classical philology volume 102 issue 1 2007 [doi 10.1086%2f521130] elsner, jaÅ- -- viewing ariadne-...

Viewing Ariadne: From Ekphrasis to Wall Painting in the Roman WorldAuthor(s): Ja ElsnerSource: Classical Philology, Vol. 102, No. 1, Special Issues on EkphrasisEditedby Shadi Bartsch and Ja Elsner (January 2007), pp. 20-44Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/521130 .Accessed: 17/05/2013 06:02

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Classical Philology 102 (2007): 2044[ 2007 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved] 0009-837X/07/10201-0002$10.00

20

VIEWING ARIADNE: FROM EKPHRASISTO WALL PAINTING IN THE ROMAN WORLD

ja elsner

nly in the twentieth century has the term ekphrasis come to beapplied exclusively to the description of works of art.1 In antiquitythe term had a much broader meaning as a technical denition for

all kinds of vivid description in the progymnasmata, or rhetorical handbooks;2

yet nonetheless there is a classic trajectory of interreferentialand indis-putably purplepassages in Greek and Roman poetry that described worksof art to offer a metatextual reection on the poem as a whole.3 Going back tothe Shield of Achilles in the Iliad (18.578608) and leading via ApolloniusRhodius to Catullus, Vergil, Ovid, and Silius Italicus (to cite only extantpoems), this is a trope of epic that may be considered a genre in its ownright. My concern here is not with ekphrasis as such, either as descriptionor as the description of art, but with a specic and repeated feature in theekphrasis of artan interest in viewing. The theme of the gaze is embeddednot only in pre-Roman epic,4 but also in the Hellenistic genre of so-called ek-phrastic epigram (that is, epigrams that play with works of art)5 and comesto be a powerful element of prose ekphraseis both in the rhetorical traditionthat culminated in Philostratus and in the novels.6

My aim here is to read the wonderfully complex self-reection on the gaze(itself a potential literary metaphor for reading) especially in Catullus 64 andsome of its successors against the parallel and equally complex visual ex-ploration of the gaze in contemporary Roman painting. For, within what has

1. See Webb 1999, 711, 1518. 2. See Webb 1999, 1115; on vividness, see Graf 1995; Dubel 1997; Webb 1997b; on the progymnasmata,

see for instance Webb 2001.3. See Elsner 2002a, 18. Friedlnder 1912, 1132, is the classic discussion of the ancient passages, with

pp. 123 on epic and other sections devoted to drama, history, the novel, epigram, rhetoric, and so forth.Other accounts of ekphrasis in antiquity include Downey 1959, Pernice and Gross 1969, Ravenna 1974,Bartsch 1989, and most recently the essays collected in Elsner 2002b.

4. So the great cloak of Jason in Argonautica 1.72167 is framed by images of gazing (72526 and76567)called by Hunter (1993, 53) two addresses to the reader.

5. See Goldhill 1994; and Gutzwiller 2002, 2004; generally now on the gaze in Hellenistic poetry, seeZanker 2004.

6. See esp. Goldhill 2001a. For ekphrasis in the novels, see Zeitlin 1990 on Longus; Bartsch 1989 onAchilles Tatius and Heliodorus, esp. 10943 on spectacle; Whitmarsh 2002 on Heliodorus. On the gaze inTatius, see Goldhill 2001a, 16772, 17879, and esp. Morales 2004; on the gaze in Chariton, see Egger1994 and now Zeitlin 2003.

O


Viewing Ariadne 21

been described as a remarkably ocular culture,7 these two forms of artisticcommentary (painterly and literary) provide evidence of the intense attentionpaid to the gaze in the Roman world. If it is difcult, under the regime ofnaturalism, to be sure that the viewing subject has correctly understood andrelated to the viewed object, then the examination of that difculty in Romanwriters and painters demonstrates an acute self-awareness about the gazespotential for failure, error, and deception. Ekphrasis itself, insofar as it pro-vides a pedagogic model for the gaze, may be seen as both its enabler (inhelping the viewers it is training to see) and its occluder (in the veil of wordswith which it screens and obscures the purported visual object). But when,in its own performance, ekphrasis demonstrates a clear self-awareness ofboth these qualities (enabling and occluding), then one might say that its truesubject is not the verbal depiction of a visual object, but rather the verbalenactment of the gaze that tries to relate with and penetrate the object.8

The Gaze in Ekphrasis

Catullus 64

The rst great surviving ekphrasis in the Roman poetic tradition appears inCatullus 64a short hexameter epic of 408 lines, written in the fourth orfth decade of the rst century b.c.e.9 A celebration of the marriage ofPeleus and Thetis in the mythological golden age, written in a highly wroughtstyle,10 Catullus 64 opens in genuection to the Argonautica of Apolloniuswith an image of Jasons ship, the Argo.11 The poem nds its way swiftly tothe couples wedding bed in the middle of things (in mediis, 48) and lingersthere over its embroidered coverlet so long that the ekphrasis threatens totake over the poem (50264). As has been comprehensively discussed byWilliam Fitzgerald, the entire text is infused with the imagery of gazing, whichis most strongly focused around the ekphrasis itself. From the opening lineswith the Nereids gazing in wonder at the Argo (15) and the ships crew gazingback at the naked nymphs who rise up to their breasts in the foam (16), athematic is established of watching and wonderat naked natural beautytending to succumb to voyeurism and at the artice of creation tending toan unnatural excess (so that the Argoliterally a ship woven [texta, 10] byAthenais a monstrum at 15). The tapestry itself (another piece of weavinglike the Argo, but woven by human hands, one presumes) intensies thesethemes with a deep focus on gazes and desiremainly unfullled or denied.

7. See, e.g., Coleman 1990; Segal 1994, 25758; Bergmann and Kondoleon 1999; Elsner 2000; Goldhill2001a; Morales 2004, 835.

