Epilogue

ABSTRACT

How should we think about Hellenistic aesthetics? To judge from the articles in this volume, the best answer might be (to quote the Facebook status bar): ‘it’s complicated’. I propose in this brief afterword to consider some of the tensions and oppositions in the foregoing discussions of literature, music, art, and philosophy and to outline potential paths for future exploration. Some of these conflicts involve resistance to commonly accepted notions of Hellenistic aesthetics, for example, to the ‘slender’ refinement associated with Callimachus, or to the sweetness and symmetry associated with Theocritus. Some involve differing modes of creation and perception (e.g. producing/interpreting a sculpture versus a poem). Others centre around philosophical treatments of aesthetics which distinguish form and content, and, in a larger sense, the physical and the intellectual. As the essays themselves note, however, the philosophers and artists/musicians/poets can no more be untangled from each other than form can from content. And although the articles offer a number of examples of this type of intriguing and productive tension, I will focus on three here—‘large versus small’ (§1), ‘sight versus hearing’ (§2), and ‘harmony versus discord’ (§3)—before closing with some final reflections on technē as an overarching aesthetic principle (§4).

1. LARGE VERSUS SMALL

Students who have taken a Hellenistic poetry class often come away with a phrase attributed to Callimachus that they find useful in many academic contexts: μέγα βιβλίον, μέγα κακόν, ‘Big book, big evil’ (fr. 465 Pf.).¹ Here—in short, proverbial form—is what looks like the essence of Callimachean poetics: the small, the delicate, and the slender is valued; the big, the coarse, and the thick is not. Positive terms are words like λεπτός; thus, Apollo tells Callimachus to keep his Muse λεπταλέην, slender, in the Aetia prologue (fr. 1.24 Harder). Negative terms are words like παχύς; Apollo contrasts the Muse with a sacrificial victim who is fed to become πάχιστον, as fat as possible (fr. 1.23 Harder).

When the new papyrus of Posidippus’ epigrams emerged at the beginning of this millennium, Callimachus seemed to have acquired reinforcements. The first section of the papyrus, Lithika (‘poems about stones’), is dominated by a series of epigrams about miniature, carved gems, admired as much for their tiny, precise craftsmanship as for the value of the stones themselves. We find the same emphasis on the small, the delicate, and the refined. Indeed, the first fully preserved word in the papyrus that is not a proper noun (the opening poem is quite fragmentary) is λεπτή (1.4 A–B). In the better-preserved epigrams that follow, the small size of the stones is primarily indicated by contrasting the stone with the larger human body that wears it: one stone hangs on a girl’s arm (4.6 A–B), others are in necklaces dangling on the recipient’s breast (6.5–6, 7.5 A–B), a fourth is held in the hand (9.3 A–B). But in one case, as Bing and Höschele note, there is an explicit focus on the diminutive size; the great marvel (θαῦμα μέγα, 15.7 A–B) is that the engraver did not lose his sight while carving such miniscule designs.²

In their article, Bing and Höschele set these delicately carved gems against items that are distinctly characterized as μέγα: colossal statues, parades with massive display, enormous royal boats, and pavilions. Their point is that there can be an aesthetic of the large; different occasions produce different aesthetic contexts. And admiration for the large qua large is possible without ignoring the loss of aesthetic qualities incompatible with that size. They note multiple ancient sources which combine praise of the huge scale or costliness of an object with concerns about its design or workmanship. One is the well-known comment of Strabo that the giant statue of Zeus at Olympia, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, failed in respecting symmetria (proportion) because if Zeus stood up from his throne he would tear the roof off his own temple (Strabo 8.3.30). Another is the criticism from Callixenus, in his description of a Ptolemaic royal barge, that an ornamental frieze on the vessel is amazing in its opulence, but only middling in its workmanship (τέχνῃ).³ Most telling, to me, is the anecdote in Josephus about Ptolemy Philadelphus’ donation of a new table to the temple in Jerusalem. When he realizes that he cannot make the replacement physically bigger than the original, he resolves to make it ‘more’ in two other ways: it will be ‘more admirable in the variegation (poikilia) and the beauty of its materials’ (JA 12.62) and ‘if he could not make it different in size [from the previous table], at least he could make it better in craft (τέχνῃ) and originality (καινουργίᾳ)’ (JA 12.77).⁴

