The Poetics of Phantasia: Imagination in Ancient Aesthetics 9781472507655, 9781472555830, 9781472509215

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The Poetics of Phantasia

The Poetics of Phantasia Imagination in Ancient Aesthetics Anne Sheppard

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square 1385 Broadway London New York WC1B 3DP NY 10018 UK Bloomsbury Academic USA An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc www.bloomsbury.com 50 Bedford Square 1385 Broadway New York Publishing Plc Bloomsbury is aLondon registered trade mark of Bloomsbury WC1B 3DP NY 10018 UK USA First published 2014 www.bloomsbury.com © Anne Sheppard, 2014 BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc Anne Sheppard has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified First published 2014 as Author of this work. Paperback edition first published 2015 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted Anne Sheppard, 2014 in any form or by any means,©electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission Anne Sheppard has asserted under the Copyright, in writing fromher theright publishers. Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form refraining from action as a result of the material in this publicationrecording, can be accepted or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, or any Bloomsbury the author. information storage orbyretrieval system,orwithout prior permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data No for loss to anyisindividual organization acting on or A responsibility catalogue record forcaused this book available or from the British Library refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4725-0765-5 ePub: 978-1-4725-1059-4 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data ePDF: 978-1-4725-0921-5 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Catalogingin-Publication Data ISBN: HB: 978-1-4725-0765-5 Sheppard, D. R., author. PB:Anne 978-1-4742-5759-6 The poetics of phantasia : imagination in ancient aesthetics / Anne Sheppard. ePDF: 978-1-4725-0921-5 cm ePUB:pages 978-1-4725-1059-4 Includes bibliographical references and index. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data (epub) — ISBN 978-1-4725-0765-5 (hardback) — ISBN 978-1-4725-1059-4 A catalog record(epdf) for this 1. book is availableAncient. from the Library of Congress ISBN 978-1-4725-0921-5 Aesthetics, 2. Greek literature—History and criticism. 3. Imagination in literature. I. Title. Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk BH108.S54 2014 111Ⱦ.850938—dc23 2013039587 Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk

Contents Acknowledgements Preface A Note on Translations Timeline Introduction: Aristotle’s Phantasia and the Ancient Concept of Imagination 1 Visualization, Vividness (Enargeia) and Realism 2 Mathematical Projection, Copying and Analogy 3 Prophecy, Inspiration and Allegory Conclusion: Ancient and Modern Imagination Bibliography General Index Index of Passages Cited

vii viii xi xiii

1 19 47 71 101 105 117 119

Acknowledgements Some parts of this book have previously been published in a different form. I am grateful to Ashgate Publishing for permission to re-­use material first published in my article, ‘Phantasia and Inspiration in Neoplatonism’ in M. Joyal (ed.), Studies in Plato and the Platonic Tradition. Essays Presented to John Whittaker (Aldershot: Ashgate 1997) 201–10; to Prof. Peter Green, editor of Syllecta Classica, for permission to re-­use material first published in my article, ‘Phantasia and Mathematical Projection in Iamblichus’ in H. J. Blumenthal and J. Finamore (eds), Iamblichus the Philosopher. Syllecta Classica 8 (1997) 113–20; to Prof. Michael Erler and Prof. Clemens Zintzen, co-­editors of the series Beiträge zur Altertumskunde, for permission to re-­use material first published in my article,‘Image and Analogy in Later Neoplatonism’ in T. Kobusch and M. Erler (eds), Metaphysik und Religion. Zur Signatur des spätantiken Denkens (Munich and Leipzig: K.G. Saur 2002) 639–47; and to Mohr Siebeck for permission to re-­use material published in my essay, ‘Phantasia in De Insomniis’ in D. A. Russell and H-G. Nesselrath (eds), On Prophecy, Dreams and Human Imagination: Synesius, De insomniis (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck forthcoming).

Preface This book has grown out of two long-­running and converging strands in my intellectual life. On the one hand, I have enjoyed works of the imagination ever since I can remember and, since I first became interested in philosophy, have been fascinated by the question why such works hold so much appeal for us. My Oxford DPhil on the response of the Neoplatonist philosopher Proclus to Plato’s criticisms of Homer (published as Sheppard 1980) raised in my mind a number of further questions which it was not possible to answer at that time; one of these was a question about Proclus’ use of the word phantasia. Subsequently, writing an introductory book on aesthetics, entitled Aesthetics. An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art (Sheppard 1987), led me to read some modern philosophical work on imagination and to think more broadly about the topic. At the same time my work on Proclus had aroused my interest in the use of allegory and symbolism in art and literature. Two conversations with distinguished scholars were particularly influential: E. R. Dodds lent me a copy of Louis MacNeice’s book, Varieties of Parable, and when I talked to my undergraduate tutor, Margaret Hubbard, about my doctoral research, she said to me, ‘At some stage this has to be confronted with Chapter 9 [of Aristotle’s Poetics].’ Rather than attempting a study of the concept of imagination in general, I have chosen to focus on the ancient concept of phantasia and its uses in aesthetic contexts. My concentration on these particular uses of phantasia has allowed me to address some of the issues about allegory, symbolism and the nature of poetic truth which E. R. Dodds and Margaret Hubbard first stimulated me to consider. I made a preliminary attempt to discuss some of the underlying questions in an article on ‘The Role of Imagination in Aesthetic Experience’, published in the Journal of Aesthetic Education in 1991 (Sheppard 1991b) and

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have also published papers on various aspects of phantasia in Neoplatonism, some of which I have drawn on when writing this book. The book has been a long time in gestation and I have benefited from the opportunity to present material relating to it on a number of occasions. I have received helpful comments from audiences at: Royal Holloway, University of London; the University of Leiden; the University of Manchester; the annual conference of the British Society of Aesthetics; University College, Cork; the London Roman Art seminar; a workshop on Arabic poetics at St John’s College, Oxford; the University of Murcia; the Université catholique de Louvain; and the London Aesthetics Forum. I have also learned a great deal over the years from my colleagues both at Royal Holloway and in the wider scholarly community and from my students. Some individuals are thanked in the chapter notes for advice on particular points, or for particular references. In addition to these I should like to thank a number of people who have suggested books and articles to me, shared their own work with me, answered questions or made comments on my project as it developed: Cosmin Andron, Franco Basso, Oleg Bychkov, Victor Caston, Stavroula Kiritsi, Peter Lautner, Dominic O’Meara, Jim Porter, Donald Russell, David Sedley, Ineke Sluiter, Carlos Steel, Suzanne Stern-Gillet, Jeremy Tanner, Tony Woodman, my daughter Sarah, and the anonymous referees who commented on my proposal for Bloomsbury Academic. I should also like to thank my family for their continual support and encouragement. Responsibility for omissions and errors rests of course with me. Anne Sheppard September 2013

A Note on Translations A list of the translations of Greek and Latin texts used is given in the Bibliography. I have also given the name of the translator(s) in the text of the book, the first time I quote from a translation. All unattributed translations are my own.

Timeline I list here the ancient writers and thinkers discussed in the book, in chronological order. Many dates are approximate; in some cases we know an author’s date of birth, or date of death, but not both, while in others we know only the period at which they were active. I have used a question mark to indicate when dating is uncertain, or disputed, and have referred to two works, the essay On the Life and Poetry of Homer, wrongly attributed to Plutarch, and the Anonymous Prolegomena to Platonic Philosophy, by their titles alone since the names of their authors are unknown. I have not included the scholia to Homer in this list as they are a compilation of material from many different dates. Homer Hesiod Pindar Gorgias Democritus Euripides Aristophanes Andocides Lysias Plato Aeschines Demosthenes Aristotle Epicurus Chrysippus

? Eighth century bc c.700 bc c.518 bc – c.438 bc c.485 bc – c.380 bc Fifth century bc (born c.460 bc) Fifth century bc (died 407/6 bc) Fifth to fourth century bc (died c.386 bc) c.440 bc – c.390 bc Fifth to fourth century bc (died c.380 bc) c.429 bc – 347 bc c.397 bc – c.322 bc 384 bc – 322 bc 384 bc – 322 bc 341 bc – 270 bc c.280 bc – 207 bc

xiv

Philodemus Lucretius Demetrius, On Style Dionysius of Halicarnassus Ovid Philo of Alexandria ‘Longinus’ Quintilian Josephus Aetius Dio Chrysostom Plutarch of Chaeronea On the Life and Poetry of Homer Sextus Empiricus Aelian Philostratus Philostratus the Lemnian Diogenes Laertius Plotinus Porphyry Iamblichus Plutarch of Athens Synesius of Cyrene Syrianus Proclus Hermias Damascius Philoponus Simplicius Olympiodorus Anonymous Prolegomena to   Platonic Philosophy Priscian of Lydia

Timeline

c.110 bc – c.40/35 bc c.94 bc – c.55/1 bc ?First century bc First century bc 43 bc – ad 17 c.20 bc – c.ad 40 ?First century ad c.ad 35 – c.ad 95 First century ad (born ad 37/8) First century ad c.ad 40/50 – c.ad 110 c.ad 50 – c.ad 120 ?Second century ad Second century ad ad 165/70 – ad 230/5 c.ad 172 – ad 244/9 Third century ad Third century ad ad 205 – ad 269/70 ad 234 – c.ad 305 c.ad 245 – c.ad 325 c.ad 350 – c.ad 430 c.ad 370 – c.ad 413 Fourth to fifth century ad (died c.ad 437) ad 412 – ad 485 c.ad 410 – c.ad 450 c.ad 458 – after ad 538 c.ad 490 – c.ad 570 c.ad 490 – c.ad 560 ad 495/505 – after ad 565 Sixth century ad Fifth to sixth century ad

Introduction: Aristotle’s Phantasia and the Ancient Concept of Imagination ‘Imagination’ is one of the standard translations of the Greek word phantasia. Although the word does appear in this sense in Plato, it was Aristotle’s usage, particularly in On the Soul (De Anima), that was of crucial importance for later thought. While we might think that aesthetic contexts are central to any discussion of imagination, many of the contexts in which ancient Greek thinkers use the word phantasia are not aesthetic at all and, conversely, the word is not used in some aesthetic contexts in which we might expect it. For that reason this book is not a complete survey of phantasia in ancient thought and, although many of the texts to be discussed do use the word phantasia, I shall also be considering material which talks of  ‘putting before the eyes’ and of ‘making you feel as if you were there’ in Chapter  1, material which uses the words eikōn (‘copy’) and paradeigma (‘model’) and the related concept of analogy in Chapter 2, and material which refers to inspiration and to symbols in Chapter 3. In order to set the detailed discussion in the main body of the book against a wider background I propose in this Introduction to offer a brief sketch of the concept of phantasia and some related concepts in ancient Greek thought from Plato to the first century ad, highlighting those aspects which are of particular importance for the rest of the book. The different uses of phantasia discussed in the book may be related to different literary and artistic modes. This point will be outlined at the end of the Introduction and will recur throughout the book. A key issue, both in philosophical discussions of the imagination and in the interpretation of Aristotle’s view of phantasia, is the extent to which imagination involves the having of mental images. Much of the material to be discussed in this book assumes that we do have mental images when we use our imaginations. Before we turn to survey the wider concept of phantasia in ancient Greek thought, it may be helpful at the outset to contrast the ancient way of thinking about mental images in aesthetic contexts with what we find in the Romantic

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poetics which has shaped many of our current assumptions about the power of the imagination. Wordsworth in ‘Tintern Abbey’ writes: And now, with gleams of half-­extinguished thought, With many recognitions dim and faint, And somewhat of a sad perplexity, The picture of the mind revives again: While here I stand, not only with the sense Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts That in this moment there is life and food For future years. (58–65)

As Mary Warnock stresses in her discussion of Wordsworth’s view of the imagination, ‘The power of the imagination to produce images in the absence of the object becomes crucial to Wordsworth’s own poetry, and to his theory of it.’1 Moreover his use of the phrase ‘the picture of the mind’ suggests that the mind projects its images outward onto the world, functioning like a lamp rather than a mirror, to use the contrast made famous by M. H. Abrams in The Mirror and the Lamp.2 Ancient poetics is predominantly the poetics of the mirror rather than the lamp, and ancient writers treat mental images as pictures in the mind, the mind reflecting images either from the world of sense-­ perception or, sometimes, from a higher, intelligible world. We shall see in Chapters  2 and 3 that such reflection is sometimes explicitly compared to reflection in a mirror. It follows that we should not be surprised that, as has often been noted, imagination in antiquity is hardly ever thought of as creative or productive. However this does not mean that the concept of phantasia is of no relevance for ancient aesthetics even though, as we shall see, many of the ways in which it is used relate to psychology and epistemology rather than to aesthetics as such.

Plato on phantasia, appearances and images Although some of the ideas to be discussed in this book can be found in the earliest Greek literature and thought, the word phantasia first appears in Plato.3 Etymologically the abstract noun phantasia is closely related to the verbs phainesthai and phantazesthai, ‘to appear’. Greek philosophers never lose sight

Introduction

3

of this relationship, using the word either to refer to what appears to us or to the part of the mind which deals with such appearances. The connection with phainesthai is explicit in Plato and Plato’s distrust of appearances is an important influence on later Platonist views of phantasia, as we shall see in Chapters 2 and 3. The word phantasia occurs in the sense of ‘appearance’ in both the Republic and the Theaetetus. In Republic 2.382e Socrates states that God does not change and does not deceive, either in appearances (phantasias) or in words or by sending signs. Immediately before this remark Socrates has been criticizing passages of Homer in which the gods are described as appearing to human beings in different shapes and he is about to criticize the deceitful dream sent by Zeus to Agamemnon at the beginning of Iliad 2. Similarly in the Theaetetus phantasia is used in the discussion of the view that knowledge is perception, first at 152c where Socrates points out that for someone who believes, as Protagoras apparently did, that ‘it appears’ (phainetai) is the way to characterize perceptions, phantasia will be the same as perception – i.e. if when I say ‘the wind is cold’, what I mean is ‘the wind appears cold to me’, then my perception of the wind as cold is simply how it appears, and we cannot go beyond that to decide whether it is true or false that the wind is cold. Similarly a little later in the dialogue when Socrates embarks on his refutation of Protagoras’ views he uses the word phantasia in the sense of ‘appearance’ when he draws attention to the extreme relativism implied in Protagoras’ position: ‘To examine and refute each other’s appearances (phantasias) and judgements (doxas), when each person’s are correct – this is surely an extremely tiresome piece of nonsense’ (161e, trans. M. J. Levett). Phantasia is used in a rather different way at Sophist 264a–b3. Here the Eleatic Stranger first declares that when opinion or judgement (doxa) occurs by means of sense-­perception (aisthēsis) the term phantasia is rightly used and then goes on to say that phainetai (‘it appears’) is what we say when there is a mixture of sense-­perception and doxa.4 Phantasia here is being used not simply of what appears to us but of how we deal with such appearances. In the passage which follows, 264b–d, the Stranger refers back to the distinction made in an earlier passage, 235d–236c, between two different kinds of imitative art (mimētikē), one which aims to produce accurate copies or likenesses, labelled eikastikē, and one which is concerned only with things as they appear, labelled phantastikē. There the Stranger explains that ‘those who sculpt or paint

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The Poetics of Phantasia

something large’ use phantastikē in order to overcome problems in how we perceive such objects – or, in the terms of the Protagorean view discussed in the Theaetetus, in how such objects appear to us: You should realize that if they were to reproduce the exact proportions of the limbs, the upper parts would seem smaller than they ought to, and the lower parts would seem larger, because we see the former from a distance but the latter from nearby. (235e–236a)

The problem of perceptual illusions resulting from looking at things some distance away is also discussed in a passage of the Philebus where the roles of memory and perception in judgement (doxa) are under discussion: SOCRATES: Wouldn’t you say that it often happens that someone who cannot get a clear view because he is looking from a distance wants to make up his mind about what he sees? PROTARCHUS: I would say so. SOC.: And might he not then raise another question for himself? PRO.: What question? SOC.: ‘What could that be that appears (phantazomenon) to stand near that rock under a tree?’ – Do you find it plausible that someone might say these words to himself when he sets his eyes on such appearances (phantasthenta)? (38c–d, trans. D. Frede)

Socrates suggests that the person looking from a distance might say correctly, ‘It is a man’, but might also make a mistake and say that what he sees is a statue. He goes on to say that memory, perception and other related experiences (pathēmata) ‘seem . . . to inscribe words in our soul, as it were’. These words can be either true or false. The metaphorical scribe is followed by an equally metaphorical painter who provides images (eikonas) in the soul of the scribe’s words. The painter is not actually named as phantasia and his role does not correspond exactly to the definition of phantasia in Sophist 264a–b3. Nevertheless, if we put the Sophist and the Philebus together, it is easy to see why a later Platonist such as Porphyry assumed that this painter, responsible for the false images which give rise to the false pleasures of the wicked a little further on in the Philebus (40a–c), is none other than the imagination.5 All this barely amounts to anything that we could call a theory of imagination or a theory of phantasia, although the passages I have surveyed are suggestive

Introduction

5

and stimulated later thinkers in a variety of ways.6 Even more suggestive is Plato’s use of the metaphor of the mirror to portray the relationship between image and original. In aesthetic contexts the best-­known use of this metaphor is the passage at Republic 10.596d–e where Socrates tells Glaucon that craftsmen such as painters have a quick and easy way of producing everything: I suppose the quickest way is if you care to take a mirror and carry it around with you wherever you go. That way you’ll soon create the sun and the heavenly bodies, soon create the earth, soon create yourself, other living creatures, furniture, plants, and all the things we’ve just been talking about. (trans. Griffith)

A couple of pages further on, at 598b–c, Socrates describes the painter as imitating what appears (to phainomenon), producing an imitation of an appearance or image (phantasmatos mimēsis) and makes the same point as in Sophist 235e–236a and Philebus 38c–d: ‘If he is a good painter, from a distance his picture of a carpenter can fool children and people with no judgement, because it looks like a real carpenter.’ In Republic 10 the metaphor of the mirror is being used to denigrate painting and the other arts on the grounds that they produce mere copies of objects in the physical world which are themselves copies of the Platonic Forms. Reflections in a mirror, like the shadows and reflections in water which form the objects of the lowest section of the Divided Line described at the end of Republic 6,7 are two-­dimensional, fleeting and insubstantial. Not all Plato’s uses of the mirror metaphor are as dismissive of the appearances in mirrors. In particular, at Timaeus 70e–72d the liver is described as functioning like a mirror which reflects images and appearances (phantasmata) coming from the highest, rational part of the soul. This passage and its influence on later thought will be discussed more fully in Chapter 3.8 For now we should simply note that ancient readers, as familiar with the Timaeus as with the Republic, might not be as ready as we are to assume that the comparison of a work of art, or any other object, to an image in a mirror has only negative implications.9 At the same time when we consider the connections between Republic 10.596–8 and the Divided Line of Republic 6 as well as the links between that passage and both Sophist 235d–236c and Philebus 38c–d it seems clear that Plato regards images and appearances, and any part

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The Poetics of Phantasia

of the mind which deals with them, as liable to produce error and illusion. He uses a series of related Greek words – parts of the verbs phainesthai and phantazesthai, the noun phantasma meaning ‘what appears’, and the abstract noun phantasia – in all these contexts. Before we move on to Aristotle, it is worth noting that this book will also deal with some other ideas about art and poetry which appear in Plato’s dialogues. The success which Ion the rhapsode claims to have in making his audiences feel as if they were present at the Homeric scenes he recites will be discussed in Chapter 1, and we shall see in Chapter 3 that Plato’s references in several dialogues to the inspiration of both poets and prophets influenced later Platonists in some significant and striking ways.10 These ideas are connected with the views on images and appearances which have formed the main topic of this section. Plato always stresses that the artist does not have knowledge, even when he allows that artistic success may be due to inspiration; it follows that art deals in images and appearances and appeals not to any rational part of the soul but to the emotions.11 The challenge for later thinkers who wished to rescue the arts from the kind of attack to which they are subjected, particularly in the Republic, was how to claim some value for irrational activities. Later Platonists sought in a variety of ways to accommodate the arts within a Platonist metaphysics, epistemology and psychology. Others, such as Aristotle and the Hellenistic philosophers, took a different approach. Aristotle’s views on phantasia and on images will be the topic of the next section.

Aristotle on phantasia and mental images Aristotle’s main account of phantasia can be found in On the Soul 3.3, where he treats it as ‘that in virtue of which an image (phantasma) occurs to us’ (428a1, trans. Hamlyn). In On the Soul Books 2 and 3 Aristotle works his way through the different dynameis – potentialities, powers or faculties – of the soul, starting with nutrition and growth, then sense-­perception, then phantasia, then thinking and finally movement and desire. Since Aristotle believes that phantasia plays an important role in explaining movement and desire, his account of these two dynameis includes further remarks on phantasia and this aspect of his discussion can be further illuminated by considering his treatment

Introduction

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of animal movement in On the Movement of Animals (De Motu Animalium). It is conventional to translate the word dynameis in this context as ‘faculties’, to translate phantasia as ‘imagination’, and to say that what Aristotle offers us in On the Soul is a treatment of imagination as a faculty of the soul. As we shall see in Chapter 2, the Neoplatonists treated Aristotle’s dynameis of the soul as psychological faculties arranged in a hierarchy, with phantasia occupying a crucial position between the irrational faculties of nutrition and growth, and sense-­perception, on the one hand, and rational thinking on the other.12 However in Aristotle’s own thought the place of phantasia in any arrangement of soul faculties is rather less clear. In 2.2.414b33–415a13 he explains that his ordering of powers of the soul corresponds to an ordering of living creatures, since plants have the power of nutrition and growth but not the other dynameis and animals have the power of nutrition and growth as well as sense-­perception but not the power of rational thought, while human beings have all these powers. Phantasia and movement are problematic here since some animals have these powers but others do not. For Aristotle phantasia remains closely linked to ‘what appears’ and is the power to deal with appearances rather than those appearances themselves. Its scope is thus rather different from that of imagination. On the Soul 3.3 comes between Aristotle’s account of sense-­perception and his account of thinking, and much of the chapter is concerned with distinguishing phantasia from perception on the one hand and thinking on the other. At 428a24–b9 Aristotle argues explicitly against the definition of phantasia offered by Plato in Sophist 264a–b.13 At the end of the chapter, at 429a1–2, Aristotle offers his own definition of phantasia as ‘a movement taking place as a result of actual sense-­ perception’. Modern interpreters have struggled to make sense of the chapter as a consistent and coherent whole; some of them have sought assistance from remarks about phantasia elsewhere in Aristotle while others have focussed on On the Soul 3.3 alone. One of the issues at stake, of particular relevance to this book, is the role of mental images in Aristotle’s account. The assumption that imagination involves mental images was attacked both by Wittgenstein and by Gilbert Ryle in The Concept of Mind and among philosophers influenced by the analytic tradition it has become more fashionable to set about analyzing propositions of the form ‘I imagine that P’ than to enquire into hypothetical pictures in the mind. Wittgenstein in his

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The Poetics of Phantasia

Philosophical Investigations introduced the influential notion of ‘seeing as’, famously illustrated by the figure of the duck-­rabbit which can be seen either as a duck or as a rabbit. He also described ‘seeing as’ as ‘seeing an aspect’ and emphasized that in seeing the ambiguous figure as, say, a duck we are interpreting what we see.14 These modern approaches to imagination have influenced the interpretation of Aristotle, leading scholars such as Malcolm Schofield and Martha Nussbaum to claim that Aristotle is concerned with the logic of the verb phainesthai (‘to appear’) rather than with mental images. According to Schofield the focus of Aristotle’s interest in On the Soul 3.3 is on phenomena which make one say cautiously phainetai – ‘It looks like an X’; mental imagery is only one type of such an experience and is not Aristotle’s main concern.15 Martha Nussbaum also emphasizes the connection with phainesthai and explicitly attacks the view that mental images are central to either Aristotelian phantasia or our notion of imagination. She starts from the discussion of animal movement in On the Movement of Animals, examining Aristotle’s account of the role of phantasia in animal movement both there and in On the Soul 3.9–11. She argues that for Aristotle aisthēsis (sense-­perception) is simply the passive reception of sense-­impressions and that the role of phantasia is to interpret such impressions. She describes such interpretation of impressions in Wittgensteinian terms as ‘seeing as’: ‘Phantasia is the faculty in virtue of which the animal sees his object as an object of a certain sort, so that we can say that perception has for him some potentially motivating content.’16 At the beginning of her discussion Nussbaum makes a striking connection between this kind of interpreting of impressions and the ‘point of view’ technique employed by Henry James in his novels. Her essay is headed by a quotation from The Portrait of a Lady, in which the heroine, Isabel Archer, says, ‘We see our lives from our own point of view; that is the privilege of the weakest and humblest of us.’17 For Nussbaum, ‘seeing as’ is ‘seeing from a point of view’; our interpretation of the impressions of sense-­perception affects our actions, not only at the basic level of animal movement but also at the level of human moral action, without any appeal to mental images.18 By contrast, Deborah Modrak argues for an interpretation of Aristotelian phantasia which once again makes mental images important. She disputes Nussbaum’s interpretation of aisthēsis as purely passive and describes phantasia

Introduction

9

as ‘the awareness of a sensory content under conditions that are not conducive to veridical perception’, an awareness which can perfectly well take the form of a mental image.19 M. V. Wedin takes a radically different view. He argues that phantasia is not like the other powers or faculties of the soul described in On the Soul but that ‘in its [re]presentational role imagination subserves full faculties in the sense that images are the devices by which such faculties [re]present the objects toward which they are directed.’ Wedin regards phantasia as dealing in mental images and considers carefully what Aristotle means by the word phantasma, often translated by ‘image’ in Aristotelian contexts, paying particular attention to On Memory (De Memoria) 449b31–450a7. However he argues against what he calls a ‘naïve view’ of images as mental pictures, as well as against Nussbaum’s interpretation in terms of ‘seeing as’.20 Most recently Thomas Johansen has argued that images are central to Aristotle’s understanding of phantasia and has drawn attention to passages such as On the Soul 429a2–4, On Dreams (De Insomniis) 461a14–30 and On Memory 450b11–451a2 which suggest that Aristotle sees a particularly strong connection between phantasia and vision. For Johansen phantasia depends on the capacity of perception rather than being a dynamis in the same way as perception and thinking.21 So much for the modern debate over the interpretation of Aristotle on phantasia and the question whether phantasia involves mental images. The problem, as often in the interpretation of Aristotle, is that different remarks in the rather disjointed discussion of On the Soul 3.3 and in his other treatments of phantasia point in different directions. It is, I think, undeniable that Aristotle sometimes refers to mental images, or phantasmata, although there remains room for dispute over just what his conception of a mental image is as well as how important he thinks such images are for phantasia. In On the Soul 3.3, the parenthetic reference at 427b17–20 to producing something ‘before the eyes’ (pro ommatōn) ‘as those do who set things out in mnemonic systems and form images of them’ is a reference to deliberate visualization. On Memory 449b30– 450a5 similarly refers to visualization, making a cross-­reference to On the Soul and stating that ‘it is not possible to think without an image (phantasma)’.22 The latter point recurs in On the Soul, not in 3.3 but in 3.7.431a16–17 and b2 and again in 3.8.432a8–14.

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The Poetics of Phantasia

Aristotle has nothing to say in On the Soul 3.3 about the imagination of the artist and I shall have little to say about that chapter, or the other discussions of phantasia in On the Soul and On the Movement of Animals, in the rest of this book. However I shall have a good deal to say in Chapter 1 about Aristotle’s use of the term ‘putting before the eyes’ in the Poetics and the Rhetoric; we shall see there that Aristotle is quite familiar with the notion of imagination as visualization but that, unlike later critics and thinkers, he does not use the word phantasia in this sense. At the beginning of Chapter 2, and in Chapter 3, I shall be discussing Neoplatonist views of phantasia. Since Neoplatonist psychology was essentially based on Aristotle,23 Aristotle’s treatment of phantasia forms a significant part of the background to the ideas to be discussed in those chapters. Many of the Neoplatonists assumed that (Aristotelian) phantasia does indeed deal in mental images, although without necessarily taking a ‘naïve’ view of such images.24 Whatever the correct interpretation of Aristotle’s view may be, the relationship between phantasia and mental images will recur throughout the rest of this book. We have seen that Aristotle uses the word phantasma to refer to such images, reserving the abstract noun phantasia to refer to the related mental power or faculty. In the next section of this Introduction I shall turn to the views of the Stoics and Epicureans, philosophers who use the word phantasia not in the sense Plato used it in the Sophist but in the sense in which he used it in the Republic and Theaetetus, to mean ‘that which appears to us’.

