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This chapter is an investigation of a Tacitean metaphor for historiography and its implications for the historian's role in history. The metaphor of the historian's physical proximity to his subject matter, which is found in the Annals 4 digression contrasting Tacitus's work with that of historians of earlier periods, is an offshoot of the enargeia that often enlivens a narrative. It is also one of the many connections between this digression and both Tacitus's account of the trial of the historian Cremutius Cordus (4.34-35) and what he suggests about his own work as historian.

This chapter argues that recent critiques of older mimetic approaches to Shakespeare have tended to neglect the contribution of narrative coherence or plot to mimesis. Following Ricoeur's exposition of the quasi-equivalence between plot and mimesis proposed by Aristotle's Poetics, it proposes that dramatic mimesis is, more than has been realized, an effect of narrative coherence. It then goes on to show the extent to which the pedagogy of narrative was, in the 16th century, based on classical judicial rhetoric, which emphasized the importance of narrative in constituting the facts as plausible by making them coherent and circumstantially vivid, or ‘evident’. Finally, it offers a number of dramatic examples that show how vivid but questionable narratives of staged and unstaged events contribute powerfully to the mimetic illusion of prose narrative or drama.

This chapter begins with speech — the original medium of communication — and with the related terms ‘expression’ and ‘articulation’. Both are shown to have bodily associations in addition to their functions in the context of language. It focuses on the Renaissance literary and educational values associated with speech-based skills, notably ‘liveliness’ (enargeia). Illustrations are given from Quintilian, Erasmus, Mulcaster, and Derrida. The issues raised in the first half of the chapter are developed in a discussion of Hamlet, a play (and character) much concerned with the problems of the media and with the relations between the oral and the written, rhetoric and performance. It is argued that the play tracks the future of English as a subject as it rejects the world of speech and performance as inauthentic, and searches for an idealized world of self and text.

The key to Senecan drama lies not in the “word,” as T. S. Eliot once described it, but in the “image,” which, as the definition of tragedy attached to the manuscript of Seneca’s plays described it, constitutes an “image of truth.” This chapter turns to the Stoic epistemology of poetry and argues that Dryden’s pairing of the adjectives “just” and “lively” to characterize the “image” of tragedy reflects the Stoic definition of enargeia or “vividness”: an image that is true to life (hence, “lively”) and that offers its own kritērion or iudicium (a sound or “just” basis for “judgment”) of its truthfulness. Stoics regularly turned to tragedy because it modeled the cognitive process, illustrating how knowledge begins with a phantasia, or “visual impression.”

This paper sketches the development of the notion of enargeia from a term of ordinary language to a technical term in ancient epistemology, and in particular the shift that takes place in the understanding of this notion in Hellenistic philosophy. According to the Epicureans and the Stoics, enargeia is not a matter of subjective feeling nor conviction; it rather describes a feature of certain impressions, which by their nature are infallibly indicative of a fact about the world. Evident impressions, therefore, are reliable criteria of truth which allow us to distinguish truth from falsehood, and to safeguard the possibility of knowledge. Moreover, the Stoics go beyond the Epicureans in assuming that the enargeia of impressions is reflected by a distinctive intrinsic character of those impressions which are objectively evident. The Sceptics, on the other hand, try to show that there are no evident impressions in the sense in which the Epicureans and the Stoics suggest. Nevertheless, they do not dispense with the notion of enargeia altogether; they introduce a subjective notion of enargeia which does not guarantee truth but is restricted to what appears to be true and is convincing.

In setting out the events, Orosius frequently has recourse to pathetic modes of writing and closely follows the Rhetorica ad Herrenium and Quintilian, especially regarding the use of enargeia. An analysis of Book 5 shows that he consciously seeks to conjure up the emotions of his readers with the aim of making them feel the misery of past events. Following rhetorical advice, not all episodes are described in a pathetic way: the Historiae present themselves as a synecdoche of reality. In line with Quintilian and earlier, classical historiography, Orosius suggests that his recourse to vivid description is a way of displaying the truth of the past, although this may seem counterintuitive to our modern understanding of the relationship between language and reality.

The chapter addresses the primary aspects of the ekphrasis of photographs. Using Mikhail Bahktin’s theory of the chronotope of the novel, the chapter defines what it terms “the chronotope of the photograph”, describing this as a narrative space that occurs between a photographic image and a poetic speaker. The primary example is taken from Walter Benjamin’s essay “A Brief History of Photography”.

