Approaching Hellenistic aesthetics^*

Abstract

The scholarship of the last four decades has decisively laid to rest the perception of Hellenistic poetry as art produced solely ‘for art’s sake’. Numerous studies have demonstrated this poetry’s extensive cultural, political, and social embeddedness,¹ such that Hellenistic art and poetry are no longer considered ‘mere’ aesthetic responses to archaic and classical models.² After all, the very idea of aesthetics as an autonomous field divorced from reality is an oversimplification: recent studies have highlighted the myriad ways in which aesthetics is itself a socially embedded field.³ The challenge now facing scholars of the Hellenistic period is how to combine these new contextual frameworks with a full appreciation of the artistic and literary qualities of Hellenistic literature and art. To address this challenge, we must put ‘Hellenistic aesthetics’ back under the microscope.

Recent years have seen an increasing interest in the study of aesthetics in the ancient world,⁴ but a systematic approach to the aesthetics of the Hellenistic period remains a desideratum. Of course, important contributions have been written in this area, such as Barbara Fowler’s The Hellenistic Aesthetic (1989), which drew attention to various themes and techniques that can be identified in both the poetry and plastic arts of the Hellenistic period. More recently, Graham Zanker’s Modes of Viewing in Hellenistic Poetry and Art (2004) has offered an updated version of this approach by focusing on the experience of viewing art and reading texts through the lens of ‘visuality’.⁵ Such studies are valuable for their interdisciplinary approach to the subject, crossing different genres and media; but even so, they are not without their limitations. For example, in postulating a singular overarching ‘aesthetic’, Fowler’s book forecloses the potential to acknowledge different or competing aesthetic modes. Similarly, Zanker’s book has been criticized for failing to deliver fully on the plurality of ‘modes’ that are promised in its title.⁶ ‘Visuality’ can help to situate ancient art within the general frame of aesthetics (in terms of the Greek aisthēsis, ‘perception’), but it does not grasp the full range of different aesthetic frames and responses that accompanied ancient experiences of viewing. Difference is a key component of ancient aesthetics, and it has come to play a major role in the modern study of this ancient phenomenon.⁷

However, the multifarious differences of ‘Hellenistic aesthetics’ have turned the topic into a disparate and contested field, which is approached with different assumptions and levels of approbation in various branches of classical studies. Literary critics and art historians must often deal with implicit aesthetics derived from the content of the artworks they study. ‘Poetics’ (or ‘literary aesthetics’) is a popular field of classical scholarship, but it is also difficult to get a grip on: we often seem to end up with as many ‘poetics’ as there are poets and themes.⁸ By contrast, when it comes to the aesthetics of the plastic arts, we are unable to rely on the words of the artist in most cases, so it is difficult for us to characterize their aesthetic positioning verbally. Nevertheless, scholars such as Fowler and Zanker have sought commonalities between literary aesthetics and the aesthetics of plastic arts, what is referred to as an aesthetic ‘koinē’. This approach can lead to some important discoveries, but it also risks overlooking the unique aspects of different media. Philosophers have the benefit of engaging with explicit statements about beauty and art, but many of the sources for Hellenistic philosophy are notoriously fragmentary and obscure. A definitive history of philosophical aesthetics in the Hellenistic period presents many challenges of interpretation and reconstruction. And beyond explicit reflections on art and beauty, one must also take account of ancient reflections on αἴσθησις (‘perception’) as the basis for an ancient ‘aesthetic theory’ avant la lettre.

One goal of this volume is to initiate an interdisciplinary dialogue between these different dimensions of aesthetics, offering fresh approaches and frameworks to galvanize further research. To this end, we have brought together scholars who work on the literature, philosophy, and art history of the Hellenistic period. Each article offers a new angle on at least one aspect of Hellenistic aesthetics. In this introduction, we will explore the different disciplinary approaches to the topic in further detail and highlight some of the main avenues that we see ahead for future research (§1), before mapping out the content of the present volume (§2).