8. See, at length, Elsner 2004. 9. The classic discussion is Klingner 1956. I am particularly indebted to the outstanding reading of

Fitzgerald (1995, 14068). For a rich account of the complexity of the narrative line in this ekphrasis andits interrelations with other texts, see Theodorakopoulos 2000. For the intriguing possibility that Catullus 64dates to after the civil war (i.e., to the 40s b.c.e.), see Hutchinson 2003, p. 210, n. 17.

10. Jenkyns (1982, 105) calls it with some hesitation . . . rococo.11. On the poems Hellenistic qualities, especially in the opening, see, e.g., Thomas 1982.


Ja Elsner22

The ekphrasis opens with Ariadne in misery on Naxos, gazing out, watch-ing Theseus sail away (5253) and unable to believe that she sees what shesees (55):

saxea ut efgies bacchantis, prospicit, eheu,prospicit . . .

Like some Bacchantes stone statue, she watches, ah,watches . . . 12

(6162; trans. after Lee)

Disheveled and near-nakedwith her milky breasts undraped (6367)Ariadne is both a visual parallel to the naked nymphs glimpsed from theArgo13 and objectied by Catullus as the subject of a gaze from outsidethe image, whether this be his own gaze and ours as his readers or that ofthe young men of Thessaly within his narrative.14 As Bacchante, she looksforward both to her nal fate as bride of Bacchus, whose approach (but notthe consummation of his love with her) is described at the end of the ek-phrasis (25164), where the Bacchantes twice-repeated euhoe (255) re-places the eheu of her looking out to sea (61),15 and also to the dance ofBacchus on Parnassus in the times of Peleus at the end of the poem (39093).The object of Ariadnes gaze here is not just the receding Theseus, but alsothe memory (commemorem, 117)16 of his arrival at Crete and his incursioninto her story (or her entrapment in his), as Catullus shifts to recounting theearlier part of the myth. That too turns out to be a drama of gazesespeciallythe striking memory of rst love in the moment that the virgin princess caughtsight of Theseus with a longing look (cupido conspexit lumine, 86):17

non prius ex illo agrantia declinavitlumina, quam cuncto concepit corpore ammamfunditus atque imis exarsit tota medullis.

She did not turn away from him her smoulderingeye-beams until throughout her frame she had caught redeep down, and in her inmost marrow was all ablaze.

(9193; trans. Lee)

Gazing on the memory of her rst gaze at Jason, which is a throwback to anearlier section of the myth within the narrative structure of the ekphrasis,Ariadne gures the intratextual viewers of the coverlet observing the bed-cover with its complex of gazes. These are not only the youth of Thessaly

12. On this simile and the way a textual tapestry appeals to sculptural imagery, see Laird 1993, 2021,also Fitzgerald 1995, 15455. On Ariadne as maenad, see Panoussi 2003, 11421.

13. Fitzgerald 1995, 15051.14. Cf. Grifn 1985, 98; and Fitzgerald 1995, 14749.15. With Fitzgerald 1995, 15456.16. Catullus memory of the story, but implicitly Ariadnes too, I take ita memory specically counter-

pointed against Theseus lack of memory of Ariadne in his departure (immemori, 123; immemor, 135; dictanihil meminere, 148, accepting Czwalinas conjecture for metuere).

17. See Fitzgerald 1995, 16162.


Viewing Ariadne 23

(explicitly cited at 267),18 but perhaps also the lovers on the point of marriageand the gods who come to celebrate the wedding feast in the latter part of thepoem. Ariadne may also gure the extratextual viewers of the ekphrasisCatullus himself and his readers, whose access to this picture is alwaysvicariously through its description, and whose response to the subject ofthis description is continuously focalized through Ariadnes gaze.19 Thesubject matter of the coverlet juxtaposes the failed marriage of Ariadne andTheseus against that of Peleus and Thetis in an ekphrastic pause that inter-poses one mythical narrative into the unfolding of another.20 In an extraor-dinarily self-referential moment within the ekphrasis, Catullus account ofthe tapestry posits another purple coverlet that the loving Ariadne mighthave spread over the bed of her beloved Theseus, had he not deserted her( purpurea . . . veste, 163). 21 Later in the poem, as the Fates sing theirprophecies to the company assembled at the wedding of Peleus and Thetis,their robes are described as white with a purple fringe (purpurea . . . ora,308). It is as if the poems logic of purple fabrics (in every case set offagainst white)22two coverlets (the real one of Peleus and Thetis bearinga picture of Ariadne and Ariadnes imagined one for herself and Theseuswithin the picture) and the robes of the Fatesculminates in a third textileassociated with destiny itself. One might argue that the vagaries of fate in itsvariety and ambiguities are to be summed up in the intimations of Catulluspurple textiles.

This shift between different registers of storytelling is itself mirrored in themove from present to past in the recounting of Ariadnes distress, from anarrative of loss to a narrative memory of love. While the love of Peleus andThetis is not directly evoked through the gaze, it too is described in the lan-guage of burning (incensus, 19)this time of the male Peleus inamed withlove for the goddess Thetis, reversing the inammation of gender betweenAriadne and Theseus. The brief account of Peleus and Thetis falling-in-lovethe former on board the Argo (1921)immediately follows that of theNereids gazing at the ship and the ships crew ogling the Nymphs (1418),with Thetis described as the fairest of the Nereids (28). So Ariadnes gazeinto the memory of her falling-in-love evokes and replays the further memoryof the love of Peleus and Thetis, already recounted in the poem, with Ariadnesexplicitly described gazes and ardent burning (86 and 9193) reecting theimplied gazes and less intensely emphasized ames of Peleus and Thetis(1421).

18. Fitzerald (1995, 140, 141, 153) makes much of the gaze of these Thessalian countrymen, but infact Catullus refers to the Thessalians gazing only after the ekphrasis is nished at 267 (spectando). Theintimacy of our private view of the spectacle of the tapestry alongside the poet is broken only after itsimages have been described by the reminder that we are looking at it in the company of a crowd of spectatorswithin the poem.

