Publilius OPTATiANus POrfyrius: ChArACTerisTiC feATures Of lATe ANCieNT (original) (raw)
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Arts in Letters: The Aesthetics of Ancient Greek Writing
When considering writing in ancient Greece, scholars from a variety of disciplines will recall Plato's famous discomfort with the medium: it dulls a sharp memory; it easily deceives its audience, being the appearance of wisdom rather than true wisdom; and it is indiscriminately mobile, available even to those who cannot understand it. 1 Famed thinkers since the fourth century b.c.e. have queried Plato's diatribe against the written text but not always with consensus or satisfactory conclusion. I find it more useful, though, to widen the lens to examine the interdisciplinary relationship between ancient Greek words and images, which scholars from the traditionally independent disciplines of classical philology, epigraphy, art history, and archaeology have been slow to do. 2 Thus, we will not only better understand Plato but also the many who have responded both to the philosopher and to the ancient Greek tradition in general, including some of the authors and artists under consideration in this volume. Rather than probe Plato's notions in particular, then, this essay seeks to situate his criticisms within their larger cultural context-by posing new questions about how the Greeks used their alphabet when it first emerged in the eighth century b.c.e., and how those uses evolved over time until around the first century b.c.e., when Rome and its Latin language came to dominate the Mediterranean. As such, this study engages a wide range of evidence and will include the visible writings on archaic pots and statues (eighth to early fifth centuries b.c.e.), the classical Athenian stage (fifth century b.c.e.), and, of course, the page (third to first centuries b.c.e.). The representative sample of material and literary evidence presented here draws on a range of my interdisciplinary research and makes clear that, from their genesis, the Greek visual and literary arts were very much in active dialogue and interacted in a variety of fascinating ways to create meaning, sometimes in collaboration and at other times in competitive terms but consistently with reference to one another. 3
The Origins of Aesthetic Thought in Ancient Greece: Matter, Sensation and Experience (CUP 2010)
This is the first modern attempt to put aesthetics back on the map in classical studies. James I. Porter traces the origins of aesthetic thought and inquiry in their broadest manifestations as they evolved from before Homer down to the fourth century and then into later antiquity, with an emphasis on Greece in its earlier phases. Greek aesthetics, he argues, originated in an attention to the senses and to matter as opposed to the formalism and idealism that were enshrined by Plato and Aristotle and through whose lens most subsequent views of ancient art and aesthetics have typically been filtered. Treating aesthetics in this way can help us perceive the commonly shared basis of the diverse arts of antiquity. Reorienting our view of the ancient vocabularies of art and experience around matter and sensation, this book dramatically changes how we look upon the ancient achievements in these same areas. james i. porter is Professor of Classics at the University of California, Irvine. Recent publications include Classical Pasts: The Classical Traditions of Greece and Rome (edited, 2006), and Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future (2000). Contents List of figures page ix Acknowledgments xi Note on translations xiv Abbreviations xv 1 Aesthetic thought in antiquity 1 Is art modern? 26 2 Aesthetic questions 40 3 Aesthetic perceptions 48 4 Aesthetic vocabularies and the languages of art 2 Form and formalism 70 1 Forms of formalism 2 Form and the form of beauty in Plato and Aristotle 3 Matter and appearances 121 1 The disgrace of matter in philosophy, art, and culture 122 2 Materialism in art 132 3 Presocratic materialism, en route to the sublime 138 4 Were the Presocratics really materialists? 147 v 5 Presocratic aesthetics: painting the phainomena 6 Sublime matter: a Presocratic invention 7 The aesthetics of atomic matter 8 Presocratic empiricism: perception and experience 9 Aesthetic developments in the wake of early philosophy, and earlier part ii the nascent aesthetic languages of the sixth to fourth centuries bce 4 The rise of aesthetic reflection in the fifth century 1 Reflecting on art and aesthetics: first beginnings? 