later moment at which the whole is remembered and the speeches are
repeated; the mythical time represented in the paintings and, occasionally,
the moment at which the artist made his painted representation. The
speaker is no more to be identified with the author, Philostratos, than is
Kalasiris with his creator, Heliodoros. The audience is also doubled, rather
as in thopoiia, or declamation, because the original descriptions are said to
have been addressed to the boys in front of the paintings while the text we
read is presented as a later report of that event for an external audience of
readers or listeners who are not in front of the paintings. The ekphraseis
are thus constantly dual: within the fictional setting of the gallery they
interpret a painting, which is real and visible to the internal audience, part
of their present surroundings, but for the external audience of readers
the words alone create the paintings, the speaker and his audience. The
paintings, as described by the Sophist, are so dazzling that we forget to
question the Sophists own existence, or that of his internal audience, or
to see that both the painting and his interpretation are creations of his
words, as he in turn is a creation of the historical Philostratos.
Rather as our sense of imaginative immersion in the procession at
Delphi as described by Kalasiris in the Aithiopika is abruptly broken by
Knemons literal response (or rather, Kalasiris literal interpretation of
Knemons response to the enargeia of the performance), Philostratos
too invites his reader to distance him or herself from the enthusiastic
submission to illusion expressed by our Sophist-guide. At the moments
of most heightened involvement on the part of the speaker, the reader
is
reminded of his or her own physical distance from the gallery and the
paintings it contains, a distance that is otherwise collapsed by the use of
direct discourse to quote the Sophists lectures. Most
dramatically, in a
passage that has been much commented on, the Sophist invites the boy to
step forward and to catch the dripping blood of the dying Menoikeus in
the fold of his garment (1.4.4).
Here the reader is confronted with his or
her distance from the scene and reminded that the scenes he or she sees
are in imagination.
It is with the image of Narcissus, with its concentration on the themes
of representation and illusion, that the impact is greatest. The whole Eikon
can be read as a meditation on the theme of illusion in the visual arts, as
the Sophist comments on a bee which may be painted or real that is
deceived (exapattheisa) by the painted flower on which it rests. Moving
on to the figure of Narcissus himself, enrapt by his own image, he starts
to address the young man directly, berating him for his absorption in the
image in the pool. By now we are used to this enthusiasm, this desire to
enter into the world of the painting; the Sophist has already invited the
boy to stretch out the fold of his garment to catch the blood of the dying
189
Menoikeus. But the mise en abme set up at the opening of Narcissus alerts
us to the irony of the situation: a man speaking to a painted youth, telling
him he is wasting his time on a mere image.
In a very similar passage in the Hunters (1.28) the Sophist interrupts
himself, observing that he has been deceived by the painting, but here he
simply observes that Narcissus cannot hear him because he is so absorbed
in the pool (and not because he is a fiction). The Sophist may be an
unselfconscious viewer, but Philostratos, who has staged the whole scene
within a scene, is drawing our attention to the seduction of illusion. With
those words, our own involvement in the scene as readers is disrupted if,
that is, we note the irony of a grown man speaking out loud to address a
painted boy and to tell him that his painted reflection cannot hear him. As
the Sophist continues his address to his internal audience with a catalogue
of details of Narcissus posture (and of the characteristics his hair does
not have) we cannot help but be aware of the fictitiousness of the whole
scene.
It is surely responses like that of the Sophist in front of Menoikeus or
Narcissus that the Younger Philostratos has in mind when he tells us in
the proem to his own Eikones that there is no shame in the deception (apat)
inherent in art, and that there is no harm in being in front of things which
do not exist as if they existed and being led by
them
to believe that they

exist. But these remarks apply equally to the readers own involvement in
the whole scene in the gallery, in the dynamic of communication between
non-existent Sophist and non-existent boy. Philostratos has written not just
ekphraseis of paintings, as his grandson said, but ekphraseis of the tropos,
the manner in which paintings are viewed. The definition of ekphrasis
as an evocation of an event, which draws us in and makes us feel as if we
were there helps to open up this aspect of a deceptively complex text.47
Philostratos work occupies a special place in that it is an example both
of ekphrasis in the ancient sense and in the modern sense: the foundation
text, in a way, for the modern definition of ekphrasis, as we saw in the
Introduction. It also has many points of contact with the pedagogical
tradition of the rhetorical schools: many of the texts illustrated in the
paintings are precisely the ones that would have been studied in the earlier
stages and Philostratos style in this text (his hermneia) is recommended
by Menander Rhetor as a model for certain types of speech.48 The
47
On the Eikones as fiction, see further: Duncan McCombie, Philostratus, Histoi,

Imagines, 2.28: ekphrasis and the web of illusion, in
Ja Elsner (ed.), The Verbal and the Visual:
Cultures of Ekphrasis in Antiquity = Ramus, 31 (2002): 14657; Ruth Webb, The Imagines as
fictional text: ekphrasis, apat and illusion, in M. Costantini et al. (eds), Le Dfi de lart:
Philostrate, Callistrate et limage sophistique (Rennes, 2006), pp. 11336.
48
190
conception of ekphrasis sketched out in the Progymnasmata can also alert

us to Philostratos achievement in evoking not the static contents of a
gallery that may or may not have existed, but in placing before our eyes a
depiction of a process of literal viewing, doubled by our own metaphorical
viewing of the scenes he places before our eyes.
Philostratos Eikones transcend in their sophistication the world of the
rhetorical handbooks and hint at the inadequacies of the discussions of
ekphrasis there. By placing an image of an image before our eyes, and
simultaneously disrupting that presence, Philostratos calls into question
the power that is so unproblematically ascribed to the word in their
definition of ekphrasis. In this, his work is comparable to the passages in
the Greek novels that comment on the paradoxes involved in the ekphrastic
project of placing before they eyes and explore the nature of the mental
images provoked and their relation to reality. It is not surprising if these
questions are largely ignored by the elementary Progymnasmata, but they
are implicit, as we saw at the beginning of this chapter, in some of the
recommendations of Menander Rhetor and in the practice of ekphrasis in
many different genres and contexts.
Ekphrasis and the Invisible
A further function of ekphrasis that is implicit in its rhetorical uses but
not explicitly discussed in the theoretical works is a development of the
idea of making absent things present. As we have seen above, ekphrasis
can be used to make visible to the minds eye features of a subject that
are invisible to the physical sense of sight such as a buildings history
or its spiritual significance. Not surprisingly, such uses of ekphrasis are
particularly frequent in Christian contexts, as Isabella Gualandri has
pointed out in relation to Latin poetry, and often serve to bring out the
spiritual qualities of a monument or work of art.49 There is no space in the
present volume to explore this phenomenon in the detail it deserves, but
one particular example deserves mention because of its close connection
to the progymnasmatic tradition with which we began. This is John
Chrysostoms use of ekphrasis in his autobiographical work On the
Priesthood in which he paints a picture (eikn) of a battle, as observed by
an innocent peasant boy, in order to convey to his reader his own state of
mind.50 Here, the visible is used as a means of expressing the invisible. The
49
Isabella Gualandri, Aspetti dellekphrasis in et tardo-antica, in Testo e immagine
nellalto medioevo (Spoleto, 1994), pp. 32841. See also Liz James, Art and lies: text, image and
imagination in the medieval world, in Antony Eastmond and Liz James (eds), Icon and Word:
The Power of Images in Byzantium (Aldershot, 2003), pp. 5972.
50
John Chrysostom, On the Priesthood, 6.12.
191
technique is close to that used by Chorikios in his eleventh declamation