1. FRAMING HELLENISTIC AESTHETICS

‘Aesthetics’ is a notoriously slippery term to pin down; it is a concept that embraces ideas of art, beauty, criticism, experience, judgement, taste, and value.⁹ The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) offers a helpfully capacious definition, identifying three main strands to ‘aesthetics’: first, ‘the philosophy of the beautiful or of art’; second, ‘a system of principles for the appreciation of the beautiful, etc.’; and third, ‘the distinctive underlying principles of a work of art or a genre, the works of an artist, the arts of a culture, etc.’.¹⁰ The study of Hellenistic aesthetics embraces all three of these aspects: abstract ancient meditations on art (understanding ‘art’ broadly to refer to a range of cultural products: crafted, painted, sung, woven, written, etc.); ancient reflections on the appreciation of and responses to such art; and finally, the inner workings and principles of ancient art forms. It is worth stressing at the outset that there is much more to aesthetics than the study and appreciation of ‘the beautiful’. Beauty has been at the heart of the modern field of aesthetics at least since the time of Kant, and beauty has sometimes been used as a touchstone for the demarcation of the ‘aesthetic’ and the ‘unaesthetic’.¹¹ In antiquity, too, beauty was an important concept,¹² and Hellenistic arts embraced the unbeautiful with ‘realistic’ and ‘grotesque’ depictions of nonidealized forms.¹³ But even so, there is more to aesthetics than beauty or its absence, and Hellenistic aesthetics often relied upon other criteria. There is much left unsaid in the ‘etc.’ of the OED’s definition.

For example, ancient poetics reveal a variety of different aesthetic categories and ‘underlying principles’. ‘Slenderness’, leptotēs, has long been recognized as an important aesthetic ideal, and is sometimes treated as the Hellenistic aesthetic mode par excellence: in particular, it is praised by Callimachus and seen as emblematic for his poetry.¹⁴ But more recent work has also sought and found other aesthetic modes, such as ‘solemnity’ (semnotēs) in Posidippus and ‘sweetness’ (hēdytēs) in Theocritus.¹⁵ There is, in fact, much more room to explore the diversity of aesthetic terminology that derives from other sensuous experiences, as well as to continue to move beyond the idea that poets can be grouped together easily into distinct ‘schools’ which resemble the sectarian traditions of philosophy. In truth, poets largely staked themselves out as individuals, and while specific individuals such as Callimachus and Theocritus may have exercised a strong influence on their successors, their poetic projects were not passed on as a fixed doctrine to be accepted or combatted.¹⁶ In recognizing the ultimate individuality of Hellenistic poetics, we can begin to address the question of how each poet deploys specific poetic strategies within different contexts of poetic production.

While Hellenistic poets were crafting implicit aesthetics suited to their own proclivities and their social milieux, Hellenistic philosophers were asking many of the questions which continue to confront us today: What is art? How can we understand it, and what role can it play in education?¹⁷ Kristeller’s assertion that the ancients could not have an ‘aesthetics’ because they had no category of ‘art’ has long been debunked.¹⁸ There are also certain risks in resorting to technē (a general term embracing a broad field of skilled crafts) to encompass the modern term of aesthetic production, since it is clear that specific arts, like painting and sculpture, were regularly singled out in antiquity and had already begun to take on the level of prestige that they would come to hold in modern aesthetics.¹⁹ Music, too, had long played an important role in symposiastic and festival culture, and would come to be a distinct profession and a topic of particular philosophical reflection. Recent years have seen an increasing number of qualifications and reservations about the ‘quarrel between philosophy and poetry’ (Plato, Rep. 10.607b4),²⁰ and it seems particularly clear that Hellenistic philosophers acknowledged the value of art and its potential to contribute in various ways to their philosophical project.²¹

But just as the poets should not be divided into fixed camps, so, too, the philosophers and the poets must not be considered to be mutually exclusive. These two groups formed an important part of the intellectual elite and were very aware of each other’s work. Many Hellenistic philosophers composed poetry themselves (such as Cleanthes, Cercidas, and Arcesilaus of Pitane), while many poets responded to philosophical doctrines in their own works.²² Philosophers, too, often drew upon ideas that were ‘in the air’ at the time, and for all their reflections on the ethical and educational value of poetry, they likely drew on ideas that were also handled by poets.²³ It has long been recognized that Hellenistic ecphrasis can be seen as a poetic illustration of the philosophical concept of phantasia.²⁴ This overlap of poetic and phenomenological content has to some extent made ecphrasis the aesthetic touchstone par excellence, but here, too, there is room for expansion. For example, the bevy of ecphrases found in the ‘New Posidippus’ has invited comparisons between the ‘lithic’ content of these poems and Posidippus’ poetics.²⁵ Material metaphors play a simultaneously aesthetic and ethical role in Hesiod’s description of the ‘Ages of Man’ (Works and Days 109–201) and in Plato’s ‘Myth of the Metals’ (Rep. 3.414b–15c), both of which had a strong influence on Hellenistic literature.²⁶ However, a comprehensive study of the literary and philosophical range of materials in the Hellenistic period has yet to be written.