Stoics and Epicureans on images and imagining Both the Stoics and the Epicureans developed empiricist theories of knowledge in which the word phantasia referred to the data of perception as they appear to us. Although their theories differ from modern empiricist theories of knowledge as well as from each other, phantasia in this context is often translated by the word ‘impression’ used by modern empiricists such as David Hume. Epicurus and his followers believed that everything in the world, including both human bodies and human minds, was composed of material atoms. According to Epicurus, solid bodies, themselves compounds of atoms, throw off atomic films which we call ‘images’ (eidōla). Perception is to be

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explained by these films reaching our eyes or other sense-­organs and producing an impression (phantasia) there. Fine atoms which come together in the air, without being thrown off from any physical object, form wandering atomic films which act directly on our minds, causing the images seen in dreams and hallucinations.25 In his Epicurean poem, On the Nature of Things (De Rerum Natura), Lucretius uses this approach to explain how we can conceive of a Centaur, for example: For certainly the image of a Centaur does not arise from a living one – there never was such a species of animal – but when the images of a horse and a man have accidentally met they easily and immediately stick together . . . owing to their fine nature and delicate texture. (On the Nature of Things 4.739–43, trans. Long and Sedley)

Some of the evidence for Epicurus’ views suggests that he also thought we could draw inferences from our impressions or combine them at will but this is explained in terms of our minds dealing with the continuous flow of atomic images: Everywhere at every time every image is ready on the spot . . . And because they are delicate the mind can only see sharply those of them which it strains to see . . . The mind further prepares itself by hoping to see the sequel of each thing, with the result that this comes about. (Lucretius, On the Nature of Things 4.797–806)26

Deliberate visualization of the kind alluded to in Aristotle On the Soul 3.3 and elsewhere would involve combining our impressions in this way in order to form a picture in our minds. The later Epicurean thinker Philodemus uses the language of ‘putting before the eyes’ (tithenai pro ommatōn) when he recommends visualization of the sufferings and dangers that can result from anger as a form of therapy against that passion.27 However for an Epicurean even quite complex mental pictures that result from our combining of images ultimately have their origin in the action of material atoms on the atoms which constitute our minds and our sense-­organs. That may be why Epicurean thinkers show little interest in the mental processes of the artist and why Epicureanism had little influence on the use of the word phantasia in aesthetic contexts. The Stoics too used the word phantasia to refer to the ‘impression’ we receive when we perceive something. A passage in Diogenes Laertius’ summary of

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Stoic doctrines explicitly distinguishes between an impression and a ‘figment’ (phantasma): An impression (phantasia) is different from a figment (phantasma). A figment is the kind of fanciful thought which occurs in dreams, whereas an impression is a printing in the soul: i.e., an alteration, as Chrysippus suggests in his On soul. (Diogenes Laertius 7.50, trans. Long and Sedley)

Diogenes Laertius goes on to distinguish between sensory impressions, ‘obtained through one or more sense-­organs’, and non-­sensory impressions ‘obtained through thought’. For the Stoics, as for the Epicureans, receiving any kind of impression, whether sensory or non-­sensory, is equally explicable in physical terms, this time not the impact of fine atomic films but a change or alteration in the state of our pneuma (‘breath’ or ‘spirit’).28 Since the Stoics, like the Epicureans, were materialists, they explained both thinking and perceiving in terms of such changes. However, unlike the Epicureans, the Stoics did not think that the images we see in dreams had an external physical cause. The difference between an impression and a mere figment is further explained in a passage from the doxographer Aetius which uses two other words from the same root as phantasia, phantaston and phantastikon, translated by Long and Sedley as ‘impressor’ and ‘imagination’: Chrysippus says that these four are all different. An impression (phantasia) is an affection (pathos) occurring in the soul, which reveals itself and its cause. Thus, when through sight we observe something white, the affection is what is engendered in the soul through vision; and it is this affection which enables us to say that there is a white object which activates us. Likewise when we perceive through touch and smell . . . The cause of an impression is an impressor (phantaston): e.g., something white or cold or everything capable of activating the soul. Imagination (phantastikon) is an empty attraction, an affection in the soul which arises from no impressor, as when someone shadow-­boxes or strikes his hands against thin air; for an impression has some impressor as its object, but imagination has none. A figment (phantasma) is that to which we are attracted in the empty attraction of imagination; it occurs in people who are melancholic or mad. (Aetius 4.12.1–5, trans. Long and Sedley)

A figment in this passage is a hallucination rather than an image seen in a dream: Aetius goes on to give the favourite ancient example of the mad Orestes

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seeing the Furies in Euripides, Orestes 255–59, the ancient equivalent of the dagger seen by Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Another passage of Diogenes Laertius lists a series of ways in which the Stoics explained how we can conceive of things of which we have no experience: It is by confrontation that we come to think of sense-­objects. By similarity, things based on thought of something related, like Socrates on the basis of a picture. By analogy, sometimes by magnification, as in the case of Tityos and the Cyclops, sometimes by diminution, as in the case of the Pigmy; also the idea of the centre of the earth arose by analogy on the basis of smaller spheres. By transposition, things like eyes on the chest. By combination, Hippocentaur. By opposition, death. (Diogenes Laertius 7.53, trans. Long and Sedley)

This passage is, again, both like and unlike the kind of account we have already seen in Epicurean thought. The Stoics avoid the awkwardness of the Epicurean appeal to a continuous flow of external atomic images and cover a wider range of cases, specifying a number of different ways in which we can manipulate our impressions to conceive of something we have never seen. This Stoic view of our ability to combine impressions may well be part of the potpourri of ideas that gave rise to some of the later ways of talking about phantasia as a power to manipulate mental images, in particular the view of phantasia as visualization which we find in ‘Longinus’ and others, discussed in Chapter 1 of this book, and the contrast made by Philostratus between phantasia and mimēsis, discussed in Chapter  3.29 Nevertheless the admittedly fragmentary evidence we have for early Stoic thought does not suggest any great interest in giving an account of imaginative processes, except in so far as, like the Epicureans, the Stoics had to find an explanation within their empiricist epistemology both for the images seen in dreams and hallucinations and for our ability to envisage things we have never seen, such as mythical creatures.

The scope of this book Many of the texts to be discussed in this book were produced by writers from the first century ad onwards, who inherited all the philosophical traditions about phantasia sketched in this Introduction, developing aspects of these traditions in a variety of ways. We shall see in Chapter 1 and Chapter 3 that

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some of the ideas to be discussed go back to the earliest Greek literature and thought. Nevertheless, the influences of Plato and Aristotle dominate and for that reason particular aspects of the thought of both these philosophers will be discussed in more detail in the rest of the book. Plato’s influence is all-­pervasive, evident both in the wider tradition of writing about the arts and in the narrower sphere of philosophy proper. It may appear paradoxical that the influence of Aristotle’s view of phantasia is clearest in the psychology of the Neoplatonists but that is because by late antiquity Plato and Aristotle were treated as largely in agreement with one another.30 Since the book covers an extensive time period, from the beginnings of Greek literature down to late antiquity, and deals with a wide range of authors, I have included a Timeline which indicates the period at which each author was writing. I shall argue in Chapter  1 that phantasia in the sense of ‘visualization’, associated with ‘putting before the eyes’ and ‘making you feel as if you were there’, is particularly related to literary and artistic realism. By contrast the uses of phantasia discussed in Chapters 2 and 3, together with the ideas of copying, analogy, inspiration and symbols considered in those chapters, offer ways of thinking about allegory and symbolism in literature and art. Both realistic and symbolic art try, in different ways, to convey truth. The question of the relationship between literature and truth is also raised by Aristotle’s claim in Poetics Chapter 9 that poetry is more universal than history and at the end of each of the three chapters of this book I shall consider how the ideas about literature under discussion relate to Aristotle’s claim. The majority of the ancient material dealing with the arts which I shall discuss is concerned with literature – especially poetry and oratory – and visual art, although occasionally music is also mentioned. Ancient texts which discuss music at greater length do consider a number of the issues examined in this book, such as the effect of music on the emotions, the mathematical structure of music and the notion of inspiration. However the connections with phantasia are less evident than in discussions of literature and the visual arts and the differences are such that I have chosen to leave music largely on one side rather than attempt to incorporate it into the argument of the book. Most, though not all, of the writers and thinkers mentioned in this book were writing in Greek. The modern English word ‘imagination’ is derived from the Latin word ‘imaginatio’, used by Augustine and Boethius as the Latin

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equivalent for the Greek term phantasia. Their concepts of ‘imaginatio’ grow out of the Greek philosophical traditions discussed in this book but deserve separate study, as do the ways in which the ideas I shall be investigating were developed by later thinkers in the medieval West, in the Byzantine world, in Arabic philosophy and poetics, and in the Renaissance.31 This book deals only with the initial stages on the long and winding road which leads from Plato’s suspicion of appearances, images and reflections and Aristotle’s claim there is no thinking without an image to Wordsworth’s ‘picture of the mind’ and Henry James’s ‘point of view’.

Notes   1   2   3   4   5

  6   7   8   9

10 11 12 13

Warnock 1976: 116. Abrams 1953. See Rees 1972: 503, n.7. The combination of δόξα and αἴσθησις is also mentioned at Timaeus 52a7, though without mention of φαντασία or φαίνεται. See Porphyry Fragment 378.11–15 Smith and Commentary on Ptolemy’s Harmonics (In Ptolemaei Harmonica, Kommentar zur Harmonielehre des Ptolemaios) 13.27–31, and Proclus, Commentary on Plato’s Republic (In Platonis Rem Publicam commentarii) vol.1, 233.8–16. I have discussed the Porphyry passages in Sheppard 2007: 73. On the Proclus passage, see Watson 1982b: 104. For a fuller discussion which argues for a more developed theory of phantasia in Plato, see Silverman 1991. Cf. also Watson 1988: 1–13. See Republic 6.510e. Cf. also Sophist 239d7–9 and see Chapter 2 below. See Chapter 3 (Early Greek views of inspiration – Homer to Plato). The image of the mirror is also used in a positive way in Alcibiades I 132e–133c. Although that dialogue may not be by Plato it was accepted as Platonic in antiquity. See Chapter 1 (‘As if you were there yourself ’ – Homer to Plato); Chapter 3 (Phantasia and inspiration) and (Inspiration and symbolism). See especially Republic 3.398d–401d and 10.602a–606d; cf. also Republic 3.386a–391e. See Chapter 2 (Mathematical projection). Watson 1982a (= 1988: 14–33) argues that Aristotle’s whole discussion in On the Soul 3.3 should be read with reference to Plato’s views.

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14 See Wittgenstein 1958: II, xi and Ryle 1949: chap 8. See also the discussion in Warnock 1976: 152–60 and 183–95. 15 See Schofield 1978. 16 Nussbaum 1985: 255–6. 17 Nussbaum 1985: 221. 18 For the connection with human moral action, see Nussbaum 1985: 380, commenting on On the Movement of Animals 703b2. Her mention of Henry James in this context is further developed in some of her other work, particularly Love’s Knowledge (1990). Although the connections she sees between James’s ‘point of view’ technique, ‘seeing as’, and Aristotle’s views of both phantasia and moral knowledge are thought-­provoking, I doubt that Aristotle is as close to Wittgenstein and Henry James as she suggests. Cf. also Chapter 1 (Techniques and effects of realism, ancient and modern). 19 See Modrak 1986 and 1987: chap 4. Modrak describes phantasia in the way cited in the text in 1986: 48 and 49, and again in 1987: 82. 20 Wedin 1988. The statement of Wedin’s position quoted in the text comes from p.24; the discussion of phantasma in On Memory 449b31–450a7 can be found on pp.53–4 and 136–41 and the argument against a naïve view of images, and against Nussbaum, on pp.90–9. For a possible parallel between Wedin’s view and that of Iamblichus, see Chapter 2 (Mathematical projection) below, n.15. 21 Johansen 2012: 199–220. 22 These passages are discussed further in Chapter 1 (‘Putting before the eyes’ – Aristotle and the orators) and Chapter 2 (Mathematical projection). 23 For full discussion of this point, see Blumenthal 1996. 24 Cf. Sheppard 1991a. 25 See Epicurus, Letter to Herodotus 46–53; Diogenes Laertius 10.32; Sextus Empiricus, Against the Professors 8 (= Against the Logicians 2).63. 26 See Epicurus, Letter to Herodotus 51; Diogenes Laertius 10.32; Sextus Empiricus, Against the Professors 9 (= Against the Physicists 1).43–7. Cf. Sharples 1996: 12–19. 27 See Tsouna 2007: 204–9. I owe this reference to Alexa Frost. 28 The Stoics thought of pneuma as a compound of fire and air which permeates all matter. For a brief account of their theory, see Sharples 1996: 43–6 or Long 1986: 152–8. 29 See Watson 1988: 59–93. 30 Karamanolis 2006 traces the development of this approach to the agreement of Plato and Aristotle from Antiochus of Ascalon to Porphyry. Blumenthal 1996 studies in detail how the late Neoplatonic commentators on Aristotle’s On the Soul approached that text.

Introduction 31 On Augustine and Boethius see in the first instance Bundy 1927: 153–76 and Watson 1988: 134–55; on medieval thought, both in the Arab world and in the Latin West, and on Dante, Bundy 1927: 177–256; on Arabic philosophy and poetics, Black 1990 and van Gelder and Hammond 2009; on Renaissance thought, Cocking 1991: 168–267.

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1

Visualization, Vividness (Enargeia) and Realism A well-­known passage of the work On Sublimity attributed to Longinus, probably written in the first century ad,1 neatly encapsulates the use of phantasia under consideration in this chapter: The word has also come into fashion for the situation in which enthusiasm and emotion make the speaker see what he is saying and bring it visually before his audience. (15.1, trans. D. A. Russell)

Phantasia here is connected explicitly with visualization by the writer and the recreation of such visualization in the audience. Both here and in the discussion of examples which follows the writer of On Sublimity is explicitly talking in terms of the seeing of images ‘in the mind’s eye’, a seeing which is brought about by ‘enthusiasm and emotion’. We shall see in this chapter that while this use of the word phantasia became particularly common in the first century ad, related ways of talking are present in Greek literature and literary criticism from the very beginning, closely connected with ideas of making the reader feel as if they were there and with what came to be regarded as techniques for achieving vividness (enargeia).2 The first section of the chapter traces the development of these ideas from Homer to Plato while the second section examines how they appear in Aristotle and in classical Greek oratory. In the third section of the chapter I consider a variety of texts from the first, second and third centuries ad which use what had by then become well-­established concepts of visualization and vividness, pointing out that these texts tend to describe the effects of visualization primarily in terms of emotion and that vividness is seen as a virtue of mimēsis, of imitation, concerned with realistic representation. The connection with realism becomes particularly clear when the techniques recommended to achieve vividness and visualization are considered. The fourth section of the chapter discusses these techniques and

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their effects, noting that some of them are also associated with the writing of realistic narrative in modern literature, particularly in the novel. Some modern praise of artistic realism, like the ancient, highlights the idea that the reader feels as if they were there. However, modern philosophical accounts of what we gain from engaging with works of literature tend to emphasize understanding, either instead of feeling or combined with feeling. In antiquity visualization, vividness and realism all come to be associated with the arousal of emotions in the reader or audience. The search for a connection between imagination and understanding leads in a different direction, to be explored in Chapters 2 and 3.

‘As if you were there yourself ’ – Homer to Plato We may begin, as the Greeks themselves liked to do, with Homer. Already in the Odyssey Odysseus praises the bard Demodocus for singing about the Trojan War ‘as if he had been there’: ‘Very beautifully (kata kosmon) you sing the fate of the Achaeans, their deeds and sufferings and toils, as if you were there yourself or had heard from someone else’ (Odyssey 8.489–91, trans. D. A. Russell).3 In the fifth century bc Gorgias included in his Defence of Helen some reflections on the power of speech (logos), including poetry under that heading: Those who hear poetry feel the shudders of fear, the tears of pity, the longings of grief. Through the words, the soul experiences its own reaction to successes and misfortunes in the affairs and persons of others. (§9, trans. D. A. Russell)

Homer and Gorgias make no use of the terminology of phantasia and enargeia but the seeds of the later theory are already present in their comments: Homer is concerned with the poet and his ability to tell a story as if he had been present himself; the idea that he makes his audience feel as if they in their turn had been present is at best implicit. Gorgias, writing as a teacher of rhetoric, turns his attention to the audience and their emotions, as a reaction to ‘successes and misfortunes in the affairs and persons of others’. In later writers we shall find the emphasis sometimes on the author, sometimes on the audience, and

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the effect of successful visualization described sometimes more in terms of author and audience feeling ‘as if they had been there’, sometimes more in terms of their emotional reactions. Homer and Gorgias offer no suggestions as to what techniques an author should employ in order to achieve such an effect but the idea that visualization could be deliberately induced is arguably implicit in the fun which Aristophanes pokes at Agathon in the Thesmophoriazusae. Agathon appears dressed as a woman and explains his strange appearance to Euripides’ puzzled kinsman in the following terms: I change my clothing according as I change my mentality. A man who is a poet must adopt habits that match the plays he’s committed to composing. For example, if one is writing plays about women, one’s body must participate in their habits. (148–52, trans. Sommerstein)4

It could be argued that Aristophanes here is mocking the effeminate style of Agathon’s poetry, rather than his subject-­matter, especially as Agathon has just sung a set of lyrics which presumably parody that style. Euripides’ kinsman, however, takes it that subject-­matter is referred to and seizes the opportunity for some jokes about what Agathon will have to get up to if he needs to imitate Phaedra or a satyr. It would clearly be unwise to try to extract an elaborate theory from a comic scene which would be funny when performed even to an audience who knew little or nothing about Agathon and his work. But Aristophanes’ contemporary audience did know about Agathon; they would have seen his plays and might have known that he was an admirer of Gorgias.5 The scene is based on the assumption that a poet should project himself imaginatively into his work – just the assumption which we find, in a more specific form, in later theories of phantasia as visualization. For Aristophanes to use this assumption in the way he does, it must have been familiar at some level to at least some of his audience. Plato too is familiar with the assumption and Plato too pokes fun at it. Characteristically, however, Platonic irony, while no less deadly in its effects than Aristophanic parody, is more subtle and has a more complex theoretical background. In Plato’s Ion, Socrates suggests to Ion, a professional rhapsode, or reciter, of Homer, that he, like Demodocus in the Odyssey, imagines himself present at the events he describes:

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When you recite epic verses well and most amaze your audience – whether you are singing about Odysseus leaping on the threshold, making himself known to the suitors and pouring arrows out at his feet, or about Achilles rushing to attack Hector, or singing some sad passage about Andromache or Hecuba or Priam – are you then in your right mind? Or are you beside yourself and, under the influence of inspiration, do you imagine you are present at the events you are describing, whether in Ithaca or Troy or wherever the story of the epic is actually set? (535b–c)

Ion’s reply makes clear that, like the audience described by Gorgias, he enters into the story he is telling to such an extent that he experiences the emotions which would be felt by someone present at the scene: ‘When I recite a sad passage, my eyes fill with tears; when it is something frightening or terrifying, my hair stands on end with fear and my heart jumps’ (535c). What is more, Ion transmits his emotions to the audience: ‘I look down at them from the stage and see them weeping and looking terrified and marvelling at what is being said’ (535e). However there are some problems about this picture of the rhapsode who feels as if he were present at the scenes he acts out for his audience and so transmits the emotions to them. First, the emotions he feels at the plight of Homer’s fictional characters are to some extent artificial, for when he performs he is, as Socrates points out, ‘at sacrifices and festivals . . . standing among more than 20,000 friendly people’ (535d). Furthermore, if Ion is to earn his living from his profession, he has to remain aware of the artificiality. As he himself admits, ‘if I make them weep, I shall be laughing myself as I take my money but if I make them laugh, I shall be weeping myself because I will lose money’ (535e). There is a tension, not further explored in the dialogue, between the claim made by Socrates, that Ion’s skill in reciting Homer is simply a matter of inspiration, not knowledge, and the suggestion that there is some deliberate artifice involved in Ion’s imagining himself present at the scenes he describes and so influencing the emotions of his audience.

‘Putting before the eyes’ – Aristotle and the orators Earlier ideas about deliberate imaginative visualization by both poets and orators are picked up and developed by Aristotle, both in the Poetics and

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in the Rhetoric.6 Although Aristotle does not express these ideas in quite the same language as we find in Hellenistic and Roman writers, his presentation of them lays the foundation for the later theory. In the Poetics he draws attention to the importance of visualization by the dramatist when working out a plot: A poet should compose plots and work them out in language by putting things before his mind’s eye (pro ommatōn) as much as possible. For in that way, by picturing them very vividly (enargestata), as if he were present at the actual events, he can find what is appropriate and is least likely to overlook incongruities. The criticism made of Carcinus is evidence for this. For Amphiaraus was coming back from the temple, which would have escaped notice if it had not been seen, but fell flat on the stage, because the audience did not like it. One should also, as far as possible, work plots out by using gestures. For, given the same natural ability, those who are actually experiencing emotions are the most convincing: someone who is distressed most authentically portrays distress, and someone angry most authentically portrays anger. (17.1455a22–32)

Aristotle here is recommending that the poet should indeed behave rather as Aristophanes mocks Agathon for doing, and rather as Socrates teases Ion for doing (although Ion is a reciter and interpreter, not a poet). He should imagine the events as if he were there and should feel the appropriate emotions in order to express them in his work. Little is said here about the audience; there is only an allusion to their annoyance at Carcinus’ failure to foresee a problem with the presentation of events on the stage, in a play which is otherwise unknown. However we can infer from this, first that Aristotle is thinking of the dramatist as visualizing his play in performance, and secondly that when such visualization is successful, the audience’s reaction would be very different from their irritation with Carcinus. Aristotle’s talk of the poet ‘putting things before his mind’s eye’ sounds casual and colloquial but in fact the phrase ‘before his mind’s eye’ (pro ommatōn) functions, both here and elsewhere in Aristotle’s work, almost as a technical term for visualization. It is used in this way in several passages of Aristotle’s Rhetoric. In particular in Rhetoric 2.8 Aristotle discusses pity, and, with an eye to the techniques by which defendants in the law courts attempted to arouse pity for their situation, says:

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And since sufferings are pitiable when they appear near at hand and since people do not feel pity, or not in the same way, about things ten thousand years in the past or future, neither anticipating nor remembering them, necessarily those are more pitiable who contribute to the effect by gestures and cries and displays of feelings and generally in their acting; for they make the evil seem near by making it appear before [our] eyes (pro ommatōn) either as something about to happen or as something that has happened, and things are more pitiable when just having happened or going to happen in a short space of time. (1386a29–36, trans. G. A. Kennedy)7

Here it is the audience, or rather the jury, who visualize the sufferings of the defendants; the Greek phrase, pro ommatōn, leaves it open whose eyes are meant but the sense requires that it be the eyes of the jury and in English we have to specify that, as Kennedy does in his translation by inserting ‘our’. The jury are not quite made to feel as if they had been there, but the sufferings are made to appear ‘near at hand’; the arousal of their emotions is explicitly the object of the exercise. In Book 3 of the Rhetoric Aristotle discusses prose style and uses the phrase pro ommatōn a number of times to describe vivid presentation. Thus in 3.2, discussing possible sources of metaphor, he says, ‘one word is more proper than another and more like the object signified and more adapted to making the thing appear “before the eyes (pro ommatōn)” ’ (1405b11–12).8 Again, in 3.10, discussing urbanity or ‘wit’, he remarks, ‘Furthermore, [urbanity is achieved] by means of bringing-­before-the-­eyes [pro ommatōn poiein]; for things should be seen as being done, rather than as in the future’ (1410b33–5).9 The latter part of this sentence apparently refers to the use of the present tense to describe future action, a technique to achieve visualization by making the audience feel as if they were there. Aristotle regards metaphor as one of the sources of urbanity and proceeds to offer a number of examples of striking metaphors used by orators. He describes several of these as pro ommatōn, meaning that they are particularly vivid.10 Finally, at the beginning of 3.11, he offers an explanation of the phrase: But it is necessary to say what we mean by bringing-­before-the-­eyes and what makes this occur. I call those things ‘before the eyes’ that signify things engaged in an activity. For example, to say that a good man is ‘foursquare’ is a metaphor, for both are complete; but it does not signify activity (energeia).

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But the phrase ‘having his prime of life in full bloom’ is energeia, as is ‘you, like an apheton’ and ‘now then the Greeks darting forward on their feet.’ Darting is actualization (energeia) and metaphor; for he means ‘quickly.’ (1411b22–31)

This passage introduces a further technical term, ‘actualization’ (energeia), and uses it to distinguish between metaphors which bring things before our eyes and those which do not. As often in such discussions it is the examples which in fact provide the most clarification. In the last case, in particular, one can see how the use of ‘darting’ to indicate rapid movement is vivid and can be described as actualization, or activity, and as ‘bringing before the eyes’. In these passages from Rhetoric 3 Aristotle is talking about stylistic effects which later critics would have classified under enargeia but he does not use that word in this context, despite his use of the related adverb enargestata (‘most vividly’) in Poetics 17.11 The term energeia which he uses in Rhetoric 3.11 is a distinct term with a range of meanings elsewhere in his philosophy. Although he uses it at this point to explicate pro ommatōn it seems to cover only part of what is covered by that phrase, referring to one particular kind of vivid metaphor.12 As in Rhetoric 2 Aristotle’s concern here is with the effect on the audience and the ‘eyes’ in question must again be those of the audience for a speech. These remarks of Aristotle in the Rhetoric find some interesting parallels in the speeches of fifth- and fourth-­century orators.13 In Andocides 1.148 and Lysias 6.50 the speakers in their perorations ask the jury to see in thought, or with their minds, what the speaker has described to them.14 Similar language recurs in Aeschines 1.161, 3.153, 3.157 and 3.244. Of the Aeschines passages 3.153 and 3.157 are particularly striking: 3.153 asks the audience to ‘transfer themselves in thought’15 from the courtroom to the theatre and compares the tears which, according to Aeschines, the families of those who died at the battle of Chaeronea will shed at the ingratitude of the city with those shed by the audience at a tragedy, while 3.157 on the ruined city of Thebes was used by later rhetorical theorists as a classic example of vivid description.16 Finally [Demosthenes] 26.25, again in the peroration of a forensic speech, asks the jury to consider the benefits derived from the laws and the consequences of lawlessness ‘putting them before your eyes’.17

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It may well be that Aristotle is drawing on oratorical practice in his talk of ‘bringing before the eyes’ in the Rhetoric. At the same time the assumptions made there about visualization recur in his psychological works where we find some further significant uses of the words pro ommatōn. The phrase occurs once in his discussion of phantasia in On the Soul. In On the Soul 3.3 Aristotle is concerned to distinguish imagination from perception on the one hand and thought and belief on the other. One way in which he distinguishes imagination from belief is to claim that imagining something is ‘up to us’ – we can imagine what we like – whereas belief is not, since belief must be either true or false. In the course of making this point he adds the following words in parenthesis, ‘for it is possible to produce something before our eyes (pro ommatōn), as those do who set things out in mnemonic systems and form images of them’ (427b17–20). Here Aristotle is clearly talking about deliberate visualization, as one kind of imagining things at will. The reference to the use of mnemonic systems suggests that he again has oratory in mind since, in later times at least, such systems were part of the training of the orator.18 Visualization is also mentioned, in very similar terms, and with a cross-­ reference to On the Soul, in On Memory: An account has already been given of imagination in the discussion of the soul, and it is not possible to think without an image. For the same effect occurs in thinking as in drawing a diagram. For in the latter case, though we do not make any use of the fact that the size of the triangle is determinate, we none the less draw it with a determinate size. And similarly someone who is thinking, even if he is not thinking of something with a size, places something with a size before his eyes (pro ommatōn), but thinks of it not as having a size. (449b30–450a5, trans. R. Sorabji)19

Again here, visualization by the thinker is explicitly under discussion. It seems that for Aristotle ‘bringing things before the eyes’ is a convenient way of describing the psychological phenomenon of visualization. The passage from Poetics 17 concerns a special case of that phenomenon, deliberate visualization by a playwright, while the passages from the Rhetoric focus rather on the visualization which a skilful orator can induce in his audience and the techniques by which that can be achieved. Although Aristotle in On the Soul and On Memory discusses visualization in the context of phantasia, his terminology is rather different from that found in On Sublimity; phantasia

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for him, in his psychological works, is ‘imagination’ in general not the specific phenomenon of visualization, and the word is notably absent from the Poetics. Aristotle does use the word phantasia in the Rhetoric in the sense of ‘imagination’ at 1.11.1370a28–30. He also uses it in the sense of ‘appearance’ or ‘impression’20 both there and in 1.11.1371a8–10, 17–20, 2.2.1378b9–10, 2.5.1382a21–2, and 2.6.1384a21–2. 1370a28–30 describes phantasia as ‘a sort of weak perception’21 and there has been much discussion of the relationship between this description and the account of phantasia in On the Soul 3.3.22 Whatever the correct account of that relationship should be, it is clear that in the Rhetoric, as in his other works, Aristotle uses the language of ‘bringing before the eyes’ when he refers to visualization, not the word phantasia.

