Nassos Papalexandrou, University of Texas at Austin

This essay is motivated by a fascinating collection of ancient poetry, but it opens with a poem dating only to the nineteenth century. Kenyon Cox, who conceived the lyric reverie of these lines, was certainly stirred by an intense emotional impulse. His poetic words channel his energy to the object of his desire and admiration, an unspecified Queen of Egypt. Brief and evocative as they are, they entice us to visualize the Queen as someone combining the simple perfection of Nefertiti’s facial lines with the sunny warmth of an Archaic Greek kore. As we decipher this poetry and its messages, we are made to engage in several concurrent dialogues: first, the poem is a fragment of an encounter between the poet and the Queen of Egypt. Following this, we, the readers, meet with the author and his imagination but also with his interlocutor as we try, in the inner folds of our minds, to delineate the “lovely brow” and the near uniqueness of the celebrated smile. The reference to Leonardo da Vinci expands the field of dialogic confrontations to include fine conduits between the poet and Leonardo, between Leonardo and the Egyptian Queen, and perhaps between us and Leonardo. And if the universal uniqueness of the Queen’s smile and the reference to Leonardo are meant to evoke the most celebrated smile in Western culture, the possibilities of uncovering more nuanced layers in the simple lines of Cox’s poem seem to multiply indefinitely. Herein, then, lies the power of poetry: it evokes what is not present; it spawns a vision out of the unseen; it guides our fantasy to the very roots of the sparks that generated it. In other words, it makes us wonder about many things and, in this particular case, about the Queen of Egypt: who is she? How did she manage to visit Leonardo’s dreams? What is the relationship between her and the poet? Does the poet imply that we, the readers, will be subject to the lures of this mysterious Queen by means of the transformational quality of his poetry? What is the essence of the Queen’s irresistible smile?

Our hermeneutic effort will be pleasantly surprised—but also drastically reoriented—if we consider the function of Kenyon Cox’s lines not merely as a poem but as an epigram. They are, in fact, part of a larger painted vision that recreates the sculpted head of an unknown Egyptian Queen (Figure 4). [1] The painting captures the appearance of a particular plaster cast that was exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York from the mid-eighties of the nineteenth century onward. [2] With simple means such as a reduced palette, clear and elegant lines, and a subtly balanced gradation of light and shadow, Cox has rendered the ambivalent nature of this object. The apparent coldness of the material of the cast is mitigated on the painting by the animated smile of the figure. In this way the spectral emptiness of the cast is transformed into an intimation of character, even idiosyncrasy. Certainly this figure is someone we can converse with. Indeed, we easily surrender ourselves to the charm of the gaze and the smile of the Queen of Egypt.

But Kenyon Cox has accomplished much more than just the successful reproduction of an alluring, if derivative, likeness. His vision of the Head of the Queen of Egypt is not a faithful recording of the cast as this would have been seen in its actual setting at the gallery of casts in the Metropolitan. [3] It is, in fact, not difficult to reconstruct his actual experience of viewing. The cast would have been placed on a pedestal, and in the best of circumstances it would have been accompanied by a simple label intended to communicate something about the representation. The tone of such a label still resonates in the brief entry for this cast in the Catalogue of the Collection of Casts, published in 1908: “No. 32. Head of a Queen of the XVIII dynasty. There is no evidence as to its identification. Of limestone. Found at Karnak and now in the Cairo Museum.” [4]

The fruitful coexistence of sculpture and poetry in Cox’s painting parallels the perceptual background of the epigrams on P.Mil.Vogl. VIII 309. It matters little why they were compiled together in this now fragmentary papyrus; in many cases the reader’s appreciation of them was originally—and still should be—inextricable from their intended function in their original contexts. [5] For their nature and various levels of referentiality often point to the world of ideas and experience embedded in the materiality of human life. As is the case with Cox’s painting, their motivation stemmed from the need to articulate formalized discourse about objects present or absent. [6] A very brief overview of the compiler’s categorization of this poetry points to the material or pragmatic basis for its inspiration: the Lithika are motivated by the need to articulate, or even dictate, a taste for exotic, intricately carved gemstones. Likewise, the Oionoskopika presuppose observation of natural phenomena and the Andriantopoiika focus on statuary and its ecphrasis. The Epitymbia and Nauagika evoke the actualities of funereal commemoration whereas the Anathematika and Iamatika have to do with material objects. It is therefore worthwhile to probe the material basis that inspired this poetry. In particular, I will argue that the elucidation of the meaning of certain epigrams (Hippika, Iamatika) should rest upon the consideration of the material culture that framed their original function as objects of perception. [7] Inversely, these epigrams can be shown to preserve insights or commentaries valuable for understanding the aesthetic motivation that informs certain works of Hellenistic figurative art. Their value for reconstructing the experience of seeing as an essential component of Hellenistic visuality cannot be emphasized enough. [8]