Materiality is an important dimension of aesthetics that has gained increasing attention in recent years, and there is much room to expand our study of the discourses of materiality in Hellenistic poetry and philosophy. Materiality was once considered the exclusive domain of archaeology, but the ‘material turn’ has revealed a much broader interdisciplinary approach to materials in the ancient world.²⁷ This new approach is inspired by the New Materialisms, but also maintains strong ties to the sophisticated Greek conceptions of materiality, which have only recently begun to be unpacked in full.²⁸ Much of the recent scholarship on this topic has focused on archaic or classical Greece and Rome, so there is significant space to treat these topics further in the Hellenistic period. Lilah Grace Canevaro’s recent exploration of material agency in the Theocritean corpus shows just how productive such an approach can be.²⁹

Reflections on materiality, whether by poets or philosophers, drew on the real sensuous experience of material, which itself brings us back to the intersection of the written and the plastic arts. As we noted above, the predominant approach to this field has been to search for commonalities across different media, particularly in the form of an artistic koinē that unites poetry and plastic art. In this approach we are confronted again by the spectre of aesthetics as mere ‘appearance’. These studies have tended to focus on techniques and effects, such as trompe l’oeil, representation in the round, or the presentation of the lowly or grotesque. But here, too, there is room for further exploration of the social realities in which this art was produced.³⁰ If poetry and art were not being produced merely ‘for art’s sake’, then we must also ask how they reflected on the social realities of artistic production. What was made of the distinction between ‘high art’ and handicraft? As a counterpoint to this distinction, one might also reflect on the extent to which ancient art criticism is an elite practice and how we might approach the aesthetic appreciation of the general public.³¹ On a more global level, to what extent did differing geographies, politics, and contexts of reception create contingent and divergent aesthetic responses? Or is it better to follow Zanker in speaking of the ‘universality and inclusiveness’ of Hellenistic aesthetics as part of an increasingly cosmopolitan world in the wake of Alexander’s conquests?³² For all the allure that narratives of cultural influence might exercise, they also risk overlooking domestic factors such as developments in education and thought, as Kristen Seaman has shown in her study of the influence of rhetorical education on Hellenistic art.³³

The social life of art, to paraphrase the subtitle of a recent book by Tonio Hölscher (2017), represents an extension of an earlier observation about the nature of Hellenistic art and poetry. Peter Bing in a now famous essay coined the term Ergänzungsspiel to refer to the way that Hellenistic epigrams invite the reader to supply additional information that completes the meaning of a text.³⁴ Zanker expanded Bing’s observation and attributed an interactive dimension not only to literary texts, but also to works of plastic art that draw the reader/viewer and their foreknowledge into the composition.³⁵ Such an interaction between audience and artwork is a cornerstone of what is called in German Wirkungsästhetik or Rezeptionsästhetik—as opposed to Produktionsästhetik, which focuses on the relationship between the artist and artwork, especially in terms of the artist’s imagination and ‘genius’—but here too we risk falling into the trap of aesthetics as mere affect. In order to avoid this pitfall, one must ask, as scholars like Hölscher have begun to, what these interactions with art contributed to the social world, and this demands that one consider the specifics of this social reality and the possibility of different forms of interaction for different social agents.

Ancient authors seem to have been aware of the importance of both aesthetic production and aesthetic reception. Ecphrasis, a type of detailed description that is traditionally associated with works of art,³⁶ abounds in Hellenistic poetry, and although it rarely includes specific details about the appearance of the artwork, it frequently describes both the skill of the artist and the experience of the viewer. Such reflections on the creation and function of artworks invite a direct comparison, if not rivalry, between poetry and plastic arts, while also serving a metapoetic role in drawing attention to the production and reception of the describing poet’s own artistry.³⁷ While ecphrasis has a long history in ancient literature, dating back to the Homeric Shield of Achilles (Il. 18.468–608), its prevalence explodes in the Hellenistic period, indicating the increasing currency and importance of reflections on art. Earlier studies sometimes took a naive approach to ecphrasis as a form of direct documentation for (largely lost) ancient artworks, whereas modern approaches to this literary topos acknowledge that the act of viewing is fictive and the reliability of data about the actual artworks is limited.³⁸ Ecphrasis also often presents the audience’s reaction to the artwork, modelling possible affective responses. But the range of these responses is fairly limited: wonder at the craftsmanship and lifelikeness of the work, desire when the artwork depicts something erotic, fear when the artwork presents a warrior or another violent figure, etc. There have been some useful studies which view these texts in the light of ancient philosophies of perception,³⁹ but in general, we are careful not to limit our approach to the affective dimension of aesthetics. The goal here is to look beyond established scholarly consensus and to offer new approaches.

