Decoding the Ancient Novel: The Reader and the Role of Description in Heliodorus and Achilles Tatius [Course Book ed.] 9781400860487

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DECODING THE ANCIENT NOVEL

DECODING THE ANCIENT NOVEL

THE READER AND THE ROLE OF DESCRIPTION IN HELIODORUS AND ACHILLES TATIUS

0. -Sg. Shadi Bartsch

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1989 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Oxford All Rights Reserved Publication of this book has been aided by the Whitney Darrow Fund of Princeton University Press This book has been composed in Linotron Trump type Clothbound editions of Princeton University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. Paperbacks, although satisfactory for personal collections, are not usually suitable for library rebinding Printed in the United States of America by Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bartsch, Shadi, 1966Decoding the ancient novel : the reader and the role of description in Heliodorus and Achilles Tatius / Shadi Bartsch. p. cm. Bibliography: p. Includes index. ISBN 0-691-04238-1 jalk. paper)

i. Greek fiction—History and criticism. 2. Romances, Greek—History and criticism. 3. Heliodorus, of Emesa. Aethiopica. 4. Achilles Tatius. Leucippe and Clitophon. 5. Reader-response criticism. 6. Description (Rhetoric) 7. Rhetoric, Ancient. I. Title. PA3267.B37 1989 883'.oi'o922—dci9

88-37474

To my parents

Contents #

_5g. PREFACE

IX

ONE . Description and Interpretation in the

Second Sophistic 3 TWO . Pictorial Description: Clues, Conventions,

Girls, and Gardens 40 THREE . Dreams, Oracles, and Oracular Dreams:

Misinterpretation and Motivation 80 FOUR . Descriptions of Spectacles: The Reader as Audience,

the Author as Playwright 109 FIVE . The Other Descriptions: Relation to Narrative

and Reader 144 six. The Role of Description 171 APPENDIX . Summaries of Leucippe and Clitophon

and the Aethiopica 179 BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX LOCORUM GENERAL INDEX

l8$ 191 196

Preface

& THIS BOOK , which grew out of a thesis I originally wrote at

Princeton University as an undergraduate, considers the role played by the descriptive passages so frequent in the ancient novels of Heliodorus and Achilles Tatius. Not a topic to set racing the pulse of many a modern reader, perhaps, and cer­ tainly the discursions themselves have had little luck in ap­ pealing to contemporary critics; for the most part, they have been regarded as more or less unnecessary blots on the main narrative. To relegate them to this status, however, is really to misjudge the novels themselves. A careful inquiry into the role that the descriptive passages play in the narrative and how they might invite the participation of their reader­ ship, involving and entangling this audience in the question of what the narrative means, suggests a completely different view. As I argue in this book, these passages not only con­ stitute an integral part of the text but even provide a key to the correct understanding and interpretation of the two ro­ mances here considered. I owe debts of gratitude to many who helped me in this undertaking. Special thanks must go to Professor John J. Winkler of Stanford University, whose book on Apuleius set me thinking about readers and authors two years ago. Pro­ fessor Winkler's patient and perceptive advice was invalu­ able in giving this work its present shape, and his sugges­ tions for revision have basically been adopted here in their entirety: if the book has shaken off its dissertation dust, it is thanks to him. Another unpayable debt is owed to Professor Froma I. Zeitlin of Princeton University, my original ad­ visor, who has been a source of support, encouragement, and interesting ideas from the start. Professors Gregory Nagy of Harvard, John J. Keaney of Princeton, and James Tatum of

PREFACE

Dartmouth read the early draft of the manuscript and oblig­ ingly offered their impressions. All helped to improve the book; the errors and omissions that remain in it, of course, are my own. I would like to thank, too, Joanna Hitchcock, my editor at Princeton University Press; Brian MacDonald, who copyedited the manuscript; and Deborah Tegarden, who fielded my numerous questions and phone calls. Finally, several friends and fellow graduate students read parts of the manu­ script and helped to smooth its path: Louise Fredericksen, David Engel, and Margo Vener. All the translations in the book are my own unless other­ wise specified, and the emphasis, it should be noted, has been on the literal rather than the graceful. The permission to use citations from "The Description of Paintings as a Lit­ erary Device and Its Application in Achilles Tatius" (Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1965) was kindly granted by Professor Eva C. Keuls (formerly Harlan). October 1988

Shadi Baitsch

χ

DECODING THE ANCIENT NOVEL

ONE

Description and Interpretation in the Second Sophistic THE FIRST four centuries A.D. have bequeathed to us the cu­

riously familiar and yet curiously strange Greek prose ro­ mances: works with a precarious position in our literary canons, born moreover of an epoch undistinguished for its literature. These novels seem familiar because they revolve around certain time-honored plot staples—boy-meets-girl, the obstacles to their union, a final happy marriage—and as such evoke enduring aspects of literature and popular cul­ ture. But they also appear strange, not only because their patent use of these plot components can seem artless but also because the advance of the plot is frequently inter­ rupted by discursions and descriptive passages that seem manifestly irrelevant to the "real" business of the story—a trait that has provoked criticism from many a disgruntled reader. Not all the Greek novels, however, share equally this pro­ clivity for the parenthetic. Five have survived in their en­ tirety: the Ephesiaca of Xenophon of Ephesus, Chaeieas and Callirhoe of Chariton, Daphnis and Chloe of Longus, Leucippe and Clitophon of Achilles Tatius, and the Aethiopica of Heliodorus. In all of these, the gist of the story is remark­ ably similar,· it has even been claimed that their plots are composed of identical elements, one novel differing from an­ other "only in the number of such elements, their propor­ tionate weight within the whole plot and the way they are combined" (Bakhtin 1981, 87). And we do find again and

CHAPTER ONE

again a common plot: after boy and girl, both beautiful, both (essentially) chaste, fall wildly in love at first sight, they are subsequently kept apart by a veritable mob of disasters— kidnappings, pirates, shipwrecks, slavery, besotted tyrants, attempted suicides, and human sacrifices, to name a few— yet overcome all difficulties and are finally united in mar­ riage at the novel's close. Set apart from the other novels, however, despite corre­ spondences in plot, are Leucippe and Clitophon and the Aethiopica. These two, to a degree unparalleled in Longus's Daphnis and Chloe and the less sophisticated works of Chariton and Xenophon of Ephesus, are distinguished by an apparently inexplicable appetite for discursions and descrip­ tive passages of every sort. We find detailed descriptions of paintings and artworks, strange animals and exotic plants, gardens and rivers, dreams and oracles, cities, processions and theatrical spectacles, as well as frequent digressions on religion, psychology, and natural history. Although descrip­ tion plays a comparatively limited role in earlier Greek lit­ erature, in these two romances it occupies a disproportion­ ate share of the text: a strange situation, and one that prompted Rohde to complain of Leucippe and Clitophon that "such trimmings have overrun the actual narrative in such rank profusion that they have turned into nothing short of the main issue" (Rohde 1914, 480). It is this char­ acteristic that often alienates the modern reader, to whom these novels seem strange and oddly inept precisely in their embrace of the irrelevant. Scholars of the genre, in fact, have tended to focus on this aspect of the ancient romances as symptomatic of their faults on a larger scale; if the romances in their entirety ap­ pear to some unpalatable and contrived, it is the frequent descriptive passages in the Aethiopica and Leucippe and Clitophon that have been singled out (and that are often dis­ missed still today) as the most irrelevant and excessive. Wolff put forward this view unequivocally seventy-five years ago, claiming that the "excess of description" was "one of the most striking faults of the whole genre," and

DESCRIPTION AND INTERPRETATION

adding to this the disparaging observation on Leucippe and Clitophon that "such is the mass, and such the damnable iteration, of the irrelevancies . .. that for the most part they simply put the reader out of patience" (Wolff 1912, 167-68, 202). Since then, the litany has been much the same. De­ scriptions are "mere purple passages designed to display the rhetorician's skill" (Todd 1940, 22); their only relevance to the story is "to vary its color or artfully retard its progress" (Hadas 1964, vi); they have "no organic connection with the plot" and are "hardly more than irrelevant digressions in­ tended to dazzle or entertain the reader" (Mittelstadt 1967, 753); or, again, they "contribute nothing to the artistry of the main story" (Perry 1967, 119). In Grimal's view, they are regrettable "pedantic expositions that from time to time suspend the narrative" (Grimal 1958, 873); he actually pre­ scribes "un peu de patience" to help the reader get through them. Finally, Reardon denounces in one fell swoop "the comparatively unimportant rhetorical trivia, the εκφράσεις [descriptive passages], the tiresome excursions on natural phenomena, the purple passages which to our taste disfigure Leucippe and Clitophon and the Ethiopica. It is as in any art the ability to use a basic structure that matters" (Reardon 1969, 308). Such an assumption regarding "basic structure" is itself suspect, and the modern critic should be wary about dis­ missing elements of the novels out of hand and calling into play standards of plot coherency and relevance that the an­ cients may not have shared. Classical views on romance's basic structure remain unknown to us and the genre was an open one and "not regulated by any authoritative prescrip­ tions" (Hagg 1971, 109). Yet prejudice comes easily, no doubt in part because the subgenre of the descriptive, which plays so predominant a part here, is often seen as a poor al­ ternative to narrative by literary criticism in general.1 An1 As Hamon (1981, 7) comments, "Description seems to be consid­ ered in a contradictory manner, either as a negation of literature (it must be left for traveler's writing or for science), or as a sort of figure's hyperbole, discourse ornament's ornament, a sort of superlative process

CHAPTER ONE

other issue deserving consideration, however, is the nature of literary convention more broadly viewed as a background of aesthetic and cultural codes in a specific period. Works that incorporate such codes aim at a defined audience in a given social context; consequently, "it is enough for these texts to be interpreted by readers referring to other conven­ tions or oriented by other presuppositions, and the result is incredibly disappointing" (Eco 1984, 8).2 Clearly, the delib­ erate use and even manipulation of such culturally instilled assumptions on the part of our novels would likewise ex­ plain why they have so rarely met with recognition and ap­ preciation among their latter-day readership. As such, the use of descriptive passages in the novels of Heliodorus and Achilles Tatius should be considered against the backdrop of the rhetorical and literary practices of their own epoch, not merely dismissed from our own. By clarify­ ing what readers of the Second Sophistic expected upon en­ countering these "suspensions of the narrative," we can in turn provide some direction for our own expectations, some idea of how to proceed. As I hope will be clear by the end of this chapter, a close look at this backdrop of rhetorical and literary practices is crucial to our own understanding of the novels and their use of the descriptive. A consideration of the ways in which literary description was employed in the heyday of the Greek romances, along with a better grasp of the aesthetic codes that informed their composition and therefore shaped the expectations of their audience, suggests that the role of the descriptive passages in Leucippe and Clitophon and the Aethiopica has been entirely misunderstood. These passages are no mere rhetorical showpieces but forge playful and intricate connections with the narrative and its whose excess must be controlled carefully." The same point is made by Beaujour {1981, 47): "Within our high culture, the history of description and its appreciation is that of a continuous and seemingly undeserved misfortune." 2 This is not to imply that the ancient novels should be classified un­ der Eco's definition of "closed texts," which are intended for a precise readership but one composed of empirical readers only.

DESCRIPTION AND INTERPRETATION

events. As this book will argue, such passages present them­ selves, for readers guided by the conventions of the epoch, as illuminators of the text; they promise insight into it; they call for acts of interpretation. As such they necessarily figure as crucial tools in the authors' narrative strategy and in our own rediscovery of how to read Leucippe and Clitophon and the Aethiopica. The Greek prose romances flourished during the Second Sophistic of the Roman Empire, a period that Flavius Philostratus named for that resurgence in the influence and popu­ larity of the sophists that began in the second century A.D.3 To this time are dated most of the romances we possess in­ tact, as well as several related works and fragments of nov­ els. The Ephesiaca, Daphnis and Chloe, Leucippe and Clitophon, the Vita Apollonii, the Iolaus fragments, and the fragments of Lollianus's Phoenicica and Iamblichus's Babyloniaea are all ascribed to the second century. Only Chari­ ton's Chaeieas and Callirhoe and the pseudobiographical Alexander romance are earlier works. Heliodorus has been situated, not without controversy, in the fourth century A.D.4

Interestingly, in the Second Sophistic we also find a grow­ ing interest in the nature and components of the descriptive passage as a literary and rhetorical technique. This new con­ cern with description manifests itself in one of its forms in the treatises entitled Progymnasmata (Προγυμνάσματα), or handbooks delineating exercises in rhetorical and historical composition for students in the schools of the Hellenistic i Lives of the Sophists (Βίοι σοφιστών] 1.481. In claiming that the movement derives from the orator Aeschines, Philostratus traces it to the fourth century B.C.; but "the plain fact is that the Second Sophistic . . . was a distinctive growth of the high empire, and it would not have been a senseless man who called it new" (Bowersock 1969, 9). * On the dating of the Iolaus fragments, see P. Parsons, "A Greek Satyricon?" Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 18 (1971): 5158; on that of the Phoenicica, see A. Henrichs, Die Phoinikika des Lollianos (Bonn, 1972). For the Greek romances, the reader is referred to the listings of relevant works on chronology in Hagg 1971, 15 n. i; Reardon 1971, 334-37; and Perry 1967, 349 n. 13 (on Heliodorus).

CHAPTER ONE

East. Four of the five handbooks still extant discuss method as well as give examples; these are the works of Theon, Hermogenes, Aphthonius, and Nicolaus, dated to the early and late second century, the fourth century, and the fifth century .Dv respectively.5 In each of these, description, or ecphrasis (εκφρασις) as it is called, is treated as an exercise that takes its place among the ten to fourteen others addressed by the handbooks.6 This is interesting of itself, since the proportion of the total work occupied by the topic of description is without precedent in the earlier handbooks of the Roman rhetoricians.7 Significantly, too, the word ecphrasis itself is not adopted as a regular term until the Second Sophistic.8 In short, as a major component of rhetorical technique, descrip­ tion appears to more or less come into its own in the course of this epoch. These Piogymnasmata already formed an important part of education at the elementary level, thus establishing a nor­ mative basis for the use of the rhetorical devices they define. 5

This is the chronology suggested by Clark 1957, 179-80. Kennedy 56-60, places Theon in the first century A.D., while the Oxford Classical Dictionary upholds the second-century date. I omit the fourth-century Piogymnasmata of Libanius, which contains a collec­ tion of examples rather than any discussion of theory. 6 The others are μύθος, "myth"; διήγημα, "narration"; χρεία, "ethical maxim"; γνώμη, "maxim"; κατασκευή και ανασκευή, "constructive reason­ ing and refutation"; κοινός τόπος, "commonplace"; έγκώμιον και ψόγος; "encomium and invective"; σύγκρισις, "comparison"; ηθοποιία, "delin­ eation of character"; θέσις, "thesis"; νόμου εισφορά, "proposal of a law"; and προσωποποιΐα, "dramatization of character." 7 We find in these works several terms with the approximate meaning of the Greek one. Descriptio in its rhetorical usage refers to the descrip­ tion of a person (e.g., Cicero, Topica 22.83; Quintilian 9.1.13); evidentia, a more general term but with forensic connotations, refers to visual clarity or sub oculis subiectio, the equivalent of the Greek ένάργεια (e.g., Cicero, Academicae Quaestiones 2.6.17; Quintilian 8.3.61-62, 9.2.40); demonstratio, to vivid delineation, ενάργεια (Auctor ad Herennium 4.55.68); illustratio, to the same as the foregoing (Quintilian .2.32). For fuller discussion, see Harlan 1965, 33-34, 39. 8 Its only two occurrences before this time are m the De Imitatione (fr. 6.3.2) and the Ars Rhetorica (10.17) of Dionysius Halicarnassensis, a rhetorician and historian of the first century B.C. (Harlan 1965, 45). !983,

DESCRIPTION AND INTERPRETATION

The approach these handbooks take proves to be relatively dry and matter-of-fact; they purvey guidelines for content and procedure rather than provide suggestions on function in a literary context, and their theory, if it deserves the name, stays within bounds too narrow to reveal how such passages might be manipulated for broader aims. Neverthe­ less, they do demonstrate several important points: the gen­ eral interest of the epoch in the descriptive; its treatment as a component of rhetorical and compositional technique; and its relatively early use, in this simple guise, in the schools of rhetoric at a time when education was rhetorical training. Even the more sophisticated employers of rhetoric, after all, must have started here; and because (as will be shown) the handbooks' discussion of proper topics for description pro­ vides a common denominator for the passages in contem­ porary rhetoricians and in the novelists, a quick perusal of what they say seems in order. The Progymnasmata discuss and define description (ec­ phrasis) in language that remains very similar from one trea­ tise to the next.9 As Theon, probably the earliest of the four, defines the figure, "εκφρασίς έστι λόγος περιηγηματικός έναργώς ύπ1 όψιν αγων τό δηλούμενον" (ed. Spengel 1885, 2,: 118; "ecphrasis is a descriptive account bringing what is illus­ trated vividly before one's sight"). This quality of creating a vivid visual image for the reader is the essential character­ istic of the device. Theon expands on the idea later, saying that "άρεται δε εκφράσεως α'ίδε, σαφήνεια μεν μάλιστα και εν­ άργεια χοϋ σχεδόν όράσθαι τά απαγγελλόμενα" (ed. Spengel 1885, 2: 119; "the virtues of ecphrasis are in particular clar­ ity and vividness, such that one can almost see what is nar­ rated"). The handbooks also list the possible subjects of ec­ phrasis, along with illustrative examples, and distinguish between simple (άπλαΐ) and compound (συνεζευγμέναι or μικταί) ecphrases. They further stress the importance of a thor9 The sections on ecphrasis in each of the four authors cited are lo­ cated in Spengel's three-volume edition (1883-1886] as follows: Hermogenes, 2:16-17; Aphthonius, 2:46-49; Theon, 2:118-20; Nicolaus, 3:491-93.

CHAPTER ONE

ough and systematic approach. Only Theon and Nicolaus extend their discussions further: both show how ecphrasis differs from narration (διήγησις) or the other rhetorical ex­ ercises, and Nicolaus treats the question of artwork. The classifications of the handbooks show that certain topics were conventionally perceived as suitable for such de­ scriptive accounts. From the range of five topics listed by the various authors, four remain constant: persons, circum­ stances, places, and periods of time (πρόσωπα, πράγματα, τόποι, and χρόνοι). Theon supplements this list with customs (τρό­ ποι), Hermogenes with crises (καιροί), and Aphthonius with animals and plants (άλογα ζώα και προς τούτοις φυτά); NicoIaus adds festivals or assemblies (πανηγύρεις) and later also introduces statues and paintings (άγάλματα and εικόνες).10 Lists of examples are provided for each topic. Theon cites as typical subjects for animal descriptions the ibis, the hippo­ potamus, and the crocodile,· for "circumstances" (πράγματα), war, peace, storms, famines, plagues, and earthquakes; for places (τόποι), meadows, shores, cities, islands, and deserts; and for periods of time (χρόνοι), seasons and festivals. Under customs or methods (τρόποι), he includes examples of mili­ tary preparations and the usage of weapons and siege appa­ ratus. Hermogenes and Aphthonius add descriptions of bat­ tles to circumstances (πράγματα) and harbors (as does Nicolaus) to the category of places (τόποι). IO Contrary to modern usage, the term ecphrasis at the time of its discussion in the rhetorical handbooks was not used primarily to des­ ignate the description of artworks (the Oxford Classical Dictionary (2nd edv 1970), for example, inaccurately defines it only as "the rhetor­ ical description of a work of art, one of the types of progymnasma"). Maguire notes this modern tendency to associate ecphrasis with art, and offers the explanation that formal descriptions of works of art and of buildings are today the most familiar types of ecphrasis because of the role they have played in the historical reconstruction of lost Byzan­ tine monuments (Maguire 1981, 22-23). Certainly most of the descrip­ tive passages in the Greek romances are not concerned with works of art. The largest number of such descriptions occur in Leucippe and Clitophon—some six out of thirty. On the accuracy of applying the term to descriptions of paintings before the late third century A.D., see n. 32.

