Page 1

Page 2

N. 96
Series directed by Pierre Dalla Vigna (University "Insubria", Varese) and Luca
Taddio (University of Udine)
SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE
Paolo Bellini (Insubria University, Varese)
Claudio Bonvecchio (Insubria University, Varese)
Mauro Carbone (Université Jean-Moulin, Lyon 3)
Morris L. Ghezzi (University of Milan)
Antonio Panaino (University of Bologna, Ravenna)
Paolo Perticari (University of Bergamo)
Susan Petrilli (University of Bari)
Augusto Ponzio (University of Bari)

Page 3
 J EAN -P IERRE V ERNANT

THE IMAGE
AND ITS DOUBLE
From the era of the idol to the dawn of art

Page 4

© 2010 - MIMESIS EDIZIONI (Milan - Udine)

Series: Filosofie n. 96
www.mimesisedizioni.it / www.mimesisbookshop.com
Via Risorgimento, 33 - 20099 Sesto San Giovanni (MI)
Telephone and fax: +39 02 89403935
E-mail: mimesised@tiscali.it
Via Chiamparis, 94 - 33013 Gemona del Friuli (UD)
E-mail: info.mim@mim-c.net
On the cover: Giulio Paolini, Mimesi, 1975
Photo Paul Maenz © Archivio Giulio Paolini, Turin
Page 5

INTRODUCTION

1. The error of an error?

The image and its double: the volume that is presented here, and that
anthologize what might be called Jean's "aesthetic writings"
Pierre Vernant, has a deliberately ambiguous title, a title that alludes to, first
still that to a particular kind of images, to the characteristic, typical,
inescapable duplicity of each image. It is a title that accepts to play the
image game, a game of mirrors and reflections in which the only certain rule
it is the existence of a reference, of a referral structure: the image is always
picture-in. But in what sense, then, to speak of a "double" image?
Perhaps it is not the image itself, which has always been double, of something - yes it is
call as you wish: original, model, reality or nature - what image does not
is? And the double of an image, then, would not be twice the double,
condemned as such to an ever greater depletion of its value
ontological and truthful? It would not be the error of an error, an error «alla
 second"?
Thus, in fact, Plato seemed to think of it, and as it is known, there are many a
to argue that the history of Western aesthetics is nothing but a comment
to the tenth book of the Republic, locus classicus of the condemnation
of the image that sees Socrates and Glaucone engaged in defining the activity
artistic and to banish it from the ideal society. Famous example: the artist imitates
on the canvas or in the marble the bed built by the craftsman, bed which, in turn,
it is nothing other than an imitation of the bed "created by the god", 1 that is, of the perfect e
immutable idea of bed. The artistic image, therefore, as a copy
doubly languid of an ideal original that was already mirrored - e
therefore soiled - in the phenomenal world.
Not a little effort what Plato asks of us: to consider "our"
world as a non-world, or as an apparent, superficial world
Vacuum. The real world, the real world, would be the ideal one, while the other -
the one we live in every day - it would only be the world of the image,
of appearance, of what appears to be but is not .
The platonic devaluation of the image with respect to the model therefore operates

Page 6

on a triple register: ontological (the image is less real ), gnoseological

(the image is less true ) and ethical (the image is worse ). Unlike
of the artisan, who imitates "what is as it is", the artist merely reproduces
"What appears as it appears", 2 with the result that on the bed of the craftsman
you can lie down, while with the artist's bed we can't make ourselves right
nothing if not stop looking at it. And it is precisely on the subject of vision - how
he saw Cassirer - that the Platonic theory revolves around: there is a seeing with the
eyes of the body, which has "the passive character of sensible perception" e
seeks only to "register and reproduce in itself a sensitive external object"; and THERE
a seeing with the eyes of the spirit, a "free contemplating" aimed at
«Plucking of an objective form».3
Put like this, the question does not seem overly complicated: it forms from
one side, image from the other, with all the related opposing pairs, including
be-appearing, essence-phenomenon, truth-appearance, science-opinion, logos-
myth. However, if the accounts do not return so well, a quick glance already teaches it
to the etymology, which reveals as eidos ("form", "idea") and eidolon
("Image") derive from the same root of idein, "to see". The attempt
Platonic to distinguish and separate two modes of vision fails a
erase the suspicion that the traced path is not so deep, and that it is
perhaps it is possible to build a bridge between logic and aesthetics. Possible and indeed
necessary, if it is true that Plato himself was not a park of ambiguity in his own
advances against image and art:4 even without returning to reiterate that i
dialogues themselves can certainly be considered as sublime
works of art, the fact remains that the philosopher, having reached the culminating moment of the
his speculations, he often sees himself forced to resort to myth; and what is the
myth if not the logos that is expressed in images? How to distinguish, in the myth,
l ' Eidos from' eidolon, the "what" from the "how," the idea of the imaginative way
in which it manifests and is said?
But perhaps it will be objected that the myth does not aspire to the truth, but to the verisimilar; and the
mathematics? Even in the purely intelligible region it seems that things
they are not as simple as they appear. As children, for example, he comes to us
asked to think of the point traced on the blackboard as an entity without
dimensions; and this too is a request of no small importance, which conceals a
 separation between seeing and thinking anything but obvious, and indeed in many ways
paradoxical. A point without dimensions is by definition invisible, yet
we design it, and we design it just to be able to see it: «La
mathematical knowledge, which as such is purely oriented to ideas in
their permanence and eternity, in their pure In-Self, cannot in any way
avoid sensitive aids and supports. Only in the image, in the individual case
sensitive, it can represent the nature of what is universal and devoid of

Page 7

image".5
Echoing the Goethian maxim according to which «the particular subject is
always universal, and the universal must always adapt to the particular ",6 the
Cassirer's words reinforce the doubt that the relationship between form and image
it cannot be reduced to a simple and reassuring aut-aut. We are not gods,
neither angels: our knowledge, however limited it may be, seems to have to
necessarily pass through the image, ie through the "screen"
of the eidola that, «rather than posing as an insurmountable obstacle to the
contemplation of the eide, [...] tends to reveal itself as a medium
"Specifically human" of that contemplation ". 7
Even scientific research, far from being that longed for world
aseptic in which the scientist leaves on the doormat at the entrance to the laboratory,
together with its subjectivity, even every form of sensitive appearance finds
right in the image a daily and irreplaceable ally.8 Exactly
as, moreover, Aristotle already thought, who in De anima affirmed
explicitly that "the soul never thinks without images [ aneu
phantasmatos ] ", and in De memoria et reminiscentia reiterated:" We cannot
think without images. The same thing happens in thinking
draw a figure: here, in fact, even though you don't need a
triangle of determined size, we trace it however of greatness
determined. In the same way he who thinks, even if he does not think one
quantity, the object is placed before the eyes as a determined quantity, even though
not thinking it as such ».9
In spite of this stance in favor of the image by
Aristotle, the Platonic "condemnation" will indelibly mark history
of aesthetics, understood both as a science of sensation and as a theory
art. That of images, and in particular of artistic images, is
been for centuries - and in many ways continues to be - the realm of appearance and
of opinion as opposed to that of being and science. But from where
derives this subdivision? Was he already present before Plato? And especially:
what is the image?

2. Historical psychology and "biography" of the image

The theme of the image, imagination and imagination is

expressly indicated by Vernant as the third fundamental pole of his
research alongside those of Greek mythologies and rationalities, "both
in the plural, as is natural for those who refuse to postulate a single reason
timeless opposite to a myth that is as unique and timeless ». 10
Page 8

Basic clarification, which clearly clarifies how in the work

the French anthropologist's reason must never be written with the
capital letter, considering it as something absolute, miraculous (e
therefore same inexplicable) conquest that would suddenly appear in the
Greece of the fifth century; it is instead the result of certain conditions
cultural, subject as such to becoming and in need of historicization.
The same goes for the imagination: the starting point for reflections
vernantiane is given by the conviction that «the collective forms of life
psychic - like the imaginary, the symbols, the belief systems - are not a
universal datum, valid always and everywhere, but the product of historical phenomena,
and therefore accompany the evolution of society in its various forms ».11
Explicitly recognizing his debt to Louis Gernet
and Ignace Meyerson, founder of the Center de recherches de psychologie
comparative, Vernant adheres to the principles of "historical psychology",
indeed, decisively contributing to their formulation and
application. An important essay dedicated to the relationship between history and psychology
clarifies the terms of the question: the innovative character of psychology
historical - or, if you prefer, of psychological history - does not consist in the fact
that the story is interested in psychology and vice versa, since the appeal (explicit or
implicit) to the psychological dimension has always characterized the activity of
historical, from Tucidide onwards. Instead, they are "the place and the"
role "of the psychological sphere within the historical investigation:" Once upon a time
psychological was for them [ scil. for historians] an explanatory principle. For
to account for the institutions, the works, the concatenation of human acts,
the historian willingly resorted to a psychology of man as if it were a given
constant, obvious, universal. For today's historian the psychological is not
constitutes a principle of intelligibility, a rule that would be imposed by
all of course; it has become an aspect among others of the historical subject, one
of the size of the object ".12
The psychological instance is no longer seen as a last resort which make
appeal in the absence of explanatory principles which are presumed to be more founded and
objective, but as an area of historical interest like others, and indeed in certain
which way is privileged: the psychological history is not situated, in fact, next to
the economic, political, social, etc., but rather within each one
of them. It is a pervasive story, which colonizes the others, lives on their results, if
takes possession of it and, starting from the precise point in which it does
they arrest, try to identify "a possible history of the functions
psychological. "13
The methodological principle of this historical psychology is clear: unlike
of behavioral psychology (behaviorism), of the psychology of

Page 9

form ( Gestaltpsychologie ) and psychoanalysis, which beyond the

innumerable distinctions all remain faithful, according to Vernant, "to
traditional conception of an immutable human nature », it introduces the
temporal dimension in the study of the "inner man", showing how
even the psychic ones are instances in continuous metamorphosis and evolution.14
The historian will therefore avoid using too general notions like
 those of Zeitgeist or of "mentality", and will speak rather of particular functions
as "memory, imagination, person, will",15 distinguishing
in addition, for each of them, different levels of processing. So much in history
because in psychology the main risk is in fact that of anachronism,
of the forced projection on the past of thought forms and ways of thinking
sensitivities specific to the present, or in any case to periods different from that in
examination. The main objective of historical psychology, instead, consists in
reconstruct and analyze "the different stages of the same psychological function".16
What all this means for aesthetics is easily said. Not just, e
trivially, that fundamental notions such as "beautiful", "ugly", "sublime",
"Pleasant" and so on they all have their own history, and what we can
appear insignificant to have been considered, in other places and in other eras,
highest artistic manifestation; there is something else. To be able to really say that,
in fact, historicization must not be limited to adjectives, but also invest
and above all the nouns: image in the first place, of course, but also
representation, representation, imitation, expression, statue, idol, icon,
art. Each term has its own life and its own biography, and this applies, a
greater reason, by "image", that ancient Greek also translates with zoon,
"Animal, living being".
What is the image, therefore, is a badly posed question from the beginning: the
image does not exist. The definite article must necessarily do
space to the innumerable indefinite articles that imply the need for
clarify what an image is in a certain place, in a certain
time and for a specific group of people: in periods other than
our image «is outlined and works otherwise, both at the level
of individual experience, both in the general process of communication
within the group and in thought operations ". 17
It is on the basis of this principle that Vernant formulated clearly, and a
several times, the fundamental question to which his writings are most explicit
aesthetic interest they try to give an answer: "At what time,
in what ways, in which sectors of plastic and literary production i
Greeks conceived the fictitious element as an experimental field
specific, different from the simple appearance as from the full reality: the

Page 10

world, typically human, of art or arts? ". 18

This question underpins a real "biography"
of the image, which considers the artistic as a sphere that has its own
specific history, a story that does not coincide with that of the image at all
tout court. Implicit is the problem - really capital for every search
of aesthetic interest - of the birth of art, or more precisely: of the
birth of art from the image. It is from an anthropologist, therefore, that aesthetics
has seen the need for distinction between history continue and deepen
of art and history of the image, and of extension of the first in the direction
of the second, which had been felt between the end of the 8th and the beginning of
Twentieth century by scholars such as Franz Wickhoff, Alois Riegl, Julius von
Schlosser, Franz Boas and Aby Warburg, as well as by Max Dessoir and others
exponents of the Kunstwissenschaft; that same need that has re-emerged
overwhelmingly, over the last few decades, with the advent of the so-called
iconic turn and the rapid spread of visual studies.19
 3. From double to image. And return
The question from which Vernant starts, therefore, is always
substantially the same: what do the Greeks mean by "image"? Or for
be more precise: which Greeks? Even "Greekness" is in fact subject to that
historicization that represents, as we have seen, one of the methodological principles
essential for Vernantian reflections. But if there is the Greece, then
there is not even the Greek image: that of representation
figurative is a long and troubled career even in Hellenic land, despite
the unitary image that so much historiography has handed down to us and can be
summarized by the abused formula winckelmanniana of the «noble simplicity e
quiet greatness ". 20
An anthropology of the image - because of this with Vernant it is -
he must ask himself what is the role of representation in a given
moment of a certain culture: what is its function, to which
needs - individual and collective - to meet, what needs are met.
In addressing these issues, Vernant moves from a precise assumption, as follows
formulated in From the presentification of the invisible to imitation
of appearance: "The concept of figurative representation is not obvious, not
it is unique or permanent, but it constitutes what can be called a
historical category ». 21 Assumed reiterated, in almost identical terms, by
Depiction and image: "The category of figurative representation does not
it is an immediate datum of the human spirit, a natural, constant and
universal. It is a mental category which, in its elaboration, presupposes

Page 11

that the concepts of appearance, imitation, likeness, image, simulacrum yes

are already enucleated and clearly delineated, in their mutual relations and in the
common opposition to the real, to being ». 22
Now the question moves and becomes: when the above concepts start at
appear «enucleated», «clearly delineated» and, above all, opposed «to
real and to being "? When does the image become a representation? The answer,
repeated as a real leitmotiv in all the texts collected in the present
volume, is categorical: with Plato, who poses in the course of the fourth century
the image - every image - under the aegis of mimesis, of imitation.
For the Athenian philosopher all that concerns the image is in the field
mimetic activity, and the latter, on the other hand, is defined in terms of
eidolon dementia, "image fabrication".23
But what does eidolon mean ? It has always been synonymous with "artifice
mimetic "or, to put it again with Plato, of" second similar object "?
Vernant proves the opposite. Between the VIII and the V century with "idol" means
an image that is by no means bound to a relationship of similarity
external with respect to a model, but is rather thought of as a model
divine symbol that "rather than representing the supernatural power can have
the function of locating it, of presenting it and also, in some cases, of
to implement it, to realize it in a concrete form ».24 Lagging, albeit in
very critical manner, to Creuzerian reflections,25 Vernant makes it clear how in
the idol origin is indissolubly connected to the religious sphere and to the rite, and
as such it is not even designed to be seen. The only exceptions
they concern certain persons (priests and initiates) or determined
circumstances (celebrations and sacred ceremonies): in all other cases the idol is not
intended for public exhibition.
We are therefore dealing with a particular type of representation that
subject to a dialectic of concealment and revelation: "By seeking this
 way, through figurative forms, of bridging the gap between the human and the
divine, the idol must at the same time, in his own figure, bring out the
distance from the human world, to accentuate the incommensurability between
the sacred power and all that makes it manifest, always
inadequate and incomplete, in the eyes of mortals ».26 The idol presents, but to the
at the same time he underlines the gulf that exists between the world of men and
that of the gods; it has symbolic value because "it makes a being present in
a form that this being passes every time ". 27
Eidolon, therefore, is the image that depends "on a kind of magic" and "yes
it passes for what it is not ", assuming" the exact appearance of all this
which is image ». 28 Patroclus is dead, killed in battle by Hector.

Page 12

Achilles, his inseparable companion, cries without finding consolation;

finally, overcome by sleep, he falls asleep. And here he immediately appears
the image of Patroclus - «similar to him in his beautiful eyes and in his voice,
in stature, in clothes » 29 - to claim a worthy burial. This is what ai
times of Homer is called an eidolon: not an appearance but an apparition, a
"Double", meaning the term not in the Platonic sense, as a reply
degraded of an original, but as a substitute, "evocation device"30
endowed with its own specific ontological and absolutely real dignity, indeed
one might say - if the expression did not sound so postmodern - iper-
real. It is the revelation, or rather the revealing itself, of a reality "that
stands out on the ordinary and common aspect of what manifests itself in the light of
day":31 dream ( onar ), divine apparition ( phasma ) and, indeed, spectrum of
a deceased ( psyche ).
As an "apparition" the eidolon is no different from any other
phenomenon; what distinguishes it, however, in all its forms, is the fact
that it makes present something that, at the same time, brings the inevitable
seal of absence. When Achilles rises to embrace the image of
Patroclus - but we would be tempted to say, and we would not be wrong, Patroclus himself -
he can't tighten anything, 'because the screeching shadow fell below ground, and vanished
like smoke ". 32 As stressed repeatedly by Vernant, the similarity between
image and model is not limited at all to the visual sphere: eidolon does not
it only reproduces the outward features of an absent, since it also has, and in everything and
for everything, the appearance, the voice, the soul and the thought of the original. A well
to look at, indeed, it is now the original itself - an original, however, similar to the
smoke and the consistency of steam, of what exists but is not left
to grab.
The appearance of an idol is therefore always, at the same time, the appearance of a
absent: the idol is precisely this paradox. "A miracle of an invisible
that for an instant it shows itself ", 33 the archaic eidolon appears all taken in
this dialectic of presence and absence: "It is not a representation
in the intimate of the subject, but of a real appearance that inserts
actually down here, in this same world we live in and that
we see, a being that reveals itself under the momentary form of the same
fundamentally different, since it belongs to the other world ». 34 Gods or dead,
in short - here is who you are dealing with when it comes to eidola.
In this regard Vernant is categorical: the archaic idol is not an image
and presupposes "a different mental organization"35 not only from ours,
but also from the Platonic one. Because it is Plato, after all, to officiate the
rite of passage from the idol as an appearance to the idol as an appearance:
 the ancient oscillation between presence and absence is certainly found in the thought of

Page 13

philosopher, but completely distorted and changed in sign. We are witnessing one
real transmutation of values, in which words remain
apparently the same but, in reality, they suffer a decisive slip that
it irrevocably alters its meaning. If Plato chooses to continue
use the term eidolon, «the most loaded with archaic values, the least
"Modern" among those offered at that time by the image vocabulary ", lo
does only to "disqualify the image",36 to depreciate it; and it is no coincidence that
he extends the sphere of the possible meanings of eidolon to the point of inducing the
word, and in particular the empty, mendacious and bewitching word of the Sophists. 37
Here comes a second inversion of values, which runs parallel to
the one suffered by the term eidolon and concerns the vocabulary relative to the
semantic constellation of imitation. Until the fifth century, "imitating [ mimei-
sthai ] »does not yet mean offering the copy of an original to the view: among the three
terms implied by mimetic activity - model, imitator and spectator -
the accent does not fall on the former but rather on the latter two. It's not about
produce an illusion, but to make present, in the eyes of the spectator, a
given subject: "To aping, to simulate is not yet to produce
a work that is a true copy of a model, but it is a way of exhibiting
be that it replaces the other, showing itself as this or that, assuming it
the ways. The act of mimeisthai, rather than a representation, is an action
effective, a demonstration ". 38 In short, it is, as Klee put it, by
to make visible, not to imitate what is already visible.
With Plato mimesis it becomes instead simple semblance, reflection. Behind and
before him, however, there are the birth of the tragedy and the development of the
sophistry. As for the first, Vernant points out that the tragic poet,
unlike the epic one, it does not limit itself to telling the events "from the di
outside ", but dissimulates" inside the protagonists, wearing theirs
their appearance, their way of being, their feelings and their words ",
disappearing completely behind the characters "who act and speak on
each scene on its own as if they were alive ».39 It's this one
dimension of "as if" to open the doors to Platonic criticism, and is in
fund the same dimension of sophistry, in which the unstoppable is consumed
disjunction between appearance and reality: «The road is opened by a Gorgia that
enhances appearance to the detriment of being, showing that appearing, thanks
to the "effect of reality", it has every power to act on the spirit of
men, of every force of impact that is usually attributed to being ". 40
Transposed to the level of the figurative arts, the condemnation of the word sophistry
translates into suspicion of any form of illusionism:
foreshortenings, perspective corrections and artifices able to simulate the real are
on the agenda at the time of Fidia and Alcamene, of Zeusi and Parrasio.

