Enargeia in Oratory
Enargeia, the quality that makes an ekphrasis an ekphrasis and distinguishes it from a plain report of the facts, is thus a paradoxical phenomenon. it is able to arouse emotions through immaterial semblances of scenes that are not present to the listener and may never have taken place. It uses the medium of language to create an impact on the world, the power of which is expressed in physical terms – most strikingly, as we have seen, by ps.-Longinos’ metaphor of enslavement. A question that remains to be answered is how a speaker could be so confident of his effect on the most intimate recesses of his listeners’ minds. Quintilian cites several examples of emotional appeals involving props and extras (particularly children) falling disastrously flat, but he never betrays any doubts about the predictable power of enargeia.1 this is despite the fact that, as ann Vasaly has noted, enargeia would seem to have depended on one of the least predictable factors in the equation: the individual’s unique and personal visualization.2 the listener’s emotional response to enargeia was, moreover, crucial to its function within a speech, which raises the further question of how orators could hope to predict and control such a seemingly individual and subjective process.
As �asaly points out, orators clearly expected their listeners to make their own, personal contributions to the word pictures they heard and to flesh out the details mentioned with further details supplied from their own imagination. Quintilian’s account of his own response to Cicero’s portrait of Verres does show that he assumed listeners would contribute actively to the images provoked by verbal enargeia and that these contained a personal input. Describing the effect this passage worked on his imagination, Quintilian is happy to admit that his own mental image
1 Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 6.1.37–42. But see libanios, Autobiography (or. 1), 41, discussed below, for an example of the failure of an ekphrasis in an epideictic speech.
2 ann Vasaly, Representations: Images of the World in Ciceronian Oratory (Berkeley, 1993), pp. 98–9. interestingly, the modern theoretician of rhetoric chaim perelman, in L’Empire rhétorique: rhétorique et argumentation (Paris, 1977), p. 49, expresses reservations about his ancient predecessors’ advice to use physical props (such as Quintilian’s swords), which may distract the audience, but seems to share their confidence in the verbally created sense of presence.
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contains details not even mentioned by cicero. What is more, he presents such elaboration as the norm:
is there anyone so incapable of forming images of things that, when he reads the passage in the Verrines, ‘the praetor of the roman people stood on the shore dressed in slippers, wearing a purple cloak and long tunic, leaning on this worthless woman’, he does not only seem to see them, the place, their appearance, but even imagines for himself some of those things which are not mentioned. i for my part certainly seem to see his face, his eyes, the unseemly caresses of both and the silent loathing and frightened shame of those who were present.
An quisquam tam procul a concipiendis imaginibus rerum abest ut non, cum illa in �errem legit: ‘stetit soleatus praetor populi Romani cum pallio purpureo tunicaque talari muliercula nixus in litore,’ non solum ipsos intueri uideatur et locum et habitum, sed quaedam etiam ex iis quae dicta non sunt sibi ipse adstruat? Ego certe mihi cernere uideor et uultum et oculos et deformes utriusque blanditias et eorum qui aderant tacitam auersationem ac timidam uerecundiam.3
Where cicero’s text provides only the barest of outlines, giving details of posture, clothing and situation, Quintilian supplies for himself further details of appearance, a response which has been termed ‘slow realisation by way of synecdoche’.4 the mental image which he describes to us includes the detail of �erres’ eyes, and the figures are set in motion, caressing each other in an external display of desire. Quintilian the reader also attributes feelings to the internal audience that presumably mirror his own response to the scene playing in his mind. this passage sheds light on the extravagant claim that Quintilian made for another Ciceronian passage, the description of the aftermath of the party discussed above (8.3.66; see p. 91–3). When he asks ‘what more would anyone who had actually entered the room have seen?’ it may well be that he is not referring to the sparse details provided by Cicero’s text but to the quality of his own, far fuller visualization of the scene sparked by the words. In the case of the passage from the Verrines, where the larger context survives, it is
3 Quintilian, Insitutio oratoria, 8.3. 64–5. my italics. this part of the Verrines was not delivered in court, a detail which Quintilian ignores. Beth Innocenti, ‘Towards a theory of vivid description as practised in cicero’s Verrine Orations’, Rhetorica, 12 (1994): 355–81 argues that the text that we have of the actio secunda does represent cicero’s oratorical practice.