DESCRIPTION AND INTERPRETATION

Elements of the prose romances match these guidelines well, and the handbooks' lists of examples find many corre­ spondences among the descriptive passages in Leucippe and Clitophon and the Aethiopica. Both Heliodorus and Achilles Tatius dwell lavishly on the appearance of various odd ani­ mals; the crocodile, for example, is described at great length by Achilles Tatius, who informs us that the creature appears to have a head (as many do) until it opens its mouth: at which point its head altogether disappears and becomes nothing but a pair of jaws, gaping so hugely that the croco­ dile's belly is visible through them (Leucippe and Clitophon 4.19.4-5).11 This blend of the vivid and the recherchd is typ­ ical of the author, but Heliodorus too shows an interest in the unusual; witness the description of the "cameleopard" or giraffe at Aethiopica 10.27.1-4. If animals are frequent, so are battles and sieges, especially in Heliodorus. The siege of Syene (9.1.1-8.6) is a long and complicated affair, won by a cunning stratagem of the Ethi­ opian king Hydaspes: Heliodorus describes how the king has his troops build a second wall around the city's own walls and then flood the intervening space by diverting a channel from the Nile. The river's waters rush around the city, turn­ ing its inhabitants into panic-stricken islanders,· when the inner walls show signs of weakening, the citizens decide to capitulate and are put in the unusual position of having to accept peace terms delivered by boat. A similar taste for par­ adoxical situations appears in another description related to the topic of battles: the novel actually opens with a descrip­ tion of the Egyptian coast at the mouth of the Nile, where the remnants of a fierce battle are to be seen (1.1.1-6). Bod­ ies, some quivering, some quite dead, are strewn across the shore, and everywhere the trappings of a drunken feast are mixed with gore-splattered implements of war—including 11 References to Achilles Tatius are from the edition of Ebbe Vilborg (Stockholm, 1955); references to Heliodorus, from the Budi series edi­ tion of Rattenbury and Lumb, French translation by J. Maillon (Paris,

1935)-

CHAPTER ONE

several wine goblets, which, seized in sudden urgency, ap­ pear to have done double duty for both banquet and brawl. Other categories of description are also well represented; among the many descriptions of places, the lush garden of Clitophon (Leucippe and Clitophon 1.15.1-8) and the meadow in the painting of Europa (1.1.3-6) provide exam­ ples of vivid loci amoeni marked by Achilles Tatius's em­ phasis on the thriving luxuriance of their greenery,· trees, vines, and flowers are growing everywhere, a spring bubbles between them, the sunlight makes patterns through the leaves, and all is colored by language that is sexually sugges­ tive. The picture of Europa herself, along with the three other paintings that the author describes, is couched in the same suggestive terms as the meadow, grabbing the readers' attention by playing to their more prurient interests and paying careful attention to Europa's anatomy, conveniently revealed by her clingy clothing. Heliodorus is much more circumspect in his descriptions of his hero and heroine, who meet (as is virtually a convention in the novels) as partici­ pants in a festival procession (Aethiopica 3.1.3-5.6)—again a topic sanctioned by the Piogymnasmata and one particu­ larly frequent in Heliodorus. This festival description, how­ ever, is unrivaled for sheer length and detail; after giving us the words of the hymn sung and describing everyone's cloth­ ing, Heliodorus—to provide us with some measure of his hero's appeal—includes the fact that the women watching lose control of themselves and pelt Theagenes with fruit and flowers. These few examples, selected almost at random, offer some indication of the types of descriptive passages to be found in the novels (a complete listing of the topics that oc­ cur is provided in the notes).12 These topics conform well to 12 Personages: in Heliodorus, Charicleia (Aethiopica 1.2.1-2, 3.4.26), Theagenes (2.35.1, 3.3.5-7), and Calasiris (2.21.2!; in Achilles Tatius, Leucippe (Leucippe and Clitophon 1.4.3, 1.19.1-2). Animals: in Heliodorus, the "cameleopard" or giraffe (10.27.1-4; the crocodile is mentioned only briefly, at 6.1.2]; in Achilles Tatius, the crocodile (4.19.1-6], the hippopotamus (4.2.1-3.5], the elephant (4.4.2-

DESCRIPTION AND INTERPRETATION

the suggestions advanced in the handbooks, and to this de­ gree the novels undeniably reflect the rhetorical and literary conventions of the day. However, the precepts of the PTOgymnasmata are not entirely helpful for understanding the role of the novels' descriptive passages in their relation to the narrative. As it turns out, the theory never goes so far, and the question persists: Why do the authors of Leucippe and Clitophon and the Aethiopica make such extensive use 5.2), the phoenix (3.25.1-7), the Egyptian ox (2.15.3-4), and the mating habits of the peacock (1.16.2-3) and of the viper with the lamprey (1.18.3-5). Ciicumstances: in Heliodorus, a marsh battle between rival bands of marsh-dwelling brigands (1.30.1-3), a pirate mutiny at the mouth of the Nile (5.32.1-6), Hydaspes' long battle and siege of Syene (9.1.1-8.6), Hydaspes' final clash with Oroondates (9.14.1-20.6), the latter's pha­ lanx and its armor (9.15.1-6), and the weapons and tactics of the Trog­ lodytes (8.16.2-3) an^ of the "cinnamon people" (9.19.3-4). In Achilles Tatius, the two battles of the Egyptian general Charmides, both against marsh-dwelling brigands (3.13.1-7, 4.14.3-9); the clods of Egyptian earth that function as the brigands' "weapons" (3.13.3); and their de­ ceitful tactics (4.13.1-3). Also: storms at sea (Aethiopiea 5.27.1-7; Leueippe and Clitophon 3.1.1-5.6). Places: In Achilles Tatius, the harbor at Sidon (1.1.1), the meadow on the painting of Europa (1.1.3-6), Clitophon's garden (1.15.1-8), the is­ lands of the swamp (4.12.4-8), the semi-island Tyre (2.14.2-4), the Nile and other rivers and lakes (2.14.8, 2.14.9-10, 4.12.1-4, 4.14.2), and the city of Alexandria (5.1.1-6). InHeliodorus, the mouth of the Nile where the remnants of a battle are to be seen (i.i.iff.), the brigands' marsh home and its islands (1.5.2-6.2), the island city of Meroe (10.5.1-2), several digressions on the Nile (2.28.1-5, 9-9-3—5, 9.22.2-3, 5-7), and the cities Philae (8.1.2-3) and Syene (9.22.4). Petiods of time (including festivals): in Heliodorus, the procession in honor of Neoptolemus (3.1.3-5.6), the festival of the Nile (9.9.2.), the spontaneous procession at the resolution of Thyamis's conflict with his brother (7.8.3-7), and the joyous celebration of the victorious Ethiopi­ ans (10.6.iff.). Statues and paintings: in Achilles Tatius, four paintings: the abduc­ tion of Europa (1.1.2-13), Andromeda chained to rocks (3.7.1-9), Pro­ metheus being gnawed on (3.8.1-7), and the story of Philomela (5.3.48); also, the statue of Zeus Casius (3.6.1), the wrought wine bowl (2.3.1-2), and Callirhoe's necklace (2.11.2-3). In Heliodorus, Theagenes' ceremonial cloak (3.3.5), Charicleia's elaborate cincture (3.4.24), and the amethyst ring that serves as her ransom (5.13.3-14.4).

CHAPTER ONE

of a device that seems to have little in its favor except being vivid? The greater part of the answer to this question, and the most intriguing, is hinted at in the practical rather than the­ oretical employment of the descriptive in the works of the prominent sophists of the period. These "theoreticians-inpractice"1'—Lucian, the Philostrati, and other well-known figures of the Second Sophistic—offer more revealing in­ sights on how ingenious minds might use description; as Reardon remarks of Lucian (subsequently saying much the same of Philostratus Lemnius), "starting from a rhetorical foundation, he makes an artistic use of the literary forms employed in the schools for essentially educational pur­ poses" (Reardon 1971, 159); and again, Lucian is elsewhere called "evidence for the great scope description found in practical rhetoric" (Palm 1965, 158). These master rhetori­ cians of the period not only used the devices found in the Progymnasmata but developed and deployed them with a view to their own larger literary goals: the works of Lucian and the two Εικόνες (Imagines, or Paintings) of the Philos­ trati, as well as Callistratus's Εκφράσεις (Descriptions) about a series of statues and the long pictorial description that is Cebes's Πίναξ (Pinax) all contain detailed descriptive passages that are used in an ambitious context by rhetori­ cians who are concerned not only with showing their skill at simply describing but also at interpreting what is to be described, or at manipulating the description in such a way that it takes on a new relation to the material it introduces or in which it is embedded. In short, "the Second Sophistic specialises not only in ecphrasis itself but in fusing it with other literary possibilities" (Anderson 1986, 259). In Lucian, the artistic development of the descriptive is best seen in the context of his lectures, in which this element often consists of the description of a painting placed at the beginning of a longer discussion. The two Philostrati, however, produced in their Εικόνες (Paintings) works consisting of nothing but de'31 owe this happy phrase to J. J. Winkler.

DESCRIPTION AND INTERPRETATION

scriptions of paintings.14 The Εικόνες are composed of a se­ ries of such pictorial descriptions connected by the common thread of the narrator's voice: both the elder and the younger Philostratus purport to be standing before the picture in question and, when the description is complete, to be mov­ ing on to the next one. This situation is clearly defined by Philostratus the Elder, who informs the reader in his preface that the pictures are hanging in a gallery he has visited; both authors, too, use the fiction of the viewer at their side to whom the works must be explained. In all these works we begin to see how a descriptive pas­ sage might be used to draw in its audience and ask of them an effort at interpretation. There are, however, interesting differences in technique between the Philostrati and Callistratus on the one hand, and Lucian and Cebes on the other, differences ultimately involving the question of how to in­ terpret. If the Philostrati, in describing a painting, will in­ vest their description (as we shall see) with more than could possibly be actually painted, in this way clarifying context and meaning, Lucian chooses rather to create out of his de­ scriptions a momentary enigma, and the accompanying viewer or viewers this author invents are usually at a loss as to what the painting means until an interpretation is sup­ plied from some other character or source. The ΕΙκόνες of Philostratus the Elder consists of a series of descriptions of panel paintings that he explicitly situates (i, proem 4) on the walls of an art gallery in Naples.1' As the 141 say "the two Philostrati," adopting for the sake of convenience the biographical information on the family presented in the Oxfoid Classical Dictionary. This distinguishes four Philostrati: the second (Flavius) wrote the Lives of the Sophists and the Vita Apolloniii his sonin-law Philostratus Lemnius (or "the Elder") wrote the first Εικόνες [Paintings); and the grandson of this man, Philostratus the Younger, wrote the second ΕΙκόνες. The notice in the Suda is notoriously con­ fused and there is to date no sure solution to the problems of ascription. For a more detailed discussion, see Anderson 1986, 291-96. "s The issue of the authenticity of the paintings Philostratus describes has been the subject of much debate and is still unresolved. A summary of the bibliography on this topic may be found in O. Schoenberger's

CHAPTER ONE

author-narrator Philostratus moves from painting to paint­ ing, he discusses what he sees with his audience in the text, the young boy to whom he is explaining the paintings. In so doing, he draws in the reader as well, an effect heightened by his use of the second person in the constant comments, questions, and exhortations to his (silent, for us) pupil. Thus he will ask, "Why are the Muses here?" (2.8.6) or "What is Amphion saying?" (1.10.3); offer various instructions: "Don't wonder at the number of Cupids" (1.6.1) or "Look at Aphrodite, please" (1.6.7); or appeal to the boy's own knowl­ edge: "you discovered in Homer, I think, that Achilles loved Antilochus" (2.7.1). As these comments already suggest, Philostratus does not restrict himself to a catalog of visible details: what he tells his imaginary audience (and us) about the pictures is far from purely descriptive, involving both the details actually visible in each picture and those he has brought in from myth, literature, and historiography. Nor is he always at pains to distinguish between what is painted and what is extraneous, and he can be vague about the topi­ cal arrangement of those details that apparently do belong in the picture proper. Other considerations affect his approach. In the broadest terms, he undertakes, like Callistratus and edition of E. Kalinka's Philostiatus: Die Bilder (Munich, 1968), 26-37. Despite a few problematic points, I find Lesky's arguments for authen­ ticity persuasive—namely, that certain discrepancies in what Philostratus seems to have seen and what he chose to interpret it as (on this, see discussion in text) indicate that the paintings were probably real; it is unlikely, as Lesky points out, that the sophist made up paintings with close parallels to ones of which we know and then forced an unlikely meaning from his own inventions by means of far-fetched interpreta­ tions (Lesky 1940, 41). See, however, the reservations of Anderson 1986, 262-63. Lehmann-Hartleben too argues for authenticity, claim­ ing that the pictures described by Philostratus were in fact topographi­ cally related in their arrangement on the gallery's walls; that such a relation can be reconstructed from their sequence in the Είκόνες, despite the fact that Philostratus described them "without regard to the ideo­ logical and formal relation which had dictated their combination," proves (according to Lehmann-Hartleben 1941, 20) that he actually saw the paintings. For a reconsideration of this evidence for programmatic painting, see Thompson 1961.

DESCRIPTION AND INTERPRETATION

the younger Philostratus, to rival or outdo the artwork by means of his own literary/artistic composition, both in craftsmanship and in the appeal to the emotions of the au­ ditor.16 But a more pressing concern is the aspect of this pro­ cess that he himself puts forward as his purpose in the intro­ duction: he wishes to teach the young to interpret (ερμηνεύω) paintings, and the work at hand—hence the addressee—is to stand as an example of such interpretation (i, proem 3). As I have emphasized, interpretation for Philostratus en­ tails seeing—and describing—more than what could be im­ mediately visible. In his highly rhetorical accounts, the painted characters are given thoughts, motives, and emo­ tions; they are often made to pass through a whole sequence of actions and states,· and their stories are extrapolated into the period before and after the moment captured on the pic­ ture. Philostratus's principle seems to be that "in order to understand the painting correctly, one must picture to one­ self its context, a part of which is supplied by the moment portrayed" (Palm 1965, 168). A typical example of progres­ sive temporality, the introduction of mythical background, and Philostratus's communication of what was said or thought—all aspects usually of narrative rather than of de­ scription—is the description of the chariot race of Pelops for the hand of Hippodameia (Εικόνες 1.17): Ή μεν εκπληξις έπ' Οίνομάω τω 'Αρκάδι, οί δέ έπ' αύτψ βοώντες—άκούεις γάρ που—ή τε Αρκαδία έστι και όπόσον έκ της Πελοποννήσου, πέπτωκε δέ συντριβέν τό αρμα τέχνη Μυρτίλου. . . . Όρα, παΐ, τους μέν τοϋ Οίνομάου, ώς δεινοί τέ είσι και σφοδροί όρμήσαι λύττης τε και άφροϋ μεστοί— τουτι δέ περί, τούς 'Αρκάδας εΐροις μάλιστα—και ώς μέλα­ νες, επειδή έπ' άτόποις και ουκ εύφήμοις έζεύγνυντο, τούς δέ τοϋ Πέλοπος, ώς λευκοί τέ είσι και τή ηνία πρόσφοροι Πειθούς τε εταίροι και χρεμετίζοντες ήμερον τι και εύξύνετον τής νίκης, τόν τε Οίνόμαον, ώς ϊσα και Διομήδης ό Θράξ βάρβαρος τε κείται και ώμος τό είδος, οιμαι δέ ουδέ 16 Fairbanks (193Ι/ xxi)- Similarly, Pollitt (ΐ974/ ίο) coins the apt term "literary analogists" for the three sophists.

C H A P T E R ONE

Here is dismay over Oenomaus the Arcadian; there, men shouting at him—for perhaps you can hear—and this is Arcadia and part of the Peloponnesus. The chariot has fallen shattered through Myrtilus' trick. . . . Look, boy, at the [horses] of Oenomaus, how fearsome they are and eager to race, full of frenzy and froth—you can find this type among the Arcadians in particular— and how black, since they were harnessed for foul and inauspicious purposes; but see those of Pelops, how white they are and compliant to the reins, companions of Persuasion, whinnying softly and with quick perception of victory,- and see Oenomaus, how like the Thracian Diomedes he lies there, a barbarian and fierce in appearance. But I do not think you will doubt about Pelops that Poseidon once admired his youth when he was serving wine to the gods on Mount Sipylus, and through admiration set him, when an adolescent, upon this chariot. The chariot traverses the sea like land, and not a drop from [the sea] leaps onto the axle, but it supports the horses, steady as the earth. But as for the race, Pelops and Hippodameia are victorious, both standing on 17

Citations from the Eixovej (Paintings) of Philostratus Lemnius, the Etx6ve? of Philostratus the Younger, and the 'Ex^gdcfei; (Descriptions) of Callistratus are taken throughout frdm the Loeb Classical Library single-volume edition containing all three works, edited and translated by Arthur Fairbanks, 1 9 3 1 .

18

DESCRIPTION AND INTERPRETATION

the chariot and united there, so overcome by each other that they are about to embrace. He is decked out in the Lydian manner, daintily, and his youth and bloom are as you saw a little while ago, when he was asking Posei­ don for the horses. The whole race seems to be taking place before our eyes and those of Philostratus's young viewer: the chariots are racing and yet Oenomaus's chariot has already shattered; Pelops is competing to win Hippodameia and then has won her, and they seem about to embrace; a short time earlier we "saw" him ask Poseidon for his horses and we saw, too, his abduc­ tion over the sea by the same god. The initial aside, too— asking if the boy can "hear" the men shouting—exemplifies a conceit found in many of the descriptions and often ex­ tended to the painted figures' thought as well as their speech; at 1.10.3, for example, Philostratus can tell us the content of Amphion's song; at 1.15.3, Theseus' thoughts; at 1.16.4, what it is Pasiphae is planning; at 1.26.3-4, the threats of Apollo,· and so forth. The words and thoughts that Philostratus imputes to these characters in interpreting the painted pictures are gen­ erally vocalizations of their known mythical situation and as such a natural offshoot of a process that is essentially lit­ erary rather than pictorial. Thus Apollo speaks, in angrily demanding back the cattle stolen by Hermes (1.26.4). The ethical perspective that frequently colors the descriptions is likewise derived from literature—for example, the terms in which Hippolytus is described (2.4). Furthermore, literary or mythical material is often explicitly interpolated to explain what is happening in a given picture, such as the brief ac­ count of the mythical events leading up to Phaethon's fall from his father's chariot that precede the picture proper (i.n.1).18 A particularly dramatic illustration of this ten18Beaujour (1981, 33) notes: "Literary descriptions remain quite opaque and meaningless to those unaware of the 'story behind them.' ... Thence the pressing need for interpretations, the hermeneutical

CHAPTER ONE

dency to "see" beyond the pictorial in the act of interpreta­ tion is provided by another literary interpolation, this one at the beginning of the description of the river Scamander. Here Philostratus instructs the young viewer, as the two stand before the painting, "συμβάλωμεν οΰν δ τι νοεί, συ δέ άπόβλεψον άυτών, δσον έκεΐνα Ιδεΐν, αφ' ων ή γραφή" (ι.ι.ΐ; "let us therefore conjecture what it means; you then, gaze upon those things on which the painting is based, insofar as it is possible to see them").19 Discussing then the passage from Homer from which the painting is derived, he concludes with "δρα δή πάλιν· πάντα εκείθεν" (i.i.l; "now look back [at the painting]. All of this is there" [emphasis added]). In other words, the earlier act of gazing was not at the picture itself; the boy to whom Philostratus is speaking is asked to see be­ yond the painting, to look, in effect, upon Homerj once he has done this, he will be the better prepared to understand what is literally pictured.20 Even more interesting, Philostratus, in his procedure of in­ terpreting what he sees by means of explanation and embel­ lishment, occasionally seems to do violence to the details of the painting he describes. Lesky has drawn attention to sev­ eral cases where such a discrepancy between Deutung (inter­ pretation) and Daistellung (representation) seems likely (Lesky 1940, esp. 44-49). He points out that the painting transcoding being sometimes woven into the warp of the descriptive procedure itself." 19 This passage is problematic. I owe the interpretation I have adopted here to J. J. Winkler, who suggests that although αποβλέπω occurs here without preposition, its meaning is still "to gaze at" and not away (as in Fairbanks 1931, 7; also Palm 1965, 164). The genitive αυτών is there­ fore of attraction, not separation (personal communication, April 2 1988). Certainly this makes better sense in context. In any case, the point remains essentially the same: interpretive activity involves more than looking at just the painting. 10 The act of returning to the painting proper after a contemplation of what is not to be seen on its surface is of common enough occurrence in the Εικόνες (e.g., 1.6.7, 1-13-9/ 1-2.5-3/ 117.2, 2-7-2, 2.13.2, 2.23.2); striking here, however, is the notion of seeing the absent details, hinted at also in 2.7.2 with the expression "[αί] 'Ομήρου γραφαί," the paintings/ writings of Homer.