Page 14

Nothing but smoke in the eyes for those who, like Plato, appreciate the
 tetragono, ideal and sacred character of Egyptian art.41
There is a final category of terms that undergoes a radical inversion
of value, and is that, very general, relative to the sphere of appearance
phenomenal. Referring to a famous study by André Rivier, 42 Vernant
emphasizes how the words that express the idea of "semblance" ( eisko, eikizo,
eoika, eikos, eikon ) or of "opinion" ( dokeo, dokos, doxa ) were not at all
linked, in their ancient use, to the problem of being and appearing, which
it emerges only in the fifth century, on the impulse of the Eleatic philosophy, and becomes
central during the IV. It is true that these words referred to,
even before Parmenides, to a form of indirect, mediated, but
this does not mean in any way that they marked the error or the
falsehood: "Far from being negatively qualified as an illusion, an error,
false appearance, Free conjecture, the ' EIKASIA, the dokos or doxa designate
valid intellectual acts, which use similarities, comparisons, analogies in the case
of eikasia, and also reasonably founded indications and probabilities in the case of
dokos and doxa, to reach objects that are not "obvious", but
they remain hidden and invisible both in the past and in the future, as in the
thickness or at the bottom of things ".43 It is always a matter of grasping - if not with
mathematical certainty, yet with enough probability - what is not
immediately visible through what it is: opsis ton adelon ta phainomena,
according to the well-known Democratic formula taken from Anaxagoras. 44 In this sense,
then, «adela and phainomena do not constitute two exclusive, defined fields
from their opposition, but two forms or two levels of reality that they maintain
mutual relations within the same universe ":45 the phenomena are -
still with Rivier - "the very things with which one has to deal". 46 Surrendering for
once to the temptation of anachronism we could say, in terms of the
Husserlian phenomenology, not only that the phenomenon reveals an "aspect"
of the object, but also that the object is never given except in and through its own
(infinite) aspects; or even, with Goethe, that "the truth is similar to God: it does not appear
directly, and we must guess from its manifestations ". 47
In the framework of Platonic thought, however, the phenomenon no longer comes
understood as a revealing element, but, on the contrary, like
shadow and vain reflection of an intelligible reality which is the task of the philosopher
dialectical - and certainly not the artist - to grasp in its purity through an act
of intellectual contemplation. Parallel to the change in conception
of the phenomenal world we note the one relative to the image: «It does not come to you
more required to work in the world as an effective force, but to act
on the eyes of the spectator, to translate presence for him in a visible way
invisible of the god and to send him a training on the divinity. There

Page 15

statue becomes "representation" in a very new sense; the symbol

divine, freed from ritual and placed under the impersonal gaze of the city, one is
transformed into an "image" of the god ",48 and this image «no longer bears the
sign of the absence, of the elsewhere, of the invisible, [...] but the stigmata of a non
to be really unreal ".49 It is the end of the idol, the dawn of art.
At the end of this journey, however, a question remains open: that
that Vernant summarizes under various formulas - from appearance to appearance,
from the presentification to the imitation, from the idol to the image, from the symbol
to art - is it an irreversible path? The idol definitely belongs to the
past? Vernant does not say so explicitly, but taking into account his net
refusal of any abstract and linear evolutionism seems at least legitimate
doubt it. In favor of a negative response, moreover, the extraordinary plays
 success
held of that formula
at baptism - "the
and which, overthrow
since of Platonism"
then, continues - that
to solicit Nietzsche
and provoke so much
contemporary philosophy. Deleuze saw it well: if sometimes - and indeed
more and more often - we are unable to distinguish a copy
from the original, it is not because the copy imitates the model that ends up so well
identify with it, but rather because a model does not exist at all. 50 IS
this does not mean only that of a "real" world as opposed to
world of phenomenal appearance is nothing but a fable, and that we should
give back to the second that dignity and those rights that had been taken away from him
first; it also means, and above all, that with the collapse of the "real" world
the world of "appearance" also collapses, since the concepts of "truth" and
"Appearance" only makes sense if they are related to one another. Is this the
"Demonic character" of the simulacral image: "The simulacrum is not one
degraded copy, it contains a positive power that denies both the original
both the copy, the model and the reproduction. [...] No model resists
to the vertigo of the simulacrum ». 51 It is therefore - as Michel pointed out
Foucault - of «enunciating a philosophy of the phantom that is not subordinate,
by perception or image, to an original datum, but that makes it the
its value leaving it between the surfaces with which it is related, [...] in what
Deleuze would perhaps not allow to call his "materiality
incorporeal. ' "52
The Deleuzian and Foucaultian reference to Andy Warhol and to Pop Art
lets us see to what extent this vertiginous character of the simulacrum is
become a favorite theme of contemporary art, which has reflected so much and
reflects on the layers of sense of the image and the possibility of
push it «up to the point where it changes its nature and turns into
simulacrum. "53 And again it is worth pointing out how this
reversal does not exclusively concern the artistic image, but

Page 16

the image as such, the image that now, instead of resemble to

real, it simulates it, or even produces it, giving life to the era of the image
digital, of holograms, 54 of avatars, social networks and reality
virtual. In the words of Baudrillard, another careful observer of the
peregrinations and metamorphoses of the simulacra, «now the image cannot
more imagine the real, because it coincides with it. [...] The only suspense that
remains consists of knowing to what extent the world can be derealized first
to succumb to its very poor reality, or vice versa as far as it can
hyper-realized before succumbing under too much reality (ie when,
having become perfectly real, having become more true than truth, it will fall prey to
total simulation) ". 55
With his androids so similar to men, yet made in the image
and nobody's resemblance, Blade Runner can be taken as a manifesto
cinematographic of this transmutation of the image. And behind Blade
Runner stands out his great inspiration, that Philip Dick who in I simulacri
imagine a righteous world, unbeknownst to the vast majority of
citizens, from two androids - der Alte and his First Lady Nicole -
indistinguishable from human beings in flesh and blood, perfect replicants capable of
deceive anyone. Here "it is not a parallel universe, a universe
or even a possible universe - neither possible nor impossible, nor
neither real nor unreal: hyperreal ».56 A world where doubles have given way to
simulacri, another world «which, however, is no longer another, without a mirror nor
projection or utopia that can reflect it - the simulation is insurmountable,
opaque, without exteriority ».57 And faced with the threat of revealing the secret that
 Nicole is "in reality" (but how empty this expression now appears!) A
to be artificial, and to the unpredictable social consequences
derive, Philip Dick leaves the floor to one of his characters, who
laconically he asks: «What is the point of going ahead? We could not
give up and just watch it on television? For me this is enough,
now. It's what I want, just its image. All right?". 58
Pietro Conte

1 Plato, Republic, 597b. For a thematic introduction to Book X and for a careful survey
of critical literature, see the edition edited by Mario Vegetti for the types of Bibliopolis,
Naples 2007.
2 Ivi, 598b.
3 E. Cassirer, Eidos and eidolon. The problem of beauty and art in the dialogues of Plato (1924), tr. en.
by A. Pinotti, edited by M. Carbone, footnotes by M. Carbone, R. Pettoello and F. Trabattoni, Cortina,
2
Milan 2009 , p. 7.
4 On this point the Cassirerian interpretation of Plato is centered; cfr. F. Trabattoni, Ernst
Cassirer and the Platonic "aesthetic", in E. Cassirer, op. cit., pp. 97-127, in part. pp. 107-108.

Page 17

5 Ivi, p. 35.
6 JW Goethe, Maxims and Reflections, edited by S. Giametta, Rizzoli, Milan 1992, maximum 199.
7 M. Carbone, Between eidos and eidolon, in E. Cassirer, op. cit., pp. 41-69, here p. 68. On the concept
"screen" merleaupontiano and on that, connected to it, of "sensitive idea", see also,
of the same Carbone, An unprecedented deformation, Quodlibet, Macerata 2004 and Sullo
aesthetics screen. Painting, cinema and the philosophy to do, Mimesis, Milan 2008 (in part the
Postal Code. 6).
8 On the cognitive value of non-artistic images and on their function in science, yes
see J. Elkins, The history of art and the images that art are not (2003), tr. en. by P. Conte, in
A. Pinotti - A. Somaini, Theories of the image. The contemporary debate, Cortina, Milan 2009,
pp. 155-205, and U. Ratsch (ed.), Kompetenzen der Bilder. Funktionen und Grenzen des Bildes
in den Wissenschaften, Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2009.
9 Aristotle, De anima, 431a; De memoria et reminiscentia, 449b-450a. On the relationship between thought and
image in Aristotle, see, for example, the contribution of D. Frede, The Cognitive Role of
Phantasia in Aristotle, in MC Nussbaum - AO Rorty (ed.), Essays on Aristotle's De
Anima, Clarendon Press, Oxford 1995, pp. 279-295, and that A. Linguiti, Image and concept in
Aristotle and Plotinus, in C.-C. Härle (edited by), At the limits of the image, Quodlibet, Macerata 2005,
pp. 53-64.
10 J.-P. Vernant, Preface to Id., Between myth and politics (1996), tr. en. by A. Ghilardotti, edited by G.
Guidorizzi, Cortina, Milan 1998, p. 6.
11 G. Guidorizzi, Preface to the Italian edition of J.-P. Vernant, Between myth and politics cit., P. XVII.
12 J.-P. Vernant, History and psychology , in Id., Birth of images and other writings on religion , history,
reason, Il Saggiatore, Milan 1982, pp. 77-88, here p. 78.
13 Ivi, p. 79.
14 Ibid.
15 Ivi, p. 83.
16 Ivi, p. 80.
17 Id., Birth of images, infra p. 39.
18 Id., Preface a Between myth and politics cit., P. 6.
19 For a historical-critical overview of the subject, see the introduction by Andrea Pinotti and Antonio
Somaini to the aforementioned image theories.
20 JJ Winckelmann, Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Art in Painting and Sculpture (1755), in
Id., Beauty in art. Writings on ancient art, edited by F. Pfister, introduction by D. Irwin, Einaudi,
Turin 1997, pp. 9-51, here p. 29.
21 J.-P. Vernant, From the presentification of the invisible to the imitation of appearance, infra, p. 54.
22 Id., Representation and image, infra, p. 67.
23 Plato, Republic 599a7.
24 J-.P. Vernant, Representation and image, infra, p. 67.
25 On Vernant's judgment in relation to the thought of Friedrich Creuzer see, in this volume, i
first two paragraphs of The plastic symbol, pp. 95-100. On Creuzer in particular, instead, see F.
 Marelli, The look from the East. Symbol, myth and Greekness in Friedrich Creuzer; LED, Milan 2000.
26 Id., From the presentification of the invisible to the imitation of appearance, infra, pp. 55-56.
27 Id., The plastic symbol, infra, p. 97.
28 Id. The figure of the dead I, infra, p. 108.
29 Iliad XXIII, 65-68 (in the translation by Vincenzo Monti).
30 J. Jimenez, Theory of art (2002), tr. en. by A. Righi, Aesthetica, Palermo 2007, p. 72.

Page 18

31 J.-P. Vernant, Representation and image, infra, p. 76.

32 Iliad XXIII, 100-101.
33 J.-P. Vernant, Birth of images, infra, p. 31.
34 Ibidem.
35 Id., Representation and image, infra, p. 85.
36 Id., The figure of the dead I, infra, p. 108.
37 On the sophists as «jugglers of the word» and on the Platonic concept of «game [paidia]» see G.
Lombardo, Ancient aesthetics, il Mulino, Bologna 2002, pp. 66-69.
38 J.-P. Vernant, Birth of images, infra, p. 29.
39 Id., The figure of the dead II, infra, p. 128.
40 Ivi, pp. 128-129.
41 As pointed out by Elio Franzini with explicit reference to Vernant's thesis, it will be really
this symbolic image - in contrast to that «which aims simply at fictitious reproduction
of the real »- to assume a paradigmatic status on the occasion of the Council of Nicea (see E.
Franzini, Thought and image, in S. Moriggi, edited by, Where is the woman? Think of the art and the
science today, Mimesis, Milan 2003, pp. 63-76, here pp. 69-70).
42 A. Rivier, Rémarques sur les fragments 34 and 35 de Xénophane, «Revue de Philologie» 30 (1956),
pp. 37-61.
43 J.-P. Vernant, Birth of images, infra, pp. 45-46.
44 DK 68 A 111 and 59 B 21a.
45 J.-P. Vernant, Birth of images, infra, p. 46.
46 A. Rivier, art. cit., p. 59, n. 1.
47 JW Goethe, Maxims and Reflections, edited by S. Giametta, Rizzoli, Milan 1992, maximum 619.
48 J.-P. Vernant, From the presentification of the invisible to the imitation of appearance, infra, p. 61.
49 Id., Birth of images, infra, pp. 31-32 (italics mine).
50 That the problem concerning the ambiguous relationship between copy and original is sometimes their
impossible differentiation does not exclusively concern the contemporary era has shown it,
in relation to ancient culture, Giuseppe Pucci in a speech dedicated to the truth of the copy
aesthetics ancient, available in format electronic to the link
http://www.siestetica.it/download/pucci_copia.pdf .
51 G. Deleuze, Simulacrum and ancient philosophy, in Id., Logica del senso (1969), tr. en. by M. De Stefanis,
Feltrinelli, Milan 1975, pp. 223-246, here pp. 230-231.
52 M. Foucault, Theatrum philosophicum (1970), tr. en. by F. Polidori, «aut aut» 277-278 (1997), pp.
54-74, here p. 57. On the now classic concept of "incorporeal event", developed by Deleuze in
Logic of sense and Difference and repetition and inspired by the reading of É. Bréhier, La théorie des
incorporels dans l'ancien stoïcisme (1907), see the recent contributions of K. Rossi, The aesthetics of
Gilles Deleuze. Comparing Bergsonism and phenomenology, Pendragon, Bologna 2005; TO
Cauquelin, Fréquenter les incorporels. Contribution à une théorie de l'art contemporain, PUF,
Paris 2006; M. de Beistegui, The image of that thought. Deleuze philosopher of immanence,
Mimesis, Milan 2007.
53 G. Deleuze, op. cit., p. 234.
54 On the hologram and the seductive power of the simulacrum in general see M. Perniola, The Society of the
simulacri, Cappelli, Bologna 1980.
55 J. Baudrillard, The perfect crime. Did television kill reality? (1995), tr. en. by G. Piana,
Cortina, Milan 1996, p. 8.
56 Id., Afterword to Ph. Dick, I simulacri (1964), tr. en. by M. Nati, intr. and edited by C. Pagetti, Fanucci,

Page 19
 Rome 2007, pp. 227-235, here p. 233.
57 Ibid.
58 Ph. Dick, I simulacri cit., P. 168.

Page 20

BIO-BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
 Born in 1914 in Provins and left an orphan at an early age of both
parents, Jean-Pierre Vernant undertakes higher studies at the Sorbonne and
it follows the agrégation in philosophy in l937. Called to arms at the outbreak
of the Second World War, he was dismissed in 1940; to return home
adheres to the formations of the Jeunesses communistes and actively participates
- as commander of the Forces Françaises de l'Intérieur of Toulouse e
of the Upper Garonne first, and of the South-West then - to the Resistance and to the
Liberation movement.
After the war he joined the French Communist Party, which he will leave in
1969. On the working front he teaches at the Jacques Decour Parisian high school until
l948, when he becomes Researcher at the CNRS. From 1957 to 1975 it is
Directeur d'Études at the École Pratique des Hautes Études. In 1964 he founded the
Center de Recherches Comparées sur les Sociétés Anciennes (Center Louis
Gernet), which he directs until l985. From 1975 to 1984 he held the Chair of Study
comparative of ancient religions at the Collège de France, where subsequently
gets the title of Professor Emeritus.
Next to research and teaching activities, it remains fundamental
always, for Vernant, social and political commitment, witnessed for example
from the protest against the Indochina war and from the signing of the «Manifeste des
121 »against the war in Algeria, as well as participation, as
member of the guarantee committee, to the UN program «Decade per la
promotion of a culture of peace and non-violence for the children of the world ".
Vernant goes out, at the age of ninety-three, on 9 January 2007.
Member of several academies, doctor honoris causa from the universities of
Chicago, Bristol, Oxford and Naples, Vernant has helped revolutionize it
study of Greek civilization, carrying out the research begun by Ignace
Meyerson and Louis Gernet in the field of historical psychology e
of anthropology and keeping faith with the principle of the inseparability of the forms of
thought from the historical-social context in which they operate and which,
mutually, they help to define.
Among his main works we mention: The origins of Greek thought
(1962); Myth and thought among the Greeks. Studies in historical psychology (1965);

Page 21

Myth and society in ancient Greece (1974); Myth and tragedy in ancient Greece
(1972) and Myth and Tragedy II. From Oedipus to Dionysus (1986; both written
together with Pierre Vidal-Naquet); Birth of images and others written on
religion, history, reason (1979); Death in the eyes. Figures of the Other
in ancient Greece (1985); The individual, death, love (1989); Myth and
religion in ancient Greece (1990); Figures, idols, masks (1990); Between myth and
politics (1996); The universe, the gods, men (2000).
Page 22

Note to the text

In this anthology we have chosen to sort the texts according to a criterion
thematic, starting from the most extensive writing and making you
follow others, in which Vernant focuses his attention on topics and
more and more specific problems.
Page 23

J EAN -P IERRE V ERNANT

THE IMAGE AND ITS DOUBLE

From the era of the idol to the dawn of art
Page 24

1
BIRTH OF IMAGES

To what extent the ancient Greeks recognized an order of reality

corresponding to what we call image, imagination, world
imagination? The research, not yet conducted in a systematic way, yes
imposes all the more imperious in front of us the more it risks, in the first instance,
to appear devoid of object: how is it possible that the Greeks, masters in the art of
"Depict" with drawing, painting, sculpture, they did not possess like us
in mind the images they represented in their works? And for whom
were tempted to question the value of these psychological "evidences",
one could have recourse to the learned testimony of Quintilian who writes
in the Rome of the first century AD: "What the Greeks call phantasiai, we do it
we design with visiones, imaginative visions, through which the images of
absent things are represented to the soul, so that we seem to perceive them with
eyes and having them in front of us ». 1
In the fourth century BC, a philosopher like Plato did not already have it
collected together the most diverse genres of the image set, for
present a unified general theory, placing them all in the framework of a
same category of phenomena, those that derive, regardless of
their differences, from mimesis, imitation? In the Sophist the foreigner of Elea
opposes the young Theaetetus, who is questioned about what the image is
he answers with a series of examples taken from the most diverse areas, the need
Socratic of a single and general definition together, which reveals the essence
common of all that is designated as image. He expects from Teeteto
that you form "what is common in all these things, which you said you were
many, and you considered it right to indicate with a single name, calling them all
image, assuming a single reality present in all ».2

Image and imitation

Page 25

For Plato all that is, in man, of the order of the eidolopoiike,
of the image-making activity, whether it be plastic arts, poetry,
of tragedy, of music, of dance, not to mention in the first instance that
these facts, is included in the field of mimetike, imitator activity. At the
 formula of the Republic that presents mimesis as a demiurgy of
images ( eidolon dementia ) that of the Sophist responds : «Indeed the
mimesis is a kind of doing, of making images, let's say, but not of doing
each of the real things themselves ». The image maker ( eidolou poietes ),
the artisan of images ( eidolou demiourgos ), is the one who is called
mimetes, imitator. 3 Plato does not limit himself to following the road on this plane
that Xenophon had opened, with less rigor and care than
theoretical order, in the Memorable. In the third chapter of the work Xenophon had
already suffered a certain slip to the vocabulary of mimos
(simultaneously the mime as a genre and as an actor), of
mimeisthai ( mimare ), of mimema (product of the action of miming), of
mimetes (the one who mimes), using this set of terms - whose
employment is not witnessed before the fifth century and that is connected a lot
likely to the literary genre of the mime, with very particular values of
mimic, mimic, simulate - to designate the work of the painter and of the
sculptor. 4 Plato takes a further step: he attributes to mimeisthai a
more precise, technical value and at the same time extends the field of
application, making the "imitate" the common characteristic of all
figurative or representative activities.5 The orientation was thus changed
of this section of vocabulary, since the balance between the three had been broken
terms implicated in the act of mimeisthai (the model, the imitator, the spectator)
in favor of the first two, among whom the relationship of imitation is now established.
In the fifth century, in fact, mimos and mimeisthai accentuate not so much the relationship as it is
it exists between the imitator and what he imitates, as well as that between the imitator and him
viewer watching it. Aping, simulating is not yet producing
a work that is a true copy of a model, but it is a way of exhibiting
be that it replaces the other, showing itself as this or that, assuming it
the ways. The act of mimeisthai, rather than a representation, is an action
effective, a demonstration. Privileging the mime-spectator relationship, the
mimeisthai vocabulary , as used in the fifth century, operates between two poles: the
first, that of deception, since the one who looks sees in the mime
and through him not what he really is, but the other that he imitates; The second one,
that of identification, since mimesis implies that the simulator does
make it similar to the other that it intends to imitate, adopting its manners. Without
except in cases where mimeisthai is used in its current meanings, in
Plato's accent is instead set very firmly on the relationship between
the image and the thing of which it is image, on the relationship of resemblance

