THE PORTRAIT OF THE LOVER

There are many ancient stories about the lover, the beloved, and the portrait: Pygmalion and the statue that comes to life is surely the most famous story, but there are many others. The plots of these stories reveal a great deal about ancient Greek and Roman concepts of love, desire, death, art, and representation. Laodamia is united with the dead shade of her husband Protesilaus, and keeps a statue of him in their bed; Admetus keeps a statue of his dead wife Alcestis in his bed: the portrait of the lover thus becomes a consolation for lost love, a paradoxical sign of both absence and presence.In other stories, men actually fall in love with images, conflating the beloved and the portrait into a single character - and in the story of Narcissus, all three characters collapse: Narcissus is lover, beloved, and portrait simultaneously. These portraits are more than a reproduction of a person: they are the representative of that person, a component part of that person's identity. Stories about the portrait of the lover thus provide a metalanguage for ancient culture, an exploration of human life through an anthropology of the image.

Translator's Introduction  One of the central themes of this book is that of "worsened" reproductions: what Augustine calls resemblance in deterioribus, the lamentable situation that arises when a copy fails to resemble its original perfectly and instead resembles it only roughly, partially, insufficiently. As examples of reproductions in deterioribus, Augustine lists such phenomena as dreams and optical illusions, family resemblances between parents and children, along with portraits, sculptures, and other works of art. But he could also have included translations under this same heading. Much like the legendary painters and sculptors whose adventures constitute the main subject of this book, translators are likewise condemned to create reproductions that are always in deterioribus. Of course, if a goddess were to intervene - as Venus did for Pygmalion, bringing his beloved statue to life - this English Portrait of the Lover might become as bright and vibrant as Maurizio Bettini's Ritratto dell'amante. But in the absence of divine intervention, I would like to explain something about the original Italian context of this book, and to say a few words about what inevitably gets lost in the translation. First, Maurizio Bettini represents a school of Italian classical studies that may be rather unfamiliar to American readers, even to American classicists. His focus is on the anthropology of ancient Greece and Rome, and in this effort to elucidate the meaning of ancient cultural models, every bit of textual evidence becomes potentially significant. The canonical authors all have their place here, of course, and the pages of this book are filled with references to Homer, Herodotus, Euripides, Cicero, Vergil, Horace, and so on. But side by side with Homer and Vergil the reader will find such authors as Palladius, Censorinus, Scribonius Largus, Fulgentius, Hesychius, Pollux, and Minucius Felix, not to mention all the anonymous scholiasts of late antiquity who provide Bettini with some of his most precious insights into the cultural models of ancient Greece and Rome. The results yielded by such an approach are dazzling and extremely persuasive - but the reader may find it disconcerting at times to confront this crowd of oddly named strangers and unfamiliar sources. At such moments, it might be helpful to invoke a metaphor that Bettini often uses to describe this sort of work: what we are looking at is a cultural mosaic made up of thousands of textual tiles, oddly shaped, varicolored, all of which must be continually combined and recombined, so that we are always having to re-read each time that we read something new, taking a fresh look at everything over again as we assemble some different part of the puzzle. Of course, to take such a synthetic approach to these ancient texts (and bits of texts) depends on a particular assumption: in Bettini's words, "this sort of dialogical mosaic implies that there is a given structure in culture, that beliefs are part of a system of meaningful signs." And this is the second point of departure, the other major difference between Bettini's work and that of many American classicists. Bettini is deeply influenced by structuralism and the semiotic theory of signs; consequently, the reader will find frequent references in these pages to such scholars as Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jean-Pierre Vernant, Emile Benveniste, Roman Jakobson, Vladimir Propp, Algirdas Julien Greimas, and Umberto Eco, among others. It is these scholars who provide the methodological assumptions according to which Bettini proceeds, and it is from these authors that he derives some of the key terms of his argument. In particular, Vernant's work on the anthropology of the image in ancient Greece is an essential element in the project which Bettini undertakes in this book. Fortunately for English-language readers, many of Vernant's relevant essays on this topic have recently been translated in a collection entitled Mortals and Immortals (edited by Froma Zeitlin). But - I hasten to add - there are no required readings, no prerequisites for this book. The important thing to keep in mind is simply that Bettini's work here, like that of Vernant, Lévi-Strauss, Benveniste and the rest, is based on a fundamental belief in the meaningfulness of human culture. The resulting combination of structuralism and semiotics is thus quite different from other varieties of post-structuralism with which English-language readers may be more familiar, as represented by such scholars as Derrida, Foucault, and Lacan, to name only a few. When Bettini uses the terms "signifier" and "signified" he is not preparing to launch into a deconstructionist spiral of philosophical abstraction; instead, he is speaking about meaning, and the way that meaning is communicated between one person and another. Accordingly, I have often chosen to translate his significato as "meaning" or "message" rather than simply as "the signified" (the Italian significato is not as technical as the English "signified"), so as not to imply a deconstructionist program which would be very out of place in the pages of this book. But by and large the reader will find that Bettini writes an almost jargon-free style of scholarship. In fact, the form in which Bettini most often makes his argument is that of a story, and of the meanings that stories can convey: as he himself explains, the Portrait of the Lover is a story about two lovers and a portrait, and all the variations that ancient culture played upon this famous theme. The entire book is built around such stories (and of course one story leads to another story, and another... as stories tend to do). Along the way, Bettini makes a series of complex arguments about the many different meanings of `the image' in ancient Greek and Roman societies, and the different cultural models (religious, political, psychological, etc.) in which images could become involved. But the guiding thread of the discourse always takes the form of a story, and it is the succession of stories that gives the book its shape and structure. This leads to the third and final observation in this apology of the translator: Maurizio Bettini is not only an extraordinary scholar, but he is also a writer of immense talent, and a very inspired teller of stories. This, more than anything, is what gets lost in translation. In many cases, I have simply had to resign myself to not being able to translate the elegant word play and boundless humor of Bettini's original Italian, with its sly irony and often elaborate allusions. As a rule, when forced to choose between the scholarship and the writing, I have always chosen the scholarship, preferring to make the argument and the method as clear as possible. This was the only choice that I could make, at least according to Augustine's pessimistic (but probably correct) theory of resemblances in deterioribus. Because this Portrait of the Lover is a translation, it cannot help but prove inferior to the original. But if I have been able to present Bettini's main arguments clearly, I hope that this English version will be of some use to anyone who shares an interest in ancient Greece and Rome, so that we might thus bring to life - again like the lucky Pygmalion - those cultures that have for so long been presented to us only in the frozen inertia of marble statues. The statue that comes to life is just a fantasy, of course, a fairy tale, a story... but these are stories that we cannot do without. In the end it is the stories that matter most of all: which is perhaps the principal lesson that this book has to teach us, and the secret of its success.