DESCRIPTION AND INTERPRETATION

that Philostratus identifies as being of Comus, "Revelry," seems rather to be of Hymenaeus, the god of marriage, since the figure described is standing watch before the doors of a bedroom and a newly married couple are in bed within (Ει­ κόνες ι.2.ι}. Not that Philostratus has through carelessness or ignorance made a mistake; on the contrary, the sophist has chosen to reinterpret the picture to extract from it the sense that he himself wants: the portrayal of the sleeping figure, he says, "κελεύει δέ ο'ιμαι μή άπαρακαλύπτους κωμάζειν τούς έν ηλικία τούτου" (1.2.3; "exhorts those of this youth's age not to revel with their heads unveiled").21 The whole piece, in short, is "a showpiece of sophistical interpretive skill" (Lesky 1940, 45): what Philostratus can do with the painting, rather than a display of what the painting is meant to show, is the test of his skill. Likewise, none of the actual details given by Philostratus in Εικόνες 2.6 on Arrichion in­ dicate that the victor here portrayed is the man who lost his life in a wrestling match but was acclaimed as winner none­ theless (cf. Pausanias 8.40.2); the wrestling technique de­ scribed "is nothing uncommon in the pancratium" and, even more significant, the supposedly dying Arrichion is ruddy colored and smiling, while his opponent "γέγραπται δέ . . . νεκρώ είκάσαι" (2.6.5; "has been painted to resemble a corpse" [Lesky 1940, 46-47]). No doubt the description has been so interpreted in order to emphasize that victory brings glory even in death; the ruddy "Arrichion" looks healthy enough to lend credence to such a moral. Philostratus's exegetical style, which in its basic approach is similar to that used by the younger Philostratus, by Callistratus, and in a few works of Lucian,22 is almost always of 11 Reardon (1971, 194) also points out the discrepancies here and at 2.6, commenting that "the author appears to 'interpret' not only details but an entire painting, precisely in the deliberate act [it seems) of thrusting aside the obvious meaning." 22 Palm (1965, 177) notes that the younger Philostratus is slightly less free in the attribution of emotion and in temporal expansion; for him too, however, interpretation is important, and the verb αίνίττομαι (sig­ nify through riddles) occurs with some frequency.

CHAPTER ONE

this variety. Interpretation for him is the equivalent of an account that explains what the picture shows; he turns pic­ ture into narrative, draws in elements from myth and his­ toriography, and describes what characters are feeling and saying. Furthermore, the occasional ethical slant in Philostratus' descriptions, whether or not the picture calls for it, follows from the second half of his statement of intent. His writings are to be lectures directed at the young, "άφ~ ών έρμηνεύοουσί τε και τοϋ δοκίμου έπιμελήσονται" (ι, proem 3; "from which they will learn to interpret, and to cultivate what is admirable").23 For this reason, paintings must be ma­ nipulated to emphasize precisely that which his audience is to cultivate, the admirable or the excellent. Rarer in Philostratus is another kind of interpretive activ­ ity—one, however, very much in evidence in the writings of other sophists of the epoch who were less concerned with writing art criticism in its own right or with making their descriptions literary works of art that would interest and in­ volve an audience per se. This approach, rather than elabo­ rating on the meaning already present, aims to uncover a hidden meaning, an unexpressed signified that shows an al­ legorical relation to the actual painting. It demands a differ­ ent level of interpretation from that needed to identify and explain what is painted, for now the interpreter must de­ scribe what is symbolized. On a brief and simple scale, this kind of interpretation does occur in Philostratus—for exam­ ple, in ΕΙκόνες i,6. Here, Philostratus considers a pair of painted Cupids shooting their arrows at each other and com­ ments "καλόν τό αίνιγμα· σκόπει γάρ, εϊ που ξυνίημι τοΰ ζωγρά­ φου. φιλία ταύτα, ώ παϊ, και αλλήλων ίμερος" (Ι.6·3; "The rid­ dle's a fine one. Let's see if I can somehow understand the painter. This is friendship, my boy, and mutual longing"). This mode of exegetical activity should be differentiated from the former typically Philostratean type, which would " Palm (1965, 165 n. 1), following Fnedlaender (1912,, 89 n. 1), thinks δόκιμος here is a reference to correct Attic Greek. The suggestion of Reardon (1971, 194], "that which is admirable," seems more likely.

DESCRIPTION AND INTERPRETATION

explain why the Cupids were shooting arrows rather than what this symbolized; its most important elements are the notion of a meaning that is not a surface one and the follow­ ing allegorical interpretation of what is in this case explic­ itly identified as an αίνιγμα, riddle. Philostratus in the Εικό­ νες chooses not to develop this approach, but in the rhe­ torical writings of the earlier sophists Lucian and Cebes, we find this concept of pictorial description as a conveyer of a hidden meaning (usually coded in allegory) employed in its fullest capacity.24 Descriptions of paintings that support allegorical interpre­ tation occur in the Pinax of Cebes and in several of Lucian's piolaliae (προλαλιαί), brief lectures functioning as introduc­ tions to larger pieces, as well as in his Slander (Περι τοϋ μή ρςιδίως πιστεύειν Διαβολή) and his On Salaried Posts in Great Houses (Περί τών επί Μισθφ συνόντων). Unlike Philostratus's isolated descriptions, these are (or were originally) embedded in a larger body of nondescriptive text, and they are described in language that is plain, precise, and largely devoid of the embellishment and explanation that marks Philostratean interpretation. Also, the pictures described are more obviously imaginary, created for the express purpose of making a point. Consequently, there is no question of the interpretive distortion of what is painted, since the painting only exists to illustrate an idea—no distortion is required. Although all the pictures are carriers of meaning that is symbolized rather than literally represented on their sur­ faces, this meaning is not always presented as a riddle or αίνιγμα. In cases in which no riddle is offered, there is like­ wise no one acting as a viewer of the painting, neither the author himself (like the Philostratus-narrator looking at the However, Lucian's On the Hall (Περί τοϋ Οίκου), which like Philostratus's Εικόνες contains a series of brief pictorial descriptions that are there for their own sake and appeal to the reader through the literary style of their interpretation, is an example of interpretation in the man­ ner of Philostratus. This approach is also employed in his Toxans (Τόξαρι.ς) and Herodotus or Aetion ('Ηρόδοτος ή Άετίων); Lucian was clearly adept at both styles. 24

CHAPTER ONE

Cupids) nor some other spectator. Viewer and puzzle must go hand in hand, since the former articulates the status of the latter. Where both are absent, the allegorical meaning of the painting is previously made obvious by the way the painting is described for the reader and by its position in the text. For example, Lucian's On Salaried Posts and his Slan­ der both contain a description of a painting that is allegori­ cal but whose meaning is nonetheless clear to the reader be­ cause the author includes the key to the allegory in the very description. At the end of the essay On Salaried Posts is described an imaginary allegorical painting on the evils of a career based on becoming wealthy. The essay is ostensibly an effort by Lucian to persuade a friend not to accept a paid position as in-house sophist to a rich man, and the preceding pages have been devoted to showing the slow and wretched decline of one who so demeans himself. When the painting is brought in at the end, its various features correspond to the general progression in the career of the domesticated sophist Lucian has just described; furthermore, the allegorical meaning of each figure in the painting is made immediately clear by the fact that their real identity is given in the description itself. We are told that the painting shows a golden gateway at the top of a steep hill. Within it sits Wealth (Πλούτος), himself golden. His lover scrambles up the hill but is abused by Hope, Deceit, and various other allegorical figures before being ejected through a back door, old, naked, and weeping. Although allegorical, this painting is not presented as a rid­ dle (αίνιγμα); its allegorical interpretation is contained in its description and there can be no question of mystification or misunderstanding. What is described is effectively the deci­ phered version of a picture that would otherwise be incom­ prehensible. The Slander also contains a description of a painting that communicates an allegorical message but that does not pre­ sent interpretive difficulties. Likewise part of a larger text, the description occurs here near its beginning but only after Lucian has announced his intention to speak on the evil ef-

DESCRIPTION AND INTERPRETATION

fects of slander and to show "τψ λόγω καθάπερ επί τίνος γραφής όποιον τι έστιν ή διαβολή και πόθεν άρχεται και όποια εργάζε­ ται" (ΐ5·2; "in words, as if in some painting, what sort of a thing slander is and whence it arises and what it effects").25 There follows the description of a painting of Apelles on this topic (15.5),26 preceded by an indication of its subject matter. Again, the painting consists of allegorical figures who are identified in the very process of description by their allegor­ ical names—Slander, Ignorance, Suspicion, and so forth. Here too no puzzlement is possible, and there is no viewer to be puzzled.27 The painting still, however, points to a meaning that is figurative rather than literal, for if Lucian were to remove the interpretive key from his description, his statement of intent would be of little help to readers faced with this odd cast of painted figures occupied in an impenetrable activity. In Lucian's Heiacles and the Pinax of Cebes, however, the paintings described present exactly this—characters engaged in an activity whose meaning is not apparent. Here, the keys to interpretation are absent, and the pictures present a puz­ zle. And here, again contrary to the situation above, a viewer has been supplied in the text—the ostensible narrator him­ self—to give voice to this potential for puzzlement. In each case, this narrator-viewer explicitly mentions his confusion before the picture, and as we read through the description of it—a description without allegorical key—the narrator's Ac­ tive and assumed confusion acts as a mirror to our own real one. Because the picture is described immediately, no pre­ liminary remarks provide interpretive clues. Thus, the 25 Citations of Lucian are from the four-volume Oxford edition by Macleod (1972] in which the essays and lectures are numbered sequen­ tially. 26 The reason Lucian gives for Apelles' decision to paint such a pic­ ture is apocryphal, and the painting may be fictitious. 27 Note however that Lucian mentions an interpreter who explained the picture to him at some prior time (15.5). Thus, although the paint­ ing as described presents no interpretive difficulties, the convention of viewer/riddle is still alluded to, but at a remove from the present time frame.

CHAPTER ONE

viewer in the text and the readers of the text (its real audi­ ence) are enlightened about the true meaning of the picture simultaneously. This point is not reached until the inevitable introduction of the learned interpreter. Often a wise and elderly figure, or a character with privileged knowledge (such as a native of the region where the painting was seen), this interpreter speaks up soon after the narrator has expressed his own re­ action; thus, the correct interpretation is always forthcom­ ing, even if slightly delayed. Both actions—the initial puz­ zlement of reader and viewer here, and the inevitable offering of an interpretation to this viewer—will prove to be significant elements in our discussion of the novels. As in the two earlier works considered, the actual descrip­ tive passages in the Heracles and the Pinax are compara­ tively factual, precise, and unembellished; the attribution of thoughts and emotions, interpolations from myth, and lib­ erties with spatial and chronological progression are all strictly curtailed. One could even characterize this as a sig­ nal for hidden meaning: as Beaujour notes on the use of de­ tailed factual description in allegorical texts, "to make sure that the meaning is definitely encoded while remaining to some extent hidden, such texts have to be scrupulous in the depiction of places and figures, leaving no meaningful fea­ ture or attribute unspecified" (Beaujour 1981, 34). In the in­ troductory piece Heracles, the narrator comes across a pic­ ture of the hero while traveling in Gaul. The painted Heracles is old, bald-headed but for a few grey hairs, wrin­ kled, and turned dark by the sun. The exact items he is car­ rying, and in which hand, are listed, and following this the oddest feature of whole painting is described—how this old Heracles is drawing after himself a crowd of men, tied to him with delicate chains of gold and amber that stretch from their ears to a hole in the tip of Heracles' tongue! And yet (with remarkable composure) he is smiling. The only feature included in the description that seems less of a potentially painted feature is that his captives follow him joyfully and eagerly; yet to some degree this also arises out of the details

DESCRIPTION AND INTERPRETATION

of the picture, since the bond that connects them to him is slack (Heracles 3). The solution to this odd riddle is not long in coming, although the narrator, who makes a point of his confusion, does not present himself as its source: Ταΰτ' έγώ μεν επί πολύ είστήκειν όρών και θαυμάζων και άπορων και άγανακτών· Κελτός δέ τις παρεστώς ούκ απαίδευ­ τος τά ημέτερα, . . . φιλόσοφος, οιμαι, τά έπιχώρια, Έγώ σοι, εφη, ώ ξένε, λύσω της γραφής τό αίνιγμα. (5.4)

Looking at this and wondering, at a loss and irritated, I had stood there for a long time. But some Celt standing nearby, not unlearned in things Greek, .. . a scholar, I think, of native custom, said "I, stranger, will solve for you the riddle of the painting." As the old Celt then explains, Heracles is identified by the Celts with Speech, or Eloquence (ό λόγος), and he is depicted as old because the elderly are better speakers than the young. The hero draws after himself an audience bound to his tongue by their ears, a nice image for the power of elo­ quence, and his arrows represent words that pierce the soul; Homer too (he adds) speaks of winged words, επη πτερόεντα. This is the allegorical meaning hidden in the picture, as the viewer now sees; and the readers or listeners themselves, momentarily puzzled, are also set straight. Whether the in­ terpreter enlightens, among the latter, individuals who are at a complete loss, or whether he confirms the guesses of those more clever, his appearance is a necessary one. Like the Heracles, Cebes' Pinax contains a description of a painting that clearly calls for the interpretation of an alle­ gorical message. Again no easy key is offered with the de­ scription to eliminate such interpretive difficulties, which again are identified by a viewer in the text. Here, the paint­ ing's abstraction causes difficulties for both viewers and readers, the latter sharing, as they read the account of the painting, the confusion expressed by the former. The picture is described in plain, precise terms at the very opening of the work: it shows three concentric circles; the outermost has a

CHAPTER ONE

gate set in it at which a crowd has gathered; at the gate pre­ sides an old man, and within are a group of women. The lack of literary and rhetorical flourishes here and the viewer's un­ planned encounter with the painting (this species of viewer never plans a gallery tour like the omniscient Philostratus) are hints that once again the description hides a deeper meaning, and although the narrator-viewer is at a loss and any guesses of the readers are just that, an interpreter is luckily at hand: Άπορούντων οΰν ημών περί της μυθολογίας προς άλλήλους πολύν χρόνον πρεσβύτης τις παρεστώς, Ουδέν δεινόν πάσχετε, ω ξένοι, εφη, άποροϋντες περϊ της γραφής ταύτης.

(2.ΐ)28

When, therefore, we had been in mutual puzzlement about the story for a long time, some old man standing nearby said, "It's no terrible thing you experience, stran­ gers, being at a loss about this painting." As the interpreter then explains, the picture is an allegory of Life (Βίος). The painted old man represents one's personal genius or attendant spirit, the women various bad traits; the outermost circle is Life itself, the smaller one is True Learn­ ing ('Αληθινή Παιδεία), and the innermost, Happiness (Ευδαι­ μονία).

In these two texts, a painting is described that contains a hidden and allegorical meaning that neither is simple enough to be immediately apparent nor is decoded by the author in the course of his description of it. Instead, the per­ sonage of the narrator-viewer is introduced into the text to voice explicitly his confusion about the meaning of the painting. In so doing, he inevitably acts as a proleptic model for the confusion of the reader or listener, who likewise can­ not be sure of the hidden significance of what is described. Readers versed in the conventional applications of such pic­ torial descriptions will be aware that an interpretation most 18

Citations of Cebes are from the edition of Fitzgerald and White

(1983)-

DESCRIPTION AND INTERPRETATION

likely follows, and as such they may hazard interpretations of their own. But guesses or impressions must remain un­ substantiated until the learned interpreter, from his stance at the viewer's elbow, offers to interpret the picture—that is, to reveal the allegory that underlies what is visible: only at this point can sure sense be made of the picture.29 The proper understanding of the picture described is a nec­ essary condition of its description in all four cases exam­ ined, because its allegorical interpretation connects the de­ scription with the text in which it appears. In On Salaried Posts, this connection is obvious, because it is indicated be­ forehand; the painting, placed atypically late, serves as an allegorical illustration of the topic of the preceding dis­ course. In the Heracles, the Slander, and the Pinax, the paintings likewise contain allegories that illustrate the ar­ gument of the adjacent text, but in these three they come before the argument and, as such, foreshadow it. This is least striking in the Pinax, where the discussion remains largely an amplification of the painting's meaning rather than an application of this meaning to some other topic. But the function of the introductory paintings as "proleptic sim­ iles" (Harlan 1965, 52) for the following part of the essay or lecture is readily apparent in the other two cases. Thus, the elderly Heracles, having bound his audience to himself through his great eloquence, is used in context as a simile for Lucian's own situation; unsure if he should be lecturing at such an age, he remembered the picture and the elo­ quence that belongs to old age, and took enough heart from the moral of the painting to deliver the lecture (now lost) that followed the prolalia (Heracles 7). In the same way, the picture of Slander shows how she works in conjunction with such figures as Envy and Deceit, and Lucian then proceeds 2' Harlan (1965, 57-58] makes an important point on the differentia­ tion of the terms διήγησις, "narration, account," and έξήγησις, "inter­ pretation," in the Pinax. The viewer originally asks the interpreter for a διήγησις, but the latter consents to give an έξήγησις (3.1). "After the sightseer has become aware of the lofty meaning of the scene, he rev­ erently switches to the other term": "ταϋτα μεν δή καλώς μοι δοκεϊς . . . έξηγείσθαι" (30. ΐ; "you seem to me to interpret these things well").