19. On focalization, see esp. Fowler 2000, 37107, esp. 4041, and on ekphrasis, 7273, 99.20. Further on the implications of this for the poem, see, e.g., Kinsey 1965; Bramble 1970; Clare 1996.21. Cf. 4950 tincta tegit roseo conchyli purpura fuco. / haec vestis, and again 265 vestis; see Hurley

2004, 107.22. The purple tapestry of 64.49 by contrast with the ivory of the couch at 64.48; the purple coverlet of

64.163 by contrast with the white feet of Theseus at 64.162; the white robes of the Fates by contrast withtheir purple borders at 64.308. See Clarke 2003, 57, 12627, 129, and 131.


Ja Elsner24

The narrativeor memoryof Ariadnes elopement with Theseus isconducted by means of abandoning her fathers sight (vultum, 117) and her-self being abandoned when her eyes were closed in sleep (122).23 Thesememories, continually reinforced by Ariadnes gaze out over the sea (5253, 6162, 127, 24950), lead to her speech (132201) in which she cursesTheseus and calls down ruin upon him as he has ruined her. Whether thenarrative of Theseus return is to be imagined as a further scene on thetapestry,24 or as the fulllment of Ariadnes cursea proleptic extensionof her gaze into the future that balances the recollective gaze into her pastCatullus tells the story, again, in terms of gazing. The deal between Theseusand his father Aegeus is that when Theseus eyes see the hills of Attica fromthe ship (233), he must hang white sails in place of black. Unmindful (andaccursed), Theseus forgets:

at pater, ut summa prospectum ex arce petebat,anxia in assiduos absumens lumina etus,cum primum infecti conspexit lintea veli,praecipitem sese scopulorum e vertice iecit.

But his father, as he scanned the view from the top of thecitadel, wasting his anxious eyes in endless weeping,the moment he saw the canvas of the darkened sailhurled himself headlong from the summit of the rocks.

(24144; trans. after Goold)

Aegeus gaze of desire for Theseus is ironically doomed as the object of hisaffection approaches, while Ariadnes gaze is stricken as Theseus recedes.Theseus himself, we are told, arrives home to grief as great as he had imposedupon Ariadne, returning to the news of his fathers death (24648), at whichpoint the ekphrasis pointedly returns to Ariadne, still looking out at the re-ceding ship and turning her griefs over in her heart (24950): prospectanscedentem maesta carinam / multiplices animo volvebat saucia curas.

Arguably, the only images on the coverlet are that of Ariadne gazing outto sea and of Bacchus coming to nd her (25164). In the unfulllment ofAriadnes gaze, Catullus creates a whole past and future of gazes reverber-ating between love and despair, like so many cares in Ariadnes heart. Whatmatters here, for my purposes, is an insistent emphasis on the gaze in whichthe principal gure within the tapestrys picture is portrayed as the paradigmfor a process of looking that refers implicitly to the poems characters outsidethe ekphrasis (the lovers Peleus and Thetis, the Thessalian youths) and to theextrapoetic viewers of Catullus masterly word painting (that is, his readers).After the description of the coverlet, we are told that the youth of Thessalygazed eagerly upon it until they were sated, as Catullus has his readers dwellon it for more than two hundred lines:

quae postquam cupide spectando Thessala pubesexpleta est . . .

23. Further on memory and oblivion, see Hurley 2004, 1089.24. Contra Fitzgerald 1995, 153; see, e.g., Hurley 2004, 100.

One Line Long


Viewing Ariadne 25

When the young Thessalianshad glutted avid eyes on this rare work . . .

(26768; trans. Mitchie)

Ironically, the only gaze that is satised in Catullus 64 is that of the Thes-salian youths come to celebrate the wedding of Peleus and Thetis and look-ing at the coverlet. Their visual satisfaction lies in a lengthy observation ofunfullled gazes; and the challenge to the reader is whether the unfullledgazes inside the tapestry (all of various forms of mythic disaster) or the satedgaze at the coverlet are the more appropriate models for our response to thepoem as a whole.

The Emulators of Catullus

The gaze remains central to a number of the refractions of Catullus 64 inAugustan poetry. Propertius 1.3, published in 29 or 28 b.c.e., opens with thepoets sleeping mistress Cynthia lying like Ariadne abandoned on the shore:25

Qualis Thesea iacuit cedente carinalanguida desertis Cnosia litoribus . . .

Like the maid of Cnossos as in a swoon she layon the deserted shore when Theseus sailed away . . .

(Prop. 1.3.12; trans. after Goold)

Compared also with Andromedas rst sleep after being rescued from thesea monster and with a maenad exhausted after Bacchic dancing (36),26

Cynthia here emulates and reverses a series of elements from Catullus. Shelies asleep in the love bed she and Propertius sharenot, however, a marriagebed as in Catullus 64and Ariadne gures as simile, not as ekphrasis orexplicit work of art (the image on Catullus coverlet). Ariadne-Cynthia isapproached by Propertius comically emulating Bacchus (multo . . . Baccho,1.3.9; cf. 1.3.14), as intimated in Catullus 64.25164, but this time Bacchusin the sense of being inebriated with wine. The gaze in Propertius is not ofAriadne looking persistently out to sea, but of Propertius as (anti-) Bacchuslooking uncertainly at his mistressbashful at being late and drunk, afraidof waking her and afraid of her dreams (1.3.1118):

sed sic intentis haerebam xus ocellisArgus ut ignotis cornibus Inachidos.

But I remained rooted with eyes intent upon herlike those of Argus upon the strange horns of Inachus child.

(1.3.1920; trans. Goold)

In this gaze at Ariadne-Cynthia (the eyes evoking the ocellis of the rst lineof the opening poem of Propertius 1, where Cynthias eyes take Propertius

25. For some of the debts of Prop. 1.3 to Catull. 64, see Curran 1966, 19697, 207; Harmon 1974, 15354,162; Harrison 1994, 19.

26. Catull. 64.61 has Ariadne as an efgies . . . bacchantis, while 25164 has maenads in their ecstasy(Propertius assiduis . . . choreis at 1.3.5); on the bacchic elements of Catull. 64, see Panoussi 2003, 11421.