to depict the cross-dressing generals state of mind and also takes us
back to the close link between imagination and emotion in Quintilian. In
Chrysostom, however, the priorities are different: rather than the image of
the event being used to provoke an emotive response to that event, here
the battle is merely a means of conveying the imperceptible and almost
ineffable: the speakers state of mind at a precise moment in the past.
Conclusion
The study of the ancient treatments of ekphrasis shows that it was

understood to be a type of speech that worked an immediate impact on
the mind of the listener, sparking mental images of the subjects it placed
before the eyes. As an elementary exercise, ekphrasis gave practice in this
type of speech, showing students how to expand the various elements of
a narration to make sure their listeners not only knew what happened
but felt as if they were witnesses themselves. The key to the nature and
function of ekphrasis is its defining quality of enargeia, the vividness
that makes absent things seems present by its appeal to the imagination.
Though enargeia is used frequently in genres such as historiography and
poetry, its effects can also be thoroughly rhetorical, helping the orator to
involve his audience (and himself) emotionally and imaginatively in the
subject of the speech and thus to promote their acceptance of the ideas
he is putting forward. When integrated into a full-scale speech, ekphrasis
served to involve the listener imaginatively and emotionally in the
events at issue, making them share the speakers indignation at a crime
or, in the more complex examples, altering their perception of a fact by
placing them in the situation of an eyewitness and making them share
that viewers experience. In this way, ekphrasis and enargeia underline the
emotive and communicative aspects of rhetorical discourse and the way
in which it involves the action of one mind upon another. In particular,
these rhetorical uses of ekphrasis demanded an active engagement from
the listener who was prompted by the speakers words to supply details,
such as the actions and events that preceded the scenes of devastation that
are a recurrent subject. In epideictic contexts, the effects of ekphrasis could
be particularly subtle, involving an interaction between the audiences
knowledge of an actual sight and the verbally induced mental image.
Works of rhetorical theory, such as the Progymnasmata or Quintilians
Institutio oratoria, can help reveal the assumptions that underpinned the
composition and reception of many ancient texts, assumptions that were
often too deeply rooted to need full articulation. In many ways, these works
are far from theoretical as they are strongly oriented towards practice, so
that the orators experience or received wisdom takes the place of explicit
analysis and exposition of the underlying ideas. In the case of ekphrasis,
one consequence of this lack of explicit theorization seems to have been that

See, in particular, Cham Perelman, LEmpire rhtorique: rhtorique et argumentation
(Paris, 1977), pp. 235.
194
the ideal end result of imaginative and emotional involvement could be

lost from sight. The manuals seem to have encouraged a certain formalistic
conception of ekphrasis as a detailed presentation that was not necessarily
vivid. At the same time, the habit of proposing all the concrete elements
of narration as subjects for ekphrasis encouraged the development of
ekphraseis of subjects such as places and persons as independent entities
rather than as elements of a narrative.
The category of ekphrasis thus overlaps in some cases both the modern
category of description and the category of descriptions of works of art
without, however, being coextensive with either group. Some ekphraseis
are of works of art; some are of objects presented as static interruptions
to narration (in Achilles Tatios novel in particular and at the end of
Heliodoros Aithiopika where our desire for closure is repeatedly frustrated
by ekphrasis). Many of these have fruitfully been analysed as such using
modern insights born of the study of the modern novel. But these are
not the defining examples of ekphrasis; rather, I would suggest that they
are often special cases that are used to reflect upon the conventions of
ekphrasis and to point out, as in the case of Philostratos, the questions that
lurk beneath the confident assertions of the handbooks.
Ekphrasis and Art
The category of ekphraseis of works of art may not have been central
to the definition of ekphrasis as it was conceived and discussed by
the rhetoricians, but the analogy with the visual arts, not to mention
the theatre, underlies the idea of ekphrasis and enargeia. As a type of
language which makes the listener see, an ekphrasis of any subject aims
theoretically to create an effect similar to that of a painting or sculpture.
The relationship between word and image in ekphrasis is thus mimetic
not in the sense of producing a copy of but in the sense that ekphrasis
acts like a painting. The analogy goes far further in that the audience
of an ekphrasis, like the viewer of a painting, can be required to supply
information from his or her knowledge of the narrative background. The
analogy with the visual arts also points towards the fictional nature of
the products of ekphrasis and enargeia: like painting, they may have the
power to create an illusion of presence, making the listeners feel as if
they were in the presence of their subjects, but this feeling of presence
is combined with an awareness of absence. An author like Philostratos
makes use of the idea of painted representation to dramatize and play
upon this combination of involvement and distance that is at the core of
the reception of both ekphrasis and painting. Ekphraseis of sculptures
raise similar questions, except that, in their case, the parallel tensions
between the medium and the subject represented, between stillness and
Conclusion
195
movement, the frozen moment and its wider context, are much more
emphatically present. Buildings form another prominent class of subject
matter for ekphrasis that is shared by both the ancient and some, at least,
of the modern definitions. Here, too, the visible details of the building can
be used to point towards the invisible attributes of the building, whether
the actions of the patron which the speaker wishes to associate with the
building or its unseen, spiritual qualities.
The Uses of Ekphrasis
The ancient definition may seem frustratingly vague and elusive, but its
interest lies precisely in this lack of formal precision. The identification of
any passage as an ekphrasis is only a first step in its analysis. Each case
needs to be studied in its context to reveal its particular qualities and its
function, and what is true of one ekphrasis will not necessarily be true of
another. Where the unity is to be found is in the underlying ideas and the
wider conceptions of reading, or the individuals relation to the word and
of the interaction between language, memory and imagination. The study
of ekphrasis and enargeia provides important information about ancient
habits of reading and deeply rooted attitudes towards texts, which are
seen as inviting imaginative and emotional involvement. These ancient
modes of reading can be surprisingly different to our own: in the case of
Thucydides history, ancient readers saw not a dispassionate and objective
account of events but a window onto the violent and turbulent events
of the past. In these rhetorically oriented readings, the text opens up to
the readers imagination: the words on the page dissolve into images as
they impact upon the mind. This does not mean that ekphraseis, or any
other type of ancient text, can only be read according to these ancient
frameworks, nor that modern insights into, say, description cannot be
fruitfully applied to individual examples far from it. But it does mean
that we cannot assume that ancient readers and writers shared our modes
of reading and our ways of categorizing texts. Sources like the humble
Progymnasmata provide precious insights into the practices that shaped
ancient and medieval writing and reading habits.
Simon Goldhill, What is ekphrasis for?, CP, 102 (2007): 56.
Appendix A
Translations
I. Translations of the Progymnasmata Chapters on Ekphrasis

Theon, Progymnasmata 118.6 120.11, ed. M. Patillon (Paris, 1997), pp. 66
69
118.6 Ekphrasis is a descriptive (perigmatikos) speech which vividly
(enargs) brings the subject shown before the eyes. An ekphrasis may be of
persons, and events and places and times. Of persons, as in the Homeric
passage: He was round-shouldered, dark-skinned, with curly hair and
the passage on Thersites: He had a pointed head, and was lame in one leg
and so on, and in Herodotus the appearance of the ibis, of hippopotami
and crocodiles in Egypt.
Of events, such as the ekphraseis of war, peace, a storm, famine, plague,
an earthquake.
Of places, such as a meadow, seashores, cities, islands, deserted places
and the like.
Of times, such as spring, summer, a festival and things of this sort.
There are also ekphraseis of the manner (tropos), such as those describing
the manner in which pieces of equipment or weapons or siege engines were
prepared, like the making of the arms [of Achilles] in Homer, or the blockade
(periteichismos) of Plataia and the construction of siege engines in Thucydides:
[beginning] they cut a long beam in two and hollowed it out completely
And in Book 9 of Ktesias: The Lydians, upon seeing at dawn from far
away the forms (eidla) of the Persians set up on long pieces of wood against
the ramparts were put to flight, since they believed that the acropolis was
full of Persians and had already been taken

All extracts from Theon, Progymnasmata, ed. M. Patillon (Paris, 1997) reprinted with
permission Les Belles Lettres.