Visualization, vividness and emotion in the first three centuries ad By the first century ad phantasia had become the standard term for visualization, used by critics of both literature and visual art. Talk of visualization, of putting things before the mind’s eye, and of vividness can be found in a wide range of discussions of poetry, oratory, historiography and painting. Quintilian, writing on the education of the orator, uses the term phantasia not of the ability to visualize but of the images called up by such an ability, declaring that the orator who is most effective in moving his audience will be the one who has a good stock of what the Greeks call phantasiai and the Romans call visiones, ‘by means of which images of absent things are presented to our mind in such a way that we seem to see them with our eyes and have them before us’ (6.2.29). Similarly at 8.3.63–5 Quintilian praises Cicero for his skill in describing Verres in such a way that his listener, or reader, feels as though he is seeing the object of Cicero’s prosecution himself. The Roman poet Ovid, who was well educated in rhetoric, describes himself in his exile at Tomis on the Black Sea as visualizing in imagination the home, city and wife no longer physically present: ‘My house, the city and the appearance of the places wander before my mind’s eye (ante oculos) . . . The image of my wife is before my mind’s eye (ante oculos) as if she were present’ (Tristia 3.4.55–60); ‘My mind sees everything clearly, using its

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own eyes (oculis suis)’ (Ex Ponto 1.8.34).23 In similar vein Josephus in Jewish War 7.320–22 describes Eleazar, the Jewish leader at Masada, as ‘putting before his eyes’24 what the victorious Romans would do to the Jewish defenders of the fortress and their wives and children, before making a speech to his companions urging them to kill themselves and their families. Typically when a writer, or a painter, is praised for realistic imitation or representation (mimēsis), he is praised for the vividness of his work (enargeia) and his success both in visualizing what he is depicting and in recreating such visualization in his audience. The effects of such visualization are described primarily in terms of emotion. We can see in more detail how this cluster of ideas is used by a variety of authors if we turn to some further texts. Aelian’s Historical Miscellany is a collection of anecdotes and historical material, dating from the early third century ad. In 2.44 Aelian describes a painting by Theon of Samos and its use in what we would call a multi-­media experience: Many works attest the fine technique of the painter Theon, and in particular the painting of a hoplite coming to the rescue when the enemy suddenly invade and bring death and destruction to the land. The young man clearly looks as if he is about to do battle with great spirit; you would say he was inspired, as if he were possessed by Ares. His eyes have a fiery look. Having snatched his weapons, it appears, he makes for the enemy as fast as his feet will carry him. Already he holds his shield in position on one side and brandishes a drawn sword, with a blood-­thirsty look and ready to kill, and shows by his whole bearing that he will spare no one. Theon has added nothing else to the picture – no comrades, no commanding officer, no subaltern, no cavalry or archers; this one hoplite was enough to satisfy the demands of the picture. However, the artist did not reveal the picture, or show it to the public that had come to look at it, before he had summoned a trumpeter. He ordered the man to play the call to attack as loud and clear as possible, as if it were a summons to battle. The strident, terrifying notes rang out just as trumpets summon the infantry to immediate action, and at once the picture was revealed; the soldier could be seen, and the music made the impression of the man dashing into battle even more vivid. (trans. N. G. Wilson)25

This description of Theon’s painting makes clear that its vividness, or enargeia, consisted in the representation of the hoplite’s feelings and attitude, as they

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might be inferred from the behaviour depicted in the painting. Notice the two references to the look in his eyes and to his ‘showing by his whole bearing that he will spare no one.’ Also interesting is the story at the end of the passage about the artist summoning a trumpeter to play as the picture was revealed. It seems that music also has a part to play in achieving vividness, even though many of our sources talk as though this concept relates only to the sense of sight. We may ask what was the point of using the trumpeter. Was Theon engaged in trompe l’oeil, in trying to make the spectators believe they were actually seeing a real hoplite?26 Perhaps, but it seems much more likely that he wanted to make them feel ‘as if they were there’, while of course knowing perfectly well that they were looking at a painting.27 Similar language, suggesting that paintings can represent both sounds and feelings, can be found in descriptions of paintings by Philostratus and Lucian. For example, Philostratus the Lemnian, Pictures (Imagines) 10.17 describes a picture in which ‘you can almost hear the cows lowing . . . and the river along the banks of which are the cows seems to be making a splashing sound’ while in Lucian, Toxaris 6–8 a series of paintings depicting Orestes and his friend Pylades is described as showing their goodwill (eunoia) towards each other.28 Another description of a painting, this time by Euphranor, can be found in Plutarch of Chaeronea, The Glory of Athens (De Gloria Atheniensium) 346e–347a: This was the action which Euphranor depicted, and in his portrayal of the battle one may see the clash of conflict and the stout resistance abounding in boldness and courage and spirit. But I do not think you would award judgement to the painter in comparison with the general, nor would you bear with those who prefer the picture to the trophy of victory, or the imitation to the actuality. Simonides, however, calls painting inarticulate poetry and poetry articulate painting: for the actions which painters portray as taking place at the moment literature narrates and records after they have taken place. Even though artists with color and design, and writers with words and phrases, represent the same subjects, they differ in the material and manner of their imitation; and yet the underlying end and aim of both is one and the same; the most effective historian is he who, by a vivid representation of emotions and characters, makes his narration like a painting. Assuredly Thucydides is

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always striving for this vividness (enargeia) in his writing, since it is his desire to make the reader a spectator, as it were, and to produce vividly in the minds of those who peruse his narrative the emotions of amazement and consternation which were experienced by those who beheld them. (trans. F. C. Babbitt)

The battle shown in the painting was one in which the Athenians and the Spartans together defeated the celebrated Theban general, Epaminondas. Plutarch’s description does not explain just how Euphranor depicted ‘the clash of conflict and the stout resistance abounding in boldness and courage and spirit’ although a slightly earlier passage (346a–b) suggests that Euphranor liked military subjects and was admired for his success in painting martial-­ looking human figures. Plutarch was something of a Platonist and that is why his admiration for the realism of Euphranor’s battle picture is somewhat grudging. Note his comment: ‘But I do not think you would award judgement to the painter in comparison with the general, nor would you bear with those who prefer the picture to the trophy of victory, or the imitation to the actuality.’ In his Life of Aratus (32.3) Plutarch alludes to another painting of a battle, this time by Timanthes, which was particularly vivid in its composition. All these references to vivid, realistic paintings, including Aelian’s description of the painting by Theon, are to paintings of military scenes. For Plutarch at least, the interest in paintings of battles goes together with an interest in descriptions of similar scenes in historiography. If we return to The Glory of Athens 346e–347a, we can see that Plutarch moves from the comments on Euphranor’s painting to some interesting remarks about Thucydides’ skill in vivid representation. In order to do so he uses what was by his time something of a commonplace, the comparison between poetry and painting attributed to the archaic Greek poet, Simonides.29 When Plutarch comes to talk about history here, he writes as though representation in painting is straightforward and unproblematic, whereas representation ‘with words and phrases’ is less easy to explain: ‘the most effective historian is he who, by a vivid representation of emotions and characters, makes his narration like a painting’; Thucydides wants ‘to make the reader a spectator, as it were.’ Although the idea that representation is easier to understand in the visual arts than in literature might seem an obvious one, I suspect that Plato is again lurking in the background here. Other things are lurking too. Plutarch is thinking of the historian as

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something like a dramatist and something like an orator. The Greek word for ‘narration’ in Plutarch’s text – diēgēsis – is the word used for the narrative of events given by a forensic orator, writing a speech for the law courts. The word translated ‘characters’ is prosōpa, a word which means not ‘characters’ in the sense of ‘personalities’ but in the sense of ‘characters in a play’, ‘dramatis personae’. So, according to Plutarch, an effective historian, like Thucydides, will use similar techniques to those used by the dramatist and the orator to make his narrative ‘like a painting’ in its vividness. Despite the Platonist background, this vividness is clearly not just a matter of accurate copying of physical detail; the historian makes his narration like a painting ‘by a vivid representation of emotions and characters (i.e. dramatis personae)’. The examples from Thucydides which Plutarch goes on to give confirm that the portrayal of emotion, through the description of behaviour, is what interests him. He first summarises Thucydides 4.10–12, an account of quite a complex battle and then quotes some sentences from Thucydides’ account of the ill-­fated Sicilian expedition (7.71):‘ “Because of the continued indecisiveness of the struggle they accompany it in an extremity of fear, with their very bodies swaying in sympathy with their opinion of the outcome.” ’ He comments: ‘Such a description is characterized by pictorial vividness both in its arrangement and in its power of description’ (The Glory of Athens 347b–c). Notice that Plutarch chooses a sentence from Thucydides which describes physical behaviour (the swaying bodies) that is indicative of an emotion (the extremity of fear). He is quite right – this scene could be portrayed by an artist, and Thucydides’ selection of this particular detail is remarkably vivid and effective. I suggested earlier that the painter Theon, by having a trumpeter play the call to attack as his painting of a hoplite was unveiled, was trying not to deceive his audience with trompe l’oeil but to make them feel ‘as if they were there’. For Plutarch, Thucydides has a similar aim. Let us return once more to the final sentence of the description of Euphranor’s battle painting: ‘It is his desire to make the reader a spectator, as it were, and to produce vividly in the minds of those who peruse his narrative the emotions of amazement and consternation which were experienced by those who beheld them.’ Thucydides is trying not just to make his readers feel as if they were there but also to feel the emotions they would have felt if they had been. No wonder, then, that one of his examples is the sentence from Thucydides 7.71. That sentence describes the behaviour,

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and emotions, of those who were watching the final battle in the harbour at Syracuse – no drama on a stage but a battle on which their lives depended. According to Plutarch, Thucydides’ description turns his readers into spectators of these spectators within his narrative, enabling them in some sense to feel the emotions which those real-­life spectators felt. In a similar passage in his Life of Artaxerxes (8.1) Plutarch praises Xenophon for his vivid description of the battle of Cunaxa in Anabasis 1.8: Now, since many writers have reported to us this battle, and since Xenophon brings it all but before our eyes30 and by the vividness (enargeia) of his description makes his reader always a participant in the emotions and perils of the struggle, as though it belonged, not to the past, but to the present, it would be folly to describe it again, except so far as he has passed over things worthy of mention. (trans. B. Perrin, modified)

Once again the historian is praised for bringing events before his readers’ eyes and for making them feel the emotions which would be felt by those present at the scene. Another interesting text comes from a work attributed to Plutarch but not by him: If one were to say that Homer was a teacher of painting as well, this would be no exaggeration, for as one of the sages said, ‘Poetry is painting which speaks and painting is silent poetry.’ Who before, or who better than Homer, displayed for the mind’s eye gods, men, places, and various deeds, or ornamented them with the euphony of verse? He sculpted in the medium of language all kinds of beasts and in particular the most powerful . . . He dared also to give the gods human shapes. Hephaestus, making the shield of Achilles and sculpting in gold the earth, the heavens, the sea, even the mass of the sun and the beauty of the moon, the swarm of stars that crowns the universe, cities of various sorts and fortunes, and moving, speaking creatures – what practitioner of arts of this sort can you find to excel him? Let us examine another of the many examples that show that he imitated things so well that we seem to see them rather than hear about them. Talking of Odysseus’ scar he speaks of Eurycleia: [Here [Plutarch] quotes Odyssey 19.467–77] Here, while everything that can be displayed to the eye is presented as if in a painting, there is still more – things that the eye cannot grasp, but only the

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mind – the surprise that makes her drop the foot, the noise of the bronze bowl, the water splashing out and the old woman’s simultaneous joy and anguish, and the things said to Odysseus as well as those that she is on the verge of saying, as she looks towards Penelope. Many other things are described in the same graphic manner by the poet, as one can see simply from reading him. ([Plutarch], On the Life and Poetry of Homer 216–17, trans. J. J. Keaney and R. Lamberton)31

The essay On the Life and Poetry of Homer probably dates from the second century ad and claims that Homer is the source of knowledge and skills of all kinds. So Homer has to be ‘a teacher of painting’ as well as a poet, and able to excel the painters in their art. The author quotes Simonides again before going on to praise Homer’s ability to depict all kinds of things ‘for the mind’s eye’ (or ‘for visualization in thought’, phantasiai tōn noēmatōn). Then he discusses a particular example of Homer’s skill, the description in Odyssey 19 of Odysseus’ old nurse, Eurycleia, washing his feet on his return to Ithaca and recognizing him by a scar on his foot. According to On the Life and Poetry of Homer, Homer surpasses the painters in being able to reveal things which the eye cannot grasp but only the mind: these are emotional reactions (surprise, joy, anguish) and sounds (the noise of the bronze bowl, the splashing, the things said to Odysseus). Yet in the end the author falls back on describing Homer as writing like a painter (‘in the same graphic manner’) and enabling his reader to see what he describes. The lines from Odyssey 19 used by the writer of the essay On the Life and Poetry of Homer form part of the example of Homeric realism used by Erich Auerbach to start off his famous book on the development of realism in European literature, Mimesis. Auerbach uses the text rather differently, to develop a contrast between the narrative style of the Homeric poems and that found in the Old Testament. According to Auerbach, in Homer everything ‘takes place in the foreground – that is, in a local and temporal present which is absolute’ whereas the stories of the patriarchs and of other characters in the Old Testament such as King David are ‘fraught with background’, leaving far more unexpressed and open to interpretation by the reader.32 Part of what interests Auerbach about Odyssey 19 is the way in which, immediately before the lines quoted in On the Life and Poetry of Homer, the epic offers a digression of over seventy verses telling how Odysseus acquired the scar in a boyhood

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hunting accident. Despite the differences between Auerbach and the ancient writer on Homer, their choice of the same example brings out that, like Auerbach, ancient critics who praise poets, historians or painters for their vividness and their skill in visualization are concerned with realism in art. Enargeia is a virtue of mimēsis, of imitation, and in particular a virtue concerned with realistic representation.

Techniques and effects of realism, ancient and modern A number of the ancient critics who discuss visualization and vividness offer specific advice on how such effects can be achieved. For example, Aristotle in Rhetoric 3.16.1417a12–13 recommends the use of the present tense instead of the past when telling a story in order to arouse pity or indignation. Similarly ‘Longinus’ in On Sublimity 25 treats the use of the present tense instead of the past by both Xenophon and Thucydides as one of the figures of speech which are a source of sublimity while Quintilian 9.2.40–3 includes shifting of tenses (‘tralatio temporum’) among the techniques for ‘putting before the eyes’ (‘sub oculos subiectio’). Demetrius, On Style 214 lists deliberate use of a past tense instead of the present as a means of achieving enargeia.33 Comments in the scholia on Homer on the use of the present tense in Iliad 1.163 or of the imperfect in Iliad 11.375 reflect the prevalence of the idea that a particular tense can be chosen as a means to vividness.34 In his discussion of figures which are a source of sublimity ‘Longinus’ also picks out the use of the second person, addressing the reader directly, citing an example from Herodotus (On Sublimity 26.2). Similarly the scholiast on Iliad 14.454–5 notes the use of the third person ‘of the son of Panthous’ rather than the first person ‘my’ as a mark of vividness and visualization (enarges kai phantasian).35 Other techniques for achieving these effects, according to the ancient critics, include repetition, discussed in Demetrius, On Style 212–14, and choice of words, especially to imitate particular sounds, discussed in Demetrius, On Style 219–20 and in the scholia on Iliad 16.101–11 and 17.263–5.36 Of greater significance and wider interest are the comments found in a number of ancient critics on the importance of picking out significant details in order to produce vividness. The point is not that every detail of a scene or an

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event must be described but that the selection of key details will enable the reader to visualize the whole, filling gaps in a description or a narrative for themselves.37 So, for example, ‘Longinus’ in On Sublimity 10.1–3 discusses a poem by Sappho and praises the way in which she conveys what it is like to be in love by choosing to describe particular symptoms in detail. Quintilian’s treatment of Cicero’s description of Verres in 8.3.63–538 draws attention not only to Cicero’s selection of details but also to the way in which, by picking out those details, the orator invites us to imagine further aspects of the scene, including the emotions of those who were present, which he has not actually described. In the next few paragraphs (8.3.66–70) Quintilian goes on to give further examples, of a Ciceronian description of a luxurious banquet and of the sack of a city, concluding, in a manner reminiscent of ‘Longinus” discussion of Sappho, with praise of two passages from Virgil’s Aeneid (3.29–30 and 7.518) where the physical symptoms of strong emotional reactions are described.39 The connection between vividness and the selection of appropriate detail is treated in a similar way by Demetrius, On Style 209–10 and 216–18 and appears also in Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Lysias 7 as well as in the scholia to Homer.40 Some of these techniques are the same as those associated with the writing of realistic narrative in modern literature, particularly in the novel. Tolstoy in What is Art? attacks imitative, realistic art precisely for its concern with detailed and accurate description and, not unlike Auerbach, contrasts the use of abundant detail by writers such as Molière and Dickens with the Biblical account of the story of Joseph in which only the most essential details are included.41 Similarly Roland Barthes in ‘L’effet de réel’ sees the use of detail by the novelist Flaubert and the historian Michelet as characteristic of modern realism.42 A particularly interesting discussion of the connection between selection of appropriate detail and literary realism is offered by Ian Watt in his classic study, The Rise of the Novel. Watt writes: ‘The novel is surely distinguished from other genres and from previous forms of fiction by the amount of attention it habitually accords both to the individualisation of its characters and to the detailed presentation of their environment.’43 He links these features of the novel to the interest in the experience of particular individuals which developed in the eighteenth century and to the growing dominance of empiricism in philosophy and science. At the end of his first chapter he notes that what he calls ‘formal realism’ – the narrative method of the novel – is

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present in earlier fiction from the time of Homer onwards but claims that before the rise of the novel this kind of realism is a feature of individual passages rather than of a literary structure as a whole. Earlier in the chapter he contrasts the kind of realism and particularism found in the novel with the more generalized mode of presentation found in earlier narratives: ‘Coleridge noted the “marvellous independence and true imaginative absence of all particular space and time in the ‘Faerie Queene’ ”and the temporal dimension of Bunyan’s allegories or the heroic romances is equally vague and unparticularised.’44 I would not want to dispute Watt’s overall account of the changes in outlook which led to the rise of the novel. However in my view he understates the extent to which formal realism is present in the literature of classical antiquity and recommended by ancient literary critics such as Demetrius, ‘Longinus’ and the scholiasts.45 Phantasia when used to mean ‘visualization’ and associated with ‘putting things before the eyes’ and ‘making you feel as if you were there’ is, then, intimately connected with literary realism. We shall see in Chapters 2 and 3 that there are other uses of phantasia which are connected with the more generalized, allegorical type of narrative which Watt, following Coleridge, contrasts with the particularized type found especially in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novel. We have seen above that ‘making you feel as if you were there’ is often picked out by ancient critics as characteristic of successful visualization.46 This characteristic can also be found in some modern praise of artistic realism. In the twentieth-­century children’s story, Matilda, by Roald Dahl, the precocious heroine, who reads nineteenth- and twentieth-­century classic novels in her local public library at the age of four, tells the librarian, Mrs Phelps, of her enthusiasm for the works of Ernest Hemingway: ‘The way he tells it I feel I am right there on the spot watching it all happen’: Mrs Phelps responds, ‘A fine writer will always make you feel that.’47 This exchange may not be as artless as it appears, for it echoes the use of similar language by nineteenth-­century writers and critics. Two particular examples are worth noting. On the one hand the language of ‘making you feel as if you were there’ is used in three poems by Robert Browning. In the earliest of these, the dramatic monologue ‘My Last Duchess’ (1842) the speaker begins ‘That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall/Looking as if she were alive.’ Similarly in ‘A Toccata of Galuppi’s’ (1855)

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the speaker describes how as he listens to a piece of music by the eighteenth-­ century composer, Galuppi, he visualizes the Venetian society for which the toccata was written. At the end of the third stanza he comments ‘I was never out of England – it’s as if I saw it all.’ Browning offers a full defence of such imaginative visualization, again in terms comparable to those used by ancient critics, in the speech by the girl Balaustion in Balaustion’s Adventure (1871) before she recites Browning’s translation of Euripides’ Alcestis: Even when I told the play and got the praise, There spoke up a brisk little somebody, Critic and whippersnapper, in a rage To set things right: ‘The girl departs from truth! Pretends she saw what was not to be seen, Making the mask of the actor move, forsooth!’ . . . Well, is the explanation difficult? What’s poetry except a power that makes? And, speaking to one sense, inspires the rest, Pressing them all into its service; so That who sees painting, seems to hear as well The speech that’s proper for the painted mouth; And who hears music, feels his solitude Peopled at once – for how count heart-­beats plain Unless a company, with hearts which beat, Come close to the musician, seen or no? And who receives true verse at eye or ear, Takes in (with verse) time, place, and person too, So, links each sense on to its sister-­sense, Grace-­like: and what if but one sense of three Front you at once? The sidelong pair conceive Thro’ faintest touch of finest finger-­tips, – Hear, see and feel, in faith’s simplicity, Alike, what one was sole recipient of: Who hears the poem, therefore, sees the play. (305–10; 317–35)

By the time he wrote Balaustion’s Adventure, Browning was becoming deeply interested in Greek and Latin literature but his use of the language of imaginative visualization predates this by many years.48 The parallel with

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ancient accounts of visualization may be no more than coincidence in his case. However the connection with ancient views is made explicitly in my other nineteenth-­century example: Cope and Sandys’ edition of Aristotle’s Rhetoric, published in 1877, includes an interesting footnote to the comments on the use of pro ommatōn poiein in Rhetoric 3.10.1410b33–5: ‘I may observe that this is one of the principal arts by which Mr Dickens attracts his readers, to which the remarkable vivacity of his writings is due.’49 For Roald Dahl, Robert Browning and Cope and Sandys it is a mark of successful visualization that the reader imagines him or herself present at the events described. I noted earlier50 that by the time phantasia became the standard term for imaginative visualization, in the first century ad, the effects of such visualization were described primarily in terms of emotion. The connection with emotion is already there in Plato’s Ion and in some – but not all – of the Aristotelian passages on ‘putting things before the eyes’. Thus Rhetoric 2.8.1386a29–36 is explicitly about arousing the pity of the jury but the other passages from the Rhetoric which I discussed, including 3.10.1410b33–5, and the passages from Aristotle’s psychological works, are about ‘seeing in the mind’s eye’, without reference to emotional effects.51 Despite Aristotle’s interest in pity and fear as the emotions associated with tragedy, the Poetics offers a largely cognitive account of aesthetic response while the treatment of phantasia in On the Soul links it closely with sense-­ perception.52 Although the connection between visualization and emotion does appear in some modern writing about literature and art, twentieth-­ century philosophical accounts of what we gain from engaging with works of the imagination often speak in terms of ‘understanding’, either ignoring ‘feeling’ or attempting to combine it with ‘understanding’. Typically, these accounts assume that it is works composed in the realist tradition dominant in Western European literature since the nineteenth century which can offer us the kind of understanding in question. This cognitive approach to imagination is itself derived from Aristotelian aesthetics. In antiquity, as we shall see, the search for a connection between imagination and knowledge led in a different direction, away from realism. In one of the passages in The Rise of the Novel which connects the description of detail with ‘formal realism’ Ian Watt cites a comment by Francis Jeffrey, from the Edinburgh Review of 1804, on the novels of Richardson:

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Other writers avoid all details that are not necessary or impressive . . . The consequence is, that we are only acquainted with their characters in their dress of ceremony, and that . . . we are never deceived into any belief of their reality, and contemplate the whole as an exaggerated and dazzling illusion . . . With Richardson we slip, invisible, into the domestic privacy of his characters, and hear and see every thing that is said and done among them . . . We sympathise with the former, therefore, only as we sympathise with the monarchs and statesmen of history, of whose condition as individuals we have but a very imperfect conception. We feel for the latter, as for our private friends and acquaintance, with whose whole situation we are familiar.53

Jeffrey here focuses on the way in which Richardson makes us feel for his characters but Watt turns away from this to discuss first Richardson’s use of letters as the formal basis of his narrative and then the rise of individualism. In What is Art? Tolstoy, standardly regarded as a realistic novelist,54 emphasizes the idea that art is only successful if it is ‘infectious’, transmitting the artist’s feelings to the audience. Yet Tolstoy’s attitude is paradoxical, since, as we have seen, he attacks the kind of realistic art which offers detailed and accurate description. Tolstoy’s position is criticized by R. W. Beardsmore in Art and Morality. Beardsmore argues that art, and especially literature, can give us moral understanding by giving us understanding of the particular. Although Beardsmore makes no reference to Aristotle, both the emphasis on the importance of the particular for moral understanding and the assumption that we can learn from art are fundamentally Aristotelian. Aristotle’s account of practical wisdom (phronēsis) in Nicomachean Ethics 6 includes the point that the person with practical wisdom will have a kind of moral perception which enables them to recognize ‘the ultimate particular fact’.55 This aspect of Aristotle’s view has been taken up with enthusiasm in modern ‘virtue ethics’. So, for example, John McDowell in ‘Virtue and Reason’ starts from Aristotle and talks in terms of ‘a reliable sensitivity to a certain sort of requirement which situations impose on behaviour’, describing that sensitivity in Aristotelian terms as ‘a sort of perceptual capacity’ before going on to use ideas from Wittgenstein and Stanley Cavell to support what he calls ‘Aristotle’s belief that a view of how one should live is not codifiable’.56 Likewise Martha Nussbaum, in Love’s Knowledge, emphasizes Aristotle’s concern with the perception of particulars and relates this explicitly to the way in which, she