Ja Elsner26

prisoner and capture his gaze), Propertius-Bacchus nds himself transformedinto the many-eyed monster Argus, employed in myth by Hera to guard Io,Inachus daughter.27 When the moons beams, peeping through the shutters,open Cynthias eyes (1.3.3133), she wakes and berates her lover with alament about abandonment, unfaithfulness, and her lonelinesswhich againplays with variations on the model of Ariadnes lament in Catullus 64. Par-ticularly striking is the image of Cynthia resisting sleep by spinning inpurple (purpureo . . . stamine, 1.3.41), which evokes the purple coverletof Catullus ekphrasis (purpura, Catull. 64.49), the purple coverings thatCatullus Ariadne imagines she might have spread on her bed with Theseus(purpura . . . veste, Catull. 64.163), and especially the spinning of CatullusFates in their white and purple robes (Catull. 64.30322), suggesting perhapsthat Cynthia is spinning out Propertius fate.28

Propertius play with the gaze in 1.3 brilliantly reverses Catullus by placingthe poems gaze in the rst-person singular of the poets own eyes as helooks at Cynthia-Ariadne. This gaze is not within an ekphrasis nor at a workof art (as are the various gazes in Catullus), but self-confessedly the poetsgaze at his woman reduced to a simile (Cynthia as Ariadne). This sets up theobjectication of the female as the viewed, only to surprise us when the poemends with the objectied Cynthia emulating Ariadnes curse and beratingPropertius in her rage.29 In transferring the gaze to the male, Propertiushugely complicates the rst-person persona of his viewer.30 Is he Theseus,the faithless deserter returned after failing to penetrate another girls door(1.3.3536)? Is he a comic Bacchusdrunk rather than divine (as at 1.3.910)? Is he one of the Thessalian youthsless a participant than an observer,watching impotently and afraid to disturb the ladys repose, self-absorbed inher dreams (1.3.1718)? Or has he become the monster Argus, watching thegirl with the paranoia of a hundred eyes as she dreams of other men (1.3.2930)? The gaze of Catullus 64, beautifully orchestrated as a coordinatingmeditation on the poems own structure as ekphrasis, becomes in Propertius1.3 a far less certain assertion of the ambivalences of subjectivity in thelovers relations (real, projected, and imagined) in relation to his beloved.The Catullan choice between unfullled gazes within an image and theexternal viewers voyeuristic satiation is replayed as the ambivalent, multi-faceted, and confused authorial gaze of a lover who cannot be fullled andcannot nd satisfaction even in just watching (since his jealousy of Cynthiasdreams causes him to want to wake her up).

Catullus Ariadne emerges twice in Ovid, both times with memorable inter-textual allusion.31 Specically in the Heroides, a collection of poems writtenas letters (many of them from famed mythical women to their lovers), prob-

27. On Prop. 1.3.1920, see Lyne 1970, 7071; Harmon 1974, 15960; Harrison 1994, 22.28. For other intimations of spinning in purple, see Harrison 1994, 23; and Clarke 2003, 12930.29. On the objectication of Cynthia in Propertius gaze (without any resistance or interference from

reality), see Greene 1995, 3078 (= Greene 1998, 5657); Sharrock 2000, 27275; ONeill 2000, 27172;Wyke 2002, 162.

30. See, e.g., Wlosok 1967, 352.31. On Fasti 3.46975 and Catull. 64, see Conte 1986, 6063; Barchiesi 1997a, 243, 245; and Barchiesi

2001, 1819, though here the gaze is not signicant.

One Line Long


Viewing Ariadne 27

ably composed in the penultimate or last decade b.c.e. and much concernedwith the gaze,32 Ovids Ariadne addresses Theseus in a text that reworksCatullus poem at length, in particular his motif of looking out over the seaat her vanished lover.33 Instead of being an ekphrasis of a pictorial gureon a bedspread, Ovids Ariadne is all voicethe poem being in her words,picking up Cynthias diatribe at the end of Propertius 1.3.34 Where Propertiusrefocalizes the Catullan motif of the gaze through himself in the rst person(and hence problematizes it with all the roles he may play), Ovid keeps thePropertian rst person but in the Catullan form of Ariadnes own gaze andvoice. Her letter explicitly casts the poems reader as Theseus (Her. 10.3):quae legis . . . Theseu (What you are reading, Theseus). Either the readeris Theseus, or the reader eavesdrops on a private communicationplayingthe voyeur, but always in danger of identication with the second-personaddressee, with Theseus as privileged reader of Ariadnes letter.35 Like thespectator of a picture of Ariadne (the Thessalian youths of Catullus) or anonlooker gure within a painting (as in several of the Pompeian versionsof the scene, which I discuss below), the reader is cast in a similar range ofpotential roles and uncertainties as Propertius 1.3 casts its narrator. Is thereader Theseus, or Bacchus (observing the action prior to his entry into thenarrative), or an innocent and impotent onlooker whose gaze happens simplyto be caught in the drama. In relation to all these potential addressees, OvidsAriadne, and indeed all the mythical heroines of the Heroides, allow the poetto give a voice and a gaze to the usually objectied female beloved of Roman(and especially Ovidian) amatory poetry.36 But the brilliant effect of return-ing the gaze to Ariadne and turning all his readers into voyeurs is that Ovidundermines any potential fullment or satiation for his external viewers: thesatisfaction of the Thessalian youths is revealed as wish-fulllment fantasy.

In relation to the ekphrastic structure of his Catullan ur-text, Ovid performsa remarkable game of giving life to what in Catullus were gures on a coverlet.Not only does Ariadne speak, but her bed (the bed on whose bedspread sheappeared as picture in Catullus, and also the bed on which Propertius Cynthialay as an imagined Ariadne) turns into a lavish and potent object spread onthe beach at Naxos and evoked at length (Her. 10.1114, 5158).37 This mayhardly resonate with a sense of mythical realism in picturing a seashoreabandonment,38 but it works to emphasize Ovids debt to his precursors andhis poems relation to the elegiac tradition of lovers, beds, and mistresses,while at the same time genuecting to (or perhaps inspiring) the Roman visual

32. See Spentzou 2003, 9193.33. On the play of Ov. Her. 10 with Catull. 64, see Verducci 1985, 246, 25662, 28485; Barchiesi

2001, 2025, 11417; Lindheim 2003, 9293, 9697; Fulkerson 2005, 32, 13740.34. There are various echoes of Prop. 1.3, from the moonlit time of night (Prop. 1.3.3033, Ov. Her.