Page 26

that unites them and yet distinguishes them. This explicit formulation of the link of
"Semblance" that every kind of imitation must realize, brings out in
close up the problem of what the copy and the model are, so much in themselves
how much in the mutual relationship. The question of the question therefore arises openly
nature of the "resemblance", of the essence of "semblance".
In this perspective the mimetic of the artists who model images yes
closely links to other similar phenomena, no more products than one
human operation but of divine art, as reflections in water are in nature,
the figures in the mirrors, the shadows, the visions of the dream. 6 These eidola,
images, establish with the real objects those same relationships as
resemblance and unreality established by the creations of human art. The work
of the painter is so comparable to that universe of reflections that a mirror,
turned in every direction, it makes appear under the hand that supports it: «Just that
you want to take a mirror and turn it on each side. You will quickly do
the sun and the celestial bodies, quickly the earth and then yourself and the other beings
 living, furniture, plants and all the objects that were said now. - Yup,
he answered, apparent objects ( phainomena ) but without real reality. [...] -
And yet, in a way, at least, even the painter makes a bed, or not? - Yup,
he answered, but his is also an apparent bed ». 7

The image as a semblance

Thus, an area of the image complex is clearly defined

it incorporates, alongside others, all the "representative" constituent productions
those that today we call works of art, and that at the same time gives
to the image as such, through its definition, a statute
own ontological: the result of an imitation, the image consists of one
simple "semblance"; it has no other reality than being similar to it
which is not, to the other and real thing of which it is the illusory replica, together the
double and the simulacrum. It is necessary to mention here the step of the Sophist who treats
of the very definition of the image: "Theaetetus: what, foreigner,
we could say that it is the image, if not a thing, made in the likeness of
a real thing, is a second similar object ( heteron toiouton)? - Lo
Stranger: you mean by this "second similar object" anything
true or what instead applies the term "similar" here? - Theaetetus: not
true for nothing, but similar to the truth. - The Stranger: you say "true" by
how much is it really? - Theaetetus: so. - The Stranger: and what is not true is
what is the opposite of true? - Theaetetus: certainly. - The Stranger: therefore,
with what is true, you do not mean something that is not
really, if you say it's not true? - Theaetetus: but somehow

Page 27

it also is, of course. - The Stranger: but not really: you say so. - Teeteto:
no, in fact; it is really only as a similar representation ".8

From appearance to appearance

This text is important: it clearly delimits the area on which Plato is

moves when facing the problems of the image: restricted area that advances
as a watershed between two sides; on one side, the side of the image
archaic, as evidenced by the uses of eidolon in Homer, conforming to one
conception of the image that the Greeks have now overcome; on the other, the
side that leads to a psychological exploration of the image, and where i
Greeks have not yet ventured.
L ' eidolon is defined by Plato a "second similar object», replication or
duplicate of the first, a sort of twin. From this point of view
the image depends on the category of the same; thanks to its own
similarity is the same as the model; at the limit, if the resemblance was made
identity, there would no longer be Cratylus's image-portrait, but
we would have two Cratylus instead of just one.9 For this to happen,
the image should not be limited to reproducing "form and color", but
to know how to render also the interiority of Cratylus, his voice, his life, his soul, the
thought. 10 This is precisely the case of the archaic eidolon , under three
forms in which it presents itself: image of the dream ( onar ), appearance aroused by
a god ( phasma ), ghost of a deceased ( psyche ). The Anticlea eidolon ,
mother of Ulysses, and that of Patroclus, a friend of Achilles, I am not alone "in
all alike "," prodigiously resembling "these two beings; with the voices, i
 speeches, gestures, thoughts, embody their actual presence in front of the two
heroes, and they turn to them talking to each other, as with their mother and
the real friend. When, however, seeing them, they are seized by the desire to
embrace them, they can grasp nothing but emptiness. 11 In the eidolon the presence
real manifests itself simultaneously as an irreparable absence.
This inclusion of a "being elsewhere" within the "being here"
it constitutes the archaic eidolon as a double rather than as an image
in the sense in which we understand it today. This is not a representation
in the intimate of the subject, but of a real appearance that inserts
actually down here, in this same world we live in and that
we see, a being that reveals itself under the momentary form of the same
fundamentally different, since it belongs to the other world. For thought
archaic the dialectic of presence and absence, of the same and of the other,
it takes place in the dimension of the afterlife that the eidolon as a double
it entails, in the prodigy of an invisible that for an instant shows itself. this

Page 28

dialectic is found in Plato but, transposed into philosophical terminology, it does not have
only changed register and taken on a new meaning. It is a certain way
overturned. "According to similar object", the image, although defined by
some verses as identical, it also depends on the Other. It is not confused with the
model because, reported as not true, not real, no longer bears the sign
of the absence, of elsewhere, of the invisible, as happened with the archaic eidolon ,
but the stigmata of a not being really unreal ( ouk on ouk ontos estin
ontos ).12 The game of the same and the other, instead of signifying the break-in
of the supernatural in the human world, of the invisible in the visible, reaches
circumscribe, between being and non-being, between the true and the false, the space of the
fictitious and illusory. The "apparition", invested with religious values, makes room for
a "seeming", an appearance, a pure "visible" which is not a question of doing
psychological analysis, but to determine the statute from the point of view of his
reality, to define the essence in an ontological perspective.

The appearance

Being of semblance, the image is of the order of appearance, of phainein:

it "makes itself seen" as an appearance of what it is not. In that
semblance is therefore a false appearance. It does not manifest that appearance
external of the thing that imitates, its concrete form, what it perceives i
senses in different moments and according to different perspectives. Contrary to
what was sometimes argued,13 the distinction made by the Sophist between two
forms of camouflage or image-making ( eidolopoiike ) - the first
which produces iconic copies ( eikones ) resembling their model of which
reproduce the real proportions, the second that produces instead of simulacra-
ghosts ( phantasmata ), sacrificing the exact proportions to replace them,
in the figure, those that will produce the illusion in the eyes of the spectators14 -
does not call into question the general statement formulated without ambiguity
in the Republic: «To which of these two ends the pictorial art is conformed for
each object? To imitate what is as it is, or to imitate what appears
as it appears ( to phainomenon hos phainetai)? It is an imitation of appearance
or of truth? - Of appearance, he replied. - Then the imitative art (he mimetike ) is
far from the truth and, as it seems, for this it executes everything, due to the fact of
seize a small part of each object, a part that is a copy
( eidolon) ".15 The painter's bed, which is a faithful copy ( eikon ), «representing
his model in order to maintain the exact length relationships,
 width and depth, and, in addition, providing the colors with imitation
which are appropriate to each detail ",16 or simulacrum tending to produce a
illusory effect for the eye,17 is always however imitation of the bed

Page 29

visible produced by the craftsman, not of the Idea or essence ( eidos ) of the bed.
The clear distinction that Plato operates, in the Sophist (235 de), between the two
eidola species cannot have a fundamental importance: it does not
in no way prevents the philosopher from formulating in the same dialogue a little later
(240 ab), the "negative" definition of the eidolon in general that we have
seen. Eikon, eidolon, phantasma are again associated (264 cd)
as aspects of non-being and falsehood. Finally (266 c), the art of the painter in
general, without distinction, is presented as an inducer of an eye dream
open. In this regard G. Sörbom rightly remembers that in the Cratylus
Socrates opposes the mimesis of painting, which imitates how much in natural things it is
already color by the colors that nature makes available to them (434 a), a
another mimesis, that which one could rightly demand from the names, and which
would have as its object no longer the sensible qualities of things, but their essence,
their ousia (423 de, 431 d2). We could not say better than painting in
as such it cannot concern the essence. The whole step is conceived in a way
to make people understand that the relationship of the word - and more generally of the
speech - with the things mentioned it cannot be analogous to the relationship of
semblance between the image and its model. You will notice the rest
that the expressions in the Cratylus (431 c 5-8) that characterize an imitation
pictorial that cannot concern the essence, are exactly parallel to
those used in the Sophist (235 de), the text used to demonstrate the
possibility of a form mimetic: the Cratylus speaks of colors and shapes
convenient ( prosekonta ), and the Sophist of convenient proportions and colors
( prosekonta). 18 There is therefore no contradiction between the distinction concerning
the two types of the Elysian of the Sophist and the conclusion of general value of the
Repubblica: «Painting and in general the art of imitating - holos he mimetike - yes
they do away from the truth ", a formula that responds to the need, stated
at the beginning of Book X, of a general definition of mimetics: "You would know
tell me what imitation is in general? ( mimesis holos [ ... ] oti pot '
estin) " (595 c 7).

Demiurgy and imitation

Plato's position is perfectly clear; it grounds the opposition between

demiurgic activity on the one hand and mimetic activity on the other. The carpenter is
really a "demiurge" of the bed because, even if it does not know the essence
of the bed and has only a right opinion, produces a real matching bed
to the proper purpose of this class of objects, following the advice of the one
who will use it and who holds this knowledge. On the contrary, the painter is neither
neither craftsman nor producer ( demiourgos, poietes ) of any bed.19 Perform one

Page 30
 copy or a simulacrum, in both cases he remains an imitator of what he is
artisans produce. 20 It does not imitate the essence of the bed, as it does instead
the artisan when he produces that particular and similar bed - from the moment
that it is possible to settle there - to the single Model, to the only really real bed,
even without it. 21 Spaced by three degrees from the real and from the true, the mimesis of the
painter is based on the numerous and different works of artisans, for
represent them not as they are, in their functionality, that is in the utility that
they must have for those who use them, but as they appear, in their external appearance
visible. 22 The image, expression of different ways of appearing, is situated
entirely in the field of "phenomena", of the sensible world with its own
irregularities, relativity, contradictions. Of phantasia, of eikasia, Plato
will say that I am like a sleeping form of thought, a dream in the state of
wakefulness. "And our art? We will not say that it makes the royal house through
of the mason's art, and another house through the art of the painter, which
last is built almost like a dream caused by man in who he is
I awake? ".23
Through the subsequent mediation of Aristotle, for which all techne
human, and not just artistic creation, is an "imitation of nature"
( mimesis tes physeos ), the Platonic conception of mimesis, variously
reinterpreted, it will exercise a well-known influence from the Renaissance
on the development and orientations of western art. On the other hand,
the clear opposition established by Plato between the intellect, active in the dianoia, and the
phantasia, immersed in the flow of the sensible, seems to prolong in certain theories
modern psychological linking the image to the sensation and having it
started investigations, like the one conducted by the Würtzburg school,
on the existence of a thought devoid of images, of a "pure" thought.
But we must not be deceived by these continuities. There
Platonic problem of the image belongs to a cultural context
very different from ours and his analyzes are set on a completely different level
that of the psychological study of mental images. The different kinds of
mimemata that Plato calls eidola, eikones, phantasmata, they are not
included in their dimension of facts of conscience, but they are seen as i
objective products of certain arts.

Spoken images

The "imitative" arts, defined in opposition to the demiurgic arts which

they produce realities, they are not limited to those which, like painting or painting
sculpture, apply to a material to give it an image shape
eyes of the spectators. All sophistry falls, in the same way as painting,

Page 31

in the eidolopoiike, in the mimetike. The sophist is a mimetes,24 as the painter, or

more precisely a mimetes in words, like the poet. His speech does not
he names the real more than the painter draws a real bed or the author
Tragically, the tragic action mimed on the stage really lives; the sophist produces
also imitations of reality, illusory appearance, of the legomena eidola,
spoken images. As the Stranger of Elea says in the Sophist: "We must
to think that there is also another art, an art of discourses, for which it is also
possible, with the speeches this time, to enchant the ears of
young people and those still very far from knowing the reality of things,
showing them spoken images of everything and in order to generate them
 the opinion that the speaker speaks the truth and that he is the most wise of everything
all?". 25
That the word of the poet, in his relationship with what he says, is so
analogous to the figuration of the painter, in his relation to the model
represented, that is analogous to an artifice that produces an "image
similar ", is what Simonides had already stated at the end of the 6th century:
"The word is the image ( eikon ) of actions". Plutarch specifies thus
further this point: «Simonides defines painting as a poem
silent and poetry a painting that speaks ( zographian lalousan ), since the
actions that the painter shows while they are being produced, the words refer to them and
describe when they were produced ».26 Simonides does not intend only
to underline, through this assimilation, the artificial and wise character of
work of combination that the poet does with words, but also to attribute
to the product of one's poetic song the same value of stability and of
monumentality, the same "reality" of the works of the sculptor and the painter.27 For
Plato, on the other hand, is about bringing back the technique of the poetic word
to the inconsistent illusionism of the plastic image.
Illusionist of the word, merchant of images built with words, the
sophist can afford to discuss everything without really knowing anything,
in the same way that the painter can represent everything by means of
drawing and color, the poet singing everything in his verses - war, storm,
king, soldier, navigator or shoemaker. It is never a question, whatever the subject
represented for the sight or for the hearing, that of simple semblances: a game of
illusory ghosts.
For Plato there is a perfect solidarity between the claim to one
universal competence, the production of false appearances and phantasmagories, e
the value of pure fun, of free play, devoid of any intent of
seriousness. «Now, with regard to those who boast of being able with one art of doing
everything, we know this, for example, and that is that by operating imitations of the same name
of the things that I am, by means of pictorial art, will be able to deceive young people

Page 32

unsuspecting children, showing them his drawings from afar, doing them
believe that, whatever he wants to do, everything is more capable than ever of
to realize, completely and concretely ".28 So if anyone claims
to know a practical man of all the professions and more competent
of the respective specialist in every art, "to such a person we will have to reply that he is
a simpleton and that in all probability met a charlatan
( goetes ), an imitator ( mimetes ) from which it has been mocked; and so it is
seemed omniscient, but only because he is unable to sift science,
ignorance and imitation (mimesis) ". 29 It is possible that poets like Homer
are deemed competent in any field; in fact, simple imitators,
"They create appearances ( phantasmata ), not real things". 30 We must therefore avoid
to trust all this complex of images and to trust the knowledge of
those who produce it: «Perhaps you should not consider yourself a joke ( paidia )
that of someone who says he knows everything and could teach everything [...]? - Teeteto:
absolutely. - The Stranger: you know a kind of joke that requires
greater artistry or even more pleasant than art
imitation? ".31 Consider in themselves, outside of any ethical criteria and
of truth, «all the imitations operated by painting and music are only in
function of our pleasure, and rightly we could collect them under one
denomination only. [...] All this is called, I would say, in some way
fun".32
 Phantasia

If the discourses, the reasonings, the heredity of the Sophists constitute for Plato
of the eidola, of the images that in their "appearing" offer themselves to the listener
as authentic realities, it is not surprising that the term phantasia, derived from
phainein (to appear), in no way designate for him the imagination as
faculty, possibility of building or handling mental images, or even
the visiones Quintilian spoke of. The phantasia itself as the state
of the thought in which one gives one's spontaneous assent to the appearance that
they cover things, in the form in which they show themselves, as when we adhere
without critical spirit at the sight of a piece of wood that, immersed in water, there
looks broken. "And the identical objects, depending on whether they are contemplated inside
or out of the water, they appear bent or straight, and hollow or prominent. This
because in the view there is a chromatic disorientation. [… ] Now,
using this condition ( pathema ) of our nature, painting a
chiaroscuro ( skiagraphia ) does not omit any sorcery ( goeteia ). And so
they do the prestidigitation ( thaumatopoiia ) and the other tricks of the genus ». 33 From
this condition ( pathema ) or affection ( pathos ) of our nature

Page 33

therefore the "illusions" of the senses and the illusionism of the image of depend
which each imitator uses to deceive the viewer and get him to take
fireflies for lanterns. Contiguous to sensation and opinion, from which they do not
it stands out clearly, phantasia is defined by its own
assimilation to "appear, resemble, without actually being, to phainesthai
touto kai to dokein, einai de me ». 34 Some texts underline these similarities.
When opinion ( doxa ) occurs "on the basis of sensation, it is possible
call this affection ( pathos ) without error otherwise than phantasia? ";
«When we say the word" appears "( phainetai ) there is a mixture of
feeling and opinion ". 35 "But this" appearing "(to phainetai ) is not it
same as having the feeling ( aisthanesthai)? - Theaetetus: precisely. -
Socrates: therefore phantasia and aisthesis (sensation) are equivalent ".36 A
man who sees objects from afar, without seeing them distinctly, yes
he will ask: «What is what appears to me ( phantazomenon ) standing up?
in front of that rock, under that tree? " Believe that he will say so to himself a
man on occasion seeing what appears to him ( phantasthenta ) in the
circumstances of which we have spoken? 37

Mimetic in the oral tradition

The Platonic interpretation of the image and the theory of mimesis which it is
side by side they mark a stage of what could be called
the elaboration of the category of the image in western thought. But for
to be exactly understood must be placed in its own context,
in the history of archaic Greek culture, of which Plato is the liquidator and al
at the same time the heir. In this culture that, as recent studies have shown,
preserves its fundamentally oral character towards the end of the fifth
century, 38 the image does not occupy the same place, does not assume the same role,
it does not have the same forms or meanings attributed to it
in our modern civilization. It is outlined, it works otherwise, both at the level
of individual experience, both in the general process of communication
within the group and in thought operations. In the Greek paideia
 traditional set of knowledge (the encyclopedia of collective knowledge,
would say EA Havelock) was transmitted orally of generation into
generation, through acting and listening to poetic style songs
formulate, punctuated by music, sometimes accompanied by dances. When
consumes the break with this system, Plato rejects a whole way of
acquisition of knowledge; in fact it rests on a "mimetic" effect of
affective communion, since the author, the executor (narrator or
actor) and the audience of spectators identify themselves in actions, in ways

Page 34

of being, in the characters represented in the narrative or on the scene. On this

Plato plan, while modifying as we have said the orientation of the
semantic field of mimeisthai, it remains faithful to the conception of mimesis
witnessed in the fifth century and that finds the most vivid expression in the Tesmoforie
of Aristophanes. It is Agatone, the tragic poet, who speaks: «because the poet is of necessity
assume the ways ( tous tropous ) suited to the dramas you want to compose.
Therefore, if one wants to do feminine dramas ( gynaikeia ), one must have his
body ( soma ) participates in these customs. [...] If one then does manly dramas
( andreia ), in his body (en toi somati ) there must be something similar.
What we do not possess by nature, the mimesis gives it to us »39 (149-156).
Because each one composes dramatic actions "appropriately for its own
nature "(v. 167), the poet must assume the ways ( tropoi ) and the character ( ethos )
of the characters participating in these actions. He must "mime" them
to represent them in their verses. Two consequences ensue. First
Plato's place does not establish any difference between the practice of
literary composition of the poet and the practice of the actor who recites these
compositions on the scene: for both it is a same mimesis. In
secondly, the best poet, or rather the worst one for Plato, possessing
the ability to represent all the characters in their truth, appears as a
monster capable of assuming all forms, a magician of metamorphoses, a
Proteus. Here the affinities of poetry are revealed, as mimetic, with the
polymorphic and variegated world of becoming and with that lower part
of the soul, always unstable and changeable, which is the seat of desire in us and
of passions.
The assimilation of the poet and the actor to the characters and actions that
represent in imitation it is prolonged in a similar mimetic effect
in the soul of the spectators. Also in this Plato remains faithful to one
tradition that has ancient roots and which is echoed in Xenophon:
the impression produced by a painted or sculpted image depends on what
it represents - nobility or servility, dignity or baseness, prudence or
hubris, courage or cowardice - and not by the way it represents him. 40 For
Xenophon the effect that the image causes on the viewer seems
correspond to the moral quality more or less high of the model, rather
that to the more or less great virtuosity of the artist. Similarly imitation
poetic, in Plato, establishes such an intimate complicity between characters
representations and listeners to provoke feelings in the soul of these
represented in those; so, having in some way "fed and
reinvigorated "our passions at the sight of the misfortunes represented in others,
we lose the ability to dominate them in ourselves. 41 Every educational method is
therefore faced with the problem of mimetic arts and their effects on the
viewer. The image, of course, is not reality but one must beware of
Page 35

"To derive being from mimesis ( ek tes mimeseos tou einai )". In fact «le
imitations, if they start from youth and last a long time, yes
consolidate into habits and constitute a second nature; and the phenomenon has
place for the body and for the voice as for thought ".42 Without representing
the ghosts ourselves, it will be enough to see them mimed by others to become similar to them.
With the criticism of mimicry and its effects it comes radically
disqualified for the philosopher the very content of the teaching transmitted in
this way is this way, since it is assimilated to those other forms
phantoms of eidola which are false appearances, illusory optical effects
produced by sculptors and painters.43
For Plato the traditional modes of expression used in communication
oral, whose rhythmic organization, the formular and musical aspect must
meet the needs of memorization, they have certain in common
characteristics that are such as not to allow them to render things, gods
beings, of actions nothing but the surface, the exteriority, the transient, the
particular, the circumstantial. Through their narrative plot, the articulation
in subsequent episodes, the syntactic structure that expresses localized events e
not general truths, personalization and visualization procedures
direct facts told, the dense language of images, dramatic,
concrete and engaging, the different forms of oral message as the story
poetic (especially that of direct style, in which the poet enters into some
way in the skin of each of his characters), the tragic dialogue, the
solemn speech of the rhetorician, the hereditary of the Sophists have the possibility of
to drag the audience, to bewitch him, to fascinate him ( thelgein ) with the magic of the
word. And they do it to such an extent that the public, through participation
almost physical to the rhythmic, verbal, vocal, instrumental models used by the
communication, has the illusion of experiencing first hand what is being said.
Taken from suffering, from fear, from pity, it is transported inside
of narration, in the heart of the oral development of the speech. But these
spells of art, this goeteia - to use the term that Plato attributed
to painting, poetry and sophistry, after Gorgias used it for
to glorify the power of rhetorical art44 - cannot build around the
listeners other than an artificial scenario, a facade of images
illusory,45 equally inconstant, multiple and fleeting as the flow of
to become sensitive and transient emotions, in whose circle this kind of
speech is necessarily imprisoned.

Imitation and becoming sensitive

This kind of message - built to outline beings and situations

Page 36

in their concrete form through a colorful variety of words, for

represent the actions as they appear hic et nunc, to express wishes and
soul passions in the way they are made clear in the eyes of others, in
short, limited to the field of visible things ( ta horata ), of events
in becoming ( ta genomena ) - it has neither a vocabulary nor instruments
conceptual, nor of a syntax that allow them, as they do the
 scientific demonstration or argumentative dialogue, to formulate a reality
authentic in its unity and permanence, of saying being not as it appears to us
here and now, but as it is, always identical to itself; in short, to state the
true, the real, instead of forging a semblance, a appearing with a sparkle
colorful of words and rhythms that produce a fascination effect, one
vertigo of the spirit.
On this plane there is a perfect homology between the modes of expression of the
painter, with his richness of colors, those of the poet or the rhetorician, with theirs
variety of words and rhythms,46 and heterogeneity, the polymorph of becoming
sensitive, with ever-changing appearances. What is manifested in the eyes and
to the ears in the most diverse forms, incessantly covering aspects
multiple and contradictory, it is the object of the figurative mimetic of the painter or of
the representative one of the poet or the speaker. The tragic poet, imitator a
words, «perhaps he will not believe that there is nothing unworthy of him, so as to put himself at
to practice seriously every imitation (...), even those things that are now
we said, thunder, sounds of winds, of hail, of winches and pulleys, sounds of
trumpets, flutes, syringes and all kinds of instruments, and then barks, bleats
and bird sounds? And his saying will not be based entirely on imitation, in the voice
how about attitudes? "47 Actually, they are "noise and fury"
of the world to be reflected in the mirror of the poet's mimetic work,
according to the needs of a literary genre that requires "all sorts of."
harmonies and rhythms, if you must express it in an appropriate manner,
and this because it involves the most diverse forms of variations ».48 "Able to
take every form and do every imitation ",49 the imitator poet, who
Plato hunts from the city after paying tribute to him as a "sacred being,
wonderful and enchanting », is the prototype of the double and multiple man
( diplous, pollaplous ), at the antipodes of the "simple" citizen that the Republic
intends to shape. 50 In fact the mimetic of the painter and the poet "is in intimate
relationship, companion and friend " 51 of that part of the soul which, in the image
of becoming, it is itself mutability, variety, heterogeneity. Foreign to
wisdom and truth, the imitative practice cannot bind to them, or inspire them
spontaneously. «The imitative art, which has little merit, being together
with an element also not very valuable, it gives rise to products that are worth little
( phaule [...] phauloi syngignomene phaula gennai he mimetike) » 52 Indeed

Page 37

"The irritable element ( aganaktetikon ) of the soul gives rise to many and varied
imitations ( pollen kai poikilen ), while the intelligent and quiet character
always similar to itself, it is not easy to imitate [...]. It is therefore clear that the
imitator poet has no natural propensity for this element of the soul e
that his wisdom ( sophia ) is not meant to please him if he is to enjoy good
reputation among the most. Instead, he is inclined towards an irritable and varied character ( to
aganaktetikon te kai poikilon ethos ), because it is easy to imitate ».53
If the poet speaks of the gods in his verses, his oral mimetic there
will represent with all the passions, the weaknesses, even the crimes they are
characteristic of that part of the human soul to which his art is linked. Furthermore
will represent the divine being, in itself quite simple and not subject to
changes, according to the model of sensitive appearances, of that becoming
who is used to depict. It will show the deity in the grip of incessant
metamorphosis, while assuming different forms, changing its appearance into one
crowd of different figures, or still disguise it according to the image of what
he himself is as a mimetes: he will make a magician, an enchanter, a
 illusionist
from producer
inducing us to of falsewith
break appearances, of ghosts
appearances, without reality.
from snatching 54 Far
ourselves from the shadows and to the
reflections, the art of the poet, even when it comes to evoke being simple and
permanent, projects it on the multiple and colorful screen of appearing,
translating it into its own imitative language.
The set of terms that are articulated to each other to give
to the platonic image its configuration also highlights the continuos
slips, operated by Plato, between the stricto sensu image and appearances
sensitive in general, between the imaginary vision and all forms of the
knowledge that they failed to get rid of the universe of appearances.
In addition to phainein, phainomena, phantasmata, which clarify and specify the
sense of phantasia, the term eikon - which in the fourth century has technical value e
designates the representative image in its materiality (for example one
statue) - is associated from Plato to eikasia. Eikasia occupies the last level
in the hierarchy of the forms of knowledge that the Republic establishes
through comparison with a line divided into four segments. 55 More than
a form of know is a conjecture, with all that the term implies of
randomness. Not being able to know the object itself through a contact
direct ( eidenai), eikasia must be based on everything it seems to have
a form of "resemblance" with the object, to be able to imagine it as
better can. In a broader sense, the image does not only integrate
in the field of doxa, in what he opposes to the episteme. The image looks like
located in the very heart of the doxa, of which highlights both the limits and the field of
application. Of doxa we say that, contrary to science, it is one

Page 38

simple "opinion", uncertain and changeable like the objects to which it refers.
But the link between doxa and the universe of the image is even more intimate
it's direct. Doxa derives from dokein which means "opinion, to appear". 56 The field
of doxa is that of appearance, of appearance, that find theirs
privileged expression in the image.

The devaluation of the image

Finally making the whole field of the image slip on the image side
sensitive, presented as an exasperating play of shadows and reflections, unless
not to escape from it in order to take refuge in a distant "elsewhere", a feat that is true
to know, Plato was led to disrupt the traditional vocabulary of the
complex of images, to reject the functions that archaic thought
recognized as a process of knowledge, way of access to being to start
from its visible manifestations. In the texts of the sixth and fifth centuries, eikazein ed
eikasia, dokein and doxa, phainein and phainomena have not yet taken that
essentially negative value that is attributed to them in a philosophical system in
which Plato founds the first general theory of imitation and at the same time
he exclaims the image from reality and knowledge.

André Rivier, in two convergent studies, 57 highlighted the risk of a

anachronistic interpretation, because pejorative, of the set of terms
grouped, on the one hand, around eisko, eikizo, eoika, eikos, eikon, on the other
around dokeo, dokos, doxa. He showed that this vocabulary, in his
ancient uses and up to philosophers like Xenophanes and Heraclitus, to historians like Herodotus
and Thucydides, remains extraneous to what Rivier calls "the problematic
of being and appearance ", central to the thinking of the fourth century, but which
emerged slowly to the philosophical consciousness of the fifth century due to the impulse of the
 research by the school of Elea.58 It is true that this vocabulary refers to
mediated forms of knowledge and therefore opposed to direct taking
on the object, that exercised by sight when applied to what is in front
in the eyes, nevertheless they are not without a positive value. Far from being
negatively qualified as illusion, error, false appearance, conjecture
Free, l ' EIKASIA, the dokos or doxa designate acts valid intellectuals who
they use similarities, comparisons, analogies in the case of eikasia, and also
reasonably founded clues and probabilities in the case of dokos and doxa,
to reach objects that are not "obvious", but remain hidden and
invisible as much in the past or in the future, as in the thickness or at the bottom of
what's this. In essence, it is always the same type of procedure -
legitimate if pursued correctly - which allows to seize with a
enough chance adela through phainomena: adela and phainomena

Page 39

they do not constitute two exclusive fields, defined by their opposition, but
two forms or two levels of reality that maintain exchange relationships
within the same universe, they coexist alongside one another,
"Composing or combining in the unity of physis". 59 In this context
not even the phainomena could be deprived of their value. Not
they constitute the world of appearances, of blunders, but they are «the things themselves
with whom one has to deal », 60 the matter of history, the data that guide the
intellectual research and that it can use as clues. This statute of the
phainomena is still present in the formula of Democritus that Anaxagoras
shares and reports: "Opsis ton adelon ta phainomena";61 the phenomena are the
vision, the visible aspect of things that do not show themselves directly to the
view.

Being and appearing

In this study we cannot undertake the analysis of this

archaic way of thinking - which we do not know whether to define phenomenal or
pre-phenomena - retracing the history or specifying the place it has
reserved for the image, the functions it takes on. 62 We just wanted to
highlight the extent of the gap that occurred between the sixth and fourth centuries in
image vocabulary, semblance, appearance, gap between a pole
positive and negative, which results in the first general theory of imitation
and the image elaborated by Plato.
By more clearly opposing the appearance of being, splitting them together
on the other hand, instead of associating them with different balances as had happened before
he, Plato gives the image its particular form of existence, le
attributes its own phenomenal status. Defined as a semblance, it
it has a distinctive character all the more precise because the appearance is not
now considered an aspect, a way, a level of reality, a kind of
dimension of the real, but a specific category in the face of being, to
which is linked by an ambiguous relationship of "false appearance". This
specificity implies the removal of the image as a counterpart
from the realm of what is really real; relegated to the fictitious and the illusory,
the image loses value from the point of view of knowledge.
In the fourth century in Athens, through the work of Plato, the image became
presents as an external semblance, in that a world of the emerged
pure appearance that has severed its ties with that of being and has
found in this exclusion from the real the foundations for a paradoxical status,
 mediator between non-being and being; assimilated to semblance, to appearance,
the image is not pure nothing, without however being something. This

Page 40

equivocal promotion of the appearance inaugurates in a certain sense the path

Psychological image: the analysis of appearance does not have to refer to the
subject to whose eyes does the appearance show itself? And the image can work
as an imitation of appearance if there is no spectator looking at it?
The way that would lead to providing the image of a statute thus seems to be open
of purely inner existence, to make it a way of subjectivity, not
having another form of existence beyond that which is conferred upon it by
individual consciousness.
However, this is not the path taken by Plato in his research
image. From the beginning, at the time of the short repetitions that prelude
to the general definition of the eidolon, Plato discards it as a cross street
where, if lost, it would be impossible to flush out the sophist, convince him that
it is unable to produce anything other than false appearances. 63 Who accuses her of being
a creator of images, the sophist asks for what he is called
image. And not enough, as Theaetetus naively believes, to show him the
reflections in mirrors, effigies painted or sculpted. The sophist will laugh at these
examples, abductees, he will say, for men who see; will claim, as far as it is
regards, of not knowing neither mirrors nor anything analogous, of not having
eyes, to ignore the view. 64 We must therefore beat him on his own ground,
to track him in his tortuosity and fictions, giving an image definition
that keeps its value even for the blind because it is independent of the
vision and the subject he sees. For Plato the stakes are decisive. The
problem is knowing if it is possible to formulate a image as a definition
that is not itself at the image level, which is not founded on
simple testimony of the senses. If you reduce the image to the appearance that
it covers the eyes of the viewer who looks at it, it will face us
two species of Sophists, both ready to make fun of us by resorting to
opposite arguments: the former will argue that the image, thus defined,
it has no more reality than they have eyes and sight; the latter will profess
instead of there being no other being beyond the image, they will claim that
what appears to everyone in a certain way, this is for each one
the only real one, the only real one. It is therefore a matter of removing the view from the game e
the sighted, to state what the image is, not in its appearance, but in the
his being, to say not what the appearance looks like, but its essence,
the being of semblance. The "psychology" of the image must be excluded
to designate instead the place occupied by the semblance in the hierarchy of
different types of reality that make up the universe. Only in this condition
the image ceases to oscillate between non-being and being, identifying itself now
with one now with the other. It is fixed, between not being and being without
get confused with neither of them, in a middle position shared with the
doxa, and which establishes the possibility of error, of false judgment,

Page 41

of the attribution of being to what is not, of the confusion of the image

 with what it is the image.65 In other words, it would be useless to define
the image as semblance, appearance, if this definition did not imply
also an explicit reference on the one hand to the Being, as distinct
from appearing, first in relation to that, and from the other side to Non-Being,
intended as a condition of a possible confusion between appearance and reality.

Good and bad imitation

It is thus prepared, parallel to the generalization of the theme

the image that extends to the complex of becoming sensitive, the
possibility of a reversal of perspective within the mimesis: if the Being
it is first, it will not be unjustified to consider the image from the other extreme, from the
side of the Model, and to consider it from the point of view not of what it seems,
but of what it looks like. The image belongs to the order
of appearing, but for Plato there is no appearing without being, image without
reality, imitation without a model. Therefore, recognized for what it is, one
simple semblance, the image cannot be the starting point that refers to
Template? It can certainly serve this purpose, but it is never a question of a
spontaneous movement and as immanent to mimesis. This movement
supposes a rupture, a change of plan, an authentic conversion: the
Model, as such, is different from the image, of a different nature; does not imply
a "appearance" that can be reproduced through similar appearances. He returned
therefore in a completely different order of knowledge. Painters and "musicians"
imitate the same with the same: with colors, shapes, sounds, movements,
they represent what, even in the object depicted, is colors, shapes, sounds,
movements. By applying themselves to things, to what appears, they strive
to return this appearance. This is precisely the danger of imitation, the
its deception, its "other" aspect in the blind pursuit of similarity.
As long as it passes from the same to the same, mimesis can only
cancel the split between the image and the model, between the fictitious and the real.
Seen from afar or shown to children, the image of the bed reproduced a
colors from the painter will seem like a real bed, because the real beds also offer
different appearances depending on the position of the spectators. But the Idea of
bed cannot be imitated in this way. His relationship with the bed of the
carpenter is not homologous to the similarity of the latter with the image
of the painter, not only because the Idea is not visible, but above all because his
noetic structure, being unique and permanent, is not related to the viewer
towards it, at the "point of view" of the viewer. On the contrary, to turn it
look at it, to contemplate it, it was necessary first of all
turn away from the multiple perspectives of appearing and addressing the

Page 42

intellectual process, or the demiurgic practice in the case of the craftsman, not
more in relation to one's position, in relation to oneself, but with reference to
this "in itself" that constitutes the fixed point where it is necessary to ask oneself, at least
in thought.
Perhaps one could say that the illusory mimesis of those that Plato calls
"Imitators" consists of a simulation of appearances to deceive someone;
the philosophical mimesis , on the other hand, would be an intimate assimilation of oneself to what is
other and radically foreign to the appearance, in order to change themselves
from the inside.66 When we pass from the mimesis of appearing to assimilation
to being, the play of the same and of the other is reversed: in the first case
the image bases its resemblance to the model on what, in that
model, never remains similar to itself; in the second the imitation also includes
 the recognition of the otherness of the model recognizes it as different also
within their own desire for similarity, precisely because the model
always remains the same.
The two forms of camouflage are therefore in solidarity only to the extent that they are
oppose, are inscribed in the opposite sides of the rift between being and
the appearance. On the path that leads from bad to good imitation not
there is continuity, but a bifurcation at the intersection of the two paths. Only at
return, when, after having contemplated the sun and the being, one comes down towards
the cave and its shadows, the possibility of recovering the camouflage is given
illusory, purifying it however, making it as simple and uniform as possible
it aims to direct it to goals other than its own, subjecting it from the outside to
Forms needs. 67

Final remarks

As such analyzes allow the scholar of historical psychology of

answer the question, which we asked at the beginning of this study, on
forms of image and imagination among the Greeks? It seemed to us that
the work of Plato marks the moment in which the world of appearances takes
body and arises, in the face of reality and in relation to it, as its "semblance".
But this turning point does not directly introduce us to our problem for at least
two reasons, although one might think that, attributing consistency and
specificity to the appearance, has opened the way to the psychological path
image. On the one hand, the distance between sensation and image is not
still relevant in the Platonic perspective. Will come to emerge only in
Aristotle, in a passage of the De anima, where for other the hesitations put in
highlight the difficulties of a clear distinction between sensation, image and
opinion in the framework of ancient thought. 68 On the other side, and more

Page 43

profoundly as it is related to mimesis, the image can never make

other than to reproduce an appearance already given, external to it. Imitation, which
it constitutes it in its being, which makes it semblance, it is at the same time what it is
limits, excludes it from the field of invention, innovation, and
creative manufacture. Defined as illusory, the fictitious does not yet appear
as a human artifice in the full sense of the term. In the areas in which it is
applica, the Platonic conception of mimesis highlights the same
absence of a category of the agent, of a notion of creative power
of man, which has been found in other areas of Greek culture.69
We have to wait until the end of the second century AD to find Flavio Filostrato,
about artists like Phidias and Praxiteles, the statement that one
phantasia, an imagination no longer dependent on mimesis, but opposite
and superior to this thanks to his own sophia, he presided over the creation
of their most beautiful works: «Because mimesis represents in the image only
what he saw, phantasia instead also what he did not see ". 70 When
rises up to the sky to draw the image of the gods, the artist neither imitates nor copies,
but imagine. Dissociated from mimesis, the phantasia you see so attributing
the same power to contemplate the invisible, to overcome the appearance for
access to the upper world of Forms, which Plato had reserved for
philosophy.

1 Institutio, 6, 2, 29.
2 240 to 3-5 (tr. It. Of A. Zadro, Plato, Complete Works, Laterza, Bari 1971, vol. II, slightly
modified).
 3 Republic, 599 a 7 (tr. It. Of F. Sartori, Plato, Complete Works, cit., Vol. VI); Sophist, 265 b 1;
Republic, 599 d 3 and 601 b 11; cfr. also Sophist, 266 ad; 267 ab; 268 d; Politician, 306 d 1-3;
Read, 668 to 6: «Music as a whole is a representative and imitative art ( eikastike,
mimetike) »; 668 b 10: «All the creations of music are imitation and representation
( mimesis, apeikasia) " (tr. it. of A. Zadro, in op. cit., vol. VII, slightly modified).
4 Memorable, III, 10, 1-8. On the use, origin and evolution of mimeisthai 's vocabulary , see
Hermann Koller, Die Mimesis in der Antike. Nachahmung, Darstellung, Ausdruck, Dissertationes
Bernenses, series 1, 5, Bern 1954; Gerard F. Else, Imitation in the Fifth Century, «Classical
Philology »53, 2 (1958), pp. 73-90; Göran Sörbom, Mimesis and Art. Studies in the Origin and
Early Developement of an Aesthetic Vocabulary, Uppsala 1966.
5 Republic, 373 b 4-8: "the imitators, the many who deal with figures and colors, or music, the
poets with their valets, rhapsodes, actors, choreuts, impresarios "(tr. it. cit.). See Fedro, 248 and: "a poet
or another artist of imitative arts »; Sophist, 299 d 3-5: "painting or any other part of the
camouflage "; Timaeus, 19 d 5-6, in which the race of poets, poietikon genos, is identified with the lineage
of imitators, to mimetikon ethnos.
6 Republic, 510 a; 516 to 4-6; Sophist, 239 b 5-7; 266 b 9-14.
7 Repubblica, 596 de (tr. It. Cit.).
8 Sophist, 240 ab (tr. It. Cit. Slightly modified).
9 Cratylus, 432 c 4-6.
10 Ivi, 432 b 6-10.