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believes, literature can function as moral philosophy, helping us to develop our moral intuitions. It is striking that Nussbaum’s examples of works of literature which can function in this way are all novels; the majority of the novels she discusses are works written within the realist tradition, novels by Dickens, Henry James and Proust.57 At the same time some important passages in Aristotle’s Poetics suggest that Aristotle saw our response to art in cognitive terms. In Poetics 4.1448b5–10 he draws attention to the pleasure which human beings take in learning from imitation (mimēsis) while at 9.1451b4–6 he says that ‘the poet’s task is to relate not what happened but the sort of thing that would happen’ and describes poetry as ‘more philosophical’ than history because ‘poetry aims at the universal, though it gives the characters names’. These remarks suggest both that we can learn from our experience of art and that poetry can give us knowledge. For Aristotle, knowledge is of universals; despite his remarks about moral perception in Nicomachean Ethics 6 the suggestion that we learn from literature because it presents us with particulars makes a connection between ethics and aesthetics which is not made by Aristotle himself. Moreover, although Aristotle, as we have seen, recognizes the importance of visualization by the dramatist when working out a plot,58 he otherwise displays little interest in the imaginative powers of writers or artists. Some recent accounts of how art and literature can give us understanding combine an Aristotelian cognitive perspective with talk of ‘feeling’ in a way which is rather different from the ancient texts which present visualization as conveying emotion. Anthony Savile in The Test of Time starts his chapter on ‘Understanding and Order’ with explicit reference to Aristotle, Poetics 1448b but goes on to develop what he calls an ‘anti-­atomistic’ account of understanding derived from the Introduction to Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics, connecting this with Poetics 1451b. So Savile can write both ‘The writer may present us with a certain representation of the world as it might appear from a certain point of view’ and ‘To come by new modes of feeling is to understand the world in new ways.’59 Similarly Christopher Janaway, defending tragedy against the criticisms of Plato in the Republic, writes: The ‘knowledge’ that we may more plausibly claim for tragedy is an understanding of human behaviour through imagining possible human

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behaviour and being impressed by its emotional significance . . . In a nutshell, the claim will be that fictional representation involves the creative use of the imagination, that the imagination, by showing us how it would feel to be a person in multifarious circumstances which we will never in fact occupy, helps us eventually learn how to feel, and that learning to feel in just this way is an irreplaceably valuable part of ethical development.60

For Janaway the imagination is not used to make us feel the emotions felt by the characters in a play or the emotions that would be felt by spectators of the events portrayed if they were taking place in real life, not just on the stage; rather the imagination helps us learn how to feel, in a way which is seen as morally valuable. Each of the modern authors I have briefly discussed in the last few pages offers their own account of the connections between imagination, understanding and feeling. My purpose in surveying their views has been to bring out the distinctive characteristics of ancient accounts of imaginative visualization. We have seen that many of these accounts emphasize ‘making you feel as if you were there’; both ‘feeling’ and ‘as if ’ are important here, and the quality of vividness or enargeia by which a writer achieves this effect is usually regarded as valuable in itself, rather than as conveying understanding or moral insight. Such vividness is closely connected, both in antiquity and in modern times, with literary realism. Many of the ancient texts I have discussed in this chapter come from the first three centuries ad, a period in which the use of the word phantasia to mean ‘visualization’ seems to have been particularly common. In chapters 2 and 3 I will turn to other uses of the word phantasia. In doing so we shall be moving away from the emphasis on emotion, vividness and realism found in most of the material discussed in this chapter. However, before we move on, it is worth pointing out that the use of phantasia in the sense of visualization and its connection with vividness, realistic representation and effects on the emotions can still be found in texts from as late as the fifth century ad. We shall see in the next two chapters that in Neoplatonism phantasia was used in distinctive ways which develop different aspects of the philosophical and literary critical tradition from those discussed in this chapter. Yet alongside these further uses of the term, the Neoplatonists continue to use phantasia in the sense of ‘visualization’ and to associate it, in that sense, with the cluster of

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ideas discussed so far. Synesius of Cyrene, in his work On Dreams, written at the very beginning of the fifth century ad, offers an idiosyncratic version of the Neoplatonist philosophical view of phantasia. Towards the end of the work Synesius emphasizes the strength of our emotional reactions to the images seen in dreams and the need to use the right words to convey such reactions, in a way which recalls the descriptions of the emotional effects of successful visualization found in texts such as On Sublimity or On the Life and Poetry of Homer: Our reactions to the visions are certainly not unemotional, our assents and attachments are strong, and not least our feelings of disgust; many deceptions involved in this attack us in sleep, and it is then that pleasure is at its most seductive, so that hatred and love rub off on our souls and persist into our waking life. So if one is to utter not just lifeless phrases, but achieve the goal of the study of eloquence – namely to put the hearer into the same emotional state and the same ways of thinking as the speaker – one will need words that have some animation in them. People win battles, walk, fly, all at the same time: the imagination has room for it all. (On Dreams 153d–154b, trans. D. A. Russell)61

Later in the fifth century Proclus, discussing Plato’s qualities as a writer and his debt to Homer, writes as follows: Plato first of all follows meticulously the stylistic form of the Homeric mimēsis. The characters of all those who appear in the dialogues are developed and the qualities of their lives passed on to us with a vividness (enargeia) equal to that with which Homer described the heroes, and both writers present their characters virtually as if they were present and expressing their own opinions and alive before us . . . Indeed the representation (mimēsis) of these men moves our imagination (phantasia) in many ways and changes our opinions, adjusting them to the changing subject-­matter, so that many are moved to cry with Apollodorus as he wails in distress, and many as well with Achilles as he laments for his friend, and at such a great distance in time they experience the same things as those who were then present. We seem to be actually present at the events on account of the vivid presentation (enargē phantasian) of the things imitated, generated in us by the representation (mimēsis). (Commentary on the Republic I 163.19–164.7)62

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The word phantasia is used in two different senses in this passage. In the first sense, which I have translated ‘imagination’, it refers to the faculty of imagination, which, as we shall see in chapters 2 and 3, for Proclus comes below the intellectual faculties, and is therefore susceptible to being moved by vivid literary descriptions. The second sense, translated here as ‘presentation’, might be understood simply as ‘appearance’ or ‘impression’.63 However, given the widespread collocation of the terms phantasia, enargeia and mimēsis in ancient literary criticism, as we have seen earlier in this chapter, it must refer specifically to the visualization which both Plato and Homer successfully produce in their readers.

Notes   1 For a recent discussion of the date of this work, see Heath 1999. Heath argues for the older attribution to Cassius Longinus, a contemporary of Plotinus, but the usual attribution to an unknown author of the first century ad seems to me more likely. The claim in 15.1 that the use of phantasia in the sense of ‘visualization’ is a recent fashion fits a first century date very well.   2 For discussions of visualization and enargeia see Bundy 1927: 105–12; Zanker 1981; Rispoli 1985: 86–95; Meijering 1987: 14–53; Webb 1997; Manieri 1998; Webb 2009. For a rather different approach to ‘Longinus’ on phantasia, see Rosenmeyer 1986: 199–212.   3 Cf. Murray 1981: 93–4.   4 See Sommerstein 1994: 168 and Muecke 1982.   5 Sommerstein 1994: 159 cites Agathon fragments 6, 8, 11, 12 and Plato, Symposium 198c for the stylistic links between the two.   6 Cf. Munteanu 2012: 76–103.   7 Cf. also 1386b5–7 and Moss 2012: 83–4.   8 The inverted commas round ‘before the eyes’, indicating that this phrase is a technical term, are Kennedy’s.   9 Kennedy glosses ‘bringing before the eyes’ as ‘visualization’. 10 See 1411a25–b21. 11 Cf. also the use of enarges to refer to the ‘vividness’ of tragedy at Poetics 26.1462a17–18 as noted by Munteanu 2012: 114. 12 The similarity between energeia and enargeia is the source of some confusion in the manuscripts of Rhetoric 3.11. On the difference between the two terms, see

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Cope and Sandys 1877: Vol. 3,110–11; Rutherford 1905: 267–8; Meijering 1987: 21, 36–7; Manieri 1998: 97–104. On energeia elsewhere in Aristotle see the very full discussion in Beere 2009: chaps 8–10 and 13. 13 I am grateful to Lene Rubinstein for drawing my attention to the passages which follow. 14 Andocides’ text reads ἀναμνησθέντες τῶν ἔργων νομίσατε τὰ σώματα ὁρᾶν αἰτουμένων ἐμὲ παρ’ ὑμῖν σῶσαι (‘Remember what they did and think that you see them in person, begging you to save my life’). Lysias uses a similar turn of phrase: προσέχετε τὸν νοῦν, δοκέτω δ’ὑμῖν ἡ γνώμη ὁρᾶν ἃ οὗτος ἐποίει (‘Pay attention, and let your mind appear to see what this man did’). 15 Γένεσθε . . . τῇ διανοίᾳ. 16 Cf. Webb 2009: 74, n.36 and 114 and the notes on these passages in Gwatkin and Shuckburgh 1890: 164 and 166. 17 πρὸ ὀφθαλμῶν ὑμῖν αὺτοῖς ποιησάμενοι. 18 See Yates 1966: chaps 1 and 2. 19 For the relevance of this passage to the Neoplatonist account of the role of phantasia in mathematical thought, see Chapter 2 (Mathematical projection). 20 On the Stoic and Epicurean use of phantasia in this sense, cf. the Introduction (Stoics and Epicureans on images and imagining). 21 αἴσθησίς τις ἀσθενής. 22 See, for example, Cope and Sandys 1877: Vol. 1, 205–6; Schofield 1978: 120; Watson 1982a:103, n.6; Wedin 1988: 89–90. 23 I am grateful to Jeremy Antrich for drawing my attention to the passage from Ex Ponto. These passages are also noted in Webb 1997:117. 24 ὑπ’ ὀφθαλμοὺς αὑτῷ τιθέμενος 25 Quintilian 12.10.6 also mentions Theon as outstanding ‘concipiendis visionibus quas φαντασίας vocant’ (translated by D.A. Russell as ‘in the vivid imaginative concepts called phantasiai’). Cf. Zanker 2004: 72–3. Another celebrated painting by Theon depicted the madness of Orestes, a scene cited in On Sublimity 15.2 as an example of phantasia in poetry, while Orestes’ vision of the Furies was commonly used by Hellenistic philosophers as an example of a hallucination: cf. Introduction (Stoics and Epicureans on images and imagining), and Russell 1964: 122. 26 Gombrich 2002: 174 takes Theon’s painting to have been an example of trompe l’oeil. 27 Cf. Meijering 1987: 37–8. 28 Cf. the discussion of these and other passages relating to enargeia in painting in Manieri 1998: 167–71. I am grateful to Richard Hawley for pointing out to me how widespread this way of describing paintings was among Greek writers of the Second Sophistic.

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29 On the comparison between poetry, or historiography, and painting, see Brink 1971: 368–71. Cf. also Philostratus the Younger, Pictures, preface 6–7, discussed in Chapter 3 (Phantasia, symbols and access to the divine). 30 μονονουχὶ δεικνύοντος ὄψει. 31 For useful notes on this passage, see Hillgruber 1999: Vol. 2, 435–8. Cf. also Rispoli 1985: 99–100 and Manieri 1998: 184–5. 32 Auerbach 1953: 7 and 12. 33 The date and authorship of this work are uncertain: see the discussion in Innes 1995: 312–21. 34 Cf. schol. in Il.1 (A) 163b and 11 (Λ) 375, Manieri 1998: 187–8, Meijering 1987: 42. 35 Schol. in Il. 14. (Ξ) 454–5 and Manieri 1998: 190. 36 Schol. in Il. 16 (Π) 101–11 and 17 (Ρ) 263–5, with Manieri 1998: 190, Meijering 1987: 42–3. 37 On this whole topic, see Meijering 1987: 39–44, Manieri 1998: 123–49 and Webb 2009: chaps 3 and 4. 38 Cf. previous section (Visualization, vividness and emotion in the first three centuries ad). 39 Cf. Russell 2001: Vol. 3, 378. 40 See schol. in Il. 10 (K) 461a, 11 (Λ) 534–5, 14 (Ξ) 226–7, with the comments of Manieri, 1998: 186–7 and Nünlist 2009: 155 and 209. 41 Tolstoy 1930: chaps 11 and 16. The parallel between Tolstoy and Auerbach is also noted by Caryl Emerson in Orwin 2002: 240 and 250. 42 Barthes 1968: 84–9. Cf. also Nünlist 2009: 186. 43 Watt 1957: 17–18; cf. also 153, 175, 261 and 291. 44 Watt 1957: 23. The remarks on formal realism as a feature of individual passages from the time of Homer onwards can be found at 33–4. The reference to Coleridge is to Potter 1933: 333. 45 Similarly Barthes overstates the contrast he draws between modern literary practice and ancient rhetorical theory 46 See previous sections (‘As if you were there yourself ’ – Homer to Plato; Visualization, vividness and emotion in the first three centuries ad) on Homer, Plato and Plutarch in particular. 47 Dahl 1989: 18–19. 48 I am grateful to Adam Roberts for his advice about Browning and for directing me to the passage from Balaustion’s Adventure. 49 Cope and Sandys 1877: Vol. 3, 110, n.1. ‘I’ here is presumably Sandys who prepared the work for publication after Cope’s death as described in the Editor’s Preface to Vol. 1, vi–xi. The Aristotle passage is discussed above (‘Putting before the eyes’ – Aristotle and the orators).

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50 See previous section (Visualization, vividness and emotion in the first three centuries ad). 51 See previous section (‘Putting before the eyes’ – Aristotle and the orators). 52 Cf. the Introduction (Aristotle on phantasia and mental images). I am grateful to Suzanne Stern-Gillet and to one of the anonymous readers of the proposal for this book for making me think harder about the significance of Aristotle in this context, and about the range of modern views on the topic. 53 Watt 1957: 175, citing Contributions to the Edinburgh Review (London 1844) I, 321–22. 54 See, e.g., Auerbach 1953: 521–4. 55 Nicomachean Ethics 6.8.1142a25–30. ‘The ultimate particular fact’ is W. D. Ross’ translation of the Greek τὸ ἔσχατον, literally ‘the last thing’. 56 McDowell 1979. 57 See Nussbaum 1990: especially 37–40, 66–75, 138–45. 58 See Poetics 17.1455a22–32, discussed above (‘Putting before the eyes’ – Aristotle and the orators). 59 Savile 1982: 95 and 98. Savile’s use of the notion of ‘point of view’ is similar to Martha Nussbaum’s, discussed in the Introduction (Aristotle on phantasia and mental images). 60 Janaway 1995: 198. 61 For further discussion of Synesius on phantasia, see Sheppard forthcoming. 62 The reference to Apollodorus is to his distress at Socrates’ impending death in Plato, Phaedo 117d; the reference to Achilles is to his mourning for Patroclus in Homer, Iliad 18.317–42. 63 Cf. the Introduction (Plato on phantasia, appearances and images).

2

Mathematical Projection, Copying and Analogy I argued in Chapter 1 that in antiquity phantasia in the sense of visualization came to be connected primarily with vividness, realistic representation and effects on the emotions. Although Aristotle’s remarks in Poetics 9.1451b4–6, to the effect that poetry is ‘more philosophical’ than history because it ‘aims at the universal’ have influenced some modern accounts of how art can give us understanding, his main account of phantasia, in On the Soul, links imagination closely with sense-­perception.1 One might therefore suppose that it would be impossible, within the ancient philosophical tradition, to claim any connection between imagination and knowledge and that accounts of how art can convey universal truths would have to be expressed in quite different terms. However the situation is not quite so simple. Aristotle’s phantasia does also play a role in thinking and Aristotle claims several times that there is no thinking without an image, although just what he means by this is far from clear.2 In post-Aristotelian philosophy, particularly in Neoplatonism, different ways of thinking about phantasia gradually developed. This chapter will begin by discussing the Neoplatonic theory of ‘mathematical projection’, according to which phantasia can represent mathematical concepts. In Proclus this use of phantasia is connected in what might seem some unexpected ways with concepts of copying and analogy which he also uses in aesthetic contexts. The first part of the chapter will study the background to the theory of mathematical projection as it appears in Proclus. That background helps to explain the way in which Proclus applies the theory beyond mathematics and its relevance to aesthetics, as we shall see in the latter part of the chapter.

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Mathematical projection In psychology, as in many other areas of philosophy, the Neoplatonists combined the views of Plato with those of Aristotle. While accepting Plato’s belief in the immortality of the soul and his dualist separation of soul and body as two distinct entities, they turned to Aristotle and in particular to On the Soul for a detailed account of psychology. Aristotle’s discussion of sense-­perception, phantasia and thinking provided a framework for the Neoplatonic division of the soul. At the same time the basic division into an irrational part of the soul, linked to the body, and a rational part, capable of detachment from the body, was of fundamental importance. Perception of the physical world clearly belonged with the irrational part; thinking in its various forms with the rational. Phantasia had a critical role at the ‘joint’ of the soul, just where rational and irrational meet. Much Neoplatonic discussion of phantasia, particularly in the commentators on On the Soul, follows Aristotle in examining the relationship between imagination and sense-­perception.3 At the same time, Proclus offers different views in different texts of the relationship between phantasia and doxa, ‘opinion’ or ‘belief ’, the lowest kind of thinking4 and both in Proclus and in other late Neoplatonists there is an identification of phantasia with nous pathētikos, the ‘passible intellect’ alluded to in only one passage of On the Soul, 3.5.430a24– 5, but regularly mentioned in Neoplatonist discussions of psychology.5 In the Divided Line described at the end of Plato, Republic 6, mathematics comes below dialectic and belongs to the lower part of the upper section of the Line. Plato there fails to give a clear account of the objects of mathematical thinking although at 510d–e he describes mathematicians as using visible forms as images of ‘the square itself’ and ‘the diameter itself’. Mathematical notions are also put to important use in the Timaeus, in passages less familiar to modern readers than the Divided Line but very well known in antiquity: the description of the formation of the world soul in Timaeus 35a–37c includes a detailed but very compressed account of the way in which the material of the soul is divided up according to the mathematical structure of a musical scale and the same structure is referred to more briefly in the description of the individual soul at 42e–44d. In the first prologue to his commentary on Book 1 of Euclid’s Elements Proclus appeals to this part of the Timaeus to justify his understanding of the nature of mathematical objects:

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The soul therefore was never a writing-­tablet bare of inscriptions; she is a tablet that has always been inscribed and is always writing itself and being written on by Nous . . . Realizing this, Plato constructs the soul out of all the mathematical forms, divides her according to numbers, binds her together with proportions and harmonious ratios, deposits in her the primal principles of figures, the straight line and the circle, and sets the circles in her moving in intelligent fashion. All mathematicals are thus present in the soul from the first . . . This, then, is a second world-­order which produces itself and is produced from its native principle and is filled with life from the Demiurge, in a fashion without body or extendedness; and when it projects (proballēi) its principles, it reveals all the sciences and the virtues. (Commentary on Euclid (In primum Euclidis Elementorum librum commentarii) 16.8–17.6, trans. Morrow, modified)

Exposition of both the Republic and the Timaeus lies behind the idea found in several passages of Proclus’ commentary on Euclid that when we are doing geometry the figures about which we are thinking are projections in phantasia of innate intelligible principles.6 If we are thinking about a circle, for example, we are thinking about a figure with extension and shape, attributes of physical objects which cannot belong to the intelligible principle of circularity. While such intelligible principles remain the ultimate objects of mathematical thought, ordinary geometry deals neither with these principles nor with extended, imperfectly circular shapes found in the physical world. Its objects have an intermediate status which Proclus explains by locating them in phantasia. He describes them as ‘projected’ in phantasia, using the same Greek verb proballein as in the passage from the first prologue quoted above.7 In one of these passages Proclus compares the figures projected in phantasia to images reflected in a mirror: Therefore just as nature stands creatively above the visible figures, so the soul, exercising her capacity to know, projects on the imagination, as on a mirror, the principles of the figures; and the imagination, receiving in pictorial form (en eidōlois) these impressions of the ideas within the soul, by their means affords the soul an opportunity to turn inward from the pictures and attend to herself. It is as if a man looking at himself in a mirror and marvelling at the power of nature and at his own appearance should wish to look upon himself directly and possess such a power as would enable him to become at the same time the seer and the object seen. In the same way when

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the soul is looking outside herself at the imagination, seeing the figures depicted there (eskiagraphēmena schēmata) and being struck by their beauty and orderedness, she is admiring her own principles from which they are derived; and though she adores their beauty, she dismisses it as something reflected (en eidōlois) and seeks her own beauty. (Commentary on Euclid 141.2–19)8

Proclus is using ‘soul’ here to refer to the rational soul alone and hence can describe phantasia as ‘outside’ the soul9 but he stresses that receipt of intelligible principles by phantasia is valuable because contemplating the figures presented in it can turn the soul back towards itself. In Neoplatonism such self-­ contemplation is the first stage on the way to contemplation of higher reality. The image of the mirror goes back to Plato, who uses it not only at Republic 10.596d–e, where the artist’s ability to copy what he sees is scornfully compared to holding up a mirror to copy everything in the physical world, but also at Timaeus 71b where the liver which receives imprints and images (eidōla) from the mind is compared to a mirror. The Greek word eskiagraphēmena (‘depicted’) recalls both the use of the word skia (‘shadow’) at Republic 7.510e and the description of the ‘unreal’ pleasures of sensual indulgence as eidōla eskiagraphēmena in Republic 9.586e. In the Republic mirror-­images, shadows and reflections are all associated with a derogatory view of images but the comparison of the divinatory liver to a mirror in the Timaeus opens the way to a more positive approach.10 Proclus also compares phantasia to a mirror in another passage of the commentary on Euclid dealing with mathematical projection: And thus we must think of the plane as projected and lying before our eyes (pro ommatōn) and the understanding (dianoia) as writing everything upon it, the imagination becoming something like a plane mirror to which the principles of the understanding send down impressions of themselves. (Commentary on Euclid 121.2–7)

We have seen in Chapter 1 that the phrase pro ommatōn (‘before the eyes’) is used by Aristotle in connection with visualization by poets and orators. Proclus probably has in mind not Aristotle’s usage in the Poetics and the Rhetoric or even On the Soul but a passage in On Memory already cited in Chapter 1 but worth repeating here:

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An account has already been given of imagination in the discussion of the soul, and it is not possible to think without an image. For the same effect occurs in thinking as in drawing a diagram. For in the latter case, though we do not make any use of the fact that the size of the triangle is determinate, we none the less draw it with a determinate size. And similarly someone who is thinking, even if he is not thinking of something with a size, places something with a size before his eyes (pro ommatōn), but thinks of it not as having a size.11 (449b30–450a5)

Aristotle presumably thought that in visualizing something ‘with a size’ we draw on our perceptions of physical objects of various sizes. Proclus however reads Aristotle through Neoplatonic spectacles and assumes that we visualize the impressions of higher principles, turning the mirror of phantasia up towards the intelligible world rather than down towards physical objects accessible to sense-­perception. The description of dianoia (‘understanding’) as writing upon the soul picks up the image of the soul as a writing-­tablet used by Proclus at Commentary on Euclid 16.8–17.6, quoted above, although in the earlier passage the writing is done by the higher faculty of nous (‘intellect’). Dianoia is the word used by Plato in Republic 6.511d and 7.533d–e of the kind of knowledge which mathematicians have, inferior to dialectic but superior to the mental states of those who deal only with objects in the physical world or with the shadows and reflections of such objects. If we think of phantasia as a mirror which reflects images from the intelligible, it may be seen positively because although it deals in images these images reflect a higher world. The Divided Line offers a Platonic precedent for taking the images of mathematics as a particularly clear example of such images. Proclus is not the first Platonist to regard phantasia as a mirror of a positive kind or to associate this with a view of mathematics derived ultimately from Plato. Already in Plutarch of Chaeronea we find mathematics and its objects compared to mirrors in which the intelligibles are reflected, at Platonic Questions (Quaestiones Platonicae) 1002a and Table Talk (Quaestiones Conviviales) 718e. Two important passages of Plotinus use the image of the mirror to convey the relationship between thinking and imagination, but without mentioning mathematics. In Ennead 4.3(27).31 Plotinus puts forward the unusual and distinctive view that we have not one but two ‘image-­making

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powers’ (phantastika) and receive images of both perceptible and intelligible things.12 Just before that passage he compares the image-­making power to a mirror which reflects thought: But what is it that remembers thoughts? Does the image-­making power remember those too? But if an image accompanies every intellectual act, perhaps if this image remains, being a kind of picture of the thought, in this way there would be memory of what was known; but if not, we must look for some other explanation. Perhaps the reception into the image-­making power would be of the verbal expression (logos) which accompanies the act of intelligence. The intellectual act is without parts and has not, so to speak, come out into the open, but remains unobserved within, but the verbal expression unfolds its content and brings it out of the intellectual act into the image-­making power, and so shows the intellectual act as if in a mirror, and this is how there is apprehension and persistence and memory of it. (Ennead 4.3(27). 30.1–11, trans. A. H. Armstrong)

The image of the mirror is more fully developed in a passage from a later treatise which, like the passage just quoted, is trying to make sense of Aristotle’s claim that there is no thinking without images: It seems as if awareness exists and is produced when intellectual activity is reflexive and when that in the life of the soul which is active in thinking is in a way projected back, as happens with a mirror-­reflection when there is a smooth, bright, untroubled surface. In these circumstances when the mirror is there the mirror-­image is produced, but when it is not there or is not in the right state the object of which the image would have been is [all the same] actually there. In the same way as regards the soul, when that kind of thing in us which mirrors the images of thought and intellect is undisturbed, we see them and know them in a way parallel to sense-­ perception, along with the prior knowledge that it is intellect and thought that are active. But when this is broken because the harmony of the body is upset, thought and intellect operate without an image, and then intellectual activity takes place without a mind-­picture. So one might come to this sort of conclusion, that intellectual activity is [normally] accompanied by a mind-­picture but is not a mind-­picture. (Ennead 1.4(46).10.6–21)

Although mathematics is not mentioned in either of these passages, Plotinus’ remark in Ennead 4.3(27).30 that ‘the verbal expression unfolds [the] content’

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of ‘the intellectual act’ and ‘brings it out of the intellectual act into the image-­ making power’ opens up the possibility of regarding mathematics as one instance of such ‘unfolding’. We shall see later that that there are other instances too and that the Neoplatonic view of mathematics belongs within a wider scheme in which at least some types of artistic activity also ‘unfold the content of the intellectual act’. There is no sign in Porphyry either of Plotinus’ two ‘image-­making powers’ or of the theory of mathematical projection.13 Iamblichus, however, appears to have understood phantasia in a distinctive way, providing the context within which the specific theory of mathematical projection that we find in Proclus could be developed. A passage from the commentary on Aristotle’s On the Soul ascribed to Simplicius14 reads as follows: Indeed even if, as Iamblichus would have it, it (i.e. phantasia) takes impressions of all our rational activities, it still represents (apeikonizetai) them in a way involving shape and division in accordance with the sensible forms. (‘Simplicius’, On Aristotle, On the Soul 214.18–20, trans. Blumenthal)

This brief statement is filled out by a longer passage in Priscian’s Metaphrasis On Theophrastus on Sense-Perception 23.13–24.20. Here Priscian presents as ‘the views of Iamblichus’ the idea that phantasia has a dual role, transmitting reflections (emphaseis) to doxa from two directions, both rousing them up from sense-­perception and extending them from intellect (nous). According to Priscian Iamblichus saw phantasia as existing as subsidiary to all the powers of the soul and as characterized by its power of assimilation (aphomoiōtikon). These views are not unlike Plotinus’ doctrine of the two ‘image-­making powers’ although it seems that Iamblichus did not follow Plotinus in admitting the possibility of more than one such power. Rather, for Iamblichus phantasia is a single, highly flexible capacity which deals in images of all levels of reality.15 We shall see in Chapter 3 that Iamblichus thought phantasia could, when in a state of inspiration, receive images from the gods.16 However the ability of phantasia to represent ‘all our rational activities . . . in a way involving shape and division’, mentioned in the commentary on On the Soul, sounds very like the ability to unfold the content of the intellectual act mentioned by Plotinus. In one of his few surviving works, Concerning the General Science of

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Mathematics (De Communi Mathematica Scientia),17 Iamblichus offers an account of the nature of mathematical objects which presents them as images with size and extension: For the shadow does not exist in itself but either on the ground which is perceptible in itself or in the mirror or in stretches of water, which are perceptible in themselves. So in this way too the objects of mathematics, just as they seem to appear (phantazesthai) as images in the Ideas, also have their foundation in them; for they should not be thought of as derived by abstraction from perceptible things but as coming down from the Ideas and having their quality as images (to eidōlikon) from them, with the addition of size and appearing (phantazesthai) in extension. (34.4–12)

Iamblichus here is developing an account of the Divided Line of Plato’s Republic, drawing the obvious analogy between the shadows and reflections which are the objects of the lowest part of the Line and mathematical objects. He is also arguing against the view that mathematical objects are derived by abstraction from the objects of perception, a view established by Alexander of Aphrodisias as an influential interpretation of Aristotle’s philosophy of mathematics.18 The Ideas, the Platonic Forms, are seen here as a kind of surface, or screen, on which mathematical images appear in the same way as shadows and reflections appear on perceptible objects such as the ground, mirrors and stretches of water. The parallel between the shadows and reflections of the lowest part of the Line and mathematical objects is taken further in the lines which follow: For what the quality of being unstable and unsupported in itself is in the images of perceptible things, this the quality of having mass and extension is in intelligible things; but since this too strives to be without mass and without parts, it seems to come to rest on the partlessness of the Ideas, just as shadows come to rest on the hard surface of perceptible things. (34.13–18)19

Phantasia is not mentioned in these passages, but the use of the related verb, phantazesthai (‘to appear’), is worth noting. We should also note that for Iamblichus it is not mathematical objects but the Ideas, or Forms, themselves that are like a mirror. Despite these differences from Proclus’ view that mathematical objects are projections in phantasia, we can, I believe, see in Iamblichus the beginnings of the theory we find fully developed in Proclus.