Homer, Odyssey, 19.246.

Homer, Iliad, 2.219 and 217 (a composite).

Herodotos, 2.76; 71; 68.
Homer, Iliad, 18.468617.

Thucydides, 2.758.

Ibid., 4.100.

Ktesias, Persika, F9b, ed. Dominique Lenfant (Paris, 2004), p. 114.
198
An ekphrasis may also be of a mixed type, such as the night battles in

Thucydides and Philistos, for night is a time (kairos) while the battle is an
event (praxis).
This exercise has a certain affinity with the previous one [i.e. (koinos)
topos]: they are alike in that they are both concerned with subjects which
are not defined, but are common and general. They differ, however,
firstly in that the topos is concerned with the results of deliberate intention
(proairesis), while ekphrasis is mostly concerned with inanimate things
which are not the result of deliberate intention; secondly in that in the
common place when we relate (apangell) the subject matter (pragmata) we
also set forth our own opinion, declaring it to be either good or bad, while
in ekphrasis the relating of the subject (pragmata) is simple.10
In ekphraseis of events (pragmata) we will deal with (epicheire) what
preceded, what happened during the event and the consequences; for
example, in the case of a war we will first go through what occurred
before the war, the enlisting of troops, the expenditure, peoples fears, the
ravaged countryside, the sieges, then the wounds, deaths and mourning,
and after all this the capture and enslavement of one side and the victory
and trophies of the other. If we are composing ekphraseis of places or
times or manners (tropoi) or persons, we will find starting points for our
discourse in the narration (digsis) about them, and from the beautiful,
from the useful, and from the pleasant, just as Homer does with the arms
of Achilles, when he says that they were fine and strong and that the sight
of them amazed his allies and terrified the enemy.11
The virtues of ekphrasis are the following: above all clarity (saphneia)
and the vividness (enargeia) which makes one almost see what is being
spoken about (ta apangellomena); then one should avoid speaking at great
length about useless things (achrsta); in general one should fit the language
(apangelia) to the subject (ta hupokeimena), so that if the subject shown (to
dloumenon) is flowery, the style (phrasis) should also be flowery, but if
it is harsh or frightening or anything else, the qualities of the language
(hermneia) should not be inappropriate to the nature of the subject.
Some people think that we should practise ekphrasis by refuting and
confirming the ekphraseis composed (literally spoken) by certain authors,
saying, for example, that Herodotos was mistaken about the appearance
of the ibis when he said they have white feathers except on their heads
and neck and the end of their tail, because the tail is completely white. But
I do not think that they are saying anything different from what I have

Thucydides, 2.25 and 7.434. Theon varies his vocabulary here, using kairos instead
of chronos and praxis for the related pragma.
10
v v v v .
11
See, for example, Homer, Iliad, 19.1218; 22.13135 and 31221.
APPENDIX A
199
already said, as I think that this type of exercise falls into the category of
refutations and confirmations of narratives (digseis).
.
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200
,
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.
Ps.-Hermogenes, on ekphrasis from Progymnasmata, in Opera, ed. Hugo Rabe
(Leipzig: Teubner, 1913), pp. 223
22 Ekphrasis is a descriptive speech, as they say, which is vivid and brings
the subject shown before the eyes.
There are ekphraseis of persons, events, states of affairs (kairoi), places,
times (chronoi) and many other things; of persons, as in Homer: he was
bandy-legged and lame in one leg ;12 of events such as an ekphrasis of
a land battle or sea battle; of states of affairs such as peace, war; of places
such as harbours, seashores, cities; of times such as spring, summer,
festival time.
There may also be mixed ekphraseis, like the night battle in Thucydides;
for night is a time (kairos) while the battle is an event (praxis).
In ekphraseis of events we will deal with what preceded them and
what happened in them and the consequences; [23] for example, if we are
pronouncing an ekphrasis of a war we will first tell what happened before
the war, the enlisting of troops, the expenditure, the peoples fears, then
the military engagements, the slaughter, the deaths, then the trophy, then
the victory songs of the victors, and the tears and the enslavement of the
other side. If we are describing places or times (chronoi) or persons, we
will find some justification (logos) both from the narrative and from the
beautiful or the useful or the unexpected.
The virtues of ekphrasis are above all clarity and vividness (enargeia);
for the expression (hermneia) should almost bring about sight through the
sense of hearing. One should also make the style (phrasis) like the subject
matter (pragma): if the subject is flowery, the language should be the same;
if the subject is harsh the language should be likewise.
One should note that some of the more rigorous authorities (akribesteroi)
did not make ekphrasis into an exercise on the grounds that it is already
included in fable, narration, common place and enkmion; for, they
say, there too we describe places and rivers13 and events and persons.
12
Iliad, 2.217.
An odd subject to single out here. Rabe suggests kairoi or chronoi.
13
APPENDIX A
201
Nevertheless, since some good authorities (ou phauloi) counted this as

one of the exercises, I too have followed their example, thus avoiding the
accusation of idleness.
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[p. 23]
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Aphthonios, Progymnasmata, ed. H. Rabe (Leipzig, 1926)
36 Ekphrasis is a descriptive speech bringing the subject vividly before
the eyes.
[37] Subjects of ekphrasis are persons and events, times (kairoi) and places,
mute animals and, in addition to these, plants: persons as in Homer
round-shouldered, dark-skinned, with curly hair;14 events such as sea
battles and infantry battles, as in the Historian [Thucydides]; times such
as spring and summer, saying how many flowers appear during them;
places as when Thucydides himself tells of Cheimerion, the harbour of the
14
Homer, Odyssey, 19.246.
202
Thesprotians, according to its layout (schma).15 In describing persons we

should go from the first things to the last, that is, from head to toe; events
from the things that happened before them, during them and what tends
to result from them; times and places from the surroundings and what
occurs in them.
Some ekphraseis are simple, others mixed; simple such as those
relating (diexerchomai) infantry battles or sea battles, mixed such as those
combining events and times, as Thucydides describes (ekphrazei) the night
battle in Sicily;16 for along with his account of how the battle was fought
he also defined what it was like at night.
When describing we must produce the relaxed (aneimenos) style [38]
and vary it with different figures and completely imitate (apomimeisthai)
the things described.
.
[p. 37]
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,
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[p. 38]

