Evasive Epiphanies in Ekphrastic Epigram

Abstract

( Greek Anthology 16.160, attributed to ‘Plato’) Paphian Cytherea came through the waves to Knidos, Wishing to see her own image. Having viewed it from all sides in its open shrine, She cried, ‘Where did Praxiteles see me naked?’ ‘Through a glass, darkly:’ not just a hackneyed, Biblical phrase summing up our inability to apprehend God, but a pithy visualisation of the gap between divine truth and our perception of it. Yet Paul's words might also stand as an image for the trope of ekphrasis, the bewildering textual prism through which the frustrated reader attempts to view an enclosed and distant image. In this paper I will attempt to unite these two themes; one, the complexities of viewing and representing the divine, and two, the unrequited desire engendered by the ekphrastic text. Both of these rely upon an interplay of presence and absence which is, in a literary context, brilliantly communicated by the series of epigrams in the Greek Anthology dealing with images of gods, particularly, if we are to speak of desire, those which address images of Aphrodite.