Summary: Part One. The Portrait of the Lover  (Chapters One - Twelve) There are many ancient stories about the portrait of the lover, with plots involving a lover, a beloved, and a portrait. These stories are made possible by specific cultural models, revealing ancient Greek and Roman beliefs about love, desire, death, art, and representation. The first portrait of the lover was created to replace an absent lover, by tracing his shadow on the wall: the portrait of the lover is thus connected with shadows, and also with the "shades" of the dead, like the archaic Greek kolossos which was a physical embodiment of the psyche or eidolon of the dead person in the form of a stone image. Laodamia is united with the dead shade of her husband Protesilaus, and she keeps a statue of him in their bed; Admetus keeps a statue of Alcestis in his bed, and so on. In other stories, men fall in love with actual statues: the beloved and the portrait are conflated into a single character (as is also the case in Lucretius's philosophy of love). In the story of Narcissus, all three characters collapse: Narcissus is lover, beloved, and portrait simultaneously. The portrait is more than a reproduction of a person: it is that person's representative, and forms of a part of that person's identity. The portrait of the lover functions as a sacralizing object, the embodiment of a vow of fidelity: if that vow is broken, the image can come to life and seek revenge. Stories about the portrait of the lover thus provide a metalanguage for ancient culture, an exploration of human life in terms of the anthropology of the image.