Page 44

11 Anticlea: Odissea, 11, 153-222; Patroclus: Iliad, 23, 65-108.

12 Sophist, 240 b 11.
13 For an explanation of this thesis, and for the names of its supporters, see G. Sörbom, op. cit., pp.
133-138; Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato, Oxford 1963, pp. 33-34 (tr. It. Oral culture and civilization
of writing. From Homer to Plato, Laterza, Bari 1973); JJ Pollitt, The Ancient View of Greek
Art. Criticism, History and Terminology, New Haven-London 1974, pp. 46-49, where i
texts used by supporters of a form mimetic, which Plato would have affirmed together
possible and desirable in the artistic field. This view is also accepted by H. Joly, Le
platonicien renversement. Logos, Episteme, Polis, Paris 1974, pp. 42, 50, 148 ff .; cfr. also G.
Deleuze, Logique du sens, appendix I: "Simulacre et Philosophie antique", Paris 1969, pp. 347-
361 (tr. It. Logic of meaning, Feltrinelli, Milan 1975, pp. 223-246.
14 Sophist, 235 and 6-236 c 6.
15 Repubblica, 598 bc; cfr. 601 b 12: "The author of the copy, the imitator, we say that we do not mean
for nothing of what is, but of what appears. Is it not so? "(Tr. It. Cit.).
16 Sophist, 235 d 8-e 2 (tr. It. Slightly modified). On the values of the term symmetry (translated with
"Exact relationship") and its use in the ancient plastic vocabulary, cf. JJ Pollitt, op. cit., pp. 9-71 e
256-258.
17 «If in fact they realized the imitations respecting really the proportional relationships inside the
beautiful things imitated, you know well that the upper parts would appear smaller than necessary, and more
large lower ones, due to the fact that we see them from a greater distance, these more from
near "( Sophist, 235 e-236 a; tr. it. cit.). On the relationship between the Platonic conception of mimesis and the
history of the plastic arts in Greece - an important problem, but which we omit in ours
study - see PM Schuhl, Platon et l'Art de son temps, Paris 1952.
18 The same expression is used in Laws, 668 and 2.
19 Republic, 597 d 10.
20 Ivi, 597 e.
21 Ivi, 596 b 6: the artisan "looks at the idea" to carry out his work; 597 to 4: "If it does not
the essence of the bed does not make the real bed, but an object that resembles it without being "(tr. it.
modified). See also ivi, 601 d sgg .: the user knows the essence, the manufacturer has the right one
opinion, the imitator has neither science nor right opinion.
22 Ivi, 597 and 2-598 a 3.
23 Sophist, 266 c 8-9. See Republic, 476 c 6-8: "Dreaming does not mean that one is asleep or as one
watching over, he believes that an object resembling a thing is not similar, but identical to what it is
look like? 534 c 5-7: "The man who does not know the good in himself, but only some eidolons of good, per
opinion and not for science, he spends his life in dream and torpor "(modified tr. it.).
24 Cf. Sophist, 235 a: "As for the sophist, tell me this: it is already clear that he is a magician magician
( tis ton goeton ), imitator of things that are ( mimetes ton onton)? (tr. it. cit.); cfr. also 235 bc;
236 c; 239 cd; 240 d; 241 b 6; 264 CE; 265 a; 267 e; 268 cd. At the end of the dialogue the art of
sophist is defined by belonging to the order of mimetics ( mimetikon ) and, as a producer of
images ( phantastikos ), of the eidolopoiike.
25 Sophist, 234 cd; see also, 234 and 1-2, the expression ta en tois logois phantasmata, «the simulacra
enclosed in words ".
 26 Simonides, fr. 190 b Bergk; Plutarch, De glor. Athen., 346 f; Quaest. Conviv., 748 a.
27 See M. Detienne, Les Maîtres de vérité dans la Grèce archaïque, Paris 1967, pp. 105-119 (tr. It. I
masters of truth in archaic Greece, Laterza, Bari 1977), and J. Svenbro, La parole et le marbre,
Lund 1976, pp. 141-142.
28 Sophist, 234 b 5-10 (modified tr. It).
29 Repubblica, 598 d 2-6 (tr. It. Slightly modified).

Page 45

30 Ivi, 599 to 2-3 (tr. It. Cit.).

31 Sophist, 234 ab (tr. It. Slightly modified).
32 Politico, 288 c (tr. It. Of A. Zadro, in op. Cit., Vol. 2, slightly modified).
33 Repubblica, 602 c 10-d 5 (tr. It. Cit.).
34 Sophist, 236 and (modified tr. It.).
35 Ivi, 264 to 4-6 and 264 b (amended tr. It).
36 Teeteto, 152 bc (tr. It. Of Manara Valgimigli, in op. Cit., Vol. 2).
37 Filebo, 38 cd (tr. It. By A. Zadro, in op. Cit., Vol. 3).
38 We think above all of the aforementioned EA Havelock book, to which we are directly inspired by
following pages. On the problem of knowing how much the Athenians could read and write in the V and in the
IV century, see FD Harvey, Literacy in the Athenian Democracy, "Revue des études grecques" 79
(1966), pp. 585-635.
39 It is possible to place this text by Aristophanes next to the indication of the Suda regarding Sophrone, the
Syracusan author of mimes, a contemporary of Euripides: he wrote male mimes and mimes
feminine ( mimous andreious kai mimous gynaikeious ). We must perhaps hold that Plato
alludes ( Republic, 451 c 1-3 and Laws, 669 c 4) to these two traditional forms of mime?
40 Memorable, 3, 10, 5.
41 Republic, 606 b 6-8.
42 Ivi, 395 c 8-d 3 (tr. It. Cit.).
43 Ibid, 605 to 7-b 1: rightly the poet is placed on the same level as the painter, «resembles him
because, compared to the truth, his creations have little value ( phaula ). It is also similar because
has a close relationship with another and similar element of our soul, but not with the best »(tr.
en. cit.).
7
44 Gorgia, Elogio di Elena, 10, in Diels-Kranz, FVS , 82 B 11. For Plato, in addition to the testimonies
already examined, see Sophist, 235 to 1; 241 b 6-7; Menesseno, 235 a 2; Republic, 413 c 1-4; 584 to 9-
10; Symposium, 203 d 8.
45 See the Republic, 365 bc.
46 Ici, 601 a 3-b 5: «also the poet applies certain colors to the single arts by means of names and sentences. [...]
I believe you know what the works of poets are revealed if, stripped of the colors of poetry, they recite themselves
reduced to pure text "(modified tr. it.). The "colors" of poetry, thanks to which it exercises the
own charm ( kelesis ), are: the meter, rhythm and harmony (601 b 1-3), cf. Read, 800 d 1-4.
47 Republic, 397 a 3-b 2 (tr. It. Cit.).
48 Ivi, 397 c 3-6 (tr. It. Cit.).
49 Ivi, 398 to 1-3 (tr. It. Cit.).
50 Ivi, 397 and 1-2.
51 Ivi, 603 b 2; 603 c 1 (tr. It. Cit.).
52 Ivi, 603 b 5 (tr. It. Cit.). Coupling and generation allow us to read in its own right
value the "trade" ( prosomilein ) that the mimetic establishes with the element of choleric soul.
53 Ivi, 604 and-605 b (tr. It. Cit.).
54 Ivi, 380 d 1-b; 381 c 7; 382 a; 382 and 10-13.
55 Ivi, 511 and; four dispositions correspond to the four sections of the line, in hierarchical order
( pathemata ) of the spirit: noesis, dianoia, pistis, eikasia; at 533 and 3-534 at 5, this comparison
it is taken up and developed; cfr. V. Goldschmidt, La ligne de la République, in Questions
platoniciennes, Paris 1970, pp. 203-219. The author has clearly highlighted the relationships between eikasia, le
imitation techniques, the scope of images and reflections.
Page 46

56 See for example Sophist, 236 and-237 a, with the game of phainein, dokein, doxazein: "Appearing and
seem ( to phainesthai kai to dokein ) without being, the fact that something is said and not what
true, all this involves innumerable difficulties [...]. What formula to find to say or think
that the fake really is? "; cfr. also the Republic, 476 d 6; 477 and 3; 478 to 10. In the Fedro the art
rhetoric is presented as a pursuit of eikos, the likely, eikota formulation
(verisimilitude), estrangement from the truth, and eikos is defined as to toi plethei dokoun,
mass opinion (literally "what it seems" to the mass), 272 and-273b; cfr. also 260 to 1-3.
57 An emploi archaïque de l'analogie chez Héraclite et chez Thucydide, Lausanne 1952; Remarques
sur les fragments 34 et 35 de Xénophane, «Revue de Philologie» 82 (1956), pp. 37-61.
58 Remarques sur les fragments 34 et 35, cit., P. 59.
59 Ibid.
60 Ibid., N. 1.
7
61 Diels-Kranz, FVS , 59 B 21 a.
62 We propose to address this problem in a forthcoming essay.
63 Sophist, 239 c sgg.
64 Ivi, 239 and 5-240 a.
65 See the Republic, 478 a, until the end of book V. In particular 478 c 5-10: «But first not
we affirmed that, if a thing resulted at the same time as being and not being, it would be
intermediate between what is absolutely and what is not at all? And that would not be the object nor of the
science neither of ignorance, but of what in turn resulted as an intermediate between ignorance and the
science? - Quite right. –And now it is not intermediate between the two what we call
opinion? "(tr. it. cit.); Sophist, 264 d 3-6: "But now that we have seen that there is both false speech
that the false opinion, it follows the possibility that there are imitations of the things that are and also the
possibility that an art of deception results from the way of acting of those who make those imitations "; 260 c:
«To talk about or talk about things that are not, this is, I would say, the false in thoughts and speeches. -
Theaetetus: right. - The Stranger: if there is falsehood there is deception. And if there is deception, where it is, however
necessity everything is therefore full of images, representations and appearances ( eidolon, eikonon,
phantasias) " (tr. it. cit.).
66 To this mimesis-assimilation corresponds the use of the verb homoioun, or exomoioun; cfr. for
example Republic, 613 b 1: to make itself similar to the god as far as possible to man ( homoiousthai
theoi); Timaeus, 90 d 5-8: whoever contemplates makes himself similar to the contemplated object ( exomoiosai ).
67 On this point, we refer to the beautiful essay by V. Goldschmidt, Le problème de la tragédie, «Revue
des études grecques »61 (1949), p. 19, republished in Questions platoniciennes, cit., Cap. 8, pp.
103-140.
68 In the chapter "Les Images" of the Nouveau Traité de psychologie by G. Dumas, I. Meyerson,
stressing that there are differences between sensation and perception on the one hand and image on the other
of nature and not of degree, he rightly observes that Aristotle's analyzes lie at the origin of
psychological study of the image as such (pp. 544 and 594). Having established that
the imagination is not identical either to sensation or to insight, or to opinion, Aristotle la
defines as follows: "A movement produced by the feeling in progress", De Anima, 3, 427 b 14
ff .; and a little further on he writes: "the images are sensations, only that they lack matter" (ibid., 432 to 9;
tr. en. by R. Laurenti, in Aristotle, Works, Laterza, Bari 1973, vol. 4, slightly modified).
69 See J.-P. Vernant, Mythe et pensée chez les Grecs. Études de psychologie historique, Paris 1965, t.
2, pp. 32-34, 41 ff., 62 ff .; Mythe et tragédie en Grèce ancienne, Paris 1972, pp. 43-74;
"Catégories de l'agent et de l'action en Grèce ancienne", Langue, discours, société. Pour Emile
Benveniste, Paris 1975, pp. 105-113; Imre Toth, Die nicht-euklidische Geometrie in der
Phänomenologie des Geistes, in Philosophie als Beziehungswissenschaft. Festschrift für Julius
Schaaf, Frankfurt aM 1972, 20, pp. 3-91, especially pp. 36 and 84.
70 Filostrato, Life of Apollonius of Tiana, 6, 19: "It was the imagination that created these effigies, which is
wiser artist of imitation. Imitation can only create what it has seen, but

Page 47

imagination can form the idea with reference to reality. Furthermore, imitation is often
shocked by terror; but nothing can disturb the imagination, since it proceeds fearlessly towards
the idea that was made by itself (Tr. it. by D. Dal Corno, Adelphi, Milan 1978).
Page 48

2
FROM THE PRESENTATION OF THE INVISIBLE
IMITATION OF APPEARANCE

The Greek example

For those who want to ask themselves not only about the shapes that images have
hired at a certain time in a particular country, but also, perhaps
more in depth, on the functions of the image as such, on the statute
social and mental of the imaginary within a particular civilization, the
 Greek case is undoubtedly privileged.
First it is for historical reasons. During the so-called dark centuries,
that is to say, roughly, from the 12th to the 8th century BC, Greece - than in that
period ignores writing - no longer knows the imaginary in the true sense,
nor does it implement figurative representation systems. Moreover, the same
graphein term means both writing and drawing and painting.
The constitution, under the influence of oriental models, of what is possible
call a repertoire of images, a palette of figures, and elaboration
of a plastic language in ceramics, in relief, in sculpture to everything
round take place around the eighth century, as if starting from a tabula rasa.
Therefore, on this level, as in other fields, we are witnessing a kind
of birth or at least of rebirth, which authorizes us to speak of one
appearance of figurative representation in Greece.
Paul Demargne will observe that this sort of rediscovery of the imaginary
on the part of the Greeks it happens, in relation to the previous period, in a desert
so total and absolute that it assumes the value - and here I quote it - of a creation
ex nihilo ».
There is more. Examining the vocabulary of Greek statuary, which is broad,
extended and uncertain, Émile Benveniste observes that the Hellenes did not possess
no specific term to designate the statue, in the sense that we give it to us. IS

Page 49

he writes: «The people who have fixed the canons and the
more perfect models of plastic art had to borrow from others
same concept of figurative representation ». 1
Let's take another step forward. The simple examination of the terms to which the Greeks
have resorted, during their history, to designate the "statue" show
that what Benveniste calls "the concept of figurative representation" does not
it is a simple and immediate fact, defined, so to speak, once and for all. The
concept of figurative representation is not obvious, it is not unique nor
permanent, but constitutes what can be called a historical category.
It is a construction that is elaborated, and with difficulty, in many ways
different, in various civilizations.
In Greece there are about fifteen expressions that designate the "idol
divine », in the many forms it has had the opportunity to assume: form
aniconic, such as a rough stone, baitulos, beams, dokana,
a column, kion, a stele, herma; theriomorphic or monstrous appearance, such as the
Gorgon, the Sphinx, the Harpies; anthropomorphic figure in the diversity of his
type, from the small archaic wooden idol, roughly modeled, with the
arms and legs attached to the body, such as Bretas, the xoanon, the Palladion,
up to the kouroi and the archaic korai ; and finally the great cult statue, which has
very different names: you can call it hedos or agalma, as well as eikon e
mimema - terms that are not used in this precise sense before
from the 5th century. Well, of all these words, apart from the last two, there is none
one that has any relationship with the idea of similarity, of
imitation, of figurative representation in the strict sense.
So it is not enough to say that the first Greek archaism had to be created from
nothing a language of plastic forms, we must add that it has them
developed following a rather original way to finally arrive, starting
from idols that act as symbolic actualizations of the different modalities of the
divine, to the image proper; that is to say the image conceived
 as
thean imitative
outward artifice that
appearance of reproduces
real things. in the form of a simulacrum
At the turn of the fifth and fourth centuries, the theory of mimesis, imitation,
sketched by Xenophon and then processed in a truly systematic way by
Plato marks the moment in which, in Greek culture, inversion takes place
which leads from the presentification of the invisible to the imitation of appearance.
The category of figurative representation is then well identified in the
its specific traits; at the same time, he finds himself connected to the great human fact
of mimesis - imitation - which forms the basis of it.
The symbol by which a power of the beyond, that is to say a being

Page 50

fundamentally invisible, it is updated and presented in this

world, has turned into an image, product of an expert imitation
that, due to its high technical character and illusionistic procedure,
is now part of the general category of "fictitious" - what we call art.
Since then, the image belongs to the figurative illusionism so much and more than
how much it is not akin to the field of religious realities.

The archaic idol: the «xoanon»

At this point a question arises. What was the status of the image,
as long as it has not been clearly connected to the faculty, proper to man,
to create with imitation works that have no other reality than theirs
semblance, whose only essence is that of simulacrum? How does it work? That
does relationship have with what it depicts or evokes?
In this exposition I will confine myself essentially to the statuary and to yours
role in the representation of the gods. I will only devote a few words to the
depiction of the dead, in the round and in relief, on painted or carved stelae.
Figure of the gods, figure of the dead. In both cases, it's a matter of showing,
circumscribing them in a precise form and in a well-defined place, powers
that are part of the invisible and do not belong to the space below. Far
see the invisible, assign a place in our world to the entities of the beyond:
it can be said that at the beginning of the figurative enterprise there is this paradoxical
attempt to insert the absence within a presence, to introduce the other
and elsewhere in the universe that is familiar to us. What were the
transformations of the image, perhaps it remains valid, to a large extent,
this bet: to evoke the absence within the presence, the elsewhere in
what is under the eyes.
Let's start with the gods. First of all, a general observation. Next to
myth in which stories are told or stories are told, next to
ritual in which organized sequences of acts are performed, each religious system
involves a third element: the forms of representation. However, the figure
religious aims not only to evoke, in the spirit of the spectator who is
look, the sacred power to which he refers and which he sometimes represents, as in the
case of the anthropomorphic statue, and at other times it evokes symbolically. There
his ambition, wider, is another.
It intends to establish a real communication, an authentic one
contact with the sacred power, through what, in one way or another, the
represents; his ambition is to make this power present hic et
nunc, to make it available to men in the forms required by the rite.
Page 51

But trying in this way, through figurative forms, to throw a

bridge between the human and the divine, the idol must at the same time, in its own
figure, to emphasize the distance towards the human world, to accentuate
the incommensurability between the sacred power and all that makes it manifest, in
always inadequate and incomplete, in the eyes of mortals. Establish with
the afterlife a real contact, to actualize it, to present it and from this to participate
intimately to the divine - but, at the same time, to underline how much of it
inaccessible, mysterious, fundamentally different and alien both
always connected with the divinity: this is the tension that every form of
representation must necessarily establish in the field of thought
religious.
To clarify this too general view I will take the example of a certain one
kind of divine idols of the Greek world. Pausania reports the
presence, in this or in that sanctuary, of a form of idol indicating with the
xoanon term . The word, of Indo-European origin (contrary to bretas, the
whose meaning is similar), comes from the verb xeo, "to scratch, to scrape", which
belongs to the vocabulary of wood work. The xoanon is a wooden idol,
more or less rough-hewn, column-shaped, of primitive invoice.
For Pausanias, the xoana have a triple character. They are the idols who
belong to the most remote past. Everything in them is archaic: appearance, worship
of which they are the object, the legends that concern them. This "primitiveness" of the
xoana produces in those who observe them a marked effect of "extraneousness", which
Pausanias emphasizes using, when he refers to them, the terms atopos,
which indicates the detachment that separates them from the images of ordinary worship, and xenos,
"stranger".
Primitiveness, extraneousness: to these two traits Pausanias adds a third,
directly connected with them. In what they have of disconcerting, of not
figured in the usual sense, the xoana imply something divine, theion ti,
as a supernatural element.
These archaic idols, which often play a fundamental role in the
cultic practice of a god and they affect him very directly - even if he is not
they represent in the canonical figurative form - they are not images, second
we. They have not crossed the threshold beyond which one feels entitled to
to speak of images in the strict sense, neither from the point of view of their origin, nor
from that of their functions.
As for their origin, the most famous have the reputation of not
to have been fashioned from the hand of a mortal craftsman. May a god have them
built and offered as a gift to one of his favorites, whether they fell from the sky or
have been brought from the sea, it is not a question of human works.

Page 52

Their shape, assuming they have one - since it is a simple piece of

wood can serve as an idol -, sometimes it is less symbolically important
matter of which they are made: a certain quality of wood or even a certain one
 particular tree, indicated by the god or connected to him by a special bond.
Moreover, the figure is almost always covered with clothes that hide it from the
based at the top.
As for their functions, they depend on the fact that the idol was not
designed to be seen: looking at it makes you crazy. Therefore it is often
locked up in a casket and kept in a place forbidden to the public.
However, without being visible as it should be an image, the idol
it is not therefore invisible as the god that cannot be looked at in the face. IS
caught in a game of hiding and showing. The xoanon is now hidden, now unveiled
it oscillates between the two poles of "kept secret" and "publicly manifested". There
"Vision" of the idol occurs each time in relation to a situation
preliminary in which it was hidden; this is what gives him his truth
meaning, attributing to it the character of a privilege reserved for certain
people, at certain times, under certain conditions. See the idol
presupposes a particular religious qualification and at the same time consecrates
this eminent dignity. The vision, like that of the mysteries, takes on value
initiation. In other words, the contemplation of the divine idol appears as the
"Revelation" of a mysterious and fearful reality; the visible instead of being the
first as the image should imitate, it takes on the meaning of one
precious and precarious revelation of that invisible that constitutes reality
essential.

Figure and ritual action

However, the idol is not only inserted in this game of concealing and showing; is
also inseparable from the ritual operations performed on it.
It is dressed and undressed; it is ritually washed; one leads it, to wet it,
to the waters of a river or of the sea; he was given stuffs and veils. You take it outside,
it is brought back inside, where sometimes it is fixed with symbolic bonds, wool threads or
gold chains. The fact is that we imagine it to be mobile; even if it has not
his feet and his legs remain attached to each other, he is always believed to be ready
to escape, to leave a place to get away elsewhere, to go and live in
another home, bringing with it the privileges and powers inherent in its possession.
At the xoanon level , the plastic figure can never be separated
completely, at no time, from the ritual action: the idol is made for
be shown and concealed, carried in procession and tied, dressed and covered,
washed. The figure needs the ritual to represent power and action

Page 53

of divinity. Because he is still incapable, in his immobile and fixed form, of

expressing movement in another way than being
changed and carried in procession, it makes it translate the action of the god animating it
and symbolically mimicking it. Therefore the xoanon always appears at the center of a
cycle of festivals organized around him, and which form a system with it
coherent symbolic, all the elements of which - plastic sign and ritual acts -
they are solidary and corresponding to each other. The problem of a possible effectiveness
of the xoanon outside of this system does not arise. It is through the series
of ceremonies of which it is the object that the idol manifests the power of the god: it
it represents the divine action mimicking it for the whole duration of the ritual, rather
that fixing it in space through a figure.
The idol, considered in ritual, has not achieved full autonomy
in its plastic form, but it is not even in a statute comparable to
that of a peg, a pole, a pillar or a herm. Chain one
 xoanon with more or less symbolic constraints does not have the same value as
stick a peg or pole into the ground. The chaining presupposes
a moving image, whose eventual escape is prevented by wrapping the
legs with a wool thread, a vegetable tie or, following a
more precise symbolism, than gold chains. The ritual does not fix the image on
soil in order to delimit a center of religious strength in space, but aims
to permanently ensure the custody of a certain social group
symbol that has the value of talisman. The idol is not fixed at a point in the
particular earth, does not locate a divine power. It is exactly the opposite:
wherever it is found, it gives those who have it in its possession the privilege e
as the exclusivity of certain powers, establishing a "personal" relationship
with the divinity, which can be transmitted hereditary and circulate in
royal families or religious genes . This aspect of appropriation of the idol,
complementary to its mobility, it translates into the fact that it inhabits it
less to the origins, in the intimacy of a human habitation: the house of the king, of the chief,
of the priest; in any case, a private, privileged residence, not a place
public. When, at the time of the city, the temple - impersonal place e
collective - will host the divine image, for the oldest xoana it will remain alive
the memory of the bond that unites them to a particular home and lineage. It's in the
home of Erechtheus, in Athens, who resides Athena's xoanon , as well as, a
Thebes, the thalamos of Semele, in the palace of Cadmus, holds that of
Dionysus. At the height of the classical era, the custom of keeping certain is maintained
secret images in private homes, and not in the temple. The priest gives
hospitality to the statue in his own house, for the duration of his office; in
take charge of the image, consecrate the personal bond that will unite it, from that
moment onwards, to the deity. The idol thus assumes the function of a sign of
investiture; in this respect, it has little importance that it looks more like it

Page 54

or less human. Between the xoanon and certain symbolic objects, which
confer to those who possess them a particular religious qualification, the line of
demarcation can be quite nuanced.

Figures and symbolic objects

The function of this kind of sacred objects consists in attesting and in

to transmit the powers that the divinity grants, by way of privilege, to its elected representatives,
rather than letting the public know a divine form. The symbol does not
represents the god, abstractly conceived in himself and for himself, nor
tries to educate on its nature; expresses the divine power to the extent that
it is managed and used by some individuals as a tool of prestige
social, a means to take hold and act on others.
Agamemnon's scepter presents these two traits, closely related
between them, of divine symbol and object of investiture. It features great
effective, imposes silence on the meeting, gives executive value to decisions,
he makes the king recognize a scion of Zeus. The scepter, held in the hand e
transmitted the power of the hereditary, objective, in a certain way
sovereignty. It is a divine object, like the xoanon: made by Hephaestus, given
from Zeus to Hermes and later passed to Pelops, Atreus, Tieste,
Agamemnon etc. And it can serve just as well as an idol of a god, ai
same way as xoanon: in Chaeronea it is the object of the most important cult,
represents Zeus. However, it retains its ancient value of talisman, of which
we must appropriate ourselves to be able to pass on the privileges. Every year, a new one
priest takes charge of the divine symbol and takes it to his home to offer it
 daily sacrifices. The role of the scepter in Chaeronea will be played by
a crown for the priest of Zeus Panemero, by a trident near the
Eteobutadi, from a shield in the royal family of Argos - from a shield, but
also from xoanon. Precisely in Argo, in the bathroom ceremony of
Pallas, Athena's xoanon was not carried in procession alone, but was
accompanied by the shield of Diomedes, also brought into the procession. In a
social context in which the divine powers and the symbols that express them do not have
still a wholly public character, but remain the property of families
privileged, there is a reciprocity between the idol and the symbolic object, which
take on the same function.
Two stories, whose parallelism emphasizes this analogy between xoanon and
sacred objects, allow us to grasp the turning point in the social history that marks
the transition from private worship to public worship and that transforms the idol, object
of investiture, a more or less secret family talisman, in the image
impersonal of a deity made to be seen. The first story comes to us

Page 55

told by Herodotus. In Gela, in a period of unrest, the city found itself

divided inside. A part of the inhabitants seceded and withdrew up
a hill from which the rest of the community threatened. A man named Teline
then decided to confront the rebels, with no other weapons than some sacred objects,
he had in his possession. Trusting in their supernatural power, yes
he introduced the rebels, put down the revolt and brought them back to Gela, thus re-establishing the
concord and social order. Teline asked for one thing as a reward for
his enterprise, and that is that from that moment the priesthood of the infernal goddesses
was attributed to his descendants, as hierophants. Well, the
sacred objects of which he had used were precisely those of the cult of these goddesses.
It will not be that from that date the cult became public and it was
then adopted as the official cult of the city? It is true that Herodotus says of
ignore how Teline could have got his hands on sacred objects, if there
had received or if he had procured them himself; but the scholiast to the II
Pitica di Pindaro specifies that the cult had been brought by the Triopio from
ancestors of Teline, at the time of the foundation of Gela, as a family cult, e
which was established as a public cult only later. We find the
same themes - popular revolt, placation of sedition not with violence
but by virtue of the sacred objects, talismans having political and religious value to the
at the same time, owned by certain families, which become, for one
sort of compromise, object of public worship in the new social order
of the city - in the second story, which directly concerns the xoanon of
Athena to Argos. The use of carrying Diomede's shield in procession, he says
Callimaco, is a very ancient rite instituted by Eumede, favorite priest
of the goddess. And here in what situation: the people had risen up and Eumede
he escaped death thanks to the same system that Teline had used: he brought
with him in the escape the sacred image, the palladion, and certainly also it
shield, object of royal investiture, and erected them, for his protection, in one
rocky escarpment. Callimaco does not tell us the rest, but we can
imagine it: Eumede instituted the rite thanks to which, from that moment on,
the whole city and all citizens would have benefited, to the same extent, from the
favor that Athena previously reserved for her protégé. In worship
public, however, the value of ancient private sacred objects is transformed into
same time as it extends. The idol, ceasing to embody the privilege
of a family or a closed group, it will lose its talisman value
always more or less secret, to assume the meaning and structure of
image. In this sense, the appearance of the temple and the establishment of a cult
 public
city doimply
- but not only
themark a turning
advent of a newpoint
forminofsocial history - the
representation of era
the of
gods, a decisive change in the nature of the divine symbol.

Page 56

The image, the temple, the public dimension

The Greek temple, more than a place of worship where the faithful gather, is one
dwelling: the god lives there, but it is a dwelling that no longer has anything private.
Instead of closing, like the human oikos , on a family interior, the house
divine is oriented towards the outside, facing the public. In the man's palace,
the frescoes decorated the interior of the room; in the temple, the carved frieze,
projecting itself on the facade, it offers itself to the spectator who looks at it from outside.
The god resides in the intimacy of the building, but it is a god that now belongs
to the entire city, which has built for him a house distinct from the house
human, at the same time leaving the Acropolis to settle in
low city. Since it is the god himself who is public, the interior of the temple is not
less impersonal than the outside. When it stops being the sign of a
privilege for those who host it in their own home, the god manifests his presence
in a way that is directly visible to all: under the gaze of the city,
it becomes form and spectacle.
The appearance of the great religious statuary cannot be understood except
in the ambit of the temple, with its dual character of a private residence
god and fully socialized space. The temple, built by the city, is
consecrated to the god as his residence; it is called naos, abode, hedos,
seat of the divinity. And the same term hedos also indicates the great statue
divine: it is through his image that the god comes to dwell in his
home. There is complete reciprocity between the temple and the statue: the temple is made
to house the statue of the god, and the statue to make it visibly manifested
presence of the god in the intimacy of his home.
Like the temple, the image also takes on a totally character
public. It could be said, at this point, that by now it was all about the statue
it consists in its percipi - all its "being" is in a "perceived being".
The only reality he has is his appearance, his only ritual function is that
to be seen. It is placed in the temple, where the god resides through, and
it is no longer carried in procession. Its form is already expressive in itself,
so he no longer needs to be dressed, carried in procession, washed ...
She is no longer required to work in the world as an effective force,
but to act on the eyes of the spectator, to translate for him in a manner
visible the invisible presence of the god and to transmit him a training
on divinity. The statue becomes "representation" in a truly sense
new; the divine symbol, freed from ritual and placed under the gaze
impersonal of the city, it has turned into an "image" of the god.

The figure of the body

Page 57
 This liberation of the image takes place through the discovery of the body
human and the progressive conquest of its form. However, the
sense of these formulas. This is obviously not the human body in
as organic and physiological reality, which supports the ego. If the
religious symbolism is oriented towards the human body and reproduces the
appearance, it is because it sees in it the expression of certain aspects of
divinity. The problem then arises as follows. In the case of xoanon,
the human aspect was not yet perceived as essential and the form of
body was not yet well defined. Because, when the great statuary will take
to manifest divinity in a form visible to all, will attribute them, in
systematic and exclusive way, the appearance of the human body? And what are they,
for religious thought, the meaning and importance of this appreciation of
human figure, which therefore appears to be the only one able to represent divinity?
Jean Cuisenier recalled the interpretation of the anthropomorphism of the
divine images in the classical Greek religion proposed by Hegel. Here though
we should understand the precise meaning of the term anthropomorphism;
means that, for the Greeks, the gods were conceived and represented in the image
some men? It seems to me instead that it was rather the human body that seemed
them, when he was in the bloom of youth, an image or reflection of the
divinity.
Athletic exercises must have greatly favored this appreciation of
Human Body. Nudity is already an important fact: the first male statues, in
Greece, I'm as naked as the athlete in the stadium or in the gym. But the factor
essential depends on the dual character of the Games, at the same time show
and religious festival. National show, one could say, that brings together and puts of
facing the various cities in a large public competition. Every city is
engaged in the contest, in which the winner represents his city,
more than himself. It is also a religious festival: the races are ceremonies
sacred. In the civic religion and in this Panhellenic religion that the Games
they contribute to form, occupying a prominent place in it, it is gone
definitely lost the memory of the ritual functions that the agon could have in
origin. However, the test maintains its ordeal value: the victory consecrates the
winner in the full sense of the word, surrounding him with a halo of prestige
sacral. In this form of ritual scenario that is the race, the athlete's triumph -
you see it in Pindar - it evokes and expands the feat accomplished by the heroes and the gods
gods: raises man to the level of divinity. Even the physical qualities -
youth, strength, rapidity, dexterity, agility, beauty - of which he proves
winner during the agon, and who incarnate in the public eye in the
his naked body, they are essentially religious values.
However, the race does not only test the physical qualities; yes yes

Page 58

manifest other aspects of the body, which the Games present to the gaze of
public in a religious light. When, in Delos, the Homeric Hymn ad
Apollo, the Ions are dedicated to boxing, dance and singing when they celebrate
the Games, "those who arrived at that moment would believe them immortal and immune
forever from old age, since he would see the grace of all of them ». There
grace, charis: through the beauty of the human body, like a reflection and one
mirror, suddenly transpires this divine quality, which is the opposite of
sacred of monstrous type. The image of the human body, molded in marble,
in bronze or gold, it must in turn show the charis: luster, splendor
bright, radiance of unalterable youth.
 Gorgo's horrible grimace symbolizes the powers of terror, chaos and
of death. On the contrary, but in an equally conventional manner of the grin
of the mask, the smile on the human face expresses the charis, the splendor that
the divinity lends, in this world, to the body of man, when, in the flower
of youth, it reflects the nature of those who are called i
Blessed, as it is said of Aphrodite is "the smiling".
In Lesvos, a public competition consecrated this religious value of beauty
physics: on the occasion of the festival called Kallisteia, "of the beauty prize",
the seven most beautiful girls were chosen, who then went on to form a
choir in the image of that of the seven Muses, to whom a cult was dedicated in
that same city. In the same way, Herodotus, the Olympian Philip tells us
of Crotone, the most beautiful of the Greeks of his time, came after his death
heroicized by the inhabitants of Segesta for its beauty, as well as other athletes
they were for their strength or their stature.
What we call physical qualities can therefore appear to the
religious consciousness of the Greeks as "values" that exceed man, "powers" of
divine origin which in human existence have a precarious reality e
inconsistent and are destined to be fleeting. Only the gods possess them in
all their fullness as permanent goods, inseparable from their nature. There
stature, the smile, the beauty of the body forms of kouros and kore, the
movement that hints they express this power of life: a life always
present, always pulsating. The image of the gods fixed by the statue
anthropomorphic is that of the Immortals, of the Blessed, of the "always young":
those who, in the purity of their existence, are radically foreign to
decline, corruption, death.

The figure of the dead

A problem arises immediately. If the archaic statue expresses, through the

human figure, that set of "values" which, in their entirety,

Page 59

they belong only to the divinity and that, when they shine on the body of the
deadly, they present themselves in the form of a weak reflection, we understand how the
same image, in the case of a votive kouros , may now represent the god
himself, now a human character who has proved himself, by winning the Games
or for some other type of consecration, "similar to the gods". But how can it
to be that same kouros, erected on a tomb in the round or sculpted
on a stele, can it have a funerary function and represent a deceased?
I have broadly expressed myself on this point in several essays dedicated to
relationship between the archaic funerary figure and the "beautiful death",2 kalos thanatos,
the one that assures the young warrior fallen on the battlefield, in the
flower of the years, an imperishable glory, always keeping alive in the
memory of later generations the memory of what he was: his
name, his exploits, the course of his life, the heroic end that raised him
forever the status of illustrious dead, of an excellent man, agathos aner,
fully and definitively achieved. Few words will suffice, therefore, to
remember the essentials of our conclusions.
Until the end of the 7th century, a similar type of stele persisted in Attica
to that described by the Homeric epic: a more or less square stone,
indicating the place of the tomb. This stone already has a function of
memory preservation; its fixity, its permanence in position
erect and immutable they evoke the deceased, whose ashes rest underground,
 pointing out that, despite his passing and his absence, he remains
will always remain present in the memory of men. It is during the VI
century, in a context that is both citizen and aristocratic, that is
develop the different types of figured stelae and the series of funerary kouroi . The dead
it is no longer recalled by a rough stone, without inscription, but from the
visible beauty of a bodily form fixed forever in the stone, with the
his name, as death has fixed her on the corpse of the young warrior
heroic that everyone admires, because in him, even if dead - or above all for
this - "everything is worthy, everything is beautiful", as Homer and Tyrtaeus say.
The figure on the stele, or the funerary kouros , stands on the tomb "in place" of
what was, did, was worth the living person; "In place", anti, means that the
figure has replaced the person as his "equivalent", which he does, in a certain
which way, the same thing that the deceased did in life (on the stele of Amfarete,
of the late fifth century, the inscription says: "It is the beloved son of my daughter who
I keep here, what I held in my lap when, you both live,
we saw the light of the sun; and now that we are both dead, I still keep it ")
and therefore that it possesses the same beauty and the same value that it
they characterized when he was alive; but also means, inversely and al
at the same time, that the figure expresses a new way of being, different from the
previous, that is the status of the dead that the deceased has acquired by disappearing

Page 60

forever by the light of the sun. "I am placed here, in Paro marble, al
place of a woman ( anti gunaikos); in memory of Bitte, for his mother
mournful death ”, declares a funerary inscription from Amorgo, dating back to the middle
from the 5th century. "In place of a woman", but the formula, in its variants,
shows well that the person whose replacement takes the place is considered in
everything and everything for what it's worth. It is "in the place of his youth and
its beauty »that the groom of the young Dionisia adorns his monument
funeral, it is "in place of its noble character" that Aspasia's husband has
built a mnema for this exemplary woman ( esthle ), «instead of her
virtue and his wisdom "which Cleobulus erected a sema for his son
Senofanto.
In the figurative representation of death, the beauty of the image
prolongs that of the deceased, as its equivalent. "Your mother has erected
on this marble tomb a young girl who has your body and size
your beauty, Tersi ", reads a funerary epigram of Anology
palatine. A stele from Athens, which crowns the tomb of a young man, recommends
to the passer-by to complain that the boy died despite being so handsome, hos
kalos on ethane. That young beauty, fixed by death before
could wither, remained visible on the monument over the centuries; on
a kore from the middle of the 6th century, by Faidimo, reads: "He [the father]
made me erect, sema his daughter File, nice to see '; come on
an inscription from Thasos, from the end of the VI: "Bello is the mnema of the deceased
Leorete raised by his father, because we will not see her again alive. "
Because the image assumes the psychological meaning of a copy that imitates
a model and gives the viewer, the human figure, the illusion of reality
he will have to stop embodying these religious values and becoming in himself and for
herself, in her likeness, the model to be reproduced. All development
of the sculptor technique guided them in this direction. But the new form
of plastic language questioned the ancient system of
representation; the sculpture, highlighting the aspect properly
human body, opened a crisis for the divine image. Therefore progress
of the statuary themselves will provoke a reaction of distrust, of which it gives us
 testimony to the work of Plato: nostalgia for the ancient divine symbols,
attachment to the more traditional forms of representation of the god, reticence
against any kind of depiction of the deity. It is not without
arouse anxiety and criticism that the image, ceasing to embody
the invisible, the beyond, the divine, can become an imitation of appearance.
We must still remember, as regards the status and destiny
image in the West, which in the 3rd century AD Plotinus marks the beginning
of the turning point thanks to which the image, instead of being defined as
imitation of appearance, will be interpreted philosophically and theologically,

Page 61

as well as plastically elaborated, as an expression of being. Again, e

for a long time, the image will take on the task of depicting the invisible.