4 Robert Cockcroft, ‘Fine-tuning Quintilian’s doctrine of rhetorical emotion: seven types of enargeia’, in Tomàs Albaladejo et al. (eds), Quintiliano: Historia y actualidad de la retórica (Logroño, 1998), p. 504.
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clear that Quintilian is taking cues from the attack on �erres in the rest of the work.
Moreover, as we have already seen in the discussion of ekphrasis, the passages that were thought to have this immediate effect of ‘placing before the eyes’ did not necessarily evoke static scenes. Quintilian’s accounts of the murder and of the sacked city are full of details of human action;
Cicero’s evocation of the room after a party begins with the comings and goings of the drunken guests, and even his tableau of �erres leaning on his mistress contains within it the aftermath of action (‘nixus’) which is sufficient for Quintilian to supply further movements and emotions to his own imaginative rendering of the scene.5
The question still remains of how an orator could control such creative visualization and interpretation of words on the part of his audience.
Quintilian interacts with Cicero’s text in exactly the way that Iser envisages the reader interacting with a work of literature, filling in the gaps left by the text.6 But where iser places emphasis on the variable and individual response of each reader, Quintilian’s account assumes a predictable response, or at least a restricted range of responses.7 For him, this is far from a merely theoretical issue: he is purporting to be able to teach his readers how to guide their audiences’ responses in practical situations, and implying that he himself has wielded this power in the courtroom. oneone indication as to how he could be so confident of a predictable response is provided by his insistence that the orator had to remain within certain bounds if he was to create the desired effect. A particularly significant passage in this respect is to be found in the conclusion to his discussion of enargeia in Book 8. Here, he advises the orator to ‘follow nature’ (‘naturam
… sequeamur) (8.3.71). But the remark that immediately follows makes it clear that the idea of ‘nature’ is largely conventional, for it is vital that the audience should be able to recognize what they hear: ‘[people’s] minds’
he says ‘accept (‘recipiunt’) most easily things which they recognize’.8 this suggests that the easiest visualisations to communicate will therefore not be new creations (whatever that might mean), or representations of
5 see lucia calboli montefusco, ‘Ἐvάργεια et ἐvέργεια: l’evidence d’une démonstration qui signifie les choses en acte’, in Mireille Armisen Marchetti (ed.), Demonstrare: voir et faire voir: forme de la démonstration à Rome (Toulouse, 2005), pp. 43–58.
6 Wolfgang Iser, ‘The reading process: a phenomenological approach’, in Jane P.
Tompkins (ed.), Reader-response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-structuralism (Baltimore, 1980), pp. 50–69.
7 Ibid., p. 55: ‘each individual reader will fill in the gaps in his own way, thereby excluding the various other possibilities; as he reads, he will make his own decisions as to how the gap is to be filled.’
8 Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 8.3.71: ‘facillime enim recipiunt animi quod agnoscunt’.
idiosyncrasies, but will correspond to the audience’s expectations and prior experience.
Quintilian’s account of his response to the portrait of �erres also provides vital clues to how an orator might be able predict his audience’s response. The values and emotions which Quintilian attributes to the scene (and which he seems to have shared himself) are carefully controlled by the use of significant details. Cicero contrasts �erres’ official status (‘praetor populi Romani’, praetor of the Roman people) with the details of his shoes, the purple cloak (‘pallium’) which, as a Greek style of dress coloured with oriental dye, would have had strong connotations of un-Roman luxury, not to mention his unmanly stance, as he leans (‘nixus’) on his mistress.9 such details would no doubt have been so loaded, so telling, for Roman readers like Quintilian that they might not themselves have been fully aware of the amount of decoding involved in their response.
this example reveals the extent to which what must have been immediate, practically unconscious, associations for the original audience were in fact culturally specific and demanded a degree of what one might call
‘cultural competence’ from both speaker and audience if they were to be fully successful.
Imagination, Memory and Knowledge
Quintilian’s remark about familiar things being most apt to lodge themselves in the mind points to the close relationship between memory and imagination in ancient thought. Moreover, much knowledge was thought of as being stored in visual form so that the type of imagining called for in oratory was closely related to memory: the orator uses his own visual resources to call up images which already exist in the audience’s mind. the close connection between visualization and memory in ancient thought is further underlined by the importance of visual images in ancient theories and techniques of memorization. The artificial memory techniques discussed by the author of the Rhetorica ad Herennium, by Cicero and (with reservations) by Quintilian relied heavily on mental images.10 the images which the auctor ad herennium suggests the orator use in order to remind himself of the order and content of the
9 see Webb, ‘imagination and the arousal of the emotions in greco-roman rhetoric’, in S. Braund and C. Gill (eds), The Passions in Roman Thought and Literature (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 122–3.
