Stephen Kidd (Brown University)
Philodemus stands at a crucial juncture for our understanding of the rhetorical and philosophical concepts of enargeia – a term translated as “vividness” in rhetorical writings but “self-evidence” in philosophical writings. In the centuries after Philodemus, enargeia becomes an indispensable rhetorical term: it denotes the quality of writing that puts the subject “before our eyes”, and becomes one of the virtues of rhetorical handbooks from Theon to Hermogenes to Aphthonius. Students practiced enargeia via “descriptions” (ekphraseis), and held enargeia as a supreme, though admittedly impossible, goal: as the ninth-century John of Sardis later wrote, “even if the speech were 10,000 times vivid, it is impossible to bring into vision the actual thing shown or described (ekphrazomenon)”; cf. John of Sardis Commentary on Aphthonius’ Progymnasmata 216: κἂν γὰρ µυριάκις ἐναργὴς εἴη ὁ λόγος, ἀδύνατον αὐτὸ κατ᾽ ὄψιν ἀγαγεῖν τὸ δηλούµενον ἤτοι ἐκφραζόµενον.
Before Philodemus, especially among Epicurean philosophers, enargeia conveyed not the ideal of “seeing” when we hear literary descriptions, but a key conceptual tool for approaching the problems of “seeing” itself. Sometimes when we see, it is “self-evident” what we are seeing, and sometimes it isn’t. So, for example, we may see Plato approaching at a distance, but only at a certain point does it become “self-evident” that it is, in fact, Plato (Sextus Empiricus AM 7.212). Meanwhile, when Menelaus saw Helen standing before him in Egypt – another stock example -- it was not at all “self-evident” to him that it was really Helen (Sextus Empiricus AM 7.255-6). So important was this philosophical term that the Stoics even described enargeia as a sort of sixth sense or inner “light”, allowing humans certainty (Sextus Empiricus AM 7.259 οἱονεὶ φέγγος ἡµῖν).
How did philosophers explain the step from philosophical enargeia – where vision itself is the problem – to rhetorical enargeia – where vision is the unproblematic goal? Philodemus offers a wealth of evidence for this issue. He uses enarg- terms dozens of times, including rare forms like the token enargēma and verbs like enargeomai, which has no entry in LSJ. Although in this short paper, I will not have space to consider all of these usages, I will focus on three key, representative passages, and adduce more parallels as I proceed, all from Philodemus On Poems. In each of these instances, Philodemus is reporting a view that claims that enargeia is what is “characteristic” (idion) of poetry. This raises the question for us: which enargeia are we talking about and how can we tell?
Although Zanker noted in 1981 that Philodemus provided the first instance of rhetorical enargeia, it has not received much attention since: enargeia plays a minor role in Philodemus on Poetry; Hedrick’s 2014 useful dissertation focuses more on Frank Speech and On Anger, not the far-more voluminous usage of the term in On Poetry and On Rhetoric; McCosker’s 2021 book too, although devoting a good deal of attention to prolepsis, does not much consider the related issue of enargeia. This paper thus seeks to clarify the movement of enargeia between philosophy and rhetoric, and how Philodemus understood the term.