.
Nikolaos, Progymnasmata, ed. J. Felten (Leipzig, 1913), pp. 6771
67 Some people place ekphrasis immediately after synkrisis, explaining
that the order of the progymnasmata is indifferent (adiaphoros) as different
people arrange them in different ways, and there is nothing to prevent
ekphrasis being practised as an exercise immediately [68] after synkrisis,
for we have already pointed out that it is permissible to use a relaxed
15
Thucydides, 1.46.
Thucydides, 7.425.
16
APPENDIX A
203
(aneimenos) style in synkrisis and, as we are taught (paradedotai) that the

same type of style (apangelia) is used more in this exercise [i.e. ekphrasis],
it is reasonable that ekphrasis should follow synkrisis. This is what others
write, but, in accordance with the usual practice, I have placed thopoiia
after synkrisis and ekphrasis after this and say: ekphrasis is an expository
[aphgmatikos] speech which vividly brings the subject before the eyes.
Vividly (enargs) is added because it is in this respect that ekphrasis
differs most from digsis. The latter sets out the events plainly, while the
former tries to make the listeners into spectators.
We compose ekphraseis of places, seasons (chronoi), persons, festivals,
events: places such as meadows, harbours, marshes and the like; seasons
such as spring, summer; persons such as priests, Thersites and the like;
festivals such as the Panathenaia, the Dionysia and what is done during
them; and we will use this exercise generally for many things (pros polla).
It [ekphrasis] differs from digsis in this respect: the latter sets out the
subject generally (ta katholou) while the former goes into details (kata meros).
So, for example, it is characteristic of digsis [69] to say the Athenians and
the Peloponnesians went to war, but it is characteristic of an ekphrasis to
say that each side made this or that type of preparation and used this or
that manner (tropos) of equipment.
We must, particularly when we describe statues for example, or
paintings or things of this sort, try to add reasons (logismoi) why the
painter or sculptor depicted things in certain ways, such as, for example,
that he depicted the character as angry from such and such a cause (aitia)
or happy, or we will mention some other emotion resulting from the story
about the person being described. Reasons contribute greatly to enargeia
in other types of ekphrasis too.
We will begin from first things and then come to the last, so that
if we have a bronze man or painted man or whatever is the subject of
the ekphrasis we will start from the head and go through the details in
order (epi ta kata meros). For thus the speech becomes lively (empsuchos)
throughout.
There being five sections of a speech, as I have frequently [70] said
prooemion, narration, antithesis, lusis, epilogue ekphrasis will prepare us
for the narrative section except in that it does not give a plain exposition
(psil aphgsis) but makes use of those elements that create enargeia and
bring the subjects of the speech before the eyes and almost make the
audience into spectators.17
There being three genres [of oratory], I mean the judicial, epideictic and
deliberative, the use of this exercise will be found in all of them. For when
17
The contrast is again between the plain style of narration, for which the exercise of
digma provided a preparation and the vivid style in which ekphrasis gave practice.
204
we are advising we often need to describe whatever it is we are speaking

about in order to be more persuasive, and when speaking in accusation or
defence we need the amplification which ekphrasis provides; moreover,
in epideictic speeches, it is sufficient for the ekphrasis to create a feeling of
pleasure (hdon) in the people sitting in the audience (theatra).
For the most part, this exercise is one of those which are used as parts
[of a speech]. But nothing would prevent it from sometimes being made
sufficient in itself for a complete subject, although for the most part it is
one of the parts [of a speech].
We need a variety of styles for it, for it is necessary to fit the type of
style (apangelia) to the subject matter, when we are speaking sweetly or
lamenting disasters [71] or generally presenting some other emotion
(pathos). On occasion we only want to inspire a feeling of happiness
(euthumia); at other times we want to arouse indignation (deinsai) and to
amplify the subject, as when Demosthenes in On the False Embassy tries to
bring the suffering of Phokis before the eyes through his speech.18

,
[p. 68]
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18
Demosthenes, 19.65.
APPENDIX A
205

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II. Extracts from the Byzantine Commentaries on Aphthonios Sardianos,
Commentarium in Aphthonii Progymnasmata
On the definition (p. 216, l. 8 p. 217, l. 5):
Perigmatikos: Instead of as in a painting (graphikos), surveying
(periodeutikos), giving a detailed account (diexodikos); as if seeming to go
around in the speech and as if showing; just as if someone took a recent
arrival in Athens and guided him around the city, showing him the
gymnasia, the Peiraeus and each of the rest [of the sights]; metaphorically,
therefore, the speech which relates (aphgeomai) everything in order,
relating to both the action and the person and showing [it] in detail is
called perigmatikos.
206
Hup opsin agn: Instead of making manifest (phaneron), bringing the

subject vividly before the eyes by detailed presentation (kata meros); for
the clarity (saphneia) of the speech makes the listeners imagine (noein) and
see (blepein) the subject. Alternatively, hup opsin as if less distinctly; for
one provides a pure vision (katharan thean), while the other [provides] a
plain impression (tupos) and mental representation (phantasia) of the thing
(pragma);19 for even if the speech were ten thousand times vivid, it would
be impossible to bring before the eyes the thing shown or described itself.
He said vividly on account of narration, because narration is composed
in a condensed manner (pachumers) while ekphrasis is composed in a
detailed manner (leptomers). So a vivid speech is one that is clear and
pure and as if alive (empnous); for, by the word alone, it all but makes one
see what one has never seen, imitating the painters art.
. , ,
,
,
,
<>
.
. ,

.
20 ,
,
. ,
, ,
,
.
At the end of his discussion of Aphthonios remarks on style, Sardianos
adds (p. 224, l. 21 p. 225, l. 4):
Theon says that the virtues of ekphrasis are clarity and vividness that
makes one almost see the subject; for that which is very plain to the
19
This extremely intriguing sentence is unfortunately unclear and may be corrupt. The
distinction appears to be drawn between direct perception on the one hand and the tupos
kai phantasia on the other, but it is unclear how this distinction is thought to relate to the
definition of ekphrasis.
20
Rabe prints in his text. I have adopted the tentative suggestion made in the
apparatus criticus.
APPENDIX A
207
senses (lian phaneron) and lies before the eyes is vivid; if then the speech
is clear and vivid, it almost transfers its subject from the sense of hearing
into the eyes; for the speech, in contemplating (thern) the things shown,
traces (hupographei) the impression (tupon) of it for (or with) the eyes and
paints the truth for (or with) the imagination (phantasia).21

,

.
Anonymous scholia to Aphthonios, in Walz, Rhetores graeci, 2

On the place of ekphrasis in the sequence and its relation to digma (p. 55, ll.
816):
There being three types of digsis, simple (haplous), confirmatory
(enkataskeuos) and elaborate (endiaskeuos), [the exercise of] digma gives us
practice in the first two, while ekphrasis gives us practice in the elaborate
type. It should, since it is related to digma, be placed immediately after
that exercise, but because it is one of the more advanced and more complex
exercises and concerns the same subjects as enkmion, psogos, synkrisis and
thopoiia that is to say, persons and events, times (kairoi) and places and
the like, it is reasonable to place it alongside them.
, , ,
,

