The visual, the verbal, and the moral: Ekphrasis of beauty in the ancient Greek novels

The five extant ancient Greek novels manifest an ancient rhetorical trope of tension between the visual arts (painting and sculpture) and the verbal arts (poetry and rhetoric): the heroines of the Greek novels are all described as closely resembling works of visual art. Usually these descriptions of the heroines as sculptures or paintings occur at the moment of love at first sight; in these passages the reader’s gaze is focalized through the gaze of the hero or an antagonist suitor, emphasizing that the heroines’ characterization as art is crucial to the overall message of the novel. How you look determines what kind of man you are.

My research consists of close reading of the novels’ descriptions of women as art and the accompanying descriptions of men’s emotional and verbal reactions to them. I argue that the novel characters’ responses to beautiful women model behavior that the authors imply should be emulated (or avoided) in the real world. Additionally, these passages contribute to an ongoing philosophical debate about the relative merits of different sensory experiences: is visual or verbal experience morally superior? The novel reader has no choice but to experience the heroines’ beauty through the verbal medium of the text, but the authors try to make their descriptions so vivid that the reader has an emotional response and thinks he is actually seeing the heroine, thus forcing ancient readers to grapple with questions of morality and the role of literature as reinforcer of the status quo in their society.