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Ancient Usages and Contexts

As we have seen in Chapter 1, the restriction of the term ‘ekphrasis’ to texts on art is a relatively modern development, inspired by modern disciplines and fields of interest. If we turn to the ancient usages of the word we find ourselves in a very different intellectual world from that inhabited by the literary critics, art historians and archaeologists who contributed in their various ways to the invention of the modern genre of ekphrasis.

although the ancient usages of the term which are most familiar to us are from texts like the Younger Philostratos’ Eikones, to ancient readers it would most probably have brought back memories of their schooldays.

Ekphrasis and the related verb ekphrazō were used overwhelmingly in technical, rhetorical contexts: in handbooks for students and teachers of rhetoric, like the Progymnasmata, and in learned commentaries on classical texts. The first recorded usage is preserved in the writings of the Augustan critic Dionysios of Halikarnassos. He criticizes the historian Philistos for failing to use an appropriate style in his ekphraseis of places, battles and the like.¹ But since the passage in question comes from a later epitome it is impossible to ascribe its usage with any certainty to dionysios himself.² it was however certainly well established in the vocabulary of school texts by the first century CE when Theon wrote his Progymnasmata, which may therefore contain the earliest extant usage.

As a post-classical term, it was generally avoided in finished speeches written in Attic Greek. When authors needed to refer to the act of describing in their works they preferred other terms, such as hermēneuo (‘to express in words’) or simply diēgoumai (‘to relate’, to ‘go through’), as Dionysios of Halikarnassos does in the parallel passage to the section of the epitome in which the term ekphrasis occurs.³ ‘Ekphrasis’, in contrast, was mostly restricted to the vocabulary of the classroom, the tools of the teacher’s trade, used to teach composition and to dissect the works of

1 Dionysios of Halikarnassos, On Imitation, 3.8.

2 see Wilhelm geissler, Ad descriptionum historiam symbola (Leipzig, 1916), p. 12. The usages of the verb ekphrazō in Euripides and sophocles which are cited in the older editions of Liddell and Scott’s Greek–English Lexicon have now been rejected as later variants.

3 Dionysios of Halikarnassos, Letter to Pompeios Geminos, 5.6.

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the classical canon. Thus we find the term in Greek manuals of rhetoric from the Roman period, like Hermogenes’ treatise On Types of Style (Peri Ideōn Logou) and in the commentaries on his other work on declamation, or the guide to epideictic speeches by ‘menander rhetor’. it is also used in the commentaries on the classical texts which were read in schools.

the scholia to homer’s Iliad, for example, identify a range of passages as ekphrasis. Some of these overlap with the modern usage, like the description of shields, while others are simply moments in the action in which the commentator found particular appeals to the imagination.⁴

all these texts – scholia, Progymnasmata, and more advanced rhetorical handbooks – reflect the ˇteaching dispensed in schoolrooms throughout the Greek-speaking areas of the Roman Empire. They are often anonymous, or wrongly attributed to some famous name (like Hermogenes or Dionysios of Halikarnassos), and are difficult to date with any certainty. Taken together, however, they do reflect a set of coherent ideas and doctrines which make it possible to build up a picture of what ancient readers and writers understood by a term like ‘ekphrasis’. The general ideas underlying the treatments of ekphrasis in these technical sources were not new. Effective poetry, and later prose, had always appealed to the imagination. But what is particularly interesting about the roman period is that we can see a range of interconnecting attempts to identify and teach this type of writing. We see which passages from the canonical classical texts became widely accepted as models; we see attempts to explain why and how these models should be absorbed and imitated. Finally, we can often see the results of the teaching methods in finished compositions, such as speeches or even in non-rhetorical works, so pervasive were the effects of the rhetorical education.

as we have already seen, these technical, pedagogical sources, including the commentaries on classical texts, had a very practical aim: teaching students to express themselves effectively and in forms sanctioned by the prestige of tradition (the two were not necessarily contradictory or distinct). They are fragments of what was once a living and complex process of training in which a great deal must have depended on oral traditions and live interaction between teachers and students.⁵ as a result, they give us a privileged glimpse behind the literary scenes. however, for the very same reasons, they can be opaque.

4 Scholia graeca in Homeri Iliadem, ed. hartmut Erbse (7 vols, Berlin, 1969–88) to 11.61–6 (shields); 15.237–8 (the descent of Apollo, likened to a hawk); 18.610 (the armour made by Hephaistos to go with the Shield of Achilles) and 23.232 (Achilles sinking into sleep).

5 See the remarks of Raffaella Cribiore, Gymnastics of the Mind: Greek Education in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt (Princeton, 2001), p. 143. p. 143.