Summary: Part Two. Other Adventures of the Image   (Chapters Thirteen - Eighteen)  Stories about the portrait of the lover make it clear that the ancient Greeks and Romans treated the image differently than we do, and the second part of this book considers these cultural practices in greater detail. Images had to be treated with respect because they were considered an actual representative of the person, and the way that images were treated was of profound concern in ancient society, and there are many anecdotes, myths, and social regulations pertaining to the involvement of images in the life of the human community. Because images are somehow a perfected form of reality, they can also foretell the future: like visions in prophetic dreams, paintings and other artificial images were ominous harbingers of the future. Images were thought to somehow convey identity in a profound and deep sense, which is not surprising, given that ancient identity was very often constructed in terms of resemblance, especially the family resemblances shared between fathers and sons. Sons are in some sense the "portraits" of their fathers, and all the anxieties and uncertainties of these family relationships could be displaced into the world of images, and the stories that were told about them in ancient Greece and Rome.

Chapter Summary: Chapter One. Introduction  Francesco Petrarch possessed a portrait of his beloved, Laura, and in a lyric poem (Canzoniere 78) he compares himself to Pygmalion, who was able to bring to life the statue of his beloved. The stories of Pygmalion and Petrarch are examples of the "fundamental story" that is examined in this book: the many different stories that can be told about a lover, a beloved, and a portrait. Petrarch's words about Laura's portrait exemplify some of the qualities that will typically characterize the paradoxical, fundamentally ambivalent status of the portrait in this relationship. The portrait engages and attracts the lover, and is often a superior, idealized version of the beloved - but it cannot engage in reciprocal relations, it cannot speak, it cannot love; the portrait exists in the absence of the beloved, it is a replacement for the beloved, so that the lover does not feel himself to be alone - but the lover is, in fact, very much alone. The portrait simulates the life, the presence of the beloved, and brings consolation - but it is also an inanimate object, proof of the beloved's absence, and hence a source of despair. These are the basic qualities of the relationship between the lover, the absent beloved, and the portrait. By considering these stories and their variations it is then possible to ask a series of essential questions about the cultural models that make these stories possible: the meaning of love, death, desire, art, and representation.

Chapter Summary: Chapter Two. A Potter Who Was Not Jealous The portrait of the lover is a consolation, a substitute for the absent beloved, and is produced from regret, unsatisfiable desire (Greek pothos, Latin desiderium). The Greeks and Romans said the first portrait was made by a woman about to lose her lover: she traced his shadow and her father, the potter, modelled it in clay. The portrait is linked with the shadow (Greek skia, Latin umbra), and with the shade of the dead (Greek eidolon or psyche, Latin umbra). In the famous story of Laodamia and Protesilaus, Protesilaus's shade returns from the Underworld to rejoin his wife; in other versions, Laodamia keeps a statue of Protesilaus in their bed. This connection between the shade and the statue is parallelled by the archaic Greek kolossos, an uncarved stone statue that represented the dead person's afterlife. The portrait is also linked to dreams, another partial representation that can console the bereft lover (Laodamia dreams of Protesilaus). In Aeschylus's Agamemnon, Menelaus's grief over losing Helen is expressed through statues and dreams, and also prints (Greek stiboi), either Helen's footprints, or the bodily impressions she left in their bed. Pythagorean texts also consider footprints and bodily impressions as signs that identity and "represent" an absent person. These cultural synonyms - portrait, shadow, shade, dream, footprint - yield many variations on the story of the portrait of the lover. The portrait represents the absent beloved, in a dense emotional atmosphere of grief, loss, desire, and hope.