10 Rhetorica ad Herennium, 3.16.28–24.30; Cicero, De oratore, 2.354–60; Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 11.2. Aristotle also makes a brief mention of the use of mental images in memory techniques in On the Soul, 427b 18–20. see, in general, Frances yates, The Art of Memory (London, 1966) and Jocelyn Penny Small, Wax Tablets of the Mind: Cognitive Studies of Memory and Literacy in Classical Antiquity (London, 1997).
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parts of his speech were intentionally bizarre so as to be as memorable as possible. these might function by suggesting words to the orator (the image of a testicle, ‘testiculus’, ‘testis’, could serve to remind the speaker to mention a witness, ‘testis’) as in a rebus puzzle.11 But other images bore a more direct, visual resemblance to the subject the orator was supposed to remember: the testicle-witnesses in this example were involved in a case of disputed inheritance in which a wealthy man is supposed to have been poisoned. he should also be pictured lying ill in bed in a direct illustration of the narrative. interestingly, the orator’s own memory seems to play an important part here: if he did not know the man in question personally, he is advised not to invent an image of some unknown person, but to choose someone known to him so that the image will spring quickly to mind.12 the memory is therefore the readiest source of images for use in such mnemonic systems, and of the architectural backgrounds to place the images in.
Memory and the Gallery of the Mind
as this suggests, images derived from sense perception were also thought to be the basis of natural memory, and this model had a long and enduring history in Greek and Roman thought. These memory images resulted from impressions received on the mind or soul through the senses. gorgias refers to the process in his Encomium of Helen (17) when he states that
‘sight engraves upon the mind images (eikonas) of actions (pragmata) which have been seen’. it was aristotle who developed this idea in ways which were influential on later centuries. He explains that sense impressions (aisthēmata) gathered in daily life somehow impressed themselves on the soul to create memory-images (phantasmata).13 this basic model endured into the imperial period and underlies much discussion of sight and memory, as well as the theory of enargeia and phantasia. Because it was so familiar it usually needed no explanation for ancient readers. there is one context, however, where the aristotelian model becomes clear. this is the special case of the heightened perception of lovers: novels and other discussions of love from the imperial period tell us time and again how
11 Rhetorica ad Herennium, 3.20.33.
12 ibid. the reader is also advised not to choose a person of low social standing (‘de minimo loco’) to figure in their tableau. The implication is that such a person would not be sufficiently individualized – quite literally ‘distinguished’ – for the orator to call him to mind quickly and easily.
13 aristotle, On Memory and Recollection, 450a 30–32; see Richard Sorabji, Aristotle on Memory (London, 1972), p. 11. Aristotle’s writings on memory and phantasia raise immensely complex issues. in what follows i am concerned only to provide a bare outline of the general features that are relevant to rhetorical phantasia and enargeia.
the image of the beloved enters through the eyes and then remains in the lover’s soul.14 This idea runs throughout the ‘Ekphrasis of Beauty’
attributed to Libanios whose author claims that, once he had glimpsed the beautiful girl at her window, his soul became a painter so that the resulting ekphrasis is the verbal expression of that impact.15
Aristotle and others frequently appeal to analogies with the visual arts to express the nature of the impressions made by sense perception upon the soul and their lingering form as memories. Famously, aristotle compares the impact of sense perception on the soul to the impression (tupos) made by a signet ring on wax.16 this idea of imprinting is evident in the Greek terms for visual language, diatupōsis and hupotupōsis, implying that such language has an effect analogous to that of direct sensation. In the same passage, memory is compared to a painting (hoion zōgraphēma), an analogy which aristotle also uses in On the Soul (427b 21–4) to explain the activity of contemplating an internal image (phantasma).17 Like the image of the impression in wax, this idea of the mind as a gallery of paintings left behind by sensation has a long afterlife. Ps.-Plutarch extends the metaphor further when he compares the fleeting images produced by ordinary sensation with the enduring soul-painting impressed on the soul by the sight of the beloved, which is like a painting burned on with encaustic (Moralia, 759C). Aristotle himself uses the graphic analogy to illustrate the way in which we can think of these internal images either as what they represent or as images of what they represent (On Memory, 450b 20 – 451a 2). In this they are just like the images created in the mind by enargeia, which create an impression like that of sensation and can be contemplated either as equivalent to what they represent, or as likenesses.
