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Pictorial Description as a Supplement for Narrative: The Labour of Augeas' Stables in Heracles Leontophonos

1996; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 117; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/ajp.1996.0048

1086-3168

Graham Zanker,

Classical Antiquity Studies

Pictorial Description as a Supplement for Narrative:The Labour of Augeas' Stables in Heracles Leontophonos Graham Zanker In this article I propose to explore the pictorialism of the twenty– fifth poem of the Theocritean corpus, uncertainly ascribed to Theocritus and entitled Heracles Leontophonos by Callierges.1 In the course of my discussion I wish to address a contention by A. S. F. Gow2 that "The three parts of the poem . . . can be fitted into the story [of the cleaning of the stables of Augeas] told by Apollodorus [2.5.5], and the reader can, if he chooses, reconstruct a context for them. Except in the most general way, however, he is neither obliged nor invited to do so: the poet's themes are the landscape and the conversation, and insofar as he is concerned with the Labours at all his subject is the Nemean lion, whose death is narrated in Part iii, rather than the stables of Augeas." I shall suggest that the landscape and other detail is in fact so insistent that it plays no such superficial and passive role, but does indeed invite the reader to reconstruct the myth. In particular I shall attempt to demonstrate how the author uses pictorial detail, in a manner strikingly analogous to procedures observable in contemporary Hellenistic fine art or at least discernible in later copies, to enable the reader to construct the narrative of the formal setting of the poem, i.e., Heracles' cleaning of the stables of Augeas, even though the episode is not related directly in the poem. In Realism in Alexandrian Poetry3 I briefly examined the remarkable pictorialism of Idyll 25. I concentrated on the author's care to impose pictorial coherence on Heracles' narrative of his defeat of the Nemean lion, with Heracles in the final assault standing and astride the back of the beast, his thighs squeezing its flanks, his heels holding its back paws down, and throttling it from behind with his arms around its neck (266–71).4 I also tried to bring out the author's deployment of pictorialism [End Page 411] to motivate the poem's tripartite narrative: the lion–skin arousing the Farmhand's curiosity concerning its wearer's identity (62–67); the skin provoking the bull, Phaethon, the protector of the herd (142–44); and the skin confirming to Phyleus that he is correct in guessing that his companion is the slayer of the Nemean lion (174–76). My discussion of the piece appeared in a chapter on the pictorial realism of the poets who were more or less demonstrably following the lead of Callimachus on the aesthetic principles appropriate to contemporary poetry, and whom I thus chose to consider as a movement. I argued that the historically appropriate term for pictorial realism, or visually precise and vivid description, is enargeia; the ecphrasis of the Greek rhetors from the Imperial and subsequent periods, of which enargeia is an aim, is attested later than enargeia.5 I hope here to be able to fill out the picture I sketched of the deployment of pictorialism in Heracles Leontophonos. In art criticism it has been recognised for some time that a prominent [End Page 412] feature of Hellenistic art is the appeal to the imagination of the viewer, when, for example, we have the representation of a moment prior to the climax of an act, so that the viewer can construct the denouement from the perspective of anticipation, or when the viewer is invited to supplement in his or her imagination details of a scene which have not been actually represented. P. H. von Blanckenhagen ("Betrachter") applied the term "der ergänzende Betrachter" to the viewer enticed to go through this process. So, to use some of his examples, it is the viewer who surprises the Crouching Aphrodite ascribed to Doidalsas, causing her to attempt to hide her sexual beauty. In the case of the Ludovisi Gaul and his Wife, it is the viewer who is to supply the object of the Gaul's stare, his victorious advancing enemy. The upward gaze of the Terme Boxer is directed at the viewer himself, in expression of the athlete's exhaustion. I would...