Verity J. Platt (Cornell University)
One of the most influential aspects of Kathryn Gutzwiller’s scholarship has been her elucidation of the relationship between Hellenistic epigrams and material objects (Gutzwiller 2002a), from her recognition in Poetic Garlands that processes of anthologization go hand in hand with the replication of opera nobilia (1998) to her field-changing analyses of Posidippus’ Lithika and Andriantopoiika (2002b, 2003, 2005) and her sensitive readings of Meleager’s engagement with Greek sculpture (2010 and 2015). In her wake, scholarship on so-called ‘ekphrastic epigram’ has become a cornerstone of the field, from explorations of the relationship between text, image and voice (Männlein-Robert, Tueller, Squire 2010) to rich discussions of literary and visual aesthetics (Sens, Stewart, Prioux 2007) and close analyses of verbo-visual relations in material contexts (Bergmann, Prioux 2008, Squire 2009, Höschele 2017).
This paper draws on a quarter-century of scholarship on image-text relations in order to ask where we go next. First, I explore the implications of the “material turn” for a genre that exhibits an intense awareness of both its lithic origins and its ongoing epigraphic potential, whilst stressing the importance of a historicizing approach to epigrammatic engagements with the visual. There is a significant difference, for example, between the materialist concerns of Posidippus’ third century BCE Lithika (Petrain, Elsner) and the tensions between matter and form that are played out in later Hellenistic poems on gems (Prioux 2015, Ballestrazzi).
Second, I trace a tension between materiality and poetics, exploring the degree to which meta-poetic analyses of epigrammatic play (which stress authorial agency and intertextuality) tend to result in a dematerialization of the very objects (whether works of art, tombs, or votive dedications) on which so many epigrammatic fictions depend. Is this tension inherent to epigrams themselves, or is it a mark of our own self-reflexive scholarly preoccupations? How seriously should we take the ‘objecthood’ of literary epigram?
Third, I seek a way out of this impasse by looking to theories of media (Michelakis). As the most medium-conscious of genres, literary epigram is deeply concerned with the material vehicles and graphic technologies that enable its own entextualization and transmission (Petrovic, Bing). Epigrams repeatedly alert their readers to the fact that “media determine our situation” (Kittler 1999), highlighting the relationship between poems and monuments as forms of cultural archive (Platt) or reflecting on their own processes of circulation and anthologization (Höschele 2010). Taking Posidippus as a case study, I explore his particular attunement to the sensory and communicative functions of media, from the diaphanous and elemental stones of the Lithika to the bronze-casting technology of the Andriantopoiika and the divinatory sêmata of the Oiônoskopika. As “discourses on discourse-channel conditions” (Kittler 1990), Hellenistic epigrams fuse meta-poetic play with an intense commentary upon their own communicative capacities. Their special affinity for objects (and thus their ‘ekphrastic’ potential) is in this sense bound to a supreme awareness of the material conditions that make possible their own acts of cultural transmission.