CHAPTER ONE

to describe the actual workings of slander in real life through these same human attributes.30 Although these four essays have all involved descriptions of paintings, elsewhere in the writings of rhetoricians of the Second Sophistic statues also function as communicators of a hidden allegorical meaning and, more important, may ap­ pear in the context of viewer and interpreter. This, for ex­ ample, is the case for the statue of Opportunity (Καιρός) de­ scribed in Callistratus's Εκφράσεις (Descriptions) 6.?I Although Callistratus usually takes a Philostratean ap­ proach to description and does not entirely depart from it here, he does tell us that this allegorical statue (identified as Opportunity), which struck him as a marvel (θαύμα), was ex­ plained to him by an interpreter who happened to be at hand: εις δέ τις τών περί τάς τέχνας σοφών, και είδότων συν αίσθήσει τεχνικωτέρα τά τών δημιουργών άνιχνεύειν θαύ­ ματα, και λογισμόν έπηγ ε τώ τεχνήματι, την τοϋ καιρού δύναμιν έν τή τέχνη σωζομένην έξηγούμένος. (6.4) One of those who are skilled in the arts and know how to trace out the marvels of artisans with a more skillful perception even applied reasoning to the work, inter­ preting the meaning of Opportunity as preserved in the statue. 30 In his article on the convention of the introductory description of a painting in sophistic literature, Schissel von Fleschenberg (Σ913, 83) or­ ganizes these traits into a four-part plan: "a) localization of the artwork, b) its description, c) its interpreter, d) a general maxim, drawn from the contemplation of the artwork, which at the same time provides the ba­ sis for the main issue of the work in question, as its leading idea." Al­ though this is a handy schematization, his attempt to encompass with it all manifestations of the introductory pictorial description tends to suppress small but significant deviations from the general pattern. See my comments on Leucippe and Clitophon at the beginning of the next chapter. J* Descriptions of allegorical statues also occur in the Vita Apollonii of Flavius Philostratus, where the wise Apollonius interprets (έξηγήσατο) the meaning of the strange appearance of a statue of Milo, correct­ ing the misinterpretation of the local inhabitants (4.28); a statue of Tan­ talus holding a foaming goblet also has a deeper meaning (3.25, 3.32].

DESCRIPTION AND INTERPRETATION

Although Callistratus as viewer-narrator had engaged in var­ ious conjectures prior to the interpreter's account, it was not until the latter's explanation that he was able to understand the work fully; and so for statues as well as for paintings, the same hermeneutic approach to description can be brought into play. As used in these essays and published lectures of sophists and orators of the Second Sophistic, then, descriptions of both paintings and statues (whether real or imaginary) are often tied to some type of interpretive activity, whose need is impressed upon the reader by the introduction of the con­ fused viewer and by the ambiguous nature of the painting itself. In these descriptive passages, the interpretation can focus on the actual content of the painting, embellishing and explaining it with information supplied from literary sources, or it can focus on the painting's hidden or allegori­ cal meaning, in which case the description proper either in­ cludes the appropriate allegorical terms or else remains on the level of the painted picture but is followed by an allego­ rizing exegesis. Such paintings of deeper meaning frequently foreshadow a discussion. If the convention of the viewer in the text (who is always the narrator) is used, exegesis be­ comes the function of an interpreter, who uncovers the deep meaning for this viewer and simultaneously for the text's real audience, at whom the whole process of imaginary pic­ ture and allegorical interpretation may be explicitly directed (the introductory piece Heracles, for example, functions as a self-justification directed at Lucian's audience).32 »3 Throughout this discussion on the literary and rhetorical uses of descriptions of paintings I have made only limited use of the name given such pasages in the Piogymnasmatal namely, ecphrasis. This is because the question of this term's area of application in the second century A.D. remains slightly doubtful. It is partly the object of Harlan's dissertation to show that up to the end of the third century, ecphrasis could refer to artwork but not to painting, and that the treatment ac­ corded descriptions of paintings was different from that of other de­ scriptions—ecphrases of nature, animals, artworks, all the categories of the Pzogymnasmata. However, this argument, largely ex silentio, does not seem sound. First, it is not only the description of a painting that can be allegorical or proleptic, as she maintains; see n. 31 above, and

CHAPTER ONE

The description of paintings (and less often statues) as a literary or rhetorical device demanding interpretation is not the only manifestation, in the Second Sophistic, of descrip­ tive passages that invite hermeneutic activity: oneirography or the interpretation of dreams, which is almost always dethe proleptic description of Europa's basket that occurs much earlier in Moschus, Europa 37-62. Second, there exist similar ecphrases on sub­ jects described both as real (occurring in nature) and as parts of paint­ ings—notably, the painted garden at Leucippe and Clitophon 1.1.3-6 that is a replica of the real one at 1.15.1-8 and reminiscent, also, of the one in the Εικόνες of Philostratus the Younger (3.2); the painted monster eager to dine on Andromeda at Leucippe and Clitophon 3.7.6-7, which is oddly like the living crocodile described at 4.19.1-6; and the topics of the Nile and its swampy islands that occur in both authors (Aethiopica r.5.2-6.2, 2.28.1-5; Leucippe and Clitophon 4.i2.r-4, 4.12.4-8), which are also treated by Philostratus Lemnius but as paintings (Εικόνες ΐ·5, ΐ·9). As Anderson (1986, 264) has commented, "It is important to compare Philostratus' versions with those of other sophists writing miniatures on similar themes, but not always presenting them as paint­ ings; by so doing we can recognise the convergence of literary and artis­ tic taste." Third, the term ecphrasis does occur in reference to paintings before it is used in this way by Nicolaus in the fifth and Philostratus the Younger in the late third century A.D. (in Philostratus, to refer to his grandfather's work, at Εικόνες, proem 2]; as Harlan herself notes, it is found in Aelian's Vaiia Histotia (2.44) as a chapter head describing a painting by Theon of Samos (Harlan 1965, 47). Chapter heads are often later additions, but the citation does not help an already uncertain ar­ gument. Fourth, paintings may not have been specifically mentioned in the earlier Piogymnasmata precisely because the description of what they portrayed would be handled in the same manner as its description outside the frame of painted work. Friedlaender compares two passages on the proper technique for describing personages—one on real charac­ ters in Aphthomus (ed. Spengel 1885, 2:46), and one on painted or sculpted figures in Nicolaus (ed. Spengel r886, 3:492)—and comments on Nicolaus that: "here is transferred to works of art what in Aphthonius . . . was prescribed for the description of personages" (Friedlaender 1912, 86 n. 3, discussing Matz, De Philostiatorum in desctibendis imaginibus fide [Bonn, 1867] 20.2. Both Progymnasmata advocate starting with the head and progressively moving down to the extremities|. Be­ cause pictorial ecphrasis would certainly be so called by Heliodorus's day, and because of the arguments listed, I have sometimes referred to it as such in the following chapters when discussing Achilles Tatius as well.

DESCRIPTION AND INTERPRETATION

scriptive (Beaujour 1981, 44), is also well and thriving. To this period date the Oneiiociitica of Artemidorus, a work of five books entirely devoted to the practical exegesis of dreams, and the six Sacred Tales (Ίεροι Λόγοι) of the orator Aelius Aristides, which contain over a hundred dreams on medical revelations made to the author by the Greek god of healing, Asclepius. But even in the nonspecialized writings of the sophists of the epoch, passages on the interpretation of dreams as well as descriptions of actual dreams periodi­ cally occur. Like the description of a picture, that of a dream presents to its audience—whether fictional character or ac­ tual reader—a need for interpretation, because it provides those who hear of it (whether reader or character) with a de­ tailed description of a visual experience that is perceived to be the repository for a deeper or hidden meaning. Further­ more, when such dreams are in fact interpreted by wise men in the text, or elucidated in the course of events, their rela­ tion to the text that frames them turns out to be analagous to that of the pictorial interpretations already examined. Artemidorus's long treatise on the interpretation of dreams was far from being the first of its kind, but the re­ marks in the proem to book one about his incorporation of much new material and his care to obtain all previous such works are substantiated by the range and comprehensive­ ness of the dream topics found in this treatise,· they are pres­ ent on a scale unmatched in earlier works. Significantly, his approach is strictly exegetical: Artemidorus "has mostly confined himself to a mere description of the different dreams from the interpreter's point of view" (Blum 1938, 67). He tells us that there are two basic types of dreams, the ένύπνιον (enhypnion) and the όνειρος (oneiros); they differ in that the former signals present circumstances, the latter fu­ ture circumstances (1.2). As such, the ένύπνιον has no hid­ den meaning and only reflects one's waking state of mind. But the δνειρος is a "κίνησις ή πλάσις ψυχής πολυσχήμων σημαν­ τική των έσομένων αγαθών ή κακών" (ed. Pack 1963, 5/ 1·2; "a movement or moulding of the soul that takes many forms and is significant of future benefit or misfortune"). The όνει-

CHAPTER ONE

ρος itself may be literal (θεωρηματικός, "to be interpreted as seen") or allegorical (αλληγορικός). If literal, it comes true im­ mediately and as it appeared in the dream (1.2,); but allegor­ ical dreams are those "δι" άλλων αλλα σημαίνοντες, αίνισσομένης έν αΐιτοίς φυσικώς τι [και] της ψυχής" (ed. Pack 1963* 5; 1.2; "signifying certain things through others, when the soul darkly riddles something in them in accordance with natural laws"), or again, "τούς τά σημαινόμενα δι' αινιγμάτων έπιδεικνύντας" (ed. Pack 1963, 241, 4·1; "showing what is signified by means of riddles"). An allegorical dream, like an allegorical painting, presents then a riddle (αίνιγμα) that de­ mands decoding and acts also as a proleptic simile, this time of future events." These traits are put to use in several works of the Second Sophistic. On a general level, a discussion of divination through dreams ("τό μαντικόν τό έκ τών όνειράτων") and of the methods of the interpreters of visions ("έξηγηταί τών όψεων)" is found in Flavius Philostratus's Vita Apollonii (2.37). The Sacied Tales of Aelius Aristides, mentioned earlier, offer parallels and disagreements alike with the interpretations of various dream symbols offered in the Oneirocritica of Artemidorus. In these "tales," the interpreter figure actually appears to Aristides as he dreams and explains the signifi­ cance of the dream; alternately, Aristides will narrate to an interpreter in a later dream the earlier dream that is to be interpreted.54 More specifically, one finds in the Vita Apollonii and in Lucian descriptions of allegorical dreams that need interpreting and that, if not always proleptic of future events, at least offer guidance with regard to the future. At 33 J. J. Winkler points out to me that Artemidorus believes the masses do not have allegorical dreams; only those who have the requisite knowledge to interpret such dreams actually dream in symbols (Oneiiociitica 4, proem, pp. 239-40). As Winkler remarks, this reinforces the argument for an educated readership in the case of the two more so­ phisticated novels. 34 See Behr 1968, i94ff. nn. 75, 76, for a listing of such occurrences. ( Behr also offers an appendix in which are found all the parallels and disagreements between Aristides' interpretations and those of Artemidorus (197-204).

DESCRIPTION AND INTERPRETATION

Vita Apollonii 1.23, the wise Apollonius is visited by a dream in which fish cast up on dry land are begging a dol­ phin swimming by for help. Apollonius's companion Damis interprets the dream wrongly but is set right by the seer, who, connecting the dream with the capture of the Eretrians five hundred years ago, thereby deduces that he should pay them a visit in the near future, as he does. Particularly rem­ iniscent of the role played by pictorial description is that of the dream described in the introductory lecture On the Dream, 01 Lucian's Career (Περί τοϋ 'Ενυπνίου ήτοι Βίος Λουκιανού) of Lucian. Most likely fictitious and perhaps in­ spired by the well-known allegory of Heracles at the Cross­ roads (cf. Xenophon's Memorabilia 2,.1.21), the dream, which Lucian claims he saw as a child, showed to him two women, each trying to drag him in different ways. One iden­ tifies herself as Sculpture, the other as Learning; after choos­ ing the latter, Lucian is taken on a chariot flight over nations that applaud him and then returns home dressed in royal purple. This allegorical dream that foreshadows the course of his career is then used to bolster the point he himself (tell­ ing his audience he does not expect them to be ΰποκριταί, interpreters) makes in the remainder of the lecture— namely, that the young should choose education over a trade, for they will become as famous as he has. Thus, its use here is similar to the function of the pictorial descrip­ tion in the Heracles, in which the painting of the aged yet eloquent hero was used as a justification for Lucian's own decision to give the lecture following the prolalia. That the Second Sophistic should be the context for a widespread attention to description as a device requiring hermeneutic activity seems appropriate in view of the broader traits of the epoch, especially the "particularly care­ ful attention on the part of artist and audience to language and to the disposition and articulation of traditional ele­ ments of composition so conjoined as to produce an artistic work. .. . It is the utilization and appreciation for artistic purposes of rhetorical techniques acquired in the process of education that seems to characterize the age" (Reardon

CHAPTER ONE

1974, ^7; emphasis added). Description is precisely such a rhetorical technique; as an important component of the Progymnasmata on composition, it is cleverly used by Lucian, Cebes, and others in the production of their "artistic works." In these it functions in a way that demands atten­ tion and is bound to elicit the interpretive activity not only of the viewer in the text but also, momentarily, of the audi­ ence at which it is directed and for whom the correct inter­ pretation is always soon provided. If we recognize this much, we have already before us, in our consideration of the conventions that informed the read­ ers of the ancient novels, an essential part of the answer to the problem posed at the beginning of this chapter. Re­ phrased in the words of Suleiman, the question was the fol­ lowing: "What are the codes and conventions . . . to which actual readers refer in trying to make sense of texts and to which actual authors refer in facilitating or complicating, or perhaps even frustrating, the reader's sense-making ability?" (Suleiman 1980, 12). To this Reardon has provided the first basis for an answer: "What is common, ultimately, to novel and sophistic, is the education received in the rhetorical schools" (Reardon 1974, 26). The codes and conventions supplied by an education in which rhetoric plays the princi­ pal part and a culture in which oratory provides the enter­ tainment shape the preconceptions that readers of the period bring to the novels, and it is the presence of these codes and conventions that the author takes for granted in entertain­ ing—or frustrating—his readers." With regard, then, to con­ ventions of description, we now have some idea of what the reader in the Second Sophistic might expect—a vital first step. This same step provides the point of departure for the rest of this book. It clears the path for an intriguing discovery: that the sophisticated novels of Heliodorus and Achilles Ta3SI should specify that I do not mean to imply there is any such thing as the reader, since personal reactions to a text always vary. But certain assumptions and expectations may be shared in a wide body of readers as a result of a common education and certain cultural conventions.

DESCRIPTION AND INTERPRETATION

tius differ from the writings of Chariton and Xenophon of Ephesus, and even of Longus, precisely in that they are not content with merely making use of the "sense-making abil­ ity" of the reader with regard to the descriptive conventions that we have considered at some length.36 Rather, these two authors elevate the reading of their novels away from an act of nonconscious reception. They compel their readers to re­ flect on and evaluate their own ability to read: at a time when "the wish to understand and interpret paintings was something altogether habitual" (Palm 1965, 171), the nov­ elists subtly manipulated these readers' expectation of the need to interpret pictorial description and oneirography, and played also with the relation linking these and other types of descriptive passage to the reader and to the text. The de­ scriptions of paintings, dreams, oracles, and even spectacles that occur in their works demand interpretation from the literary characters who came upon the paintings and spec­ tacles or are visited by dreams, and who function therefore as the "viewers in the text"; but they also demand interpre­ tation from the readers, both ancient and modern, who themselves are made via ecphrasis to "see" what is de­ scribed.37 The descriptive passage, after all, by dint of being 3' In contrast, the few dreams that occur in Xenophon of Ephesus's Ephesiaca come true as one would expect, while descriptions of any sort are rare in Chariton's Chaeieas and Callirhoe, probably because this work precedes their effervescence in the Second Sophistic: Palm (1965, 182) remarks on their scarcity here that "this could be a sign of a later influence of rhetoric on the novel, since obviously ecphrasis was fostered by rhetoric." The dreams in the work of Longus, who is not to be classed with the preceding two authors, tend to be instructive rather than prophetic; if prophetic, they are what Artemidorus would call θεωρηματικοί—they come trae immediately. The exception to this is the first dream described (Daphnis and Chloe 7.2), which is prophetic as well as instructive, and takes longer to be fulfilled: Dryas and Lamon see Daphnis and Chloe touched by Cupid's arrow; later the pair fall in love. On Longus's ecphrases, including the initial pictorial description, see Chalk 1960, Mittelstadt 1967, Littlewood 1979, and Hunter 1983, among others. " For such, as we have seen, is the goal of ecphrasis, which is a "λόγος περιηγηματικός έναργώς υπ' όψιν άγων τό δηλοΰμενον" (ed. Spengel 1885,

CHAPTER ONE

descriptive, and as a device that stops and postpones the nar­ rative, "requests a 'translation' as to its meaning, its func­ tion in the work; it calls upon and interrogates the reader whom it transforms into an interpreter" (Hamon 1981, 11). At this point, the crucial difference between the treatment of such passages in the works of the second-century sophists and in the Aethiopica and Leucippe and Clitophon becomes apparent: in these two works, both the viewers in the text and the readers of the text are often abandoned by the au­ thor: no interpretation is forthcoming from this source, and no wise interpreter is supplied in the text to enlighten the fictional viewers and the readers. Rather, readers and char­ acters are left to formulate their own interpretation—a change that makes all the difference. When no interpretation in the text is clearly marked as definitive, the readers find themselves compelled, in the very act of reading, to come to some decision about the pas­ sage at hand, regardless of whether the fictional viewers voice interpretations of their own. The readers may accept conjectures of the characters,· they may, based on a famili­ arity with conventional types of interpretation, draw their own conclusions; or they may choose to suspend judgment temporarily, while remaining aware that such passages often do hide a deeper meaning. Whatever the readers do, how­ ever, their understanding of the passage and its potential will necessarily be colored by the events of the narrative it­ self—the textual environment, that is, in which the passage is situated. The tendency to draw conclusions based on the course of the story will be even stronger when the textual viewers do voice interpretations. These viewers usually see artworks and dreams as containing deeper meaning that has a bearing upon their own life, or rather upon its future course—what for us constitutes the forthcoming narrative. As such, the understanding attributed to them will work to affect the 2:118; "a descriptive account bringing what is illustrated vividly before one's sight").

DESCRIPTION AND INTERPRETATION

readers' understanding of the passage and of its function in the narrative. Unquestionably, the interpretive activity of the readers will work at a certain remove from the level of the characters, because the former are aware that the de­ scriptive passage is a literary device and look for a function and for meaning in this context. Nonetheless, because the characters react in response to the same stimuli—that is, these carriers of a deeper meaning—as the readers, and be­ cause they voice their own interpretations and then act upon what they have just said, the readers' understanding too is inevitably colored: "the lure of narcissistic identification only makes it more difficult for the interpreter to keep his distance from the interpretant," or the interpreter in the text (Schor 1980, 169). The dual call to interpretation to which both character and reader may respond also works to create different levels of meaning in the text. Because the readers are often operat­ ing from a position of superior knowledge, they may at times understand a descriptive passage in the same way as its viewers and on other occasions see that these viewers are clearly mistaken. Yet even this vantage point, in the absence of an official interpretation, is not infallible—far from it. For the descriptive passages in these works do not play a merely benign and didactic role,· there is a reason for the absence of the unerring interpreter figure. In Aethiopica and Leucippe and Clitophonl description plays with its own conventional status, with the expectation of the readers that it functions as a device worthy of interpretation and proleptic of the truth. Manipulating the careful readers' attention to pattern and detail, Heliodorus and Achilles Tatius use ecphrasis and oneirography to undermine such expectations and to play with the shifting nuances between readerly detection and readerly deception. And ultimately, as an authorial tool to illuminate or to obscure, the descriptive passages in these novels lay bare the illusory power of the readers to make of the text what they will.