To extend the notion of ‘situational aesthetics’ adduced by Bing and Höschele, it might therefore be useful to add two further items to our original pairing of ‘large’ and ‘small’ as aesthetic qualities. One is fairly obvious: technē, which, as we have seen, can come into conflict with the large: both Strabo and Callixenus imply that once objects reach a certain scale, precise craftsmanship may not be possible.⁵ The other is truphē (a term originally meaning softness and luxury but frequently used to refer to the cultural phenomenon of Hellenistic royal display). Truphē is naturally connected with largeness, technē with smallness. Philadelphus thus in fact makes an exchange when he cannot fulfil his original vision of a table five times bigger: he will replace truphē with technē, and offer in addition an alternative form of truphē, varied and precious materials.

Let us return to the stone poems of Posidippus that set off this discussion of large versus small. As Bing and Höschele note, while the section emphasizes the aesthetics of the small, there are two poems about massive stones at the end. Poem 18 describes an enormous stone-mixing vessel; its massive liquid volume and its dimensions (notably its enormous thickness, πάχος, 18.5 A–B), fill the entire epigram with numbers and units of measurement. It is very reminiscent of Callixenus’ unending stream of numbers and measurements as he recounts the staggering spectacle of the Grand Procession of Ptolemy Philadelphus (Ath. 5.197c–203b), and it distinctly evokes the oversized display characteristic of truphē. The ‘nine men’ (18.1 A–B) summoned in the first line of poem 18 indicate a context of public celebration. Poem 19, in turn, marvels at the force needed to eject a twenty-four cubit boulder out of the sea. Mythic allusions and a hymnic invocation to Poseidon (as the author of the marvel) reveal that we are now in the world of divine power, whose colossal scale is of course the model for Ptolemaic royal display. This is a very different context from the private, erotic world of viewers admiring gifts of jewels on their lovers’ bodies at the start of the Lithika; an appropriate shift in the economy of the Hellenistic aesthetic marks the move from private to public space. A final thought: while the explicitly acknowledged myths and deities in poem 19 are Greek, the Ptolemies maintained a doubled religious life as both Greek and Egyptian royal rulers. It could be worthwhile, in considering this topic further, to reflect on how Egyptian aesthetic traditions might contribute to the battle between large and small.

2. SIGHT VERSUS HEARING

The word ‘aesthetics’ literally means ‘related to perception’. It is formed from the verb ‘to perceive’ (αἰσθάνομαι), which is used by Greek authors to refer to multiple types of sensory input: seeing, hearing, even smelling (Hdt. 3.87). Etymologically the verb looks to derive from ἀΐω,⁶ which, while it also has a general meaning of ‘perceive’, is weighted more towards ‘hearing’ in particular. This lexical and etymological background should inform consideration of our second set of tensions in Hellenistic aesthetics: what happens when there is ambiguity about the means of perception? How do we judge the success or failure of an ecphrastic poem, which translates a work of art from one means of perception (visual) into another (aural)? What if the poem itself is more an aesthetic evaluation than a description? Even if the poem seems largely descriptive, is there not an implicit competition between the visual and the verbal inherent in the act of reframing the former as the latter? The answers to these questions will either expand or limit the technical aesthetic criteria we can employ in evaluation. While some criteria embraced by the Hellenistic philosophers and critics can function across both modes (e.g. proportionality), others (e.g. euphony or verisimilitude) operate more in one realm than in the other.

Ecphrasis is embedded into the very foundations of Greek poetry with Homer’s account of the making of Achilles’ shield in Book 18 of the Iliad. As the editors of this volume note in their introduction, however, it is an especially beloved device of the Hellenistic poets. For his hero Jason, more a diplomat than a warrior, Apollonius describes designs woven into a cloak instead of metalwork on a shield (Arg. 1.721–68). Theocritus’ goatherd in Idyll 1 persuades the shepherd Thyrsis to sing his famous Daphnis song by offering a carved cup and praises its elaborate decorations in an extended display of ecphrastic skill (Id. 1.27–56). In a briefer format, Hellenistic epigram turns its piquant lens on crafted objects great and small: Posidippus alone has epigrams treating everything from the lighthouse at Alexandria (115 A–B) to the miniature gems mentioned above.

