Building on the concept of enargeia, Chapter 4 examines the cinematism of epic ecphrases: passages containing detailed descriptions of remarkable objects. To the ancients, Homer’s vividness of presentation put him in the forefront of painters, while film directors, chiefly Eisenstein, have repeatedly referred to him as a precursor. In particular, the stories told on the shield of Achilles in the Iliad validate Eisenstein’s concept. Eisenstein wrote extensively about Lessing’s thesis, advanced in his influential Laocoön, about the limits of painting and poetry; both authors’ approaches are evaluated here, with Eisenstein’s argument proven the stronger one. The story of Theseus and Ariadne depicted on the coverlet in Catullus’ poem 64, the most complex ecphrasis in classical literature, is then treated as the basis of a film adaptation, which reveals the astonishing sophistication that can be discovered from the perspective of cinematism. Shorter observations about Virgil and, in passing, Juvenal round out this chapter.

This chapter introduces the rich intersections between Latin literature and Roman material culture. Why should Latin scholars concern themselves with ancient objects? How might study of Roman physical remains inform an understanding of Latin literature? In what ways do attitudes towards Roman material remains align with disciplinary approaches to interpreting Latin literature? The chapter proceeds in seven interconnected parts. The first examines the materiality of Roman texts, introducing the picture-poems of Optatian. This leads to cultural ideas about words and images – and not least to the artefactual nature of manuscripts in both roll and codex. Late-antique ‘illustrated’ manuscripts take us to the rhetorical phenomenon of ‘ecphrasis’. Ecphrasis has been much discussed in recent years; but there remains a reluctance to look across the landscapes of art and text: a residual blindness to the ‘cyclical’ dynamics between visual and verbal media. The point leads to an analysis of words and images displayed in a shared environment, as well as some of the Roman rhetorical conceptual underpinnings. It also leads, in the final section, to variables of education, learning and literacy.

Chapter 5 considers ecphrasis less as an anxious competition between visual and verbal arts than as another form of sociable relations between persons and things. The chapter looks especially at collections by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (“Sonnets for Picture”) and the two women poet-lovers who wrote together as Michael Field, Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper (Sight and Song). Following the example of Keats, these poets used grammatical questions (whose ecphrastic uses go back to classical epigrams and idylls) to structure their encounters with works of visual art. Embodying vision in both conversational syntax and poetic (and sometimes typographic) form served their larger efforts to restructure social and sexual relations in the politically charged moment of 1848 (for Rossetti) and at the end of the century (for Michael Field). They sought to draw works of art out of commodity relations and into something that looked like conversation, repersonalizing and reimagining the forms of sociability in which objects and persons might participate.

This chapter takes up the volume’s key notion of ‘dialogue’ by comparing – and thus bringing into dialogue – two periploi from the late Hellenistic and the imperial period, the description of the Red Sea in Diodorus’ Bibliotheke 3.38–48 and the island ecphrasis 2.17 in Philostratus’ Imagines. To the volume’s larger themes, the chapter adds the aspects of mediality and reader response. It shows how both texts employ a fairly similar ecphrastic technique characterised by contextualisation, historicisation and narrativisation, in order to afford their readers quite different experiences. The key element is their divergent strategies of mediality: the Bibliotheke is characterised by a marked ‘bookishness’, whereas the Imagines creates a feigned orality. Both strategies have their place in contemporary discourses and contexts. The Bibliotheke situates itself in the late Hellenistic debate on writing and reading history, and particularly in the discourse on the pleasures of reading historiographical texts, while the Imagines is part of a broader trend of enriching texts with structures and elements of oral communication in the imperial period.

Ecphrasis dramatizes a form of attention, the reflective gaze at an object. An ecphrasis also performs an interpretative process with which the reader is made complicit: the strategies of viewing comprehended by an ecphrasis are normative, even and especially when contested. When Marcel, Proust’s narrator in À la recherche du temps perdu, stands for almost three-quarters of an hour lost in admiration in front of paintings by Elstir, keeping his host and dinner guests waiting, we are invited by Proust’s prose not merely to imagine the entrancing paintings, but also to recognize and respect the aesthetic prowess and self-regard of the narrator – as well as to stand at some distance with the author from the narrator’s youthful fascination and social indiscretion. It is a passage that highlights aesthetic response as a function of modern social protocol, with Proust’s customary self-aware humour.1 How to stand in front of a picture, how long to look at it, what to look at, and, above all, in what language to articulate a response, are all expressive aspects of the cultural spectacle of ecphrastic performance, in antiquity as much as in fin-de-siècle Paris.2

In this and the next chapter, I turn to a poetic form that plays a particular role in the aesthetics of late antiquity, namely, the hexameter narratives generally known as epyllia. In this chapter I will be looking specifically at how an epyllion narrates a story of eros. The parochial fights over definition – what precisely is or is not an epyllion, and is it a genre recognized in antiquity? – need not detain us here, though such debates have repeatedly vexed scholars.1 I have already indicated that questions of form need to go far beyond such restricted, formal perspectives. This chapter is primarily more concerned with the issue of scale, namely, what the effect is of taking a grand subject and renarrating it in the space of a few hundred lines. If scale matters, then the epyllion’s treatment of eros should prove to be a particularly telling space in which to interrogate how the scale of narrative – its form – affects its perspective. What can and cannot be said in a love story? How long should a love story be? How does size matter?

Ekphrasis is the poetic device of describing one type of art within another, best exemplified by the Homeric “Shield of Achilles.” Ekphrasis is seen as a special element of the epic genre which often has metapoetic meaning.

This chapter is dedicated to showing the technique used by John to portray himself as an eyewitness: description. This description, in the classical rhetorical tradition of ante oculos ponere, engages the audience in the narrative by giving them the opportunity to visualize what John himself saw. For example, descriptions introduced by the phrase ?a? e?d?? are rendered as though they formed part of a transcription of a vision made at the very moment it occurred. This is why they appear in the text ex abrupto, marked only by the introductory sign ?a? e?d??, a device habitually used to signal the reader/listener that a given vision has occurred unexpectedly. The ?a? e?d?? structure mimics the mechanics of sight. However, the descriptive forms employed in the book of Revelation are not limited to the use of this ?a? e?d?? pattern. On the contrary, throughout the text John employs six other kinds of descriptions: 1) ????sa ?a? e?d?? descriptions, or ecphrasis; 2) e?d??-????? descriptions; 3) t? p???e??µe?a descriptions; 4) ?a? e?d?? ???e??? descriptions; 5) ?? t? d????se? descriptions; 6) t?p?? or t?p???af?a descriptions.

In this chapter, Renaud Gagné pursues a chronologically wide-ranging study of how the motion of the heavenly bodies was thought about through the idea of choral dance. This chapter compares various unrelated, self-reflexive usages of the astral chorus metaphor in three genres of poetry and briefly considers how each illuminates the others. Instead of a teleological narrative, a dialogue of commonalities and contrasts is sought in the juxtaposition of comparable case studies. The striking image of the astral chorus was, among many other things, a powerful catalyst for thinking mimesis in action. A vision of the cosmic order is used in all three texts to reflect on the boundaries of poetic representation. The first text is a short epigram from Marcus Argentarius (AP 9.270 = G.-P. XXVI). The second passage is the ecphrasis of Dionysus’s shield in the Dionysica of Nonnus of Panopolis (25.380-572). The third text is another shield ecphrasis, that one from the first stasimon of Euripides’ Electra (432-486). The readings illustrate how a key figure of cosmic harmony was revisited to ponder the limits of poetic representation. Projecting itself on the cosmos, the idea of the choral dance could also reflect the cosmos back on song itself.