Ekphrasis – the verbal representation of visual art – has traditionally been regarded as a form of paragone or competition between different forms of representation. The Introduction advocates a more reciprocal model of ekphrasis that involves an encounter or exchange between word and image. It outlines the ways in which the paragone has dominated critical conceptions of intermedial relationships. Ekphrastic works of various periods and styles have been read through the paradigm of the paragone that was established in the Renaissance; and yet this was not the only model available during that period. It is argued that the agonistic model was the primary means of conceptualising ekphrasis during the first ‘ekphrastic turn’ of the 1990s, and that this model has continued to be influential into the twenty-first century. However recent critics and theorists working across various disciplines and periods have started to interrogate this influential paradigm.

Chapter 4 offers a new interpretation of the written style used by some leading members of the early Royal Society to represent plant and animal bodies. For a long time, the consensus has been that the naturalists of the late 17th century saw their descriptions as transparent signifiers of the objects for which they stood, simply representing the world as it appeared to the senses. This chapter shows, by contrast, that naturalists such as John Ray saw their written style as a form of "verbal picturing" or enargeia, capable of provoking the same bodily and affective pleasures long associated with certain forms of vivid pictorial depictions. The latter part of the chapter analyzes the implications of this insight for interpreting the empirical projects of the early Royal Society. Focusing on the role of the comparison in natural-historical and anatomical description, it shows that the lines between intellectual and affective persuasion were blurred. Comparison could function as a philosophically grounded analogy, but it was also a form of figuration that aided intelligibility by provoking sensations of ease and pleasure in the bodily parts of the mind. Matters of pleasure, then, went to the very heart of the epistemology of empiricism.

Post-Freudian and post-Foucauldian readings of A Midsummer Night’s Dream assume that the play celebrates the freeing-up of female sexual desire from neurotic inhibitions or disciplinary norms. But this is incompatible with what we know historically about 16th-century society’s investment in female chastity. This paper addresses the problem of this incompatibility by turning to Shakespeare’s use of forensic or legal rhetoric. In the Roman forensic rhetoric underlying 16th-century poetics, probable arguments of guilt or innocence are ‘invented’ from topics of circumstance, such as the Time, Place or Manner of the deed. The mysterious Night, Wood and Moonlight of Shakespeare’s play can be seen as making sexual crimes (violence, stealth, infidelity) take on the form of probability and fairy agency. The play thus brilliantly represents the stories of Theseus’s notorious rapes, abandonments and perjuries as fearful ‘phantasies’ or imaginings experienced by Hermia and Helena. This explains how the Victorians could interpret the play as a chaste, childlike ballet, while moderns and postmoderns take it to be a play about psychological repressions working against the free play of sexual desire.

This chapter explores new dimensions of Aurelius Prudentius Clemens' Hamartigenia through a focus on ornaments and figures—textual devices that delighted late antique readers but which tend to be opaque to modern readers. The Hamartigenia offers many instances of the image that deforms or changes how we can apprehend a text's meaning rather than conforming to habituated modes of understanding. The chapter discusses two key concepts that are essential in understanding how Prudentius and other late antique poets composed their poems through recognizing the importance of visualization in their conception of how audiences are affected by speech and writing: ekphrasis and enargeia. The pursuit of such thematic images and figures enhances the understanding of Prudentius' often dark and always intricate poetics, and further advances the study of the late antique poetic imagination.

This chapter examines Finnegans Wake, a work of comic fiction by Irish author James Joyce. It argues that writing has never thrown questions back at its questioners with as much energy as Finnegans Wake. Full of exclamations, historical presents, onomatopoeia, and the most extreme exuberances of free indirect discourse, the text presents an uncanny enargeia that suggests a living presence. Faced with a new kind of literary enigma, the first critics of Finnegans Wake developed the interpretive scheme through which the book is still most often seen. According to this scheme, the elusive subject of the Wake is, in one way or another, “a dream”. The word “wake” names many things at once in the title of Finnegans Wake: Irish waking of the corpse; staying awake in the night; following in the wake of a fallen giant; and waking up from sleep.

This chapter is an analysis of the metaleptic effect of apostrophe in narratives that are embedded in a lyric frame, using the example of the Pindaric epinician ode. In apostrophe, a narrator ‘turns away’ from his default addressee, but in contrast to epic, Pindaric lyric has many addressees: the chapter therefore begins with an analysis of the Pindaric ‘you’, a topic much less explored than the Pindaric ‘I’, and concludes that in an epinician ode the victor and his family are the default addressee. Turning to the three instances of narrative apostrophe in Pindaric myths, the chapter argues that, owing to the hymnic associations of early Greek apostrophe, these instances serve to anticipate a mythical (Pelops) or historical (Battus) character’s status as a hero enjoying hero cult. These apostrophes suggest the movement of a character into the world of the ode’s performance (epiphany) rather than the movement of the narrator and his narratee into the world of the mythical past (immersion or enargeia). The conclusion is drawn that whereas modern metalepsis usually has an illusion-breaking effect and is typically found in experimental texts, the narrative apostrophes in Pindar show that ancient metalepsis rather tends towards increasing the authority of the narrator and the ideological force of his tale.