,
, ,
, .
Doxapatres, Homiliae in Aphthonii Progymnasmata, in Walz, Rhetores
graeci, 2, Introduction (on the place of ekphrasis in the sequence and its relation
to narration) (p. 509, l. 5 p. 510, l. 9):
Some people think ekphrasis should be placed immediately after digma
because it, too, is an element (topos) of the narrative mode (to digmatikon).
For they also say that because there are three types of digsis, simple
(haplous), confirmatory (enkataskeuos) and elaborate (endiaskeuos), [the
exercise of] digma gives us practice in the first two, while ekphrasis
21
Another tantalizing and obscure passage.
208
gives us practice in the final one, the elaborate type. Others place it after
common place;22 however, Aphthonios and the more accurate authorities
among his predecessors place it after thopoiia. For if ekphrasis is to be
placed alongside digma because it is of the narrative type, then thesis
and the introduction of a law should be placed before common place, if,
at any rate, they belong to the argumentative section while common place
belongs to the epilogue. At all events, even if both of these, that is digma
and ekphrasis, contribute to the narrative sections of speeches (digseis),
it is nevertheless the case that since digma contributes to the plainer and
simpler kinds (tropoi) of narration these would be the ones that relate the
events (pragmata) in a condensed form (pachumers) it has been placed
earlier since it is easier. Ekphrasis, by contrast, has been placed much later
[in the sequence] since it is more complex and requires greater mastery
(hexis) in as much as it gives us practice in the more complex kind of
narration, the elaborate one (endiaskeuos).
Hermogenes in his book On Invention deals with narrations and
the kinds of narration and explains how to compose the confirmatory
(enkataskeuos) and the simple (haplous) kind but does not explain the
expansion (platusmos) of the elaborate narration at the same time, but
rather at the end of the third book.23 In just the same way, Aphthonios
places many other exercises after the exercise of digma that prepares
us partly for the simple kind of narration, because the events are told in
condensed form, and partly for the confirmatory kind, because of the use
of both the cause and other elements of narration, before finally coming to
ekphrasis, which belongs to the elaborate type.

. , ,
, , ,
, .
24 ,
o. ,
,
.
, . ,
,

, ,
. ,
Walz prints ovv ov.
Ps.-Hermogenes, On Invention, 2 and 3.15.
24
Walz prints . I have emended this to .
22
23
APPENDIX A
209
.
, .

[510] ,
, ,
,
,
,
,
.
Examples of simple and elaborate (endiaskeuos) narrations: Anonymous, Peri
tn tessarn mern tou teleiou logou, Walz, Rhetores graeci, 3, p. 576, l. 21
p. 578, l. 5
There are three ways to write narratives: simple, elaborate (endiaskeuos),
and confirmatory (enkataskeuos). The simple narrative is the one that just
sets out the facts in a plain manner and obviously without adornment.
The elaborate narrative is the ekphrastic one that recounts everything in
detail and all but brings the actions before the eyes while the confirmatory
is the one that gives the causes for the actions and states the reason for
each thing that occurred. The writer (zgraphos) will use each and every
one of these at the right moment: the simple one when it is the time for
an unaffected (apheleia) and truth-like style; the elaborate in debates and
when amplifying the subjects. You can even combine the confirmatory
with the elaborate type whenever you wish to bring the subject before the
eyes and to amplify it. However, the plain narrative is not mixed with the
others as it is not possible for the same thing to be both plain and complex
(poikilos).
In the case of the preliminary exercise of narration, for the most part
the rhetoricians recommend that it should be simple; however, it is not
unreasonable to introduce more complexity on occasion and expand it to
provide a more challenging exercise in rhetoric. So then, as an example I
will give you a narrative presented in three ways; let this be the story of
the madness of Ajax.
The plain narrative:
Ajax, having been defeated in the contest for the arms of Achilles, was
angry with the victor, Odysseus, and plotted his revenge against the sons
of Atreus who had made the choice. During the night he advanced on
them with hostile intent, his sword at the ready, but Athena confused both
his mind and his sight, and the hero fell upon the flocks and stabbed some
210
as if they were men and drove the others to his tent and, after whipping
them severely, killed them. Finally, having recovered from his madness,
he sentenced himself to death by his own hand.
The elaborate narrative:
Ajax, having been defeated in the contest for the arms of Achilles, carried
a burning rage in his heart against those who had awarded the prize to
the man from Ithaka, the sons of Atreus. He indicated (mnuei) his inner
feelings by his wild appearance, by the ruthless and hot-blooded look in
his eyes as well as by his fast and deep breathing. During the night he set
out against them, his sword in his hand, a sword that was sharp, a sword
that was shining, glinting in the darkness of the night. He moved at one
moment with stealthy control and at the next he moved quickly in his
rage long was the stride of the gigantic hero but Athena diverted both
his mind and his eyes, darkness fell on his inner and his outer vision. The
night stalker fell upon the flocks fold and cut down the dumb animals
as if they were men; one he slashed in two, another he pierced through;
the head of another he separated from the body, into the belly of another
he plunged his sword; here were streams of blood, there spilled guts,
everywhere piles of corpses; here, those that were still breathing tried to
leap away but the fold stopped them, the wolf was inside, the guard dogs
slept soundly, they were soon avenged, the hero, recovering his senses,
fell, becoming the victim of his own sword.25
, ,
,

,
,
,
,

,
[p. 577] ,

,

,
.
25
There follows an example of a confirmatory, enkataskeuos, narration in which reasons
are given for each part of the action.
APPENDIX A
211

,
, ,
, ,
,
.

, ,
, ,
,
, , ,
,
, ,
, ,
, ,
, ,
,
[p. 578] , ,
, ,
, ,
.
Appendix B
Subjects for Ekphrasis
Asterisk indicates that the category is unique to the author.

Theon:
Pragmata:
Prospa:
Topoi:
Chronoi:
*Tropoi:
a battle, peace, a storm, a famine, plague, earthquake.

Eurybates, Homer, Odyssey, 19.246; Thersites, Homer,
Iliad, 2.219 and 217; animals from Herodotos account of
Egypt (2.76; 71 and 68).
meadows, shores, cities, a wilderness.
periods marked off by nature (spring, summer) or
culture (festivals).
The Making of the Shield of Achilles (Homer, Iliad, 18);
Thucydides account of the fortification of Plataia and
the construction of a (siege) machine (2.758 and 4.100);
and Ktesias 9 (a strategy involving effigies).
Ps.-Hermogenes:
Prospa:
Pragmata:
Kairoi:
Topoi:
Chronoi:
description of Thersites, Homer, Iliad, 2.217.

land battle and sea battle.
peacetime, war.
harbours, seashores, cities.
spring, summer, festival time.
Aphthonios:
Prospa:
Pragmata:
description of Eurybates, Homer, Odyssey, 19.246.

sea battle, infantry battle (as in the Historian, i.e.
Thucydides).
Kairoi:
spring and summer.
Topoi: Thucycides description of the harbour of Cheimerion,
1.46.
*Aloga za, phuta:
no examples.
214
Nikolaos:
Topoi:
Chronoi:
Prospa:
*Pangureis:
meadows, harbours, marshes and the like.

spring, summer.
priests, Thersites and the like.
the Panathenaia, the Dionysia and what happens during
them.
Pragmata:
no examples.
*Statues and paintings: no examples.
Other Examples of Ekphrasis from Handbooks Related to the Teaching of the