2 Material economies of art and aesthetics 3 The rise of aesthetic reflection in a new aesthetic public sphere 4 Protagoras and the new role of experience 5 Protagoras' peers 6 Gorgias 7 Democritus, Hippias, and Prodicus: the componential and compositional method 8 Stoicheia and componential analysis 9 "Radical empiricism" and the radical aesthetics of the particular 10 Beauty's material causes 11 Aesthetic pleasures of the senses 5 The evidence of Aristophanes and Gorgias 1 Measuring values in Frogs 2 Gorgias' "critical" materialism 3 Gorgias and the stoicheion: structure, sign, and play at the end of the fifth century 6 The music of the voice 1 Aristotle on the ascendancy of the "voice" 2 Euphony and the new science of aesthetic sound 3 The vivacity of the voice 4 Speech-writing: Alcidamas of Elaea on the spoken and written word 5 Hieronymus of Rhodes on the animated voice 6 Isocrates on the written voice 7 Hearing and punctuating the voice: incipient classicism vi Contents 8 The voice visualized 9 Cultures of the voice in Greece and Rome 7 The voice of music 1 Music in its ancient contexts 2 Lasus of Hermione and the new poetics of sound 3 Clearchus and the riddle of S 4 Pindar's rhetoric of innovation and the new poetics of sound Sacadas, Lasus, and the new poetics of sound 6 Lasus' theory of the musical note 7 The search for new sounds 8 Solving the riddle Appendix: Clearchus of Soli on Pindar in Athenaeus 8 Visual experience 1 The majesty of Phidias 2 Tastsinn to Gesichtssinn? 3 Locating ideals: the Foundry Cup 4 Idealization in art: a materialist perspective 5 Cycladic marble 6 The Nolan amphora by the Berlin Painter 7 Phenomenality 8 Frozen music 9 Hiding in the light: perception, deception, allurement part iii broader perspectives 9 Sublime monuments in ancient aesthetics 1 La parole et le marbre 2 Voices made of stone: towards an aesthetics of early sepulchral verse inscriptions 3 Homer's monumentalizing imagination 4 Song versus stone? 5 Hellenistic monumentality: lithic leptotēs 6 Verbal architecture 7 Sound sculpture 8 Taking stock 9 Monuments and their shadows 10 Sublime matter Contents vii part iv aesthetic futures Epilogue Bibliography Index locorum General index viii Contents
Introduction to Philosophy: Aesthetic Theory and Practice, 2021
Four different areas of concern can be singled out within ‘ancient aesthetics’, if we take the latter term to describe ancient authors’ attempts to theoretically comprehend beauty and the arts: i. The attempt to understand beauty (to kalon) as an ‘objective’ quality in the world that characterises some objects, people, and nature herself; ii. The attempt to understand what we would call the ‘subjective’ dimension involved in human responsiveness to beauty and the arts: the way that beautiful things please or move us, and the way that their effect upon us can be edifying, purifying us from negative beliefs or emotions (katharsis), or morally elevating us to be better citizens or human beings (in the context of paideia); iii. Attempts to understand how artistic objects, from poems to sculptures, are produced: whether through madness or inspiration, or by following codifiable technical norms, and with what ends; iv. falling between (i.) and (ii.), attempts to theorise the ethical and political significance of the arts, given their capacities to powerfully affect and transform individuals or groups. The chapter traces these four concerns as they come in and out of focus in the prephilosophical Greeks, Pythagoras and Plato, Aristotle, and then the Hellenistics, led by the Stoics.
The Force of Tradition in Early Greek Poetry and Painting
Humanities Australia 10: 40-53, 2019
[This paper is an abbreviated version of the 20th Annual Trendall Lecture, delivered at the University of Queensland, Brisbane, 30th January 2018.] In early Greek society, when literacy was rare and memory essential for defining and recording the cultural identity, it was tradition that set the parameters of the world view. This is seen most clearly in the Homeric epics, for these reflect a long-standing oral poetic tradition in which, for the contemporary hearers of the bards’ performances, the shaping of the narrative sequence was conveyed as much by the form as by the content of the poetry. As is now well documented in oral-traditional theory, the traditional bards drew upon a massive repertoire of formulaic phrases, set-piece situations and story patterns, all well-familiar through generations of repetition, which through recurrence over time had acquired laminations of extra-contextual associations that vastly enriched the listeners’ reception process and response to the story as it unfolded. In this article, the initial objective will be to demonstrate that the black-figure vase-painting of Athens in the 6th century BC was just as much governed by its painting tradition as oral epic was by its poetic tradition: the painters were equipped with a repertoire of figure-forms, iconographic motifs and scene-types, each of which increasingly over time developed associative significations over and above the overt content of the scene. Thereafter, the focus will shift to the tension between the constraints of the tradition and the urge for creative innovation, exploring how new ideas could be visually expressed within the traditional horizon of viewer-expectations. (Any venture to push beyond that horizon in a traditional context would almost inevitably lead to rejection by the tradition-trained recipients.) Close analysis of some examples of scenes that might initially appear to challenge traditional patterns will reveal that they are in fact largely built up out of pre-existing elements, each bringing its own traditional associations, and that the originality of the painter consisted in drawing upon those associations innovatively to evoke an exceptionally rich viewing response.