HELIOS Volume 40 Spring/Fall 2013 Numbers 1–2 Vision and Viewing in Ancient Greece Sue Blundell, Douglas Cairns, and Nancy Rabinowitz, Guest Editors Preface 1 Introduction 3 Sue Blundell, Douglas Cairns, Elizabeth Craik, and Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz I. Art and Text Swallow This: A Pelike within Late Archaic Song and Visual Culture 41 Deborah Steiner Framing a View of the Unviewable: Architecture, Aphrodite, and Erotic Looking in the Lucianic Erôtes 71 Melissa Haynes Apparitions Apparent: Ekphrasis and the Parameters of Vision in the Elder Philostratus’s Imagines 97 Michael Squire II. Narrative Hesiod and the Divine Gaze 143 Helen Lovatt ‘Empire of the Gaze’: Despotism and Seraglio Fantasies à la grecque in Chariton’s Callirhoe 167 Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones III. Performance Women as Subject and Object of the Gaze in Tragedy 195 Nancy Rabinowitz Vision and Knowledge in Greek Tragedy 223 Chiara Thumiger Humiliation? Voyeurism, Violence, and Humor in Old Comedy 247 Ian Ruffell IV. Enlightenment Dynamics of Vision in Plato’s Thought 281 Fritz-Gregor Herrmann ‘Blessed Is He, Who Has Seen’: The Power of Ritual Viewing and Ritual Framing in Eleusis 309 Georgia Petridou Notes on Contributors 343 HELIOS EDITOR Steven M. Oberhelman EDITORIAL BOARD Helene Foley Mary-Kay Gamel Barbara K. Gold Barnard California, Santa Cruz Hamilton S. C. Humphreys W. R. Johnson Richard P. Martin Michigan Chicago Stanford Sheila Murnaghan Martha Nussbaum C. Robert Phillips III Pennsylvania Chicago Lehigh Brent Shaw Marilyn Skinner Victoria Wohl Princeton Arizona Toronto H ELIOS publishes articles that explore innovative approaches to the study of classical culture, lit- erature, and society. Especially welcome are articles that embrace contem porary critical methodolo- gies, such as anthropological, deconstructive, feminist, reader response, social history, and text theory. To be considered for publication, all material must be typed on 8½ by 11-inch paper and double spaced throughout, including indented quotations and notes. Authors are encouraged to send an electronic copy of their paper (preferably as a PDF file) to the editor. An abstract of at least 150 words should accompany the article. All manuscripts must be anonymous, with no reference to the author appearing in the text or notes, and will be refereed by experts in the field. For standard titles and abbreviations of ancient sources, the author should consult LSJ9, OLD, and OCD3. For bibliographical citations, the author must follow the author-date format; the format may be found in the style-sheet in TAPA. Please address all editorial correspondence to Steven M. Oberhelman, Editor, Dept. of Interna- tional Studies, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas 77843–4215; email: s-oberhelman@ tamu.edu. Subscriptions are $44.00 for individuals ($64.00 outside the U.S.) and $88.00 for institutions ($124.00 outside the U.S.). Payment in U.S. currency, check, money order, or bank draft drawn on a U.S. bank should be made payable to Texas Tech University Press. Helios–ISSN 0160–0923 Subscriptions and other business matters should be Spring/Fall 2013, Volume 40, nos. 1–2 addressed to: (published two times a year) Texas Tech University Press Copyright © 2013 Attn: Journal Subscriptions Texas Tech University Press Phone: 806.742.2982 Box 41037 Box 41037 Lubbock, Texas 79409–1037 USA Lubbock, TX 79409–1037 USA Email: [email protected] Preface Most of the papers published in this volume were presented as part of the panel “Vision and Power,” which formed one of the strands at the Celtic Conference in Classics held in Cork in 2008. We are immensely grateful to the 18 people who gave papers, and to the many other attendees who took part in the discussion, over the three-and-a-half-days that the panel lasted. In particular we owe a great debt to the contributors whose papers are published here. Their diligence and patience have been considerable. We would also like to express our gratitude to Helen Morales, the outside reader, and to Steve Oberhelman, for their hard work and invaluable editorial suggestions. Douglas Cairns wishes to thank the Leverhulme Trust, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and the European Research Council for funding the research that has informed his contribution to the Introduction. He would also like to thank Professor Richard Smith (University of Kentucky) for help with psycho- logical bibliography. Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz would like to thank Emily Del- bridge, who provided research assistance, and the Deans of Faculty at Hamilton College, David Paris and Joe Urgo, who furnished vital support for research and writing. HELIOS, vol. 40 no. 1–2, 2013 © Texas Tech University Press 1 Introduction SuE BLUNDELL, DOUGLAS CAIRNS, ELIZABETH CraIK, NancY SORKIN RABINOWITZ This volume explores the ways in which vision and viewing were depicted and conceptualized by writers and artists in the ancient Greek world. Since the 1960s, a substantial amount of scholarship has appeared on diverse aspects of the subject of vision, some of it purely theoretical, and some seeking to apply the theory in specific contexts such as art history or film studies. Central to much of this work is the idea that the way in which we view the world is relative both to the cognitive processes of the individual viewer, and to the culture in which the viewer exists. This notion has given rise to the widely employed concept of visuality, the idea that cultural patterns and social discourses constitute a kind of screen through which people necessarily look at the outside world (e.g., Elsner 2007, xvi–xvii, following Bryson 1988, 91–2). Scientific studies of visual perception carried out since the early 1960s have provided a firm foundation for this approach. The idea that information received via the senses furnishes us with ambiguous or incomplete evidence for external reality is widely accepted among cognitive scientists. Richard Gregory, for exam- ple, developed the theory that sense perceptions are similar to the predictive hypotheses of science—mental constructs devised to explain the available sensory evidence, which are then psychologically projected into external space and accepted as reality. For Gregory, visual perception is not a straightforward outcome of pat- terns of light that enter the eye, but rather a product of information based on our accumulated experiences, knowledge, and expectations about the world (Gregory 1977, 10–4). “[T]he senses do not give us a picture of the world directly; rather they provide evidence for the checking of hypotheses about what lies before us. Indeed we may say that the perception of an object is a hypothesis, suggested and tested by the sensory data” (Gregory 1977, 13–4). The conclusions of cognitive scientists were at the same time being matched by the speculations of art historians. In the early 1970s, Michael Baxandall developed the notion of “the period eye,” arguing that the skills that people employ in pro- cessing visual information are to a large extent culturally determined. Within any culture, Baxandall argues, shared experiences and ways of thinking, and the sup- plementary knowledge brought to any act of viewing, will help to determine which visual characteristics will most appeal to the beholders of an image: HELIOS, vol. 40 no. 1–2, 2013 © Texas Tech University Press 3 4 HELIOS We enjoy our own exercise of skill, and we particularly enjoy the playful exercise of skills which we use in normal life very earnestly. If a painting gives us oppor- tunity for exercising a valued skill and rewards our virtuosity with a sense of worthwhile insights about that painting’s organization, we tend to enjoy it: it is to our taste. (Baxandall 1988, 34) To one degree or another artists will respond to these socially constructed tastes when creating art objects. “The beholder must use on the painting such visual skills as he has . ​and he is likely to use those skills his society esteems highly. The painter responds to this: his public’s visual capacity must be his medium” (Baxan- dall 1988, 40). The cultural relativism underlying Baxandall’s analysis was echoed in many contemporary studies. At the root of this thinking lay the age-old question (nota- bly explored by both Greek and Enlightenment philosophers) about the extent to which we are justified in relying on our senses for our knowledge of external real- ity. If we are indeed compelled to turn to sense-perception for at least a part of our knowledge of the world, then which of the senses is the most useful? Is the eye necessarily our most valuable organ? In the 1980s Martin Jay coined the term ocu- larcentrism to describe the primacy that had been accorded to vision in modernist culture (Jay 1988a and 1988b). This privileging of sight had generated as its late twentieth-century antithesis a suspicion of the visual, which was expressed partic- ularly strongly by French writers and thinkers in the post-war period. Critics such as Sartre, Lacan, Althusser, and Derrida challenged from various standpoints the supposed superior ability of the eye to provide us with knowledge of an objective reality (Jay 1993, 211–594). In this postmodern retreat from positivist values, “what is perceived by the senses and what makes sense are split asunder” (Jay 1993, 585–6). The distrust aroused by vision’s failure to access the outside world was compounded by its deemed complicity in systems of oppression: Debord (1970) and Foucault (1977) have highlighted spectacle and surveillance as two long-term elements in the historical intensification of political and social control. This reaction against the cultural dominance of vision occurred during a period when the defining media of the late twentieth century—photography, film, televi- sion, video, and the internet—were exponentially increasing our society’s capacity for creating and disseminating images.