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the Progymnasmata textbooks for example were probably never intended to be a source of definitive statements of theory, but were keys to an educational process.⁶ As even C.S. Baldwin grudgingly admitted, they can give us some idea of the compositional categories in which students were taught to conceptualize their writings,⁷ as well as of habits of thought and analysis inculcated in the young.⁸ Theon certainly speaks as if this were the effect of the training he recommends. By offering examples of his own composition, the teacher will imprint them (tupoō) on his students’

minds, so that they in turn can imitate (mimeisthai) them.⁹ the two verbs reveal strikingly how Theon wished to think of the educational process he was representing: through his compositions, he shapes, even brands, the students’ minds.¹⁰ the student, in turn, learns by imitation, by aping the actions of his master until he is able to produce an analogous work of his own. in this way, he learns to imitate the processes, not merely the forms, of composition. as described by theon, it is an intellectual formation which takes root at the level of habit.

so the Progymnasmata reflect a stage in the shaping of the ‘literary consciousness’ (to borrow Genette’s phrase) of the elite students who studied rhetoric, rather than being critical tools for the analysis of texts.

They also derived their full utility and significance from their wider cultural and intellectual context. the Progymnasmata are most likely to prove useful if read, as far as possible, against that context, as i will try to do in the next chapters, by setting them in their larger educational context and by investigating the ideas about vividness in language and about the relationship of mind, language, memory and emotion which are presupposed by the authors of the Progymnasmata. though the Progymnasmata certainly do not suffice to explain works like the ancient

6 all the surviving versions of the Progymnasmata have been translated in george a.

kennedy, Progymnasmata: Greek Textbooks of Prose Composition and Rhetoric (Atlanta, 2003). I have supplied my own translations of the chapters on ekphrasis in Appendix A.

7 charles s. Baldwin, Medieval Rhetoric and Poetic (New York, 1928), p. 38: ‘Arid, impersonal as arithmetic, pedantically over-classified, sometimes inconsistent, these rules are nevertheless illuminating. They expose sophistic oratory. The patterns set forth for boys are recognizably the patterns of the public oratory of men.’

8 On the formation of habit in rhetorical education, see James J. Murphy, ‘The key role of habit in Roman rhetoric and education as described by Quintilian’, in Tomàs Albaladejo et al. (eds), Quintiliano: Historia y actualidad de la retórica (Logroño, 1998), pp. 141–50.

9 theon, Progymnasmata, ed. and trans. Michel Patillon and G. Bolognesi (Paris: Lesed. and trans. Michel Patillon and G. Bolognesi (Paris: LesMichel Patillon and G. Bolognesi (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1997), 70, l. 30 – 71, l. 2. Examples of such models are included in the corpus70, l. 30 – 71, l. 2. Examples of such models are included in the corpus of libanios, in Opera, vol. 8.

10 Libanios, Letter 337 similarly refers to a grammarian who is able to make the poets

‘dwell in students’ souls’. on ancient images of education as moulding and shaping, see teresa morgan, Literate Education in the Hellenistic and Roman Worlds (Cambridge, 1998), pp.

259–60.

novels, philostratos’ Eikones or even a declamation, they can provide one set of clues to the cultural and intellectual background of a work and to the basic assumptions about language and representation which inform the text. It is not surprising that the general influence of the Progymnasmata is detectable – sometimes quite patently, sometimes in a more subtle form – in poetry, historiography and other types of writing.

Ekphrasis and the progymnasmata

as exercises, the Progymnasmata were a keystone of the education process of the elite, marking the transition from grammar to rhetoric and presenting the student with a set of literary, linguistic and ethical concepts at a formative stage in his career.¹¹ With these exercises, students had their first taste of composition and their first opportunity to engage creatively with the literary traditions they had absorbed from the grammarians.

The rhetorical skills they taught were the badge of the adult educated male.¹² While some exercises, like the chreia (a discussion of a saying attributed to some famous figure such as Diogenes the Cynic) might include grammatical exercises (demanding that the students rewrite a simple sentence in different grammatical forms), others were primarily aimed at developing skills of presentation and argumentation.¹³ in the form in which they have come down to us, these exercises range from a fable (muthos), using animal characters to illustrate a moral, and a simple narrative (diēgēma), usually taken from mythology,¹⁴ through exercises in praise (enkōmion) and blame (psogos), to the systematic discussion of a general question such as whether one should marry (thesis) and the introduction of a law (nomou eisphora). Other exercises include the chreia;

11 see theon, Progymnasmata, 70, ll. 29–32. on the curriculum, see robert a. kaster,robert a. kaster, Guardians of Language: The Grammarian and Society in Late Antiquity (Berkeley, 1988); Malcolm; Malcolm heath, Menander: A Rhetor in Context (Oxford, 2004) and, on Progymnasmata in particular, see morgan, Literate Education, pp. 191–2; Cribiore, Gymnastics of the Mind, pp. 220–44 and The School of Libanius in Late Antique Antioch (Princeton, 2007), pp. 143–7; and Ruth Webb, ‘The Progymnasmata as practice’, in Yun Lee Too (ed.), Education in Greek and Roman Antiquity (Leiden, 2001), pp. 289–316.