Chapter Summary: Chapter Three. The Story of Admetus, and the  True Portrait of the Lover   After Alcestis has traded her life for his, Admetus dreams about Alcestis and keeps a statue of his dead wife in their bed (the parallel presence of portraits and dreams). In Euripides's version, Admetus says that embracing the statue he "has his wife, yet not having her." Euripides's Helen uses the same words to describe the ghost which Paris takes to Troy (he "has her yet not having her"). Dreams, ghosts, and portraits are all paradoxical examples of having and not having, of presence and absence. Embracing the statue of his dead wife, Admetus calls out her name: the name is another image that identifies and represents an absent person. Most importantly, Admetus swears undying fidelity to his wife: the portrait is a pledge, a vow. Admetus will love only the statue; he will take no other wife. Ancient Roman inscriptions provide non-literary evidence for the portrait as a sign of fidelity. Allius consoles himself with a portrait of his dead wife, Allia Potestas, vowing he will take it with him into the tomb when he dies (much like Admetus); Cornelia Galla adored the effigy of her dead husband (much like Laodamia). The "true" portraits of the lover and their poetic variations are constructed on the basis of the same cultural model: the image represents the absent beloved, serving as consolation for the surviving lover and as an expression of devoted faithfulness, even after death.

Chapter Summary: Chapter Four. A Plaster Dionysus  Apuleius's Metamorphoses features a portrait of the lover: Thrasyllus murdered Charite's lover Tlepolemus in order to marry her, but Charite is instead devoted to a portrait of the dead Tlepolemus, an image made to resemble the Roman god Liber (Greek Dionysus). Tlepolemus then appears to Charite in a dream, and tells her about the murder. Charite avenges his death, and then kills herself: a tragic Laodamia who also avenges her dead husband. The practice of representing the dead in the form of Dionysus was widespread in Rome, and is criticized by Statius in a poem written to console the widow of the poet Lucan. She keeps a portrait of her husband, calls out his name, dreams about him: but she does not confuse him with Dionysus. Why worship the image of the dead in the form of Dionysus? The religion of Dionysus was linked to resurrection and rebirth: the Titans dismembered the infant Dionysus and cooked his body, but his heart was preserved in a plaster statue until the god returned to life. Plaster was symbolically connected to birth, generation, and preservation; according to some myths, mankind itself originated from the plaster-like substance that was produced when Zeus blasted the Titans with lightning as a punishment for having killed Dionysus. The plaster in which the god's heart was preserved is a variation on the portrait of the lover: a memorial to the departed dead, and a hope for that person's miraculous rebirth and return.

Chapter Summary: Chapter Five. The Sign Stained by Reality   The portrait of the lover is a metalanguage for ancient cultural models of death and fidelity. The first portrait was a consolation for an absent lover; portraits were also supposed to provide consolation to those grieving for the dead: in Fulgentius's false etymology, the idol is idos dolu (Latin species doloris), an "image of grief," and many Christian authors (Minucius Felix, Lactantius) considered idolatry to have begun with cults of mourning for dead kings. Imbued with emotion, the portrait is considered more than a likeness of a person: it "is" that person, a part of that person, based on both similarity and contiguity, metaphor and metonymy. Likewise, the ghost of the dead is more than a likeness: it "is" that person, in a debilitated, partial state - like the portrait. In Peirce's terminology, the portrait is iconic (similar to its object) and indexical (physically connected to its object). This indexical quality allows the portrait to function as the sacralizing object in the swearing of a vow (Greek horkos, following Benveniste's analysis): the sacralizing object is a metaphorical reminder of the absent person, but it embodies that persons' agency, and can punish violators of the oath. For Dio Chrysostom, the person has a "son" or a "wife" in his portrait, and it is an act of adultery to rededicate an old statue to a new recipient, a violation of the fidelity embodied in the image.

