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Written on the Body: Ekphrasis, Perception and Deception in Heliodorus' Aethiopica

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 July 2014

Tim Whitmarsh
Tim Whitmarsh*
Affiliation:
University of Exeter
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Extract

Novels have so much solid and monolithic bulk when they sit in a hand or on a shelf; inside, the pages are forests of symbols, as though even in books of such magnitude the sentences needed compression to fit on to pages. How different to poetic volumes, beguilingly slender, their pages brilliant with blank, white space, across which the spindly words stretch like gossamer. In terms of content, however, novels are rarely as monolithic as their physical form suggests. From earliest times since, the genre has dealt, centrally, with themes of metamorphosis, transubstantiation, the fundamentally permeable nature of the self. The solid material aspect of the novel often masks a central preoccupation with the fluidity of identity.

In the compass of this article, I want to explore the central role accorded by Heliodorus, arguably the greatest of ancient novelists, to questions of perceptual deception, to seeing and seeming; and in particular, I want to explore the role of artworks within Heliodorus' narrative economy. The narrative turns, as is well known, on the amazing paradox of an Ethiopian girl born white. Charicleia's skin colour is a visual trap, an illusion. Given that her freakish pigmentation is the result of her mother's glancing at an art-work at the moment of conception, Charicleia can almost be said to be a walking ekphrasis, an embodiment of the illusory traps of the unreal.

Type
Research Article
Information
Ramus , Volume 31 , supplement 1-2: The Verbal and the Visual: Cultures of Ekphrasis in Antiquity , 2002 , pp. 111 - 125
Copyright
Copyright © Aureal Publications 2002

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References

1. On the theme of colour in the Aethiopica, see Dilke (1980); Hilton (1998); and esp. Selden (1998); also Whitmarsh (1998); Perkins (1998). The ideas in this article have been long in gestation; particular thanks to Simon Goldhill, Richard Hunter and Michael Reeve for their help over the years, and, more recently, to Jaś Eisner, Helen Moore and the stimulating interrogants at Corpus Christi College, Oxford on September 11 2002. This article is dedicated to the memory of Don Fowler, who revolutionised the study of ekphrasis for classicists.

2. Generally on ekphrasis in Roman-Greek literature, see esp. Blanchard (1986); Conan (1987); Bryson (1994); Eisner (1994 and 2000); Webb (1997a).

3. Bartsch (1989); cf. also Billault (1981); Winkler (1982), 294; Fusillo (1989), 83–90 (focusing primarily upon Achilles); also Hardie (1998), 26–33. On visuality in general in Heliodorus (often presented through the theatrical register), see also Rohde (1876), 449f.; Walden (1894); Buhler (1976); Marino (1990). Rommel (1923), 59–64, discusses Heliodorus’ ‘scientific’ digressions, but is primarily interested in tracking the sources.

4. Billault (1979); Debray-Genette (1980); Pulquério Futre (1981–82); Dubel (1990); Anderson (1993), 166. Bowie (1995) explores different questions, reading Heliodorus’ ekphrasis of a gem as an allusion to Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe.

5. Particularly à propos of Achilles Tatius: see Morales (1995 and 1997); Goldhill (2001), 167–72, 178. The forthcoming work of Froma Zeitlin is eagerly anticipated.

6. For the general point, see Doody (1997), 387–404, esp. 388 (though rather overstated!); ‘Prose fiction…has special obligations to—and special affinities with—ekphrasis. The use of it seems scarcely a matter of choice for any example of the genre, ancient or modern, realist or magical. In dealing with the visual icon and its meaning-ful-ness, a novel must succinctly express its own drive to meaning.’

7. See esp. Webb (1997a), 246f.; Webb (1997b); and esp. Webb (1999). For the closely related term enargeia, see further Zanker (1981).

8. For the centrality of verisimilitude to ancient aesthetics, see Russell (1981), 25. But the concept is not unproblematic: see Bann (1989), 32, on Sen. Controv. 10.5.27 (id quod melius erat in tabula, non quod similius, ‘that which was better in the picture, not that which was more accurate’); on Philostratus’ moving pictures, see Blanchard (1986); Conan (1987); Webb (1999), 14f.; and generally for a critique of oversimplistic applications of this agenda, Bryson (1991).