These new approaches to Hellenistic aesthetics follow recent trends in the study of Hellenistic art and poetry more generally. The influence of the Hellenistic courts has long been recognized. Powerful patrons, such as the Ptolemies and the Seleucids, invited intellectuals and entertainers of all stripes—poets, philosophers, grammarians, painters, sculptors, and courtesans—to join their courts and contribute to the prestige of their major metropoleis. Earlier studies sometimes assumed that these poets produced what was essentially ‘propaganda’ for their patrons (e.g.Griffiths 1979), the only alternative to which was the escape into aestheticism (e.g.Schwinge 1986).⁴⁰ But both of these positions have been revealed to be too general and too totalizing. Hellenistic poets were not limited to the empty expression of praise, but could produce poems that left room for alternative and opposing perspectives.⁴¹ To what extent were such perspectives also reflected in their aesthetics? One recent study has noted large-scale aesthetic similarities between poets from different courts.⁴² Are there still elements which can be identified as distinctive within individual Hellenistic courts (or indeed cities)? And what about poets who did not find a wealthy patron or whose affiliation cannot be pinned down? It is also worth thinking about the growing presence of Rome in the Hellenistic world: how do Roman receptions of Hellenistic aesthetics fit into this broader picture?⁴³

In any case, the term ‘Hellenistic’ itself is a double-edged sword. It has long been noted that the modern sense of this term can be traced back to the somewhat arbitrary dating of the Prussian historian Johann Gustav Droysen (1836). Despite its arbitrariness, however, and the various continuities between the Hellenistic age and the classical Greek and imperial Roman periods which bracket it, the period does seem to have some features which set it apart, and which have consequently led to its relative neglect in favour of classical Greece and Rome for much of the history of classical scholarship.⁴⁴ Others have preferred the term ‘Alexandrian’ on the principle that the masters of the age all flocked to the Ptolemaic court in Alexandria,⁴⁵ but this is only an impression given by the extant sources, as recent studies into the literary cultures of the Seleucids, Attalids, and other civic centres have shown.⁴⁶ In general, terms like ‘Alexandrian’ or ‘Hellenistic’ invite typologization, which then risks oversimplification.⁴⁷ A list of the defining qualities or traits of ‘Hellenistic aesthetics’ may never be fully complete or it may only ever apply to a limited subset of what can be recognized as a larger, more complex artistic assemblage. In using the term here, we seek not to stake a claim for an exclusive or singular Hellenistic ‘aesthetic’, but rather we embrace the plurality of Hellenistic aesthetics. Aesthetic positions look different when expressed in poetry, in philosophy, or in the various media of plastic arts. Each of these modes of expression have their own particularities and are also capable of rendering and reflecting the aesthetic modes of other media.

In thinking about ancient aesthetics, it is also important to consider our own aesthetic response as scholars. Critics of earlier generations had a tendency to apply their own aesthetic evaluations of ancient material as criteria for other judgements in their scholarship. For example, Gow and Page frequently use aesthetic quality as an index of chronology in their treatment of Hellenistic epigrams: more original poems are earlier, while derivative or ‘stilted’ poems are late.⁴⁸ Ironically, it was just such aesthetic judgements that first led to the relative exclusion of Hellenistic poetry from the canon of ancient Greek literature. Indeed, some Hellenistic authors continue to be neglected because of their perceived ugliness or obscurity.⁴⁹ Although some modern audiences may be captivated by the alleged ‘beauty’ and ‘grandeur’ of antiquity, it is the place of scholarship to challenge and interrogate such subjective judgements.

In general, we remain convinced of the importance of difference and variety (in Greek: poikilia) in Hellenistic aesthetics, so we do not seek to propose a single, unifying aesthetic for this period. Instead, we seek to identify the points of contact where different aesthetic fields touch, so that we can describe Hellenistic aesthetics more completely in all its diversity.