Chapter Summary: Chapter Six. Incredible Loves Ovid's Pygmalion loved a statue that came to life at his hands, but other versions say that Pygmalion was an insane tyrant engaged in a repulsive affair with a lifeless statue. There are many stories about men who loved statues: unhappy, even disgusting stories, because the statues can never reciprocate love. Historical tyrants like the Roman emperors Tiberius and Caligula were also notoriously infatuated with images (frequently obscene). Jensen's novel Gradiva (made famous by Freud's analysis) provides a modern version of love for a statue: like Ovid's Metamorphosis, the Gradiva has a happy ending in which the statue becomes a woman in the end. In terms of the "fundamental story" of this book - stories about the lover, the beloved, and the portrait - these examples show that the beloved and the portrait can combine: the beloved "is" the portrait. The portrait does not represent an absent beloved, but is a love object unto itself. But this was not considered appropriate behavior: men in love with statues often suffered the same mythical fates as men who committed incest. To love a statue violates the rules: the statues are defenseless, and must be protected from undue aggression. Precisely because they are physically passive, they become objects of desire in cultures where the male sexual subject values most highly a passive sexual object: these ancient stories about "incredible love" for portraits are stories about men, and their desire for perfectly passive, mute and beautiful objects of desire.

Chapter Summary: Chapter Seven. The Story of the Cruel Painter In many stories about the lover, the beloved, and the portrait, the lover is an artist: lover of the beloved, and author of the portrait. Pausias loved Glycera, who was famous for making garlands. In his devotion to her, he learned how to paint every kind of flower: Glycera perfected both his love and his art. In contrast, Arellius was a notorious Roman painter who painted goddesses with the faces of his girlfriends, profaning the sacred with his own amours. In Poe's story "The Oval Portrait," a cruel artist marries a beautiful woman and decides to paint her portrait: as he paints, he gradually steals the life and vitality from his wife, until finally he has finished the perfect portrait (which he loves desperately), only to discover that his wife is dead. The narrator of Poe's story is obsessed by the painting's perfect "life-likeliness" of expression: as the painter exclaims when he finishes the portrait, "this is really life, life itself." In Poe's aesthetic, such "life-likeliness" was an undesirable quality: "The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of `Artist.'" The artist who confuses life and art (or loves art more than life) commits a terrible error. In the case of Poe's cruel artist, it is as if the portrait were an adulterous woman, an unworthy concubine, acting as the artist's accomplice in the referent's assassination.

Chapter Summary: Chapter Eight. Lucretius In Lucretius's analysis of simulacra in De Rerum Natura, the portrait replaces the beloved even when the beloved is still present. The lover may embrace his beloved, but he is grasping at an image, an illusion. For Lucretius, the wounds of love are real wounds, lovesickness is a real disease. The lover's body is purely physical, grotesque and disgusting. Unlike the light-hearted fictions of Ovid's Ars amatoria and Remedia amoris, Lucretius's love is hideous and real. Lucretius's theory echoes the story of the portrait of the lover, but now the presence of the beloved in the form of images (dreams, the beloved's name, etc.) is only a continual torture. In the Aeneid, Vergil's Dido is also tormented by images of the absent Aeneas. For Lucretius, even when the beloved is present, the lover still grasps at simulacra, scraping the surface of the beloved body, wounding and wounded in return. Love is a hopeless devouring: but unlike food and drink, the beloved cannot be properly consumed. The lover is a toy in Venus's hands, who excites in him an empty craving for images. Epicurus's views on love were apparently not so harsh; Lucretius has taken the Greek theory of eidola and developed a tormented theory of impossible love. In the legend of Lucretius's biography, he was supposedly the victim of a love potion, and died from desire: the poem and the legend (even if it is not true) are both desperate stories of love.

Chapter Summary: Chapter Nine: Narcissus and the Twin Images  Ovid's Narcissus loves his own image: here lover, beloved, and portrait become one. When Narcissus sees himself, he is fatally afflicted with love. In ancient erotic theory, the eye was a locus for emotional emanations, and also for jealousy (as in the evil eye: Greek baskanon, Latin fascinum). The Narcissus story is a warning about the dangerous powers of the erotic gaze. But there is a less famous version: Pausanias says Narcissus loved his twin sister, and when she died, Narcissus stared at reflection to see his lost twin. Dead twins are also replaced by images in the stories of Romulus and Remus, and Athena and Pallas (and the Palladium). The practice of replacing a dead twin with an effigy is widespread in traditional cultures. Twins are essentially a pair, and the absent brother or sister must be replaced by an image, just as the portrait of the replaces the absent half of a romantic pair. In Roman culture, lovers could be seen as siblings; a male lover could be called "brother", a female lover "sister" (as in examples from Plautus, Propertius, Petronius, Martial), with no implications of incest. Siblings have a reciprocal relationship of affection and identity, and as such can stand outside or even in opposition to the standard married couple. Aristophanes's speech in Plato's Symposium gives a mythical origin to the pair of lovers: Zeus divided the primordial humans in two, so we are always seeking our other half.

