Art and Artists in Greek
Rhetorical Education

Craig A. Gibson (University of Iowa)

Young men who studied rhetoric in one of the great urban centers in late antiquity would have found themselves surrounded by beautiful temples, statuary, and paintings. The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of works of art and architecture and popular perceptions of the craftsmen who made them in Greek rhetorical education. On the basis of composition exercises (progymnasmata) of the fourth-sixth centuries C.E., I argue three main points. First, autopsy of local works of art and architecture may have formed part of the curriculum in late antiquity. Libanius preserves ecphrases of two paintings from the Bouleuterion in Antioch, where he held classes. Obscure passages in Ps.-Nicolaus’ ecphrasis of the Alexandrian Tychaion would have been clearer if performed on site, as we know other ecphrases to have been. Second, in addition to being able to pepper their compositions with the names of famous Classical artists, elite young men were being trained to think of artists as moral educators, and in this sense as heirs to the tragic poets of Classical Athens. Ps.-Nicolaus describes in his ecphrases how sculptors use their technical expertise to bring to life the emotional experience of mythological characters and elicit useful emotional responses in the audience. Third, students used artists and their artwork as subjects of exercises in ethopoeia from late antiquity through the Byzantine period, in order to explore the interrelated themes of erôs, metamorphosis, and represented reality.