1 IS. Benveniste, Le sens du mot ΚΟΛΟΣΣΟΣ et les noms grecs de la statues, «Revue de philologie» 6
(1932), pp. 118-135, here p. 133.
2 In Individu, la mort, l'amour, Gallimard, Paris 1989 (tr. It. By A. Ghilardotti, The individual, the
death, love, edited by G. Guidorizzi, Raffaello Cortina, Milan 2000).
Page 62

3
IMPLEMENTATION AND IMAGE

More than half a century ago, Émile Benveniste observed that the Greeks originally
they had no name for the statue and that, despite having set for
the West had the canons and the models of plastic art, however, they had to
to borrow from others, not having it at the start, «the very concept of
figurative representation ».
Is this observation still valid today? To decide, we would need to
at least be sure to understand it correctly. Benveniste was not
qualified to intervene in the debate on the origins of the great statuary
Greek, which appeared in the mid-7th century. Antecedents in the same
Greece or foreign influence, particularly from the Near East? Between these two
options, no one has the competence to decide categorically, unless
that he is not an archaeologist; and Benveniste had no intention of replacing himself, in
this field, to specialists. On the other hand, to affirm, as he does, that i
Originally Greeks did not possess the concept of non figurative representation
in no way implies that they had to go through a preliminary phase
aniconic, to build an anthropomorphic statuary. Whether it's a stone
rough, of a pillar or an entirely human effigy, a divine symbol,
rather than depicting the supernatural power, it can have the functions of
to localize it, to present it and also, in some cases, to implement it, to carry it out
in a concrete form. Aniconic, theriomorphic, anthropomorphic - symbolism
religious is anything but a catalog of images tending to represent, in
more or less similar, the figure of the deities. In other words, a
cult statue, whatever its shape, even if it has a full appearance
human, does not necessarily appear as an image, perceived and conceived
as such. The category of figurative representation is not a given
immediate of the human spirit, a natural, constant and universal fact. It's a
mental category which, in its elaboration, presupposes that the concepts of
appearance, imitation, likeness, image, simulacrum are already there
enucleated and clearly delineated, in their mutual relations and in the common

Page 63

opposition to reality, to being. This statement of a full

figurative consciousness occurs, in particular, in the effort made by the
ancient Greeks to reproduce in an inert material, by means of technical devices,
the visible aspect of those who, when alive, suddenly show their eyes
value of one's beauty - divine beauty - as thauma idesthai,
 admirable to see.
He is as a linguist, examining a part of the vocabulary to discover them
mental implications, which Benveniste addresses the problem of
figurative representation with the Greeks. Well, indeed, on this level, yes
requires a finding. The Greek vocabulary of divine effigies appears
late, multiple, heteroclite, disjointed. The terms, different by origin,
scope, guidelines, juxtapose and sometimes overlap, without
constitute a coherent whole, which refers to some idea of
figurative representation. Some of these terms are strictly used
specialized, whether they concern particular deities (such as the dokana, the two poles)
verticals joined by two transverse beams representing the Dioscuri, the hermes
which indicates at the same time the god and the ithyphallic pillar surmounted by a head
which is consecrated, the palladion reserved for Athena), whether they refer to
well-defined types of divine representation (from the baitulos, simple stone
sacred, from kiones and stuloi, conical or rectangular columns, up to
kolossos, anthropomorphic statuette with welded legs in wood, clay or stone,
which could be used for a double ritual). More terms, more meaning
ample, they concern only secondarily the representation of the god;
agalma applies to every precious object, to any ornament, before
take the sense of divine image; hedos and hidruma indicate the seat, the
dwelling, and then, by derivation, the statue in which the god resides; the first
meaning of tupos is sign, imprint, replica, from which, on an ancillary basis, the
form that the sculptor imposes on the material. Andrias - the little man -
maintains in the effigy not its representative character, but the same object
which reproduces on a reduced scale. The use of this term is therefore compliant
the use, widely attested in the inscriptions and in literary texts, of indicating
the image of worship directly with the name of the god depicted, instead of with
one of the statue's names. Only one example, which is also the oldest of which
we have: the only allusion to a divine statue found in the Iliad
regards that of Athena in her temple at Troy (VI, 301-303). Hecuba there yes
bears, accompanied by elderly women, to lay a beautiful veil on offer
embroidered. All, once entered the sanctuary, "stretch their arms towards
Athena "; Teano, the priestess, «takes the veil and puts it on his lap
Athena. " On the statue's knees, of course, the statue depicting the
goddess seated in all her majesty on her throne. The text however does not speak in any
moment of the statue as such; he speaks only of Athena.

Page 64

Bretas and xoanon pose more complex problems. Bretas is a word

preellenic, not Indo-European, of obscure etymology; xoanon is a Greek name,
derived from xuo or xeo, "scrape, scratch, smooth". In the wake of Plutarch e
of Pausanias, the moderns were led to associate the two terms, to see you
the sign of the most primitive form of divine effigy: of small dimensions,
roughly carved in wood, brete and xoana, objects of religious fervor
particular, will constitute, in their archaism, the first draft of a
anthropomorphic representation of the divinity and also, in the hypothesis of
a genetic evolution, the ring that unites ancient aniconism with the new
human representation of divinity. The comprehensive study by AA Donohue1
on the uses and values of xoanon from the end of the fifth century BC to the time
Byzantine revisited the question; we will mention only the points of his
investigation that directly affects our research in the first place
archaism. Neither bretas, nor xoanon, nor any are attested in linear B
another similar word; it is found neither in Homer nor in Hesiod, nor in the
oldest Greek poets. If bretas appears, next to other terms, in Aeschylus,
 the first indisputable
of Sophocles, usebe
which can ofdated
xoanon is found
around 468.inIn
a this
fragment
sense,ofagalma
the Tamiri
e
andrias appear in the texts before bretas and xoanon; and these two
"Witnesses" of the most ancient representation, in the eyes of the moderns, "seem
absent from the life and literature of archaic Greece ", to resume the
words of AA Donohue.
Secondly, the meaning, which is not unique; the senses are multiple
and vary according to places, eras, context. In their employments
older, neither bretas nor xoanon appear to be exclusively related to
vocabulary of the statue. In Euripides, bretas applies to the Trojan horse and to
a sort of trophy. 2 In Sophocles, in that fragment of Tamiri in which xoanon
appears for the first time, the word indicates a musical instrument
"melodious". 3 At this point a conclusion is required. Where
the etymology is evident, the various uses of the word confirm what that already is
indicated: xoanon, no more than the other names of the statue, makes no reference
directly to the concept of figurative representation. The word refers to
a certain type of technical operation - grating, polishing - the results of which can
don't even be an effigy.
To this disparate series, we need to add the two terms they have
particularly attracted the attention of all those - Greek scholars, philosophers, historians -
who aspired to define the status of the image in Greek culture: eidolon
and eikon. Three reasons justify the prominent place occupied by these two
terms in the investigation of the concept of figurative representation. In
First, due to their etymology, these two terms are connected,

Page 65

contrary to the rest of the vocabulary we are dealing with, at

vision and similarity. Secondly, they are of general scope: fin
since classical times both can be used to indicate, in addition to the
natural images (reflected in water or in a mirror), all forms of
images created artificially by men, whether they are all-round, engraved or
painted, depicting gods, men, animals or anything else; Yes
they even apply, outside of plastic effigies, to the figures we have
in spirit, to what today we would call mental images. Yes. I am
finally imposed throughout the Greek tradition until the Byzantine era, in which,
as Suzanne Saïd notes, «eidolon ended up indicating the gods who did not
they exist except in their image, while eikon has been reserved for
representations of God ». 4
Idol-icon. Where does the preference that we are tempted to attribute to?
this pair and to what extent we can find, starting from it, the
meaning that the figurative facts covered in the spirit of the Greeks? Self
we associate the two terms to oppose them to each other, like the two forms
opposites that the representation can assume,5 is only because, in the first
centuries of our era, the Christian controversy against pagan cults has served it
to differentiate the two types of images and draw a line of demarcation
clear between the statues of false gods and the figure of the true god? In this case,
the idol-icon opposition would be linked to a historical context
particular and would not make full sense except in relation to it. Not
instead, we need to go back further, to identify in the Greek vocabulary
of the image the presence from the beginning and the permanence for the whole culture
ancient of a tension expressed by the dualism of these two terms, each one
of which would, from the beginning, respectively refer to functions
different images and mental attitudes in front of it? IS
 this last thesis that S. Saïd has expounded in the essay already cited.
In what, according to this author, is the distinction between eidolon and
Eikon? In the fact that the relationship between the image and what it represents is always
different depending on the case. Idol and icon, writes S. Saïd, are different
"Because they constitute different modes of representation". L ' Eidolon is a
simple copy of the sensitive appearance, which follows what is offered to the view,
while the eikon is a transposition of the essence. Between the eidolon and his
model, the identity is exclusively superficial; between the eikon and what it does
refers, there is a relationship «on the level of the deep structure and of the
meaning". The eidolon, as a simulacrum, turns only to the eye;
it attracts him, fascinates him and makes him forget the model he replaces, at
point to take the place of it as a double. The eikon, as a symbol, yes
it is based on a comparison between differentiated terms: it appeals to intelligence
which it needs, in its very function as image, since the relationship

Page 66

which establishes it is not an external similarity, but a commonality or one

kinship - of nature, quality, value - which does not belong to the evidence
sensitive, but that the spirit perceives by seizing a hidden similarity between
heterogeneous elements.
The distance between eidolon and eikon widens in the Byzantine Empire at the time
of the struggle of images that, beyond the dispute between iconophiles and iconoclasts,
consecrates the entirely negative value of idol and the all-positive value of an icon, but
this detachment was already inherent in the etymology of the two terms. It is true that
both derive from the same stem * wei-, but, as S. Saïd notes, "only
eidolon belongs to the sphere of the visible, since it is formed on the theme * weid-,
which expresses the idea of seeing (see the Latin video, the Greek eidos and idein). Eikon
it is linked to the * weik- theme, which indicates an adjustment ratio and of
convenience (see eisko, eikazo, eikelos) ».
The differentiated use, from the epic, of terms similar to a
eidolon and a eikon would confirm this dual nature of the image, a
second that it assumes the functions of simulacrum or those of symbol. In its
perfect resemblance, eidolon is always presented, in Homer, as
inconsistent, deceiving, more or less obscure; to the same extent as not
it preserves that the appearance of what it is the copy of, let it escape
the essence. It should be added, following S. Saïd, that the
contrast between the two forms of figurative representation is outlined
clearly when comparing the passages in which the gods are assimilated to
men and those in which men are compared to gods: "In the first case,
this assimilation is always expressed by words of the family of
eidolon. To say that a god is in the image of man means to say that it is his
double. In the second case, the similarity, which is always expressed through
eoikos (or its equivalent homoios or enaligkios ), is located on another
level. If a human being is in the image of the god, this does not happen because of it
reproduces the physical appearance, but because it is endowed with a quality that the gods
they possess the highest rank » 6 . In summary: from archaic times to the world
Byzantine, two lines, which diverge until they come to completely oppose,
both develop continuously, without fracture or modification
deep.
If the icon could appear, in the end, as "an open door to the afterlife",
if the idol could be condemned because it imprisons man
in appearance and in this world, it is because the eidolon wants already from the start
pass himself off as his model and try to blend in with him while the eikon
recognizes that it is distinct from it and claims only a relationship relationship. OR
 also: the idol makes the visible, which is its whole being, an end in and of itself;
stops the look that sinks into it and prevents it from going any further.

Page 67

The icon, on the contrary, carries within itself the overcoming of itself. 7
S. Saïd's analysis has the great merit of not treating the image as one
simple and obvious reality, whose nature is unquestionable; it searches for
the note to respond to the problem of what images were in the spirit
of the Greeks: what functions they had, what mental operations they implemented,
how they were seen and conceived, in what the relationship of similarity consisted
what did they have with their model?
The stakes are very important. It is not just a matter of knowing whether in the
Greek culture, from the Homeric times to the Byzantine era, has been maintained
continuity of a polar structure of the image or if, on the contrary, it is necessary to do
place for moments of crisis, of rupture, of renewal in the history of the
figurative representation. Behind this first question, there is a profiling one
second, linked to the first, which directly concerns the psychological status
image. At what moment the image acquired the characteristics
that will allow Plato to define it as a fiction, a non-entity
which has no other reality than its "likeness" with what it is not:
in short, when the image was perceived as a semblance
deceptive, illusory product of an imitative artifice?
In this regard, S. Saïd does not take into account, in his essay, a given
essential: in the eidolon-eikon combination , the two terms are not contemporary.
Eikon is not used before the fifth century. This innovation appears so much
more significant, as it occurs at the same time as it does its own
appearance another part of vocabulary, to express the values of
simulation and imitation: mimos, mimema, mimeisthai, mimesis - terms
that apply to plastic figures, poetry and music, but who they are
particularly linked to the birth of a new genre of literary work, the
dramatic show, whose originality consists in making present to the
eyes of the public, because they see them directly on the scene, the characters and the
"fictitious" events that the epic told in the form of a story, in an indirect style.
Eikon, mimeisthai, tragedy - the simultaneity of these three categories of facts
it will appear less accidental if one considers that according to Plato - the first
philosopher who elaborates a general theory of the image as an imitation
of appearance - the tragic spectacle constitutes the prototype par excellence
illusionistic techniques implemented by mimesis.
What conclusion to draw from this time lag between eidolon,
present in our oldest texts, and eikon, later, than what
did the Greeks mean by figurative representation? To decrease the impact of
this gap of three centuries, one can, of course, observe that, failing that
of the word itself, in the contemporary era of eidolon is the set of
terms to which eikon relates and on which S. Saïd based his analysis: the

Page 68
 perfect eoika, "agrees, it seems", the participle eikos, eoikos ( fem . eikuia ),
«Similar to», the verbs eiko, eikazo, «to make similar, to assimilate, to suppose»,
eikelos or ikelos, "similar, comparable". But it is precisely on this point that
the interpretation of S. Saïd seems to encounter the greatest difficulty: between the two
semantic fields that distinguished, the contrast does not appear so rigorous
as she says. In particular, it is not correct that, in case the gods are
assimilated to men, "this assimilation is always expressed in words
of the eidolon family ". Some examples among the many: when, in the Iliad,
Ares (V, 604), Poseidon (XIII, 357), Poseidon and Athena (XXI, 285)
in order to act, they assume the appearance of a human being, this assimilation
of divinity to man is expressed by eoikos or eikten; equally,
in the Odyssey (VIII, 194; XIII, 222, 288), when Athena intervenes with
the appearance of a man or a woman, does it andri demas eikuia, or demas
d'eikto gunaiki. If we compare the Iliad (XXII, 227) with the Odyssey (II, 267), yes
sees that the contrast between what belongs to the external aspect
visible ( eidolon, eidos ) and what depends on the intellectual comparison ( eoikos,
eikos ) disappears. In the Iliad, Athena goes to see Hector after having taken the
stature and the voice of Deifobo, eikuia demas kai phonen; in the Odyssey faces
Telemachus with the build and the voice of Mentor, eidomene demas kai
Auden. Far from being opposed, eikuia and eidomene are interchangeable, ai
same way in which in the Iliad (XVII, 323) Apollo incites Aeneas with the traits of
Perifante, demas Periphanti eoikos. And this "relational resemblance" in the
eoika register is confirmed three lines later (326): toi min eeisamenos, da
a similarity of vision in the register of eidos and idein.
There is worse. The eidolon "simulates" the outward appearance of what it is
duplicates and S. Saïd is completely right on this point (although to the stature,
to the posture, to the features of the face, to the complexion, to the garments, to the arms one should
add the item, which does not belong to the category of what is visible, but
it is part of the way an individual presents himself to others, in his "appearing";
this outward "resemblance" of the eidolon should, in the perspective of S.
Saïd, move him away from the forms of analogy to which the vocabulary corresponds
related to eikon. The opposite is true. The "similarity" of eidolon yes
expresses through the same terms from which eikon derives . The semantic fields
of these two families of words they can sometimes dissociate themselves, but instead of
contrast, intersect and overlap in our oldest texts.
This point is of a certain importance, so it is worthwhile to stop at one
little'. In observing that eidolon should be translated with double or spectrum,
rather than with image, we have indicated several times that this
term is used exclusively to indicate three types of phenomena:
the supernatural apparition, phasma, the dream, oneiros ( onar ), the soul-
shadow of the dead, psyche.8 In the three cases, theeidolon takes on appearance

Page 69

perfectly similar - the text insists you - to those of the human being of
which is double. Thus the eidolon created by Apollo is "the same as Aeneas himself
( Aineia ikelon ) and identical in arms "( Iliad, V, 449-450); Greeks and Trojans
they fight around this shadow, as if it were Enea himself. IS
the same for the dream - oneiros - sent by Zeus to Agamemnon, which
he resembled Nestor, angoixist eoikei (Iliad, II, 58), as
also for the eidolon created by Athena to appear in Penelope's dream, which
is similar in appearance to a woman, Iftime: demas d'eikto gunaiki (Odyssey, IV,
796-797, 824, 835). And so, finally, is the psyche of Patroclus, which presents itself
in front of Achilles asleep in his form of eidolon, similar in all e
for all to Patroclus, for his stature, his beautiful eyes, his voice: pant'eikuia; the
it resembled in a prodigious way: eikto de theskelon autoi (Iliad, XXIII, 66 and
 107).
However, if there is no incompatibility between eidolon and the vocabulary of
eoikos, if, on the contrary, the similarity of the former is expressed each time for
through the words of the second family, the idol contrast
icon is no longer relevant for the archaic age; can no longer be the background to
an investigation into the status of the image, its functions and its nature.
One does not find on one side an image-idol that simulates appearance, and
on the other an image-icon oriented towards the essence.
Moreover, the studies of A. Rivier, to which S. Saïd refers to
to underline «the intellectual character of the operation described by the eisko verbs
and eikazo »,9 had the great merit of demonstrating that, like dokeo,
dokos, doxa, that vocabulary, in its most ancient uses, remains foreign
to what Rivier calls "the problematic of being and appearing",
problematic became central in the thinking of the fourth century, after having emerged
very slowly in the philosophical consciousness of the V, by the impulse of the school
eleatic; and in fact eidolon, which is a simulacrum or dream created by a god, or
soul-shadow, never refers to these categories, under any of them
its forms. The eidolon is placed outside the binomial appearing-being; while
without expressing the essence, it is no longer even simple appearance.
The eidolon-psyche of Patroclus, the eidolon-dream with the appearance of Iftime are
much more than the outward appearance of these two individuals; they have the voice,
they exchange words and communicate with those in front of them in a dialogue
animated, like people really present in flesh and blood would do.
Eidolon, which is neither appearance nor essence - two terms that make sense
only one in relation to the other and vice versa -, it manifests itself, we could say,
using the less inadequate term we have, such as "appear"
someone's. In this it is not different, at first sight, from all the others
"Phenomena", that is to say from everything that manifests ( phaino ) one's own
presence showing itself through the eyes of men. Eidolon, however, if any

Page 70

distinguishes, because in it the appearance is equivocal, disconcerting: it implies a

double and contradictory aspect. On the one hand, as a simulacrum, it is
so precise, concrete, complete that one cannot but be fascinated,
but at the same time it is elusive: when you want to reach out to
touch it, subtract and dissolve. It is inconsistent, evanescent, empty, like
a shadow, a dream, of smoke. It is indeed appearance, but the appearance of those who are not there;
his presence is the presence of an absent person. The absence inherent in eidolon is not
but all negative; it is not the absence of what does not exist, of nothing, but
that of a being who is not from below; if you can't reach it either
to grasp, it is because it belongs to the beyond, from which it has arisen for little, almost to make you
immediately return; at the very moment in which it shows itself to our eyes and right into the
his presence in this world, bears the mark of that other world in which
She resides. To put it in one word, eidolon is an apparition; stands out on the appearance
ordinary and common of what manifests itself in the light of day, it is detached from it
more and less at the same time. It is "more" for the divine character than in some
cases are expressly attributed to him and that highlights his size
"supernatural"; it is "less" because the absence and emptiness that are the sign
of its presence make it akin to those illusory, weak, blurred reflections
that form on the dark surface of the mirrors, when one looks at you and there
you see, knowing well that it is not there and that that "self" is an illusion.10
Figure of the invisible, the archaic eidolon is at the same time the presence of the one
whose identity is recognized by seeing it before and complete absence of a
being that has left the light of day (the psyche ) or that is foreign to it already in
 origin (the ' oneiros and phasma ). In the history of figurative representation
this starting point gives the measure of the changes that, from the VIII to the IV
century, have affected the status of the image to lead, in Plato, to
a general theory that makes all the forms of eidola, whether they are eikones or
of phantasmata, deceptive appearances, products of the same activity
"Mimetic" creator of a world of illusions, thanks to its ability to
reproduce, as in a game of mirrors, the outward appearance of everything
there is visible in the universe. 11
From double to image, from the presentification of the visible to imitation
of appearance, this metamorphosis of eidolon poses a new and difficult
problem. If eidolon does not imitate the appearance of what the spectrum is, yes
however, it presents as its double, its simulacrum. What it consists of
then, its resemblance to that of which it manifests the presence absent in
this world, and what else could be this similarity, if not the
physical similarity between the copy and its model - their identity of appearance?
The objection would be valid only if the similarity effect created
from eidolon it was strictly limited to the visual field; but it is not so, however
a double reason. First, the voice has its place and plays a

Page 71

role in the appearance of eidolon, in the same way as external appearance;

then, and above all, the identity of body shape, stature, gait, of
look, of clothes, instead of expressing oneself - how one might expect, and how
supposes S. Saïd - through the vocabulary of "seeing" ( idein, eidos ), he does it
with terms related to eoikos, revealing an "adjustment" of another kind,
different from conformity due to imitation of outward appearance. Beyond
of the simple physical appearance, what eidolon reproduces is identity
of the individual, or, to resume the expression of A. Rivier, the relationship with the
his model, "with the exemplary image of nature that is his own". 12
Of course the body is an element of this identity, but it does not fit into it
in the way a painter would draw the precise portrait; the body is
perceived as a witness of what they are, from the social point of view and
personal, a man or a woman. As an emblem, on which they were written
the qualities, the virtues, the offices of each one, it shows in the eyes of others
status and the rank of an individual, his time, that is what is worth and honors
that must be paid to him. In what we call the physical appearance of a
person, the body appears, for the Greeks, bearer of values: beauty, nobility,
strength, agility, elegance, splendor of the charis. Compliance with these values -
that only the gods possess in their fullness13 and in the body of mortals
they can only shine with a weakened, dimmed, transient brilliance -,
this affinity with respect to a model establishes, for the individual, a first one
form of similarity, resemblance to oneself, adjustment
of "appearing" to what one really is, that is, to what one is worth. 14
This first similarity, by means of which each recognizes the
own identity, it is not a kind of imitation, point by point, but rather
a congruence in relation to a norm, an evaluation in relation to a
exemplary model. Similarity with oneself, therefore, constitutive of identity,
of which the eidolon presents as a duplicate, like the children with respect to the father who,
to generate them, he imprints his model, his tupos, on his wife's womb,
to be "like him", eoikota tekna (Works and Days, 182, 235), or
like Pandora, shaped in the clay by Hephaestus in the guise of a parthe
nos,15 that is, of what it will be when the similarity with itself
will become effective in her; and this female identity that Pandora assumes
 assimilating itself
likeness: for the to theof
beauty model of parthenos,
her young body of ita refers
virgin,in
ofturn to another
her clothes,
of its ornaments, of its crown, for the charis, the power of seduction
that emanates from her, the parthenos is herself "in the image of the immortal goddesses"
( Works and Days, 62).16 So if Pandora can be, at the same time, the
first girl, from which the entire lineage of women descended, and an image
shaped in the form of a parthenos which, as such, is similar to