Chapter Summary: Chapter Ten. The Insult After her funeral, Propertius's lover Cynthia visits him in a dream. She criticizes him for not observing her funeral rites; she is jealous of the new woman that has taken her place in Propertius's house. This woman has insulted Cynthia's image by melting it down for gold; she punishes the slaves for mentioning Cynthia's name (the name is also an image). Cynthia is especially fearful that Cynthia's mirror will be filled with the new woman's image. Cynthia is very concerned about how her images will be treated after her death, and whether the surviving lover will be faithful to the portrait of the lover. Cynthia's mirror does not just reflect images, but retains traces of her presence; like the portrait, the image in the mirror is tangibly connected by sympatheia to the person (as in Statius's poem about the image of Flavius Earinus captured in a mirror). Real mirrors, as Eco has shown, do not work this way; but these are the mirrors of myth and stories. In another poem by Propertius, the Roman matrona Cornelia returns from the dead to visit her husband. She is not worried that her images will be mistreated, and she asks her husband to engage in a dialogue with her image, as if it were able to reply. The portrait of the elegiac lover is threatened by betrayal and infidelity, but in the ideal Roman family, the portrait of the wife is regarded with dignity and respect.

Chapter Summary: Chapter Eleven. Seduction and Vendetta Names, power, riches, even physical features are passed from father to son in patriarchal societies, but the reproductive process involves women. In such societies, the women are like images: women have an autonomous, self-contained meaning, but they always "refer" to men. They embody the men's honor, and the men will defend the women (their honor) at all costs. In The Stone Guest, Pushkin's version of Don Juan, the Commendatore is Donna Anna's husband, not her father: but she is still "his" woman. When Don Juan seduces her, he invites the statue of his dead rival to act as his accomplice; the offended statue comes to life and murders Don Juan (the opposite of Perseus, who defeats his wife's lover and punishes him by turning him into stone). The statue embodies fidelity (so Ovid's Dido venerates a statue of Sychaeus), and if the statue is insulted, it can exact punishment. Many ancient stories describe the statue's revenge, especially the revenge of heroes' and athletes' statues. A medieval story tells how a man accidentally married a statue of Venus by placing a ring on her finger. He could not marry his human bride until Venus relinquished her claims. A similar story tells how a man accidentally pledged himself to an image of the Virgin: but Mary insists on her claims and the man becomes a monk. The images are "binding," with serious consequences for the lover who associates too closely with them.

Chapter Summary: Chapter Twelve. The Justice of Death Standing Up   Because the image is the embodiment of a vow, it also the power to enforce that vow: the image is justice. Statues are especially able to exact revenge: they increase in size, and free themselves from immobility in order to pursue the offender and punish him. In the cultural imagination, the statue operates along two symbolic axes: it is "death standing up" (death made to look like life), and it is "mummified life" (a living creature that looks dead). As such, the statue is a truly uncanny object (following Freud and Jentsch's terminology): it looks like a living creature but seems dead, or it is a dead thing that seems suspiciously alive. Jakobson analyzes the statue in similar terms: the statue is an embodiment of life in a durable exterior form; it is an image of continuing life. By definition, the statue thus combines both life and death, like the paradox of absence and presence in the portrait of the lover. The statue has the same motionless, cold character of someone who is dead, with the exterior aspect of someone who is actually alive. The statue of the Commendatore that can uncannily come to life to punish Don Juan ("mummified life") and the kolossos that functions as the double of death in archaic Greek culture ("death standing up") define the two ends of that symbolic range which the statues inhabit in our cultural imagination.