As a brief illustration of our approach to Hellenistic aesthetics, we would like to consider the image printed here as fig. 1. This object is a modern reconstruction using Hellenistic materials, now housed in the J. Paul Getty Museum. The order of the beads, as well as the choice to restring it as a single band rather than as multiple necklaces or earrings, reflects modern interpretive decisions which affect how we experience and understand the object. The relation of the stud to the other beads surrounding it is unclear. This image thus represents a modern aesthetic assemblage that may draw upon several disparate ancient objects. Despite its obvious allure as an aesthetic object, one cannot fully separate the beads from their social context, especially considering the fact that they entered circulation in the 1990s by way of the now disgraced antiquities dealer Robin Symes.⁵⁰ The modern illegal antiquities market presents both an ethical dilemma and a documentary one, since looted antiquities are rarely accompanied by the kind of find data that helps to historicize them.⁵¹ As a result, such objects are practically condemned to a merely aesthetic interpretation.

Figure 1.

Twenty-eight miscellaneous beads and one stud, 225–175 bce (Egypt). Gold, carnelian, amethyst, and emerald; approx. 14.2 × 0.9 cm and 2.3 × 1.3 cm. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Villa Collection, Malibu, California, 92.AM.8.10. Permalink: https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/object/103Z05. Image courtesy of the Getty Villa’s Open Content Program.

Open in new tabDownload slide

Looking past this modern social frame, there are a few clues to the ancient social setting. The beads are made of gold and precious stones and therefore certainly belong in an elite context. One might think of Posidippus’ Lithika (1–20 A–B) in which several poems discuss gems in bracelets and necklaces (4, 5, 6, 7, 8 A–B). Posidippus does not refer to a combination of stones as in the Getty necklace, although carnelian does appear in 8 A–B and several epigrams do refer to gold settings for stones (4, 6, 7, 8, 12 A–B). On the other hand, Asclepiades of Samos, an older contemporary of Posidippus, explicitly criticizes the combination of gold and emerald (AP 12.163.1–2 = HE 24):

εὗρεν Ἔρως τι καλῷ μῖξαι καλόν, οὐχὶ μάραγδον

χρυσῷ, ὃ μήτ’ ἀνθεῖ μήτε γένοιτ’ ἐν ἴσῳ

Love has somehow found out how to mix beauty with beauty, not emerald with gold, which doesn’t grow and would not be fitting …

The second line is difficult to interpret and has long puzzled commentators, but the sense is pretty clear: emerald and gold do not fit together aesthetically.⁵² Asclepiades’ aesthetic judgement runs counter to ancient elite tastes, in which the combination of the two materials was a popular sign of luxury.⁵³ Posidippus often imitated Asclepiades, but the fragmentary state of 12 A–B, which features gold, seashell, and an isolated genitive form of the word σμαράγδου (12.3 A–B), prevents us from knowing whether the emerald here is part of the object or perhaps a point of comparison.⁵⁴ Is the beauty of the shell like that of emerald? Or is the shell more fitting with gold than emerald would be? The state of the text does not allow us to know definitively.⁵⁵

As a general aesthetic impression, the bracelet with its bright, contrasting colours and alternation of materials might call to mind the ‘jeweled style’, something which is normally associated with Latin poetry of late antiquity.⁵⁶ This aesthetic mode balances a highly referential and learned content with a fairly rigid, sometimes disjointed structure which helps to highlight the skill of the artist and guide the response of the reader; in doing so it reflects comparable developments in contemporary art.⁵⁷ More recent studies have begun to explore the antecedents of this late antique aesthetic mode and have posited roots in the Hellenistic period, for which this bracelet itself might serve as a further material example.⁵⁸

And one need not look only to poets for examples of the aesthetic and metapoetic significance of gemstones in the Hellenistic world. A fragmentary passage from the second book of Philodemus’ On Poems summarizes the position of the euphonist critic Heracleodorus (De Poematis II 69.2–26 Janko 2020):