TWO

Pictorial Description: Clues, Conventions, Girls, and Gardens SHORTLY AFTER the beginning of Leucippe and Clitophonl

the unnamed narrator—ostensibly Achilles Tatius himself— comes by chance upon a painting of the abduction of Europa, which is then described in careful detail.1 To one side of it is portrayed a luxurious meadow, which borders on the Phoenician sea shown to the other side. Europa's hand­ maidens are at the edge of the meadow, gazing out to sea with a mixture of fear and joy; far from the shore the bull is swimming away with a scantily clad Europa on his back, and with Eros leading him on. When our narrator comments aloud on Eros's rule over heaven and earth, a young man standing next to him is prompted to mention his own suf­ ferings for love; Achilles presses him for his story, the young man accedes, and the narrative that follows is the tale of Clitophon (the νεανίσκος) and Leucippe. It can hardly be doubted that the author's placement of this pictorial description at the very head of his work would give rise to certain expectations in the ancient reader about its role in the following narrative. The use of a descriptive passage as an introductory device was familiar enough from the works of the contemporary sophists; "in second Sophis­ tic literary productions, descriptions of paintings as intro­ ductions to large sections or whole books of an individual 1 For a precis of this novel as well as of the Aethiopica, see the appen­ dix.

PICTORIAL DESCRIPTION

work are fairly common" (Mittelstadt 1967, 757 η. i).1 The pictorial descriptions in Lucian's Heracles, in his Slander, and in Cebes' Pinax are used as introductory passages, and, of course, in another novel, Longus's Daphnis and Chloe, the device of the introductory painting takes on a scope and significance unparalleled elsewhere. Here, as in Leucippe and Clitophonl the narrator comes by chance upon a painted picture (composed of a series of pastoral scenes and set in a grove of the nymphs in Lesbos), which is then described. However, the narrative of the romance that follows is not only prompted by this picture but is the literary equivalent of the picture and a prolonged ecphrasis of "consummate art" itself: as the narrator gazed upon it, he tells us, "I con­ ceived a strong desire to compose a literary pendant to that painted picture" (Hadas 1964, proem 2); as a result, he has "carefully set the story out in four books" (proem 3).3 Of course, in these texts and elsewhere, it is not only the early positioning of the pictorial description but, more es­ sentially, its role as a communicator of an allegorical mean­ ing that would have given rise to various expectations in the reader. Paintings that may or may not have been invented for the occasion were used both here and elsewhere as vehi­ cles of allegory, for "in the rhetorical literature of the second century A.D. the evocation of a fictitious allegorical scene was still a routine device" (Harlan 1965, 58).4 Such descrip­ tions, when they introduce a longer passage or a whole es­ say, often anticipate the subject matter of what follows.5 Yet 2 The same point is made by Schissel von Fleschenburg (1913, 83ff.|, who labels the technique "Bildeinsatz" or "painting insertion." 3 It is perhaps otiose to say that the pictorial description foreshadows the story, since they are one and the same, but this is effectively what the opening description does. * Interestingly, Lucian uses the description of a dream to the same end in On the Dieam, or Lucian's Career (Περι τοϋ 'Ενυπνίου ήτοι Βίος Λουκιανού)—an example of "Traumeinsatz," and one that points up the affinities shared by pictures and dreams as subjects for hermeneutic de­ scription. s So routinely that, as Harlan points out with regard to the allegory of Concord and Strife in Aelius Aristides, 44.395, "the speaker is giving

CHAPTER TWO

these passges do not usually offer up their meaning to the reader on the spot; in fact, in almost every case, a character­ istic of this allegorizing use of descriptive passages is the in­ sertion into the text of an interpreter (έρμηνεύς or εξηγητής) to uncover and explain the deep meaning of the painting. Only in those descriptions where the author himself sup­ plies the interpretation in the very process of describing is this figure lacking, and in such cases there are no viewers in the text to be puzzled; otherwise, the interpreter is a neces­ sity without which the viewers are unable to understand the painting before them. This situation is a frequent one. In the Heracles, the nar­ rator-viewer Lucian stands for a long time before the paint­ ing of Heracles, "όρών και Θαυμάζων και άπορων και άγανακτών" (5-4; "looking and wondering, at a loss and irritated") until a learned Celt at his side ("Κελτός δέ τις παρεστώς ούκ άπαίδευτος τά ημέτερα, . . . φιλόσοφος, οίμαι, τά έπιχώρια") interprets it (λύω) for him. In the Pinax, too, the viewers (among whom the narrator numbers himself) are in confusion over the painting they see—"άπορούντων ούν ημών" [ι.ι]—until an old man who is standing nearby speaks up. He offers them what will be an interpretation (έξήγησις) "fit for the riddle (αίν­ ιγμα) of the sphinx." Longus must find an interpreter (έξηγητής) of the picture he has just described before he, as viewer-narrator, can compose his "literary pendant" of it (proem 3). Even the protagonist Hysminias of a much later Greek romance, Hysmine and Hysminias, cannot under­ stand an allegorical painting of four girls until he sees the interpretive inscription at its bottom (2.6). The ubiquitous interpreter (usually elderly) also appears to help the puzzled in-text viewers of allegorical but not proleptic artworks at Vita Apollonii 4.2,8, Callistratus's Descriptions 6.4, and Lucian's Erotes 8 and 15. In addition, Lucian refers offhand to his audience the (purely rhetorical) choice between visualizing the painted allegories themselves and imagining the interpreter describing them" (Harlan 1965, 59).

PICTORIAL DESCRIPTION

an interpreter who helped him understand the picture of Slander (5).6 Several odd variations upon this picture/narrator/inter­ preter/interpretation sequence that constitutes the conven­ tion of the introductory ecphrasis are strikingly apparent at the beginning of Leucippe and Clitophon. Achilles Tatius, himself the ostensible narrator at this point, says of his own reaction to the painting: Έγώ δέ και τά άλλα μεν έπηνουν της γραφής, ατε δέ ών ερω­ τικός περιεργότερον έβλεπον τον άγοντα τον βοϋν Έρωτα· καί, "Οίον," είπον, "άρχει βρέφος ουρανού και γης καΐ θαλάσσης." (ι.2.ι)

I was praising the other features of the picture too but, since I am given to love, kept looking in particular at Love leading the bull, and "How," I said, "that baby rules it over heaven, earth, and sea!" Conventionally the interpreter makes his appearance at this point and offers his exegesis. However, when the Tyrian Cli­ tophon is introduced and addresses the narrator, there is no mention made of interpreters or interpretation. Whether this is Clitophon's official function is at first uncertain be­ cause of his youth, the absence of the proper introduction, the viewer's lack of puzzlement about the picture, and the nature of the painting as representing a well-known myth, hence offering less choice for pointed allegorical interpreta­ tions than a made-up story (Heracles among the Celts) or a nonstory (the concentric circles of Life). But the other traits of the interpreter are there, since Clitophon, standing close 6 Perhaps we should also mention the Satyticon 83-87, where an old man standing nearby—the poet Eumolpus—offers the narrator Encolpius both an official and an unofficial interpretation. His tale of how he guilefully glutted his lust for a beautiful boy at Pergamum, itself set in a picture gallery that includes pictures of Ganymede and Hyacinth, foreshadows his actions with Giton despite all his pious words. It is presented to the unsuspecting reader (and to poor Encolpius), however, as a tale, not an interpretation, while the official interpretation is an­ nounced as such: it is the poem on the capture of Troy (89).

CHAPTER TWO

by the narrator-viewer Achilles (παρεστώς), offers to clarify (δεικνύω) the object of the former's attention—not by an interpretation, but by his own life story, for he himself has suffered at the hands of Love.7 Certainly the readers may no­ tice that the description of the painting itself is in the fac­ tual and detailed mode that always seems to be a harbinger of a deeper meaning and often of its own proleptic activity. This ecphrasis "is singular in that it is very extensive and yet contains no excesses of the sort that occur in the Philostrati or even in Callistratus" (Palm 1965, 185). In fact, this is essentially true of all but one of the pictorial descriptions in Leucippe and Clitophon. Hence the readers may well expect, though not be sure, that a connection between the painting and the story intro­ duced in lieu of its interpretation will soon become evident. As a corollary, they are lured by their own expectations into producing vague conjectures about the relationship of paint­ ing to narrative and about what the former's deep meaning and proleptic activity might be; they provide temporary interpretations of their own, taking what Eco, with regard to the act of reading in general, has called "inferential walks."8 Such reader activity, whether consciously planned or not, 7 To make this episode conform to his schematized arrangement, Schissel von Fleschenbeig labels it as an exchange of his steps c and d (see chapter 1, n. 30), so that the "general maxim drawn from the con­ templation of the artwork" that anticipates the subject matter of the text to come is placed before the "interpreter" (Schissel von Fleschenberg 1913, 99). In so doing he ignores the many ambiguities that sur­ round the question of Clitophon as interpreter and attributes to the nar­ rator's brief comment on Eros a role fulfilled elsewhere by much longer and more detailed passages. Mittelstadt develops a similar schema, di­ viding the device of the introductory picture into "the localization of a picture, its description, the author's own interpretation, and, finally, mention of the leading theme emerging from the picture" (Mittelstadt !967, 757 n. i; emphasis added). Again this analysis is not quite right; although the picture is localized and described, the single line on Eros's power over heaven and earth seems rather scanty to bear the burden of being at once authorial interpretation and comment on the leading theme, at least as Mittelstadt envisions these two elements. 8 On the inferential walk, see Eco 1984, 31-33.

PICTORIAL DESCRIPTION

exposes them to the possibility of error: participation in the text brings with it its own risks. As the narrative progresses, the readers suspect a connection, look for it—but cannot guess at its extent or its validity until it is over, or they think it is over. Again, Eco's more general comments are strikingly appropriate: "To expect means to forecast: the reader collaborates in the course of the fabula, making fore­ casts about the forthcoming state of affairs. The further states must prove or disprove his hypotheses" (Eco 1984, 32)· In fact, out of the four paintings described in Achilles Tatius's work, three have no interpretation, and the interpre­ tation that accompanies the fourth, as we shall see, gives rise in retrospect to reservations in the readers as to its pur­ pose and helpfulness. The device of the introductory paintings may also provide an explanation for the pictorial quality of Heliodorus's intro­ ductory ecphrasis, for the Aethiopica, too, opens with a de­ tailed descriptive passage. A band of brigands looking down from the hilltops near the Heracleot mouth of the Nile see below a moored ship loaded with cargo and a beach strewn with dead bodies. Scattered everywhere are the remnants of a banquet—overturned tables and goblets, untouched food, wine mixed with blood. Yet the victors of the battle are no­ where to be seen, and spoils and ship are unplundered. Then a second sight strikes the pirates' eyes: a girl of divine beauty perched on a rock nearby, armed with a bow, crowned with laurel, and sitting absolutely still. Her atten­ tion is fixed on a young man lying at her feet who is badly wounded and in a deathlike stupor. Suddenly, he speaks. Heliodorus's descriptive passages are generally character­ ized by their animation; even when they concern inanimate objects, they create an illusion of movement and life, whereas Achilles Tatius may treat even living animals as cu­ riously static, a true picture. Good examples of this differ­ ence in descriptive styles (on which see chapter 4) are pro­ vided by their divergent handling of the bandits' islands in the Nile's marshes (Leucippe and Clitophon 4.12.4-8 and

CHAPTER TWO

Aethiopica 1.5.2,-6.2) and the crocodile (Leucippe and Clitophon 4.19.1-6 and Aethiopica 6.1.2). Here, however, the scene is described almost as if it were painted: a stillness lies over everything, all movement is arrested, Charicleia (for it is she) sits on her rock like a statue, until finally Theagenes speaks and breaks the spell.® But it is more than the stillness of the scene portrayed that creates the impression of a paint­ ing. Like the painting that is found at the beginning of Leucippe and Clitophon, the scene is located geographically be­ fore it is described,10 and a similar concern for detail is evident; Charicleia's stance, for example, is described mi­ nutely—seated on the rock, she is resting her left elbow on her right thigh and leans her cheek on her fingers, and her head is bowed as she stares at the young man (1.2.1-2). The paradoxes and antitheses that pervade the description are typical of Achilles Tatius's descriptive technique as well, while the final sophistic treatment of Theagenes' gaze, which pain pulls down but the sight of Charicleia forces up (1.2.3), is strikingly similar to the description of the painted Prometheus in Leucippe and Clitophon, whose gaze is di­ vided between Heracles and his own pain (3.8.7). Finally, and again like a painting, the tableau is gazed upon by ob­ servers who have come across it by chance—"precisely like people before a picture that they want to interpret" remarks Palm pregnantly (Palm 1965, 195). The scene is described through their eyes, but these brigands, the only viewers in the text, cannot understand what they see. Precisely like the conventional viewers of introductory pictures, they are άπορούντες, at a loss. Here, where Achilles offers a young man telling a story in the place of a clearly identified interpretation, Heliodorus of­ fers nothing. Although the viewers of the strange scene— 9 The pictorial quality of this ecphrasis has been widely recognized, starting with Rohde's drawing of attention to the "sense of a pictorial effect in the very effectively arranged pictures at the beginning of the novel" (Rohde 1914, 450). 10 As we have seen, both Schissel von Fleschenburg and Mittelstadt have identified this as the first element of the conventional Bildeinsatz.

PICTORIAL DESCRIPTION

both the first and second band of brigands, and any reader new to the novel—are in complete confusion, there is no one to act as interpreter, and indeed, no character present here could, for the brigands and the shipwrecked couple do not even share a common language. The pirates make several attempts at guessing what the scene might mean; for exam­ ple, when the first band sees Charicleia: οι μεν γαρ θεόν τινα ελεγον, και θεόν "Αρτεμιν ή την έγχώριον 'Ισιν, ol δέ ίέρειαν υπό του θεών έκμεμηνυΐαν και τόν όρώμενον πολύν φόνον έργασαμένην. Και οί μεν ταϋτα έγίνωσκον, τά όντα δέ οΰπω έγίνωσκον. (ι.2..6) Some kept saying she was a goddess, either Artemis or the native Isis, others, that she was a priestess driven mad by some god, and who had worked the massive slaughter that they saw. And these were their opinions, but the truth they did not yet know. Upon their arrival, the second band is reduced to similar ef­ forts at reasoning: "τούς μεν γαρ πολλούς φόνους ύπό τών προ­ τέρων γεγενήσθαι ληστών εΐκαζον" (ΐ·3·6,· "they conjectured that the many corpses were caused by the former bandits"). The hermeneutic activity that the strange scene elicits from the pirate band is matched by that of the readers, who have no better idea of what the meaning of the ecphrasis is and who, like the pirates, do not even know the characters' names (and will not find out until 1.8). The pirates' behav­ ior, in short, is a textual mirror for that of the readers, who also will venture interpretations without yet knowing the truth, and who, as Heliodorus says of the pirates, are the more affected because of their ignorance of what came be­ fore. But there is one difference,· the readers know that the earlier bandits have erred in their interpretation, because Heliodorus himself makes this explicit; and they know the second group has erred too, because the first band at no point killed men already dead. In short, while puzzling over the solution themselves, the readers are made aware of the pos-

CHAPTER TWO

sibility, even probability, of incorrect exegesis—if the pi­ rates can be misled, so can they. Interestingly, Heliodorus has made use of the introductory painting convention in another and equally subtle way. Be­ cause his novel starts in medias res, the earliest point in the story is not to be found at the beginning of the work, as it is for Leucippe and Clitophon. In fact, the events from which the whole novel takes its start are not revealed until 4.8.18, when Calasiris reads Charicleia's ribbon. On it Persinna has written the story of Charicleia's conception and subse­ quent exposure. It was the baby's white skin that prompted her abandonment, a hue arising from a strange coincidence that Persinna explains: εγώ μεν χήν α'ιτίαν έγνώριζον δτι μοι παρά την όμιλίαν την προς τον ανδρα προσβλέψοα την Άνδρομέδαν ή γραφή παρασχούσα και πανταχόθεν έπιδείξασα γυμνήν, αρτι γαρ αυτήν άπό τών πετρών ό Περσεύς κατήγεν. (4-8-5)

I knew the reason: during my lovemaking with my hus­ band I looked at the Andromeda which a painting rep­ resented and showed as completely nude, just as Perseus is leading her down from the rocks. Thus the real beginning of the whole story occurs at pre­ cisely this moment, and in a manner of his own, Heliodorus has made use of another "introductory" painting—although we are not aware of it until book four. It has often been remarked that the painting of Europa with which Leucippe and Clitophon opens is thematically similar to the narrative that follows it, but these themes are often left vague: the painting's opposition between land and sea, the portrayal of an abduction and flight over the ocean, the pointing of a "symbolic finger at the prime movers of the novel, namely Tyche . . . and Eros" (Harlan 1965, 94). The­ matic similarity may also be remarked in the "introductory" painting of Andromeda occurring in book four of the Aethiopiea on which we have just commented: here, both painting and novel center on the fortunes of a white Ethio-

PICTORIAL DESCRIPTION

pian princess and a Greek hero. Furthermore, the description of the painting of Europa also serves to set the tone of the novel in a very effective way, which is later strengthened by the paintings of Andromeda and Philomela: it emphasizes the erotic.11 Thus Europa is described in a manner that is unabashedly voyeuristic; having told us that "τό δέ σώμα δια τής έσθήτος ύπεφαίνετο" (ι.ι.ιο; "her body was visible through her clothing"), Achilles Tatius then goes on to de­ scribe with sensuous detail just what was visible: βαθύς ομφαλός· γαστήρ τεταμένη· λαπάρα στενή· τό στενόν είς ίξύν καταβαίνον ηΰρύνετο. μαζο'ι. τών στέρνων ήρέμα προκύπτοντες· ή συνάγουσα ζώνη τον χιτώνα και τούς μαζούς έ κ λ ε ι ε , κ α ΐ έ γ ί ν ε τ ο τ ο ΰ σ ώ μ α τ ο ς κ ά τ ο π τ ρ ο ν ό χ ι τ ώ ν . ( 1 .1 .1 1 )

The deep navel; the taut belly,· the narrow waist—the narrow part widened as it went down to the hips; the breasts, gently pushing out from her chest. Drawing to­ gether tunic and breasts, the girdle confined them, and her vesture was a mirror to her body. In the same painting, Europa's handmaidens and the meadow in which they are standing are described in simi­ larly erotic terms,· the passage on the foliage of the mead­ ow's trees in particular contains language rife with opportu­ nities for sexual double-entendre. The erotic emphasis is maintained in the later descriptions of the paintings of An­ dromeda and Philomela; the one, we are told, is clothed in the thinnest of tunics (3.7.5), whereas the other tries to cover her breasts with a garment that has been torn off by a lustful Tereus (5.3.6). Anderson, who has noted the erotic tendencies of these pictorial ecphrases, takes these descrip­ tions as reason to call Clitophon a "voyeur" and a "sensuous hero" who is "ready to grasp at the amorous import of pic­ tures" (Anderson 1984, 79). But this seems misleading, for it is Achilles Tatius himself who is describing and comment­ ing on the Europa picture, and the descriptions of the other 11 Like

many others of the novel's ecphrases; cf. chapter 5.

