From Hellas with Love: The Aesthetics of Imitation in Aristaenetus's Epistles

summary: Combining general observations on Aristaenetus’s use of the episto-lary medium, which serves to bridge the gulf between the author’s present and Hellas’s literary past, with a close reading of two epistles, my article investigates the aesthetics of imitation underlying this collection of amatory letters. I show how issues of artistic mimesis are treated both in the opening text (1.1), which programmatically reflects upon the style of Aristaenetus’s work, its imitative nature and the fictionality of his epistolary loves, and in Ep. 2.10, written by a painter in love with his own creation.

once upon a time, an anonymous translator in 18th-century london

hailed Aristaenetus, whose epistles he presented to his contemporaries under the title Letters of Love and Gallantry, as “a Gentleman and a Lover ... the Delight of the Fair, and the Darling of the Ingenious.”1 Sadly, this ancient epistolographer has long since lost his popularity, suffering the same fate as many writers of later antiquity,2 whose works were all too quickly condemned by critics as epigonal, derivative and artificial. What might have appealed to

From Hellas with Love: The Aesthetics of Imitation in Aristaenetus’s Epistles*

regina höscheleUniversity of Toronto

Transactions of the American Philological Association 142 (2012) 157–186

© 2012 by the American Philological Association

* This essay is based on a talk first given at a conference on “Fragmented Narrative: The Narratology of the Letter and Epistolary Literature in Ancient Greek,” organized by Owen Hodkinson at the University of Lampeter in September 2008; later versions of the paper were presented at the Universities of Cincinnati and Munich in 2010. I am very grateful to the respective audiences for their feedback. In addition I would like to thank Peter Bing, Niklas Holzberg and the anonymous referees for their generous comments. All translations of Aristaenetus are taken from Bing and Höschele (in preparation); the Greek text follows Mazal 1971.

1 Letters of Love and Gallantry. Written in Greek by Aristaenetus. Discovering the Air of Courtship and Address Among the Quality of Greece (London 1716), 2–3.

2 On the date of Aristaenetus (around 500 c.e.), cf. Mazal 1977, Burri 2004 and the summary in Drago 2007: 25–36.

158 Regina Höschele The Aesthetics of Imitation in Aristaenetus’s EpistlesThe Aesthetics of Imitation in Aristaenetus’s Epistles

readers in the age of gallant literature could not pass muster in the eyes of a scholarly community that tended to judge texts by their degree of originality. Aristaenetus’s two books with their 50 amatory epistles are, it is true, replete with rewritings, quotations and allusions, which at times give the text an almost cento-like character. But this is no reason to dismiss his collection as the work of a “common burglar” (Arnott 1973: 202).3 It is, on the contrary, of great interest to take a closer look at the dynamics resulting from such textual mimesis and to consider the role of imitatio in Aristaenetus’s oeuvre. With the recent reappraisal of Second Sophistic authors4 we are now in a much better position to appreciate such intrinsically imitative texts—although Aristaenetus lived quite a bit later than the writers commonly associated with the Second Sophistic, he was clearly inspired by such authors as Lucian, Philostratus and Alciphron5 (as we shall see, these three even appear as corre-spondents in his collection), and his own literary technique strongly resembles theirs. Like them (or even more so), he was aware of his belatedness and hardly suffered from a Bloomian anxiety of influence, but took delight in displaying his learnedness by modeling his own texts on those of earlier authors and challenging the reader to identify his sources and uncover the full extent of his textual appropriations. It has to be said that Aristaenetus’s allusive practice differs considerably from the complex, sophisticated manner in which, for instance, Hellenistic poets frequently engage with earlier literature.6 Most of his references are, so to speak, much more obvious and straightforward—he even goes so far as to lift entire sentences or whole passages from his models,

3 It has to be said that Arnott holds a more positive view of Aristaenetus’s intertextual technique in his 1982 article.

4 For the Second Sophistic, cf., e.g., Anderson 1993, Swain 1996, Whitmarsh 2001 and Borg 2004; for the epistles of Alciphron as a Second Sophistic text, cf. Schmitz 2004. On how writers of that period play with the advantages and disadvantages of the epistolary medium, cf. Hodkinson 2007.

5 This is not to say that they are his only models, but they certainly play a crucial role in Aristaenetus’s epistolary universe. As Arnott 1982: 307 observes, “the authors most fre-quently and extensively exploited by ‘Aristaenetus’ are Achilles Tatius, Alciphron, Homer, Lucian, Menander, the Philostrati of the Letters and Imagines, and Plato.” For a general overview of Aristaenetus’s engagement with earlier literature, cf. Drago 2007: 36–77. An example of his allusions to Philostratus’s Imagines will be given in my discussion of Ep. 2.10, while Alciphron will be considered in relation with Aristaenetus’s choice of genre and Ep. 1.1. On Aristaenetus’s engagement with Philostratus, see also Gallé Cejudo 1993.

6 For an example of Hellenistic allusive practice, cf. Bing 2009: 166–69 on Callim. Epigr. 43 Pf. (= Anth. Pal. 12.134 = 13 Gow-Page, HE).

The Aesthetics of Imitation in Aristaenetus’s Epistles 159The Aesthetics of Imitation in Aristaenetus’s Epistles

reapplying them practically unaltered in the context of his letters—but this form of collage, too, can have intriguing effects.

It is indeed tempting to see in Aristaenetus a forerunner of postmodern mash-up artists, who freely mix together bits and pieces of earlier works. In a cultural landscape increasingly dominated by the internet, where (as Michiko Kakutani recently remarked) “copying and recycling [are] as simple as press-ing a couple of buttons,”7 the concepts of authorship and originality are more and more thrown into doubt. David Shields’s new book Reality Hunger, with which Kakutani starts her reflections on “Texts without Context,” is a case in point: consisting of 618 fragments, among them countless quotations from other writers, it poignantly asks “Who owns the Words?” (2010: 209; this very phrase belongs to a passage that is itself an unacknowledged reworking of re-marks by the cyberpunk author William Gibson). The same question has been raised by 17-year old Helene Hegemann, author of the much-acclaimed novel Axolotl Roadkill (2010), who was first praised as the new star of Germany’s literary scene and then fiercely attacked for (alleged?) plagiarism.8 The liter-ary scandal surrounding her work serves to remind us of how easily the line between creative adaptation and intellectual theft is blurred in an age that promotes the art of cut-and-paste along with a recombinant aesthetic.9 As Hegemann argued in her defense, “there’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity.”10

In many ways, then, Aristaenetus seems to be the perfect cut-and-paster avant la lettre, a premodern author catering to the taste of a postmodern audi-ence. However, the aesthetics of imitation that underlies Aristaenetus’s oeuvre was already appreciated by another pair of 18th-century literati: Richard Brinsley Butler Sheridan and Nathaniel Brassey Halhed, in the preface to their

7 This quote has been cut and pasted from “Texts without Context,” published in The New York Times, March 17, 2010.

8 It turned out that Hegemann had taken, almost without alteration, various passages from the little-known novel Strobo by the internet blogger Airen. For an account of the heated debate resulting from this discovery, cf. Nicholas Kulish “Author, 17, Says ‘It’s Mixing,’ not Plagiarism,” The New York Times, February 12, 2010.

9 Cf. Shields 2010: 104: “The recombinant (the bootleg, the remix, the mash-up) has become the characteristic pivot at the turn of our two centuries,” a quote taken from William Gibson, “God’s Little Toys: Confessions of a cut & paste artist” (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.07/gibson.html).

10 “Originalität gibt’s sowieso nicht, nur Echtheit.” This statement formed part of a press release, in which Hegemann and the Ullstein publishing house responded to accusations of plagiarism (cf. http://www.boersenblatt.net/356651/).


1771 translation of Aristaenetus’s first book into English verse, characterized his collection as “a cento from the writings of Plato, Lucian, Philostratus, and almost all the ancient Greek authors, whose sentences are most agreeably woven together, and applied to every passion incident to love,” adding that “[t]his circumstance, though it may lessen our idea of the invention of the author, should not in the least depreciate the performance, as it opens to us a new source of entertainment in contemplating the taste of the composer in the selection of his sentences and his ingenuity in the application of them.”11

Despite Aristaenetus’s former popularity and his potential to appeal, once again, to an audience breaking loose from Romantic concepts of originality, scholarly treatments of his oeuvre remain few and far between. To be sure, we now have a 650-page commentary by Anna Tiziana Drago (2007), which illuminates many of Aristaenetus’s sources,12 but the sophistication and self-consciousness of this all-but-forgotten author have yet to be fully explored. In what follows, I would like to investigate more deeply the dynamic that arises from the imitativeness of his texts and shed some light on Aristaenetus’s literary self-awareness, by combining general observations on his use of the epistolary medium with a close reading of the introductory letter and a re-lated text (Ep. 2.10). As I shall argue, the opening epistle programmatically reflects upon the style of Aristaenetus’s work, its imitative nature and the fictionality of his epistolary loves. This thematic complex also stands at the center of 2.10, which self-consciously treats the issue of artistic mimesis by showing us a painter in love with his own creation. With their extraordinary degree of self-reflexivity, these two letters encapsulate the very aesthetics of Aristaenetus’s poetic enterprise, and it is my contention that we ought to read his work against the backdrop of this metaliterary program. The present analysis, therefore, does not so much aim at discussing all of the allusions to be found in the two letters (though due attention will be given to prominent intertexts) as to reveal what they, explicitly or implicitly, say about the act of imitation.