Chapter Summary: Chapter Thirteen. The Gaze  Pygmalion's statue opens her eyes and turns to look at her lover. In the beginning, Greek statues had legs that were welded together and eyes that were shut. they lacked motion and vision, two essential signs of life. As soon as the statues were given free-standing legs, they could run away, and had to be tied down with chains (Pausanias describes several such examples). Daedalus was the first to open the statues' eyes, and many legendary images were supposedly able to return the spectators' gaze. In Roman culture, the act of looking back and returning someone's gaze - respicere - is a fundamental component of social contact and communication. Love relationships also demand this reciprocity; gazes of love must be returned. But Ovid's Anaxarete refuses to return her lover's gaze; he commits suicide, and Anaxarete turns into stone when she sees his corpse. As she stands and stares out the window - prospiciens - Anaxarete becomes a statue. It is an aetiology of the Venus prospiciens of Salamis, the Greek Aphrodite parakyptousa. Ovid's prospiciens belongs to the Roman paradigm of the reciprocal gaze, respicere; the Greek parakyptein instead means winking or glancing. This Aphrodite parakyptousa derives from the Near Eastern "woman in the window", a cult representation of Astarte connected with sacred prostitution. Over time, the Near Eastern image became a Greco-Roman story: in Ovid's version, a woman who only agreed to pro-spicere out of the window at her lover's corpse, never returning - re-spicere - his gaze of love.

Chapter Summary: Chapter Fourteen. Respect Because portraits are representatives of people, they command respect. Tiberius punished anyone who took Augustus's image (on a coin, on a ring) into a latrine or a brothel. Tiberius's obsessions are paralleled by the superstitions expressed in the rules of Pythagoras: images should not be taken into unclean places, etc. One's own image also commanded respect: Scribonius Largus complains that people are more careful in choosing a portrait painter than in choosing their own physician. Because of this close connection between person and image, the fate of the image foretells the person's fate, as in historical anecdotes about Caesar, Vitellius, Domitian, Galba, Otho, etc. Caligula even kept a cult statue of himself which was dressed in the same clothes as the emperor. The image and the referent were made to exist in simultaneity (the image as a mirror of life). Statues could also represent entire classes of people, as in Quintilian's dilemma: "The image of a tyrannicide should be placed in the gymnasium; the image of a woman should not be placed in the gymnasium: a woman killed a tyrant." A woman's image could not appear in the male gymnasium; images of men could not appear where the cult of the Bona Dea was being celebrated. Conversely, the impious matronae of Juvenal's sixth satire insulted an image of their own womanhood by urinating on a cult image of the goddess Pudicitia. The images command respect (or are the victims of disrespect) for a culture's fundamental categories of identity.

Chapter Summary: Chapter Fifteen. Premonition In Terence's Eunuch, the hero sees a picture of Jupiter committing adultery, which inspires him in his own amorous escapades. The picture is a premonition of his own fate. In Plautus's Mostellaria, the tricky slave Tranio invents a similarly ominous picture: a crow plucking the feathers of two old vultures, just as he is plucking the feathers of two foolish old men. In Plautus's vocabulary, the word graphicus - "like a picture" - means "perfect." Against Plato's insistence on the inferiority of the images, Plautus considers the picture an ideal form of reality. Such images can disclose the future, as in historical anecdotes told about images of Galba, Pompey, etc. There is a contrast here between Homer's Odysseus, who hears his adventures in a song on Phaeacia, while Vergil's Aeneas sees his adventures decorating a temple in Carthage. Petronius's Encolpius also sees his unhappy love affair depicted in paintings, and Clitophon (the hero of Achilles Tatius's romance) sees his love for Leucippe prefigured in a painting. Likewise, when Leucippe is about to be kidnapped, the hero is warned by two omens: the flight of a hawk pursuing a sparrow, and a painting of the story of Tereus and Philomela. The image is an enigma that announces the future, like images of prophetic dreams, or the premonitory words of omens. In both literature and life, images of vision and of sound are signs to be interpreted; we ignore them at our peril.

