-
Meaning and Material Presence: Four Epigrams on Timomachus's Unfinished Medea
- Transactions of the American Philological Association
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 137, Number 2, Autumn 2007
- pp. 305-331
- 10.1353/apa.2008.0003
- Article
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
This essay contains readings of four epigrams by Antipater, Antiphilus, and Philip on Timomachus's painting of Medea. This work was unfinished, and I argue that its fragmentary condition plays a crucial role in the epigrams' poetics. Specifically, the painting's incompleteness disrupts the usual conventions and capacities of ekphrastic epigram and induces a crisis in poetic speech. To illustrate this, I rely on the distinction between presence and meaning developed by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht.