Ekphraisis and Psyche: Symbols Spoken From the Deep

I would have you imagine, then, that there exists in the mind of man a block of wax…that this tablet is a gift of Memory, the mother of the Muses; and that when we wish to remember anything…we hold the wax to the perceptions and the thoughts, and in that material receive the impression of them as from the seal of a ring—Socrates (Plato's Theaetetus, trans. 1892)

In Book 18 of Homer's Iliad there are 153 lines dedicated to the description of Achilles’ new shield—following Patroclus’ death Achilles lost his panoply to the Trojan Hector. The text calls the new shield “a world of gorgeous immortal work” (Homer, 1990, Iliad 18., p. 564). It is Hephaestus, the crippled artificer of the Greek gods, who makes the “great” and “massive” shield at the request of Thetis, the mother of Achilles (1892 18., p. 558). Upon it he forges an entire world, a moving kosmos, consisting of: 1) “the earth and the sky and the sea;” 2) “two noble cities filled with immortal men;” 3) “a fallow field;” 4) “a king's estate;” 5) “a thriving vineyard;” 6) “a herd of longhorn cattle;” 7) “a meadow deep in a shaded glen;” 8) “a dancing circle;” 9) “the Ocean River's mighty power girdling round the outmost rim of the welded indestructible shield” (1892 18., pp. 565, 572, 629, 639, 654, 670, 686-687, 690, 708-709).

These details may be regarded as literary superfluity, as simple artistic flourishing containing no great intellectual value; but, in fact, this stylistic convention comprises a long history of what may be called a discourse in vividness, a type of artistic aliveness and “energeia” (Preston, 2009, p. 115). Notably, this theme of aliveness/activity (energeia) in creative expression-ing is outlined in Aristotle's Rhetoric. In Book 3 chapter 11 of this volume Aristotle (1954) defines, apropos of the Iliad, narratives becoming “living beings” by the action of “proportional metaphors” (Rhetoric 3. 11:2, p. 5). Aristotle (1954) says of the Iliad that “[Homer] repre