10.17) to the uncertain groping of hands: Propertius desirous but afraid of touching Cynthia (1.3.1318),Ovids Ariadne stretching between sleep and fear for the vanished Theseus by her side (Her. 10.916).Critics have rather ignored the Propertian intertext between Catullus and Ovid.

35. For some general issues of epistolarity in the Heroides, see Farrell 1998 and Kennedy 2002.36. See the discussion of Spentzou 2003, 2442. On elegiac objectication (what Sharrock calls

womanufacture) see Sharrock (1991a, 1991b) and Wyke (1987a, 1987b, 1995). For further general inter-relations of the Heroides with Roman elegy, see, e.g., Barchiesi 2001, 2947; Hardie 2002b, 12128.

37. On the bed, see Verducci 1985, 26267; Lindheim 2003, 110.38. As remarked by Barchiesi 2001, 114.


Ja Elsner28

tradition of this imagery with its elaborate cushions and couches on the sand(see, e.g., gs. 1 and 9). Where Catullus guratively described his wovenAriadne as a stone statue of a Bacchante (61: saxea . . . efgies Bacchantis),Ovid has his real Ariadne running about as an excited bacchante, sittingfrozen on the rocks, as much a stone myself as was the stone I sat upon(Her. 10.4850: concita Baccha . . . in saxo frigida sedi / quamque lapis sedes,tam lapis ipsa fui).39 This is not only virtuosic play with Catulluss original,but also performs the classic Ovidian strategy in relation to art of avoidingekphrasis as such and bringing art to life in the text (a technique especiallyperfected in his Metamorphoses).40

In all this, the gaze remains centralwith Ariadne constantly looking out(Her. 10.1718, 2731, 49), her eyes pouring tears when they fail to seeTheseus sails (Her. 10.4346), able to see no trace of human habitation (60),unable to see her own mothers tears as she succumbs to death in her aban-donment (119), with no one there even to close her eyes in death (120). Inan interesting projection, and an afrmation of the reciprocity of gazes inRoman culture, part of Ariadnes purpose is to attract Theseus gaze back ather as his ship recedes (39) and ultimately to have him see her in her misery,with his mind if not his eyes (Her. 10.13338).41 Effectively, some of thebite of Ovids transposition of the theme from Catullus ekphrastic coverletand Propertius extended mythical simile to an impassioned letter is thetransference by which Ariadnes gaze projects itself in her imagination intothat of Theseus, so that in the last section of the poem he sees her sufferingand, in seeing it, feels it.

Some Reections on the Gaze in Campanian Painting

It is well known that the structure of the Roman domestic house was in partarticulated through a complex and brilliant orchestration of the view.42 Thishad implications in terms both of social status and of areas within the houseof relatively greater public access or privacy.43 It also related to the arts ofmemory in Roman intellectual culture whereby orators were trained to mem-orize their speeches by means of remembered views within houses (amongother things). 44 Clearly the view across rooms and through specicallydesigned vistas was related to the gaze not only as depicted within specicrooms or pictures but also as demanded from the visitors to the house bythose pictures.45 Indeed within individual rooms, it is clear that the decora-tion often envisaged particular viewing positions and vistas.46

39. See Barchiesi 2001, 114.40. See esp. Hardie 2002b, 17793.41. On Ovids Aridane constructing herself as object of Theseus absent male gaze, see Lindheim 2003,

11114, 16465, 167.42. See, e.g., Drerup 1959, 15559; Bek 1980, 181203; Jung 1984.43. The classic discussion is Wallace-Hadrill 1994, 361 and 14374, with some discussion of vistas at

4445, 8283. See also Hales 2003, 97163; Leach 2004, 37, 1854.44. See esp. Bergmann 1994; also Elsner 1995, 7485.45. For some interesting accounts of the gaze in relation to some Roman paintings, see Fredrick 1995;

Platt 2002.46. E.g., Scagliarini Corlita 197476.


Viewing Ariadne 29

Most surviving Roman mythological paintings are panel-type insertswithin the wall decoration from the so-called Third and Fourth Styles (mid-Augustan to Vespasianic, with most examples clustering in the Neronian andFlavian periods). By the last two decades of the rst century b.c.e., just afterPropertius published the Monobiblos and before the major works of Ovidwere composed, such panels begin to appear in surviving housessuch asthe Farnesina villa in Rome or the villa from Boscotrecase.47 In these panels,some of the most popular subjects (Ariadne gazing out to sea, Narcissusgazing into the pool) explicitly evoke the questions of looking, focalizing,and responding to what is seen in ways that intersect interestingly with theliterary tradition. What have been called supernumerary gures within apicture, which render a scene as if it were staged and watched, add an extrafrisson to the gazequestioning the viewers own spectatorship by offeringsome pictorial models of the act of viewing within the picture.48 This spot-lighting of a protagonist within a theatre of gazes within the picture is notconned to Pompeii; there are several parallels in Philostratus descriptionsof (purportedly real) pictures in his third-century Imagines.49

Following the lead of Catullus, let us turn to the gaze in one of the mostpopular mythological subjects from Campania, namely, the image of Ariadnegazing out at Theseus ship as it sails away.50 Our surviving examples aremostly from the so-called Fourth Style, dating to Neronian and Flavian timesrelatively soon before the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 c.e. 51 In the contextof the single panel, the isolation of Ariadne in her abandonment, which isimplicit in Catullus literary treatment of the theme, is occasionally stressed,as in a painting from Herculaneum now in the British Museum (g. 1).52

But more common is what has been called the strangely sociable depictionof Ariadne at her moment of desertionaccompanied by one or more wingedgures, often with one weeping and a second pointing to the receding ship.53

The privacy and desolation of the moment is staged as a group, with thepointing gure making visually explicit Ariadnes gaze at the ship whilethe lamenting Eros externalizes her state of mind and tears (e.g., gs. 24).The fact that in many of the extant examples the weeping Eros covers hiseyes only heightens the schemes emphasis on gazes and visual emotion.54

47. For a brief account of panel painting, see Ling 1991, 11241; and on the picture-gallery setting ofsuch panels, Leach 2004, 13255.