The two epigrams of Leonidas discussed by Chaldekas bring this question forward in its most complicated form. First, there is the issue of whether the objects described are ‘art’. Ecphrasis originally referred to the technique of describing an object so that a listener/reader can picture it; the term was not originally limited to works of art like sculpture or painting, although that is how the term is now largely used.⁷ We have already noted that the ‘stone poems’ of Posidippus include not only crafted stones, large and small, but also a natural boulder (19 A–B). To this we can add another non-worked stone, the magnet discussed in poem 17. The framing by the poet is the same for both the worked and unworked stones: a mix of description and admiration. As Chaldekas argues, however, descriptions of objects in Greek verse are overwhelmingly of art objects, and thus poetic focus on any object could ‘artify’ it by association.⁸

What is being described in these epigrams of Leonidas? Both treat dedications to Athena by retired woodworkers and consist of a list of carpenter’s tools (drill, saw, axe, etc.). That means that in addition to being ecphrastic epigrams, these are anathematic epigrams, that is, epigrams accompanying items dedicated to a divinity. Such dedications are a feature of sanctuaries throughout the Greco–Roman world, in all eras and across every region. Patients who received cures might dedicate a model of a limb, sailors rescued from the sea an oar, a new bride a lock of hair. Inscriptions (prose or verse) accompanying the object typically name the worshipper, the divinity to whom the object is dedicated, and the reason for the dedication. In the case of a retiring artisan, the dedication normally consists of tools of the trade; this may take the form of (1) actual tools, but it could also occasionally be (2) model tools, or (3) a tablet with images of the tools.⁹ Art, or not art? The first is not; the second is ambiguous; the third at least approaches the status of a sculptural relief or vase painting.

The second layer of complication involves the reality of the objects Leonidas describes. Most literary examples of anathematic epigrams are fictional; there likely are no woodcutters, no tools, or images of tools hanging in a temple of Athena. This means that Leonidas is almost certainly describing, in words, objects that he himself has imagined. The image relayed to his audience has no true visual antecedent, and the tension between two modes of artistic production, poetry and woodworking—or even between poetry and, say, tablet-painting—is illusory. By extension, the tension between two modes of perception (aural and visual) is also a mirage. Behind the words of the poem lie … more words.

The third layer of complication involves the nature of verse production and reception in the Hellenistic era. The audience for Homer’s ecphrasis of Achilles’ shield would have experienced that passage purely as an aural phenomenon, listening to a recitation. In the bookish world of the Hellenistic poets, writing and reading overlay the original affiliation of poetry with aural perception, and ‘verbal’ no longer coincides with ‘aural’. An era that can produce the technopaegnia (poems written to form shapes by manipulating the length of lines of verse) is an era that sees poetry as well as hearing it. Again, the tension between the visual and aural modes of perception blurs, this time on the receiving end. If the poem is also (at least in part) visual, then the gap between original and description narrows.

In the case of anathematic epigrams, the confusion between visual and aural, between object and words, is even more fraught. The underlying premise of the dedicatory epigram (real or fictional) is that the verse is inscribed on the dedicated object, often speaking in the first person with the voice of the item. For example, in the ‘dedicatory’ section of the Posidippus epigram book, a cup dedicated by a new freedwoman speaks in its own voice: ‘Epikratis dedicated me to Arsinoe, after she drank the water of freedom for the first time’ (38.1–2 A–B). While Leonidas chooses to use the third person and narrate his dedications from an objective point of view, the common understanding that the verse would be inscribed on the object simultaneously reifies the words and verbalizes the object. We end up with an intellectual Möbius strip where the description of the object is imagined as part of the object itself. The only analogous situation I can think of on the visual side of the fence are the vase paintings which include inscriptions (especially those which are not merely labels); a good example would be the vase depicting Sappho reading from a scroll labelled ΕΠΕΑ ΠΤΕΡΟΕ⟨Ν⟩ΤΑ (‘winged words’), with further verse incised inside the scroll. The transfer of a poetic term for speech to a label on the outside of a scroll shows the vase painter adopting the phrasing of the poets into his visual world.¹⁰