Progymnasmata
Theon:
Nikolaos:
Doxapatres:
passages mentioned in Theons preliminary discussion

of how to teach ekphrasis in his introduction: plague
in Thucydides, 2.4757; (an event) the fortification
of Plataia, 3.21; (places) Sais in Plato, Timaeus, 21e
25d, Ekbatana in Herodotos, 1.98 (Theon mistakenly
places this passage in Book 2 [Theon, p. 128, n. 78]),
Theopompos on valley of Tempe; Philistos, Dionysios
war preparations against the Carthaginians (Book 8)
and funeral procession (Book 11).
destruction of Phokis in Demosthenes, 19.65.
cites the text of Thucydides, 2.79 as an example of a land
battle and 2.83 as an example of a sea battle.
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on Greekness: Viewing the Greek Past under the Roman Empire (Cambridge:
Cambridge Philological Society, 2006), pp. 2746.
Webb, Ruth, The Imagines as fictional text: ekphrasis, apat and illusion,
in M. Costantini et al. (eds), Le Dfi de lart: Philostrate, Callistrate et
limage sophistique (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2006), pp.
11336.
Webb, Ruth, The model ekphraseis of Nikolaos the Sophist as memory
images, in Michael Grnbart (ed.), Theatron: Rhetorische Kultur in
Sptantike und Mittelalter (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2007), pp. 46375.
Whitmarsh, Tim, The writes of passage: cultural initiation in Heliodorus
Aethiopica, in Richard Miles (ed.), Constructing Identities in Late Antiquity
(London: Routledge, 1999).
Whitmarsh, Tim, Greek Literature and the Roman Empire (Oxford: Oxford
Whitmarsh, Tim, Written on the body: ekphrasis, perception and deception
in Heliodorus Aethiopica, in
Ja Elsner (ed.), The Verbal and the Visual:

Cultures of Ekphrasis in Antiquity = Ramus, 31, 12 (2002):
11125.
Winkler, John J., The mendacity of Kalasiris and the narrative strategy of
Heliodorus Aithiopika, Yale Classical Studies, 27 (1982): 93158.
Winterbottom, Michael, Schoolroom and courtroom, in Brian Vickers
(ed.), Rhetoric Revalued (Binghampton: Center for Medieval and Early
Renaissance Studies, 1982).
Yates, Frances, The Art of Memory (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1966).
Zanker, Graham, Enargeia in the ancient criticism of poetry, RhMus, 124
(1981): 297311.
Zanker, Graham, Realism in Alexandrian Poetry: A Literature and Its Audience
(London: Croom Helm, 1987).
Zanker, Graham, New light on the ekphrastic epigram, ZPE, 143
(2003): 5962.
Zeitlin, Froma I., The artful eye: vision, ekphrasis and spectacle in
Euripidean theatre, in Simon Goldhill and Robin Osborne (eds), Art
232
and Text in Ancient Greek Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1994), pp. 13896.
Zeitlin, Froma I., 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: Cambridge
Index
Achilles 23, 40 n.4, 43; see also Shield

of Achilles
Achilles Tatios, Leukippe and Kleitophon
168, 178180, 181, 183185, 194
actor, orator compared to 100, 104,
1756
Ailios Aristeides 65, 147
Egyptian Oration 180
Letter to the Emperors 1613, 171
Rhodian Oration 159
Smyrnaean Oration 174
On Rome 174 n.18
Aeschines 25, 153
3.157: 74 n.36, 114
aitia (cause) 63, 645, 82, 181, 203
Ajax 43, 66, 68, 69, 72, 823, 20911
Alexander 15, 142, 1489, 151, 174
amplification 76, 778, 93 n.16, 131,
152, 155, 164, 16970, 204
anaskeu see refutation
aphgmatikos 51, 55, 58, 76, 203
Aphthonios 14, 44, 46, 48, 5052, 556,
579, 612, 64, 66, 7981, 127,
136, 156, 2012
Apsines 74 n.36, 163 n.97
Aristotle 134, 136
On Memory and Recollection
449b450a 11112, 114
Poetics 1455a 97
Rhetoric 1411b 26, 51, 85; 1417a 68
On the Soul 427b 110 n.10, 112, 114;
432a 128
Attic dialect 14, 15, 1718, 39
Augustine 16
De Rhetorica 64 n.10
De Trinitate 119, 1212, 161, 183
auxsis 76, 131, 155; see also
amplification
Barthes, Roland 13, 68, 124
battles
inepideictic 164
as subject of ekphrasis inthe
Progymnasmata 5658, 62, 139
Bemarchios 1256, 130
buildings see ekphrasis
Callistratus see Kallistratos
character, depiction of 15, 22, 43, 68,
823, 92, 121, 123, 130, 132, 153,
176, 182, 184, 203
Cicero 21, 91, 923, 94, 100101,
107110, 123, 148, 153, 179, 187
circumstantia see peristaseis
city, description of 545, 61, 734,
913, 96, 109, 11415, 1212,
124, 128, 142, 145, 1489, 1557,
159, 16063, 170, 174, 179, 205
common place see koinos topos
competence, cultural 110, 1245
confirmation (elementary exercise) 43,
45, 48, 78, 80, 199
Constantius 125, 159, 164 n.100, 182
n.37
crocodiles 9, 61, 180, 181, 197
declamation 4, 10, 13, 15, 1617, 19,
256, 80, 100, 12930, 1313
ekphrasis in74, 78, 85, 139152
and fiction 1545, 1757
relation to Progymnasmata 479
deinsis 76, 99100, 131
deliberative oratory 4, 51, 76, 80, 129,
131, 142, 1445, 203
Demetrios, On Style 75 n.42, 923
Demosthenes 25, 63, 11516
indeclamation 15, 26, 142, 1489,
151, 155, 176
Or. 18.169171: 89, 90
234
Or. 19.65: 51 n.51, 74, 76, 89, 100

n.32, 11415, 1523, 204
Or. 24.208: 101 n.35
descriptio 9, 51, 75, 87
description 79, 62, 669, 70, 74, 846,
1056, 124, 129, 138, 194
diagraph 51
diagraph 77, 156, 157, 159
diaskeu 72, 74 n.36, 102 n.41, 140
n.31, 142, 143, 144, 162; see also
endiaskeuos
diatupsis 512, 55 n. 67, 65 n.14, 72,
74 n.36, 77, 89 n.6, 93 n.16, 100,
101 n.35, 112, 126, 142, 143, 156,
158, 162, 171
digsis (narration) 42, 54, 55, 6367,
7078, 82, 85, 138, 184, 198, 203,
207; see also peristaseis
Dio Chrysostom 22, 134 n.12, 136, 156
n.73
Dionysios of Halikarnassos
On Imitation 39, 57
Letter to Pompeios Geminos 39
Lysias 22, 24, 912, 124
Dionysios of Halikarnassos, ps.
On Epideictic 478, 133, 137, 1578
On Mistakes inDeclamation 845,
13941, 1545
Doxapatres 44, 6970, 81 n.58, 127,
2079
dreams 95, 104, 116, 122 n.53, 128 n.69,
170, 178
education 1417, 25, 4042, 45,
479, 845, 126, 139; see also
declamation; grammar;
Progymnasmata
eikos 83, 102 n.41, 168
ekphrasis
of buildings 1, 2, 11, 33, 58, 62, 81,
1557, 1745, 195
and digsis 6272, 758, 85
and enkmion 7881, 137
of festivals 56, 61, 64, 789, 137,
157, 184, 197, 200, 203, 213
and interpretation 58, 756, 83,
14554, 1745
and koinos topos, 50, 7678, 1267