There is no doubt that the epigrams grouped under the title Hippika evoke the actuality of the major panhellenic sanctuaries at Olympia, Delphi, Nemea, and the Isthmus. [9] They all celebrate the kleos of either a victorious horse or a victor, or both, in one or more of these prestigious athletic arenas. [10] But the poetry of kleos is a poetry of physical and mental action, that is, its purposes are fulfilled upon recurrent readings or performances of their content in specific contexts. [11] It is, therefore, useful to search for internal clues in the poems regarding the material referentiality of their content. In this respect, demonstrative adjectives such as οὗτοϲ (AB 71.1, AB 76.2, AB 77.2), τοῦτον (AB 84.2, AB 85.2), ὅδ᾿ (AB 86.2) always refer to the objects of celebration, πῶλοϲ or ἵπποϲ, thus suggesting a strong and deliberate deictic function. This is easily explainable if we consider that the epigrams were originally meant to be read or performed in the presence of actual likenesses, which I understand as sculptural visualizations of the epigrams’ objects of reference. [12] This is indicated, for example, in the concluding lines of the epigram AB 74:

Θε̣ο̣ῖ̣ϲ̣ι̣ δ᾿ Ἀ̣δ̣[ε]λ̣φε{ι}οῖϲ εἰκὼ ἐναργέα τῶ̣ν τότ᾿ [ἀγώνω]ν̣
     ἅρ̣[μα καὶ ἡνί]ο̣χ̣ον χάλκεον ὧδ᾿ ἔθετο.

Callicrates of Samos monumentalized his victory in an equestrian event at the Pythian games by setting up a bronze quadriga and its charioteer. The demonstrative ᾧδε in AB 74.14 clearly points to the monument, and in this way it signals the implied conceptual and physical space of the epigram. Interestingly enough, in the same epigram the monument is termed εἰκὼ ἐναργέα, a vivid likeness, a representation redolent with the splendor, the vitality, and the emotional charge of the reality it represents. [14] Thus, the beholders are made to understand that they witness a glorious moment of the past in its perpetual reenactment and, in this way, they are immediately transformed into idealized spectators of a unique athletic event. Unfortunately the concerted tenor of these words and their figurative object of reference is now lost. Something of their cooperative efficacy, nonetheless, can be appreciated in monuments such as a gravestone from Athens for a Phoenician visitor who died there. [15] Inscribed in both Phoenician and Greek, this μνῆμα combines a suggestive image with an epigram that verbalizes the subtly dense mood of the former. This extraordinary monument cannot be discussed here in detail, but I would like to emphasize the directive force of the demonstrative in the first line of the epigram <εἰκόνα τήνδε>, which functions like the demonstratives in the Hippika: one is immediately made to understand that the poetry has to do with the relief but also that the relief cannot stand alone without the poetry. Inherent in this explicit gesture of verbal deixis is the latent message that the communicative efficacy of the monument depends on the simultaneous viewing of image and poetry, of the visual and the aural.

A great number of Hellenistic works of art were accompanied by epigrams, that is, verbal enablers intended to function as essential components of ensembles which were programmatically conceived in terms of both poetically articulated words and images. Unfortunately, the intended effect of these ensembles has been lost or largely ignored as a result of the systematic or accidental dislocation of epigrammatic poetry from its actual experiential contexts. [16] The compilation, for example, of epigrams on P.Mil.Vogl. VIII 309 is perhaps one of the earliest testimonies of their transformation into purely literary or textual artifacts. It stands at the beginning of a long tradition of publications which includes the Greek Anthology as well as more recent collections such as those by Kaibel or Peek. [17] This process has resulted in the scholarly neglect of the original format of epigrams as a determinative component of visual experiences much more complex and nuanced than the consumption of poetry available in book form. [18] Equally problematic is the often fragmentary and dispersed nature of monuments that originally combined sculptural or painted images with inscribed epigrams. Pausanias’ account of Olympia, for example, reveals how much of the communicational multivalence of the original monuments he experienced is now lost. Their figurative components have all perished, whereas the few surviving epigrams are often treated as isolated textual data only partially capable of evoking the determinative ambience of their original context. [19] Further, the traditional disciplinary focuses within classical archaeology have privileged the study of the figural components of artworks (e.g. sculptures in the round, reliefs) at the expense of their verbal paraphernalia and vice versa. This is true even when the latter have survived together with the former and their mutual relationship is archaeologically verifiable. [20]