ἐκεῖν[ό] τε πάρεϲ[τιν εἰπ]ε̣ῖν, ὅτι καθ’ αὑτοῦ τ[ὸ] “δ[ι]α̣φερούϲα[ϲ] μὲν τέχ̣ναϲ, ἐν δὲ τῷ κοινῶι τὸ τέ[λο]ϲ ἐχούϲαϲ” παρατέθηκεν̣. “ὡϲ̣” γὰρ “ὁ̣ [δ]ακτυλιογλύφοϲ, ἴδιον ἔχων οὐ τὸ ποιεῖν ὅμο[ι]ον—κοινὸν γὰρ ἦν καὶ πλ̣[ά]ϲτου καὶ ζωγ̣[ρ]άφου—[τὸ] δ’ ἐν ϲιδήρῳ καὶ λιθαρίωι διὰ τῆϲ ἐγγ̣λυφῆϲ, τἀγα̣θ̣[ὸ]ν οὐκ ἐν τούτωι κεί[με]νον, ἀλλ’ ἐν τῶι ποιεῖν ὅ̣μ̣[ο]ιον, ὃ πάντ̣ων κοινὸν ἦν̣, ἔχει, παραπληϲίωϲ” ἀξιοῦται̣ καὶ ὁ ποητὴϲ “τὸ μὲν̣ ἴ̣δ̣ι̣ον ἐν τ̣[ῆι ϲυ]νθέϲει β[άλ]λ̣[ε]ϲθαι, τὸ δ’ ἀγαθὸν διὰ [τ]ο̣ῦ̣ κ̣αὶ λό̣[γῳ] κοιν⟦ω⟧‵οῦʹ θηρεύειν”, ὅ φηϲιν οὗτοϲ ἁπλῶϲ “μηδὲ ἓν ὠφελεῖν ἢ βλάπτειν”, ὥϲπερ ἐκ τῶν παρατεθέντων ϲυνηχὼ[ϲ] ἀ̣λλ’ οὐ τοὐναντίον.

And one can say that he has adduced the phrase ‘arts that differ, but have their purpose in common’ against himself. For ‘just as the ring engraver has as his end not making a likeness—for this is shared with both sculptor and painter—but doing so on steel or on a gemstone by means of engraving, with his excellence residing not in this, but in making a likeness, which is common to them all, likewise’ it is claimed that ‘the poet too founds his particularity on the form, but pursues excellence by means of that excellence which is also common to prose’, which this man flatly says ‘cannot help or harm him [sc. the poet] at all’, as if on the basis of these comparisons he had proved this claim rather than its opposite.⁵⁹

Heracleodorus is a mysterious figure, whom we know only because he is attacked by Philodemus. He seems to date to the second half of the third century bce, thus making him contemporaneous with the generation of Hellenistic poets that followed the likes of Asclepiades, Posidippus, and Callimachus.⁶⁰ This passage makes clear that Heracleodorus was comfortable using a gem-engraver as an analogy for the poet. Heracleodorus had used this analogy in service of his larger claim that neither the content nor the form of poetry matters; instead, the aesthetic value of the poem is determined purely based on the sound of the words. Philodemus refutes this claim, but does so on the basis of the same gem-engraver analogy, which he retains: the gem-carver must, like the poet, make a likeness which is intelligible. Regardless of the dispute which Philodemus documents, it seems clear that both literary critics were aware of the aesthetic potential of gemstones in this comparison. One might argue that Heracleodorus’ recourse to this analogy is itself a sign of the influence of Hellenistic poets.⁶¹

So, regardless of the original provenance of the Getty beads, they seem to be part of a larger aesthetic complex which raises issues of social value, luxury, craftsmanship, and metapoetics alongside more autonomously aesthetic issues such as the appearance of stones, the sound of words, and the accuracy of imitation. Neither in antiquity nor today can aesthetic appearance be completely separated from these other issues.

2. MAPPING THIS VOLUME

This special issue arises from the editors’ shared research interests in Hellenistic aesthetics. From 2019–23, Matthew Chaldekas worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Tübingen in the Collaborative Research Cluster (CRC) 1391, ‘Different Aesthetics’, an interdisciplinary research group which brings together scholars from classical philology, art history, archaeology, English, German, Scandinavian studies, musicology, and theology to study topics in premodern aesthetics. The main goal of the CRC is to explore the way that aesthetics grows out of and interacts with the thought patterns of its historical period and with the lived experience of historical people—an approach that is particularly relevant given recent trends in the study of Hellenistic poetry, as outlined above.⁶² Thomas Nelson is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford whose work explores the aesthetics of Hellenistic poets both in and beyond Ptolemaic Alexandria.⁶³ This special issue combines revised papers from a panel that the editors organized at the 2022 Annual Meeting of the Society for Classical Studies (‘The poetics and pragmatics of Hellenistic aesthetics’), alongside further invited contributions from important scholars of Hellenistic culture.

