The Captor’s Image: Greek Culture in Roman Ecphrasis by Basil Dufallo (review)

This book-length study of Roman ecphrastic literature offers a fascinating reflection on Roman engagement with Greek culture through the relationship between art and text. Dufallo argues that he has overthrown the “standard” view of ecphrasis as a contest between art and text in which one “dominates” the other (reflecting a “standard” view of Roman responses to Greek culture in which one must dominate the other) and replaced it with a reading of ecphrasis that goes beyond poetics to explore the cultural self-positioning of Roman authors. It is certainly true, as Putnam’s endorsement states, that Dufallo “expands the conversation by moving from strictly literary readings to larger cultural issues.” But the claim of novelty, appropriately in a book about Roman literature, is rather overplayed. Equally, it is the case that Dufallo does not in fact argue that all ecphrasis is “about” the Roman receptivity to Greek culture. In fact, he reflects on genre, narrative, alienation and identification, patronage and power, sexuality, and epiphany, among other things. There is also an irony in claiming to efface the “standard” meta-literary reading of ecphrasis, when the relationship between Greek and Roman literature is clearly a trope of poetics itself, and in fact meta-literary readings keep raising their heads throughout the book. Nevertheless, there is much that is fresh, subtle, and interesting in this book. If anything, it does more than it says on the tin.

The style can be compressed and hard going. Undergraduates will find this book a challenge. The book is also keenly aware of artistic and political contexts and avoids the charge of being a “raid” on different texts. The chronological arrangement gives a sense of the development of Roman Hellenism over time. The choice of texts (and their counterparts in art) is inevitably restricted, and Jas Elsner in his review in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review laments the primary focus on Latin verse literature, at the expense of Latin prose literature (Vitruvius and Pliny), Greek novels, the second sophistic and late antiquity. However, the book incorporates a wide range of different genres and periods in Latin literature.

The first chapter on Naevius, Plautus, and Terence showcases the sophistication of early Latin literature and its engagement with Greek art and culture. Inevitably, the ecphrases concerned are on the small side (and, in the case of Naevius, fragmentary), but the dramatic context of comedy leads to rich reflection on issues of performance and staging in Roman cultural self-positioning. Both of the comic case studies are just as important for thinking about gender as for thinking about ethnicity: cross-dressing as heroines from Greek art (Menaechmi) and being inspired by an image of Jupiter and Danae to rape the beloved (Eunuchus). The importance of rape in new comedy and the Roman imperial gaze is not fully articulated (the book maintains a certain squeamishness despite its focus on sexuality), although Dufallo acknowledges the difficulty of pinning down rape as a trope in ancient culture. Instead, the chapter sometimes succumbs to a temptation to pursue a moral reading of rape.

Chapter 2 tackles the well-worn topic of Ariadne in Poem 64 of Catullus, without which no account of Roman ecphrasis (or arguably Roman Hellenism) would be complete. The discussion of Apollonius’ Medea could have been strengthened by considering the importance of Ariadne as exemplum for Medea in Jason’s seduction of her. The chapter is certainly an excellent synthesis of current research and creates a new perspective by introducing a comparison with second-style wall painting, introducing themes of illusion, surface, and distraction. For Dufallo, Catullus is playing the same games with his readers, creating an image of desire for the Greek past that deconstructs itself. Throughout the book, Dufallo’s laudable emphasis on ambiguity is in tension with his desire to create a strong argument. In this chapter, ambiguity and inconsistency is the argument. What it does not fully account...