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Plutarch of Athens, the teacher of Proclus’ teacher Syrianus, held a view of phantasia similar to that of Iamblichus. His views on phantasia are briefly reported in another of the late Neoplatonic commentaries on Aristotle’s On the Soul, the commentary on On the Soul 3 ascribed to Philoponus.20 At 515.12–15 the author of this commentary reports that Plutarch thought the phantasia was ‘double; its upper limit, or starting-­point, is the limit of the intellectual, and its other limit is the highest part of the senses’. At first this might sound as though Plutarch followed Plotinus’ view that there are two image-­making powers but the following lines of the commentary make clear that, to quote H. J. Blumenthal, ‘The duality, which at first sight appears to be one of being, is rather one of function.’21 The author of the commentary on On the Soul goes on to report that Plutarch compared the phantasia to two lines, one from above and one from below, meeting at a point. The point is one in so far as it is a single point, but two in so far as it may be taken either with the upper or with the lower line. Similarly the phantasia can be taken both as one and as two in so far as on the one hand it gathers into one what in perceptible things is divided, and on the other receives an impression of the simple and, one might say, unitary quality of the divine in imprints and different shapes (515.20–9). It has been suggested that the comparison with two lines, meeting at a point, derives from Aristotle, On the Soul 3.2.427a9–1422: But it is like what some call a point, which is [both indivisible] and divisible in so far as it is one and two. That which judges, therefore, is one and judges at one time in so far as it is indivisible, but in so far as it is divisible it simultaneously uses the same point twice. In so far then as it uses the boundary-­point twice it judges two separate things in a way separately; in so far as it uses it as one it judges one thing and at one time.

Aristotle in this passage is talking not about phantasia but about a unified faculty of sense which makes it possible for us to perceive that we are perceiving23 but it is quite possible that Plutarch has transferred the remarks about the point and the line to make them applicable to phantasia. However the comparison might also suggest that Plutarch, like Iamblichus, has the Divided Line of the Republic in mind; perhaps he is putting phantasia exactly at the point of division in Plato’s Line, a point which could be seen not as the dividing point in a single line but as the place where two lines, an upper and a

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lower, meet; this would be an appropriate place for a faculty at the ‘joint’ of the soul. If that is correct, phantasia would be able to deal with mathematical objects only when, as it were, looking upwards and Plutarch might wish to preserve a distinction between phantasia and mathematical reasoning proper. On the other hand, the talk of phantasia receiving the simple and unitary quality of the divine suggests that it can also receive images from a higher realm than that of mathematics.24 Many of Proclus’ ideas derive from his teacher Syrianus and it is no surprise that the theory that mathematical objects are projected in phantasia appears in Syrianus’ commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics Μ (13). Much of Metaphysics Μ discusses Plato’s view of ideal numbers and, as a good Platonist, Syrianus in his commentary is concerned to defend the view that the objects of mathematics exist independently of particulars and are not derived from abstraction. At 91.11–92.10 Syrianus argues that alongside the Platonic Form of Largeness in the understanding (dianoia) there is another Largeness which exists in a subsidiary way in the phantasia. At 91.23 Syrianus calls this Largeness ‘the form in the imagination’ (to phantaston eidos). Geometry is concerned with objects of this kind. Being too weak to use thoughts independent of imagination it spreads out the partless principles (logous) into imagined and extended shapes and sizes and examines them in that way. Syrianus goes on to say that it is only when the phantasia is inadequate that there is any need to use a drawing. The implication is that the really good mathematician works out his proofs using visual images ‘in his head’ without recourse to drawing diagrams and that even that kind of mathematician is inferior to the thinker who can contemplate Largeness without visualizing anything at all. The Divided Line of Plato’s Republic is again in the background here but Syrianus diverges from Plato in using the term dianoia (‘understanding’) not for the part of the soul concerned with mathematics but for a higher faculty and in introducing the idea that the objects of mathematics are projections in the phantasia of higher intelligible principles.25 The discussion so far has shown, I hope, that the theory of mathematical projection we find in both Proclus and Syrianus develops out of Neoplatonist interpretation of the Divided Line of the Republic and the theory of the generation of the soul in the Timaeus. The theory belongs within an account of phantasia which draws both on Aristotle’s On the Soul and on Plotinus’

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suggestion that there is a higher ‘image-­making power’ which reflects thought. Unsurprisingly, the projection theory has attracted most attention as part of a philosophy of mathematics. However my concern here is rather with mathematical projection as simply one of a number of ways in which, to quote Plotinus again, ‘the verbal expression unfolds [the] content’ of ‘the intellectual act’. It is to some other ways in which the contents of a higher world can be projected, or reflected, in phantasia that I now turn.26

Copying and analogy We saw earlier that Iamblichus in Concerning the General Science of Mathematics 34.4–12 uses the Greek phrase to eidōlikon for the ‘quality as images’ which the objects of mathematics possess and that at Commentary on Euclid 141.2–19 Proclus uses the word eidōla of the images projected in phantasia. In Plato the word eidōlon is usually pejorative, as at Rep. 9.586e, whereas the word eikōn, meaning ‘image’ or ‘copy’ and used as a correlative of the word paradeigma, ‘model’, can bear a more positive sense.27 At Commentary on Euclid 22.2–6 Proclus describes mathematical figures as eikones: Those truths about the gods that are difficult for imperfect minds to discover and understand, these the science of mathematics, with the help of likenesses (eikones), shows to be trustworthy, evident and irrefutable.28

Similarly in commenting on Euclid’s definition I,3 Proclus remarks: Every compound gets its boundary from the simple, and every divisible thing from the indivisible. The principles of mathematics provide images (eikones) of these truths. (Commentary on Euclid 101.2–5)

Not only mathematical figures and principles, but even Euclid’s definitions can be described as eikones: Proclus begins his commentary on definition I,6 by saying ‘If we take these propositions as likenesses (eikones), we can understand that every being simpler than what immediately follows it supplies a boundary and limit to its successor.’ (Commentary on Euclid 115.10–12)29 In another passage of the Commentary on Euclid Proclus uses eikones of the figures projected in phantasia:

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If someone should inquire how we can introduce motions into immovable geometrical objects and move things that are without parts – operations that are altogether impossible – we shall ask that he be not annoyed if we remind him of what was demonstrated in the Prologue about things in the imagination, namely, that our principles inscribe there the images (eikones) of all things of which the understanding has principles and that this unwritten tablet was the lowest form of ‘nous’, the passible (pathētikos). (185.25–186.7)

The language of eikōn and paradeigma is also used, both by Proclus and by other later Neoplatonists, in what look to us like contexts of aesthetics and literary criticism.30 The connection with phantasia is not always in evidence here but, as we shall see, it can be invoked when the context is appropriate. Neoplatonist discussions of art and literature always need to be set against their metaphysical background, as do Neoplatonist accounts of psychology and epistemology. Within the grand scheme of Neoplatonic metaphysics both art and mathematics find their place as means of accessing higher reality; within the Neoplatonist soul, phantasia plays an important, although ultimately subsidiary, role in making that access possible. I shall start by discussing some passages in which the terms eikōn and paradeigma appear, but not phantasia, before turning to texts in which the link with phantasia is explicitly made. Proclus’ commentary on the Timaeus includes a passage which applies the language of eikōn and paradeigma to one of the most famous sculptures of the ancient world, Phidias’ statue of Zeus: So too Phidias who made the statue of Zeus did not look at something that has come to be but arrived at a notion of the Homeric Zeus. If he had actually been able to reach the intellectual god himself, clearly his own work would have been a finer achievement. Beauty, or the lack of it, comes to the image (eikōn) from the model (paradeigma), likeness or unlikeness to the archetype comes from the sculptor. (Commentary on the Timaeus I. 265.18–24)

As the next few lines of the Timaeus commentary show, Proclus is using the example of Phidias’ Zeus to illuminate the metaphysics of the Timaeus: the divine craftsman or demiurge described in that dialogue is the maker of the world, parallel to the sculptor of the statue, but any beauty in the world (or the statue) comes from the model, the Platonic Forms, not from the craftsman.

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The language of eikōn and paradeigma can also be found in a literary context, applied to the literary criticism of the Platonic dialogues, in a text from sixth-­century ad Alexandria which shows the influence of Proclus and his school, namely the Anonymous Prolegomena to Platonic Philosophy.31 In Chapter VIII of that work the author considers the presentation of conversations and characters in a Platonic dialogue, describing the characters presented in four different ways as analogous to objects at four distinct levels of metaphysics: One must realise that Plato presents the conversation either (1) through the characters themselves, as when he introduces Socrates himself or someone else discussing in his own person, or (2a) through others who have heard it from the characters, as when he introduces someone talking about things which he has heard from Socrates, or (2b) through others who have learned from these people who heard it from Socrates, or (2c) through others who heard it from the second group [of hearers]. The procession of the hearers goes as far as this but no further. In this too he evidently is again imitating the order of reality. For he does not proceed beyond the third [type of indirect narration] since all things that exist are either intelligible or objects of discursive thought (dianoēta), whose objects are images (eikones) of the intelligible; or objects of perception, which are themselves images of the objects of discursive thought; or images of the objects of perception, like the images produced by painters. There is nothing beyond these, as there are four levels here too. And [the direct presentation of] the characters is analogous (analogei) to the intelligibles; [presentation through] those who have heard it from them is analogous to the objects of discursive thought, since they [i.e. the narrators] are, as it were, images (eikones) of the characters themselves, just as the objects of discursive thought are images of the intelligibles; the second group of hearers are analogous to the objects of perception. (20.2–18)

In this passage Plato’s use of a variety of what we might call ‘framing’ techniques to introduce the characters of his dialogues is presented as a procession32 of Socratic interlocutors, according to which Socrates and his interlocutor(s) may be presented either in person or in three possible types of narrated dialogue: through someone who has heard them discussing, or through others who have learned of the discussion from those who actually heard Socrates, or through others who have learned of it from narrators of this second type.

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The author draws an explicit parallel with the levels of the Neoplatonic universe – ‘In this too he is evidently again imitating the order of reality’ – and sets out how each level in the Neoplatonic universe offers images of the level above it. He declares that the first way of presenting the characters in a dialogue is analogous to the intelligibles. Two of the three types of narrated dialogue are then reiterated: one is analogous to the objects of discursive thought, while the other (presentation through those who have learned from those who actually heard it) is analogous to the objects of perception. The remaining way of presenting characters (through others who have learned of it from the narrators of the second type) is not mentioned in the reiteration but presumably would correspond to the ‘images of the objects of perception, like the images produced by painters’ or the shadows and reflections of the Divided Line which once again lies behind the way in which the Neoplatonic scheme of reality is presented here.33 Plato’s modes of presenting conversations are divided up in the same way in Proclus’ commentary on the Parmenides but here with explicit reference to phantasia as well as to eikōn, paradeigma and analogy. The Parmenides opens with an elaborate framing of the conversation between Parmenides, Zeno and the young Socrates which forms the bulk of the dialogue: Cephalus is telling Glaucon and Adeimantus what he heard from Antiphon who was reporting the conversation as he heard it from Pythodorus, who was actually present at the encounter between Socrates, Zeno and Parmenides.34 Proclus treats this series of nested frames for the dialogue as a set of four conversations parallel to four levels in the universe: We have then, first, the original conversation between the principal personages at the scene where it took place; second, the account of Pythodorus recalling the original conversation and presumably narrating everything as it had occurred; third, the account given by Antiphon of the arguments that Pythodorus had expounded to him and which he transmitted, as we have said, to Cephalus and the philosophers from Clazomenae; and fourth, the account by Cephalus of the arguments transmitted to him by Antiphon, ending up with an indeterminate audience. Of these four conversations . . . the last is analogous to the procession of Forms into sense-­objects . . . The preceding conversation resembles the establishing of the Forms in natural essences . . . The still earlier conversation resembles the

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procession into souls of the varied world of Forms from the Demiurge . . . And the first of all the conversations represents the organisation of the Forms in the realm of the truly real. (Commentary on the Parmenides 625.18–626.19, trans. Morrow and Dillon)35

Having picked out four levels of the universe in ascending order, Proclus goes on to present them in descending order, with more emphasis on their relationship to the soul and on the different ways in which one level is an image, or likeness, of another: Just as the same arguments are present in all four conversations, but in a special way in each – primarily in the first conversation, for there we have the original discussion; secondarily in the second, for here their transmission is accompanied by memory and imagination (phantasia); in a tertiary way in the third, for here there is memory of memory; and in the lowest fashion in the fourth, which is the lowest stage of memory – so likewise the Forms are everywhere, but in a special way in each grade of being. Those which exist primarily exist in and for themselves, Socrates says, and are in the rank of intelligibles, at which level there is no imaging (ouden eikonikon) of anything higher, just as in the original conversation the argument (logoi) was not transmitted through imagination (phantasia) or memory (memory is a likeness (eikōn) of things remembered). The forms in souls have their being in a secondary way, in respect of perfection; and thus are likenesses (eikones) of the intelligibles, even as the second exposition is secondary because it uses memory and imagination (phantasia). The forms in nature are likenesses (eikones) even more, i.e. they are likenesses of likenesses (eikonōn eikones); for it is through the forms in souls that the reason-­ principles (logoi) in nature come to be and are. The forms in sensible things are last of all, and they are images (eikones) only, for the Forms end their procession at what is unknowable and indeterminate. (Commentary on the Parmenides 626.24–627.14)

In this version of four modes of presenting conversations the second mode, corresponding to the account of Pythodorus in the Parmenides and to the mode in which Plato ‘introduces someone talking about things which he has heard from Socrates’ in the Anonymous Prolegomena, uses memory and phantasia. In the Anonymous Prolegomena that mode was associated with the objects of discursive thought, dianoia, the word used by Plato for the kind of

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reasoning involved in the second section of the Divided Line, i.e. in mathematics. In the Parmenides commentary Proclus presents each level of reality as an image, or eikōn, of the level above it, but this imaging begins at the level at which phantasia operates.36 Phantasia thus plays a key role not only in enabling us to think about mathematical objects but also in representing intelligible Forms, just as Pythodorus and other narrators of Platonic dialogues present us with remembered likenesses of Socratic conversations. When he compares this mode of presenting conversations with ‘the procession into souls of the varied world of Forms from the Demiurge’ Proclus refers explicitly to the Timaeus and presumably has in mind the account of the formation of individual souls at 42e–44d.37 In the Timaeus itself the character of Timaeus, notoriously, describes his account of the formation of the world as a ‘likely story’ (eikōs logos), claiming that this is the best he can do since the phenomenal world is only an image or likeness (eikōn) of the eternal, unchanging model (paradeigma) (Timaeus 29b–d).38 In accordance with this, we might expect the Neoplatonists to describe not only the framed, reported conversations in Platonic dialogues but also the myths which some of Plato’s characters tell as eikones that belong to the level of phantasia. That is indeed precisely what we find in another Neoplatonist commentary strongly influenced by Proclus, the commentary on the Gorgias by the Alexandrian Neoplatonist, Olympiodorus. Olympiodorus introduces his comments on the myth in the Gorgias as follows: When children, we live in accordance with imagination (phantasia), and our imaginative part is concerned with shapes and forms and suchlike. So that we may heed the imagination (to phantastikon), we employ myths, since the imagination enjoys myths. After all, a myth is nothing other than a false statement imaging (eikonizōn) the truth. If then, myth is an image (eikōn) of truth, and if the soul is also an image (eikōn) of what is before it, it is reasonable (eikotōs) that the soul enjoys myths as image to image (hōs eikōn eikoni). Since we grow up with myths from the tender conditions of childhood, we cannot help taking them over. (Commentary on the Gorgias Lecture 46.3, p. 237.14–23, trans. Jackson, Lycos and Tarrant modified)39

Olympiodorus proceeds to offer an allegorical interpretation of the myth at the end of the Gorgias. Proclus justifies his allegorical interpretation of the myth of Er at the end of the Republic in very similar terms, developing the

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connection with the imagination at greater length than Olympiodorus and using the word phantasia not only of our power to form images but also, confusingly, of those images themselves: We should add to these points that souls are intellectual in their nature and full of incorporeal and intellectual principles; however, in our world of change they have assumed an imaginative intellect (phantastikos nous) and cannot live without this here. For that reason some of the ancients say that imagination (phantasia) and intellect are the same and others, although they distinguish between the two, hold that there is no thinking without images.40 Since, as we said, souls have become passible instead of impassive and inclined to give things shape instead of having no concern with shape, it is reasonable (eikotōs) to say that using this kind of story is an appropriate way of teaching them; these stories contain within them a great deal of the intellectual light of truth, but the fictional (plasmatōdes) element forms a screen in front, concealing it with imitation (mimēsis), as imagination in us obscures our individual intellect. For stories which are entirely fictional are suitable only for those who live by the imagination (phantasia) alone and who in general have only passible intellect (nous pathētikos);41 the bright light of knowledge and the self-­revealing quality of intellectual cognition are suitable for those who concentrate all their own activity in pure thoughts. As for the kind of story which is fictional outside but intellectual inside, it remains for us to say, I suppose, that this corresponds to those who are a combination and have a double intellect – the one which we really are and the one which we have put on and use as a screen. That, I suppose, is the reason why we take pleasure in stories as natural to us; the double intellect in us enjoys them – the part of us which is nourished by the inner meaning has seen the truth, while the part which is impressed by the outer story has been put on the road to knowledge. Just as, if we are using our imaginations, we should employ images (phantasiai) that are pure and not polluted by any base imaginings (phantasmata), so too, I suppose, mythical stories should have an outer dress appropriate to the intellectual figures within. (Commentary on the Republic II 107.14–108.14)

For Proclus and his successors, then, phantasia deals not only with the images of mathematics but also with some aspects of literary representation as found in Plato’s dialogues. One of Plato’s modes of presenting conversations is ascribed to it, as are his myths. The images in question are often described as eikones while the model of which they are copies is described as a paradeigma

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and the relationship between the two is described as analogy. We have also seen that Proclus uses the terms eikōn and paradeigma, though not phantasia, with reference to Phidias’ statue of Zeus.42 The parallel between a human craftsman and the divine demiurge who forms the world was also used, within the Platonic tradition, with reference to both architecture and ship-­building. Philo of Alexandria in On the Creation of the Cosmos according to Moses (De Opificio Mundi) interprets the account of creation in the book of Genesis in the light of Plato’s Timaeus. In §§15–24 of that work Philo develops an extended parallel between the activity of God in creating the world and the activity of an architect planning a city. According to Philo’s understanding of creation, God looks to an intelligible world (kosmos noētos), using that as a model (paradeigma) for the copy (mimēma) which is the physical world. In the same way, says Philo, an architect designing a city ‘first designs within himself a plan of virtually all the parts of the city that is to be completed – temples, gymnasia, public offices, market-­ places, harbours, shipyards, streets, constructions of walls, the establishment of other buildings both private and public. Then, taking up the imprints of each object in his own soul like in wax, he carries around the intelligible city as an image in his head. Summoning up the representations (eidōla) by means of his innate power of memory and engraving their features even more distinctly (on his mind), he begins, as a good builder, to construct the city out of stones and timber, looking at the model (paradeigma) and ensuring that the corporeal objects correspond to each of the incorporeal ideas’ (On the Creation of the Cosmos §§17–18, trans. Runia).43 Similar ideas appear in Proclus, in relation to the design of a ship rather than a city, in a passage from Proclus’ commentary on the Timaeus where we find a contrast between phantasia and simple copying or imitation (mimēsis): Just as with craftsmen in this world some can copy (mimēsasthai) other things accurately, while others have the power of moulding wonderful shapes and necessary practical devices, so the first man to make a ship imaginatively (phantastikōs) moulded the model (paradeigma) of the ship in himself. (Commentary on the Timaeus I 320.5–10)44

It might seem surprising that phantasia here is given the power of producing a model (paradeigma), not just copies. However in Neoplatonic terms the model

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of the first ship is itself bound to be a copy of an intelligible principle. Proclus describes it as a model here, rather than a copy, because he wants to draw a contrast with the simple, mimetic copying of objects in the physical world in which inferior craftsmen engage. The better kind of craftsmen who ‘have a power of moulding wonderful shapes and necessary practical devices’ will be sculptors like Phidias. A passage from the commentary on the Parmenides develops much further what might have been going on in the mind of the first man to make a ship: It is as if someone had constructed a ship and embarked men on it of whom he himself was the creator, and as if he were to launch the ship on the sea and bring to bear certain winds upon it, possessing as he would some art of Aeolus,45 and thus he would send the ship off to be carried along, and he should be able to do all this by the very fact of conceiving of it; as if by the very fact of imagining (phantastheis) all these things in this way, he were to produce the external existence of all the things which he possessed himself within his imagination (phantastikōs). It is obvious that he himself, then, would be the cause of all those things which would befall the ship by reason of the winds on the sea, and thus, by contemplating his own thoughts, he would both create and know what is external, not requiring any effort of attention towards them. It is in this way, then, and in a more transcendent way than this that the divine Intellect, through possessing the causes of all things simultaneously, creates them all and contemplates them, without issuing forth from its own conning-­tower. (Commentary on the Parmenides 958. 27–959.9)

Despite the attractive account here of the imaginary ship’s voyage, Proclus is not concerned to praise the power of phantasia but, as the end of the passage makes clear, to draw a parallel with the transcendent knowledge of the divine Intellect which creates and contemplates all things without any effort on its part.46 Proclus also appeals to phantasia when he considers the origin of language in his commentary on the Cratylus. Proclus believes that the names of things reflect their essential nature. At Commentary on the Cratylus 8.10 he describes names as products of ‘the soul using imagination’ (phantazomenē). When he comes to discuss ‘the art of making names’ in more detail he asserts that there is ‘an image-­making power’ (eikastikē dynamis) in the soul. He notes in passing

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that painting is connected with this power which he describes as making inferior things like superior ones. He adds that by this same power the soul can make itself like beings superior to itself, gods, angels and demons, and continues: But by the same power it also makes its inferior products like itself and even like things greater than itself, because it fashions statues of gods and demons. Wanting to bring likenesses (homoiotētes) of real things into existence from itself, likenesses which are immaterial in a way and products of rational reality alone, and using the linguistic imagination (lektikē phantasia) as an assistant, [the soul] produced real names.47 (Commentary on the Cratylus 19.6–12 )

A little later, at 19.22–3, he adds that the true maker of names is Intellect (Nous) which places in them images (eikones) of the models (paradeigmata). In the Neoplatonic hierarchy of being Intellect comes above Soul and is ultimately responsible for Soul and its products. There is accordingly no inconsistency in Proclus’ move here from saying that the soul produces names for things to saying that the true maker of names is Intellect. The image of phantasia as the soul’s ‘assistant’ rather than a part of it might seem puzzling but is comparable to the description of phantasia as ‘outside’ the rational soul at Commentary on Euclid 141.2–19.48 While Proclus gives phantasia a role to play in the making of names, he prefers to see the rational soul and ultimately the higher hypostasis of Intellect as the true ‘legislator’ for language.49 We have seen in this chapter that for Proclus phantasia had an important role to play in reflecting images of a higher world in a whole range of contexts: in mathematics; in the interpretation of Plato’s dialogues, particularly the myths; in sculpture; in ship-­building (or naval architecture, to put it more grandly); and finally in the formation of language itself. These roles for phantasia are adumbrated in earlier thinkers such as Philo of Alexandria, Plotinus, Iamblichus and Plutarch of Athens and were already present, at least in regard to mathematics, in the thought of Proclus’ teacher, Syrianus. There can be little doubt that the reappearance of these ideas in the Anonymous Prolegomena and in Olympiodorus are due to the influence of Proclus on subsequent Neoplatonic thought. Understood in this way, phantasia, despite being sometimes regarded as ‘outside’ the rational soul, can

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still be its ‘assistant’ and can aid the acquisition of knowledge. We need now to consider a little more closely how this Neoplatonic phantasia relates to art and literature. The notion of phantasia discussed in this chapter does offer a way in which art and literature can portray universal truths, by means of analogy. Phidias’ statue of Zeus or Plato’s myths do not directly portray the intelligible world, which for Proclus is where universal truths lie. Phidias, according to Proclus, has conveyed the Homeric concept of Zeus rather than ‘the intellectual god himself ’ and Plato’s myths require the kind of allegorical interpretation which Olympiodorus and Proclus provide for the myths at the end of the Gorgias and the end of the Republic. It seems that if we were to ask Proclus how he understood Aristotle’s claim in the Poetics that poetry is more philosophical than history, his answer, rather disconcertingly for modern readers, would be that poetry – and Platonic dialogues, and art – are philosophical in so far as they can be interpreted allegorically in terms of Neoplatonist psychology and metaphysics. However the situation is more complicated than this. The language of eikōn, paradeigma and analogy is only one way in which Neoplatonist thinkers talk about allegory. Before we come to any final conclusions about the ways in which phantasia is used in ancient discussions of literature and art, we need to consider other approaches to allegory, and its connections with concepts of prophecy and inspiration. These other approaches will be discussed in the next chapter.

Notes   1 See Chapter 1 (Techniques and effects of realism, ancient and modern), discussing Savile 1982, and the Introduction (Aristotle on phantasia and mental images), on phantasia in On the Soul.   2 On the Soul 3.7.431a16–17 and b2; 3.8.432a8–14; On Memory 449b30–450a5. Cf. the Introduction (Aristotle on phantasia and mental images).   3 See Watson 1988: 96–133; Blumenthal 1996: 137–49.   4 See Blumenthal 1975 and 1982. Cf. also Blumenthal 1996:107–9 and 141–3; Watson 1982b; Lautner 2002.

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  6 For the relationship between this idea and Proclus’ view of innate knowledge in general, see Steel 1997.   7 See Proclus, Commentary on Euclid 51.9–56.22 and 78.20–79.2, discussed in Watson 1988: 119–21. Cf. also O’Meara 1989: 132–4; Cleary 2000; MacIsaac 2001; Nikulin 2008; O’Meara forthcoming.   8 For other discussions of this passage, see Charles 1971 and Cocking 1991: 67. Cf. also Rappe 2000: 131–7. On Proclus’ view of phantasia more generally, see also Beierwaltes 1985: 256–62.   9 Cf. Commentary on the Cratylus 19.6–12, discussed below (Copying and analogy) and in Sheppard 1995: 346. 10 Cf. the Introduction (Plato on phantasia, appearances and images), and Chapter 3 (Early Greek views of inspiration – Homer to Plato). 11 Cf. Ch. 1 (‘Putting before the eyes’ – Aristotle and the orators). For the use of pro ommatōn by Philodemus, see the Introduction (Stoics and Epicureans on images and imagining). 12 On Plotinus’ view of the imagination, cf. Blumenthal 1971: 88–95; Watson 1988: 97–103; Dillon 1986; also Warren 1966. 13 For a survey of Porphyry’s views on phantasia see Sheppard 2007. 14 For a judicious discussion of the authorship of this commentary see Blumenthal 2000 (also in Blumenthal 1996: 65–71). 15 Iamblichus’ view seems to foreshadow that of M.V. Wedin, discussed in the Introduction (Aristotle on phantasia and mental images). For some discussion of the Priscian passage see Huby 1993: 6–7. 16 See Chapter 3 (Phantasia and inspiration). 17 O’Meara 1989: chap 2 argues that the work we know as De Communi Mathematica Scientia formed Book 3 of a large work On Pythagoreanism. I have argued that this passage is part of the history of the theory of mathematical projection in Sheppard 1997b. 18 See Mueller 1990. 19 In translating these passages of Iamblichus I have been helped by the unpublished translation of De Communi Mathematica Scientia by J. O. Urmson, deposited in the Institute of Classical Studies Library by Richard Sorabji. 20 For two contrasting views of the authorship of this commentary see Lautner 1992 and Charlton 2000. 21 Blumenthal 1975: 134. 22 See Taormina 1989: 84–9. For a useful survey of Plutarch on phantasia more generally, see Lautner 2000: 438–45.