The articles offer a range of new approaches and frameworks to the issues handled above. Each article shares points of contact with other articles in the issue; as a whole, they reveal the range of different approaches possible in the study of Hellenistic aesthetics. We do not purport to offer the definitive treatment of this topic, but rather to offer several fruitful new angles that will help to continue and develop the dialogue between fields. Issues of materiality, philosophical affinity, and social contextualization (including ethnic, religious, and gender identity) will all continue to be important elements in the framing of future discussions of Hellenistic aesthetics.

We begin in the first article (‘[Theocritus], Idyll 23: a stony aesthetic’) with Thomas Nelson raising questions of materiality and its relation to form in Hellenistic poetics. This poem has been called ‘wretched’ and ‘unattractive’ by earlier critics, but Idyll 23 seems to adopt a purposefully cold and rigid poetics that is tied to its non-bucolic urban space and opposed to the sweetness of the Theocritean countryside. This ‘stony’ aesthetic offers a view into the responses of later generations to the Hellenistic ideals of leptotēs and hēdytēs.

The second article offers a new approach to the geopolitical framing of Ptolemaic display (‘Situational aesthetics in Ptolemaic culture’). While previous studies have offered various ways of reflecting on the Hellenistic aesthetic ideals of big/small and semnotēs/leptotēs, Peter Bing and Regina Höschele suggest that Ptolemaic aesthetics must be understood with specific reference to its Sitz im Leben, and that Hellenistic literary ideals can best be understood with reference to Ptolemaic monumental display.

The third contribution turns to philosophy’s own explicit reflections on poetry and music (‘Chrysippus’ lullaby: the early Stoics on the benefits of mousikē’). Aistė Čelkytė carefully studies the scattered sources for the early Stoa to establish how early Stoics evaluated the ethical status of the rhythmic arts. Rather than considering music to be a corrupting influence, as is often posited in the fabled ‘quarrel between poetry and philosophy’, the Stoics seem to have been perfectly comfortable reconciling its aesthetic and ethical dimensions.

The fourth article explores the interplay between literature and art history (‘Ecphrasis and manual labour: the aesthetics of woodwork in Leonidas’). Matthew Chaldekas raises the question of the distinction between high and low art by exploring the poet of the little people, Leonidas of Tarentum. By comparing his poems on woodworkers with the extant ancient iconography of this craft, he shows how ecphrastic imagery can also reflect a realistic theme from the ancient Lebenswelt. This article shows how the idea of the humble worker could draw inspiration from various sources.

The fifth article turns to the influence of Hellenistic aesthetics at Rome (‘Teaching Vergil to write: Vergil’s aesthetics and the influence of Philodemus and Parthenius’). Michael McOsker and Lee Fratantuono consider what Vergil might have learnt from two late and underappreciated Hellenistic poets, Philodemus of Gadara and Parthenius of Nicaea. They suggest that Philodemus’ aesthetic theories provided a blueprint for Vergil’s own style in the Aeneid, and that one of Parthenius’ obscure erotic myths served as a launchpad for intellectual Vergilian games that result in a kind of psychagogia. We gain a glimpse here of Roman receptions of Hellenistic aesthetics beyond the often overbearing ‘shadow of Callimachus’.

Finally, the volume closes with an epilogue by Nita Krevans, who picks up on several recurrent tensions that thread through the individual articles (‘large versus small’, ‘sight versus hearing’, and ‘harmony versus discord’), before spotlighting technē (‘craft’) as an aesthetic principle that transcends differences of genre, media, and philosophical school.

The approaches in these articles go beyond a conception of aesthetics as purely decorative or concerned only with perceptual affect. Of course, these articles only provide a taste of possible frameworks and approaches; there is much that remains unexplored in these pages, especially in the study of Hellenistic art itself. But by exploring the intersections of recent advances in Hellenistic literary studies, philosophy, and art history, we seek through these contributions to situate Hellenistic aesthetics within the ancient social world and the particular historical moment(s) from which it emerged. In so doing, we hope that these articles will add fresh impetus to the study of Hellenistic aesthetics and lay a foundation for new avenues of research.

ABBREVIATIONS

ABBREVIATIONS
 
• A–B

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

 
• HE

  Gow, A. S. F. and D. L. Page 1965: Hellenistic Epigrams, 2 vols, Cambridge.

REFERENCES

Footnotes