Chapter Summary: Chapter Sixteen. Resemblance Augustine considers dreams, mirrors, and family resemblances to be resemblances "in deterioribus", inferior copies. Family resemblance was a Roman obsession. Catullus hopes Torquatus's son will resemble him perfectly; Ovid's Hypsipyle and Seneca's Andromache praise their sons for resembling their fathers (unlike Martial's Cinna, whose children resembled his wife's lovers). The male factor governs reproduction: patres patribus, as Lucretius says. But images perceived during conception also produce resemblances: in Heliodorus's Ethiopica, the daughter of Ethiopians is white because her mother looked at a painting of Andromeda when she was conceived. Body fluids can also produce resemblances. Breast-milk even produces paternal resemblances because milk supposedly derives from insemination. Faustina was sprinkled with a gladiator's blood when she conceived Commodus, who later played the gladiator. Commodus had a twin, and Fronto praises their resemblance to Marcus Aurelius: the philosopher-king needed twins to reflect both sides of his identity. Roman nobles acquired cognomina from actors who physically resembled them, a practice apparently related to the "double" of Roman funeral rituals, in which an actor played the role of the dead man. Chariton's Callirhoe holds Chaereas's image to her womb, anticipating that their son will resemble his father. The son is a portrait of the lover: Vergil's Dido wishes Aeneas had given her a son, and she embraces Ascanius in Aeneas's absence. Phaedra claims to love the "young Theseus" in her stepson Hippolytus. In Artemidorus's Oneirocritica, dreams of portraits and mirrors symbolize children: images and reflections of their parents.

Chapter Summary: Chapter Seventeen. The Doll In 1889, a sarcophagus was excavated in Rome. It contained the remains of Crepereia Tryphaena and her beautiful doll. The word for doll in Latin is pupa, in Greek kore - and both of these words also mean the "pupil," the "girl" in the eye. The doll is a tiny mirror that reflects the world at large, and dolls were often interred with miniature tables, chairs and other small utensils. Unlike other images, the dolls' articulated joints simulate movement; the castanets in their hands simulate sound. The doll has a nude body that can be dressed; like a person, the doll can change her external appearance. Dolls do not have referents as other images do. The doll is an auto-referential sign: the simulacrum of a girl that pretends to be a girl. These physical features imply certain behaviors: the girls would play with their dolls, dressing them, combing their hair, making them walk. Lactantius thus mocked pagan religion as nothing more than men playing with big dolls of the gods. On the eve of their wedding, Roman and Greek girls dedicated their dolls in a temple of the goddess (as Juvenal tells us). This is why Pascoli called Crepereia's doll a "doll denied to Venus"; Crepereia did not live long enough to see her wedding. By giving up their dolls, their `virginal' double, girls renounced their childhood. The doll is another kolossos: an image that captures a person's fleeting identity in a permanent form.

Chapter Summary: Chapter Eighteen.  Image, Mirror, and Homo Suus Seneca gives a lurid description of Hostius Quadra's use of mirrors to heighten his sexual pleasures (a debauched autoscopy). Accused of witchcraft, Apuleius had to defend himself on the charges of possessing a mirror, and his Apology also contains an apology of the mirror itself: Apuleius claims the mirror image is superior to manufactured images because it changes to perfectly reflect its referent at every moment. But the image in the mirror is impermanent; manufactured images have the virtue of durability. The mirror image is impossibly close to its referent, which is why Narcissus's reflection cannot be brought to life like Pygmalion's statue: Narcissus is already that living image, the homo suus (as Apuleius says) of his reflection. In Plautus's Amphitruo, Sosia confronts his double on the same stage (that ille ego, his alter ego), and there is a struggle for identity. The image is a substitute for its referent; but the double is a rival. Heracles attacked a statue of himself, and the statue attacked him in return. Images, on the other hand, are intended as a replacement for the absent person. But Plato (in the Phaedrus) argues that portraits, like writing, suffer from the absence of their "father", from the living voice or living person which they reproduce. The dying Agesilaus did not want to leave images of himself behind for precisely this reason: the homo suus is exposed to all sorts of dangers in his representation as an image.