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23 Cf. the comments in Hamlyn 1993: 128. Hamlyn remarks, somewhat crisply, that Aristotle’s analogy of a point is ‘not perspicuous in its implications, to say the least.’ 24 Cf. Chapter 3 (Phantasia and inspiration). 25 On this passage of Syrianus, cf. Praechter 1932: 1752 and O’Meara 1989: 132–4. 26 I have previously discussed some of the material in the second part of this chapter in Sheppard 1995. Cf. also Watson 1988: 123–4. 27 For an argument for understanding εἴκων as used in the Timaeus in a positive way, see Bryan 2012: 139–44. 28 Cf. the citation of this passage in the discussion of Proclus on ἀναλογία in Gersh 1973: 83–90. 29 On Proclus’ use of εἴκων in these passages see Glasner 1992. 30 The connection between Proclus’ view of mathematics and his view of literature is also made, suggestively but in very general terms, and without reference to any other Neoplatonists apart from Plotinus, in Trimpi 1983: 200–19. By contrast the attention given in modern scholarship to the theory of mathematical projection has led R. M. van den Berg to argue that for Proclus the mathematical sense of eikones is primary: see van den Berg 2001: 120–33. 31 See Westerink’s introduction to Westerink, Trouillard and Segonds 1990: vii–lxxxix. 32 The Greek word for ‘procession’ – πρόοδος – is a technical term of Neoplatonic metaphysics, normally used to refer to the successive emanation of levels of reality from the ultimate One. 33 See Westerink, Trouillard and Segonds 1990: 69. I have previously discussed this passage, and some of the other material in this section, in Sheppard 2002. I should like to reiterate my thanks to Carlos Steel for helping me to understand the argument of the passage. 34 Parmenides 126a–127b. 35 Cf. also Commentary on the Parmenides 644.4–645.6. 36 However the third and fourth levels of reality described in the Commentary on the Parmenides do not correspond as clearly to the lower sections of the Divided Line as those in the Anonymous Prolegomena. 37 See Commentary on the Parmenides 626.14–16 and cf. above (Mathematical projection). Cf. also the discussion of this passage in van den Berg 2001: 132–33. 38 For a recent, full discussion of εἴκων and παράδειγμα in the Timaeus, see Bryan 2012: 114–60. 39 Cf. also Lecture 46.6, p.239.19–30. 40 Probably a reference to Aristotle; cf. above (Mathematical projection). 41 Cf. section earlier in Chapter 2 (Mathematical projection). 42 See earlier in this section.

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43 Philo is less consistent in his terminology than Proclus, using both μίμημα and εἴδωλον as correlatives for παράδειγμα, as well as the verb ἀγαλματοϕορεῖ, translated by Runia as ‘carries around as an image’. For discussion of this passage see Runia 2003. Cf. also Watson 1988: 80. 44 I have followed Runia and Share 2009 in translating ἔργων . . . πρὸς τὰς χρείας as ‘practical devices’ although otherwise the translation here is my own. 45 In Homer Aeolus rules the winds and sends Odysseus off from his island with all the winds except the favourable one tied up in a bag: see Odyssey 10.1–79. 46 The last phrase of the passage, ‘without issuing forth from its own conning-­tower’, is an allusion to Plato, Politicus 272e. 47 The Greek word ὄνομα means both ‘word’ and ‘name’ here but since Proclus, following Plato, concentrates on the names of the gods, ‘name’ seems the best translation. 48 Cf. section earlier in Chapter 2 (Mathematical projection). 49 The parallel with legislation is based on Cratylus 429a–b just as Proclus’ mention of painting is no doubt sparked off by Cratylus 429a.

3

Prophecy, Inspiration and Allegory At the end of Chapter 1 I discussed some modern accounts of the connections between imagination, understanding and feeling. We saw that, despite the differences between these modern treatments of imagination and ancient accounts of imaginative visualization, vivid presentation that appeals to the imagination is closely connected, both in antiquity and in modern times, with literary realism. In Chapter 2 we have seen that for Proclus and his successors in the Neoplatonic tradition imagination (phantasia ) also has a role to play in reflecting images of a higher world and that some works of art and literature, including Plato’s myths, can be seen as copies (eikones) of models (paradeigmata) on a higher plane, requiring allegorical interpretation. The recognition that not all art aims at realistic representation and that some art has the power to conjure up an image that points beyond itself and to express ideas outside our everyday experience can also be found in modern philosophical treatments of imagination, particularly that of Kant. Before we investigate the connections between phantasia and allegory in antiquity any further, it will be helpful to pause and consider Kant’s view.

Kant on imagination The notion of imagination with which I am now concerned is found particularly in two sections of Kant’s Critique of Judgement, his discussion of the sublime, especially §23, 245, and his treatment of genius and aesthetic ideas in §49, 314–16, and reappears in his remarks on poetry in §53, 326. Kant is more concerned with the appreciation of art than with its creation. He divides what he calls ‘the judgement of taste’ into two kinds, the ‘judgement of the beautiful’ and the ‘judgement of the sublime’. He claims, somewhat mysteriously,

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that when we make judgements of the beautiful, our imagination and our understanding are in ‘free play’. To explain our appreciation of phenomena such as jagged mountains, mighty seas and great storms, which are not regarded as beautiful but which can be aesthetically satisfying to contemplate, Kant introduces the ‘judgement of the sublime’. Here the mental faculties involved are not imagination and understanding but imagination and reason: For the sublime, in the strict sense of the word, cannot be contained in any sensuous form, but rather concerns ideas of reason, which, although no adequate presentation of them is possible, may be excited and called into the mind by that very inadequacy itself which does admit of sensuous presentation. (sec.245, trans. J. C. Meredith)

Kant’s point is that the sight of the stormy ocean is not itself sublime, but the disturbing view it offers to the senses stirs the mind to the ideas of reason and so to the appreciation of sublimity. This is well explained by Mary Warnock in Imagination: The presentation of sublimity cannot be in the form of a sensuous image, simply because there is no form or design to be grasped in the object and therefore none to be reproduced in an image of it. But it is our own very inadequacy to form an image of the idea suggested by the object which constitutes our sense of the sublime.

Imagination is involved because ‘Imaginatively we stretch out towards what imagination cannot comprehend.’1 In Kant’s view the pure judgement of the sublime applies to nature, not to art. However later in the Critique of Judgement he uses a similar notion of imagination realizing its own inadequacy when he discusses the creative artist, in his treatment of genius in §49. In 314 he discusses genius as ‘the faculty of presenting aesthetic ideas’, using the term ‘aesthetic idea’ in a technical sense which he goes on to explain: By an aesthetic idea I mean that representation of the imagination which induces much thought, yet without the possibility of any definite thought whatever, i.e. concept, being adequate to it . . . It is easily seen that an aesthetic idea is the counterpart (pendant) of a rational idea which, conversely, is a concept to which no intuition (representation of the imagination) can be adequate.

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It seems, then, that an aesthetic idea, aroused in us by art, is the best art can do to convey a Kantian idea of reason. The nature of ideas of reason is such that they cannot be adequately represented, but the imagination is able to offer a kind of quasi-­representation which, by its very inadequacy, points beyond itself. Kant goes on to offer examples of the sort of ‘rational ideas’ that a poet may seek to convey in this way: ‘the rational ideas of invisible beings, the kingdom of the blessed, hell, eternity, creation, etc. . . . death, envy and all vices . . . love, fame and the like.’ He then suggests an example of an aesthetic attribute, ‘a secondary representation of the imagination’, i.e. an artistic image that in turn supplies the mind with an aesthetic idea. The example is Jupiter’s eagle, an attribute that helps us think of Jupiter even though the concept of Jupiter himself cannot be adequately represented. Kant’s examples here bring to mind subject matter which is often most effectively treated in non-­realistic modes of literature and art. The eagle might be said to be symbolic of Jupiter and the religious subject matter Kant mentions – ‘the kingdom of the blessed, hell, eternity, creation’ – being outside our immediate sensory experience, has frequently been presented in art using allegory and symbol. The myths in Plato’s Gorgias, Phaedo and Republic concern life after death, while the ‘likely story’ of the Timaeus concerns the creation, or rather formation, of the world. The inadequacy which is an essential part of a Kantian aesthetic idea is also a feature of symbolic or allegorical art. In antiquity something unsatisfactory, odd or absurd in the surface meaning of a work was often regarded as a sign that allegorical interpretation was required.2 Similarly for Kant it is because we realize the inadequacy of the artistic representation that we are led to look beyond it. However Kant goes further, saying that the imagination realizes its own inadequacy. In §53, 326 he assigns poetry ‘the first rank among all the arts’ on the grounds that: It expands the mind by giving freedom to the imagination and by offering, from among the boundless multiplicity of possible forms accordant with a given concept . . . that one which couples with the presentation of the concept a wealth of thought to which no verbal expression is completely adequate, and by thus rising aesthetically to ideas. It invigorates the mind by letting it feel its faculty – free, spontaneous, and independent of determination by nature – of regarding and estimating nature as phenomenon in the light of aspects which nature of itself does not afford us in experience . . . and of employing it accordingly in behalf of . . . the supersensible.

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The resulting paradox is well brought out in one of the passages from Mary Warnock quoted above: ‘Imaginatively we stretch out towards what imagination cannot comprehend’.3 Kant presents these ideas about imagination in terms of his own metaphysics. Similarly we have seen that Proclus and his successors appeal to Neoplatonic metaphysics when they talk of Plato’s myths as eikones, or copies, which reflect higher realities, projected in phantasia. In Neoplatonic terms those higher realities are at the level of Intellect, where the Platonic Forms are to be found; this is a level above ordinary human, discursive reason but it is capable of representation by discursive reason and in phantasia. However for the Neoplatonists there is something beyond Intellect, the transcendent One which is even harder to comprehend. Some of what Kant has to say about the sublime and aesthetic ideas suggests that any parallel between his view of imagination and the ancient view should focus on the attempt to grasp what lies beyond Intellect rather than on representation of the contents of Intellect. My concern here is not with the comparison of modern and ancient systems of metaphysics. Rather, I wish to use Kant’s ideas, and Mary Warnock’s comments on them, as a way of interrogating the ancient material relating to phantasia and to ask whether in antiquity too we can find the idea that ‘Imaginatively we stretch out towards what imagination cannot comprehend’. One might expect to find such an idea in Neoplatonism but, as we shall see in the course of this chapter, Neoplatonist thinkers more commonly appeal not to imagination but to inspiration when discussing artistic presentation of the very highest level of reality; at the same time there is a ‘minority tradition’ which does appeal to phantasia in such contexts. In order to understand the way in which such ideas developed in antiquity we need once again to go back to some of the earliest Greek literature and thought, and to consider ideas about divine inspiration, allegory and symbolism as well as the contrast sometimes drawn between phantasia and mimēsis, before tracing the development of the ‘minority tradition’ within Platonism.

Early Greek views of inspiration – Homer to Plato In Homer’s Iliad the poet calls upon the Muses for information before relating the ‘Catalogue of Ships’ and in the Odyssey the bards Phemius and Demodocus

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are described as taught to sing by a god, or by the Muse.4 Hesiod at the opening of the Theogony offers an extended account of an encounter with the Muses on Mount Helicon, presenting them as teachers who breathed divine song into me that I might tell of the past and of the future and they commanded me to sing of the race of the immortal, blessed Gods, and always to sing of themselves, both first and last. (Theogony 31–4, trans. D. A. Russell)

This scene of inspiration provided a model for accounts of poetic inspiration in later literature.5 Scholarly discussion has stressed that the Muses, as in Homer, are seen as givers of knowledge6 but it is also worth noting that they command Hesiod to sing about the gods – appropriately for the topic of the poem which begins with this scene, but also significantly for later ideas about inspiration. In a similar vein Pindar presents himself as a prophet, inspired by the Muse: ‘Prophesy (manteueo), Muse, and I will be your interpreter (prophateusō)’ (fragment 137 Bowra, trans. D.A. Russell). These ideas about the divine inspiration of poets – and prophets – were picked up first by Democritus and then by Plato. An often-­quoted fragment of Democritus uses the strong word enthousiasmos (‘divine possession’, literally ‘having a god within’) of the poet’s state of mind: ‘Whatsoever a poet writes under possession (enthousiasmos) and the divine spirit (hieron pneuma) is very beautiful’ (Democritus fragment B18, trans. D.A. Russell). Plato uses the idea of inspiration in a number of different ways. Modern readers interested in literary criticism and aesthetics are most familiar with the claims made about poetic inspiration in the Ion and the Phaedrus but inspiration is also referred to in the Meno, the Apology, the Laws and the Timaeus. As we shall see, here as elsewhere, the Timaeus was particularly influential on later Platonist thought in antiquity but it will be useful at this point to survey Plato’s treatment of inspiration in all the dialogues mentioned since subsequent Platonists treated Plato’s thought as a unity and often had more than one dialogue in mind when making use of ideas derived from Plato. In the Ion Socrates succeeds in persuading Ion, a rhapsode, that his ability to speak about the poetry of Homer comes not from knowledge or skill (technē) but from divine inspiration (theia moira). The dialogue includes

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passages which appear to praise poetic inspiration but which describe it as a kind of possession, or madness, treating poets as comparable to prophets, implying that neither poets nor prophets have any control over the words the god puts into their mouths. Passage 534c–d is particularly striking: That is why the god takes away these people’s reason and uses them as ministers and givers of oracles and divine prophets so that we who hear them may know that it is not these people, whose reason is not in them, who are saying these things which are so valuable; rather the god himself is the speaker and is addressing us through them.

Modern interpreters often regard Socrates’ praise of poetic inspiration in the Ion as ironical.7 At the very least, the passage quoted above shows that it is double-­edged: however successful poets may be at what they do, that success is not due to knowledge and they themselves can take little credit for it. The brief passage on poetic inspiration in the Phaedrus, at 245a, seems more sympathetic to poetry, contrasting inspired poetry with uninspired and regarding the former as superior. We should note that such inspiration is still firmly described as ‘possession (katokōchē) and madness (mania)’. It is the third of four beneficial kinds of madness, the first of which is prophetic madness. The phrase theia moira, used in the Ion to contrast the divine inspiration, or, more literally, divine dispensation, to which the poet and the rhapsode owe their abilities is also used at the end of the Meno, again to contrast inspiration and knowledge. Socrates and Meno have concluded that virtue cannot be taught and that politicians are guided neither by knowledge nor by wisdom. At 99c Socrates compares the politicians to prophets and tellers of oracles who utter truths under the influence of divine inspiration (enthousiōntes), without knowledge. Shortly afterwards, at 99d, he includes the poets along with the prophets, the tellers of oracles and the politicians as inspired and subject to divine possession but completely lacking in knowledge, and in the final paragraphs of the dialogue, at 99e–100c, he declares that since virtue cannot be taught, it must be the product of divine dispensation, theia moira. Meno 99c is closely parallel to Apology 22b–c where Socrates expresses his disappointment that the poets, when subjected to his questioning, turned out not to have knowledge but to be inspired, like the prophets and tellers of oracles.8 Clearly there is a good deal of irony present in the references to divine inspiration in both the Meno and the

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Apology but we should note the continuing parallel between poets and prophets and the continuing contrast between inspiration and knowledge. Similarly in Laws 3.682a the Athenian Stranger describes poets as inspired but makes it clear that if poets say something true it is only by chance: ‘Poets as a class are divinely gifted and inspired when they sing, so that with the help of Graces and Muses they frequently hit on how things really happen’ (trans. Saunders). A subsequent passage, Laws 4.719c, once again divorces poetic inspiration from knowledge and is more pessimistic about the poet’s chances of hitting on the truth: When a poet takes his seat upon the tripod of the Muse, he cannot control his thoughts . . . His art is the art of representation (mimēsis), and when he represents men with contrasting characters he is often obliged to contradict himself and he doesn’t know which of the opposing speeches contains the truth.

Although these passages do not draw an explicit parallel between the poet and the prophet, the reference in Laws 4.719c to the poet ‘taking his seat upon the tripod of the Muse’ implies a parallel with prophets such as the Pythia at Delphi who sat on a tripod regarded as the ritual seat of Apollo.9 So far we have seen that Plato picks up what were already by his time traditional ideas about poetic inspiration and a parallel between the poet and the prophet also found in Pindar, but emphasizes that neither poets nor prophets have knowledge, treating their inspiration as possession by an external divine force. We might be inclined to think that in antiquity such ideas had nothing to do with ideas about imagination, or phantasia. However in the final passage of Plato to be discussed, from the Timaeus, inspiration and the formation of images come together. At 70e–72d Plato offers an account of the lowest, appetitive part of the soul, locating it in a specific part of the body ‘between the midriff and the navel’, and then goes on to describe the liver as having a psychological role. It is said to function like a mirror which reflects images coming from the highest, rational part of the soul and so enables that part to exercise some control over the unruly appetitive part: And knowing that it would not understand reason or be capable of paying attention to rational argument even if it became aware of it, but would easily fall under the spell of images (eidōla) and phantoms (phantasmata) by day or night, god played upon this weakness and formed the liver, which he put

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into the creature’s stall. He made it smooth and close in texture, sweet and bitter, so that the influence of the mind could project thoughts upon it which it would receive and reflect in the form of visible images, like a mirror. When the mind wants to cause fear, it makes use of the liver’s bitterness and plays a stern and threatening role, quickly infusing the whole organ with bitterness and giving it a bilious colour; at the same time it contracts the liver and makes it all wrinkled and rough . . . By contrast, gentle thoughts from the mind produce images of the opposite kind, which will neither produce nor have connection with anything of a contrary nature of their own, and so bring relief from bitterness, using the organ’s innate sweetness to render it straight and smooth and free, and making the part of the soul that lives in the region of the liver cheerful and gentle, and able to spend the night quietly in divination and dreams, as reason and understanding are beyond it. For our makers remembered that their father had ordered them to make mortal creatures as perfect as possible, and so did their best even with this base part of us and gave it the power of prophecy so that it might have some apprehension of truth. And clear enough evidence that god gave this power to man’s irrational part is to be found in our incapacity for inspired and true prophecy when in our right minds; we only achieve it when the power of our understanding is inhibited in sleep, or when we are in an abnormal condition owing to disease or divine inspiration. (trans. D. Lee)

The word phantasia is not used here, but Plato does use phantasmata of the images reflected in the liver-­mirror and claims a connection between such images, dreams and prophetic inspiration; inspiration is once again regarded as something irrational.10 Despite the distrust of images and appearances elsewhere in Plato, this passage, as we shall see, enabled the development of the ‘minority tradition’ within Platonism which links phantasia and inspiration. Before we consider this tradition, we should pause to examine the development of allegorical interpretation in antiquity as well as some further uses of the term phantasia by ancient critics of literature and the visual arts.

Phantasia, symbols and access to the divine When Plato in the Republic criticizes Homer and Hesiod for telling false stories about the gods, he alludes in Republic 2.378d to the possibility of understanding

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those stories as allegories (hyponoiai) but dismisses such a defence on the grounds that young people cannot distinguish what is allegory and what is not. The allegorical interpretation of problematic passages in Homer goes back at least to Theagenes of Rhegium and Metrodorus of Lampsacus in the sixth to fifth centuries bc while the Derveni Papyrus offers an allegorical reading of an Orphic cosmogony from around 400 bc. Despite Plato’s brisk dismissal of allegory, his criticisms of Homer and Hesiod gave renewed impetus to allegorical interpretation of these poets. Commentators used a variety of terms for such allegory, often referring to ‘riddles’ (ainigmata) as well as using Plato’s word hyponoia (literally ‘under-­sense’) and the Greek word allēgoria. The word symbolon appears to have been first used of a literary ‘symbol’ by Chrysippus and was particularly taken up by the later Neoplatonists for whom symbolon was something of a technical term, used in theurgy to refer to an object on one level of being which stands for an entity on another, higher level.11 A number of the ideas discussed in this chapter so far can be seen coming together in the work of Dio Chrysostom, written in the first to second century ad, during the period known as the Second Sophistic. In Oration 36.33–5 Dio talks of poets as inspired, presenting a rather Platonic view that even poets like Homer and Hesiod hit on the truth by chance and dismissing more recent poets writing for the stage as lacking any such ability. In Oration 12, delivered at Olympia in sight of Phidias’ statue of Zeus, Dio puts into Phidias’ mouth a lengthy defence of his art which includes the statement that human beings attribute to God a human body as a vessel to contain intelligence and rationality, in their lack of a better illustration, and in their perplexity seeking to indicate that which is invisible and unportrayable by means of something portrayable and visible, using the function of a symbol (symbolon) and doing so better than certain barbarians, who are said to represent the divine by animals, using trivial and absurd starting-­points. (12.59, trans. Cohoon, modified)

Dio’s Phidias goes on to claim that his own portrayal of Zeus follows that of Homer.12 Dio makes no mention of phantasia when he talks of poets and sculptors representing the gods. However the term is used in such contexts in some of the scholia to Homer and by two sophists writing later in the Second Sophistic,

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both called Philostratus. We saw in Chapter 1 that the scholia to Homer include a number of comments on techniques for achieving vividness (enargeia) and that the word phantasia can be found in the scholia in the sense of ‘visualization’.13 Other scholia however use phantasia in a rather different way. Most notably, the scholia on Iliad 14.342–51 distinguish three modes (tropoi) of considering poetry, which turn out to be types of poetic content rather than, as one might at first suppose, ways of interpretation. The three modes are: that which imitates reality (mimētikos tēs alētheias), that which accords with the appearance of reality (kata phantasian tēs alētheias) and that which surpasses reality and accords with phantasia. The scholiast offers some examples of each one. The examples of the first mode are simply adjectives: ‘father-­loving’, ‘woman-­hating’, ‘faithless’,  ‘outspoken’. Two of these epithets were titles of comedies by Menander and ‘the faithless person’ is one of the types described in the Characters of Theophrastus. It has therefore been suggested that the scholiast has New Comedy and its ‘realistic’ depiction of characters in mind here.14 The example of the second mode is the description of souls as eating and talking; we should not examine everything in detail and assume that souls so described have tongues and throats. Presumably the point here is that we should not understand passages such as the accounts of the underworld in Odyssey 11 and 24 too literally. Realism is left behind completely in the examples of the third mode: the Cyclopes, the Laestrygonians15 and ‘these things concerning the gods’. At this point we need to consider the context of the scholion. Iliad 14.342–51 is the final part of the scene in which Hera lures Zeus into making love to her on Mount Ida. The passage was one of those attacked by Plato in Republic 2 (390c) for promoting inappropriate ideas about the gods and the scholiast is responding explicitly to Plato, implying that Plato errs in taking the passage too literally. Faced with passages in Homer which defy literal interpretation, the scholiast appeals to a concept of phantasia which is explicitly contrasted with mimēsis. A few other scholia use phantasia in a similar way.16 The contrast between phantasia and mimēsis also appears in a passage from Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius of Tyana which is regularly cited in accounts of the ancient concept of artistic imagination.17 In 6.19 Apollonius is presented engaged in conversation with an Egyptian, Thespesion. When Apollonius ridicules the animal images of gods found in Egypt, Thespesion asks sarcastically whether Greek sculptors such as Phidias and Praxiteles went

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up to heaven and copied the forms of the gods there. Apollonius’ reply appeals to phantasia and contrasts it with imitation (mimēsis): ‘What about sculptors like Phidias and Praxiteles? Surely they did not go up to heaven, model the forms of the gods and then reproduce them by their art? Was there something else which presided over their moulding?’ ‘There was something else,’ said Apollonius, ‘something full of wisdom.’ ‘What sort of thing was that?’ asked Thespesion. ‘You cannot mean anything other than imitation.’ ‘It was imagination, a wiser craftsman than imitation, which made those things,’ he replied. ‘Imitation will fashion what it has seen, whereas imagination can also fashion what it has not seen, since it will conceive of that with reference to what actually exists. Moreover imitation is often disrupted by shock; nothing disrupts imagination which proceeds unperturbed in pursuit of what it has conceived.’