1. aristaenetus’s “lettered” universeTo begin, let us take a look at the role of the medium in which Aristaenetus chose to write and see what significance he attributes to the epistolary form. One could be misled into thinking that epistolarity is a central and explicit

11 Quoted from Kelly 1854 [2010]: 433.12 Note also the recent bilingual editions by Vieillefond 1992, Zanetto 2005 and Pagén

2009, as well as the Spanish translation by Gallé Cejudo 1999.


theme of the letters—when in fact it is not—since it appears so prominently in Ep. 1.10, the letter best known to modern scholarship because of its role in reconstructions of Callimachus’s tale of Acontius and Cydippe (cf. Dilthey 1863, Harder 1993), which is itself centered around an intriguing incident of quasi-epistolary communication. As Patricia Rosenmeyer 1996 and 2001a: 110–30 has demonstrated, the apple “sent” to Cydippe bears the traits of both letter and inscription: the γράμματα carved onto its surface force the recipient unwittingly to perform a perlocutionary speech act, which will lead to the girl’s wedding with Acontius malgré elle. In this case, the epistolarity of the narrative is not just constituted by its frame (the letter is sent from a woman named Eratocleia to one Dionysias), but also by its content: what we have here is a tale revolving around an object that is cunningly turned into a letter. The act of inscribing a rather uncommon medium is, moreover, redu-plicated in the scene where Acontius longingly engraves the words Κυδίππη καλή into the bark of trees.13 No doubt, the idea of such an “appistle” and the prominence of writing within the story would appeal to an author who has made it his aim to set short prose narratives in epistolary form. However, it has to be stressed that this letter is not typical of the collection as a whole: the texts do not normally include inlaid epistles; what is more, the majority do not show any signs of being letters at all, such as conventional epistolary formulae or references to the medium, the composition of the message, its delivery or reception.

In numerous instances nothing besides the letterhead indicates that the text in front of us is supposed to be part of a correspondence between X and Y, particularly when we are dealing with a third-person narrative, where the con-nection between narrator and narrated event remains completely obscure.14 Unlike the captions that accompany many of the letters and provide a brief summary of their content, the epistolary headings with their punning names seem to go back to the author himself. Ep. 1.15 may serve as an example: in-spired by another story from Book 3 of Callimachus’s Aetia, it relates how king Phrygius made peace with an enemy city after falling in love with Pieria, one of its female inhabitants. Insofar as this is a tale about Love putting an end to War, the speaking names of sender and addressee, Aphrodisius and Lysimachus,

13 Cf. Rosenmeyer 2001a: 126–30 on “Acontius Inscriptor.”14 Zanetto 1987: 196 distinguishes between two types of letters in Aristaenetus and

other epistolographers: 1) the writer reports something concerning himself, the addressee or both of them (first or second person narrative); and 2) the writer reports something that concerns neither of them (third person narrative).


create a link between the story and its epistolary frame. Considering the droll wit of such sprechende Namen,15 one will hardly question their authenticity. At the same time, the headings not infrequently appear dispensable in rela-tion to the narratives that follow them. If, for instance, 1.15 had by some coincidence been excerpted without its letterhead and transmitted outside of the collection’s context, it would probably not occur to anyone to read it as a letter, something that is true for many of Aristaenetus’s epistles.

Occasionally the recipient is addressed in the course of the message, so we are at least reminded of the fact that there is an epistolary addressee func-tioning as internal narratee.16 Texts directly concerning the writer and/or recipient mostly occur in the second book of the corpus (12 out of 22 letters as opposed to 4 out of 28 in Book 1).17 While Aristaenetus’s collection thus contains a larger number of “proper”18 letters than a reading of the first book

15 On invented names in Greek epistolography, cf. Arnott 1982: 292–93; on redende Namen in Alciphron, cf. Schmitz 2004: 99–100, who argues that Alciphron, by using the device almost ad nauseam, deliberately points to the artificiality of the letters.

16 Cf. 1.3.77 (ὦ φιλότης), 79 (εὔχαρι Ἀνθοκόμη); 1.13.1 (φίλτατε); 1.16.34 (ὦ φιλότης); 1.19.67 (Θελξινόη), 69 (γλυκυτάτη); 1.20.1 (ὦ Μυρωνίδη); 1.23.1 (φίλε); 1.25.31 (ὦ Πετάλη); 1.28.23 (ὦ Τιμόκρατες); 2.3.1 (Φίλιννα), 16–17 (ὦ γύναιον δηλαδὴ συμπαθὲς γυναικί); 2.5.50 (Ἁρπεδόνη).

17 The following list includes only letters where the writer enters in a dialogue with the addressee, not first-person narratives which would function equally well without the epistolary framework: 1.14 (Philochremation explains to Eumusus that she wants money, not poems), 1.18 (Callicoete comments on Meiraciophile’s amatory preferences), 1.24 (Musarion assures Lysias of her love), 1.26 (Speusippus praises Panarete’s dancing), 2.1 (Aelianus recommends Charidemus to Calyce), 2.2 (Euxitheus declares his love to Pythias), 2.3 (Glycera complains to Philinna about her husband), 2.5 (Parthenis asks Harpedone for advice in her lovesickness), 2.6 (a young man to his rival), 2.9 (Dionysodorus to his perjuri-ous beloved, Ampelis), 2.13 (Chelidonion justifies herself in front of her lover Philonides), 2.14 (Melissa reminds Nicochares of their amorous encounter), 2.15 (Chrysis develops a plan of how to switch men with Myrrhine), 2.16 (Myrtale complains to Pamphilus that he prefers another), 2.17 (Epimenides tries to seduce the married Arignote), 2.21 (Habrocomes praises Delphis’s beauty).

18 Letters, like any literary genre, are hard to define; for a list of epistolary criteria, cf. Trapp 2003: 1, for further discussion, Gibson and Morrison 2007. Considering the general fluidity of generic boundaries, it is tricky to speak of something like a letter sensu stricto; in this context, I simply mean to distinguish between erotic narratives cast in epistolary form that could easily appear in another generic framework and texts that more closely resemble actual or pragmatic letters, whose purpose it is to pass on some sort of message from sender to recipient.


might suggest, only three make prominent reference to the act of writing.19 Interestingly, in all three cases the author presents us female letter-writers filled with longing or suffering from the pangs of love in a manner reminiscent of Ovid’s Heroides.20 Musarion in 1.24 is so infatuated with Lysias that she has no eyes for any of her numerous suitors; she implores him to come to her as soon as possible and concludes her message with the words: προσείρησό μοι, ψυχὴ Λυσία, θᾶττον ἤδη, ἐπεὶ καὶ τὸν χρόνον τοῦτον, ὃν ἐπιστέλλω σοι, χρονίζεις. πρὸς σὲ πάντες ἐκεῖνοι σάτυροι, οὐκ ἄνθρωποι, καὶ παρ’ οὐδὲν τίθεμαι τούτους (“A quick farewell, then, Lysias, my soul, since the very time I take to write this letter delays your coming. Compared with you, all the others are satyrs, not men. I don’t give a damn for them,” 1.24.37–40). The farewell formula here not only seals the letter, but it also reflects upon the delay caused by the act of writing itself and adds to the temporal gap between the composition of the message and its reception—even as Musarion’s letter tries to hasten Lysias’s arrival.21

In 2.5 Parthenis, a virgin not only in name, is enamored of a singer living next door and, like young Medea in Apollonius’s Argonautica, she desperately tries to come to grips with the unfamiliar and overwhelming feeling of love.22 While writing her letter to Harpedone, whom she asks for advice in her misery, Parthenis sneezes and happily takes this as a sign that the youth might have thought of her: ἡδέως μάλα ἔπταρον μεταξὺ γράφουσα. ἆρα ὁ νέος, τοὐμὸν μέλημα, διεμνημόνευσέ μου; (“Ha, sweet coincidence: I sneezed while writing. Did the youth, my darling, remember me in his thoughts?” 2.5.47–48). Last but not least, Chelidonion in 2.13 attempts to win back her lover, assuring him of her desire and fidelity.23 “If you knew,” she writes, “that I even lay awake at night, thinking of you, and put your letter—written, as it was, by your own hand!—right between my breasts, trying to comfort my heart which almost

19 In addition to the three passages discussed above, we find three brief references to the medium letter at 2.1.1–3 (τὴν παροῦσαν ἐπιστολήν ... ἐπιστείλαιμι), 2.9.19 (ἐπέστειλεν) and 2.17.21 (τὰ γεγραμμένα).

20 For Ovid’s heroines as authors, cf. Fulkerson 2005.21 We find a similar play with the idea of delay caused by the act of writing in one of

Philostratus’s letters, where an erastes urges a boy to give in to his desire, only to find out that his beard has already started to grow since he set out to compose his message; cf. Philostr. Ep. 13 with Goldhill 2009: 298–99. On the complex issue of temporality in ancient letters, cf. Rosenmeyer 2001a: 74–76.

22 For Parthenis’s literary ancestry, cf. Drago 2004.23 For Chelidonion and the laments of other abandoned women in ancient literature,

cf. Drago 1998.


leapt out in my longing for you, you would, on this account alone, be making a thousand kisses ready for delivery” (2.13.9–14). Philonides’ letter, which presumably contained a farewell message (he secretly sneaked away, while Chelidonion was asleep), is thus turned into an objet d’amour: the very epistle which marks his absence serves as a physical substitute for the beloved, but, being only a pale ersatz, it obviously fails to make Philonides present in any satisfying way. After all, Chelidonion asserts twice that she cried non-stop while writing to him: “I wrote this, by the Erotes, breathing heavily, weeping and sighing at every word I put to paper” (2.13.27–29; cf. 2.13.19–20).24

As these three examples indicate, Aristaenetus knows very well how to cre-ate the illusion of epistolary authenticity, but, given their rarity, such generic markers are apparently not of primary importance to him. In this sense his letters differ, for instance, from the erotic epistles in Book 4 of Alciphron’s corpus, which distinguish themselves from the preceding letters of fisher-men, farmers and parasites precisely by their epistolary self-awareness. As Rosenmeyer observes, “their constant references to the act of letter writing suggest the conventionality of the association between the worlds of erotic and epistolary exchange” (2001a: 298).25 Does the scarcity of such references and other epistolary features in Aristaenetus’s collection indicate that the letter form itself is of no particular concern to him? Or could the medium nonetheless have a special function in connection with his poetic agenda?

