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When Ovid curses Ibis to “imitate real bullocks with Perillean bronze (aere Perilleo),” he can count on his audience being familiar with the story, already common in the time of Pindar, of the human-sized, bull-shaped cauldron-instrument the sculptor Perillos designed for the tyrant Phalaris of Agrigentum to conceal the agony of his victims as they roasted to death in its belly, converting their cries into mimetic bellows via an invisible system of pipes running through the animal’s head and opening at its nostrils (Ibis 437). Byzantine grammarian John Tzetzes describes the story of the bronze bull as one told by “countless” (μυρίοι) authors (Hist. 1.646-668). Though many examples appear in the ancient sources, they tend to disagree on the question of culpability. Some authors emphasize the guilt of the ruler-patron and others, that of the artist. Some paint the artist as the victim; others, the tyrant; still others, the subjects.  This flexibility renders the story a catalyst for reflections on the relationship of art and artist to one another and to structures of power; as well as on the capacity of art to consume the life of its creator, its audience or its patron. This made it a particularly suitable subject for declamatory exercises.

The actors in the story derive their interchangeability from their subservience to the strange object at its center, which, on occasion, even becomes completely detached from its original context, as when medieval Christian authors depict the emperor Hadrian using one to roast Saint Eustace. The bull is striking enough to audiences to compel them to become invested in any of these questions of perpetrator and victim. It is Phalaris’ association with the bull that renders him the go-to exemplum of despotic cruelty for ancient rhetoricians and it is to the bull that Epicurian philosophers refer when seeking to represent the most deplorable condition to which a human being could be subject.

This paper will have two parts. In the first half, primarily via an examination of Ovid's and Lucian’s interest in the bull as a transformative mimetic object, I argue that it is its status as a transgressive species of artistic representation that lends it its magnetism and consequent productivity as an idea-object. This leads me to ask: what kind of representation is the bronze bull? It is a practical device and an artistic representation that literalizes ekphrastic fantasy by coming to life in a dynamic, multisensory spectacle when it is used practically. What it does mimetically (bring a bull to life) is driven by what it does actually (roast a person to death) and the co-occurrence of the two processes engenders an ontologically ambiguous collapse at the moment of the “twin sounds” (Ovid, Tristia 3.54). In the second half, I argue that this seemingly anomalous trick, brought about by Perillos’ ingenious design, is actually a striking example of a powerful transhistorical mimetic phenomenon with consistent, shared characteristics that occurs when an independent process of life becomes the vehicle for a dynamic representation. I call it “actualized mimesis.”