CHAPTER TWO

three paintings (Andromeda, Prometheus, Philomela) are in­ serted into the narrative in such a way that no indication is given that they are Clitophon's descriptive efforts,· rather, the author seems to have forgotten that we are listening to a first-person account, and to have placed in this account "independent" descriptive passages. Clitophon is genuinely involved only in the Philostratean interpretation of the Philomela picture, which he gives at Leucippe's request after it has been "independently" described (5.5.1-9). A final tone-setting device related to the introductory ecphrasis of the picture of Europa is the physical environment of the teller of the story and his listener. Once Clitophon has agreed to tell his tale, the author leads him to a grove that, coming so soon after the one described in the painting, and sharing with it close-planted trees and a stream, reminds us of the painting and its story, and hence raises expectations. As the author himself says of the place, it is "μύθων άξιος ερωτικών" (1.2.3,· "worthy of love stories"). Descriptions of gardens, however—both the painted gar­ denlike meadow in the Europa picture and the real garden at Clitophon's home in Tyre—are significant not only as tonesetting devices, but in a much more specific way as foreshadowers and indicators of the heroine's character. Hence I shall consider this question before proceeding to the proleptic function of pictorial descriptions in the novel in general, arguably the most important use of the descriptive passages in the two works at hand, and one that is shared at times by other kinds of ecphrasis (despite Harlan's argument [1965] to the contrary). A striking feature of the description of the meadow in the picture of Europa at the novel's opening and the description of Clitophon's garden in Tyre that occurs soon afterward (1.15.1-8) is the fact that each duplicates the other very closely. Of Europa's meadow (1.1.3-6), we are told that blos­ soms (άνθη) abound, in particular narcissus, rose, and myrtle ("νάρκισσος και ρόδα και μυρρίναι"). Among these flowers is planted a dense group of trees so close that their foliage is intertwined: "συνεχή τά δένδρα· συνηρεφή τα πέταλα· συνήπτον

PICTORIAL DESCRIPTION

ot πτόρθοι τά φύλλα, και έγίνετο τοις άνθεσιν όροφος ή τών φύλλων συμπλοκή" (ι.1.3-4; "the trees were closely set; their leaves rested on each other; the branches mingled their fo­ liage, and the intertwining of the leaves made a roof for the blossoms"). The sun shines through this leafy roof, forming shadows of the leaves on the ground: "εγραψεν ό τεχνίτης ύπό τά πέταλα και την σκιάν, καΐ ό ήλιος ήρεμα τοϋ λειμώνος κάτω σποράδην διέρρει" (ι.ΐ·4; "the artist also drew the shadow cast by the leaves, and the sun broke through gently down onto the meadow, here and there). And finally, the meadow, through the middle of which a spring is flowing ("ύδωρ κατά μέσον ερρει τού λειμώνος," 1.1.5) after bubbling up (άναβλύζον), is described as enclosed within a surrounding wall ("όλον έτείχιζε τον λειμώνα περιβολή," ι.ι.$). Like the meadow in the painting, Clitophon's own garden is full of flowers, and the rose and the narcissus are men­ tioned and described. The garden contains a closely set plan­ tation of trees; the mingling of their leaves is described in the same language of sexual innuendo that was found in the ecphrasis of the meadow (συμπλοκαί, περιπλοκαί, περιβολαί are used at other points in the romance to refer to the cou­ plings of lips and bodies rather than plants):11 "εθαλλον οί κλάδοι, συνέπιπτον άλλήλοις άλλος έπ' άλλον· γείτονες αί τών πετάλων περιπλοκαί, τών φύλλων περιβολαί, τών καρπών συμπλο­ καί" (1.15-2; "the branches were flourishing, each leaning upon another throughout, and there were neighboring interminglings of their leaves, embraces of their foliage, intertwinings of their fruits"). Also as in the earlier ecphrasis, the effect of the sun's light breaking through the trees' foliage is "περιπλοκή is sexual at all its other occurrences (2.37.10, 2.38.4 twice, 5.8.3, 5.25.8, 5.27.3]; it is used horticulturally only here at 1.15.2. Likewise, συμπλοκή is used in the sexual sense at 1.9.5, !-!7-9, 2.37.6, 2.38.4, 4.7.5, 5.3.6, 5-15-5, 5-15-7, 5-26.2, and 7.5.4; in the gar­ den sense it appears only in these two episodes, at 1.1.13 and 1.15.2, and at 2.15.2. Περιβολή occurs only in these two episodes, at 1.15.2 and 1.1.5. (In the β family, however, it is found at 5.25.8 also, with a sexual meaning.] In other words, the gardens are linked by their usage of words not appearing elsewhere or, if appearing, used predominantly in the sex­ ual sense.

CHAPTER TWO

described: "τών δέ φύλλων άνωθεν αιωρουμένων ύφ' ήλίφ προς ανεμον συμμιγεΐ ώχράν έμάρμαιρεν ή γή την σκίαν" (1.15-4; "as the leaves quivered above, the earth flashed their pale shadow, cast by the sun and made mottled by the wind"). Nor is this garden lacking a spring ("πηγή"), also bubbling up ("άνέβλυζε"), or an enclosing wall ("περί τό άλσος τειχίον ήν," ι. 15 -1 ).13 Its only real difference seems to be the pres­ ence of birds and of ivy climbing up the trees. Violets, too, are not present in the earlier garden. One effect of this unusual assimilation of painting and na­ ture is the strengthening of the association between Europa and the novel's heroine Leucippe, who is associated with Clitophon's garden because he explicitly compares her to it at 1.19.1-3, and because the first successful steps to their love affair are taken in it. The flowers Clitophon sees in her face are the very ones in his garden, the narcissus, the rose, the violet, while her hair is like ivy, also growing in the real garden. As a result of this linking of Europa to Leucippe the painting's role as foreshadower itself seems better con­ firmed. The relation of heroine to garden, however, goes deeper than this. Littlewood points out the same fact of Leucippe's connection with Clitophon's garden and the prox­ imity of the description of the garden and that of Leucippe, a description in which her skin, cheeks, eyes, and hair are compared to the garden's flowers and plants and her appear­ ance is summed up with, "τοιούτος ήν Λευκίππης επί τών προσώπων ό λειμών" (1.19.2,; "such a meadow was there on the face of Leucippe"). Arguing from this and from other asso­ ciations of heroine and garden in the works of later Greek novelists, as well as from the erotic contents of such gardens and the insistent emphasis in these ecphrases upon the " The excellent point is made by Harlan (1965, 104) that it is tech­ nically impossible for the earlier meadow to be walled in on all sides and simultaneously jut out into the sea so that the girls in the meadow are wetting their feet in the waves. But perhaps the criticism of incon­ sistency is less to the point than the notion of parallel gardens deliber­ ately created at the cost of consistency; it is after all inconsistency that grabs attention.

PICTORIAL DESCRIPTION

walls or hedges surrounding the garden (which are present even in the most improbable places, such as the seaside meadow of the Europa painting—although here another ex­ planation is possible [n. 13]), Littlewood concludes that the garden in effect represents the girl associated with it; walls and hedges function of course as a symbol of virginity, and erotic details and sexual vocabulary (περιπλοκαί, συμπλοκαί, περιβολαί, ομιλία) as a symbol of pleasures to come, or if you wish, of what is to be found within the "walls" (Littlewood 1979, 107). However, all gardens are not equal, and, as Littlewood sug­ gests, variations in the descriptions of gardens may reflect in turn the personality of the heroine each is made to repre­ sent. Having remarked the particular suggestiveness of the description of Clitophon's garden, which is "more sensual than most," he then concludes that "It is therefore no sur­ prise to find that Leukippe listens ούκ άηδώς (1.19.1) to the discourse on mutual attraction in nature and subsequently agrees to admit the hero to her chamber, where her virginity is saved only by the fortuitous irruption of her mother" (2.23.3-6; Littlewood 1979, 101). Thus, Leucippe's ambiva­ lent safekeeping of her virginity may be said to be indicated beforehand by the eroticism of the garden that symbolizes her. What Littlewood has failed to mention, however, is that Europa's garden is described in equally erotic terms; and this in turn draws our attention to a new correspondence be­ tween her and Leucippe, and a new foreshadowing of the lat­ ter by the former. Europa is represented as strangely calm; although her handmaidens are distraught and evince a mix­ ture of joy and fear, Europa—who as it is mounts the bull of her own will in the myth—is seated calmly on the back of the swimming bull, holding his horn "ώσπερ ηνίοχος χαλι­ νού" (ι.ι.iO; "like a charioteer [holds] the reins") and using her veil as a sail.14 This calmness in the face of abduction by an amorous bull is all the more striking when one considers that the motif of ** Harlan (1965, 98) has also noticed this calmness.

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mingled joy and fear (or two similarly antithetical emo­ tions), so commonly used to describe the expression of the main character in descriptions of paintings, has here been attributed to the faces of Europa's handmaidens rather than to that of Europa herself, where it would surely be more ap­ propriate. In fact, no emotions are attributed to Europa at all; to this may be contrasted the description of Andromeda ("επί δέ τών προσώπων αυτής κάλλος κεκέρασται καΐ δέος," 3-7-2;

"upon her face beauty and fear were mingled") and that of Philomela and Procne ("γελώσι δέ άμα και φοβούνται," 5-3-7; "they laughed and at the same time feared") and even that of Prometheus ("ό δέ Προμηθεύς μεστός έστιν ελπίδος αμα και φόβου," 3-8-7; "Prometheus is filled with hope and at the same time fear"). Examples are also available from other works of the period; the Andromeda described in Philostratus's Εικόνες, for instance, is said to "χαίρει μετ' έκπλήξεως" (1.29.3; "rejoice, with fear"), and the one in Lucian's On the Hall (Περί τού Οίκου) to feel "αιδώ . .. και φόβον" (22; "mod­ esty and fear"). Europa's marked lack of the conventional emotions of mingled joy and fear, or beauty and fear, and her seemingly calm control of the bull's path as she "steers" him through the waves are signs that point to a not unwill­ ing victim, an acquiescent kidnappee, so to speak. Hence, the picture of Europa not only foreshadows Leucippe's dan­ gerous journey across the sea and the eventual outcome of sanctioned union, but also Leucippe's very laxity concerning her own virginity, which she agrees to yield to Clitophon (2.19.2), and her readiness to flee with the hero, more it seems out of pique against her mother than love for the hero. "Έξαρπάσατέ με τών της μητρός οφθαλμών, δποι βούλεσθε," she pleads with him (2.30.i; "snatch me away from my moth­ er's sight, wherever you like!"). Like Europa, she is the most yielding of kidnap victims. In short, both Leucippe and Europa are well characterized by their respective gardens, and the earlier pictorial descrip­ tion foreshadows the later "real" one and serves to empha­ size the relationship of the acquiescent kidnappee of myth to the real one of the story. All this serves to explain the

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presence of the erotic garden in the painting of Europa, a fea­ ture that puzzles Harlan, for although the rape of Europa "was probably the most common mythological theme of the graphic arts in antiquity," and although the representation of Europa on the bull as described here, with her veil form­ ing a sail and her left hand gripping the bull's horn, is a pose that "has found confirmation in known representations," Harlan comments that "we cannot provide the same [confir­ mation] for the 'meadow' on the seashore which appears un­ related to the remainder of the painting" (Harlan 1965, 96, ιοί). Hence, it seems the garden is Achilles Tatius's own insertion, and as such—as we have seen—a deliberate com­ ponent of his narrative strategy. The painting of Europa is unique in that its foreshadowing function is directed at the readers alone; coming before the narrative of the story itself, it cannot provide clues about future events to the protagonists Leucippe and Clitophon. In contrast, the descriptions of the three other paintings of An­ dromeda, Prometheus, and Philomela are embedded in the narrative time of the story proper and are observed by the protagonists themselves. In this way, the paintings (like dreams and oracles) act as foreshadowers on a double level, for both the readers and the characters of the story, who, however, do not always choose to consider or comment on the paintings' possible significance. Such is the case with the paintings of Andromeda and Pro­ metheus, presented by the author as a pair because they fore­ shadow different aspects of the same event, namely the ap­ parent sacrifice and disembowelment of Leucippe by the savage Nilotic brigands at 3.15.1-6. The descriptions of these two pictures parallel in an ingenious manner specific and recognizable aspects of the scene to come,· as a result, when the readers come to the scene that has been foreshad­ owed, they are aware of that fact at once. As represented, Andromeda is bound and lying in a rocky hollow that resem­ bles an "αυτοσχέδιος τάφος" or improvised grave (3.7.2)— constrained, yet still beautiful, "έστηκε δέ νυμφικώς !στολισ­ μένη, ώσπερ Άϊδωνεί νύμφη κεκοσμημένη" (3-7-5/ "she Stood,

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decked out for a marriage, like a bride adorned for Hades"). The monster is just rising from the waves, but Perseus hov­ ers between it and Andromeda; in his right hand he holds a strange weapon, not the falcatus ensis with which he is usu­ ally represented/5 but an instrument that enables one both to stab and to cut, and whose oddness is emphasized. With this he will save Andromeda. First of all, then, Leucippe's piopitiaiy sacrifice by the brigands (who wish to purify the robber camp, as recounted in 3.19.3) is clearly paralleled by the propitiary sacrifice of Andromeda.16 Both are bound (Leucippe is with "όπίσω τώ χείρε δεδεμένην," 3-15-2·; "hands bound behind her back"). Both likewise are associated with the "bride of death" theme, Andromeda being explicitly dressed in bridal regalia, and Leucippe lamented over by Clitophon in such terms be­ fore the actual event: ώς καλά σου τών γάμων τά κοσμήματα· θάλαμος μεν τό δεσμωτήριον, εύνή δέ ή γή, δρμοι δέ και ψέλλια κάλοι καΐ βρόχος, καί σοι νυμφαγωγός ληστής παρακαθεΰδει· άντι δέ ύμεναίων τίς σοι τον θρήνον αδει. (3.ΓΟ.5)

How fine are your wedding adornments! A prison is your bridal chamber, the earth your marriage bed, ropes and a noose your necklaces and bracelets, and a brigand sleeps beside you as the man who will give you away. A dirge is being sung in place of your wedding hymn. The comparison of the two to a bride of death is an effect at which Achilles Tatius seems to have deliberately aimed by the unusual representation of Andromeda as dressed in bridal clothing, not, apparently, a pictorial convention of the time; "the image of the 'bride of death' is literary rather than pictorial. None of the known representations of Andromeda « Thus Gaselee 1917, 151 n. 3. paintings here largely foreshadow not through allegory but through simile; events shown are reduplicated, hence the apt designa­ tion of "proleptic simile." But the question remains of just which events will be meaningful for future developments. 16 The

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on the rock show her dressed as a bride" (Harlan 1965, 117). We can see thus how Achilles Tatius has taken pains to es­ tablish the link between foreshadower and foreshadowed as explicitly as possible, with the result that when we do reach the sacrifice of Leucippe what we realize now with hind­ sight or perhaps suspected earlier seems to be confirmed by the correspondence of such details.17 Clitophon laments that the earth is Leucippe's marriage bed, and in fact this aspect of the sacrifice that follows (the "sleeping" of the dead bride on the ground rather than a bed) is also foreshadowed by the description of the Andromeda painting. Andromeda's makeshift grave in the rock suggests Leucippe's hasty placement in a coffin, which is left above ground rather than buried. Interestingly, both occupiers of the graves are living beings (but this does not even become clear to the reader with hindsight but with post-hindsight, so to speak, for neither the first-time reader nor Clitophon have any inkling that Leucippe is not truly dead). Finally, the strangeness of Perseus's weapon must be considered. Leucippe, like Andromeda, is saved by a very odd sort of sword—here an actor's weapon, with a retractable blade.18 The description of the painting of Prometheus, which is shorter than that of Andromeda, refers to the same sacrifice of Leucippe but foreshadows her gruesome disembowelment rather than her sacrifice. He too, like Leucippe, is bound, and the graphic description of what the eagle is doing to him 17 There have been many complaints about the gratuitously fruity de­ scription of the unhappy Andromeda, whose wrists (καρποί, also the word for fruit) hang like clusters of grapes on a vine ("οί καρποί δε ωσπερ αμπέλου βότρυες κρέμονται," 3-7-4-)- Perhaps the jarring pun ("fruit" hang­ ing like grapes) is meant to recall the only other occurrences of καρποί, both in Clitophon's garden, where the wording is in fact very similar: here, "ο καρπός . . . έξεκρέματο και ήν βόστρυχος τοϋ φυτοϋ (1.15-4; "the fruit [grapes] ... hung down and were the ringlets of the vine"); thus Andromeda, like the heroine whom she foreshadows, has connections to Clitophon's garden. 18 One wonders whether Prometheus's weapon's explicit function of both stabbing and cutting bears any relation to the fact that Leucippe herself is disemboweled by a stab followed by a cut.

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and the agony he is feeling will provide us with unpleasant memories as we read the more factual account of Leucippe's disembowelment. Even more specifically, Prometheus is alive during his "disembowelment" and is looking at his wound (3.8.7); likewise Clitophon laments over Leucippe that "σε ζώσαν άνέτεμον, οΐμοι, και βλέπουσαν δλην την άνατομήν" (3.16.3; "they cut you open alive, alas! while you watched the whole dissection"). And both Leucippe and Pro­ metheus do not merely lose their insides; their tormentors— bird and brigands—actually dine off the unsavory products of this process. The unlikely spectacle of the bandits eating Leucippe's entrails could not make the parallels to Prome­ theus clearer. When they come upon these two paintings, neither Clitophon nor Leucippe makes any attempt at interpretation. We must assume that for them, as for us, the true proleptic sig­ nificance of the paintings becomes visible only with hind­ sight. But the reader is aware that the paintings must fore­ shadow something, not only because of the conventions of the day and the example provided by the Europa painting but because of the very way in which these two paintings are presented in the narrative. Clitophon and Leucippe have just survived a shipwreck and have been washed ashore at Pelusium; here they ask Zeus Casius for a portent about their similarly shipwrecked friends (3.6.2). No portent as such is forthcoming, but in its place they see in Zeus's temple the paintings of Andromeda and Prometheus. Hence, we are bound to suspect that the paintings foretell certain events, but however cleverly we formulate our interpretations, we cannot be sure they are right until the events actually occur. It is here that Achilles Tatius plays most skillfully with the readers' expectations and with their notions of how to read the work. For when the events that have been foreshad­ owed finally occur, they are recognized at once, marked clearly as they are by the correspondence of details that Achilles Tatius has cleverly inserted into both accounts. It is clear that together the paintings of Andromeda and Pro­ metheus are "proleptic similes," respectively, for Leucippe's

PICTORIAL DESCRIPTION

sacrifice and disembowelment.19 At this point, as readers we take pride in our reading skills,· being attentive, we have no­ ticed details, caught the reference to the portent, remember the Europa painting, and smile complacently as we reflect on our sharpness in seeing the correspondence between the descriptions of the paintings and Leucippe's gruesome fate. And precisely because this fate was foreshadowed, we accept it all the more unquestioningly. It is thus an even greater shock than it would have been otherwise to discover that we, along with Clitophon, have been completely fooled; that the disembowelment and sacrifice of Leucippe were both staged; and that the heroine is well and alive, no bride of death at all. Such is the truth of the situation, revealed only at 3.i8.3ff. Here we learn that Clitophon's slave Satyrus and his Egyptian friend Menelaus, taken in by the robber band, were required to perform the sacrifice of Leucippe as a rite of initiation; finding an actor's knife with a false blade they used this, and the entrails of which they relieved her were those of an animal, sealed inside a fake pouch, which in turn was attached to Leucippe. With this elaborate contrivance, Achilles Tatius fools (ostensibly) his characters and (really) his readers. It is our very interpretation of the two descrip­ tions—corrected, confirmed, or supplied as it is by hindsight when we reach the events apparently foreshadowed by the pictures and therefore all the more clearly true—that is the means by which we unconsciously fool ourselves into be­ lieving in an elaborate trick set up by the author, the "death" of the heroine. 19 Friedlaendei is patently mistaken when he claims not only that Andromeda foreshadows Leucippe but also that Prometheus and Hera­ cles foreshadow Clitophon and Clinias, since (he says] Clinias so often helps or advises Clitophon. He then compounds his error by suggesting that the author has failed to develop his story as fully as originally planned, because the rescue of Clitophon by Clinias that one might ex­ pect is missing from the narrative (Friedlaender 1912, 49-50). This gen­ eral alacrity to attribute perceived inconsistencies to the carelessness or shortcomings of the author has resulted in similar comments about the end of the novel (which does not return to the narrator in Sidon), See chapter 5.