It has sometimes been claimed that the concept of phantasia invoked here is a rare ancient example of imagination as creative.18 However we should note that for Philostratus phantasia differs from mimēsis not because it can create something new but because it can reach a divine realm beyond the world of sense-­perception. Philostratus here is combining together ideas from all the main philosophical schools, drawing particularly on Platonism and Stoicism.19 His concept lacks the precision of the later Neoplatonic concepts of phantasia, eikōn and paradeigma discussed in Chapter  2. Although Proclus applies the concepts of eikōn and paradeigma to Phidias’ statue of Zeus, Philostratus seems to be thinking much more generally of a power to portray the divine. Phantasia is used in a similar way in the preface to the work entitled Pictures by Philostratus the Lemnian, a younger relative of the author of the Life of Apollonius of Tyana: If one considers the matter, one finds that the art of painting has a kind of kinship with poetry and that an element of imagination (phantasia) is common to both of them. For the poets introduce the gods as present on the stage along with everything impressive, solemn and attractive. Painting does the same thing, showing in the picture things which the poets are able to describe in words. (Pictures, preface 6–7)

Here again phantasia is treated as the element which makes it possible to portray the gods.20

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Phantasia and inspiration So far in this chapter we have seen that early ideas about poetic and prophetic inspiration are used by Plato to stress that neither poets nor prophets have knowledge, that in the Timaeus prophetic inspiration is associated with images (phantasmata) reflected in the liver as though in a mirror, that allegorical interpretation offered ancient critics a way of explaining anthropomorphic depiction of the gods in poetry and sculpture, and that both in the scholia to Homer and in the works of the two Philostrati we find the idea that phantasia can portray the divine. I come now to what at the beginning of this chapter I called the ‘minority tradition’ within Platonism, in which inspiration and phantasia are brought together. We can see the beginnings of this in Plutarch of Chaeronea and find it more fully developed in three Neoplatonist authors, Synesius of Cyrene, Iamblichus and Hermias.21 Our very limited evidence for the views of Plutarch of Athens suggests that he might also have been sympathetic to this tradition. Plutarch of Chaeronea refers to phantasia in both the The Pythia’s Prophecies (De Pythiae Oraculis) and The Decline of Oracles (De Defectu Oraculorum). In both these works he uses the word phantasia in the Stoic sense of ‘impression’ or ‘presentation’;22 he does not mention the faculty which receives such impressions in The Pythia’s Prophecies but in The Decline of Oracles he calls this the phantastikon or the phantastikē dynamis (‘the imaginative power/faculty’). Inspired phantasiai are alluded to at The Pythia’s Prophecies 397c where Theon, one of the speakers in the dialogue, is distinguishing the god’s contribution from that of the Pythia: As a matter of fact, the voice is not that of a god, nor the utterance of it, nor the diction, nor the metre, but all these are the woman’s; he puts into her mind only the visions (phantasiai), and creates a light in her soul in regard to the future; for inspiration (enthousiasmos) is precisely this. (trans. F. C. Babbitt)

Phantasia and inspiration are linked together in a similar way in The Decline of Oracles at 431b–438d. First Demetrius wonders how the demons responsible for oracles make the prophetic priests and priestesses ‘possessed by inspiration and able to present their visions (phantasiastikous)’ and then at 433c Lamprias

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claims that certain streams ‘dispose souls to inspiration and impressions of the future’ (tas psychas enthousiastikōs diatithēsi kai phantastikōs tou mellontos). At 438a Lamprias further declares that prophetic inspiration comes only when the ‘imaginative faculty’ (phantastikē dynamis) is in the right condition: ‘Whenever, then, the imaginative and prophetic faculty is in a state of prophetic adjustment for attempering itself to the spirit as to a drug, inspiration in those who foretell the future is bound to come’ (trans. F. C. Babbitt). Traditionally dreams were one way in which prophetic visions might be received. Plato makes use of that tradition in the passage of the Timaeus quoted above, 70e–72d. Plutarch wrote a substantial essay on the generation of the world-­soul in Timaeus 35a–36b and it has been pointed out that the Timaeus is the Platonic work which he quotes or refers to the most.23 One other passage of Plutarch is worth noting here specifically. At Isis and Osiris (De Iside et Osiride) 383f–384a Plutarch compares the use of aromatic herbs in Egyptian rites to purify ‘the part of the soul which is imaginative (phantastikon) and receptive to dreams’ with polishing a mirror. This looks like another passage directly influenced by Timaeus 70e–72d. Overall it seems likely that the connections Plutarch makes between phantasia and prophetic inspiration represent a Middle Platonic tradition deriving from the Timaeus. These connections reappear in Neoplatonic thought, particularly in the work of Synesius of Cyrene, Iamblichus and Hermias. If I were to deal with the relevant Neoplatonic material in chronological order, I would discuss Iamblichus next. However, as we shall see, the ideas to be found in Iamblichus are connected to those found in Plutarch of Athens and Hermias. Like Plutarch of Chaeronea, Synesius is not a systematic thinker and his work On Dreams (De Insomniis), in which he writes at length about phantasia, shows the influence of Porphyry rather than Iamblichus.24 For these reasons I shall consider Synesius next, before turning to Iamblichus and subsequent Neoplatonists. Synesius makes it clear from the very beginning of On Dreams that he regards dreams as prophetic. After initial praise of prophecy and some remarks specifically about dreams he turns in Chapter 4 to phantasia, describing it as a special, ‘holier’ form of sense-­perception. He then declares, ‘At any rate, it is by its means that we commonly have contact with gods who counsel us, prophesy to us and otherwise take thought for us’ (134c). He offers a rather miscellaneous

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list of benefits which dreams can bring us – finding treasure, becoming a poet after an encounter with the Muses, being informed of conspiracies, being cured of illness – before coming to his main point, that dreams can open the way to the most perfect visions of reality and conjunction with the intelligible (to noēton). He emphasizes that it is phantasia which offers the means to such a vision. Synesius uses the idea that phantasia acts as a mirror, ultimately derived, as we have seen, from the Timaeus, several times. At 134b he claims that ‘Soul contains the forms of things that come to be (ta gignomena) . . . it projects (proballei) only those that are relevant, and produces a reflection (enoptrizei) of them in the imagination’. ‘Forms’ here means Platonic Forms and Synesius’ use of the word ‘projects’ (proballei) might suggest that he has in mind the later Neoplatonist notion of mathematical projection, discussed in Chapter  2. However, as we saw there, Syrianus is the first Neoplatonist in whom this notion appears in a fully developed form.25 Synesius is talking about prophecy, not about mathematics, using a rather generalized and unsystematic version of Neoplatonic metaphysics. He distinguishes between Mind or Intellect (nous) which ‘contains the forms of things that are’ and Soul – i.e. the Soul in general, the hypostasis of Soul – which contains the forms of things that come to be. He is concerned to explain how the phantasia attached to our individual souls is capable of prophecy and does so by using the idea that phantasia is like a mirror which reflects images of forms that are projected upon it. Later, at 149c–d, Synesius describes the imaginative (phantastikon) pneuma as a mirror which receives images flowing out from all things, past, present and future.26 In terms of Plotinus’ distinction between a higher and a lower phantasia,27 this activity would belong to the lower phantasia which retains images of perceptible things, not the higher one which reflects images from the intelligible world. However Synesius’ view that even future things give off images which are received by phantasia goes beyond Plotinus and is hardly justified by his rather casual remark at 149b that ‘the future too is a mode of existence’. Since he wants to argue that phantasia is the faculty involved in prophetic dreams he needs to give some account of how we can form veridical images of the future but his attempt to combine something like Plotinus’ essentially Aristotelian view of the relationship between phantasia and sense-­ perception with the belief that images are material effluences from real objects

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appears not fully thought through. He seems to be thinking of phantasia as a single faculty which can face either way, both up towards the intelligible and down towards nature; in so far as it is like a mirror, it is a mirror which can be turned in either direction. Finally, at 152b Synesius compares the differences between ‘a true mirror, a distorting mirror, and a mirror made of unlike materials’ with the differences between the pneumata of different souls. This comparison is presumably meant to explain variations between people’s dreams and their interpretation of them. It reflects the notion already found in Timaeus 70d–72d, that variations in the physical state of the liver will lead to variations in our emotional reactions and in our ability to ‘spend the night quietly in divination and dreams’.28 The view that variations in human capacity explain variations in the ability of human beings to understand the unchanging divine and to receive messages from the gods is common in both Middle and Neoplatonism.29 Synesius here is again thinking of phantasia as receiving images from a higher world, not from nature, and gives the image of the mirror a neat twist by allowing for the possibility of distorting mirrors and mirrors made of unlike materials. Synesius’ interest in dreams, particularly prophetic dreams, leads him to associate phantasia with prophetic inspiration and he makes interesting use of the image of phantasia as a mirror. His only mention of poetic inspiration is the casual allusion at 134d to becoming a poet after a dream-­ encounter with the Muses. Towards the end of On Dreams, in Chapters 18–19 (153a–155a), he makes connections between the imaginative experiences we have in dreams and rhetorical education but now he seems to be using phantasia more in the sense of ‘visualization’ discussed in Chapter 1 than in any specifically Neoplatonic way.30 In general, while Synesius’ treatment of phantasia contains many interesting suggestions, he fails to offer anything that could be described as a clearly thought out philosophical account of the imagination. When we turn to Iamblichus we find not only the idea we have already met in Plutarch and Synesius, that phantasia can receive inspiration, but also a theory of the function of phantasia within which that idea finds a specific place. In Chapter 2 I discussed the reports in the late Neoplatonic commentaries on Aristotle’s On the Soul that for Iamblichus phantasia not only ‘takes

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impressions of all our rational activities’ but also exists as subsidiary to all the powers of the soul and is characterized by its power of assimilation.31 The idea that phantasia can form images of any other faculty in the soul makes it possible for Iamblichus to include the tradition that connected phantasia with inspiration within his philosophy. He picks up that tradition in On the Mysteries (De Mysteriis) III.14 where he is replying to some remarks of Porphyry about those who prophesy in a state of inspiration ‘according to their imagination’ (kata to phantastikon). Iamblichus’ regular strategy in On the Mysteries is to claim a divine origin for the phenomena under consideration.32 So too here he describes the kind of prophecy under discussion as ‘evoking the light’; in it the luminous vehicle of the soul is illuminated by divine light, ‘from which vehicle the divine appearances (phantasiai) . . . take possession of the imaginative power (phantastikē dynamis) in us’ (132.10–11, trans. Clarke, Dillon and Hershbell).33 The connection between phantasia and the astral body or ‘vehicle of the soul’, also found in Synesius, goes back at least to Porphyry.34 Iamblichus here uses that connection to explain how the ‘imaginative power’ can become inspired by the gods. In the multi-­layered Iamblichean universe gods are present at many levels. When Iamblichus discusses divination in dreams at On the Mysteries III.2–3 he argues as follows: If the soul weaves together its intellectual and its divine part with higher powers, then its own visions (phantasmata) will be purer, whether of the gods, or of essentially incorporeal beings, or . . . of whatever contributes to the truth about intelligible things. (107.7–11)

It may well be that the gods of III.14 are gods at the level of Intellect (nous) but if Iamblichus did indeed believe that phantasia exists as subsidiary to all the powers of the soul, the possibility remains open that phantasia could form images not only of the rational powers in the soul but of any supra-­rational powers. In III.3 the ‘intellectual’ and ‘divine’ parts of the soul may be distinct, in which case the ‘divine’ part would be what Proclus calls the ‘one in the soul’. Just as the Neoplatonic metaphysical system includes the One at the summit of the system, beyond the level of Intellect and the Platonic Forms, so Neoplatonic psychology developed to make room for a ‘one in the soul’ by which human beings can make contact with the One. This theory is already present to some extent in Iamblichus35 and, as we shall see, appears more explicitly in Hermias

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and Proclus, offering some new possibilities for articulating ideas about imagination, inspiration and symbolism. We saw in Chapter  2 that the commentary on On the Soul 3 ascribed to Philoponus includes a report of the views of Plutarch of Athens on phantasia which describes it as capable of receiving ‘an impression of the simple and, one might say, unitary quality of the divine in imprints and different shapes’ (515.27–9) and I suggested there that Plutarch might be thinking not only of the role of phantasia in mathematics but also of its ability to receive images from a higher realm.36 Phantasia and inspiration are explicitly linked together in Hermias’ commentary on Plato’s Phaedrus, a commentary which is largely a report of the lectures of Syrianus that Hermias and Proclus attended together in Athens. It includes some Iamblichean material, probably transmitted via Syrianus.37 At Commentary on the Phaedrus 85.19–86.3 Hermias approaches the connection between phantasia and inspiration in a rather different way from Iamblichus. He has just been arguing that inspiration (enthousiasmos) properly so called belongs to the ‘one in the soul’ but in 85.19–86.3 he goes on to say that there are other kinds of inspiration which concern the other parts of the soul, caused by demons or by gods not without demons. Understanding (dianoia) can be inspired when it makes a sudden intellectual discovery, and opinion (doxa) and phantasia are said to be inspired when they discover arts (technai) and produce remarkable works, as did Phidias and the maker of Heracles’ baldric referred to in Homer, Odyssey 11.612. Hermias goes on to explain how spirit (thymos) and even desire (epithymia) can be inspired. There is no mention here of phantasia taking impressions of rational activities or forming images of higher powers of the soul. Rather, Hermias implies that the gods, or the demons, can come down to all the levels of the soul, even the lowest, and cause inspiration or something akin to inspiration. Phantasia is firmly slotted in at the same level as doxa, just above the irrational powers of spirit and desire. Nor is Hermias interested in the role of phantasia in prophecy and divination. His examples of inspired phantasia come from the visual arts. If Phidias can produce statues which portray the gods as they really are, it is not, as in Philostratus, because his phantasia has reached up to heaven, nor, as in Proclus, because those statues are copies of an intelligible model,38 but because something of heaven has come down to the human sculptor.

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It looks as though Hermias, following Syrianus, is reconciling the Iamblichean talk of phantasia as inspired with a strictly orthodox Neoplatonist psychology which keeps phantasia at a relatively low level, alongside doxa, not allowing it to range as widely as Iamblichus had done. In Hermias’ contemporary and fellow-­student, Proclus, phantasia and inspiration are usually kept apart while Olympiodorus regards phantasia and inspiration as opposing principles.39 Should we then conclude that most of the Neoplatonists, despite their belief in a transcendent One ‘beyond being’40 and in the possibility of the human soul making contact with that One through mystical experience, perhaps by means of the ‘one in the soul’, would not allow the possibility that the arts offer us a way by which we can imaginatively ‘stretch out towards what imagination cannot comprehend’? We saw in Chapter 2 that, for Proclus at least, art and literature can portray universal truths by means of analogy and that just as phantasia enables us to grasp the concepts of mathematics, so it can assist in the production of copies (eikones) of an intelligible model (paradeigma). The kind of imagination described in Chapter 2 seems very different from Kant’s concept and may strike a modern reader accustomed to post-Romantic notions of creative imagination as disappointingly scholastic. We saw that both Proclus and Olympiodorus appeal to this kind of imagination to justify the allegorical interpretation of Plato’s myths. Accustomed as we are to valuing creativity and individuality and to the kind of literary realism considered at the end of Chapter 1, we might well be tempted to dismiss the Neoplatonist approach to literature as leading to a mechanical kind of allegorizing, in which philosophical meanings are ‘read off ’ from literary works, with the effect of diminishing the power of such works and the nature of the experience they offer to readers. Although some of the ideas found in Plutarch of Chaeronea, Synesius, Iamblichus, Plutarch of Athens and Hermias, as well as in Philostratus, open the way to a more flexible concept of imagination, the fact remains that in ancient thought the concept of phantasia, even when thought of as inspired, hardly appears in discussions of poetic and artistic inspiration. The way in which Hermias treats the inspiration of phantasia as not inspiration in the strict sense is telling here. However if we leave the term phantasia aside for a while, and turn instead to the theory of inspired poetry found in Proclus, we shall find that Neoplatonist understanding of our response to the arts is more complex than has appeared hitherto.

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Inspiration and symbolism In the sixth essay of his commentary on the Republic Proclus does his best to defend Homer against the criticisms made by Plato in Republic 2, 3 and 10. Much of that defence involves offering allegorical interpretations of passages attacked by Plato in Republic 2 and 3, such as the Theomachy of Iliad 20 or the deception of Zeus by Hera and their union on Mount Ida recounted in Iliad 14.153–351.41 The interpretations are preceded by a lengthy theoretical justification of allegorical interpretation, at the end of which Proclus distinguishes explicitly between eikones and symbola: In all such imaginative presentations (phantasiai) found in the writers of myths some entities are shown (endeiknytai) through others; it is not a matter of showing models (paradeigmata) through copies (eikones) in all these cases; sometimes symbols (symbola) are used while at other times the sympathy (sympatheia) between the two types of entity is expressed by analogy (analogia). (Commentary on the Republic I 86.15–18)42

The use of the word phantasia here to refer to the works produced by writers of myths is striking and presumably indicates that Proclus is assuming the kind of connection between myths and the psychological faculty of phantasia which we find in his commentary on the myth of Er, at Commentary on the Republic II 107.14–108.14, discussed in Chapter 2.43 In Chapter 2 I treated that passage as concerned with myths to be interpreted by analogy, as eikones. However that kind of interpretation, suitable for Platonic myths, would not be capable of defending the myths of Homer which appear outwardly far more shocking and offensive. No doubt that is why Proclus here appeals to a different type of interpretation, which he calls symbolic.44 The verb endeiknytai which Proclus uses here for the ‘showing’ of entities in myths is something of a technical term, perhaps ultimately derived from Plato’s use of this verb in the remarks about the use of mythical paradeigmata at Politicus 277d and 278b.45 Proclus uses the related noun endeixis at Commentary on the Timaeus I 17.9–15 where he treats Socrates’ words ‘One, two, three’ at the opening of the Timaeus (17a) as showing the triadic nature of the divine orders.46 In general Proclus regards the ‘endeictic’ method of interpretation as suited to indirect teaching about the gods.47 Similarly Damascius uses endeixis

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specifically to refer to the way in which the highest entities can be alluded to by means of symbols.48 At the end of the sixth essay Proclus develops a theory of three types of poetry: imitative, educational and inspired.49 The imitative, or mimetic, kind of poetry is further subdivided, following Plato Sophist 235d–236c, into ‘eikastic’ poetry, which aims to produce an accurate likeness of the thing imitated, and ‘phantastic’, which is concerned only to present an apparent likeness.50 According to Proclus, this kind of poetry is the object of Plato’s attack on poetry in Republic 10. ‘Eikastic’ poetry does occur in Homer in passages in which Homer represents the heroes fighting or holding counsel or speaking in accordance with their different types of character (Commentary on the Republic I 192.28–193.4). Proclus offers only one example of ‘phantastic’ poetry, the description of the sun as rising out of a lake in Odyssey 3.1–2 (Commentary on the Republic I 192.21–8). The second, educational kind of poetry offers moral advice and is related to the life in which the soul operates in accordance with intellect and knowledge. This too can be found in Homer, in passages concerned with the nature of the soul, with the distinction between Heracles and his ‘image’ in the underworld made in Odyssey 11.601–4 and in passages concerned with physical science and cosmology as well as in Theognis and Tyrtaeus, the poets mentioned by Plato in Laws 1.630a (Commentary on the Republic I 186.23–187.24 and I 193.4–9).51 The third, highest type is inspired poetry and corresponds to the type of life in which the ‘one in the soul’ is united with the gods. This is the type most prevalent in Homer. Proclus’ key examples of inspired poetry are the passages of which he has earlier offered allegorical interpretations such as the binding of Ares and Aphrodite by Hephaestus and the union of Zeus and Hera on Mount Ida (Commentary on the Republic I 193.10–16). According to this theory, most of Homer’s poetry is to be understood as inspired, symbolic representation of the highest levels of reality. Proclus does not mention eikones or analogy when he presents his theory of three types of poetry and although it is tempting to associate these with the second, educational type of poetry, that would, I think, be a mistake.52 What he does do is to distinguish clearly between the symbolic representation employed by inspired poetry and the kind of imitation (mimēsis) attacked by Plato in Republic 10:

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How could the kind of poetry which interprets divine things by means of symbols (symbola) be called imitative (mimētikē)? For symbols are not imitations (mimēmata) of the things of which they are symbols; for opposites could never be imitations of their opposites, the base of the fine, or the unnatural of the natural; the symbolic view (symbolikē theōria) shows (endeiknytai) the nature of things even by means of complete opposites. (Commentary on the Republic I 198.13–19)53

Confusingly, elsewhere in his work Proclus distinguishes between the inspired and the symbolic, while usually maintaining the distinction between symbols and eikones. In Platonic Theology I §4 he lists the inspired, the dialectical, the symbolic and that which uses eikones as four different ways in which Plato expounds theology, associating each of the four with a different dialogue or pair of dialogues. He claims that the inspired way is used in the Phaedrus, the dialectical in the Sophist and the Parmenides, the symbolic in the Gorgias and the way that uses eikones in the Timaeus and the Statesman. A similar list of four ways of expounding theology also appears in his commentary on the Parmenides, at I 646.16–647.18.54 In his commentary on Euclid, however, Proclus is quite happy to declare, ‘The angle is a symbol (symbolon) and a likeness (eikōn), we say, of the coherence that obtains in the realm of divine things – of the orderliness that leads divine things to unity, divided things to the indivisible, and plurality to conjunction and communion’ (Commentary on Euclid 128.26–129.3).55 Like all Neoplatonist commentators, Proclus adapts his theories to the text under consideration, despite maintaining a consistent underlying conceptual scheme, and of course he may have held different views at different times in his career. If we take seriously the distinctions made in the Platonic Theology and the commentary on the Parmenides, we need to revise the view put forward in Chapter  2 that for Proclus Platonic myths can be interpreted by means of analogy, as eikones. It seems that only some Platonic myths are of that type, and that others require other types of interpretation. At Commentary on the Republic I 166.20–4 Proclus comments on Phaedrus 247e as a passage where Socrates speaks in an inspired and poetic manner (entheastikōs kai poiētikōs), saying that ‘the affinity to the race of demons which prepares for the presence of the divine light moves his [i.e. Socrates’] imagination (phantasia) to symbolic utterance (symbolikē apangelia).’ Not unreasonably Proclus regards this passage

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as one where Plato is echoing Homer, pointing out that in Phaedrus 247a Plato picks up the Homeric word daita used of the feast of the gods in Iliad 1.424. In Platonic Theology IV Proclus interprets the Phaedrus myth at much greater length, treating it as inspired in accordance both with the four ways of expounding theology set out in I §4 and with the references to inspiration within the text of the Phaedrus itself. Despite the separation made between the inspired and the symbolic in I §4 Proclus does use the noun symbolon and the adverb symbolikōs (‘in a symbolic way’) towards the end of IV §9 as well as using eikōn in two other passages of IV concerned with expounding the Phaedrus myth.56 The passage from the Republic commentary on the Phaedrus myth provides a rare example of Proclus associating phantasia with inspiration and symbolism. Olympiodorus seems to simplify Proclus’ complex theory by treating the myth in the Gorgias as an example of a myth to be interpreted as an eikōn, since according to Proclus the myth in the Gorgias is a myth in which symbols are used rather than eikones.57 I am not primarily concerned here with the overall consistency of Proclus’ views, or with differences of doctrine between Proclus and Olympiodorus. Rather, I am appealing to the theories Proclus puts forward in the sixth essay of his Republic commentary as evidence for two important points: first, that there is a Neoplatonic understanding of allegory and symbolism which allows for the possibility that at least some literature can point us beyond the realms of even the highest kind of rational experience and secondly, that this understanding is normally expressed in terms of inspiration rather than phantasia. If we allow for the fact that Proclus rarely finds any irony in Plato,58 the way in which he develops the notion of inspiration follows directly from Plato’s own use of it. Unlike the ‘minority tradition’ discussed earlier in this chapter, he largely ignores the connections between inspiration and phantasia suggested by Timaeus 70d–72d, putting them together in just one passage, Commentary on the Republic I.166.20–4, where the Platonic text under discussion, Phaedrus 246e–247e, pulls him in that direction. Proclus’ own Hymns appear to be a conscious attempt to put his theory of inspired poetry into practice.59 In general, however, while allegorical interpretation flourished in both Greek and Latin and among both pagans and Christians in late antiquity,60 the writing of deliberately allegorical works developed much more slowly. The origins of deliberate allegory may be seen in

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the personification of the Litai (‘Prayers’) in Homer, Iliad 9.502–12 and in sophistic fables such as the story of the Choice of Heracles told by Prodicus in which personifications of Virtue and Vice appear61 but literary allegory really comes into its own only in late antiquity with the composition of allegorical epics. Two striking examples are the Christian Psychomachia of Prudentius, composed in the fourth century ad, and the pagan Marriage of Philology and Mercury by Martianus Capella, probably composed in the last quarter of the following century. In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, allegory became the dominant mode of both literature and art. Poets such as Dante shared with their readers a world-­view based on a combination of Platonism and Christianity which lent itself very readily to the writing and reading of allegory.62 It has been argued that medieval Gothic architecture was influenced by Neoplatonist views of symbolism, filtered through the Christian version of Proclus’ views found in the work of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite,63 while in the Renaissance the rediscovery of pagan Neoplatonist writings led to the conscious use of Neoplatonic symbolism by well-­known artists, including Botticelli and Michelangelo.64 In English literature, the most famous example of an extended allegorical epic, Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, is now little read and popularly regarded as ‘difficult’ while the poems of William Blake, for example, are often enjoyed simply for their surface meaning, without regard to the complex underlying symbolism. If we come to poets such as Spenser or Blake with assumptions formed by reading fiction in the realist tradition, of the kind discussed at the end of Chapter 1, we are likely to miss much of the deeper meaning implied by these poets’ use of allegory and symbol. It is true that in order to get a precise grasp of that meaning we need to learn quite a bit about their world-­view since we no longer share the assumptions of an Elizabethan intellectual such as Spenser, let alone those of an eighteenth-­century autodidact such as Blake. Yet even if we lack such specialist knowledge we will not miss everything: the opening stanzas of The Faerie Queene, describing Una and the Red Cross Knight, present a vivid picture which could be the beginning of an adventure story, although the detailed description of the red cross on the Knight’s shield, the mention of the lamb led by the lady, Una, the description of the dwarf who follows her, and their arrival at a cave inhabited by a monster, half-­serpent and half-­woman, all quickly reveal that this is no ordinary story.

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We should not assume that allegorical literature is going to be off-­putting, or difficult to read; rather we should allow ourselves to be drawn into the world of the poem and let it open our minds to possibilities we might not have thought of when we began. So too in the theories of allegory offered by the Neoplatonists, the literal, ‘surface’ meaning of a text is not immediately discarded. We saw in the passage from Proclus’ commentary on the myth of Er discussed in Chapter  2 that Proclus recognizes our enjoyment of the outer ‘screen’ presented by the literal meaning of myths and stories, as does Olympiodorus.65 Nevertheless it cannot be denied that for Proclus and his contemporaries in the end what is most important is the higher knowledge to which Platonic myths lead and the access which inspired poetry can offer to a realm beyond that of knowledge. At the ends of both the previous chapters I considered the relationship between the ideas discussed in those chapters and Aristotle’s claim in Poetics Chapter 9 that poetry is more philosophical than history. We have seen in Chapter 1 that the notion of phantasia as visualization, linked to vividness and to ‘making you feel as if you were there’, differs in significant ways from the view of some modern thinkers that literature can give us moral understanding of the particular and help to develop our moral intuitions and that the latter, although sometimes presented in terms derived from Aristotle’s moral philosophy, could not be Aristotle’s own view. The connection between phantasia, eikones and analogy, discussed in Chapter  2, suggests a relatively straightforward way in which poetry can give us knowledge of universals: if we accept Neoplatonic psychology and metaphysics, allegorical interpretation in terms of eikones and paradeigmata allows us to read not only literary texts but a whole range of other phenomena in terms of the underlying philosophy. The question now is how the ideas about symbolism and poetic inspiration considered in the present chapter relate to Aristotle’s claim. These ideas do allow a wider range of literature to be drawn into the Neoplatonist interpretative net – Homer and Hesiod’s Theogony as well as Plato – and we may find it attractive that the possibilities of interpretation seem less constrained precisely because symbols, according to Proclus, can represent by opposites and are thought of as giving access to a world beyond the rational. If, to quote Mary Warnock again, imaginatively we are ‘reaching out towards what imagination cannot comprehend’, perhaps we

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do not need to be quite so precise about what is going on, since we have to recognize that we cannot fully articulate the experience in rational terms. Yet Proclus himself is extremely precise when he allegorizes specific episodes in Homer in terms of Neoplatonic metaphysics. When Aristotle says that ‘poetry tends to make universal statements’ the only way in which he indicates the content of such universal statements is to say that a universal statement is ‘one which tells us what kind of thing a particular kind of person would probably or necessarily say or do’ (1451b8–9). Such universal statements are, then, about the world we live in, not about any transcendent metaphysical world – unsurprisingly, since for Aristotle there is no such world. The ideas discussed in Chapters 2 and 3 put a distinctively Neoplatonist interpretation on the way in which literature can convey truth, which may be contrasted both with Aristotle’s view and with the modern ‘particularist’ view discussed at the end of Chapter 1. I have argued that these Neoplatonist ideas can help us to understand allegorical literature and art, not just in the sense that the producers of some allegorical works have consciously used these ideas, but more broadly in the sense that the Neoplatonist views open up different ways of thinking about the meaning of literature and art from those to which we have become accustomed since the nineteenth century. This matters not only because past works can thus become more accessible but also because allegory and symbol, while no longer dominant, are still in use by modern writers and artists.66 At the same time, the Neoplatonist views are themselves quite diverse. Examination of the ways in which both Middle and Neoplatonists use – and do not use – the concept of phantasia has, I hope, brought that diversity to light while clarifying some of the fundamental characteristics of the ancient Platonist approach to works of art.

Notes   1 Warnock 1976: 57, 58.   2 See Pépin 1966: sect. IV, 251–8.   3 I used Kant in a similar way in Sheppard 1991b but did not there attempt to relate Kant’s views to ancient views of imagination.   4 See Iliad 2.484–92, Odyssey 8.477–98, 22.345–9.   5 See, e.g., Callimachus fragment 2, Propertius 3.3.   6 See for example Murray 1981 and Russell 1981: 70–1.