To prepare for the more detailed focus on Paul in Part Three, this and the following chapter sketch visual cultures amidst which Paul preached, thought, and lived. A complete account of ‘Greco-Roman visual practices’ would be neither practicable nor desirable; the sources discussed here are selected with a view to their social diversity, prominence in the extant record, relevance to visuality, and significance in the history of scholarship on Paul. Firstly, the materialist philosophical turn is examined, underscoring its new emphasis on visuality and how this cultivated socially, personally, and religiously transformative modes of viewing. Then the adaptation of philosophical discourse in rhetorical and artistic theory is explored, showing how these too emphasize the constructive and sustaining power of visual assumptions and habits in relationships to God and neighbour. Finally, the role of scopic regimes in the transformation of the political and religious culture under Augustus is examined.

This chapter maintains that the narrations of Hellenistic decrees are a useful source for the oratory during this period. It emphasizes the cross-pollination of oratory, drama, and historiography, and between politics and theatre. Some of the decrees analyzed suggest that audiences in Hellenistic assemblies, even in the smaller cities, were as fascinated by the public performance of oratory as their Classical predecessors. The analysis of three aspects of these inscriptions leaves demonstrate the importance of oratorical performance and the vitality of oratory in the Hellenistic period: an emphasis on the tragic element of paradoxon (‘swift reversals of fortune’); a focus on visualizing narrated scenes (enargeia); and a recurrent attempt to stir the emotions of the audience.

This chapter discusses how declamatory narratives guide audiences to review their ethical commitments as spectators. The declamations involving a blind son accused of murdering his father (“The Bloodstained Wall,” DM 1, and “The Blind Man in the Doorway,” DM 2) deprive the defendant of key aspects of personhood (including most desires, capacities, and means of self-assertion), a more extreme representation of the impairment than the literary norm. For the speaker of “The Poor Man’s Torture” (DM 7), the sight of his tortured body will terrify his opponent, as the proof of his accusation will emerge from his pain. The father of “Suspected of Incest with His Mother, II” (DM 19) undermines his case through his failure to provide a self-consistent vision of his torture of his son. There can be no affectless viewing of the scene of torture in these speeches, yet the ethically appropriate response is a subject of controversy. These declamations associate the acts of visualization performed by the characters and the jurors with normative accounts of virtue. They offer broad-ranging claims about the interrelationship between acts of spectatorship, identity, and ethics.

The chapter examines the earliest set of instructions in the vernacular for meditating on death and the afterlife. First included in a handbook of practical and pastoral theology dating from the 1270s called the Miroir du Monde, these instructions achieved widespread diffusion through all classes of laypeople and clergy in the revised version of the Miroir by Friar Laurent d’Orléans, the Somme le Roi (1279). The instructions exhort readers to “go out of this world” once a day by imagining that they have died and their souls have gone first to hell, then to purgatory and paradise, in order to see what punishments and rewards await human beings in the next life. The chapter discusses the epistemology of meditative vision, and its background in Augustine’s theory of corporeal, spiritual, and intellectual vision; it examines how readers’ meditative visualization of the afterlife is facilitated by key metaphors of the text, sometimes accompanied by manuscript illustrations; it also describes the linguistic consequences of a daily implementation of the exercise.

This chapter argues that when we set Aristides’ dream narratives in the Hieroi Logoi against other ancient accounts of dreaming, what stands out is the degree to which Aristides engages the complexity of the dream scenario as a linguistic and literary challenge. This chapter contrasts the dream language of the Hieroi Logoi with the votive conventions associated with temple dreaming and, in more depth, with the concerns of contemporary technical writers on dreams – Galen and Artemidorus – to show that in contrast with other evidence for ancient dreaming, Aristides’ accounts are shaped by distinctly rhetorical concerns. In the rhetorical context, Aristides is interested in the challenge of dream narration as a way of testing the limits of vivid description—the limits of enargeia.

This chapter examines the literary technique of ekphrasis, defining it in terms of its intended effect on the audience: the vivid representation of an image to the mind’s eye, so as to evoke an emotional or other response. Ekphrasis makes an object appear present to an audience; it can be rich in detail or deftly brief. Both modes engage the audience in the imaginative recreation of the object, person or scene in their mind. This chapter also examines other aspects of crafting a text using ekphrasis: order, variety, and reading objects as texts. It argues that ekphrasis prompts questions about the thing described: Who is the maker? Who is the observer? And why is it absent?