modern definition of 13, 59, 11,
2838
inthe novel 17885
of persons 61, 62, 66, 76, 812, 92,
127, 138, 1578, 17071, 178
n.28
and persuasion 14355, 160164
as rhetorical technique 846, 165
of storms 65, 139, 142, 1468,
1545, 1767, 179, 197, 213
theory and practice 1389
of the tropos 645, 67, 6972, 82,
174, 1812, 189, 1978
of works of art 46, 55, 62, 814,
1723,18590,1945
see also battles; declamation;
enargeia; epideictic; fiction;
kairos; painting; poetry
enargeia 5, 10, 14, 212, 26, 27, 38, 48,
51, 523, 59, 704, 813, 87130,
13840, 142, 145, 149, 1513
and argumentation 1234
and emotion 88, 90, 94101
and fiction 179, 1845
inhistoriography 20, 14041
as illusion 1689
inpoetry 223
endiaskeuos (elaborate) 66, 712, 74,
78, 137 n.24, 207210; see also
diaskeu
energeia 26, 856
enkataskeuos (confirmatory) 66,
207210; see also kataskeu
epibatrios logos (Speech of Arrival)
156, 169
epideictic 4, 1011, 15, 40, 46, 47
9,1337, 167
ekphrasis in55, 69, 76, 7881, 99,
15564, 16975, 182, 2034
epithalamios 157; see also wedding
speech
Erinyes see Furies
thopoiia 43, 142, 144, 176, 188, 203,
207, 208
thos 21, 82; see also character
Euripides 31
Index
Hippolytos 1201, 180
Orestes 97, 113
explicatio 51, 75, 147 n.53, 153 n.67
fiction 104, 120
declamation and 15, 1545, 1757
ekphrasis and 10, 756, 1689,
17885, 1879, 194
see also plasma
Friedlnder, Paul 11, 313
funeral oration see monody
Furies 97, 102, 116, 118, 169, 183
gamlios logos 157; see also wedding
speech
Gautier, Thophile 29, 34
Gorgias 5, 111
grammar, teaching of 423, 85
Hamon, Philippe 74, 1056, 124; see
also description
Heliodoros, Aithiopika 168, 178,
18183, 18485, 188
Hermogenes 4 n.9, 13, 14, 40
On Issues 131, 132, 1545
commentaries on 133, 142, 144,
145, 155
On Types of Style 57, 65, 132, 142,
147
Hermogenes, ps.
On Invention 66, 72, 132
Progymnasmata 44, 46, 50, 51, 56,
578, 62, 64, 65, 66, 75, 767, 79,
200201
Herodes Attikos 15
Herodotos 20, 58, 63, 180, 198
Hippolytos 180; see also Euripides
historiography 1, 32, 42, 63, 73, 90,
101, 103, 129, 140141, 154;
see also Herodotos, Ktesias,
Philistos, Theopompos,
Thucydides, Xenophon
Homer 18, 23, 34, 37, 40, 54, 63, 120,
130, 180, 197, 200, 201; see also
Shield of Achilles
Horace, Ars Poetica 67, 100
235
hupotupsis 77, 100, 112, 126; see also

diatupsis
image, mental see phantasia;
visualization
John Chrysostom 190191
John Sardianos, 27, 44, 52, 53, 54, 57,
65, 80, 81, 83, 2047
Julian 159, 164 n.100, 182
kairos 56, 61, 62, 64, 198, 200, 201, 207,
213
Kallistratos 6, 32, 35, 82, 187
kataskeu see confirmation
kephalaion 48, 169; see also telika
kephalaia
kltikos logos (invitation speech) 1567,
1601, 170
koinos topos 43, 47, 50, 768, 113, 1267,
158
Ktesias 69, 197, 213
language
as force 23, 98100, 107, 1289
and phantasia 88, 937, 11315,
117121
see also Attic; grammar
Libanios 1516, 41 n.10, 43, 44,
Autobiography (Or. 1) 1256
Enkmion of the Kalends (Or. 9) 137
model ekphraseis 6 n.12, 46, 56,
612, 68, 7881, 83, 84, 112, 121
n.50, 137, 138, 139
model enkmia 79
Monody for the Temple of Apollo (Or.
60) 159
Longinos (ps), On the Sublime 20,
223, 968, 1012, 107, 115118,
129, 132, 142, 145, 155, 165, 167,
168
Longos, Daphnis and Chloe 178
Lucian 14, 18 n.17, 19, 289, 3031, 117
n.37
The Dream 14 n.4, 16
Eikones 2021
Enkmion of the Fly 79
236
The Hall (De Domo) 6, 134, 1724

On Mourning 171 n.12
True History 11920
Tyrannicide 144, 145
On Writing History 67, 14041
Lysias 22, 85, 89, 90, 912,1234;
see also Dionysios of
Halikarnassos
madness 104, 116, 118, 176, 20910
Marcus Aurelius 1613
melet see declamation
memory 10, 889, 110113, 119123,
154, 158, 159, 161, 163, 165, 167,
16972, 174, 180, 185
memory techniques 25, 11011
Menander Rhetor 4, 14, 40, 52, 113,
131, 1336, 155164, 169172,
189, 190
metaphor
Aristotle on 85
indefinition of ekphrasis 556, 93
metastasis (transference of blame) 100,
146, 148
metathesis (change intime) 100101
mimesis 55, 119 n.46, 1278
monody (brief speech of lamentation)
159, 160, 1702
Nikolaos,
Progymnasmata 14, 445, 50, 512,
534, 55, 56, 58, 61, 62, 745, 77,
78, 104, 113, 114, 138,152, 158,
2025
on ekphraseis of works of art
46, 55, 65, 824
on ekphrasis and digsis
(narration) 7073, 88
on the function of ekphrasis
48, 76, 99, 131, 144
model ekphraseis 46, 612, 823,
139, 1867
orality 5, 9, 40, 69 n.26, 98, 129
painting see ekphrasis of works of art
as analogy for ekphrasis 278,

