Seeing Thought: Timomachus' Medea and Ecphrastic Epigram

From the time of Lessing, Timomachus' Medea, poised in a moment of agonizing indecision, has exemplified the essential qualities of art, its spatial fixity and indeterminacy of meaning. I study this famous painting, based on a surviving Euripidean passage and still knowable through Roman descendants, as a rare example of transmutation from text to image and then again from image to text. The principal literary texts concerning the painting are a series of ecphrastic epigrams in which Timomachus' interpretation of Euripides is mediated by the cultural discourse about Medea begun within Stoic ethical theory. My larger goal is to illuminate the interrelationship of text and image by showing how the painted image displays or encodes discursive meaning and the ecphrastic texts encourage a mental image of the painting in a certain viewing circumstance.