9. Rouveret (1989), 50–59, argues that Plato is specifically disapproving of illusionistic skia-graphia, but the evidence is not really there.

10. See Plut. Mor. 348c for Gorgias’ famous comment about the illusionistic powers of tragedy.

11. For discussions, see Debray-Genette (1980); Pulquerio Futre (1981–82); Dubel (1990); Bowie (1995).

12. Dubel (1990), 107 (my translation).

13. Bowie (1995).

14. Bowie (2001), 30f., argues ‘very tentatively’ for verbal parallels with Pausanias, though he proposes that it is Pausanias who emulates Longus (not vice versa).

15. Laird (1993).

16. W. Stephens (1994), 72, argues persuasively for a different kind of narrative ‘contagion’: the ring is one of a number of O shapes that are contiguously associated with Charicleia.

17. Winkler (1982) is the classic discussion.

18. For the different traditions concerning Andromeda’s colour, see Dilke (1980).

19. Bartsch (1989), 48.

20. Whitmarsh (2001), 73, and on ‘maternal impression’ see Reeve (1989).

21. Gow (1952), 2.334, with references. Hes. Op. 235 is the locus classicus for this idea, but 182 () surely cannot mean anything similar, in view of the following lines ( etc.). Is , (unattested elsewhere in early epic as a synonym for : cf. West [1978], 199) a corruption, extrapolated from 235?

22. Whitmarsh (2001), 86.

23. Fuller discussion at Whitmarsh (1998), 108–11; see also Whitmarsh (2001), 86.

24. Rouveret (1989), 438.

25. Jax (1936), 47.

26. Rattenbury & Lumb (1960), i.4 n. 2.

27. Scut. 218 ; also (Scut. 234) is picked up by the following sentence in 1.2.2, (‘the rest of her arm was hanging carelessly’). For other uses of the Scutum, see Whitmarsh (1994); Hardie (1998), 37.

28. The identification of the statue with Penelope, moreover, is extremely insecure; but if correct, it provides an interesting resonance for readers of the Aethiopica (cf. 5.22.3, where Odysseus in Calasiris’ dream sends Penelope’s greetings to Charicleia).

29. Cf. Aristaenetus 1.1: (‘a living atatue of Aphrodite’). Charicleia is explicitly compared to a statue at 2.33.3 and 10.9.3. The subsequent description of the wounded Theagenes, whose ‘cheek, though reddened with fresh blood, was rather shining with brilliant white’ (, 1.2.3), also has a strong hint of pictorialism, particularly in the use of the ‘ekphrastic’ imperfect. The locus classicus for vivified statues is Ovid Met. 10.243–93, with the coruscant interpretations of Eisner (1991); Eisner & Sharrock (1991).

30. Rohde (1876), 155f. For a similar interpretation of the Imagines, see Maffei (1986).

31. Dubel (2001), 57 (‘univers topique’), 53f. (Theagenes). For moral and cosmological aspects in the description of Theagenes, see further Karl-Deutscher (1996), 324.

32. Haynes (2003), 69. Analogously, in Lucian’s Imagines (3), the beautiful Pantheia is said to be ‘beyond the power of language’ ()

33. Karl-Deutscher (1996), esp. 322f., 331–33.

34. Barthes (1990), 33.

35. Cf. e.g. Hunter (1994), 1076: ‘Statues are almost limitlessly readable—we encode our own patterns, our own desires upon them.’

36. Fowler (1991), 29.

37. Lessing (1984 [1766]), 98–103. Cf. esp. Blanchard (1975); Debray-Genette (1980); Taplin (1980); duBois (1982), 1–27; Becker (1990); Henderson (1993). For references to and brief discussion of the fall-out after Laocoön, see Debray-Genette (1980), 294f. The tension between description and narrative also impacts on art: see Snodgrass (1981) on the ‘synoptic’ method in archaic vase painting (with Hardie [1985], 18 n.49, for the observation that Achilles’ shield is frequently represented in archaic artwork, but never with any attempt to follow Homer’s narrative).