12 Public speaking was understood as a masculine activity, and in consequence I will assume that students and teachers were male. on female education, see Ewen Bowie, ‘the‘the readership of Greek novels in the ancient world’, in James Tatum (ed.), The Search for the Ancient Novel (Baltimore, 1994), pp. 435–59 and Cribiore, Gymnastics of the Mind, pp. 74–101.

13 on the chreia, see Ronald Hock and Edward O’Neil, The Chreia in Ancient Rhetoric:

Volume I. The Progymnasmata (Atlanta, 1986) and Volume 2: Classroom Exercises (atlanta, 2002).

14 these narrative exercises, particularly diēgēma, prepared for the narrative section of a speech (diēgēsis).

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kataskeuē and anaskeuē, the confirmation or refutation of a story on the basis of certain criteria like probability; koinos topos (common place), a rehearsal of the commonly held opinions about a certain type of person (such as a murderer or a temple-robber); synkrisis, or comparison, in which one thing is proved better or worse than another by systematic comparison of the qualities of both; prosōpopoiia or ēthopoiia, a speech in the words of a character in a certain situation (such as ajax when he had lost the contest for the arms of Achilles, or Niobe’s lament for her children)¹⁵ and the composition of an ekphrasis.

Quintilian (Institutio oratoria, 1.9) mentions some of these exercises and notes that in first-century CE Rome this part of the curriculum was being taken over by the grammarians. The discussion of these exercises by Suetonius suggests that by the late first or early second century they were no longer taught by the rhetors at all, and were presumably taught entirely in the grammarians’ schools.¹⁶ However, Quintilian warns us against assuming that this was a universal phenomenon. He attributes some of the blame for this situation to the roman rhetors, many of whom considered such elementary teaching to be beneath them, and he contrasts their behaviour to that of their Greek counterparts who, he claims, recognized the value of the Progymnasmata and did not disdain to teach them. theon’s Progymnasmata may therefore represent an attempt to ensure that these exercises continued to be taught as a coherent whole within the Greek schools of rhetoric, in contrast to the haphazard approach of the Latin-speaking teachers. It seems that in Greek schools up to the end of antiquity and beyond the Progymnasmata continued to be taught as part of rhetorical studies and were not generally taken over by grammarians (though practice must have varied considerably). The fact that, in the fourth century, libanios composed fair copies of these exercises suggests that he still saw them all as falling within his duties as a rhetor, as Raffaella Cribiore has recently emphasized.¹⁷

The Sources for the progymnasmata

Theon claims to be the first to provide definitions (horoi) of the exercises (so the definition of ekphrasis found in all the versions of the Progymnasmata is

15 theon calls this exercise prosōpopoiia, a term that is used elsewhere specifically of a passage where words are attributed to an inanimate object, such as a city.

16 suetonius, De grammaticis et rhetoribus, 25.4. see also the introduction to theon’s Progymnasmata by Michel Patillon (pp. xiii–xiv). Robert Kaster in his edition of Suetonius (Oxford, 1995) suggests on pp. 279–80 that all the exercises had been relegated to the grammatici by suetonius’ time.

17 cribiore, The School of Libanius, pp. 143–7.

perhaps his own), though he makes no claim to have invented the exercises themselves.¹⁸ addressing himself to the teachers of rhetoric, he is the most informative of all the authors concerning the ways in which the exercises were to be taught, particularly in the discussion of pedagogical methods which precedes the chapters devoted to the individual exercises.

a much shorter version of the Progymnasmata is transmitted with the works of Hermogenes, a rhetorical theorist of the second century CE whose writings on style and on argumentation came to form the core of the Byzantine rhetorical curriculum.¹⁹ the ps.-hermogenean text may date to the third century.²⁰ its brevity led to complaints of obscurity from Byzantine readers.²¹ neither of these two treatises came close to the popularity of the fourth-century version by Aphthonios, identified as a pupil of libanios.²² aphthonios secured lasting popularity by appending his own examples of each exercise, rather than simply referring to passages in the ancient authors as his predecessors had done,²³ but his instructions are minimal. This deficiency in Aphthonios’ book was clearly felt by its Byzantine users as several commentaries were composed, drawing on theon among other sources, to explain his laconic text phrase by phrase.

