Art objects and the glorious Greek past in some late antique ekphrastic epigrams

The aim of this paper is to analyse, through selective case-studies, the treatment of art objects portraying authoritative figures of the past in some late-antique Greek ekphrastic epigrams. In accordance with current scholarly conventions, the expression “ekphrastic epigram” is not used here in the ancient sense of ekphrasis – that is, a coherent and detailed description, as theorised in imperial and late-antique school texts – but in the sense of poems that take as their subjects works of art, such as paintings or statues, but do not describe them in an analytical manner. As recent scholarship has shown, the concern of these poems is more with the interpretation and evaluation of a work of art than with its actual description – for which the epigram, with its few lines, would have not proved particularly suitable. Poets mostly evoke artefacts, counting on the physical presence of the object, when the poem is conceived as an actual inscription aimed at complementing the message conveyed by the artefact, or on the audience’s visual memory, when it is composed, from the very beginning, for a book, and thus is physically detached from any artefact. Poets comment on the work of art and express interpretations that coincide with their own aesthetic predilections and theories. Based on the long-standing analogy between the “sister arts”, ekphrastic epigrams often express literary judgments and can be read as metapoetic statements. The epigrams analysed in this paper are all written by poets from the so-called Cycle of Agathias, a 6th-century anthology assembled by the lawyer, poet and historian Agathias of Myrina. Unlike his predecessors (i.e. Meleager of Gadara and Philip of Thessalonica), Agathias collected only works by his contemporaries, “representatives” – to put it in Alan and Averil Cameron’s words – “of that Indian summer of Greek poetry which illuminates the age of Justinian”. This paper will offer some comments on the role played by glorious Greeks of the past in the Cycle’s ekphrastic epigrams. The vast repertoire of iconographic schemes, paradigmatic examples, and expressive modules offered by these past authors – and with which any cultivated man of that time would have been acquainted through the rhetorical training offered in schools – is not used in a “decorative” manner, merely to compose literary epigrams “in the ancient style”, but to express “contemporary” contents – be they aesthetic ideas or moral beliefs. In other words, the past is read through the present, and may help to shape it.