Of course, one might say that Aristaenetus is simply following in the foot-steps of his predecessors Alciphron, Aelian and Philostratus, imitating content as well as epistolary form without giving much weight to the implications of this generic choice. But in turning to precisely these models and composing fictional letters of his own, Aristaenetus is, I believe, very much aware of one of this genre’s most crucial aspects, namely its mediating function, which is central to any kind of epistolary exchange and bound to be of interest to one seeking to bridge the gulf between himself and the admired authors of old. As should become evident from my discussion below, bridging this gulf is one of Aristaenetus’s main objectives: like so many post-classical writers he has inscribed countless passages of earlier literature into his oeuvre and thus created a truly “lettered” universe of epistolary communication. In a recent paper on Catullus I suggested that the pairing of his two translations from Sappho (Carm. 51) and Callimachus (Carm. 66) with epistles (Catullus’s letter

24 For parallels in Ovid’s Heroides, cf. Drago 2007 on 2.13.19–20.25 For an analysis of Alciphron’s epistolary self-consciousness, cf. Rosenmeyer 2001a:

298–307 and König 2007.


to Calvus in Carm. 50 and his letter to Hortalus in Carm. 65) is anything but coincidental.26 As a means of communication between two persons who are physically separated, a letter serves to transport words from one locale—and one temporal moment—to another.27 It is thus in harmony with the dynamic of Catullus’s poetic enterprise, which consists in a multi-layered transportation of words: through his translations the verses of Sappho and Callimachus are brought from a remote place, a distant time, a foreign language and an alien culture to the here and now of Catullus and his readers—and, significantly, each translation is accompanied by a letter.

Could not the intervening distance between writer and addressee marking any epistolary communication reflect the temporal and cultural remoteness of earlier authors in relation to Aristaenetus in a comparable manner? His dialogue with literary predecessors clearly stands at the core of the collection. Indeed, he even includes authors of other eras (Lucian28 and Alciphron in 1.5 and 1.22, Philostratus in 1.11 and Aelian in 2.1) as correspondents within his own corpus (cf. Zanetto 1987: 197–99), which makes it all the more plausible that the epistolary form itself on some level embodies the dialogue, helping to bridge the gulf in time and space through the act of writing and reading.29 This procedure is prefigured by Alciphron’s invention of an epistolary ex-change between Menander and his beloved Glycera (4.18 and 19), which seals the fourth and last of his books30: after evoking, throughout his collection, a

26 Höschele 2009b. For the pairing of these four poems (though without reference to the role of the epistolary medium), see now also Acosta-Hughes 2010.

27 On the importance of distance and the awareness of the gap in ancient epistles, see also Trapp 2003: 38–42.

28 Though not an epistolographer himself, Lucian, as a composer of literary dialogues, may be seen to engage in a related genre, insofar as the ancients regarded the letter as “one half of a conversation” (Ps.-Demetrius 223).

29 If the Chariton in Philostr. Ep. 66 is identical with the novelist (which is very likely, cf. Tilg 2010: 79–81), then Philostratus likewise addressed a letter to an author of a by-gone era as if alive (similarly Philostr. Ep. 73 talks of Plutarch to Julia Domna as though he were still alive). While seemingly suggesting that Chariton’s words will not be remembered beyond his death and insinuating that nothing remains of him (“Those who are nobod-ies while they live, what will they be when they live not?”), he paradoxically enters into a dialogue with precisely this (dead) “nobody.” Interestingly, Petrarch, upon discovery of Cicero’s correspondence, felt inspired to elide the gulf between himself and the classical author by addressing a letter to Cicero, which was followed by several other epistles to the ancients. As Hinds 2005: 52 observed, “epistolarity always entails tensions between presence and absence, but never more so than here.”

30 A commentary on this pair of letters is offered by Bungarten 1967; for an interpreta-tive discussion, cf. Rosenmeyer 2001a: 301–6 and Höschele (forthcoming).


world largely based on that of New Comedy (his letters permit us glimpses into the private concerns of various rural and urban characters), Alciphron ends his work by featuring the Athenian playwright as a letter-writer himself, absorbing, so to speak, his main model into the epistolary discourse of his oeuvre.31 Aristaenetus pays homage to Alciphron in the same manner, and he does so—and this is significant—in a pair of letters (1.5 and 1.22) that are themselves full of Menandrian echoes attesting to his awareness of Alciphron’s strong intertextual ties with New Comedy32; he is, in a way, imitating the imitative technique of his model, including its epistolary appropriation of a literary predecessor.

So even if many of the texts exhibit a mere veneer of epistolarity, Aristaenetus does, I believe, draw on the genre’s mediating function,33 try-ing, on a figurative level, to mitigate his distance from past authors through the medium of the letter, which like no other literary form in antiquity is designed to make the absent present.34 In this sense, the medium may be part of the (metaliterary) message after all. Jacques Derrida once remarked of the letter, “[l]e mélange, c’est la lettre, l’epître qui n’est pas un genre, mais tous les genres, la littérature même” (1980: 54). Insofar as Aristaenetus has incorporated into his oeuvre a great number of passages from earlier texts of different generic origins, this definition perfectly suits the concept of his epistolary collection35: for what is his lettered universe if not a universe of belles lettres, a panopticum of Greek literature?

31 As Hodkinson 2008: 145n138 points out, the concluding two letters are particularly self-conscious of their writtenness and epistolarity (Menander talks about several letters within his letter) and may thus be understood as “a figure for the whole of Alc.’s text.”

32 Ep. 1.5 (Alciphron to Lucian) and 1.22 (Lucian to Alciphron) each tell of a woman who cunningly regains a man’s affection with the help of another female, forming a sort of thematic diptych (Zanetto 1987: 198–99); for a discussion of this pair and its allusions to comedy, cf. Höschele (forthcoming), with further references.

33 In a similar vein, König 2007 has recently sought to attribute a deeper meaning to Alciphron’s choice of the letter form, arguing that “with all its connotations of insuf-ficient and precarious communication,” it serves “as the ideal vehicle for opening up to us ... landscapes of frustrated desire” (259); a reading that is convincing, even though Alciphron’s characters, whose dreams of a better life remain unfulfilled, only rarely men-tion the problems associated with the medium letter.

34 On the parousia-topos in ancient epistolography, cf. Thraede 1970.35 Cf. Lesky 1951: 11: “Fabel und Motive sind so gut wie zur Gänze den verschiedensten

Provinzen der griechischen Literatur vieler Jahrhunderte entnommen.”


2. puella scripta—puella picta: lais in epistle 1.1Aristaenetus’s awareness of his own belated position within the literary history of Hellas is given due expression in the first of his Epistles, which, I submit, draws our attention to the imitative nature of his oeuvre and the artificiality of his epistolary loves. At the center of this introductory letter stands the de-scription of a woman whose beauty is eulogized for its perfection. Aristaenetus himself is in love with Lais, “the most beautiful masterpiece of Nature, pride of the female sex and in every way the living image of Aphrodite” (1.1.5–6),36 and depicts all her charms to Philocalus, the “Lover-of-Beauty.” Time and again scholars have conjectured that some scribe simply inferred the name of the otherwise unknown author from that first letter; for them, the work itself was written by an anonymous author, Aristaenetus (“Praiser-of-the-Best”37) being just one of many sprechende Namen.38 This may be so, but it does not exclude the possibility that the author himself (or rather his persona) speaks through that figure, addressing not a single individual, but all his readers, who are thus flatteringly greeted as φιλόκαλοι. Like the scriptae puellae of Roman love elegy, Lais is, as we shall see, more than just a woman39: she is a literary construct, an emblem of the work itself.40 By making the portrayal of Lais

36 Ὢ φύσεως τὸ κάλλιστον φιλοτέχνημα, ὢ γυναικῶν εὔκλεια καὶ διὰ πάντων ἔμψυχος τῆς Ἀφροδίτης εἰκών.

37 According to Lesky 1951: 8, “Aristaenetus” etymologically refers rather to the one “der das beste Lob empfängt, als den, der solches spendet,” but in the context of this letter one might as well interpret the name differently.

38 The first to cast doubt on Aristaenetus’s authorship was Mercier toward the end of the 16th century (his 1595 edition was followed by three further editions in 1600, 1610 and 1639); on the editorial history of Aristaenetus in general, cf. Mazal 1968. Arnott 1982: 293–94 asserts that the author would not combine a real name (i.e., his own) with fictitious names in the following letters. Zanetto 1987: 197–99, on the other hand, points out that Aristaenetus explicitly pays homage to earlier epistolographers, and concludes that “[l]’epistolografo, per sottolineare il piano di continuità sul quale la propria opera si colloca rispetto alla tradizione, pone il proprio nome accanto a quello degli altri epis-tolografi, e nella medesima sede, l’‘intestazione’ dell’epistola” (199). For a summary of the discussion, cf. Drago 2007: 16–36.

39 On the concept of the scripta puella, cf. Wyke 1987, 1989a, 1989b (reprinted in 2002); for the intermingling of poetics and erotics in Ovid’s Amores, cf. Bretzigheimer 2001. See also Höschele 2009a and 2010: 194–229 on the programmatic function of Meleager’s Heliodora.