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Achilles Tatius uses the expectations of observant readers versed in conventions of interpretation against the readers themselves. But for the readers, the interpretive game is not over even at this point. When they realize that the death of Leucippe is a hoax on both Clitophon and themselves,20 a more discerning reading of the descriptions of the paintings of Andromeda and Prometheus seems to uncover subtler ele­ ments proleptic of the new and final truth. Thus, the fact that Prometheus does not die from his disembowelment seems to become newly significant, as does the fact that An­ dromeda, though buried in a makeshift grave like Leucippe, is also alive.21 Perhaps the readers may even notice that the foreshadowing action of the painting of Andromeda is in a sense reversed, showing as it does a Greek man rescuing an Ethiopian maiden from sacrifice, whereas at Leucippe's "sacrifice" it is an Egyptian man who rescues a Greek maiden. But the beauty of their predicament at this point is that they do not know if in finding and accepting these "hints" at a different truth, even in a second retrospective consideration of the descriptions, they are finding clues that Achilles Tatius actually put there or if they are—once again—effectively tricking themselves. As it turns out, if the readers are skillful enough, which for Achilles Tatius means not only attentive but learned, their answer will be forth­ coming from another quarter, from the foreshadowing action not of painting but of sculpture, and from the sculpture of Zeus Casius described at 3.6.1 specifically. The ecphrasis of this statue occurs just before those of the paintings of An­ dromeda and Prometheus; however, it occurs before, rather 20 It is of course Clitophon who is narrating the story of the hoax, and as such he is aware of the truth at the moment in "real time" of the story's telling. Yet he preserves the illusion of άγνωσία for the reader's sake, only revealing his own knowledge through hindsight after the cli­ max at 3.18.3. At this point he tells us that while his eyes were covered, Menelaus removed the trick belly from Leucippe's front. 11 Harlan (1965, 116) notes that Andromeda's rocky hollow "sounds an emphatic echo of the premature burial so common in the novels," but does not see how it acts to affirm the readers' new interpretation of the picture's meaning.

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than after, the request for an omen, which may well be more play on Achilles Tatius's part. The statue of Zeus Casius is said to be holding a pome­ granate,· to this description the author adds an intriguing postscript: "προβέβληται δέ την χείρα και εχει ροιάν έπ' αύτη· της δέ ροιάς ό λόγος μυστικός" (3-6.Χ; "he extends his hand, and holds a pomegranate in it; there exists a mystical ac­ count about the pomegranate"). Achilles Tatius makes no further mention of the "mystical account," which the read­ ers may then try to figure out, a task probably easier for the ancient readers than for us. Yet Anderson has suggested a likely interpretation of the pomegranate's significance that confirms the final truth about Leucippe's sacrifice and may have been Achilles Tatius's answer, carefully concealed, to the misleading interpretive possibilities he supplied in the pictures of Andromeda and Prometheus. As such it would also function as an endorsement of the readers' final and most uncertain finding of clues in the two paintings. First of all, Anderson points out that Artemidorus associates the pomegranate in dreams with "τον έν Έλευσϊνι λόγον"—that is to say, it "symbolizes slavery and subjection," as in Persephone's case, and presumably Scheintod (or apparent death), because Persephone comes back to life (Anderson !979/ 517}- Artemidorus comments in the same place that "ροαι δέ τραυμάτων ε'ισι σημαντικοί δια τό χρώμα και βασάνων δια τάς άκανθας" (ed. Pack 1963, 79> ΐ·73; "pomegranates are symbolic of wounds, on account of their color, and of tor­ tures, on account of their spines"). Certainly Leucippe's Scheintod is particularly bloody and cruel. Yet the symbol­ ism of the pomegranate (says Anderson) extends even fur­ ther, to the device of the false belly itself, formed from a pouch made of sheepskin and filled with animal entrails; ap­ parently, the pomegranate could signify anything that was a sham or that presented a false appearance. Thus John Chrysostom, in On Vanity (Περί κενοδοξίας), compares κενοδοξία first to a theatrical sham, then to a pomegranate; the fruit is to all appearances sound and ripe, yet appearances are decep­ tive:

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'Εάν δέ λάβης κατά τής χειρός ή ροιάν ή μήλον, εΐκει τε τοις δακτύλοις ευθέως και διατρυφθέν τό εξωθεν έπικείμενον λέπος άφίησιν αυτούς εις την κόνιν καΐ την τέφραν έμπεσεΐν."

If you should take either a pomegranate or a quince in your hand, it yields immediately to your fingers, and the external rind that covers it, having crumbled, lets your fingers break inward to dust and ash. As such, the pomegranate serves to draw attention to the contrast between being and seeming, and to foreshadow the theatrical sham of the false belly; moreover, by its very false appearance and proneness to rupture, "the fake, collapsible, decaying fruit anticipates the sheep's-pouch trompe-l'ceil" (Anderson 1979, 518). Hence, the readers' final and correct interpretation of the descriptions of the two paintings in the temple of Zeus Casius—that is, that they foreshadow Leucippe's life and not her death—is confirmed by this corre­ sponding description,· the ecphrasis of the statue, coming immediately before that of the paintings, in effect tells the readers how to interpret the descriptions of Andromeda and Prometheus, although it is unlikely that they will see this the first time they read the work through. The descriptions of the paintings of Andromeda and Pro­ metheus play upon the expectations of reader and character by foreshadowing the same event on several different levels and with several possible interpretations. The descriptions of the painting of Europa, the first picture described, and of Philomela, the last, play similar tricks upon the expecta­ tions aroused by the interpretive act, yet in a completely dif­ ferent way. I have already remarked upon the foreshadowing of the heroine Leucippe's character by the painting of Europa and by the description of gardens pictorial and real. But the ec21 Περί κενοδοξίας· καΐ όπως δει τους γονέας άνατρέφειν τά τέκνα 2f., in Johannes Chiysostomus, LJber Hoffart und Kindererziehung, mit Einleitung und kritischem Apparat, Das Woit der Antike 4, ed. Β. Κ. Exarchos (Munich, 1955), 35; cit ed. m Anderson 1979/ 5 Τ$ η· 7·

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phrasis of the picture foreshadows more than this. In fact, and unlike the paintings of Andromeda and Prometheus, the single picture portends two disparate events; this is accom­ plished in a way that once again satisfies our expectation that what is foreshadowed will be fulfilled, only to under­ mine that complacency in the course of the narrative's events. Again, not only hindsight (in confirming what seems to be the correct interpretation) but also post-hindsight (in destroying it) come into play. Of the description of the painting of Europa, as has been said, no official interpretation is offered by the author; hence, any formulation, until the narrative (via Clitophon) unfolds its events, is up to the readers entirely. It would be reasonable for them to suppose that the painting foreshad­ ows the abduction of an unwilling girl by an enamored male, and a flight over the sea; furthermore, the initial connection established between Europa and Leucippe by the two de­ scriptions of gardens may well lead the readers to suspect that it is the latter who will be abducted. But when the un­ suspecting Calligone is suddenly kidnapped by brigands hired by the Byzantine Callisthenes, who like Zeus have dis­ guised their appearance (albeit as girls rather than bulls, 2.18.3), the readers realize that this is in fact the event whose foreshadowing they recognized in the painting of Eu­ ropa. The facts of the forcible kidnapping, the use of disguise by the abductors, and the carrying off of the girl by sea (both bull and pirate bark are seen in mid-ocean by those on the shore) are by no means the only indications of the foreshadowing's fulfillment; Achilles Tatius surrounds the episode with clues that point back to the painting of Europa and con­ firm the readers in their opinion. Thus, immediately before the domestic sacrifice (near the shore) at which Calligone is abducted, the women of the household go to see the formal sacrifice that several Byzantines are conducting at Tyre and that provides the reason for Callisthenes' presence abroad (2.15.1). Like Europa and her handmaidens, this is a group of women going out on their own with no male companion­ ship. In addition, the sacrifice is a sumptuous affair at which

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there are flowers everywhere, "νάρκισσος και ρόδα και μυρρίναι" (2.15.2; "narcissus and rose and myrtle"). The very same three flowers are those found in Europa's meadow, even listed in the same order (1.1.5). Finally, the sacrificial animals are mentioned, and one particular kind is described, the βοΰς Αιγύπτιος or Egyptian ox (2.15.3). To keep us from overlooking the significance of this description, or rather to emphasize that significance, Achilles Tatius adds to the ecphrasis a comment that makes the correspondence of paint­ ing to sacrifice quite explicit: "εί δέ ό μϋθος Ευρώπης αληθής, Αίγύπτιον βοϋν ό Ζεύς έμιμήσατο" (2.15.4; "if the story of Europa is true, Zeus took on the form of an Egyptian ox"). In this context of women, flowers, and bulls, Callisthenes sees Calligone for the first time and assumes mistakenly that she is Leucippe, whom he has determined to kidnap. In any case, he falls in love with her and subsequently points her out to his servant Zeno as the girl to carry off, telling him to gather a band and giving various other instructions. In other words, it is in this evocative and clue-ridden context that the kid­ napping is arranged. Consequently, when the kidnapping does occur, the read­ ers are convinced that this is what was foreshadowed by the painting of Europai as in the case of the parallelism between the painting of Andromeda and Leucippe's sacrifice, the cor­ respondence of small details serves to confirm the fulfill­ ment of what was foreshadowed. But in this case, the sur­ prise of rediscovery recurs when Clitophon elopes with Leucippe at 2.3i.3ff., which, unlike the abduction of Calligone, is a major point in the narrative. Their flight, as the readers realize in retrospect, is what the painting of Europa really symbolizes,· this is not to say that the painting does not foreshadow the earlier abduction, but the prior foreshad­ owing is superseded by the importance of the present event, which, after all, forms the basis of the entire novel. Further­ more, other details of the painting now make sense: the calmness of Europa, the presence of a garden, the lush foli­ age unbefitting the modest Calligone. The effect is one of such surprise precisely because the readers' expectations

PICTORIAL DESCRIPTION

have been satisfied by the earlier fulfillment of the paint­ ing's message; they have ceased to look for the predicted event and its arrival takes them unawares. Again, their way of reading has been undermined and their complacency shaken by an author who insists on playing with modes of interpretation. The painting of Philomela is the last one described and the only one whose description is followed by an interpretation or έξήγησις, which is incorporated into the narrative and presented as Clitophon's Philostratean explanation to Leucippe of the events portrayed. The painting itself depicts Philomela showing Procne a tapestry on which is embroi­ dered Tereus's lustful struggle with her; her clothes are torn, her breasts exposed, and he is holding her tightly. On the rest of the painting the two women are depicted as showing Tereus the remains of his grisly meal, while he draws his sword against them (5.3.4-8). The context in which the painting is described leaves no doubt that it directly foreshadows a disaster to come, and in fact this disaster follows immediately upon the description. Uniquely, its arrival is not only expected by us, but known for a fact, for the motivations of the characters concerned have all been described beforehand; we are told that the Chaereas who brought about Leucippe's cure from madness is secretly in love with her, and that this will be the cause of "άλλο της Τύχης γυμνάσιον" (5.2.3; "another of Fate's ex­ ercises"). Specifically, Chaereas has contrived a plot to steal away Leucippe: "ληστών ομοτέχνων (όχλον) συγκροτήσας, ατε θαλάσσιος ών άνθρωπος, και συνθέμενος αύτοΐς α δει ποιεΐν, έπΐ ξενιάν ημάς εϊς την Φάρον καλεί, σκηψάμενος γενεθλίων άγειν ήμέραν" (5-3-2; "training a mob of pirates like himself, as he was a seafaring man, and organizing for them what they had to do, he invited us to Pharos as guests, on the pretext that he was celebrating his birthday"). Thus, as readers we are well informed about what will soon happen to Leucippe; the characters themselves, however, are also aware of the im­ pending disaster, because the painting of Philomela that pre­ sents itself to us and to them at this juncture leaves no

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doubt about the situation. Clitophon and Leucippe happen to see the painting just as they are leaving for Chaereas's house, and in a very portentous context. A hawk has struck Leucippe's head with its wing, at which sign, Clitophon tells us: χαραχθείς οΰν επί τούτφ, καί άνανεύσας εις οΰρανόν, "'Ω Ζεϋ, τί τούτο," έφην, "φαίνεις ήμιν τέρας; αλλ' εί τφ δντι σος ό όρνις ούτος, άλλον ήμΐν σαφέστερον δειξον ο'ιωνόν." μεταστραφείς ούν (έτυχον γαρ παρεστώς έργαστηρίω ζωγρά­ φου) γραφήν όρώ κειμένην, ήτις ύπηνίττετο προσόμοιον. (5-3-3—4)

Troubled at this, then, and looking up to heaven, I said, "O Zeus, what is this portent you show us? If this bird is truly yours, display to us some other clearer omen." And turning around (for I happened to be standing next to a painter's workshop) I saw a painting hanging there, which intimated darkly a similar thing. As if this—and the use of the loaded verb αίνίττομαι—were not a clear enough indication of the painting's significance, a further discursion on the calamity it predicts is made by Clitophon's Egyptian friend Menelaus, which like Clitophon's narration serves to alert both the protagonists and the readers simultaneously. Menelaus advises Clitophon and Leucippe not to continue their trip to Pharos: λέγουσι δέ οί τών συμβόλων έξηγηταί σκοπείν τους μύθους τών εικόνων, άν έξιούσιν επί πράξιν ήμΐν συντύχωσι, καί έξομοιούν τό άποβησόμενον τώ τής Ιστορίας λόγψ. (5-4- 1J

The interpreters of signs tell us to look at the stories of pictures, if they should meet our eye as we are going out on our business, and to liken what will happen to the account of the story. Here are more loaded terms, such as έξηγηταί and σύμβολον—words familiar from the conventional uses of pic­ torial descriptions in contemporary works, but not at all characteristic of Achilles Tatius's practice elsewhere in the

PICTORIAL DESCRIPTION

narrative. And Menelaus even tells us and the lovers just what events the painting foreshadows: "έρωτος παρανόμου, μοιχείας άναισχύντου, γυναικείων ατυχημάτων" (5·4·2; "law­ less love, shameless adultery, women's misfortunes"). Thus, we know what will happen if Leucippe and Clitophon accept Chaereas's invitation, and so do they. At this point it would be a reasonable development in the plot for them to make their excuses. However, they go ahead any­ how, only delaying the journey to Pharos for one day. In fact, their seeming fatalism is necessary to a larger stratagem, that of the author, because the fulfillment of the painting's message is an element in a larger web of events and expec­ tations that Achilles Tatius is weaving around the descrip­ tion of the Philomela painting. Once at Pharos, Chaereas shows them the lighthouse and then takes them to his house. He leaves, and the pirates he has hired rush in; they grab Leucippe and make off with her in a ship (5.7.2-3). We are not in the least bit surprised, for what is this but the "lawless love, shameless adultery, and women's misfor­ tunes" of which we have been told? Leucippe's seizure by Chaereas's men has been foreshadowed in so many ways that its preflgurement has almost become a bald statement of fact. We have been shown a painting, given proof of its provenance from Zeus, told that paintings foreshadow fu­ ture happenings to the viewer, and informed of Chaereas's hiring activities. Furthermore, the painting of Tereus alone is followed by a formal exegesis, usually an occasion to show the painting's hidden significance and, more fundamentally, to show that it has such a deeper meaning. The author is not only inviting the reader to take an "inferential walk," he is rolling out the red carpet! In fact, if we reflect a little, we come to think that all this insistent pointing to the paint­ ing's message—a message so obviously spelled out, so quickly confirmed—is rather odd. Achilles Tatius has in­ cluded three pictorial descriptions in his work before this one, and each has been completely devoid of any interpreta­ tion by author or character and has foreshadowed events at some temporal remove from the description of the painting

CHAPTER TWO

itself. Here, however, efforts at interpretation are under­ taken by both Clitophon and Menelaus, Achilles Tatius sets up the painting as an omen, and what is foreshadowed oc­ curs the next day. The irony of all this authorial assistance at such a late date is only compounded by the strange fact that this ecphrasis corresponds less than any other to what actually happens. Although the description of the picture is detailed, Menelaus's comment on what it foretells is the vague "lawless love, shameless adultery, women's misfor­ tunes," and in fact apart from this—which essentially covers any illicit male lust for a woman who is not his to have, and the use of force against her in some way—the picture has surprisingly little to do with the event that follows it. In­ stead of involving two men and one woman, it involves one man and two women; Chaereas is not married, there is no act of revenge on Leucippe's part, and the two stories are basically dissimilar. Even more, there is little to indicate that Leucippe will come to such a bloody end, and so soon, unless the reader is willing to compare the cutting out of Philomela's tongue with the cutting off of Leucippe's head.23 It may be, therefore, that in a reversal of his previous treat­ ment of the descriptions we have seen, Achilles Tatius is lighting up in neon a painting's foreshadowing of an event that seems to correspond to it only rather weakly. But the aim of this reversed procedure is the same: to play on the readers' expectations, which by this time have become more wary and discriminating. Whereas the other descriptions ap­ peared to foreshadow a particular event because of the close correspondence of details in the two, and hence led to our surprise when the event was not what it seemed, or another '' Leucippe's decapitation, of course, is another Scheintod, yet one unlikely to fool the reader the second time around. Unlike the earlier false death, it does not play a crucial role in manipulating expectations aroused by an ecphrasis, but seems more a plot device to set up Clitophon's involvement with Melite without breaking the mold of the ro­ mantic hero altogether. Of course, in the sense that the three Scheintode each recall their precedents, the whole succession is a sort of play upon itself as well.

