American Journal of Philology

This book investigates a relatively unstudied chapter of the well-known, competitive flirtation between poetry and the plastic arts, which is first evidenced by the fact that, from Homer onward, the vast majority of ekphraseis concern works of art. This flirtatious antagonism between text and artefact is connected with the fact that epigrams, in particular, display a symbiotic relationship with the monuments (funerary or dedicatory, real or imagined) which they often caption. Epigram as the αὐδὴ τεχνήεσσα λίθο (CEG 429), although belonging originally to the archaic, epigraphic beginnings of the genre, became either a practical or a fictional mode, which was recycled in the literary, multifaceted epigrams of the [End Page 294] Hellenistic age. Not enough attention has been paid so far to the idea that, in the Hellenistic period, interest in collections of both works of art and poetry books might overlap time and again. Part of the reason for this scholarly inattention lies in the fact that the evidence for such collections is scanty. On the one hand, later anthologizers selected, dismembered, and reassembled most of the original collections of epigrams (indeed, this book could hardly be written before the discovery of the untouched original collection of the "New Posidippus," whose structural organization has opened new horizons to literary analysis). On the other hand, we are left with even less information about ancient collections of artistic objects. Prioux concentrates on some of the border-crossing cases of anthologies of epigrams that comment or pretend to comment on collections of works of art and explores their iconographic projects.

The book is divided into two large sections, the first of which (25-140) considers three series of epigrams that illustrate works of art assembled as small, concrete, museological exhibitions. All three series were found in situ together with the relevant works of art: first, the "house of epigrams" at Pompeii (1.1); second, the crypto-portico of the so-called "house of Propertius" at Assisi (1.2); third, the Roman "villa of Aelian" (1.3). The second large section (141-335) deals with three series of epigrams that came to us as parts of poetic books from either papyrus or the Medieval transmission. These epigrams are separate from any physical monuments, but they presuppose, either fictionally or actually, a collection of works of art: first, Nossis 4-9 HE, all of which possibly comment on objects dedicated in a temple of Aphrodite (2.1); second, the lithika and the andriantopoiika of the "New Posidippus," reflecting, respectively, an imaginary collection of rings intended to homage the Ptolemies and a sort of condensed history of art (2.2); third, the thirteen epigrams on statues gathered in the Apophoreta of Martial (170-82), corresponding to a selection of favorite images drawn from Domitian's propaganda (2.3).

In section 1.1, Prioux argues that the five more or less readable epigrams found in the exedra of the "house of epigrams" are intended to interpret, rather than describe, the emotions or motivations of the painted characters-a density of meanings that the corresponding upper frescoes could only hint at. The foregrounding of a defiantly interpretive mode in these epigrams resonates with the crucial role played by the picture and epigram that are featured in the center of the exedra and represent Homer killed by the riddle posed by the young fishermen, according to the biographic tradition. This image of agonistic challenge could also be a metaphor for the superiority of epigram over epic poetry; in my opinion, however, not of the epigram tout court, but specifically of the riddle epigrams, which depict the interpretive "contest" between the poet and the obscure sense of the stelai images (they date at least from Leonidas Tar. 22 HE, and come into fashion with and after Antipater Sid. in the first century B.C.E). The character of the epigram by Euenus (3 GP) accompanying the picture of a ram that...