Facing the Gods: Epiphany and Representation in Graeco-Roman Art, Literature and Religion by Verity Platt (review)

In the second book of Plato’s Republic, Socrates banishes the poets, including Homer and Hesiod, from the beautiful city. The reason given is simple: they tell false stories about the gods. Plato is amplifying the criticism of the traditional anthropomorphic conception of the gods put forward by the sixth-century poet Xenophanes, according to whom saying that the gods were born, have bodies, and behave badly is not only unsophisticated but in fact deeply impious. Indeed, the philosophical accounts of the nature of divinity that emerge with the Presocratics and Plato would seem to be hopelessly irreconcilable with the apparently naive anthropomorphism of traditional Greek religion. In particular, the very idea of epiphany, so common as a subject in art and literature, would appear to be a complete nonstarter. How could the gods appear to human beings if they do not have bodies? How could divinity, which is so radically different from humanity, ever be apprehended directly or even recognized?

In her account of epiphany in the Graeco-Roman world, beginning with archaic Greece and concluding in third-century Imperial Rome, Verity Platt never accepts the premise that epiphany is a relic of traditional religion that must be rejected by philosophers and is only useful for later literary and artistic appropriations once it has been decontextualized and desacralized. On the contrary, one of the central claims of Platt’s book, repeated in various forms, is that “epiphanic ‘games’ exploit the tension between self-conscious aesthetic detachment and the excitement (or fear) of divine encounter in such a way that to deny their potential seriousness is to drain them of their richness as cultural artifacts” (392). Platt alternates between sophisticated interpretations of material remains (votive reliefs, sculptures, paintings, friezes, sarcophagi) and works of literature (Homeric Hymns, Hesiod’s Theogony, and various Hellenistic and Second Sophistic texts), sometimes combining the two (inscriptions that preserve texts as material artifacts, as well as numerous examples of ekphrasis), to show just how this tension animates the history of epiphany.

Part I (Chapters 1–4) deals with epiphany in Hellenic and Hellenistic literature and art. Platt shows how an awareness of the problems inherent in anthropomorphism can be detected in both literary and artistic representations of epiphany. Recognition of these problems predates both Plato and Xenophanes, and is found at the very beginning of Greek literature, in Homer’s Odyssey and in the Homeric Hymns. In fact, it is the very challenge of representing the numinous within the material or by means of language that is both explored and exploited by artists and authors, who aim not only to depict divine manifestations, but to create divine presence, to make the gods appear. Platt explores the particular tension between the products of artifice, which point to their human creators, and the divine presence that makes epiphany such an important phenomenon. These chapters also consider the potentially uneasy relation between epiphany, which can seem to be a singular, spontaneous, and private phenomenon, and ritual, with its putatively shared, public character. Platt describes the ways that ritual was able to incorporate the phenomenon of epiphany, in part by dissolving the difference between “god” and “image” in ritual context.

When turning to treat Hellenistic sources, Platt rejects the notion that the self-conscious artistry and scholarly culture that characterize the period are in fact evidence of a move away from the sacred. Platt argues for a greater continuity with the Hellenic sources; rather than pursue a secularizing mode of analysis, she advances an interpretation that brings out the religious significance of the allusions to Hellenic models found in Hellenistic art. The interpretive key is the “language of manifestation” spoken by these Hellenistic artists and authors, a language whose vocabulary is drawn from the works of Phidias and the Homeric poetic tradition. The citation and quotation of earlier epiphanic...