40 Similarly Zanetto 2005: 235: “Laide, la donna bellissima, può infatti essere perce-pita come metafora della fascinazione letteraria, ‘donata’ ad Aristeneto dalla dea stessa dell’amore.”


the central theme of his introductory letter, the author invites us to attribute a metapoetic meaning to her. In this context the question of whether or not he was actually called Aristaenetus is marginal.

At the beginning of his ecphrasis, Aristaenetus asserts that he wishes to “paint her intoxicating beauty in words to the best of [his] ability” (κάλλος ἀφροδίσιον εἰς δύναμιν διαγράψω τοῖς λόγοις, 1.1.7–8). This remark attests to the author’s familiarity with the long tradition of rivalry between the arts, wherein writers compete against painters or sculptors with regard to the mimetic and aesthetic value of their artistic representations.41 And indeed, the verbal picture that Aristaenetus paints of Lais, evoking her white cheeks daubed with a touch of red, her red lips, her dark eyebrows, her black pupils surrounded by the brightest white,42 seems perfectly capable of entering in a contest with any of the portraits mentioned later in the letter. Lais may be introduced as Nature’s creation (εὖ μὲν ἐδημιούργησεν ἡ φύσις, 1.1.1; φύσεως τὸ κάλλιστον φιλοτέχνημα, 1.1.5), but she ultimately owes her existence to the verbal power of the author, who, like Pygmalion or Philopinax in Ep. 2.10 (on which see below), appears to be in love with the product of his own “womanufacture.”43

Lais’s double status—as the author’s beloved and symbol of his text—is intriguingly reflected in the following passage (1.1.20–24):

τράχηλος λευκός τε καὶ σύμμετρος τῷ προσώπῳ κἂν ἀκόσμητος ᾖ, δι’ ἁβρότητα τεθάρρηκεν ἑαυτῷ· περίκειται μέντοι λιθοκόλλητον περιδέραιον, ἐν ᾧ τοὔνομα γέγραπται τῆς καλῆς· γράμματα δ’ ἐστὶ τῶν λιθιδίων ἡ θέσις.

Her throat is white and becoming to her face, even when unadorned, confident in its plush delicacy. Nonetheless a necklace set with stones encircles it, on which the name of my beautiful girl is written; the arrangement of the stones spells out the letters.

This image is striking in various ways. First of all, there seems to be an implicit pun on Lais’s name and the almost homophonous Greek word for

41 On the relation between the arts in Hellenistic poetry, cf. Männlein-Robert 2007; for the paragone between painting and literature in Philostratus’s Imagines, cf. Giuliani 2007.

42 1.1.8–15: λευκαὶ μὲν ἐπιμὶξ καὶ ὑπέρυθροι παρειαί, καὶ ταύτῃ τὸ φαιδρὸν ἐκμιμοῦνται τῶν ῥόδων· χείλη δὲ λεπτὰ καὶ ἠρέμα διῃρημένα καὶ τῶν παρειῶν ἐρυθρότερα· ὀφρύς τε μέλαινα, τὸ μέλαν ἄκρατον· τὸ δὲ μεσόφρυον ἐμμέτρως τὰς ὀφρῦς διορίζει· ῥὶς εὐθεῖα καὶ παρισουμένη τῇ λεπτότητι τῶν χειλῶν· ὀφθαλμοὶ μεγάλοι τε καὶ διαυγεῖς καὶ καθαρῷ φωτὶ διαλάμποντες· τὸ δὲ μέλαν αὐτῶν, αἱ κόραι μελάνταται, καὶ τὸ κύκλῳ λευκόν, αἱ γλῆναι λευκόταται.

43 The term is taken from Sharrock 1991.


stone: λᾶας. To be sure, the author does not use this term, but a compound participle built on the basis of its synonym λίθος (λιθοκόλλητον at 1.1.22) and the diminutive λιθιδίων (1.1.24). However, it appears all but certain to me that an ancient Greek reader is likely to associate the word λᾶας, when asked to picture stones cut in the shape of the letters Λ, Α, I and Σ. If so, then girl and text are tied together by a very strong bond indeed: Lais is wearing a “name tag” made of λᾶας; the stones themselves have been turned into letters, forming a word that, self-reflexively, points to the very material from which this “lapidary” text was fashioned. Aristaenetus could hardly have chosen a more haunting image for the writtenness of his beloved, who is here—in the truest sense of the word—featured as a text.

A comparable link between woman and writing is suggested at the very end of the epistle, which the author concludes with the words (1.1.61–65):

οὐκ ἔχω ὅ τι λέγω, οὐδὲ ὅπως παύσομαι· λήξω δὲ ὅμως, ἓν μέγιστον ἐπευχόμενος τοῖς γραφεῖσι, τῆς Λαΐδος τὴν χάριν, ἧς δι’ ἔρωτα πολὺν οἶδα καὶ νῦν τὸ προσφιλὲς ὄνομα πολλάκις εἰπών.

I am dumbstruck, but unable to stop talking about her. But stop I shall none-theless, wishing for my writings this one most crucial thing, namely the charm of Lais—my great love for her, I know, makes me utter her beloved name continually.

By this wish Aristaenetus associates the charm of his girl, who had been introduced as a member of the Graces’ chorus (τῶν Χαρίτων συνηρίθμησε τῷ χορῷ, 1.1.2–3), with the literary style of his oeuvre. Χάρις is—it should be noted—not only a quality to be praised in a beautiful woman, but also a term used by ancient critics to denote a specific way of writing. Demetrius, for instance, in his work Peri hermeneias, discusses various forms of χάρις in con-nection with what he calls the γλαφυρὸς λόγος, or “elegant style” (128–89). As Kathryn Gutzwiller (1998: 87–91) has convincingly argued, Meleager, in a set of four self-epitaphs (Anth. Pal. 7.417–19 and 421), programmatically presents his writings as characterized by precisely this stylistic quality. In Gutzwiller’s reading, Meleager’s Menippean satires, which bore the title Charites, and his epigrammatic art appear linked via their literary style, their χάρις.44

Of particular interest in our context is that Meleager also praises his two principal girlfriends for their eloquence and charm. In Anth. Pal. 5.148 (= 47 Gow-Page, HE) he predicts that Heliodora will, one day, beat the Graces ἐν

44 Cf. also Männlein-Robert 2007: 243–50.


μύθοις (“in words”) with regard to grace.45 This can be interpreted as a proph-ecy of the literary fame awaiting his beloved/poetry: Meleager’s epigrammatic oeuvre, which here and elsewhere is emblematized by his darling Heliodora, will out-charm his very own Graces.46 In the following text, Anth. Pal. 5.149 (= 32 Gow-Page, HE), he beholds the charming image of charming Zenophila done by an artist who with this portrait charmingly offered him Charm herself as a gift.47 Zenophila, too, is described as chattering away (λαλιάν, 1), which strongly suggests that her pictorial representation is likewise to be taken as a symbol for Meleager’s poetry.48 In any case, he clearly associates χάρις with both women and writing, and it may well be that Aristaenetus’s final remark was inspired by these epigrams. What is more, the author’s claim that he con-tinually utters his darling’s “beloved name” (προσφιλὲς ὄνομα, 1.1.64) looks like a reader response to the very first of Meleager’s Heliodora poems (Anth. Pal. 5.136 = 42 Gow-Page, HE), where the epigrammatist programmatically urges a fellow symposiast to fill his cup and say again, again and again “For Heliodora,” mixing her “sweet name” (γλυκὺ ὄνομα, 2) with pure wine.49 Even if Lais does not turn up again in the course of the collection (as does Heliodora in Meleager’s Stephanos), she has, I think, a similar programmatic function, and the emphasis on her name, which is, let us recall, the very word spelled out by the stones of her necklace, highlights once more her textual nature. Last but not least, we should note that Lais, like Heliodora and Zenophila, is

45 Φαμί ποτ’ ἐν μύθοις τὰν εὔλαλον Ἡλιοδώραν / νικάσειν αὐτὰς τὰς Χάριτας χάρισιν (“I say that sweetly-speaking Heliodora will one day beat the Graces themselves in words with regard to their grace”).

46 Cf. Gow-Page, HE ad loc.; Gutzwiller 1997: 187; Männlein-Robert 2007: 246; Höschele 2009a: 119–20 and 2010: 213–14.

47 Τίς μοι Ζηνοφίλαν λαλιὰν παρέδειξεν ἑταίραν; / τίς μίαν ἐκ τρισσῶν ἤγαγέ μοι Χάριτα; / ἆρ’ ἐτύμως ἁνὴρ κεχαρισμένον ἄνυσεν ἔργον / δῶρα διδοὺς καὐτὰν τὰν Χάριν ἐν χάριτι (“Who is it that portrayed for me my chattering companion Zenophila? Who has led one of the three Graces to me? The man, indeed, has fashioned a charming work, charmingly giving Charm herself as a gift”).

48 Cf. Männlein-Robert 2007: 249: “Das Bild Zenophilas ist also eigentlich das poetische Werk des Dichters.”

49 Ἔγχει καὶ πάλιν εἰπέ, πάλιν πάλιν, Ἡλιοδώρας / εἰπέ, σὺν ἀκρήτῳ τὸ γλυκὺ μίσγ’ ὄνομα (“Pour in and say again, again and again ‘For Heliodora,’ say it and mix her sweet name with pure wine,” 1–2). A close variation of this epigram is offered by Anth. Pal. 5.137, where Meleager characterizes Heliodora’s name as ποθεινόν (“desirable”). For the metapoetic dimension of these two poems, cf. Gutzwiller 1997: 175–77 and Höschele 2009a: 105–13; 2010: 197–208.


not only praised for her fine looks, but also for her voice: ἡνίκα δὲ φθέγγεται, βαβαί, ὅσαι τῆς ὁμιλίας αὐτῆς αἱ σειρῆνες, ὅσον ἡ γλῶττα στωμύληθρος (“And when she speaks—oh my god!—what Siren-songs escape her lips, how expressive her tongue!” 1.1.42–43)—something that could, no doubt, be said of the oeuvre itself.