PICTORIAL DESCRIPTION

more important event superseded it, this description is taken to refer truly to Leucippe's abduction by Chaereas be­ cause the author emphasizes the truth of such an interpre­ tation repeatedly. A different method, but to the same pur­ pose: that the readers assume that one particular interpretation is the right one, and thereby set up the stage for their own deception and an eventual awareness of their inadequacy at foreseeing the meaning of what they are read­ ing. What is it, then, that the painting foreshadows more closely than the obvious and temporally proximate debacle at Pharos? In fact, the answer is not one but two different incidents, both of which involve one man and two women, and both of which parallel the situation depicted in the painting of Philomela: a man already bound to a woman, whether by marriage or by an understanding of marriage, has a sexual interlude with another. Thus at 6.18.4-6, Thersander, who has been lusting after Leucippe for some time and has had her abducted by his slave Sosthenes, tries to force her to accept his advances, although he is married to Melite. Similarly, just before this at 5.27.3, Clitophon finally sleeps with Melite, although he is bound to Leucippe. In short: the depiction of a man wronging his wife with another woman is proleptic of Clitophon wronging Leucippe with Melite, and then of Thersander wronging Melite with Leucippe. The cleverness of Achilles Tatius's arrangement here does not only consist of the neatness with which he has four per­ sonages employed in two love triangles (both foreshadowed by one original love triangle) that would normally involve six characters, and the resultant element of comedy and complicity. Rather, what is especially notable about the na­ ture of the painting's foreshadowing is that its main charac­ teristics, sex and violence, have been divided and each char­ acteristic represented by one of the triangles that the painting foreshadows. Although the basic story is reflected in both events, if the incidents are considered in more detail we see that in the later one Thersander becomes extremely violent toward Leucippe, who will not comply with his at-

CHAPTER TWO

tempts at seduction; we read for example that "άτυχήσας δέ ων ήλπισεν, άφήκε τφ θυμώ τάς ήνίας. ραπίζει δή κατά κόρρης αυτήν, "Ω κακόδαιμον άνδράποδον,' λέγων" (6.2θ.ΐ; "failing to get what he hoped for, he gave free rein to his rage: he struck her on the face, saying, 'Wretched slave!' "). For all this, he does not actually succeed in his attempted rape—hence vio­ lence (like Tereus) but no consummated act of sex (unlike Tereus). On the other hand, Clitophon does have sex with Melite, and enjoys it greatly (as he admits at 5.27.4); here, however, it is the element of violence that is entirely lacking. Melite is not only willing but eager; she has been in love with Clitophon for some time and initiates the affair: "περιβαλλούσης οΰν ήνειχόμην και περιπλεκομένης προς τάς περιπλοκάς ουκ άντέλεγον και έγένετο δσα ό Έρως ήθελεν" (5.27.3; "I al­ lowed her embrace, and I did not oppose her intimacy when she intertwined her body with mine, and what Love wished for came about"). Within the general context of the situation preshadowed by the painting of Philomela, then, it seems that Clitophon fulfills the intimation of sex, and Thersander that of violence. Leucippe is the subject of force (like Philo­ mela) but escapes sex, while Melite sleeps with the man who is another's (like Philomela) but suffers no violence. This is admittedly intriguing, but how can we be sure this is how the readers should interpret the description of Philo­ mela's fate? We could argue that Menelaus's pithy explana­ tion of what the painting foretells—lawless love, shameless adultery, women's misfortunes—applies very well to these two episodes with Clitophon and Thersander, better in fact than it does to Leucippe's abduction by Chaereas, because in the former we properly have women's misfortunes (in each incident the man's conduct with the one is against the in­ terests of the other), whereas in the latter only one woman was involved, Leucippe. But Menelaus's prediction is, as we have noted, rather general. Yet another clue is provided by the description of the painting itself, one difficult for mod­ ern readers to catch as they are not surrounded by ancient artwork, but one a cultivated Greek or Roman would be

PICTORIAL DESCRIPTION

more likely to notice: the pictorial description deals with three characters, Philomela, Procne, and Tereus, yet no work showing this tripartite topic is known: it seems "extant rep­ resentations of the myth from the classical period do not in­ clude the figure of Tereus" (Harlan 1965, 129). This sug­ gests, although we cannot be certain of it, that here as elsewhere Achilles Tatius has modified in his description the conventional appearance of a common pictorial topos, with the specific aim of creating a parallel between the ecphrasis and the event it is to foreshadow. This in fact is a procedure he has followed for three of the four paintings he describes in the course of his work. All four are paintings of subjects or stories frequently portrayed in ancient art; therefore, they describe familiar works whose conventional appearance was well established in the minds of the readers. For example, it appears that "the rescue of Andromeda, like the abduction of Europa, was among the most frequently depicted myths in antiquity. Helbig lists 21 representations (1183-1203) of the scene among Campanian wall-paintings" (Harlan 1965, 113).24 Another wall painting of Andromeda, with "the general composition of Achilles' scene" occurs in the house of the Sacerdos Amandus in Pompeii;25 and descriptions of paintings of Andromeda are to be found in Philostratus's Είκόνες 1.29 and Lucian's On the Hall 22. Depictions of Europa are equally common, Helbig listing nine Europa scenes among the Campanian wall paintings and Schefold eighteen such scenes in Pompeii;26 Wolff too points out their presence everywhere in the Hel­ lenistic world, writing that "the abduction of Europa . . . was one of the stock possessions alike of painter, sculptor, en­ graver, poet and rhetorician. It figured largely in statues, in 14 The reference is to Wolfgang Helbig's Wandgemaelde dei vom Vesuv veischuetteten Staedte Campaniens (Leipzig, 1868). ilSHarlan 1965, 115 n. i she cites Karl Schefold, Pompejanische ; Wandmaleiei (Basel, 1952,), ro8-9. 16 Harlan 1965, 96-97 and 96 n. I ; she cites Helbig 1868, 122-30 (cf. n. 24 above), and Schefold, Die Waende Pompeiis (Berlin, 1957).

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vase-painting, and in the wall-painting of Alexandria and the cities of southern Italy" (Wolff 1912, 171-72). This tendency of Achilles Tatius to use stock subjects for his ecphrases is enormously important, not because it shows he is an unimaginative employer of artistic and rhetorical conventions but for precisely the opposite reason. In describ­ ing the paintings of Europa, Andromeda, and Philomela, he uses convention itself to heighten what is unconventional: for in each of these pictures, surely familiar in real life and on real walls to his readers, he has inserted an element that is unusual, striking, alien to the convention; and this ele­ ment—the meadow in the painting of Europa, Andromeda's strange "grave" and bridal clothing, Tereus's presence with Philomela and Procne—is always crucial to the foreshadow­ ing action of the description and to Achilles Tatius's play on the readers' expectations. It is precisely there to be noticed. One might even say that it resembles Achilles' work itself, so much a play upon convention. If we return to the treatment of the painting of Philomela, we see that Achilles Tatius has engaged in one more devia­ tion from the conventional that creates and then defeats reader expectations. This arises out of the interpretation of the painting that Clitophon gives in response to Leucippe's request at 5.5.1. The painting has already been described in a detailed description that, like the novel's others, is care­ fully free of interpretive material. What Leucippe asks, how­ ever, is "Ti βούλεται της εικόνος ό μϋθος";—"What does the story of the painting mean?" In other words, a request is being made for έξήγησις, not διήγησις. Clitophon responds with a second description in Philostratus's best manner, re­ plete with mythological material not visible in the actual painting and adorned with pathos, paradox, and metaphor. He describes the sisters' motivation and emotion; he clari­ fies their drastic course of action by an explanation of the female mentality,· he adds his own ethical slant to what is portrayed ("one wife, it seems, doesn't satisfy those lecher­ ous barbarians"). Furthermore, the description is no longer static but becomes a narrative, and its characters move

PICTORIAL DESCRIPTION

through space and time.17 As such, what Clitophon is saying is clearly not a factual description but a literary interpreta­ tion that therefore should reveal the most meaningful as­ pects of the Philomela story portrayed; this, after all, is Philostratus's procedure. The reader, then, may be inclined to accept Clitophon's exegesis as the painting's true meaning and the indicator of the events in the narrative that are to follow,· the exegesis, following close upon the painting, is itself invested with im­ portance by the many clues and signs that point to the paint­ ing's significance. Clitophon lays emphasis on two features of the painting in particular, the women's fear of discovery and their desire for revenge. These are stressed with every rhetorical device possible, whereas other possible lines for commentary—for example, the plotters' fear, or Procne's grief for her son—are not even considered. Thus, the whole passage 5.5.4-6 contains an expolitio on the single main idea of how Philomela, tongueless, informed Procne of Tereus's doings, while 5.5.6-7 emphasizes again and again the vio­ lence and horror of the act of revenge, spurred on by the dreadful jealousy that is woman's; the passage culminates with a grim warning: μόνον γαρ έρώσαι γυναίκες άνιάσαι τον τήν εύνήν λελυπηκότα, καν πάσχωσιν έν οΐς ποιοΰσιν οΰχ ήττον κακόν, τήν τοΰ πάσχειν λογίζονται συμφοράν τη τού ποιείν ηδονή.

(5-5-7)

Women desire only to hurt the man who has wronged their marriage bed, even if they suffer no less distress in what they bring to pass; they balance the calamity of what they suffer by the pleasure they obtain from their action. Now, the theme of the Philomela story in general, which is included in both the purely pictorial and the exegetical ecphrases, foreshadows as we have seen an event that comes 17 This change is so drastic that it is impossible to miss. On the con­ trast between it and the preceding description, see also Harlan 1965, 128 and 131-32.

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to pass almost immediately, the violent abduction of Leucippe for sexual purposes. At least, the readers are compelled to accept this as what has been foreshadowed by Achilles Tatius's insistent emphasis on that point. But because they have also read Clitophon's interpretation of the picture, and because it is likely that they will thereby be well aware of Clitophon's focus on the themes of female discovery and fe­ male revenge, they may be awaiting something more, some new development that will fulfill Clitophon's uncovering of the painting's "deeper meaning." However, by the novel's end the readers have discovered that once again their expectations have been defeated. It is in fact the earlier and noninterpretive description of the painting that is the true carrier of meaning, whereas the sup­ posed interpretation is a sham. The original description, as we saw, foreshadows the later developments in the narra­ tive, whereas all that Clitophon's interpretation effects is to mislead us, and not only in claiming a superior status but even in what it claims to foreshadow. Hence, Harlan's criti­ cal observation that, although the interpretation is told in a way so as to point up the excessive quality of the jealousy natural to all women, in the context of Achilles Tatius's novel this version does not fit (Harlan 1965, 128-29). When the readers, forewarned by Clitophon's exegesis, reach the episode of his infidelity to Leucippe and his tryst with Melite, they have every reason to expect that Leucippe will find out about this betrayal and that her revenge will be fearful. After all, they know all about the passion for revenge that a wronged woman feels,· Clitophon himself has told them about it. Yet Leucippe never does find out, although the pos­ sibility of her discovery is kept alive right up to the time of Melite's testing by the waters of the Styx (8.14.3-4) and re­ mains an unstated risk to the novel's end. No discovery, no terrible act of vengeance, only an interpretation wrapped in its conventional cloak of meaningfulness but found to be an empty, misleading account. In retrospect, the way Clitophon's interpretation is intro­ duced into the narrative supplies powerful clues about its lack of validity. In it, Clitophon describes a feature absent

PICTORIAL DESCRIPTION

from the actual painting, a liberty that the readers might consider perfectly in keeping with the embellishment and expansion so typical of a Philostratus. The painting is com­ posed of two scenes: one portrays Philomela as she shows the tapestry to her sister (on it is woven a picture of her rape by Tereus); the other portrays the women showing Tereus his son's remains, as he leaps up from the table with sword in hand. Clitophon, however, is not content with merely bringing in the mythological background to the story,· he ac­ tually begins his description with birds that are not visible and ends it with the metamorphosis of the humans into these birds. The birds, he says in opening, are "'Αηδών και χελιδών και εποψ, πάντες άνθρωποι και πάντες όρνιθες, έποψ ό άνήρ· α'ι δύο γυναίκες, Θιλομήλα χελιδών, και Πρόκνη άηδών" (5.51-2.; "a nightingale, and a swallow, and a hoopoe, all of them humans and all birds; the man is the hoopoe; as for the two women, Philomela is the swallow and Procne the nightingale"). Likewise, he returns to this aspect of the painting as he ends: Tereus, seeing the basket with his son's remains, realizes what he just ate; maddened with rage, he draws his sword and dashes at the women, . . . ας δέχεται ό άήρ. και ό Τηρεύς αύταις συναναβαίνει και όρνις γίνεται, και τηροϋσιν ετι τού πάθους την εικόνα· φεύγει μεν άηδών, διώκει δε ό Τηρεύς. ούτως έφύλαξε τό μί­ σος και μέχρι τών πτερών. (5-5.8—9)

. . . whom the air takes up. And Tereus rises up together with them, and becomes a bird. And they preserve still the image of their emotion,· the nightingale flees, Tereus pursues; thus he keeps his hatred even as a bird. Now, far from being perturbed at the lack of correspondence shown between this interpretation and the painting proper, the readers might consider such inconsistency as significant in itself, a carrier of deeper meaning and a signal of the au­ thor's future intentions. Certainly, as we have seen, this is the case in several purely factual pictorial descriptions in the novel. Furthermore, in Philostratus's Εικόνες, apparent distortion eventually proved to be more meaningful, with re-

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gard to the sophist's intentions for the painting, than the rest of the interpretation; as noted earlier, the reinterpretation of Hymenaeus as Comus and of an unknown wrestler as Arrichion signals (if correct) the ulterior, ethical purpose of the author and interpreter. Distortion occurs in a context of heightened, not reduced, significance. But there is just one problem with this Philostratean in­ terpolation of the birds: it is not an interpolation. Clitophon is not elaborating on the painting by the introduction of mythical scenes not visible before him; he is interpreting a painting that is different from the one just described to us. For when Leucippe asks him what the painting means, she includes the very odd query: "και τίνες αί όρνιθες αύται; και τίνες αί γυναίκες; και τίς ό αναιδής εκείνος άνήρ"; (5 • 5 -1; "And what are these birds? And who are the women? And that shameless man?"). The women and the shameless man we know of; but the painting as described in the earlier, fac­ tual account shows no birds whatsoever, and no metamor­ phosis has yet taken place. In short, the proleptic irrelevancy of Clitophon's interpretation is indicated long before the ad­ vance of the narrative confirms it. So much, one might say, for convention, since here, in the context of an interpretation marked by conventional indi­ cators of meaning (έξηγητής, ύπαινίττομαι, σύμβολα), by the presence of audience and interpreter, by its own introduc­ tion via the question of a puzzled viewer in the text—in short, in the context of an interpretation that cries out its nature as truth in evoking all the devices of the rhetorical and literary codes involved in the description of paintings— we are given an interpretation that is misleading and mean­ ingless. Once again Achilles Tatius has used the readers' own expectations to deceive them and make them aware of their assumptions about reading and the inadequacy of their own reading; for if reading is a prolonged process of taking "inferential walks" and filling in areas of uncertainty cre­ ated by the text, then the readers of Leucippe and Clitophon are having a rather hard time of it.28 18

What if the readers notice the inconsistency in Leucippe's ques-

PICTORIAL DESCRIPTION

Let me draw attention at this point to another play on conventions of pictorial ecphrasis that occurs with the intro­ ductory description found in the Aethiopica. As we have seen, this static and picturelike descriptive passage is badly in need of interpretation and is the object of hermeneutic activity of the part of both bandits and readers. However, no interpretation appears to be given—until, that is, Charicleia's explanation of who she and Theagenes are and how they ended up on the beach surrounded by dead brigands. This explanation, delayed until Theagenes' questioning at 1.2,1 and properly beginning at 1.22 ("Έστι δή τά περί ημών τοιάόε," 1.22.2) provides the answer to the puzzle posed by the "picture" and, although in narrative form rather than static, would perhaps not be atypical of a Philostratus. Cer­ tainly in its details it is a plausible extrapolation from the opening scene, and nothing Charicleia says definitely con­ tradicts the little she had said in privacy or to her fellow Greeks beforehand—for example, her plaint about separa­ tion from her family, capture by pirates, and dangers by sea and land (1.8.2)—although some points are a little obscure. Yet this "interpretation" offered by Charicleia is of course false, and the readers probably guessed this at Charicleia's first words, for she immediately identifies Theagenes as her brother, which we know to be a lie. So much Heliodorus has made clear by showing the extent of her feelings for him and by the use of words such as πόθος and ερως (1.2.9) to desig­ nate those feelings. But quite simply, no readers of the ro­ mance genre would have any doubt that the beautiful pair swooning over each other were lovers and not siblings. In tion? It is likely that many will, yet the outcome must be the same. The authorial insistence on the painting's deep content, the readers' fa­ miliarity with embellishment and interpolation as a sophistic mode of interpretation, and the presentation of the whole episode in conformity with conventions of pictorial interpretation will militate against an outright rejection of Clitophon's interpretation; in addition, the truth of the matter cannot be surely established until the last line of the novel, for discovery and revenge could come at any moment. Achilles Tatius at no point permits the readers' suspicion to become sure knowl­ edge.

CHAPTER TWO

short, Charicleia gives a false interpretation that the bandits believe in but we, the readers, do not. Hence, another inter­ pretation occurring near the book's beginning is revealed to us as false (confirmed soon after at 1.25.2), and the bandits, who already erred in trying to interpret the opening scene, have been shown to be not only bad interpreters but also too trusting of the interpretations of other characters. This may set the readers on guard against such interpretations from the novel's first pages; it also highlights the issue of the va­ lidity of the readers' own interpretations. As Schor makes the point about interpreters in the text (interpretants) in gen­ eral, "via the interpretant the author is trying to tell the in­ terpreter something about interpretation and the interpreter would do well to listen and take note" (Schor 1980, 170). As it is, the truth is not revealed until much, much later—at 5.32.1-33.ι and at the very end of Calasiris's long story. Achilles Tatius makes greater use of pictorial description than Heliodorus, and consequently this chapter has mostly concerned the earlier writer. Yet both authors use conven­ tions of pictorial interpretation to modulate the readers' re­ lation to the text in one way or another, and to warn them about the limitations of their interpretive ability. Achilles Tatius's stratagem in particular, as illustrated by his manip­ ulation of pictorial description as we have seen it for the paintings of Europa, Andromeda, Prometheus, and Tereus, is one that relies on the creation and subsequent deflation of expectations that the readers have been tricked into form­ ing, based on their understanding of more conventional treatments of description. Only in the case of the foreshad­ owing not of an event, but of Leucippe's character, is the de­ scription of a painting—that of Europa—less deceptive. Yet here too it is not what is conventional but what is anoma­ lous, and therefore noticeable within a conventional con­ text, that provides the readers with meaningful clues— namely, the meadow in the painting and the self-assurance of the abducted Europa. Elsewhere, it is often the observant readers who will actualize the text in such a way as to secure their own deception, because it is the very correspondences between description and narrative that Achilles Tatius pro-

PICTORIAL DESCRIPTION

vides (the matching of the Europa picture to Calligone's ab­ duction, of the Andromeda and Prometheus pictures to Leucippe's sacrifice) that are misleading and induce such readers to err. This is a game planned for careful readers, the cul­ tured individuals who by their very awareness of literary convention are made to formulate interpretations, often with hindsight, that are revealed as incorrect by an under­ standing that comes even later than hindsight.29 It is a game that induces readers to fill in the "gaps" implied by the pres­ ence of descriptions without interpretations by applying their own hermeneutic activity to the text and by supplying their own ideas about what such descriptions may mean or foreshadow—but a game that then double-crosses them by a repeated display of their inadequacy.30 19 The words "cultured," "careful," and "educated" are used ad­ visedly throughout. Whatever the readership of the more naive novels may have been, the very presence of the features discussed in this work argues for a readership versed in sophistic literature and rhetorical con­ vention—fields of study that, for the epoch, constituted education. If such an argument seems circular, there are other qualities that indicate the novels' high level of composition. On stylistic grounds, the reader is referred to Reeve (1971], who documents a certain level of stylistic polish present in all the novels by virtue of the authors' careful avoid­ ance of hiatus. Disagreeing with Perry's evaluation of the genre as "humble and demotic" (Perry 1967, 33), Reeve asserts that this is only a "projection of the writer's own evaluation," because it is not substan­ tiated by "a lack of literary ambition on the part of the novelists them­ selves" (1971, 538). On structural grounds also, Leucippe and Chtophon and the Aethiopica lay claim to literary sophistication. See the study of the structural patterns in the former by Sedelmeier 1959, 11331. (I thank J. J. Winkler for bringing these articles to my attention.) On Heliodorus, Keyes 1922 is instructive in this regard. 30 On the filling in of textual gaps as a component of the reading pro­ cess in general, see Iser 1978, esp. 165-70, and 1980, 110-19. See also Iser, "Indeterminacy and the Reader's Response in Prose Fiction," in Aspects of Narrative, English Institute Essays, ed. J. Hillis Miller (New York, 1971), 1-45. Suleiman (1980, 24) offers a cogent summary of Iser's basic position: "According to Iser, it is because all texts contain elements of indeterminacy, or 'gaps,' that the reader's activity must be creative: in seeking to fill in the textual gaps—gaps that function on multiple levels, including the semantic level—the reader realizes the work."

THREE _5