The Captor's Image Greek Culture in Roman Ecphrasis

by Dufallo, Basil

• ISBN13: 9780199735877
• ISBN10: 0199735875
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2013-02-22
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

An influential view of ecphrasis--the literary description of art objects--chiefly treats it as a way for authors to write about their own texts without appearing to do so, and even insist upon the aesthetic dominance of the literary text over the visual image. However, when considering its use in ancient Roman literature, this interpretation proves insufficient.The Captor's Imageargues for the need to see Roman ecphrasis, with its prevalent focus on Hellenic images, as a site of subtle, ongoing competition between Greek and Roman cultures. Through close readings of ecphrases in a wide range of Latin authors--from Plautus, Catullus, and Horace to Vergil, Martial, and Ovid, among others--Dufallo contends that Roman ecphrasis reveals an uncertain receptivity to Greek culture that includes implications for the shifting notions of Roman identity in the Republican and Imperial periods. Individual chapters explore how the simple assumption of a self-asserting ecphrastic text is called into question by comic performance, intentionally inconsistent narrative, satire, Greek religious iconography, the contradictory associations of epic imagery, and the author's subjection to a patron. Visual material such as wall painting, statuary, and drinkware vividly contextualizes the discussion. As the first book-length treatment of artistic ecphrasis at Rome,The Captor's Imageresituates a major literary trope within its hybrid cultural context while advancing the idea of ecphrasis as a cultural practice through which the Romans sought to redefine their identity with, and against, Greekness.

Author Biography

Basil Dufallo is Associate Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan.

Table of Contents

Abbreviations
Introduction. Greek Culture in Roman Ecphrasis
1. Staging Ecphrasis in Early Latin Literature: From Naevius to Plautus and Terence
2. Becoming Ariadne: Marveling at Peleus's Coverlet with the Inconsistent Narrator of Catullus 64
3. The Challenge of Rustic Art: Ideals of Order in Vergil, Eclogues 3 and Horace, Satires 1.8
4. Describing the Divine: The Ecphrastic Temples of Vergil, Georgics 3.13-36 and Propertius, Elegies 2.31
5. Heroic Objects: Ecphrasis in the Aeneid and Metamorphoses
6. Sex, Satire, and the Hybrid Self in Petronian Ecphrasis
7. The Patron's Image: Philhellenism, Panegyric, and Ecphrasis in Statius and Martial
Epilogue. Captives and Captors: Apuleius and Philostratus
Bibliography
Index