The programmatic link between subject matter and style, between female and literary grace, suggested by Aristaenetus at the beginning of his collection may furthermore recall the way in which Philostratus the Elder concludes his Imagines (2.34): after describing an image of the three Horae, the narra-tor conjectures that the painter himself must have encountered the dancing Horae and was “shaken to and fro by them into their artistry” (σεισθῆναι ὑπ’ αὐτῶν εἰς τὴν τέχνην): “thus perhaps do the goddesses intimate that grace must attend his painting”50 (ἴσως αἰνιττομένων τῶν θεῶν, ὅτι χρὴ σὺν ὥρᾳ γράφειν). The Horae, who are often represented together with the Graces, fulfill the same symbolic function in Philostratus as graceful Lais does in Aristaenetus. For ὥρα, like charis, can refer to “beauty, grace, elegance of style” (LSJ s.v. IIb): the loveliness of the image (and the text!) is emblematized by the very goddesses it represents.51

But let us return to Aristaenetus. Earlier in the letter he tells his addressee (1.1.31–36):

ταύτην ἑαυτοῖς ὡς οἷόν τε ἦν οἱ κορυφαῖοι γεγράφασι τῶν ζωγράφων. ἡνίκα οὖν δέοι γράφειν Ἑλένην ἢ Χάριτας ἢ καὶ αὐτήν γε τὴν ἄρχουσαν τῶν Χαρίτων, οἷον εἰς ὑπερφυὲς παράδειγμα κάλλους ἀφορῶντες ἀνασκοποῦσι τὴν εἰκόνα Λαΐδος, κἀντεῦθεν ἀποτυποῦνται θεοπρεπῶς τὸ φιλοτεχνούμενον εἶδος.

The greatest masters have painted her for their own purposes as best they could. So when they need to paint a Helen, or the Graces, or the Graces’ queen herself, they look to the image of Lais as a superb model of beauty, and from there they copy that lovingly created form in a manner fit for the gods.

Lais, then, serves as model for artists who wish to depict the most legendary beauty in the history of mankind, or even the Graces and Aphrodite—in and of itself a common enough topos (suffice it to mention the anecdote according to which the fourth-century hetaera Phryne served as model for both Praxiteles’

50 Translation by Elsner 2000b, who offers an intriguing interpretation of the Horae ecphrasis.

51 Cf. Elsner 2000b: 255 on σὺν ὥρᾳ: “so brilliant a pun on the ostensible painting’s subject (Horae), on the artist’s necessary gifts and on those of the writer, that I do not see how to translate it.”


Cnidian Aphrodite and Apelles’ Anadyomene; cf. Ath. 13.590f–591a52). In fact, Athenaeus says of Lais, the notorious Corinthian hetaera, who serves as avatar for Aristaenetus’s mistress, that “she was so beautiful that even paint-ers came to her and copied the woman’s breasts and her chest” (13.588d–e). Though probably inspired by Athenaeus’s account, our passage strikingly differs from it and similar tales in one important aspect: in Aristaenetus, the artists do not resort to Lais herself when they are about to paint a picture, but to a previously made portrait of her, producing, so to speak, copies of a mere copy. This is strangely evocative of Plato, who, it is well known, discredits the mimetic arts, insofar as they reproduce nothing but replications, or shadows, of the ideal Forms.53 Clearly, he would have been appalled by what is going on here! Aristaenetus, however, seems to see nothing objectionable in this sort of second-hand mimesis. Quite on the contrary: Lais’s image virtually constitutes an ideal Form, the εἰκών paradoxically functions as παράδειγμα.54 Comprising the very essence of beauty, it is the best exemplar one could wish for. Considering her position at the head of the collection and her paradigmatic function as a model for pictorial representations of female loveliness, we may even think of Lais’s beauty as informing, almost by a process of emanation, the other girls of Aristaenetus’s erotic universe, even as it had, according to our author, provided the model for Helens and Aphrodites.55 In this sense, she does not need to appear again in person, like Meleager’s Heliodora, in order for her presence to be felt: for what is Lais, if not the archetype for all the rest?

Aristaenetus’s literary technique, in turn, appears analogous to the painters’s procedure: what the painting-as-model is to them, texts are to him. By continu-ally taking his inspiration from others, he too is, in a way, replicating replicas (above all when the model texts themselves are full of allusions to previous literature). The very depiction of his beloved is in large part a rewriting of a letter by Alciphron (fr. 5), in which the Corinthian courtesans describe to the Athenian hetaerae the impact of Lais’s spectacular beauty.56 We may thus read

52 For anecdotes about Phryne, cf. Rosenmeyer 2001b: 243–48 and McClure 2003: 126–36.

53 Cf. the discussion of mimesis in Book 10 of Plato’s Republic (595–607), where works of art are characterized as “third removes from reality” (τρίττα ἀπέχοντα τοῦ ὄντος, 599a).

54 For the relationship of these two terms in Platonic thought, cf. Ti. 29a–c, where the demiourgos is said to have fashioned the world as a “copy” (εἰκών) of the eternal, unchangeable “model” (παράδειγμα).

55 Though he does not explicitly use the term “emanation,” it may well be that Aristaenetus’s thinking has been colored by Neoplatonic theories.

56 For parallels, cf. Drago 2007 ad loc.


the passage under discussion as a metapoetic reflection on the imitativeness of Aristaenetus’s oeuvre, which is indisputably characterized as something positive. In addition, the idea of Lais’s being painted highlights, once more, the constructedness of Aristaenetus’s beloved: she is as much a puella picta as she is a puella scripta. In this context, the semantic flexibility of the Greek verb γράφειν, which denotes both the act of writing and that of painting, is of particular significance, pointing to the quasi-interchangeability of the two media (Aristaenetus clearly plays with this ambiguity toward the beginning of his letter, when declaring that he is about to depict Lais’s beauty in words: διαγράψω τοῖς λόγοις, 1.1.8–9).57 The analogy between painter and writer is, then, inscribed into the very word that epitomizes the artistic activity of each (cf. 1.1.31–32 ~ 1.1.63).

Coming back to Lais, we may observe that she is simultaneously introduced as the “living image of Aphrodite” (1.1.6) and presented as the exemplar from which Aphrodite’s image is formed. In a similar vein, she serves as a model for portraits of Helen, while herself being modeled on the Helen of Homer (1.1.45–62):

οὕτως οὖν τὴν ἐμὴν ὡραϊζομένην καὶ τρυφῶσαν ὑπὸ πλούτου τῆς εὐπρεπείας οὐδ’ ἂν ὁ Μῶμος ἐν ἐλαχίστῳ μωμήσαιτο. ἀλλὰ πόθεν ἄρα με τοιαύτης ἠξίωσεν Ἀφροδίτη; περὶ κάλλους οὐκ ἠγωνίσατο παρ’ ἐμοί, Ἥρας Ἀθηνᾶς οὐκ ἔκρινα τὴν θεὸν εὐπρεπεστέραν ὑπάρχειν, ψῆφον αὐτῇ δίκης οὐκ ἀπέδωκα μῆλον, καὶ ἁπλῶς μοι ταύτην πεφιλοτίμηται τὴν Ἑλένην. ὦ πότνια Ἀφροδίτη, τί σοι τῆς Λαΐδος ἕνεκα θύσω; ἣν οἱ προσβλέποντες ἀποτροπιάζουσιν ὧδε σὺν θαύμασι προσευχόμενοι τοῖς θεοῖς· “ἀπίτω φθόνος τοῦ κάλλους, ἀπίτω βασκανία τῆς χάριτος.” τοσοῦτον αὐτῇ περίεστιν εὐπρεπείας, ὡς τῶν προσιόντων ἀγλαΐζειν τὰς κόρας τὴν Λαΐδα. καὶ γέροντες εὖ μάλα πρεσβῦται θαυμάζουσιν, ὡς οἱ παρ’ Ὁμήρῳ δημογέροντες τὴν Ἑλένην, καὶ· “εἴθε,” φασίν, “ἢ ταύτην ηὐτυχήσαμεν ἡβῶντες ἢ νῦν ἠρξάμεθα τῆς ἡλικίας.” οὐ νέμεσις τὸ γύναιον εἶναι διὰ στόματος τῇ Ἑλλάδι, ἔνθ’ οἱ κωφοὶ διανεύουσιν ἀλλήλοις τῆς Λαΐδος τὸ κάλλος. οὐκ ἔχω ὅ τι λέγω, οὐδὲ ὅπως παύσομαι.

… not even Blame could find the slightest thing with which to blame my girl in the fullness of her bloom, in the luxury of her looks. But why has Aphrodite considered me worthy of such a girl? She did not compete in a beauty contest with me as judge; I did not judge the goddess more beautiful than Hera or Athena; I did not give her an apple as the token of my vote, and yet she simply honored me with this Helen. O mistress Aphrodite, what offering shall I make to

57 Cf. the ambiguity of γράμμα in Erinna’s Agatharchis epigram (Anth. Pal. 6.352) with Männlein-Robert 2007: 41–42. For the same pun in Philostratus’s Imagines with further examples, cf. Elsner 1995: 32 and 2000b: 255; Frontisi-Ducroux and Vernant 1997: 229.


you in return for Lais? When people see her, they are so awestruck that they try to ward off evil by praying to the gods as follows: “May no one envy her beauty, may no one begrudge her grace!” Lais possesses such excess of beauty, that she brings sparkle to the eyes of all who pass. Even the oldest of the old marvel at her, as the Trojan elders (δημογέροντες) marveled at Helen in Homer, and “If only,” they say, “we’d had the luck to encounter her when we were young, or we were just now at the threshold of youth.” There’s no begrudging that the woman is on the lips of all Greece, where even the mutes nod to each other in admira-tion of Lais’s beauty. I am dumbstruck, but unable to stop talking about her.