834, 96, 1034, 139, 154, 1789,
186, 194, 205, 206
as analogy for memory 112,
119121
incourtroom 89
indeclamation 150
pathos 82, 100, 148, 204
Paul the Silentiary 2, 31, 156, 174
Pausanias 2, 7, 54
peacock 47 n.38, 79, 134, 174
perigsis 545, 75, 174
peristaseis (elements of narration)
635, 69, 79, 81, 91, 138, 155; see
also pragma
persuasion, 10, 13, 48, 75 n.43, 105,
130165
phantasia 27, 52, 88, 9397, 99, 1012,
104, 107130 passim, 140, 155,
158, 165, 206, 207
inStoic philosophy 114118, 119,
167
phantasma 27, 122, 183
inAristotelian philosophy 11112,
114, 115, 118
inStoic philosophy 116, 118, 1834
Philistos 39, 57, 63, 198, 214
Philostratos
Eikones, 2, 67, 21, 28, 3035, 36, 81,
173, 18790, 194
Life of Apollonios 119 n.46
Lives of the Sophists 1415, 133, 136,
1612
pithanon 48, 168
plasma 120, 169, 180; see also fiction
Plato 55, 57, 119 n.46, 214
Plutarch 19 n.19, 20, 25, 99 n.27, 103,
129, 149
Plutarch, ps 18 n.18, 112, 120
poetry 72, 89, 130, 14041, 154
descriptions of works of art in13,
36
ekphrasis in4, 190
enargeia in223, 40, 8990, 95, 979,
1012, 129, 193
inthe Progymnasmata 28, 49, 845,
141
Index
Polemo 136, 156, 177
pragma 61, 63, 64, 678, 72, 75, 79 n.52,
91, 111, 138, 142, 155, 181, 198,
200, 206, 208, 213
presbeutikos logos (Ambassadors
Speech) 160, 162
Progymnasmata
nature of 1719, 412, 456, 489
order of 4950
relation to fullscale speeches
479, 137
inrhetorical curriculum 423, 459,
62
see also Aphthonios, confirmation,
ekphrasis, thopoiia, ps.
Hermogenes, koinos topos,
Libanios, Nikolaos, refutation,
Theon
Prokopios of Caesarea 156, 1745
proof (inoratory) 8990, 137, 141, 152,
163, 164, 165, 175
Quintilian, 34, 10, 14, 267, 46, 48, 78,
87130 passim, 131
Institutio oratoria
1.9: 43
2.4.3: 85
2.4.26: 83
2.4.289: 137 n.22
2.10.8: 176
4.2.34: 103
4.2.635: 103, 168
6.1.30: 90
6.1.3132: 89, 94
6.1.3742: 107
6.2.268: 100, 104
6.2.2930: 95, 102, 104, 121, 168
6.2.33: 97
6.2.35: 100, 104
6.2.36: 104
8.3.62: 26, 98
8.3.63: 92
8.3.645: 212, 24, 107110
8.3.66: 91, 1089, 153
8.3.679: 724, 88, 93, 99, 142,
148
8.3.71: 109
237
9.2.401: 100
11.2: 25 n.36, 110
Quintilian [?]
Major Declamations 150
Minor Declamations 143 n 40
reading 1726, 28, 96, 1823, 195
refutation (elementary exercise) 43,
45, 48, 78, 80, 199
Rhetorica ad Herennium 25 n.36, 74
n.36, 87, 100 n.32, 11011, 120,
148
Sardianos see John Sardianos
Second Sophistic 10, 1417, 30, 33,
36, 177; see also declamation;
epideictic
Seneca, the Elder 75 n.41, 104, 133, 147
n.53
Shield of Achilles 23, 6, 7, 11, 19, 28,
31, 32, 33, 40 n.4, 54, 58, 66, 68,
70
Sminthiac Oration 157
Smith, Susan 1245
Smyrna 162, 171, 174
Sopatros the Rhetor 14, 478, 74, 131,
133, 137, 1419, 153, 154
Sophokles 180
Souda 44, 46
Spitzer, Leo 3335, 37
stasis theory 132; see also declamation;
Hermagoras; Hermogenes;
Sopatros
Statius 30, 32, 81
Statue see ekphrasis of works of art,
Kallistratos; Nikolaos, model
ekphraseis
indeclamation 155
inepideictic 157
storm see ekphrasis
sub oculos subiectio 51, 100
Syrianos 14, 133 n.5, 1445
telika kephalaia (heads of purpose) 144
theatre, as analogy 54, 100, 104, 176,
194
238
Theon 14, 256, 3981 passim, 85, 87,

94, 99 nn.27 and 31, 11415,
120, 1267, 138, 180, 197200,
206
Theopompos 116, 214
Thersites 58, 197, 203
Thucydides 18, 1920, 38, 58, 62, 63,
68, 69, 71, 103, 116, 129, 195,
197, 198, 200, 201, 202
Tiberios 89 n.6, 93 n.16, 101 n.35,
topos (place) see also koinos topos
tupos (impression) 52, 112, 206
verisimilitude 1023, 117118, 1245,
168; see also eikos, pithanon
Virgil, Aeneid 3, 30, 32, 33, 70, 97, 113

visualization
developed inancient education
245, 956
inoratory, 956, 100, 102, 104,
107110, 115, 119, 212, 123
inpoetry 1012
as response to reading inAntiquity
1925
wedding speech 47, 113, 1578, 160
Xenophon 2021, 38, 146

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Ekphrasis, Imagination

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Ruth Webb 2009

1. The Contexts of Ekphrasis

2.Learning Ekphrasis: The Progymnasmata 

3. The Subjects of Ekphrasis 

4. Enargeia: Making Absent Things Present 

5. Phantasia: Memory, Imagination and the Gallery of the Mind

6. Ekphrasis and the Art of Persuasion

7. The Poetics of Ekphrasis: Fiction, Illusion and Meta-ekphrasis

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The subjects of ekphrasis

Comparison of the subjects for ekphrasis with the

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My work on ekphrasis in the Greek rhetorical tradition began with

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This is the definition of ekphrasis taught to students in the Greek schools

Leo Spitzer, The Ode

on a Grecian Urn, or content vs. metagrammar, in Essays

Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion

As Graham Zanker, New light on the

Philostratos the Younger, Eikones, Proem, 2.

This study focuses on the rhetorical theory and practice of ekphrasis

Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion

supplements rhetorical precepts with accounts of his first-hand experience

See, in particular, Donald R. Russell, Greek Declamation (Cambridge, 1983); Lucia

Ekphrasis is not used, to my knowledge, in Gotthold Ephraim Lessings seminal

Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion

modern literature as well as to Greek and Latin texts. In earlier periods, on

art as their subject) led to those particular ekphraseis coming to be seen

Webb, Ekphrasis ancient and modern.

Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion

entirely different grounds, and are ultimately incommensurate, belonging

ideas the strict division

mode of speech which rivals the effects of painting or sculpture, creating

Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion

have complemented them in antiquity. As elementary exercises they do

Barbara Cassin, LEffet sophistique (Paris, 1995).

Even the uses of ekphrasis in epideictic speeches, referring as they do to

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1. The Contexts of Ekphrasis

Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion

The Context of Ancient Ekphrasis

See, for example, Theon, Progymnasmata, 118, l. 7: o

Lucian, The Dream or His Life, 113.

The contexts of ekphrasis

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

Philostratos, Lives of the Sophists, 537 and 574.

Pernot, La Rhtorique de lloge dans le monde grco-romain (2 vols, Paris

speech and community in the Euboicus, in

Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion

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

The contexts of ekphrasis

See on this point Laurent

Lee Too (ed.),

Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion

See, for example, Lucians self-defence against an accusation that he misused an

The contexts of ekphrasis

and revisions of Homer in the Second Sophistic, in Simon

On the manipulation of the past in the declamations, see Thomas

mimesis and the performance

1. The Contexts of Ekphrasis

2.Learning Ekphrasis: The Progymnasmata

3. The Subjects of Ekphrasis

4. Enargeia: Making Absent Things Present

5. Phantasia: Memory, Imagination and the Gallery of the Mind

6. Ekphrasis and the Art of Persuasion

7. The Poetics of Ekphrasis: Fiction, Illusion and Meta-ekphrasis

The subjects of ekphrasis