38. Lessing (1984 [1766]), 19.

39. duBois (1982),7.

40. Bühler (1976); Winkler (1982), 95–106.

41. The aorist is used in some MSS at 1.1.6, but with the force of a pluperfect (Heliodorus is not as strict with tenses as many earlier authors). Rattenbury & Lumb print the pluperfect , which has less MS authority.

42. LSJ s.v. 11.4.

43. Horn. Hymn. Dem. 190ff.

44. Full details in Whitmarsh (1994); see also Hardie (1998).

45. Karl-Deutscher (1996).

46. A famous passage, also invoked in descriptions of Alexander: compare the of Alexander at Plut. Alex. 63.4, De fort. Alex. 2.343e; and see Mossman (1988), 90.

47. Iliad 16.143.

48. Further, Hardie (1998), 36.

49. Vernant (1985), 117. Agamemnon’s shield, representing Athena and Gorgo, appears at Il. 11.36f.; note the verbal echo (Aeth. 3.3.5) from (Il. 11.36).

50. Cf. 7.10.4: (Arsace’s description of Theagenes). Cf. also Ach. Tat. 1.4.3.

51. Whitmarsh (1994); also Hardie (1998), 37.

52. Though is conventional (cf. e.g. 3.3.7), it is tempting in this case to imagine a specific address to Cnemon (the narratee), who will presently (as we shall see) confuse narrative artifice with reality. In the ekphrasis of the ring, the non-specific is used (5.14.2); here, on the other hand, in using the alternative, second-person form, Calasiris identifies his addressee as precisely the sort of reader to wish to foreclose the gap between seeming and being.

53. Compare e.g. Aesch. Sept. 592: (‘for he wishes not to seem best but to be best’); or Favorinus’ Corinthiacus (= [Dio] Or. 37) 25: (‘both to seem and to be Greek’).

54. Fuller discussion in Whitmarsh (1994); also Hardie (1998), 26.

55. Kövendi (1966), 183; Winkler (1982), 106f.; Morgan (1989).

56. Similarly at 5.32: the pirate Pelorus (‘monstrous’, a nomen loquens, perhaps alluding to the Cyclops at Od. 9.257) is encouraged by Calasiris to spy on Charicleia ‘with self-control’ (, 5.31.1); advice that the barbarian is unable to follow (he returns , ‘plotting something monstrous’, 5.31.2). It is provocative too that Calasiris describes Charicleia as looking like Artemis: not only does this pick up the iconography of the novel’s opening scene (discussed above), but also it sends out an intertextual warning signal, by implicitly linking Pelorus’ illicit viewing to that of Actaeon.

57. Cf. e.g. Virg. Aen. 4.83–85.

58. Clitophon, who styles erotic pursuit as the renunciation of (1.5.7), claims (‘I imagine Leukippe all the time’, 1.9.1); also (‘imagining what could not be seen’, 2.13.2). Similarly, Chariton’s description of the imagination of King Artaxerxes: (‘picturing and imagining her in this way he burned with desire’, 6.4.7).

59. A source of light was, naturally, necessary for vision; but this light was of a similar order to that of the eye. Cf. Simon (1988); Rouveret (1989), 79ff. For phantasia, see in general Watson (1988); and further Imbert (1980) on Stoicism. For the language of viewing in Achilles Tatius, see Morales (1997); Goldhill (2001), 167–72.

60. I am of course aware that this question remains partially open; but even if there can be no final resolution, Bowie (1994) and S. Stephens (1994) present a substantial body of evidence in favour of elite, and probably male, readers.

61. Also proleptic of Theagenes’ conquest of the bull at 10.28; see Bartsch (1989), 148. Traditionally, the Centaurs were ‘anti-culture personified’ (duBois [1982], 29).

62. For the popularity of this passage in a slightly earlier period, see Trapp (1990), 141–73, esp. 172. The horse crash at Achilles Tatius 1.12, conversely, implies a breakdown of self-control (combining the Platonic model with the chariot crash in Euripides’ Hippolytus).