A latter-day Helen, Lais inspires the same admiration among men, even the oldest of the old, as the woman for whose sake the Trojan War was fought. Aristaenetus explicitly evokes here the teichoskopia scene in Book 3 of the Iliad, where the δημογέροντες (note the Homeric term in ll. 57–58 of our text) comment on Helen’s appearance upon seeing her come out on the city-wall (Il. 3.156–60):

οὐ νέμεσις Τρῶας καὶ ἐϋκνήμιδας Ἀχαιοὺςτοιῇδ’ ἀμφὶ γυναικὶ πολὺν χρόνον ἄλγεα πάσχειν·αἰνῶς ἀθανάτῃσι θεῇς εἰς ὦπα ἔοικεν·ἀλλὰ καὶ ὧς τοίη περ ἐοῦσ’ ἐν νηυσὶ νεέσθω,μηδ’ ἡμῖν τεκέεσσί τ’ ὀπίσσω πῆμα λίποιτο.

Surely there is no blame on Trojans and strong-greaved Achaians, if for long time they suffer hardship for a woman like this one. Terrible is the likeness of her face to immortal goddesses. Still, though she be such, let her go away in the ships, lest she be left behind, a grief to us all and our children. (Trans. Lattimore 1951)

The phrase οὐ νέμεσις (“no blame, no begrudging”), which introduces the speech of the elders in Homer, is postponed by Aristaenetus until after the quotation of their speech and attributed to the narrator’s voice. This is remark-able, since thus the only verbal correspondence between his passage and that of the Iliad (except for the word δημογέροντες) is separated from the actual citation of the elders’s words.

The way in which Aristaenetus introduces the response of the elders may at first trick us into believing that it is, more or less, identical with the Trojans’s reaction, but upon activation of our poetic memory we realize that he has in fact modified the content of their speech: though clearly understanding why Helen’s attractiveness would drive men to wage wars over her, the Homeric elders do not—at least not explicitly—regret that they did not have the chance to rejoice in such a woman during their youth, nor do they wish to be young


again. While Homer links incomparable beauty to death and destruction (hence the Trojan elders’s ambivalence), Aristaenetus’s text, embodied by his beloved, exhibits only beauty, without any of the danger: it is pure charm, totally benign. The harmlessness of Lais, which is integral to the aesthetics of Aristaenetus’s epistolary collection, may have to do with the fact that she (and the erotic tradition represented by her) is so remote from real life, so much a product of artifice, that one can simply take delight in her beauty without having to fear any consequences. Evidently, Aristaenetus is not writing a second Iliad, but has created a work in which everything appears pleasing to the eye, irresistibly imbued with χάρις—even in epistles where characters employ trickery, where husbands are deceived and women commit adultery (cf. 1.5, 1.9, 1.20), the upshot is always humorous, never tragic.58

The prayer of Lais’s admirers that φθόνος and βασκανία stay away from her loveliness and grace (ἀπίτω φθόνος τοῦ κάλλους, ἀπίτω βασκανία τῆς χάριτος) is clearly reminiscent of similar concerns with regard to literary works (cf. Zanetto 2005: 234–35)—one need only think of Callimachus, who, at the beginning of the Aitia, tries to ward off “Baskania’s deadly race” (ἔλλετε Βασκανίης ὀλοὸν γένος, fr. 1.17 Pf.) and proudly declares, in one of his self-epitaphs, that he composed songs “mightier than Envy” (ἤεισεν κρέσσονα βασκανίης, 21.4 Pf. = 29.4 Gow-Page, HE). Again, woman and text appear to be one and the same, identical in their grace and the effect they have upon those who encounter them. When Aristaenetus states that Lais is “on the lips of all Greece,” he no doubt envisions similar fame for his oeuvre, implicitly predicting its future popularity. One is reminded, for instance, of Theognis’s prophecy that his beloved Cyrnus shall lie on the lips of many, πολλῶν κείμενος ἐν στόμασιν (240), and be a song for all concerned with the gifts of the Muses and for future generations alike: πᾶσι δ’, ὅσοισι μέμηλε, καὶ ἐσσομένοισιν ἀοιδή / ἔσσηι (251–52). Note too Ovid’s self-confident claim, at the end of the Metamorphoses, that he will be read by all people living in the Roman empire: quaque patet domitis Romana potentia terris / ore legar populi (“wherever Roman power extends over the subjugated lands, I shall be read by the people’s mouth,” Ov. Met. 15.878–79). The observation that even the mutes nod to each other in admiration of Lais’s beauty is taken almost verbatim from the above-mentioned letter by Alciphron (fr. 5, καὶ οἱ κωφοὶ διανεύουσιν ἀλλήλοις τὸ ἐκείνης κάλλος). “Thus,” the Corinthian

58 Cf. Ferro 1999: 437: “L’aspetto ludico è infatti essenziale all’opera, che non ha scopo educativo o intenti moralistici e mira al puro intrattenimento.”


courtesans observe, “Lais gives speech even to those who cannot talk” (οὕτω γλῶσσα γίνεται καὶ τοῖς λαλεῖν μὴ δυναμένοις Λαΐς). Aristaenetus, by way of contrast, is amusingly turned into a mute himself, dumbstruck by so much loveliness (οὐκ ἔχω ὅ τι λέγω)—and yet, as we have seen, he is unable to stop talking about his beloved.

3. the artist’s love for his own creation: epistle 2.10Whether depicted in words or painted on canvas, Lais is clearly marked as the author’s creation and can be said to stand paradigmatically for all of Aristaenetus’s epistolary loves. Significantly, the theme of artistic womanu-facture is once more evoked in Ep. 2.10, which has for its subject a puella picta in the truest sense of the word. The writer of this epistle, with which I would like to conclude the present discussion, is a painter with the telling name of Philopinax (“Image-Lover”). Infatuated with one of his paintings, he finds himself in an awkward predicament, which he describes at length to Chromation, i.e., to “Paint” or “Pigment” personified (the name of the ad-dressee already suggests that Philopinax solely functions in the self-reflexive world of art). Let me quote the text in its entirety:

Φιλοπίναξ Χρωματίωνι. καλὴν γέγραφα κόρην, καὶ τῆς ἐμῆς ἠράσθην γραφῆς. ἡ τέχνη τὸν πόθον, οὐκ Ἀφροδίτης τὸ βέλος· ἐκ τῆς ἐμῆς ἐγὼ κατατοξεύομαι δεξιᾶς. ὡς ἀτυχής, <ὃς> οὐ γέγονα τὴν γραφικὴν ἀφυής· οὐ γὰρ αἰσχρᾶς εἰκόνος ἠράσθην. νῦν δὲ ὅσον μέ τις ἀποθαυμάζει τῆς τέχνης, τοσοῦτον κατοικτείρει τοῦ πόθου· οὐ γὰρ ἂν ἧττον δόξαιμι κακοδαίμων ἐραστὴς ἢ σοφὸς εἶναι τεχνίτης. ἀλλὰ τί λίαν ὀδύρομαι καὶ τὴν ἐμὴν καταμέμφομαι δεξιάν; ἐκ τῶν πινάκων ἐπίσταμαι Φαίδραν, Νάρκισσον, Πασιφάην· τῇ μὲν οὐκ ἀεὶ παρῆν ὁ τῆς Ἀμαζόνος, ἣ δὲ καθόλου παρὰ φύσιν ἐπόθει, ὁ δὲ κυνηγέτης, εἰ τῇ πηγῇ προσῆγε τὴν χεῖρα, διεκέχυτο ἂν ὁ ποθούμενος καὶ παρέρρει τῶν δακτύλων· ἡ μὲν γὰρ πηγὴ γράφει τὸν Νάρκισσον, ἡ δὲ γραφὴ καὶ τὴν πηγὴν καὶ τὸν Νάρκισσον οἷον διψῶντα τοῦ κάλλους. ἐμοὶ δὲ ὅσον ἐθέλω, πάρεστιν ἡ φιλτάτη, καὶ κόρη τὸ φαινόμενον εὐπρεπής, κἂν τὴν χεῖρα προσάξω, ἀσύγχυτος ἐπιμένει βεβαίως, καὶ τῆς οἰκείας μορφῆς οὐκ ἐξίσταται. ἡδὺ προσγελᾷ καὶ μικρὸν ὑποκέχηνε, καὶ εἴποις ἂν ὡς ἐπ’ ἄκρων τῶν χειλῶν προκύπτει τις λόγος καὶ ὅσον οὔπω τοῦ στόματος ἐκπηδᾷ. ἐγὼ δὲ καὶ τὴν ἀκοὴν προσεπέλασα πολλάκις ὠτακουστῶν, τί ποτε ἄρα βούλεται ψιθυρίζειν, ἀποτυχὼν δὲ τοῦ λόγου πεφίληκα τὸ στόμα, τῶν παρειῶν τὰς κάλυκας, τῶν βλεφάρων τὴν χάριν, καὶ ὁμιλεῖν ἐρωτικῶς προτρέπω τὴν κόρην. ἣ δὲ καθάπερ ἑταίρα τὸν ἐραστὴν ὑποκνίζουσα σιωπᾷ. ἐπέθηκα τῇ κλίνῃ, ἠγκαλισάμην, ἐπιβέβληκα τῷ στήθει, ἵνα τυχὸν τὸν ἔνδον ἔρωτα θεραπεύσῃ, καὶ


πλέον ἐπιμέμηνα τῇ γραφῇ. αἰσθάνομαι πάλιν τῆς παραπληξίας, καὶ κινδυνεύω τὴν ἐμὴν προσαπολέσαι ψυχὴν δι’ ἄψυχον ἐρωμένην. χείλη μὲν φαίνει ὡραῖα, ἀλλ’ οὐκ ἀποδίδωσι τὸν καρπὸν τοῦ φιλῆσαι. τί δὲ ὄφελος κόμης καλῆς μὲν φαινομένης, κόμης δὲ οὐκ οὔσης; κἀγὼ μὲν δακρύω καὶ ποτνιῶμαι, ἡ δὲ εἰκὼν φαιδρὸν ἀποβλέπει. ἀλλ’ εἴθε μοι τοιαύτην ἔμψυχον, ὦ χρυσόπτεροι παῖδες Ἀφροδίτης, δοίητε φίλην, ὅπως ἂν ἐκ τῶν τῆς τέχνης ἔργων ἴδω κρείσσονα τέχνης, ὡραϊζομένην ἐν ζῶντι κάλλει, καὶ προσαρμόζων ἡδέως τῇ φύσει τὴν ἐμαυτοῦ τέχνην ἄμφω θεάσωμαι συμφωνούσας ἀλλήλαις.