And, like the writers on enargeia, aristotle also emphasizes the physicality
14 see, for example, chariton, Chaireas and Kallirhoe, 6.5–7; ps. Plutarch, Erōtikos, 759c with further discussion below. achilles tatios, Leukippe and Kleitophon, 1.9 offers the further development that the flowing of the image of the beloved into the lover’s soul leads to a form of copulation. see also aristotle, Rhetoric, 1370b19–22 on the special importance of memory to the lover and apollonios of rhodes, Argonautika, 3.453–6. cicero, De oratore, 2.357 also refers to this theory in his discussion of memory.
15 libanios, Progymnasmata, pp. 541–6.
16 aristotle, On Memory and Recollection, 450a 25–32. see sorabji, Aristotle on Memory, 3;
gerard Watson, Phantasia in Classical Thought (Galway, 1988), p. 25. Quintilian, 11.2.4 refers to the analogy between memory and the imprint of the ring on wax as something that ‘many people think’, a sign of the pervasiveness of the Aristotelian image.
17 Malcolm Schofield, ‘Aristotle on the imagination’, in Jonathan Barnes et al. (eds), Articles on Aristotle 4: Psychology and Aesthetics (London, 1979), p. 119 cautions, however, that aristotelian phantasmata are not always to be understood as mental images outside On Memory and Recollection. nevertheless, in On the Soul, 429a 3–5 aristotle derives both terms from phaos [light], reflecting the role of sight as the primary sense.
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of these images which are impressed on the body itself.18 there are thus many parallels between the effects of enargeia and the effects of direct perception which further help to explain the ease with which Quintilian can blur the distinction between the two.
For what lies behind vivid speech is the gallery of mental images impressed by sensation in the speaker’s mind. The souls of both speaker and listener are stocked with internal images of absent things, and these provide the raw material with which each party can ‘paint’ the images that ekphrasis puts into words. This idea surfaces in the rhetorical handbooks in the shape of warnings about describing shameful or inappropriate subject matter. In his chapter on the koinos topos, for example, Nikolaos warns against including too much detail in ekphraseis of subjects such as adulterers or a seducer of young boys, ‘for in describing such things we will slander ourselves more than him �i.e. the adulterer]’.19 More striking still is the caution urged by menander rhetor when he discusses the ekphrasis of the bride and groom in his discussion of the wedding speech (epithalamion).20 Unless it is socially acceptable for the speaker to have seen her (if he is close relative, for example), a verbal description will lay him open to suspicions of harbouring an illicitly acquired memory image of her in his mind. so verbal representation is clearly thought not just to betray knowledge of words (of the lexicography of adultery or of beauty, as in Hamon’s definition of description), but to derive from an internal image of what is being described.21 this image resides deep within the speaker’s mind and may itself derive from perception. As in the case of the passages of Euripides and �irgil analysed by ps.-Longinos and Quintilian respectively, the verbal evocation allows a glimpse into the mind of the describer, which can be fraught with risk for an orator who is bound to his audience through social ties.
Thinking and Speaking with Pictures
Words, in Quintilian’s discussion of enargeia, serve simply to communicate the orator’s internal image, his phantasia, of a scene to the audience. his insistence on the visual source and effect of vivid language, and his relative
18 aristotle, On Memory and Recollection, 453a 14–16. see Watson, Phantasia in Classical Thought, p. 31.
19 Nikolaos, Progymnasmata, 45.16: ἐκφράζovτες γὰρ πλέov ἡμᾶς αὐτoὺς ἢ ἐκεῖvov διαβαλoῦμεv.
20 menander rhetor, On Epideictic, Treatise II, 404. 11–14.
21 philippe hamon, Du descriptif (Paris, 1993), p. 42 stresses the way in which description appeals to the reader’s memory and knowledge, but the relevant competence is above all
21 philippe hamon, Du descriptif (Paris, 1993), p. 42 stresses the way in which description appeals to the reader’s memory and knowledge, but the relevant competence is above all