48. See Klein 1912; Michel 1982; and Clarke 1997.49. E.g., for gures in the center of crowds: Imag. 1.3.1, 1.28.8, 2.31.2; for youths spotlit in the center

of action: 1.30.4, 2.4.4, 2.7.5.50. On the popularity of the theme, see Fredrick 1995, 27173.51. See the catalogue by Gallo 1988; also Parise Badoni 1990, 8387; and LIMC III.1.105860,

nos. 7590.52. Gallo 1988, 6870, no. 15.53. See McNally 1985, 178.54. Ariadne accompanied by a single weeping eros: e.g., Naples Museum 9046 and Pompeii V.3.4, with

Gallo 1988, nos. 10 and 8; accompanied by a single winged gure pointing: e.g., VI.8.3 and VIII.5.5, withGallo 1988, nos. 12 and 14; accompanied by a weeping eros covering its eyes and a pointing gure: e.g.,Naples Museum 9047, VI.9.2, VII.12.26, V.1.18, with Gallo 1988, nos. 14. The weeping gure (nude, male,youthful, often with a bow) is clearly an eros. The female gure pointing has been identied as Eos byScherf (1967, 2226), and as Nemesis by Parise Badoni (1990, 83) and Bragantini (PPM VII.572) for no verygood reason in either case so far as I can see.


Ja Elsner30

This exteriorization or visual dramatization of the image of Ariadnes griefis extended further by an iconography of additional gures that intrude intothe scene. In a painting from the Casa della Softta (V.3.4), the painter addsto the basic conguration of Ariadne, weeping Eros, and Theseus ship anadditional seminude bearded male gure on the lower right, apparently hold-ing an oar and looking at Ariadne who herself looks out beyond the lamentingEros to the departing ship (g. 5).55 Not only is there a play of gazes withinthe picture (the onlooker at Ariadne, Ariadne at the ship, the Eros with hishand over his eyes) but insofar as the male onlooker gures a viewer externalto the main mythical narrative (like the Roman viewer within the house wherethis picture was displayed, for instance), Ariadnes grief is framed as itselfa spectacle to be observedas the Thessalian youths observe the coverlet inCatullus or as Ovids readers eavesdrop onto the privacy of Ariadnes letterto Theseus. The fact that the gure with the oar is hard to explain within thelogic of the mythical narrative (some kind of marine personication, perhaps?)only adds to the sense of rupture.56

In the triclinium of the Casa di Cornelius Diadumenus (VII.12.26), thepainter adds still greater complexity (g. 6).57 This time Ariadne on the leftgazes at the departing ship with the aid of a winged female gure, while theEros covers his eyes in weeping. To the right of this group is a seminude malegure with an oar (as in the Casa della Softta)58 who may be observing themor may be looking up.59 Behind him is a second, clothed, female onlookerwhose gaze is focused above Ariadne on two gures at the top left. These arethe goddess Athena (Theseus protectress), apparently ying out over therocks towards the ship, and what is probably a nude winged Eros recliningon the rocks.60 This groupand certainly Athena on the rockswhichappears in no other extant version of the scene, is an import from theTheseus escaping while Ariadne sleeps iconographic topos.61

However one stretches the mythical narrative to explain the accumulationof gures on the upper left (Athena and the reclining nude), no interpreta-tion that seeks a coherent pictorial unity within the image can surely makesense of the two onlookers to the right. Instead we have a staging not onlyof viewers observing a scene of gazing, but of one of these interlopers lookingup and seeing in the picture something that never was there (in any of theother examples of Ariadne gazing) but comes to be so herethe epiphany ofAthena and the vision of the reclining winged nude. Since the primary objectof Ariadnes gaze in all these versions is a vanishing ship, more or less sketchy

55. See Gallo 1988, p. 65, no. 9; Guzzo 1997, p. 120, no. 70; PPM III.899.56. Not to speak of the phallic intervention of the oar whose tip reaches up to the line of Ariadnes gaze

between her eyes and Theseus ship.57. See Gallo 1988, p. 63, no. 3; Bragantini 2004, 14244; and PPM VII.57172.58. And this oar is no less ithyphallic.59. If we follow La Volpes nineteenth-century drawing of the scene, he is looking up: PPM documen-

tazione, 71517.60. Again given the current state of the image, the best guide is La Volpes drawing. But we do have to

trust it! See PPM documentazione, 71517, and PPM VII.572.61. On the sleeping Ariadne abandoned by Theseus, see McNally 1985, 17791; Parise Badoni 1990,

7382; LIMC III.1.105758, nos. 5566.


Viewing Ariadne 31

in the distance, the actual object of the painting as it stages the scene is thegaze itself. But what the mural from the Casa di Cornelius Diadumenus addsto this subject is a deliberate problematization of the observing focalizer. Inmultiplying its onlooker gures and staging the potential difference of theirgazes (both in direction and in object), the painting throws back at its viewersa question about what point of view, what hierarchy of signicance, whatobject of the gaze they themselves will apply to this (or any) painting.

