Dazzling Likeness: Seeing Ekphrasis in Aeneid 10

Abstract

What, exactly, identifies the ekphrastic at work? Some basic definitive properties can be agreed: ekphrasis is a descriptive trope that brings what it describes vividly before the imaginative gaze of its audience. It is through its vivid evocation of a scene or object unseen to this audience that the ekphrasis fulfils its purpose, and makes an emotional impact upon them. The affective power of ekphrasis thus draws its audience into the fictional world of its narrative, blurring the boundaries necessarily erected by its verbal frame, while at the same time the focus on crafted objects that we often see in ekphraseis (particularly in those on which scholars have predominantly chosen to concentrate)—and the break that an ekphrasis can create when it is interposed in a continuing narrative—serve to highlight the very createdness of this world.So ekphrasis is on the face of it a well-defined literary figure, easily recognisable both by its intrinsic attributes and by its effects. Nevertheless the boundaries of ekphrasis are not as clearly defined as the summary above might suggest. Ekphraseis of art objects have commanded the most scholarly attention: they allow for discussion of the fashioning of the text as well as its function and they conform to modern understandings of what an ekphrasis looks like. But defined in classical terms, ekphrasis covers a far broader descriptive territory than does verbal representation of representative art alone and can include, as well as descriptions of objets d'art, descriptions of battles, of cities, of persons, places, times and events, of plants and animals, and of festivals…