Philopinax to ChromationI painted a beautiful girl—and fell in love with my own painting. Art itself filled me with longing, not Aphrodite’s arrow. I was shot by my own hand! O miserable me—to be born with a talent for painting! After all, I would not have fallen in love with an ugly picture. Now people pity me for my desire as much as they admire me for my art: my wretchedness in love appears to match my brilliance in painting. But why am I lamenting so excessively and blaming my right hand? From pictures I know Phaedra, Narcissus and Pasiphae. The first did not always have the Amazon’s son at her side; the last was burning with a completely unnatural desire; and the hunter—whenever his hand reached out for the spring, his beloved would dissolve and slip away from his fingers. For the spring bears the image of Narcissus, even as the painting bears that of both spring and Narcissus: like someone dying of thirst for his own beauty. I, however, can be with my darling as much as I want, the girl is good-looking, and when my hand reaches out for her, she stays there, steadfast and unshaken, without losing her own shape. She smiles at me sweetly, her lips slightly parted, and one could say that a word crouches at their very tip, ready to jump out of her mouth at any given moment. I have often moved my ear closer so as to hear what she might want to whisper. But unable to catch what she was saying, I kiss her mouth, her blossoming cheeks, her eyes full of grace, and try to persuade the girl to make love to me. She, however, remains silent, like a hetaera who wants to tease her lover a little. I put her on my bed, embrace her, throw myself upon her chest, hoping that she might, perhaps, cure the love inside me, but I am all the more maddened by my desire for this painting. Then, again, I become aware of my insanity, and <see that> I am at risk of losing my life for a lifeless beloved. The look of her lips is lovely, but they are fruitless to kiss. What good is hair dazzling in appearance, when it is hair that doesn’t exist? I weep and implore, but her image just gazes at me cheerily. O golden-winged children of Aphrodite, if only you could give me such a girl alive, so that, thanks to the works of my art, I might see her greater than art, abloom with living beauty; and so that, with pleasure setting the product of my skill beside that of nature, I might contemplate both in perfect harmony.


Like Pygmalion, Philopinax is consumed with love for a lifeless piece of art, which does not, and cannot, respond to his touch.59 Without a doubt, though, the medium in which he works puts him at a further disadvantage, since taking a two-dimensional portrait to bed is bound to be even less satisfying than embracing a three-dimensional statue. After accusing his own talent for having put him into such a state of misery (ἐκ τῆς ἐμῆς ἐγὼ κατατοξεύομαι δεξιᾶς, 2.10.2–3) Philopinax tries to comfort himself by evoking mythical paradigms of unnatural longing worse than his: Phaedra desiring her stepson, Pasiphae in love with a bull and Narcissus yearning for his own reflection. Importantly, Philopinax claims to be familiar with all these tales from pictorial representations (ἐκ τῶν πινάκων, 2.10.8–9): his knowledge of and reference to other paintings parallels Aristaenetus’s continuous dialogue with previ-ous texts; once again writer and painter appear analogized. It is worthy of note that πίναξ itself can be used to designate either a painting or a writing tablet—as in the case of γράφειν and cognates, the semantic ambiguity of the word underlines the parallel between the two sister arts that is so crucial to Aristaenetus’s literary program.

It is hardly a coincidence that the story of Narcissus receives the greatest emphasis among the three exempla. While not falling in love with his own image, Philopinax desires an image of his own creation. As Bettini 1999: 97 rightly remarks, “at least in terms of the story’s plot, there is little difference between a lover who is infatuated with a statue (or with a painted image) and a lover who is infatuated with himself.”60 And, indeed, what is someone so smug about his artistic skills, so convinced of his own brilliance, as our letter-writer if not a narcissist par excellence? As Rosati’s 1983 reading of the Ovidian version demonstrates,61 the tale of Narcissus, with its focus on the

59 For cases of agalmato-/iconophilia in antiquity and beyond, cf. Bettini 1999 and Hersey 2009. The motif seems to have been a popular topic for rhetorical exercises in later antiquity: Philostratus in his Life of the Sophists (V S 2.18), for instance, reports that Onomarchus of Andrus (2nd c. c.e.) presented a speech in the voice of an image-lover (ἐπὶ τοῦ τῆς εἰκόνος ἐρῶντος); the same theme stands in the center of an ethopoiia by Severus of Alexandria (4th c. c.e.), which is transmitted among the Progymnasmata of Libanius (Sev. Alex. Ethop. 8 = Ps.-Liban. Ethop. 27): τίνας ἂν εἴποι λόγους ζωγράφος γράψας κόρην καὶ ἐρασθεὶς αὐτῆς; (“What would a painter who painted a girl and fell in love with her say?”). Cf. also Stramaglia 2003 on P.Köln 250 and its rhetorical background. On these parallels, see also Puiggali’s 1984 treatment of love and folly in Aristaenetus 2.10.

60 Cf. also Ahl 1985: 246 on Ovid’s Pygmalion: “The artist is deceived by his own work—by what is in effect, self-love of astonishing intensity.”

61 With regard to its potential for artistic self-reflection and the motif of illusion, the myth of Narcissus is closely connected with that of Pygmalion. Cf. Hardie 2002: 143–72


reflection of the youth’s image, lends itself to being used for the purpose of artistic self-reflection, and the notion of an image-within-the-image that is conjured up in Aristaenetus’s letter adds yet another layer of reflexivity: ἡ μὲν γὰρ πηγὴ γράφει τὸν Νάρκισσον, ἡ δὲ γραφὴ καὶ τὴν πηγὴν καὶ τὸν Νάρκισσον οἷον διψῶντα τοῦ κάλλους (“for the spring bears the image of Narcissus, even as the painting bears that of both spring and Narcissus: like someone dying of thirst for his own beauty,” 2.10.13–15). On the one hand, we are invited to picture Philopinax in front of a painting, beholding Narcissus beholding himself. The double status of the spring as both bearing the image of the youth and being itself represented on a painting, which mirrors Narcissus’s double status as both beholder and beheld, is, on a linguistic level, reflected in the chiastic phrase πηγή – γράφει – γραφή – πηγήν that encloses Narcissus in its very center.62 On the other hand, we see the artist infatuated with an image that represents, if not himself, then the very essence of his aesthetic ideals.

Significantly, the words with which Philopinax describes the picture are taken almost verbatim from the Imagines of Philostratus the Elder; in fact, Aristaenetus’s sentence conflates the very beginning and end of an ecphrasis which the Second Sophistic author had given of a painting with the same subject matter: ἡ μὲν πηγὴ γράφει τὸν Νάρκισσον, ἡ δὲ γραφὴ τὴν πηγὴν καὶ τὰ τοῦ Ναρκίσσου πάντα (“the spring bears the image of Narcissus, even as the painting represents both the spring and the whole story of Narcissus,” Imag. 1.23.1) + ἐφέστηκε γὰρ τὸ μειράκιον τῷ ἐν ὕδατι ἑστῶτι, μᾶλλον δὲ ἀτενίζοντι ἐς αὐτὸ καὶ οἷον διψῶντι τοῦ κάλλους (“for the youth stands over the youth standing in the water, or rather over the youth who looks at him and seems like someone dying of thirst for his beauty,” Imag. 1.23.5). By evoking the two phrases which frame the image in Philostratus our text wittily suggests that Philopinax “saw” the painting of Narcissus in the art gallery imagined

on the former, 173–226 on the latter. For Pygmalion as a paradigmatic viewer of artworks, cf. Elsner 1991. Might Aristaenetus have been familiar with the two Ovidian tales? I would not exclude the possibility that he knew and responded to Latin literature, though the scope of this essay does not permit me to consider this notoriously difficult issue in further detail (for a balanced discussion of the question without conclusive results, cf. Drago 2007: 55–68; see also Degani 1998 on the relation of Byzantine epigrams to Latin literature). At any rate, there do not seem to be any striking Ovidian reminiscences in Ep. 2.10 that would go beyond the motif of artistic self-reflection.