One of these is by John Sardianos, probably writing in the ninth century, another by the eleventh-century scholar doxapatres.²⁴

one further ancient version of the Progymnasmata is by a certain Nikolaos, who is placed by the Souda in the fifth century.²⁵ Like Theon, Nikolaos goes into each exercise in some detail and is a good deal more

18 theon, Progymnasmata, 59, ll. 19–20.

19 ps.-hermogenes,ps.-hermogenes, Progymnasmata, in Opera, ed. Hugo Rabe (Leipzig, 1913), pp. 1–27.

the new edition of this text by michel patillon in Corpus Rhetoricum (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2008), pp. 180–206 appeared too late for me to take account of it in this book.

20 pierre laurens, preface to Hermogène: l’art rhétorique, trans. michel patillon (paris, 1997), p. 41.

21 A scholiast quoted in RE 2, 1 col.2797 [s.v. Aphthonios] commented on the difficulty of understanding the Progymnasmata attributed to Hermogenes, describing them as ‘rather unclear and difficult to comprehend’ (ἀσαφῆ πως καὶ δύσληπτα); cf. Doxapatres, Homiliae, p.

131.

22 aphthonios,aphthonios, Progymnasmata, ed. Hugo Rabe (Leipzig: Teubner, 1926). Corpus Rhetoricum, ed. Michel Patillon (Paris, 2008) contains a new edition of this text on pp. 112–62.Michel Patillon (Paris, 2008) contains a new edition of this text on pp. 112–62.

23 On the post-Antique popularity of Aphthonios, see Herbert Hunger, Die hochsprachliche profane Literatur der Byzantiner (2 vols, Munich, 1978), vol. 1, pp. 92–120 and, pp. 92–120 and and Jean-Claude Margolin, ‘La rhétorique d’Aphthonius et son influence au X�Ie siècle’, in Raymond Chevallier (ed.), Colloque sur la rhétorique (Paris, 1979), pp. 239–69.

24 ioannes sardianos, Commentarium in Aphthonium, ed. Hugo Rabe (Leipzig, 1928);

doxapatres, Homiliae in Aphthonii Progymnasmata, in Walz, Rhetores graeci, 2. on sardianos and Doxapatres, see Alexander Kazhdan (ed.), The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium (new York, 1991), pp. 1,067 and 660 respectively.

25 Nikolaos, Progymnasmata, ed. Joseph Felten (Leipzig, 1913). Souda, vol. 3, 469.

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informative than either Aphthonios or ps.-Hermogenes. Nikolaos claims that his aim was to compile rather than to compose a new treatise, and one senses the weight of tradition upon his shoulders when he remarks that the quantity of work left behind by the dead makes it impossible to invent anything new – all he can do is gather information.²⁶ in fact, his compilation contains some valuable and unique passages which contribute a great deal to the overall picture of the Progymnasmata and their place in rhetorical education. Our ignorance of so many of his sources makes it impossible to say whether Nikolaos’ modesty was false or not, but in relation to the surviving sources he shows originality, in some cases making explicit an idea which was only implicit in the shorter treatises, in others reflecting new developments. In particular he is the only one to introduce works of art into the theoretical literature as a subject matter for ekphrasis (see below, pp. 81–3). Finally, there is an anonymous Byzantine treatise on the Progymnasmata, preserved in several manuscripts and printed in Walz’s Rhetores graeci, which presents some interesting developments.²⁷

Exactly how these exercises were taught is unclear: some papyrus fragments of written compositions survive (though not, to my knowledge, any examples of a school ekphrasis), but Theon’s introduction shows that the compositions were also recited in a first step towards rhetorical performance.²⁸ Even when written, the exercises may later have been committed to memory. So these were not just exercises in prose composition the way we would understand it. they were part of a cumulative training in the techniques and processes of rhetorical performance. In Theon’s system, in particular, texts, whether composed by the student or the teacher, were not closed literary forms, but open to endless manipulation, elaboration and discussion: students were taught to subject the content of stories, sayings, even ekphraseis, to a process of confirmation and refutation, arguing for or against their likelihood.²⁹

the Progymnasmata were eminently practical texts, shaped to fulfil a particular role within the ancient curriculum. the surviving examples do represent a remarkably unified group, especially bearing in mind the centuries which elapsed between Theon and Nikolaos. But they were far from being a static or abstract system. The conformity which strikes the modern reader is the result of centuries of selection in which many other versions were lost along the way, such as those by several authors mentioned

26 Nikolaos, Progymnasmata, p. 1.

27 Walz, Rhetores graeci, 3, pp. 595–8.

28 On the evidence for the use of books in education, see Cribiore, Gymnastics of the Mind, pp. 143–56.

29 see michel patillon, introduction to theon, Progymnasmata, pp. xciii–xcvii; Webb,

‘the Progymnasmata as practice’.