Shadi Bartsch

Introduction: Eight Ways of Looking at an Ekphrasis

Words about an image, itself often embedded in a larger text: ekphrasis today has become such an important element of scholarly approaches to the novel, to epic, to the Romantics, and even to genres beyond the literary, that it may be difficult to remember its relative obscurity of a quarter-century ago. Once skimmed over as superfluous, or derided as rhetorical showmanship, ekphrasis now seems to present countless opportunities for the discovery of meaning: it has been variously treated as a mirror of the text, a mirror in the text, a mode of specular inversion, a further voice that disrupts or extends the message of the narrative, a prefiguration for that narrative (whether false or true) in its suggestions. The moment of ekphrasis can be and has been characterized as gendered, spatial, static, epiphanic, mute, appealing to audience in the text or outside the text, or to no one but its speaker in the text—and even as closing off the possibility of interpretation rather than appealing to it. On the psychological level, we have become acquainted with theories of ekphrastic hope—“when we discover a ‘sense’ in which language can do what so many writers have wanted it to do: to make us see”—or ekphrastic fear, the possibility that the distinguishing characteristics between word and image might collapse. 1 And always, of course, there have been attempts to expand or contract the sense of what ekphrasis itself means: the description of an artwork, a vivid presentation of any scene, whether natural or invented (so-called notional ekphrasis), 2 the representation in words of a visual representation. Ekphrasis can of course be all of these things and do all of these things, though rarely simultaneously; and as is well known, purists would limit it to the definition of the ancient progymnasmata , while modernity tends to think first of its applicability to the visual arts. 3 In being multiform, it defies definition, and it especially defies the many attempts to still it, to render words into plastic art by emphasizing the spatial, the petrified, the eternal. If for Krieger (1967, 5) ekphrasis symbolizes “the frozen, stilled world of plastic

Lucan and Historical Bias

Lucan’s anti-Caesarian bias in shows him as ardens et concitatus indeed (Quint. Inst. 10.1.10). We are less inclined now to imagine that the narrator’s impassioned voice represents that of the author himself, but nonetheless the narrator’s statements of favoritism or denunciation set the poem apart from its epic predecessors. What is at stake in the narrator’s self-representation as a man who cannot speak sine ira et studio? If as the Romans held, personal benefit or detriment is the cause of historical bias, Lucan may use such bias to demonstrate that the outcome of the civil war has been a personal devastation even to later generations.

“Wait a Moment, Phantasia”: Ekphrastic Interference in Seneca and Epictetus

he only extended ekphrasis in the entirety of Seneca’s work opens traditionally enough. It is a description of Syracuse, considered in antiquity to be the most beautiful and opulent of cities, and thus a natural choice for the ekphrasis of a geographical site. Cicero praised the locale in his Verrines for its size and beauty, its double harbor, its temples and statues (Verr. 4.117–19); over 150 years later, Quintilian proffered this very laus Siciliae as an outstanding example of an ekphrasis of a particular region.1 Seneca seems to follow this model in starting his own laus Siciliae with a list of features that will excite admiration in any prospective traveler to the city. In an exposition introduced by the verb mirari, “to wonder at,” punctuated by the fivefold repetition of videbis, “you will see,” and generously sprinkled with superlatives, he describes for his audience the narrow straits of Messina, the fearsome whirlpool Charybdis, the stream Arethusa, the peaceful harbor, and finally the deep stone quarries where so many Athenians perished at the close of the ill-fated Sicilian expedition of 413 b.c.e. (Cons. ad Marc. 17.2–4):

The Cambridge Companion to Seneca

1. Seneca: an introduction Shadi Bartsch and Alessandro Schiesaro Part I. The Senecan Corpus: 2. Seneca multiplex: the phases (and phrases) of Senecas life and works Susanna Braund 3. Senecan tragedy Christopher Trinacty 4. Absent presence in Senecas Epistles: philosophy and friendship Catharine Edwards 5. The dialogue in Senecas Dialogues (and other moral essays) Matthew Roller 6. Seneca on monarchy and the political life: De Clementia, De Tranquillitate Animi, De Otio Malcolm Schofield 7. Senecas scientific works Francesca Romana Berno 8. Senecas Apocolocyntosis: censors in the afterworld Kirk Freudenburg Part II. Texts and Contexts: 9. Seneca and Augustan culture James Ker 10. Seneca and Neronian Rome: in the mirror of time Victoria Rimell 11. Style and form in Senecas writings Gareth Williams 12. Senecas images and metaphors Mireille Armisen-Marchetti 13. Theater and theatricality in Senecas world Cedric A. J. Littlewood 14. Senecas emotions David Konstan Part III. Senecan Tensions: 15. Senecan selves Shadi Bartsch 16. Senecas shame David Wray 17. Theory and practice in Senecas life and writings Carey Seal 18. Senecas originality Elizabeth Asmis 19. Seneca and Epicurus: the allure of the other Alessandro Schiesaro Part IV. The Senecan Tradition: 20. Seneca and the ancient world Aldo Setaioli 21. Seneca and Christian tradition Chiara Torre 22. Seneca redivivus: Seneca in the medieval and Renaissance world Roland Mayer 23. Senecan political thought from the Middle Ages to early modernity Peter Stacey 24. Seneca and the Moderns Francesco Citti.

Roman Literature: Translation, Metaphor & Empire

The Romans understood that translation entails transformation. The Roman term “translatio” stood not only literally for a carrying-across (as by boat) of material from one country to another, but also (metaphorically) for both linguistic translation and metaphorical transformation. These shared usages provide a lens on Roman anxieties about their relationship to Greece, from which they both transferred and translated a literature to call their own. Despite the problematic association of the Greeks with pleasure, rhetoric, and poetic language, the Roman elite argued for the possibility of translation and transformation of Greek texts into a distinctly Roman and authoritative mode of expression. Ciceros hope was that eventually translated Latin texts would replace the Greek originals altogether. In the end, however, the Romans seem to have felt that effeminacy had the last laugh.