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  7 See for example Murray 1996: 10 and 119 and Stern-Gillet 2004: 177–82. Cf. the discussion of Ion 535b–e in Chapter 1 (‘As if you were there yourself ’ – Homer to Plato).   8 See the discussion of the parallel between the Meno and Apology passages and of other passages where Plato mentions inspiration in Bluck 1961: 424–7.   9 The passages from Phaedrus, Meno, Apology and Laws 4.719c are conveniently collected in Murray 1996: Appendix, 235–8. On Plato’s use of the analogy between poetry and prophecy, cf. Murray 1996: 118, commenting on Ion 534b7. On the tripod at Delphi, see Parke and Wormell 1956: Vol. I, 24–6. 10 I have discussed the influence of the mirror image in this passage in Sheppard 2003. For Plato on phantasia see the Introduction (Plato on phantasia, appearances and images). 11 The modern distinction between ‘allegory’ and ‘symbol’ is of no relevance to antiquity; cf. section later in Chapter 3 (Inspiration and symbolism), n.44. On the development of ancient allegorical interpretation and theories of symbolism, see Lamberton 1986 and Struck 2004. On the technical meaning of symbolon for the Neoplatonists, see Sheppard 1980: 145–61. 12 On these passages of Dio see Watson 1988: 71–5; Cocking 1991: 41–3. 13 See Chapter 1 (Techniques and effects of realism, ancient and modern). 14 See Meijering 1987: 68. 15 Odysseus encounters one Cyclops in particular, Polyphemus, in Odyssey 9 and the Laestrygonians in Odyssey 10.80–132. 16 See schol. in Il.4 (Δ) 439; schol. in Il.9 (I) 420; schol. in Il. 10 (K) 199; schol. in Il. 15 (O) 694–5; schol. in Il. 21 (Φ) 3. For detailed discussion of these passages as well as schol. in Il. 14 (Ξ) 342–51, see Meijering 1987: 67–71. Cf. also Schmidt 1976: 61–3 and Russell 1981: 109. 17 See for example Bundy 1927: 112–16; Rosenmeyer 1986: 235–40; Watson 1988: 60–4; Cocking 1991: 43–7. 18 So, for example, Bundy 1927: 115–16, criticizes Saintsbury and Bosanquet for mistakenly regarding the passage as ‘a unique assertion in early aesthetic of the creative power of the imagination’ but himself talks of ‘the free play of phantasy’. 19 The background to Philostratus’ usage is discussed at length by Watson 1988: 64–93. 20 Cf. Fowler 1989: 180–6. Fowler makes some suggestive comments on what she regards as effects of phantasia in this sense in Hellenistic painting and poetry. 21 I have already discussed some of this material in Sheppard 1997a and Sheppard forthcoming. My account of Synesius here follows Sheppard forthcoming rather than Sheppard 1997a. 22 On the Stoic use of the word phantasia, cf. the Introduction (Stoics and Epicureans on images and imagining).

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23 See Jones 1916: 108 and Russell 1972: 63–6. On the passages discussed here, cf. also Bundy 1927: 96–8. 24 See Lang 1926 for the parallels between On Dreams and Porphyrian material. Deuse 1983: 227–9 suggests connections between some points in On Dreams and ideas found in Iamblichus, Plutarch of Athens and Hierocles but fails, in my view, to distinguish sufficiently between views peculiar to these thinkers and standard Neoplatonic views. Cf. also Lacombrade 1951 and Vollenweider 1985: 14–17. For a different view of the relationship between Synesius’ ideas and those of Porphyry and Iamblichus, cf. Gertz forthcoming. 25 Cf. Chapter 2 (Mathematical projection). 26 Synesius regards pneuma (‘breath’ or ‘spirit’) as the organ of phantasia, located, according to 142d, in the brain; see further Lang 1926: 46–7 and cf. also Deuse 1983: 222–4 and 227–9. He seems to assume that images seen in mirrors are the result of effluences from objects: cf. Proclus, Commentary on the Republic I 289.21–290.27 and Olympiodorus, Commentary on the First Alcibiades, 217.23–218.3, with the discussion in Steel 2008: 82–7. 27 Cf. Chapter 2 (Mathematical projection). 28 Cf. also Plotinus, Ennead 1.4 (46).10. 29 See, for example, Philo, On the Creation of the Cosmos §23; Abraham 119–25; Plutarch of Chaeronea, The Sign of Socrates (De Genio Socratis) 589d; Plotinus, Ennead 6.5 (23).11.26–31; Porphyry, Launching-­points (Sententiae). 29.21–2; Proclus, Commentary on the Republic I 40.4–41.3 and 116.24–117.21; Platonic Theology I §4.21.97–9. For further references, and discussion, see Dodds 1963: 273–4 and Brisson 2005: 599–600. 30 See Chapter 1 (Techniques and effects of realism, ancient and modern). 31 See Chapter 2 (Mathematical projection). 32 Cf. Clarke 2001: especially 19–38. 33 On ‘evoking the light’ (ϕωτὸς ἀγωγή) see Clarke, Dillon and Hershbell 2003: 155, n.208. 34 See Sheppard 2007 and Tanaseanu-Döbler forthcoming. On the vehicle of the soul more generally see Kissling 1922; Dodds 1963: 313–21; Di Pasquale Barbanti 1998. For a useful collection of source texts concerning the vehicle, see Sorabji 2004: Vol. I, §8, 221–41. 35 See Dillon 1973: 253–4; Shaw 1995: 118–26. 36 See Chapter 2 (Mathematical projection). 37 See Praechter 1912 and Bielmeier 1930. Bernard 1997: 4–23 argues for greater independence on the part of Hermias. 38 Cf. Chapter 2 (Copying and analogy).

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39 Olympiodorus, Commentary on the Phaedo 6.2, pp. 97–8; 6.12, p.103; and Commentary on the First Alcibiades 8.11–14, p.9. Cf. Bundy 1927: 144. 40 Cf. Plato Republic 6.509b. 41 For the defence of this passage in the scholia to Homer as phantasia rather than mimēsis, see the section earlier in this chapter (Phantasia, symbols and access to the divine). 42 Proclus’ Greek is difficult to construe, and to translate, here. My interpretation, initially argued for in Sheppard 1980: 197–200, is accepted in Lamberton 2012: 91. For a different interpretation, which takes it that ἀναλογία in this passage is the relationship between symbols and their referents, not between εἴκονες and παραδείγματα, see Chlup 2012: 188; cf. also Coulter 1976: 50. 43 Cf. Chapter 2 (Copying and analogy). 44 I have argued elsewhere, against Coulter 1976: 39–60, that Proclus’ distinction between analogia and symbolism is not the same as the modern distinction between allegory and symbolism: see Sheppard 1980: 197, n.97 and cf. Dillon 1976. 45 Cf. Robinson 1953: 212–3. 46 Cf. Gersh 2003: 146. 47 See Lautner 1995: 8–10, with the references cited at 9, n.23. 48 See for example Damascius, On First Principles (De Principiis) I 55.9–16 and II. 11.14–18, with the comments in Steel 1999: 365–7; On First Principles II 43.8; Lectures on the Philebus (In Philebum) §62, with the note in Westerink 1959: 30; also Pépin, 1981: 277; Lautner 1995, 9–10; Rappe 2000: 209–13. 49 The theory of three types of poetry is presented in full at Commentary on the Republic I 177.7–205.23. 50 On the Sophist passage cf. the Introduction (Plato on phantasia, appearances and images). 51 On which passages of Homer Proclus is referring to here cf. Sheppard 1980: 165–6. 52 Proclus’ treatment of Hesiod is thought-­provoking in this regard. I agree with van den Berg forthcoming that for Proclus the Theogony counts as inspired poetry, to be interpreted along the same lines as Homer, while the Works and Days, on which Proclus wrote a commentary, belongs to the educational type of poetry and is, on the whole, not susceptible to allegory. Van den Berg 2001: 119–38 argues that educational poetry does use analogia and proposes a rather different interpretation of the distinction between eikōn and symbolon from that presented here. Cf. Chapter 2 n.30. 53 For discussion of the theory of three types of poetry and Proclus’ allegories of Homer, see Sheppard 1980: especially 48–85 and 162–202; Lamberton 1986: 188–232; Kuisma 1996: 79–134; Struck 2004: 227–53; cf. also Rangos 1999.

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54 For further discussion of Platonic Theology I §4 and Commentary on the Parmenides I 646.16–647.18, see Saffrey and Westerink 1968: 136–7; Gersh 2000; Pépin 2000; Sheppard 2000. 55 Cf. Trimpi 1983: 208. 56 See Platonic Theology IV §9.30.14–17 and 24–31, IV §11.37.3–8, IV §16.49.4–5. I have discussed Proclus’ interpretation of the Phaedrus myth in the Platonic Theology in Sheppard 2000. 57 Cf. Chapter 2 (Copying and analogy). 58 Cf. Sheppard 1980: 106–7 and 141–2. 59 This has been convincingly argued by van den Berg 2001: 86–140. 60 See for example the surveys in Pépin 1976 and Whitman 1987 as well as the essays on individual allegorists collected in Whitman 2000: Part I. 61 The fable is reported by Xenophon in Memoirs of Socrates (Memorabilia) 2.1.21–34. 62 See, for example, Bundy 1927: 225–56 and, more generally, Lewis 1936. 63 See Panofsky 1946. Panofsky’s arguments are criticized in Kidson 1987. 64 On Botticelli see, for example, Wind 1967: 113–40 and Gombrich 1972: 31–81. On Michelangelo see, for example, Panofsky 1968: 115–21 and Wind 1967: 152–70 and 177–90. 65 See Chapter 2 (Copying and analogy). 66 For an elegant discussion of a range of writers who use allegory and symbol, beginning with Spenser and ending with twentieth-­century poetry, drama and novels, and including some theoretical reflections, see MacNeice 1965.

Conclusion: Ancient and Modern Imagination This book has been concerned with three uses of phantasia in ancient thinking about literature and art. Each of the three uses needs to be set within a wider context of the ways in which ancient writers described two fundamental literary modes, realism on the one hand and allegory and symbolism on the other. My main focus, like that of the ancients themselves, has been on literature and particularly on poetry and oratory. Some of the material discussed has also dealt with visual art but, as explained in the Introduction, I have left music largely on one side. Like the ancients I have assumed that phantasia deals with mental images, justifying this approach in the Introduction, particularly in my discussion of interpretations of Aristotle’s account of phantasia.1 In Chapter 1 we saw that phantasia in the sense of ‘visualization’, as found in ‘Longinus’ On Sublimity and in many other texts from the first three centuries ad, is connected to a range of ideas which can be found in the earliest Greek literature and thought but which came to be expressed in increasingly technical terms as critics of literature and art developed their own technical vocabulary. Rather than simply talking of ‘making you feel as if you were there’ and ‘putting before the eyes’ critics came to use the term enargeia, ‘vividness’, regarding this as a virtue of mimēsis (‘imitation’), and associating it with literary and artistic realism. Most of the ancient texts describe the effects of enargeia in terms of arousing emotion and we saw that this is rather different from the way in which a number of modern thinkers regard realistic literature as helping us to develop our moral understanding by ‘learning how to feel’. At the end of Chapter 1 I discussed the relationship between this modern view and the Aristotelian moral philosophy which lies behind it, arguing that the modern view connects ethics and aesthetics in a way that Aristotle himself does not.

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We also saw at the end of Chapter 1 that phantasia is still occasionally used by the Neoplatonists in the sense of ‘visualization’. However they mainly use the word to refer to a specific power or faculty of the soul, within a philosophical psychology based primarily on Aristotle’s On the Soul. Chapter 2 started from the theory of mathematical projection found in later Neoplatonism, particularly in Proclus, according to which phantasia can represent mathematical concepts, and went on to study the wider application of the language of copying and analogy used in that theory to a range of contexts, including discussions of literature and art. We saw at the end of the chapter that this way of talking was used by Proclus and Olympiodorus to justify the allegorical interpretation of Plato’s myths and that in Neoplatonic terms it offers one way in which the arts can give us knowledge of universals and in which poetry can be, as Aristotle claimed in the Poetics, more philosophical than history. Chapter 3 dealt with the connections made by some Platonist thinkers in antiquity between phantasia and the inspiration of both poets and prophets. I placed the well-­known passage from Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius of Tyana 6.19 which contrasts phantasia and mimēsis within this context. I also argued that Iamblichus’ view of phantasia opens up the possibility of the imagination forming images of the supra-­rational which would function as symbols of the divine realm not accessible to any kind of rational thought. However when Proclus uses a theory of symbolism to interpret much of Homer allegorically he usually appeals not to phantasia but to inspiration, remaining, perhaps, more true to the main thrust of Plato’s thought than do those thinkers who are willing to link phantasia and inspiration. At the end of the chapter I returned to Aristotle’s claim that poetry is more philosophical than history and considered more fully how the ideas discussed in Chapters 2 and 3 might help us to understand allegorical literature and art. One thing that should have become clear in the course of this book is that the word phantasia is used in different ways by different ancient authors and that there is no single ancient concept of imagination, any more than there is a single modern concept. Just how a particular thinker conceives of imagination will depend on their overall approach to both psychology and metaphysics. The enormous shift in thinking about the self and the world during the eighteenth century that Louis MacNeice in Varieties of Parable calls ‘the Great Divide’2 means that we tend to take for granted that in talking about imagination

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we are talking about a subjective inner life, accessible by introspection; we have lost the assumption that such an inner life corresponds to the objective structure of the world although in return we have gained a belief in imagination as a creative power. More recently the notion of such a subjective inner life and in particular the belief that imagination deals in mental images has been criticized, as we saw in the Introduction, by both Ryle and Wittgenstein in a way which has affected not only subsequent philosophical discussions of imagination but also the interpretation of some ancient texts, particularly Aristotle.3 By contrast, in antiquity what we call the creativity of the artist was far more commonly attributed to inspiration from an external source than to imagination and many thinkers assumed that the microcosmic structure of the human soul corresponded to the macrocosmic structure of the world as a whole. Plotinus stated explicitly that the three fundamental levels of the Neoplatonic metaphysical system – the One, Intellect and Soul – were also present in human beings.4 In saying this, he articulated a more widely held assumption about the relationship between the human soul and the world which has far-­reaching consequences for both psychology and aesthetics. Such an assumption lies behind many of the differences between ancient and modern views of imagination. Despite the revival of scholarly interest in Neoplatonism in the twentieth and twenty-­first centuries and the ever-­increasing amount of academic research on the philosophy of late antiquity, much Neoplatonic thought can seem remote and alien to modern readers, especially to those more familiar with the analytic and empiricist tradition. In a similar way, literature which uses allegory and symbol can seem remote and alien to readers more familiar with works written in a realist mode. It would be easy to dismiss Neoplatonism as of purely historical interest or as some fascinating exotic specimen which we may admire from a distance without admitting the possibility that it may have something to say which is relevant to our own situation. Yet one of the virtues of a philosophical system such as Neoplatonism is that it makes attempts to tackle all aspects of human life and to offer ways of thinking about those experiences which are not fully explicable in rational terms. We may not find acceptable the answers which the Neoplatonists offered to questions such as ‘How can poetry convey truth?’ but consideration of why those answers do not satisfy us may help us in our own examination of those questions. More

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narrowly, given the dominance of the Neoplatonic world-­view in pre-­modern Western thought, a grasp of the Neoplatonist approach to allegory and symbolism can help us to appreciate imaginative works which do not use realism, or which mix realism with other modes, striving to go beyond the representation of our everyday world to capture all the aspects of our experience which would be missed by the mimetic craftsman of Plato, Republic 10.596e holding up a mirror. In Romantic thought the mirror becomes a lamp; in Neoplatonic thought the mirror can be turned away from the physical world, to reflect the loftiest heights of metaphysics accessed by the innermost depths of the human soul.

Notes 1 See Introduction (Aristotle on phantasia and mental images). 2 MacNeice 1965: 50. 3 Cf. Introduction (Aristotle on phantasia and mental images). 4 See Ennead 5.1 (10). 10.5–6.

Bibliography Editions of Greek and Latin texts I have not included here well-­known commentaries and editions of Greek and Latin authors, or Loeb Classical Library editions, but list editions of the scholia to Homer and of the Neoplatonic texts cited in the book. Anonymous Prolegomena to Platonic Philosophy, ed. L. G. Westerink, Amsterdam: North Holland Publishing Company 1962. Damascius, Lectures on the Philebus, wrongly attributed to Olympiodorus, ed. L. G. Westerink, Amsterdam: North Holland Publishing Company 1959. Damascius, Traité des premier principes, ed. L. G. Westerink and J. Combès, 3 vols, Paris: Les Belles Lettres 1986–91. Hermias, In Platonis Phaedrum Scholia, ed. P. Couvreur, revised C. Zintzen, Hildesheim and New York: G. Olms 1971. Iamblichus, On the Mysteries, ed. E. C. Clarke, J. M. Dillon and J. P. Hershbell, Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature 2003. Olympiodorus, In Platonis Gorgiam commentaria, ed. L. G. Westerink, Leipzig: Teubner 1970. Olympiodorus, Commentary on Plato’s Phaedo, in The Greek Commentaries on Plato’s Phaedo, ed. L. G. Westerink, vol. 1, Amsterdam: North Holland Publishing Company 1976. Olympiodorus, Commentary on the First Alcibiades of Plato, ed. L. G. Westerink, Amsterdam: A. M. Hakkert 1982. Philoponus, in Aristotelis De anima libros commentaria, ed. M. Hayduck, Berlin: G. Reimer (Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca XV) 1897. Plotinus, Opera, ed. P. Henry and H.-R. Schwyzer, 3 vols, Oxford: Clarendon Press (Oxford Classical Texts) 1964–82. Porphyry, Kommentar zur Harmonielehre des Ptolemaios, ed. I. Düring, Gothenburg: Elanders boktryckeri aktiebolag 1932.

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General Index For ancient authors see also the Index of Passages Cited Agathon 21, 23, 43n. 5 Auerbach, Erich 33–4, 35 Barthes, Roland 35 Beardsmore, R.W. 39 Blake, William 93 Browning, Robert 36–8

mimēsis 3–4, 5, 28, 34, 40, 42, 63, 74, 77, 80–1, 90, 102 mirror 2, 5, 49–52, 54, 77–8, 83, 84–5, 104 Modrak, Deborah 8–9 music 14, 29 Nussbaum, Martha 8–9, 39–40

Chrysippus 12, 79 Coleridge, S.T. 36

Olympiodorus 92, 94 ‘one in the soul’ 86–8, 90

Dahl, Roald 36 Dickens, Charles 35, 38, 40

paradeigma 58–67, 71, 81, 88, 89, 94 perception 3, 10–12, 59–60 see also sense-­perception Phidias 58, 64, 65, 67, 79, 80–1, 87 Philodemus 11 Plato 14, 30, 48 as a writer 42–3 criticisms of tragedy 40 Divided Line 5, 48, 51, 54, 55–6 on inspiration 75–8 on phantasia 2–6 Plutarch of Athens 55–6, 87, 88 Porphyry 4, 53, 83, 86 Proclus 42–3, 47–50, 57–67, 88–93, 94–5, 102

eikōn 57–67, 71, 74, 81, 88, 89, 90–2, 94 endeixis 89–90 Epicurus 10–11 Gorgias 21, 22 Hesiod 79, 94 Homer 3, 21–2, 32–4, 36, 42–3, 79, 89, 90, 94, 95, 102 Homeric concept of Zeus 58, 67 see also scholia on Homer Iamblichus 53–4, 85–7, 88, 102 Janaway, Christopher 40–1 Johansen, Thomas 9 James, Henry 8, 15, 40 Kant, Immanuel Critique of Judgement 71–4 McDowell, John 39 MacNeice, Louis 99n. 66, 102 memory 61, 64

realism 14, 33–41, 71, 80, 88, 93, 101, 103–4 Ryle, Gilbert 7–8, 103 Savile, Anthony 40 Schofield, Malcolm 8 scholia on Homer 34, 35, 80 sense-­perception 6–8, 48, 52, 53, 81, 84 see also perception Simonides 29, 32–3 Spenser, Edmund The Faerie Queene 36, 93

118 Stoics 10–13, 81 symbolon 79, 89, 91–2 Theon of Samos 28–9, 30, 31, 44n. 25 Thucydides 29–32, 34 Tolstoy, Leo 35, 39

General Index Warnock, Mary 2, 72, 74, 94–5 Watt, Ian 35–6, 38–9 Wedin, M.V. 9, 68n. 15 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 7–8, 39, 103 Wordsworth, William 2, 15 Xenophon 34

Index of Passages Cited Aelian, Historical Miscellany 2.44 28–9, 30 Aeschines 1.161 25 3.153 25 3.157 25 3.244 25 Aetius 4.12.1–5 12 Andocides 1.148 25 Anonymous Prolegomena to Platonic Philosophy VIII.20.2–18 59–60 Aristophanes,Thesmophoriazusae 148–52 21 Aristotle On Dreams 461a14–30 9 On Memory 449b30–450a5 9, 26, 50–1, 67n. 2 450b11–451a2 9 On the Movement of Animals 7, 8, 10 Nicomachean Ethics 6.8.1142a25–30 39–40, 46n. 55 Poetics 4.1448b5–10 40 9 14, 67, 94–5 9.1451b4–6 40, 47 9.1451b8–9 95 17.1455a22–32 23, 26 26.1462a17–18 43n. 11 Rhetoric 1.11.1370a28–30 27 1.11.1371a8–10 27 1.11.1371a17–20 27 2.2.1378b9–10 27 2.5.1382a21–2 27 2.6.1384a21–2 27 2.8.1386a29–36 23–4, 26, 38

2.8.1386b5–7 43n. 7 3.2.1405b11–12 24, 26 3.10 1410b33–5 24, 26, 38 3.10.1411a25–b21 43n. 10 3.11.1411b22–31 24–5, 26 3.16.1417a12–13 34 On the Soul 3.2.427a9–14 55 3.3 6–10, 11 3.3.427b17–20 9,26 3.3.429a2–4 9 3.5.430a24–5 48 3.7.431a16–17, b2 9, 67n. 2 3.8.432a8–14 9, 67n. 2 3.9–11 8 Callimachus, fragment 2 95n.5 Damascius On First Principles I 55.9–16 98n. 48 II 11.14–18 98n. 48 II 43.8 98n. 48 Lectures on the Philebus §62 98n. 48 Demetrius, On Style 209–10 35 212–14 34 214 34 216–18 35 219–20 34 Democritus, fragment B18 75 [Demosthenes] 26.25 25 Dio Chrysostom 12.59 79 36.33–5 79 Diogenes Laertius 7.50 11–12 7.53 13 10.32 16n. 25, n. 26 Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Lysias 7 35

120

Index of Passages Cited

Epicurus, Letter to Herodotus 46–53 16n. 25 51 16n. 26 Gorgias, Defence of Helen §9 20 Hermias, Commentary on the Phaedrus 85.19–86.3 87–8 Hesiod, Theogony 31–4 75 Homer Iliad 1.424 92 2.484–92 74 9.502–12 93 14.153–351 89 14.342–51 80 Odyssey 3.1–2 90 8.477–98 74–5 8.489–91 20 9 96n. 15 10.1–79 70n. 45 10.80–132 96n. 15 11.601–4 90 11.612 87 19.467–77 22–3 22.345–9 74–5 Iamblichus Concerning the General Science of Mathematics 34.4–12 53–4, 57 34.14–18 54 On the Mysteries III.2–3 86 III.14 86 Josephus, Jewish War 7.320–22 28 ‘Longinus’, On Sublimity 10.1–3 35 15.1 19 15.2 44n. 25 25 34 26.2 34

Lucian, Toxaris 6–8 29 Lysias 6.50 25 Lucretius, On the Nature of Things 4.739–43 11 4.797–806 11 Olympiodorus Commentary on the First Alcibiades 8.11–14 98n. 39 217.23–218.3 97n. 26 Commentary on the Gorgias 46.3, p.237.14–23 62 46.6, p.239.19–30 60n. 39 Commentary on the Phaedo 6.2, pp.97–8 98n. 39 6.12, p.103 98n. 39 Ovid Ex Ponto 1.8.34 27–8 Tristia 3.4.55–60 27 Philo of Alexandria Abraham 119–25 97n. 29 On the Creation of the Cosmos according to Moses §§15–24 64 §23 97n. 29 ‘Philoponus’, On Aristotle On the Soul 3 515.12–15 55 515.20–9 55, 87 Philostratus, Life of Apollonius of Tyana 6.19 80–1, 102 Philostratus the Lemnian, Pictures preface 6–7 81 10.17 29 Pindar, fragment 137 Bowra 75, 77 Plato Alcibiades I 132e–133c 15n. 9 Apology 22b–c 76–7 Cratylus 429a–b 70n. 49

Index of Passages Cited Ion 534c–d 76 535b–e 21–2, 23 Laws 1.630a 90 3.682a 77 4.719c 77 Meno 99c–100c 76–7 Parmenides 126a–127b 60 Phaedrus 245a 76 247e 91–2 Philebus 38c–d 4, 5 40a–c 4 Politicus 272e 70n. 46 277d 89 278b 89 Republic 2.378d 78–9 2.382e 3 2.390c 80 3.386a–391e 15n. 11 3.398d–401d 15n. 11 6.509b 98n. 40 6.510d–e 48 6.510e 5, 50 6.511d 51 7.533d–e 51 9.586e 50, 57 10 90 10.596–8 5 10.596d–e 50, 104 10.602a–606d 15n. 11 Sophist 235d–236c 3–4, 5, 90 239d7–9 15n. 7 264a–b3 3, 4, 7 Symposium 198c 43n. 5 Theaetetus 152c 3 161e 3 Timaeus 17a 89

121

29b–d 62 35a–37c 48, 83 42e–44d 48, 62 70d–72d 5, 77–8, 83, 85, 92 71b 50 Plotinus 1.4(46).10.6–21 52, 97n. 28 4.3(27).30.1–11 52 4.3(27).31 51–2 5.1(10). 10.5–6 104n. 4 6.5(23).11.26–31 97n. 29 Plutarch of Chaeronea The Decline of Oracles 431b–438d 82–3 The Glory of Athens 346a–b 30 346e–347a 29–30, 31–2 Isis and Osiris 383f–384a 83 Life of Aratus 32.3 30 Life of Artaxerxes 8.1 32 Platonic Questions 1002a 51 The Pythia’s Prophecies 397c 82 The Sign of Socrates 589d 97n. 29 Table Talk 718e 51 [Plutarch], On the Life and Poetry of Homer 216–17 32–3 Porphyry, Launching-­points (Sententiae) 29.21–2 97n. 29 Priscian, Metaphrasis On Theophrastus On Sense-Perception 23.13–24.20 53 Proclus Commentary on the Cratylus 8.10 65 19.6–12 66, 68n. 9 19.22–3 66 Commentary on Euclid 16.8–17.6 48–9, 51 22.2–6 57 51.9–56.22 68n. 7 78.20–79.2 68n. 7

122

Index of Passages Cited

101.2–5 57 115.10–12 57 121.2–7 50 128.26–129.3 91 141.2–19 49–50, 57, 66 185.25–186.7 57–8 Commentary on the Parmenides 625.18–626.19 60–1 626.14–16 69n. 37 626.24–627.14 61–2 644.4–645.6 69n. 35 646.16–647.18 91 958.27–959.9 65 Commentary on the Republic I 40.4–41.3 97n. 29 I 86.15–18 89 I 116.24–117.21 97n. 29 I 163.19–164.7 42–3 I 166.20–4 91–2 I 177.7–205.23 98n. 49 I 186.23–187.24 90 I 192.21–8 90 I 192.28–193.4 90 I 193.4–9 90 I 193.10–16 90 I 198.3–19 90–1 I 289.21–290.27 97n. 26 II 107.14–108.14 63, 89 Commentary on the Timaeus I 17.9–15 89 I.265.18–24 58 I.320.5–10 64–5 Platonic Theology I §4 91,92 I §4.21.97–9 97n. 29

IV §9 92 IV§11.37.3–8 99n. 56 IV§16.49.4–5 99n. 56 Propertius 3.3 95n. 5 Quintilian 6.2.29 27 8.3.63–5 27, 35 8.3.66–70 35 9.2.40–3 34 12.10.6 44n. 25 Sextus Empiricus Against the Professors 8 (= Against the Logicians 2).63 16n. 25 Against the Professors 9 (=Against the Physicists 1).43–7 16n. 26 ‘Simplicius’, On Aristotle On the Soul 214.8–20 53 Synesius of Cyrene, On Dreams 134b 84 134c–d 83–4, 85 149b 84 149c–d 84 152b 85 153a–155a 85 153d–154b 42 Thucydides 4.10–12 31 7.71 31–2 Xenophon Anabasis 1.8 32 Memoirs of Socrates 2.1.21–34 99n. 61