Word & Image

Abstract

Abstract This chapter examines the relationships between visual and verbal media in Roman antiquity. More specifically, it demonstrates how the study of Roman art intersects with the study of ancient Greek and Latin texts, and vice versa. Despite the tendency to segregate areas of scholarly expertise—above all, to separate “classical archaeology” from “classical philology”—any critical engagement with Roman imagery and iconography must go hand in hand with critical readings of written materials. The chapter proceeds in three parts. First, it explores some of the ways in which Roman literary texts (both Greek and Latin) engaged with visual subjects. Second, it discusses the textuality of Roman visual culture, surveying the roles that inscriptions played on Roman buildings, statues, mosaics, paintings, and other media. Third, it demonstrates the “intermedial”—or, perhaps better, the “iconotextual”—workings of Roman texts and images, with particular reference to the fourth-century ce picture-poems of Optatian.