With a number of these Campanian paintings it is possible to embark ona contextual interpretation in the light of other pictorial themes with whichthey were connected.62 The number of visual juxtapositions is large and theirpotential meanings not always obvious. But twice, for instance, Ariadnegazing at Theseus receding ship is paired with a pendant showing Leanderswimming across the Hellespont to Hero, who gazes upon him from theother bank.63 Clearly, here is a play of desire defeated and desire fullled.In each case the lovers are separated by water with the female looking outat the male in action who sails away from his lover (in the case of Theseus) orswims towards her (in the case of Leander). In the House of the Vettii (g. 7),the watery nature of the space over which desire and separation are enactedin these stories is emphasized by a remarkable frieze of swimming shes inthe upper part of the room above the panels with mythological scenes.64

In the House of the Tragic Poet (VI.8.3.5), the Ariadne theme cuts acrossmore than one room. In room 14 (sometimes numbered 14a), off the peristyle,was an image of Ariadne looking out to sea with an Eros pointing to Theseusship.65 Across the peristyle, in triclinium 15, was a panel of Theseus desertingAriadne (probably asleep, though this section of the picture hardly survives).66

Here the pictorial dcor of the house offers not only what could be seen asa temporal progression of the subject with the gazing scene following theabandonment, but also effectively two renderings of the same theme fromthe (very different) points of view of Theseus and Ariadne. In cubiculum 14,the story is focalized through Ariadnes gazeit is a narrative of her lossand the bereavement of her love (as thematized by the Eros). In room 15, weare offered Theseus boarding ship with Athena hovering over the rocks to theupper left. The desertion is focalized through the sharp glance of Theseus,who looks back for a last time at his sleeping lover as he leaves, and justiedby the presence of Athena, who urges him on to his mythic destiny. Again,the paintings perform the diversity of potential focalization around a singleevent or sequence of events and the complexity of clashing subjectivities inresponse.

62. See Parise Badoni 1990, 88, appendices 1 and 2, for lists of the surviving cases.63. In room z of the Casa del Gallo, VIII.5.2.5 (PPM VIII.56365 with PPM documentazione 282 and

839) and in cubiculum d of the House of the Vettii, VI.15.1 (PPM V.48285).64. See PPM V.483. Note that not all the mythological images from the walls of cubiculum d have

survived and that the original scheme would therefore have been more complex. The Ariadne theme maybe completed in the nearby oecus e, whose south wall has Dionysus and Ariadne (?) enthroned together inits main image: see PPM V.48891.

65. Gallo 1988, p. 68, no. 12, PPM IV.56263.66. Parise Badoni 1990, 7476, PPM IV.57376. A good black-and-white photograph of the much-

damaged Ariadne is in Rizzo 1929, tav. xxxix.


Ja Elsner32

Two treatments add a further frisson to the complex by throwing Dionysusinto the pictorial melting pot. In the Casa dei Capitelli Colorati (VII.4.31.51),there are two views of the encounter of Dionysus and Ariadne, both in roomsoff the peristyle in the middle of the house. In oecus 24, in an image largelylost but well preserved in nineteenth-century drawings, Dionysus and hisentourage come upon Ariadne asleep (g. 8).67 In oecus 28 was an image (nowwholly preserved in somewhat contradictory nineteenth-century versions)showing Ariadne weeping and gazing away from the sea out of the picturesspace to the left. Behind her to the left, Theseus ship sails away into thedistance, while to the right stand Dionysus, Silenus, and two bacchantes(g. 9). 68 Here we have a single subjectthe discovery of Ariadne byDionysusstaged in radically different ways with very different emotiveconnotations. In neither case does Ariadne know her fate as divine bride,but in one she sleeps through both abandonment and epiphany, while in theother she stares away from her fateboth past and future, both loss andimminent bliss. The viewer focuses no longer on Ariadne, whose ignorancein different ways might be seen as the subject of both images, but on thedramatization of that ignorance in which we know something that the pro-tagonist of the visual narrative does not.

In two rooms off the peristyle of the Casa della Fortuna (IX.7.20), the sameplay of different Dionysiac discoveries is enacted. In one room (i), Dionysusand his entourage come across the sleeping Ariadne in an iconography re-lated to the scene in oecus 24 of the Casa dei Capitelli Colorati (g. 10).69

In room l, however, at least two images of Ariadne were juxtaposed. Oneshowed her seated in a chair to the left giving the thread of wool to Theseusat the inception of their love,70 the second had her seated on the ground atthe lower right and pointing. It is ambiguous from Discannos nineteenth-century drawing whether she points at the ship, receding into the distance, orat Dionysus himself who stands before her (g. 11).71 Here Ariadne appearsto confront both her fates (directly reversing the effects of the image inoecus 28 of the Casa dei Capitelli Colorati)both the loss of her humanlover (emphasized by the image of her meeting with Theseus in the sameroom) and the arrival of her divine lover. This image offers a wakeful re-sistance to the Ariadne of room i and a deliberate swapping of Theseus forDionysus in that the two images are in parallel, with Ariadne seated in both,to the left with Theseus and to the right with Dionysus. In the visual narrativesof rooms i and l, the stories seem incompatibleeither Ariadne was asleepor awake when Dionysus came upon her, either the god arrived with a largeretinue or their meeting was in intimate isolation.72 It is as if the refractionsof the gaze that we have been exploring are themselves versions of the re-

67. See PPM VI.107273, PPM documentazione 833.68. See Gallo 1988, pp. 7375, no. 19, PPM VI.104647 and PPM documentazione 205. Rizzo 1929,

tav. cix gives as good a picture as one can nd of the murals state a hundred years ago.69. See PPM IX.848. 70. See PPM IX.860.71. See PPM IX.862, and Gallo 1988, pp. 7173, no. 18, but beware the reproduction here (no. 16),

which is wrongly reversed right to left.72. For another image of just Dionysus and Ariadne alone together from VI.11.4, but with Ariadne

asleep, see PPM documentazione 283.

One Line Long


Viewing Ariadne 33

fracted mythological matrix that allowed stories to be told in such substan-tially divergent ways by the same patrons and artists for the same groups ofviewers.