Untangling the visual and the verbal would be helped by further discussion of Hellenistic visual art in the light of this volume. Is the Telephus frieze encroaching on the narrative province of the epic poet? Does the inclusion of old women and children as subjects for prestige genres like sculpture offer the same artistic promotion for characters poorly represented in epic and tragedy that ecphrasis offers to nonartistic objects?

3. HARMONY VERSUS DISCORD

Nelson’s discussion of ‘anti-sweetness’ in the pseudo-Theocritean Idyll 23 raises the question of whether there can be an aesthetics of discord as well as the more traditional aesthetics oriented towards harmony and order. A well-known fragment from Timon of Phlius’ satirical Silloi may offer a useful starting point for considering this problem (786 SH = Ath. 1.22d):

πολλοὶ μὲν βόσκονται ἐν Αἰγύπτῳ πολυφύλῳ

βιβλιακοὶ χαρακῖται ἀπείριτα δηριόωντες

Μουσέων ἐν ταλάρῳ

Many are feeding in populous Egypt

scribblers on papyrus, ceaselessly wrangling

in the birdcage of the Muses.

The above translation is Pfeiffer’s, from his History of Classical Scholarship.¹¹ A more nuanced translation, based on Dee Clayman’s commentary,¹² might read: ‘Many are being pastured in Egypt with its many tribes, bookish cloisterlings,¹³ ceaselessly wrangling in the wicker birdcage of the Muses.’

Note the emphasis on multitude (πολλοί), on the enclosure of the poets/scholars (like birds in cages), on the multiethnic composition of Egypt (Αἰγύπτῳ πολυφύλῳ: hinting at additional possibilities for conflict), and on a term for feeding (βόσκονται) that is used for pasturing herd animals—all this in addition to the main point about the argumentative nature of the scholars. Timon belittles the Alexandrian poets and scholars as quarrelsome parasites, enclosed like pet birds, fed like cows, and yet even in this intellectual haven unable to stop fighting with each other.

It is tempting to see the ‘wrangling’ simply as part of the insult package: the intellectuals in the museum are confined, dependent, and unruly. If the scholars, however, are being protected and fed by their royal patrons, it is surely in the expectation of some benefit to the Ptolemaic regime. While Timon implies that the quarrels prevent the lazy scholars and poets from producing anything of value, a caged bird is fed and protected because it provides entertainment, and the quarrels Timon scorns could certainly provide such entertainment. A different view of these intellectual disputes can be found in Callimachus’ fourth Iamb: two boastful trees, the laurel and the olive, are disputing their status in the tree world. When a bramble intervenes to make peace between them, she does produce a temporary accord; unfortunately for her, what they agree on is that her lowly status makes her ineligible to criticize them (fr. 198.94–104 Pf.). The character promoting harmony is summarily dismissed; the right to quarrel triumphs. To privilege harmony over discord in constructing a Hellenistic aesthetic, in other words, may well suppress an essential feature of art in this pedantic age.

It is true, as noted by Čelkytė, that the Hellenistic Stoics promote harmony (in both the physical and spiritual sense) as an important feature of certain forms of art. For example, she demonstrates that the Stoics believed music was beneficial even for infants and young children, that is, human beings who do not yet have true intellectual capacity. The harmonies of well-constructed music produce calm. Even for reasoning adults, the patterned forms of music and verse, according to Cleanthes, are closer to the ‘divine’ than the prose writings of the philosophers.¹⁴ For both children and adults, the orderly and pleasurable sounds of music are thought to encourage rationality and aptitude for learning. The Epicurean Philodemus, meanwhile, offers a different type of approach to the notion of ‘harmony’: instead of focusing only on form, he suggests that additional effects on the audience can be achieved by aligning form and content.¹⁵ McOsker and Fratantuono show how Virgil manifests that double harmony in a series of passages from the Aeneid exhibiting striking sound effects, in many cases paralleling examples from Philodemus’ own epigrams.