The sheer abundance of originally “functional” poetry in P.Mil.Vogl. VIII 309 provides yet another testimony of the incompleteness or distortion of the surviving record of Hellenistic visual arts. Against this unfortunate situation, certain epigrams enable a fresh understanding of “canonical” works of Hellenistic art that survived detached from their original contexts. For example, it is tempting to juxtapose the enigmatic horse of Artemision (Figure 2), the well-known and celebrated masterpiece, with epigrams such as AB 72 or AB 76. The horse and its jockey, now on display at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, were recovered in 1926 just off the northwest coast of the island of Euboia. [21] This group has been praised for the accuracy of realistic modeling it displays both in the rendering of its overall movement and for its graphic details. M. Robertson, for example, has stated that the jockey is “a more direct and detailed transcript of observed nature, and a more vivid impression of life in action, than in any other work of major art that has come down to us from ancient Greece.” [22] The same author, however, is perplexed by what exactly the dynamic pose of this horse aims to convey. He is disturbed by its “extremely spread movement (not, I fancy, a good racing style)” which he explains in terms of the artist’s need to accommodate the far superior jockey. [23] Robertson is perhaps right in criticizing the racing style of this horse. The flying gallop with outstretched legs is naturally impossible, but it has had a tenacious career as a conventional schema for representing the impressively fast running of horses. [24] How are we then to account for this paradoxical departure from reality in a composition motivated by the aspiration to be an eikon enarges, a photographic evocation of reality? B. Ridgway is close to the truth when she understands the bronze group to represent the moment “close to the goal.” [25] The horse and its jockey are striving to attain victory and glory; they are conceived at the pinnacle of their performance.

This interpretation is now convincingly corroborated by the Hippika AB 72 and AB 76 on the newly published papyrus. Both epigrams are informed by the same realities as those we see crystallized in the animated bronze. Not unlike the epigram in Cox’s painting, both of them “guided” the beholders toward a meaningful dialogue with the subtleties of the formal vocabulary of their objects of viewing (AB 72): [26]

τοῦ πώλου θηεῖϲθε τὸ λιπαρέϲ, ὡϲ πνόον ἕλκει
παντὶ τύπωι καὶ πᾶϲ ἐ<κ> λαγόνων τέταται
ὡϲ νεμεοδρομέων· Μολύκωι δ᾿ ἤνεγκε ϲέλινα
νικήϲαϲ ἄκρωι νεύματι καὶ κεφαλῆι.

The epigram is replete with admiration for a remarkable animal captured at the peak of its potential and beauty through the art of the sculptor. The epigrammatist’s voice dictates the perceptual terms that guide our gaze throughout the image. His directives are explicit: we are confronted with a virtual replication of a Nemean competition (AB 72.3). We are meant to understand that, both in reality and in its re-presentation, an abstract quality of the horse (τὸ λιπαρέϲ) has been transformed into palpable signs: the horse’s blasting gallop is faster than the wind. [28] His formidable motion is manifest in the tension of his ribs, which is a visual trope that orchestrates the forward movement of the animal. The epigrammatist also wants us to pay particular attention to the head of this animal, a meaningful and well-timed nod of which won him the victory. In this way, the symbiotic coexistence of epigram and image chronicle the unique performance of an outstanding animal.

