WORDS AND IMAGES JOSTLED one another, co-operatively or competitively, in diverse areas of classical Athenian culture. This chapter will address one particular domain in which images, the images of figurative art, were subjected to the questioning of words, the words of philosophical enquiry. I am concerned here with philosophical discussion of images – discussion not, for the most part, of specific images, but of images as a class of objects: objects with representational content, or, in Greek terms, mimetic objects, mimêmata. Mimesis is still a widely misunderstood concept (or family of concepts, as it is preferable to say). Its continued translation as ‘imitation’, which has become largely inimical to any effort to do justice to the scope and ramifications of the concept, is only the most immediate index of this state of affairs. One purpose of this essay is to try to show that the understanding of mimesis, principally in the context of Plato's references to the visual arts, is more complex, but also more rewarding for the history of aesthetics, than existing accounts might suggest.

Plato refers to artistic images, especially painting, on numerous occasions. He does so, it is true, predominantly for the purposes of analogy or by way of obiter dicta, rather than with sustained attention to the subject in its own right. But as Wittgenstein was fond of stressing, the analogies philosophers draw are revealing, and indeed partly constitutive of their patterns of thought. One reason for the frequency and range of references to graphic and plastic art in Plato is a responsiveness to the prominence of images in the surrounding culture, that is especially in fourth-century Athens. While philosophy partly shaped itself, then as later, by standing back critically from its cultural environment, Plato certainly did not close his eyes to the images of the painters and other artists. For Plato, the mimetic or figurative arts (including narrative textiles, which he interestingly mentions several times) are part of the city of luxury in the Republic, the city which suffers, so Socrates suggests, from a cultural ‘fever’ whose affinities with Athens itself need no demonstration. For my present purposes, however, direct connections with elements of contemporary Athenian culture will remain in the background.

Dreaming of immortality

Hermes, son of Zeus and Maia, is a deity who has many affinities, even an intimate familiarity, with laughter. In Book 8 of the Odyssey, as we saw in the previous chapter, it was Hermes who told Apollo, amidst the gods' general mirth at the sight of adulterous Ares and Aphrodite ensnared in Hephaestus' trap, that he would consider such a price, and more, well worth paying for the chance to have sex with the goddess of love herself. His remark reignited the laughter of the Olympians, the sullen Poseidon excepted. Hermes' connections with the scope of laughter were of interest also to the poet of the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, a work generally assigned to the late sixth century. Twice in this poem Hermes' persona as a sly trickster, the trademark he shows practically from birth, elicits laughter from other gods: first from Apollo (281), whose cattle Hermes has stolen, then from Zeus himself (389), who bursts into loud laughter when his son lies to him shamelessly but with expert guile about the theft of the cattle.

THE VIEW FROM THE MOON

In one of his many Lucianic incarnations, Menippus of Gadara – supposed Cynic, inventor of a genre of satirical burlesque that amalgamated the traditions of comedy and philosophy, and a literary influence on Lucian's own writing – explains to a friend how a realisation that human affairs are ludicrous helped throw him into a state of existential aporia. Having lifted his vision to the totality of the cosmos, he was utterly perplexed. ‘I could not discover’, he confides, ‘how it came into being, who made it, what its beginning or end was.’ The philosophers he consulted were of no use to him. All equally doctrinaire, they nonetheless disagreed utterly about such vast concepts as time and space, infinity, the plurality of worlds and the existence of gods. Taking matters into his own hands like an Aristophanic Trygaeus or Peisetaerus, Menippus strapped on wings and flew up to the moon.

WORSHIPPING THE GODS WITH LAUGHTER

In a bizarre anecdote related by Theophrastus in his lost work On Comedy and preserved in paraphrase by Athenaeus, we are told that the people of Tiryns in the north-east Peloponnese once suffered from a pathological addiction to laughter which incapacitated them for the serious business of life. They consulted the Delphic oracle, which told them they could escape their affliction by throwing a bull into the sea as a sacrifice to Poseidon, but on one strict condition: that they did so in an atmosphere free from laughter (ἀγελαστί). Anxious to adhere to Apollo's instructions, the Tirynthians took the precaution of excluding children from the sacrificial ritual. But one child infiltrated the crowd. When caught and rebuked, he asked: ‘What's the matter? Are you afraid I'll upset your bull/bowl?’ The Tirynthians burst into laughter, apparently at an (accidental) pun on two senses of ‘upsetting’, i.e. enraging the sacrificial victim and overturning the bowl – a play on the imagery of wine and animal sacrifice that may also allude to the Tirynthians' reputation for intoxication. The episode taught the city just how hard if not impossible it was to be ‘cured’ of an inveterate habit.

NATURE AND CULTURE, BODIES AND MINDS

When ancient Greeks laughed, did they take themselves to be yielding to an instinct rooted in their animal bodies or displaying a characteristic they shared with their gods? Might they have imagined, for that matter, that they were doing both those things at the same time?

In broaching such large, scene-setting questions, it is hard to avoid taking initial orientation from Aristotle's famous obiter dictum in the Parts of Animals that humans are the only living things capable of laughter. This proposition – sometimes replaced in antiquity, and even conflated (as it occasionally still is), with the logically distinct idea of laughter as part of the essence of humans – addresses an issue which has continued to provoke debate right up to the contemporary study of animal behaviour. It would be unreasonable to expect Aristotle, for all his wide-ranging biological interests, to have anticipated the findings of the modern science of ethology, which claims to identify among other primates (and possibly elsewhere too) forms of behaviour that are physically and even socially analogous to laughter (and smiling) and that can help shed light on the evolution of these types of body language among humans.

EXISTENTIAL ABSURDITY: PREDICAMENTS ANCIENT AND MODERN

The eponymous protagonist of Samuel Beckett's early novel Murphy spends most of his time in search of an escape from the burden of mundane consciousness, or from what the novel calls his ‘unredeemed split self’. Murphy survives by cultivating a sort of impassivity: in Beckett's words, a ‘self-immersed indifference to the contingencies of the contingent world which he had chosen for himself as the only felicity’. Such impassivity is a version of Greek ataraxia, and the novel itself invites us to think of Murphy's mental life as a whole in the terms of Greek philosophy. We learn, for one thing, how Murphy had studied with the eccentrically Pythagorean Neary, whose attempt to inculcate an ‘attunement’ and blending of ‘the opposites in Murphy's heart’ had proved fruitless. An entire chapter, moreover, is devoted to the depiction of Murphy's mind as both markedly tripartite and as a kind of private Platonic Cave, divided into zones of light, half light and darkness.

WHO IS SHAMED BY SHAMEFUL SPEECH

The ritualised performances investigated in the previous chapter are characterised not only by a general association with the symbolic arousal of laughter, but also by a marked tendency towards the use of aischrologia, ‘shameful’ or offensive speech. In sacred contexts, such aischrology is a pointedly paradoxical transgression of the normal religious requirement of euphēmia (auspicious, pure speech, often equated with ‘silence’). But at the same time it is observably framed and protected by the ritual setting itself, and thereby converted into a function of the worship and celebration of a deity. However difficult it may be for us to recover the authentic mentality of those who participated in such events, we can see that ritual aischrology, together with the laughter which typically accompanies it, is controlled and made somehow acceptable by its inclusion within a culturally codified set of protocols. Outside such frameworks, by contrast, aischrologic behaviour takes on the appearance of an intrinsically shameful, aggressive and destabilising phenomenon, a threat to communal necessities of restraint, cooperation and order. In the common flow of social life, moreover, aischrology seems to possess a sort of doubleness in relation to the workings of shame.