It is also true that the Alexandrian poets value euphony as a source of both sensory and social harmony. In the Aetia prologue, Callimachus praises sweetness and clarity (γλυκύς, ‘sweet’, fr. 1.11; μελιχρότεραι, ‘more honeyed’ 1.16; λιγὺν ἦχον, ‘pure-toned sound’, 1.29 Harder) and condemns loud, confusing noise (θόρυβος, 1.30). Apollonius opens the action of the Argonautica with a depiction of Orpheus singing ‘with ambrosial voice’ to calm the quarrelling heroes (1.494–512). Theocritus’ herdsmen saturate the first Idyll with sugary compliments for each other’s music, combining various forms of ἡδύς (‘sweet, pleasant’) along with words for honey (Id. 1.1, 2, 7, 65, 146–47).¹⁶ Song is praised for features that effect calm (Apollonius), disparaged when it offers jangling discord (Callimachus), and described as a sensory treat (Theocritus).

And yet, when Theocritus opens Idyll 1 with formally paired exchanges of ‘sweet’ compliments between his two herdsmen-musicians (Id. 1.1–11), that praise imagines that the performer will be taking part in a competition with an adversary—and losing (admittedly, the opponents are Pan and the Muses, respectively). The most carefully ordered, rhythmically assured, symmetrical passages in Theocritean pastoral are precisely those passages in which his herdsmen compete against each other in singing contests—contests which, of necessity, set the characters in opposition to each other. One could argue that this is a case where the formal harmony of poetry/music brings social harmony (a resolution in the form of a judgement and prize) to characters who start out at odds. But, as Nelson shows in his discussion of the pseudo-Theocritean Idyll 23, one could also argue that the soft, sheltered symmetry of Theocritean pastoral contains the seeds of its own disruption. For every Idyll 6, where the contest ends in an amicable tie and exchange of gifts, there is an Idyll 5, which concludes with the winner deriding the loser and then threatening to castrate an unruly billy goat.

In a similar vein, Apollonius’ portrait of Orpheus as a conflict-resolution specialist has an odd and interesting feature. Yes, Orpheus’ divine voice, ἀμβροσίῃ αὐδῇ (Arg. 1.512; ‘ambrosial’ references both the divine sphere and the motif of sweet taste already noted above) restores social harmony by calming the quarrelling Argonauts. But Apollonius foregrounds the quarrel by giving the words of the quarrellers in direct quotation; the song of Orpheus itself is reported as a second-hand summary. What is more, the Argonauts are unable to resume normal speech at the end of the song. It is perhaps too harmonious; when Orpheus halts his performance, the Argonauts sit paralysed and voiceless, still straining to hear (ἔτι προύχοντο κάρηνα | πάντες ὁμῶς ὀρθοῖσιν ἐπ᾽οὔασιν ἠρεμέοντες | κηληθμῷ, Arg. 1.513–15, ‘all still leaning in with pricked ears, sitting silent under his spell’).

Finally, for all his praise of slender elegance in the Aetia prologue, Callimachus seems to relish the long, bombastic words that describe the disharmony he condemns. In some sections he uses those words to describe his own poetry, in an odd form of programmatic praeteritio. When he mentions a ‘loud noisy poem’ (μέγα ψοφέουσαν ἀοιδήν) and ‘thundering’ (βροντᾶν) in lines 19–20, he frames his own stylistics by negating the fictional expectations of his critics: ‘don’t expect me to produce big chaotic noises; thundering belongs to Zeus’. In other sections, he contrasts his own choices (the ‘pure-toned sound’, λιγὺν ἦχον, 1.29) with the din of donkeys (θόρυβος, 1.30) but then lingers in spondaic delight over the onomatopoetic word for ‘bray’, which fills the last two feet of the following line (1.31): θηρὶ μὲν οὐατόεντα πανείκελον ὀγκήσαιτο, ‘let someone else bray like the eared beast’. And λιγύς itself is an ambiguous term. We translate it, in this context, as ‘clear-sounding’ or ‘pure-toned’, and it is true, as Harder notes, that it has a long history of positive associations when describing speech or poetry.¹⁷ It also, however, means ‘shrill’ or ‘penetrating’ (e.g. of the wind, Od. 3.186) and is used to describe the sound of lamentation (ululation) and of flutes. In this regard it is parallel to another Callimachean aesthetic term, τορός. When Callimachus condemns the Lyde of his predecessor Antimachus as παχὺ γράμμα καὶ οὐ τορόν, we translate it as something like ‘pudgy writing, and unclear’. The root meaning of toros, however, is ‘piercing’ (as in a drill).