In both epigrams the imagery evokes a representation akin to the Artemision horse, the conception of which points to a victory context and to the same gamut of values that have subtly been translated into the tension and dashing energy of Molycos’ and Etearchos’ racers. That the Artemision horse was intended to monumentalize a victory is corroborated by the brand on the horse’s right hind thigh: it is a flying Nike holding out a wreath. [29] Both bronze original and the epigrams celebrate an admirable exertion of heroic proportions. We need only look at the garment flying behind the bronze jockey to realize the import of AB 72.1–2: ὡϲ πνόον ἕλκει παντὶ τύπωι. Likewise, the bronze horse’s outstretched legs in full flight convey the struggle of the noble animal towards victory as in AB 72.2 (καὶ πᾶϲ ἐ<κ> λαγόνων τέταται) and AB 76.1 (ἐκ̣τέ̣τα̣[τ]α̣ι̣ π̣[ρ]ο̣τ̣[ρ]έ̣χ̣ω̣ν̣ ἀ̣κρώνυχοϲ). His ears, turned completely back to his rider, no less than the pulsating nervousness of his muscles, denote his eagerness for victory (λιπαρέϲ)— the celebrated quality of Molycos’and Etearchos’ chargers. [30]

I am tempted to juxtapose this epigram with a small Hellenistic bronze in the Byzantine Collection of Dumbarton Oaks representing an emaciated man of indeterminate age seated on a stool (Figure 3). [31] In its opening lines the epigram conjures up the image of a represented—but as yet unspecified—somebody (houtos) whose bones are animated by an insubstantial, flickering sparkle of spirit (pneuma). If there is some life left in this figure, it is concentrated in his eyes. Interestingly enough, the Dumbarton Oaks bronze features the same pathetic lifelessness in his emaciated torso which is kept together by a transparent layer of thin flesh. Likewise, his arms are inorganically appended. If there is some life remaining in them, it is slowly dripping out of his numb fingers. The figure is at the threshold of death, an awful and unappealing spectacle, an image of helplessness and suffering that inspires sentiments of pity, curiosity, and fear in the past and in the present. It is the spectral appearance of an uncanny state of existence. As is the case in the opening lines of the epigram, the represented is withering away and the only sign of life is that which is traceable in his sparkling eyes. Coming from nowhere, his gaze is directed to a vacuum. AB 95.12 affords us an epigrammatic statement of the unhappy object of ecphrasis in this poem. We are not supposed to look at a human but rather at a skeleton, a leipsanon anthropou.

The juxtaposition of the Dumbarton Oaks bronze and the Iamatikon AB 95 shows the potential of considering their efficacy in concert. Moreover, it shows how much of the affective power of this poetry is lost because of its reification as literary artifact. Where then should we recontextualize the original coexistence of image and epigram? How were they meant to be viewed together? The invocation of Apollo Pythios, considered together with the mention of the Asclepiads, point to the sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi. [32] The kind of statuary represented by the Dumbarton Oaks bronze was seen at Delphi by Pausanias, who reports: “Among the votive offerings of Apollo was an image in bronze of a man in an advanced stage of decay, whose flesh has already fallen off so that he has nothing left except for the bones. The Delphians said that it was “a dedication of Hippocrates the physician” (Pausanias X 2.6). In view of this precedent, Delphi turns out to be an appropriate context for the expression of Medeios’ piety and his thankfulness to Apollo. It is also an appropriate, panhellenic context for the advertisement of his successful practice and his expertise. The reference to the revered, healing clan of the Asclepiads (AB 95.6), the clan to which Hippocrates of Cos belonged, may be motivated by his rivalry with them. He is not an Asklepiad himself, but he has inherited his father’s all-healing power, a power commensurate to that of the Asklepiads. [33]

It is possible that the bronze skeleton and an epigram like AB 95 were somehow displayed together, thus mutually reinforcing their communicative power in a manner clearly illustrated by Cox’s Head of the Queen of Egypt. Unfortunately, the archaeological record has not preserved any traces of this co-existence. Should we reconstruct the placement of the statuette (or of a large-scale prototype, of which the statuette is but a replica) on top of a stone pedestal? In this case AB 95 was inscribed in stone. Or is it possible that the epigram was written on a perishable medium to be reconstructed as an appendage to the figurative component of the dedication? Given the present state of the available evidence we cannot even attempt to answer these questions. We can, however, enjoy the art of the statuette in light of the poetry treasured in the Milan papyrus and vice-versa. In this way we enrich our sensibilities, and we come somewhat closer to the bizarre and exotic lifeworld of the Hellenistic Mediterranean. [34]