Much might be said about the multiple thematic reverberations of meaningand response generated by the variations on mythical themes perpetuated byCampanian painters. Those variations are exactly parallel to the creativitywith myth offered both by such oral traditions as those reported by Pausaniasand by much more high-own literary versions in poets like Catullus andOvid.73 My point here is that the gaze (different characters gazing, thedifferent potential objects upon which the gaze may be focalized, the self-consciousness of representing the gaze itself being gazed at) is a centralweapon in the visual mythographers pictorial argument. This is repeatedlyemphasized by Philostratus in his elegant early-third-century ekphraseis ofwhat are allegedly real panel paintings and can be generically taken to havesome intended resemblance to the kinds of murals we nd in Pompeii. WhilePhilostratus Ariadne (1.15) belongs to the sleeping topos (alongside a seriesof other often-eroticized sleepers),74 the painting described immediately after-wardsof Pasiphaturns brilliantly on a play of frustrated gazes. WhileDaedalus makes the cow whose form will allow the queen to experiencesexual satisfaction,

Pasipha outside the workshop in the cattle-fold gazes on the bull. . . . She has a helplesslookfor she knows what the creature is that she lovesand she is eager to embrace it,but it takes no notice of her and gazes at its own cow. . . . It gazes fondly at the cow, butthe cow in the herd, ranging free and all white but for a black head, disdains the bull.For its pose suggests a leap, as of a girl who avoids the importunity of a lover. (Imagines1.16.4; trans. Fairbanks)75

This complex of desires frustrated is enacted by the same meansthe gazeas the exchange of looks that generates falling-in-love in the Perseus de-scription (1.29) or the self-absorbed petrication in his own reected gazeplayed out by Narcissus in Imagines 1.23. Repeatedly in Philostratus the gazeis articulated as a key mechanism for the emotional impact and, hence,meaning of paintings.76 Within works of art, then, as well as within thewriting about works of art, the gaze takes up a crucial role as focalizer ofthe subjects position, director of the subjectivity of a viewer to a chosenobject, projector of desire, framer of interpretative direction.

Corpus Christi College,Oxford

University of Chicago

73. The outstanding account of Graeco-Roman myth, its relations to truth and belief, and its pluralismis Veyne 1988.

74. For eroticized sleepers, cf. Comus at Imagines 1.2, Olympus at 1.20, and Midas satyr at 1.22; othersleepers include Pan at 2.11 and Heracles at 2.22.

75. See, on 1.16, Beall 1993, 35963.76. Particularly interesting are those moments when the gaze appears to become the subject of Philos-

tratus account of a picturefor instance, Imagines at 1.13.9, 1.16.4, 1.21, 1.23, as well as the Imagines 5of the Younger Philostratus; see on this Elsner 2004, 16471; also Leach 2000.


34

Fig. 1.Fresco of Ariadne looking out at Theseus ship sailing away. From a house in Hercu-laneum, now in the British Museum. Third quarter of the rst century c.e. Photo: After RouxAin and Barr 1861, vol. 2, tav. 34.


35

Fig. 2.Fresco of Aridane looking out at Theseus ship in the company of a weeping cupid.From an unidentied building in Pompeii, now in the National Museum in Naples (no. 9046).Third quarter of the rst century c.e. Photo: After Roux Ain and Barr 1861, vol. 2, tav. 35.


36

Fig. 3.Fresco of Aridane looking out at Theseus ship in the company of a pointing cupid.From Pompeii (IX.5.11). Third quarter of the rst century c.e. Photo: After Roux Ain andBarr 1861, vol. 3, tav. 106.


37

Fig. 4.Fresco of Ariadne looking out at Theseus ship in the company of a weeping cupid anda pointing female winged gure. From Pompeii (IX.2.5, room c, north wall). Third quarter ofthe rst century c.e. This picture, taken in 1931, is all that remains of this wall painting, whichhas now completely faded from sight. Photo: DAI Inst. Neg. 31.1744.


38

Fig. 5.Fresco of Ariadne looking out at Theseus ship, accompanied by a weeping cupid anda male onlooker gure with an oar, from the Casa della Softta (Pompeii V.3.4). Third quarter ofthe rst century c.e. Photo: After Notizie degli Scavi 1905, g 4, p. 212.


39

Fig. 6.Fresco of Ariadne looking out at Theseus ship in the company of a weeping cupid,a pointing female winged gure, and two onlooker gures. From the Casa di Diadumeno(Pompeii VII.12.26/7). Third quarter of the rst century c.e. Photo: DAI Inst. Neg. 32.1700.


40

Fig. 7.Fresco of Ariadne looking out at Theseus ship accompanied by a pointing cupid, witha sherman in the middle distance. From cubiculum d of the House of the Vettii (PompeiiVI.15.1/2). Third quarter of the rst century c.e. Photo: Reproduction of an original photographtaken by Sommer.


41

Fig. 8.Fresco of Dionysus and his entourage discovering the sleeping Ariadne. From oecus 24of the Casa dei Capitelli Colorati (Pompeii VII.4.31/51). Transferred to the Naples Museum (MN9278) and now almost wholly lost. Third quarter of the rst century c.e. Photo: After Niccolini182457, vol. 13, tav. 6.


42

Fig. 9.Fresco of Ariadne abandoned, with Theseus ship in the distance and Dionysus withhis entourage approaching behind her. From oecus 28 of the Casa dei Capitelli Colorati(Pompeii VII.4.31/51). Third quarter of the rst century c.e. Photo: After Niccolini 182457,vol. 11, tav. 35.


43

Fig. 10.Fresco of Dionysus and his entourage discovering the sleeping Ariadne. From room iof the Casa della Fortuna (Pompeii IX.7.20). Third quarter of the rst century c.e. Now whollylost and surviving only in a nineteenth-century sketch by Discannio. Photo: Guidotti, DAI Inst.Neg. 53.0559.


44

Fig. 11.Fresco of Ariadne face to face with Dionysus, pointing to him or to Theseus reced-ing ship. From room l of the Casa della Fortuna (Pompeii IX.7.20). Third quarter of the rstcentury c.e. Now wholly lost and surviving only in a nineteenth-century sketch by Discannio.Photo: Guidotti, DAI Inst. Neg. 53.0561.


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