Aesthetic clarity, then, is not always pleasant to hear. Nor is discord always the enemy of harmony. Just ask barbershop quartets, who make frequent use of dominant seventh chords that are built on dissonance. When Nelson discovers an alternative and oppositional aesthetic of harsh stoniness in Idyll 23 that, too, is a Hellenistic aesthetic, promoted from a subtle undercurrent to the main theme.

4. CRAFTING HELLENISTIC AESTHETICS: TECHNĒ

After this brief survey of the contradictions and ambiguities in Hellenistic aesthetics, is there any aesthetic principle that can hold its own across the different genres, media, and philosophical schools surveyed in this volume? In spite of its occasional difficulties with excessively large objects, I would nominate technē. In the Aetia prologue, Callimachus dismisses his demonized critics, the Telchines, with an aesthetic command (fr. 1.17–18 Harder):

ἔλλετε Βασκανίης ὀλοὸν γένος. αὖθι δὲ τέχνηι

 κρίνετε, μὴ σχοίνωι Περσίδι τὴν σοφίην·

Begone, destructive tribe of Bascania. And from now on use craft

to judge poetry, not a Persian surveying chain.

Callimachus invokes craft as the proper measure for sophia (which refers here to poetry,¹⁸ but is in my view deliberately broader in scope) because the term ‘craft’ encapsulates the combination of labour and artistry that is valued by all the authors treated here. Craft smooths hexameters; it adorns melodies; it carves precious stones; it designs royal gifts to the temple. Craft operates across the verbal, the musical, and the visual, linking the poet, the musician, and the sculptor.

Craft is also part of the everyday world of those who view or hear art. Leonidas’ woodworker has spent his career engaged in technē (AP 6.205.10); so has the doctor who dedicates a skeleton to Asclepius in an epigram by Posidippus (95.11 A–B). Even Callimachus’ Persian surveyor can be said to practise craft. It is simply that his craft is the wrong one in this context. As the Stoics argue, while craft is an essential method to bring order to multiple endeavours in life, specific pursuits have their own specific technai.¹⁹ It is the virtue of craft that it partakes of both the specific and the general, adapting itself to each project while maintaining a more universal identity as a disciplined system of production, correction, and harmonization. Perhaps, then, we could think of ‘craft’ as the ultimate form of situational aesthetics. The creation and presentation of art involves multiple forms of craft: a statue is carved with tools and set on a base; a song is accompanied by crafted instruments; a poem is written on manufactured paper with a pen cut from reed. Each aspect of production and performance has its own technē. The result is an aesthetics that is no less demanding than the traditional focus on ‘harmony’ or ‘proportion’, but is much more expansive.

ABBREVIATIONS

ABBREVIATIONS
 
• A–B

  Austin, C. and G. Bastianini 2002: Posidippi Pellaei quae supersunt omnia, Milan

 
• Harder

  Harder, M. A. 2012: Callimachus, Aetia: Introduction, Text, Translation and Commentary, 2 vols, Oxford

 
• Pf.

  Pfeiffer, R. 1949–1953: Callimachus, 2 vols, Oxford

 
• SH

  Lloyd-Jones, H. and P. Parsons 1983: Supplementum Hellenisticum, Berlin

REFERENCES

Footnotes