62 Similarly, Bettini 1999: 94 observes that “the intellectual play of reflections ... man-ages to insinuate itself into the very language of Ovid’s lines,” cf. Met. 3.424–26: cunctaque miratur quibus est mirabilis ipse. / se cupit imprudens et qui probat ipse probatur, / dumque petit petitur pariterque accendit et ardet.


by the Imagines, whose speaker poses as an art critic and purports to offer brief discourses on pictures he had encountered in a Neapolitan villa.63 It is, I think, a fair assumption that Aristaenetus—like the majority of current scholars64—took the Imagines to be a purely textual construct; consider-ing the fictional nature of his model, Aristaenetus’s intertextual game with Philostratus appears particularly intricate: he presents us with an imaginary painter who implicitly purports to have seen images that only exist in words, while his very name, Philo-pinax, ambiguously characterizes him as a lover of paintings and a lover of texts, encapsulating both modes of representation, the visual and the verbal.

It is worthy of note that Aristaenetus has switched the case of the participle διψῶντι from dative to accusative (διψῶντα), thereby shifting its reference from the reflected image to Narcissus himself. He thus responds to a striking reversal in the model text by means of a further reversal, which underlines the quasi-identity and interchangeability of the two figures: while Philostratus had transferred the thirst for beauty from the boy staring into the water to his aquatic double,65 Aristaenetus, through a sort of textual “mirror effect,” transfers it back to the desiring subject.66 The evocation of Philostratus’s image

63 Note that the myths of Phaedra and Pasiphae are likewise evoked at Imagines 2.4 (on Hippolytus’s death) and 1.16 (on Daedalus’s construction of a wooden cow).

64 Scholars have puzzled much over the question whether Philostratus is describing a real or a fictional gallery. Even though there is no external evidence for the existence of these paintings, the hypothesis that Philostratus is thinking of an actual gallery has found numerous followers (thus, e.g., Lehmann-Hartleben 1941). Elsner 1995: 24, however, rightly points out that the “text allows a deep doubt about the actual existence of any-thing (whether paintings or gallery).” For further literature on this issue, cf. Elsner 1995: 313–14n6; see also Bryson 1994, Elsner 2000b, Leach 2000 and Newby 2009. Be that as it may, the myth of Narcissus was in fact a favored subject in Roman art; cf. Balensiefen 1990: 130–66 and Elsner 2000a.

65 Cf. Frontisi-Ducroux and Vernant 1997: 230: “Les deux Narcisse ... finissent par échanger leurs positions, quand, dans la phrase qui les superpose, le Narcisse des eaux est dépeint le regard tenu vers le premier, et comme assoiffé à son tour de sa beauté.” On Philostratus’s Narcissus, see also Bann 2009 and Baumann 2010: 1–9.

66 We may observe a similar reversal in Callistratus’s description of a Narcissus statue standing beside a spring, where it is the reflection of the sculpture (i.e., the product of second-grade mimesis) that is said to look like the real Narcissus (5.4: οὕτω δὲ ἦν ζωτικὸν καὶ ἔμπνουν τὸ καθ’ ὑδάτων σχῆμα, ὡς αὐτὸν εἶναι δοξάσαι τὸν Νάρκισσον). Strikingly, some Roman paintings of Narcissus were in fact located next to basins or pools, with the youth looking out of the picture into real water; cf. Elsner 2000a: 98–99.


moreover calls to mind a thematic complex that is integral to the plot of our letter: the illusion of lifelikeness created by a masterful artist.67 In describing the idyllic scenery surrounding Narcissus, Philostratus demonstrates its mimetic realism by observing that a bit of dew is dripping from the flowers and even a bee has settled on them: οὐκ οἶδα εἴτ’ ἐξαπατηθεῖσα ὑπὸ τῆς γραφῆς, εἴτε ἡμᾶς ἐξαπατῆσθαι χρὴ εἶναι αὐτήν (“I do not know whether it was deceived by the painting, or whether we are just to be tricked into believing that the bee is real,” Imag. 1.23.2)68—a fascinating blurring of boundaries between reality and art! Turning to Narcissus, the speaker states that he too has been fooled, though not by a painting—οὐδὲ χρώμασιν ἢ κηρῷ προστέτηκας, ἀλλ’ ἐκτυπῶσαν σὲ τὸ ὕδωρ, οἷον εἶδες αὐτό, οὐκ οἶσθα οὔτε τὸ τῆς πηγῆς ἐλέγχεις σόφισμα (“nor have you been engrossed by colors or wax; no, you don’t real-ize that the water represents you in just the way in which you look at it, nor do you recognize the trick of the spring as such,” Imag. 1.23.3). Philopinax, on the other hand, is indeed spellbound by a painted portrait—and not just by any, but by his own creation! In a way, this is the ultimate triumph of il-lusionism—it is one thing to be deceived by someone else’s work, another to fall for your own artifice.69

While his longing for a response from the beloved is frustrated like that of Narcissus,70 Philopinax at least finds comfort in the fact that the image, unlike the watery vision of the youth, does not dissolve upon being touched. The idea that the painted woman looks as though she is about to speak is a topos frequently found in ecphrastic literature.71 Often, though, it is precisely

67 This connection has also been pointed out by Drago 2007: 503–4.68 The notion of an insect being attracted by painted flowers recalls the anecdote about

the artistic contest between Zeuxis and Parrhasius recorded by Pliny the Elder (35.65), according to which the former painted grapes so true to nature that birds flew up to them. Sure of his victory, Zeuxis asked his rival to draw the curtain from his work, only to find out that Parrhasius’s mastery had deceived him into taking a painted curtain for real.

69 The predicament of Philopinax thus resembles that of Pygmalion, of whom Solodow 1988: 217 remarks with reference to the anecdote of Zeuxis and Parrhasius (cf. n68): “Ovid in his account has gone this one better: Pygmalion’s representation is so persuasive that it deceives not the birds, not a fellow artist, but the maker himself!”

70 Cf. Imag. 1.23.3: σὺ δ’ ὥσπερ ἑταίρῳ ἐντυχὼν τἀκεῖθεν περιμένεις. εἶτά σοι ἡ πηγὴ μύθῳ χρήσεται; (“As though you had met a companion, you are waiting for some reaction on his part. And then—do you expect the spring will address you?”).

71 Cf., e.g., Asclepiades 43 Gow-Page, HE (Anth. Plan. 120) on Lysippus’s Alexander statue: αὐδάσοντι δ’ ἔοικεν ὁ χάλκεος (“the bronze resembled one about to speak,” 3). The same participle might have appeared in Posidippus’s epigram on Hecataeus’s Philetas statue, though we cannot be certain about this supplement (63.7 A–B). For the lifelikeness


the lack of voice that is said to give away the artificiality of a portrait or statue.72 Here, Philopinax amusingly associates the silence of the image with the behavior of a hetaera who wants to tease her lover, and even seems to be aroused by the puella’s unresponsiveness. After describing his futile attempts at making love to the picture, however, he once again calls himself back to reason. Interestingly, Philopinax becomes aware of his own insanity at precisely the point where the scene tilts over into farce: whereas previously we might have followed him in our imaginations with a certain sympathy, perhaps even feeling titillated as he reached out to his “girl” and tried to kiss her, the idea of the artist throwing himself on top of his canvas so as to rub against the chest of his beloved, is so grotesque that it forces us to feel a jarring clash between image and painted medium: the pinax in all its unforgiving flatness. Unlike in the case of Narcissus, that clash is not tragic (the lover of the image does not drown), but only humorously bizarre. At first, the artist’s wish for an authentic woman resembling the one he had painted seems to indicate that he is about to overcome his madness. And yet, even then Philopinax, who evidently suffers from a severe case of pinakophilia, does not show himself willing to part with his creation, as he pictures himself gazing at both the girl and the portrait after which she is fashioned.

***

While Aristaenetus in Ep. 1.1 had drawn a purely verbal picture of Lais, Philopinax resorts to real colors, though in the end his painting exists only in the medium of the text. It should have become clear how closely the two arts are tied together, and how self-consciously the author highlights the construct-edness of his puellae. The juxtaposition of Philopinax’s chef d’oeuvre with a girl created by Nature, which he envisions in his fantasy, parallels the double status of Lais, who is introduced as “Nature’s masterpiece,” but implicitly marked as a product of the author’s verbal skills. Like Philopinax, Aristaenetus seems to be infatuated with his own creation, and invites all lovers of beauty,

of statues in ecphrastic epigram, cf. Manakidou 1993: 257–59. Note too how Onomarchus (see n59), in the role of an iconophile, remarks that the voice of the beloved image “is always on the verge of speaking”: ἔχεις δὲ καὶ φωνὴν μέλλουσαν ἀεί.

72 Cf. Erinna, Anth. Pal. 6.352.4 (αἰ καὐδὰν ποτέθηκ’, ἦς κ’ Ἀγαθαρχὶς ὅλα, “if he had given her voice, she would be entirely Agatharchis”) with Männlein-Robert 2007: 42–43. See also Herod. 4.32–34, where Kytto remarks about a statue: πρὸ τῶν ποδῶν γοῦν εἴ τι μὴ λίθος, τοὔργον, / ἐρεῖς, λαλήσει. μᾶ, χρόνῳ κοτ’ ὤνθρωποι / κἠς τοὺς λίθους ἕξουσι τὴν ζοὴν θεῖναι (“Well, yes, if it weren’t a stone in front of us, you’d say the work was going to speak. Gosh, with time men will, one day, be able to put life even into stones!”).


i.e., his readership, to agree with this enthusiastic assessment of his oeuvre. In his eyes the text’s artificiality is an essential part of its aesthetic appeal, not a sign of inferiority, and it is up to us to recognize its merits instead of casting it aside as derivative. A closer look at Aristaenetus’s playful combination of sources, of whose sophistication the preceding pages have attempted to give an impression, shows that the Epistles are much more than many scholars have given them credit for—in a way, they are the ultimate “post-text,” a most charming post-script to Greek literature.73

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From Hellas with Love: The Aesthetics of Imitation in Aristaenetus's Epistles

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