Page 72

immortal goddesses, we will understand better why in the oldest texts there is not yet
a radical opposition, much less a clean cut, between the identity of
a living creature and the likeness of an effigy created by the expert hand
of a craftsman: the innumerable daidalas, the chases shaped by Hephaestus
all around Pandora's golden diadem «in the image of animals that
they nourish the seas and the earth ", they are all" like living beings "; it's this one
resemblance to flesh-and-blood creatures comes from the fact that, thauma idesthai,
admirable to behold, the jewel prolongs the effect that the person of the virgin
it produces on those who look at it: the infinite charm, charis polle, of which it shines
the diadem mixes and merges with the vital power of beauty and
seduction that, in the image of the immortal goddesses, radiates from the body of the
maiden ( Theogony, 578-584).
Last observation: why a man is fully himself, why
reach his identity in accordance with the authentic type of kalos kagathos,
it is necessary and enough that it appears "similar to the gods", as well as the images that
depict men or animals, to get animated and arouse the same admired
wonder that if they were true, they must appear "similar to living beings". The
parallel between these two similarities goes beyond the simple comparison.
Assimilating a man to the gods means recognizing that, as regards
this character, his figure is perfectly restored in fullness and
in the integrity of the values it must manifest. This restoration of identity
presupposes that the divinity puts us a little of his own, conceding to a mortal
a bit of that grace, that strength and that beauty that I am
the prerogative of the Immortals.
We remember how Athena does because Odysseus appears before Nausicaa
in all his majesty as a hero. Laertes son has already washed himself in the waters of
a river and purified his body, his head and his face from impurities and from
fat that stained his skin; oil oily, it has concealed its nakedness
wrapping himself in his robes placed near him: «And behold, Athena, the daughter of
great Zeus, making him appear taller and stronger, brings him down onto
forehead strands of hair with hyacinth reflections; and as a skilled artist,
instructed by Athena and Hephaestus in all the tricks of the trade, he merges in gold on
silver ( pericheuetai ) a masterpiece of grace ( charien ta erga ), so Athena
poured ( katecheue ) grace on the head and shoulders of Ulysses. He was radiant
of grace and beauty, when he returned to sit aside on the bank of the
sea "( Odyssey, VI, 229-236). The "similarity with the gods" due to
splendor of the charis is poured on the living man, as is the
"Resemblance to living men" is poured from the hand of the skilled craftsman
on the images he shapes.
In contrast, the baseness and unworthiness of a human being transpire in
Page 73

deterioration or even total degradation of his figure. Such as

is this loss of grace expressed? By means of the negation of the
similarity, convenience. In eoikos, eikelos are countered , in negative, by
1 ' aikia, the act of aeikizein: outraging the body of the downed enemy,
abandoning his corpse to dogs and birds, tearing his skin to pieces
tearing the face away, letting it rot and decay, devoured by worms, in
full sun, means trying to bring his figure back to the zero degree of
similarity and decency, to totally destroy his identity and his
value, to reduce it to nothing. Nausicaa, evoking the metamorphosis of Ulysses,
at first horrible, barely awake, then radiant with grace and beauty,
he confides to his servants: «I admit it, that man seemed to me a little while ago
aeikelios, and now theoisi eoike, is similar to the gods "( Odyssey, VI, 242-243). From a
on the other hand, the "resemblance to the gods", which confirms everyone's eyes
noble identity, making you shine with a brightness more than human; on the other, the
no resemblance, indecency which, rejecting you from humanity, reduces you to
a state of non-person.

1 Xoana and the Origin of Greek Sculpture, Scholars Press, Atlanta 1988.
2 Trojan women, 12; Heraclidae, 936-937 ( bretas Dios tropaiou); Fedra, 1250 and 1473.
3 Xoan 'hedumele, fr. 238 Radt.
4 S. Saïd, Deux noms de l'image en grec ancien: idole et icône, «Compte rendus de l'Académie des
Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres ", April-June 1987, pp. 309-330.
5 "It is certainly indisputable that the idol can only be dealt with in the antagonism that it is
undoubtedly unites with the icon ", writes Jean-Luc Marion, Fragments sur idole et l'icône, " Revue
de Métephysique et de Morale »4 (1979), pp. 433-445, here p. 433.
6 S. Saïd, art. cit., p. 322.
7 See JL. Marion, art. cit .: "The look alone makes the idol" (p. 435); «Idol - or point of fall of the
look [...]. When the idol appears, the gaze stops: the idol concretizes this
suspension "(p. 436); "If the idolatrous gaze has no criticism of its idol, it is
because it no longer has the means: its ability to observe culminates in a position that comes
immediately occupied by the idol, in which every possibility of observing is exhausted "(p.
437). And vice versa, on the icon: «While the idol results from the look that points to it, the icon
recalls the view, letting the visible gradually saturate with the invisible [...]. Icon, not of the
visible, but of the invisible, which therefore implies that, although presented by the icon, the invisible remains
invisible "(p. 440); «The icon makes the invisible visible only by causing an infinite look
[...]. The human gaze, instead of fixing the divine in a figmentum, equally impenetrable, not
ceases, contemplated by the icon, to see the tide of the invisible coming "(p. 444).
8 When a god appears at the sight of men with the appearance of a mortal, the term eidolon
it is never used. In this sense, we must distinguish from the problem of image i
problems posed by epiphanies and divine metamorphoses.
9 S. Saïd, art. cit., p. 311, note 12.
10 The eidolon itself can be called obscure, amauros, and divine, theoio, as in the Odyssey, IV,
531. In the Iliad, II, 56, the oneiros perfectly identical to Nestor, who comes to visit
Agamemnon during the divine night is divine, theios. In the cases of phasma and psyche,
belonging to the afterlife is evident, contrary to the case of the dream; in fact, there are dreams that
they are not divine.

Page 74

11 Cf. J.-P. Vernant, Image et appareance dans la théorie platonicienne de la mimésis, «Journal de
Psychologie »2 (1975), pp. 136-175 (reprinted, with the title Naissance d'images, in Religions,
histoires, raisons, Paris 1979, pp. 105-137).
12 A. Rivier, Sur les fragments 34 and 35 de Xénophane, «Revue de Philogie» 30 (1956), pp. 37-61, here
p. 48, note 1. Cited by S. Saïd, art. cit., p. 322.
13 Fullness so intense, so blinding that the human gaze cannot contemplate them. In this sense,
the values reflected by the body are rooted in an invisible afterlife.
14 Saintillan rightly writes: «For a mortal, to come to light, to appear, always means
 to
of assume a semblance
the generation, to the- children
which will then
who become
will have tohis -, a semblance
resemble it "( Lesthat willde
grâces transmit,
Pandora,byunpublished
means of text
presented at the conference in Lille on Hesiod. We thank Daniel Saintillan for sending it to us).
15 Parthenoi [...] ikelon: Works and days, 71; Theogony, 572.
16 Zeus orders Hephaestus to "create, in the image of the immortal goddesses, a beautiful lovely body of a virgin".

Page 75

4
FIGURE OF THE INVISIBLE AND CATEGORY
1
PSYCHOLOGICAL OF THE DOUBLE: THE KOLOSSOS

On the basis of an example, I would like to show how the Greeks have potulo
to translate certain powers of the beyond into a visible form, which belong to the
domain of the invisible.
The nature of these sacred powers appears to be closely linked to their way
 of representation.
symbolic, In religious
it is through forms - symbolism, as in
and with these any species
forms of
- that thought
builds its objects.
The example chosen is that of the kolossos. This word, originally, does not exist
refers to stature, does not designate, as it will do later for accidental reasons,
effigies of gigantic size, «colossal»: in the Greek nomenclature
concerning the statue, very varied and quite fluctuating, as shown
E. Benveniste,2 the term kolossos, of the animated genus of origin
preellenica, it is connected to a root kol-, which can be approached to certain names of
place in Asia Minor (Kolossai, Kolophon, Kolura) and which expresses the idea of
something erect, bristled.3
By this way, the kolossos seems to be able to distinguish itself from other archaic idols - the
bretas, the xoanon - whose appearance is, in many respects, similar (form
sheathed, legs and arms welded to the body). But bretas and xoanon appear
almost always mobile: carried around, in procession, or even kept
directly in the arms of the priest or priestess, they are idols who
one could say "portable". 4 Instead, fixation to the ground, immobility
they define the kolossos in its essence.5 We can represent you below
two forms: either as a statue-pillar, or as a statue-menhir, made of a stone
standing, of a stone slab planted in the ground, and sometimes even buried.
A series of archaeological documents, illuminated by some texts up to
us and concerning the kolossoi, it allows us to specify the function and the values

Page 76

symbolic of these idols.

At Midea (the current Dendra), in a cenotaph of the 13th century BC, one is
found, instead of skeletons, two blocks of stone lying on the ground, one more
large of the other, roughly cut in the shape of quadrangular slabs that
they taper upwards to mark the neck and head of human characters
(a man and a woman).6 Buried in the empty tomb, next to the objects
belonging to the deceased , the kolossos appears as a substitute for the corpse
absent; holds the place of the deceased.
This practice of substitution responds to beliefs that we know well.
When a man, who left for distant lands, seems to have disappeared forever o
when he perished without being able to bring back the corpse, or perform over
he the funeral rites, the deceased - or rather his "double", his psyche - remains
to wander endlessly between the world of the living and that of the dead: what not
it belongs more to the first, and has not yet been relegated to the second.7 Therefore the
its specter conceals a dangerous power, which is manifested by torture in the
against the living.
Replaced to the corpse at the bottom of the sepulcher, the kolossos does not aim to reproduce
the features of the deceased, to give the illusion of his physical appearance. What
it embodies and fixes in the stone is not the image of the dead, but his life
in the afterlife, that life that is opposed to that of the living as the world of
night to the world of light. The kolossos is not an image; is a "double",
as the dead man himself is a double of the living.
However, the kolossos is not always relegated to the night of the sepulcher. There
bare stone can also stand up to light, above the empty tomb, in a
secluded and deserted place, which its wildness votes to the infernal powers.
It is so in Fliunte, on the cenotaph of Aras and his sons; so in Lebadea, where, in
a wood that no human hand had ever touched, a stone slab,
without inscription or figure, it surmounted the Agamede pit: in the opening of the
 bothros, Trophonios had disappeared, swallowed up in the depths of the earth. There
rituals of evoking the dead were celebrated: the libations were poured on the stele
prescribed, the blood of a black ram was made to flow; then, three times, i
bystanders called the dead by name, with eyes fixed on the stone, on the
which was believed to have reappeared.8
So the same square stone that, at Midea, was used to isolate the dead
from the living, relegating him forever to his subterranean abode, he can equally
allow, when erected to the surface of the ground, to establish contact with
he. Through the kolossos, the dead dates back to daylight and manifests to the
eyes of the living its presence. Unusual and ambiguous presence which is also the
sign of an absence: giving himself to see on the stone, the dead reveals himself to the

Page 77

same time as not belonging to this world.

In Selinunte a whole piece of land, outside the walls, was devoted to the powers
afterlife. 9 Inside a fence, set against the peribolus of Zeus
Meilichios, Hell Zeus, 10 a large number of stones, roughly
cut into the shape of a human face, male and female, they were driven into the earth. On
these kolossoi, that the Selinuntini planted in their field of the dead and where
they also laid, together with the meals due to the dead, tabulae
defixionum entrusted to the underground deities, two inscriptions found in Cyrene ci
provide the necessary clarifications.
The first is the text of the sacred law on welcoming the supplicants who have come
from abroad.11 If the person from whom the suppliant declares himself protected is dead,
in his country or in another place, and if the landlord, who welcomes at
of himself the suppliant to grant him his protection now, knows the name of the
principal, he invokes him by name for three consecutive days. If you don't know
the identity of the principal, pronounce the formula: "Human, man or woman who you
is. " He produces kolossoi, one of a man, the other a woman, of wood or of
earth, he receives them at his table and serves them a part of all the food; having
so put in order with the anonymous deceased who sent him the supplicant, the
landlord sends him away from his home and sends him back to the universe of gods
dead: having performed the hospitality ritual, he takes the kolossoi and food portions there
leads into an uncut forest, where it plants the kolossoi in the soil.
The second inscription reproduces the text of the oath that guarantees the
reciprocal obligations of the settlers who leave for Africa, for Cyrene, and gods
fellow citizens who remain in the metropolis of Tera.12 This oath took place
practice in the following way: kolossoi are made of wax this time, and there
he throws himself into the fire, pronouncing the formula: "Let him melt and disappear
that he, his lineage and his possessions will be unfaithful to this oath ".
During both rituals, the kolossos carries out the transition between the world
of the living and of the dead. But, depending on the case, this step takes place
in one sense or another: now it is the dead that are made present to the universe of gods
alive, now the living are projecting themselves into death. In the ritual of
supplicants, in fact, it is a question of establishing with an unknown dead man or man
woman who is - a bond of hospitality: as in the evocation rites, the psyche,
yielding to the call repeated three times, it goes back to the light and becomes present in the
kolossos that fixes it inside the house; finished the common meal,
the presence of the dead moves away, planting the kolossos in the land of a forest
uncultivated, symbol of the other world down here. In the case of the oath, it is
instead for the living to irrevocably vote for death in the case of perjury:
through the kolossoi, who represent them in the form of "double", those who
Page 78

they swear they throw themselves into the fire; it is their vital and social being that they are
liquefies and disappears in advance in the invisible. 13
However, in both cases the kolossos appears, as "double",
associated with psyche; it is one of the forms that can cover the psyche, power
of the afterlife, when it becomes visible to the eyes of the living.
Thus , for the Greeks, kolossos and psyche are closely related. They
they belong to a clearly defined category of phenomena, to which one is
applies the term eidola and which includes, in addition to this shadow which is the
psyche and to this gross idol which is the kolossos, of the realities like
the image of the "dream" ( oneiros ), the "shadow" (skia) and the "apparition
supernatural »( phasma).14 The unity of these phenomena, which are for us so
disparate, comes from the fact that, in the cultural context of archaic Greece, they
they are grasped in the same way by the mind and are meaningful
analogous: therefore one has the right to speak, in their regard, of a true category
psychological, the "double" category, which presupposes an organization
mental different from ours. A "double" is something quite different
an image. It is not a "natural" object, but it is not even one
mental product: neither an imitation of a real object, nor an illusion of
nor a creation of thought. The double is a reality external to the
subject, but which, in its very appearance, is opposed, due to its character
unusual, to familiar objects, to the ordinary scenario of life. It yes
moves on two contrasting planes at a time: the moment in which it is shown
present, it reveals itself as something that is not from here, as belonging to a
inaccessible elsewhere.
It is thus, for example, in the case of the Eidolon of Patroclus, which Achilles sees
stand up before him when he falls asleep at the end of a long night of
lamentation in which, watching alone, with a soul invaded by pathos - from
"Nostalgic desire" of the absent -, did not cease to call to the
memory the memory of his friend. The eidolon is standing above the head
of Achilles lying, as happens in the case of the "dream", of the oneiros; but it is, in
reality, the psyche of Patroclus. What Achilles sees in front of him is Patroclus
in person: his stature, his eyes, his voice, his body and his clothes.
However, when he wants to hug him, eidolon proves elusive: he is a
smoke, which disappears under the ground, with a little cry, like a bat. 15
There is therefore in eidolon an effect of deceit, of disappointment, of
" Enticement ", apate: it is the presence of the friend, but it is also his
irremediable absence; is Patroclus himself, but also a breath, a smoke,
a shadow or the flutter of a bird.16
The archaeological and epigraphic documents we have mentioned have put

Page 79

in light the "double" aspects of the kolossos and its links with a reality
like the psyche, that the fact of belonging simultaneously to the world
 visible and beyond it necessarily makes ambiguous.
A text from Aeschylus Agamemnon confirms that the kolossos must be
located in the psychological context of the experience of the double and that i
meanings of the idol-menhir, on the religious plane, depend precisely on the
the fact that it is grasped by the Greeks in this category of the double. The choir
sings the palace of Menelaus, deserted by Elena who left in her footsteps
Lover.17 Never has the presence of this woman weighed so severely on
this dwelling as from when he left it: for the power of pathos, of the
love nostalgia that Menelaus feels for the one who is far away, the ghost of
Elena does not stop attending the house; and does it under three double forms, alle
which the choir refers to successively. First it's the phasma, which
now it seems to reign over the palace instead of the missing bride. Then we talk
of kolossoi, a term that quite rightly C. Picard translates as «figurines of
substitution »: these figurines are used by loving magic to evoke
the absent, as they are in the funeral rites to summon the dead. 18 Finally we talk
of dream figures ( oneirophantoi ), which arise during sleep. All
these "double", substitutes for Menelaus of the bride, have no other effect than
that of making his emptiness more sensitive and more unbearable
absence: they lack what makes Elena a real woman: the charis, lo
splendor, the radiance of life. Ghost, kolossos or nocturnal dream, i
eidola di Elena bring to the groom the disappointment of a presence that always is
subtracts and shows itself only to escape. In the double of the beloved woman, below
the seductive mask of Aphrodite, is the elusive Persephone that shines through. 19
One could comment on the text of Aeschylus with the verses that Euripides - almost
in the form of pastiche - dedicated to the same theme in the Alcesti. Alcestis yes
he is about to descend into hell. Her husband, Admeto, whose life she redeemed a
the price of his own death, he swears to remain forever inconsolable and
not to know any other woman: it is with Alcestis who will continue to unite
every night, in a dream. He will also make an effigy of her, which she will lie on
bed, she will stretch out beside her and embrace her, calling the name of her beloved:
in this way he will be able to believe that he is holding his wife, who is present although absent:
καίπερ οὐκ ἔχων ἔχειν. 20
In this singular trade, his "soul" ( psyche ) undoubtedly
he will try, instead of warm pleasure, only "cold voluptuousness" ( psychron): and that
what is the psyche itself if not a cold shadow?21
These words of Admetus evoke a legend that Euripides knew
well and that had inspired another tragedy: the Protesilaus. Dead close to

Page 80

Troy, in faraway land, without his body being returned home,

Protesilaus left an inconsolable widow. In the version of the story
which gives Apollodoro, 22 the bride, named Laodamia, models an eidolon of the
husband and every night has trade with this "double"; as long as the gods have
have pity on her and put off, for a while, the psyche of Protesilaus next to
wife alive. In the version of Igino 23 the figurine made by Laodamia is
of wax. The father, who surprised his daughter's night-time gearing, orders
throw the effigy into the fire. Laodamia throws itself in its turn to follow
Protesilaus in the afterlife. The two versions of the myth will recognize the double
orientation already observed in the rituals practiced in Cyrene, depending on the
matter of the kolossoi. But, be it of stone or wax, make it go back to light
of the day the shadow of the dead or send among the shadows those who live at
light, the kolossos always realizes, as "double", the connection of the living
 with the infernal world.
However, there is a difficulty: how can a stone, modeled and
placed by the hand of man, to have a meaning of "double" that the
it relates to uncontrollable and mysterious psychic phenomena like the figure
of dream or supernatural appearance? Where does the fact that a slab comes from?
of stone, roughly cut, can, under certain conditions, appear
also doubled, ambiguous, with a face turned towards the invisible? In what
what the kolossos contrasts so strongly with the world of the living to seem
insert in the terrestrial scenario, in which it was raised, not just a stone,
a familiar object, but the very power of death, in what it is
Does it involve unusual and terrifying? The answer must be sought in
religious representations that give to the world view of the Greeks,
through the play of correspondences and oppositions that they
they establish its specific characteristics among the various aspects of reality. Like every
sign, the kolossos refers to a general symbolic system, from which it is not
can separate. It is only within this mental organization
overall that it may appear in close affinity with death and with
dead.
We emphasize some aspects of this relationship. We note first that
the oath, which acts by voting those who swear by the infernal powers,
it can be done, in Greece, with the simple contact with a raw stone: it is sworn
"On the stone".24 We also remember that it is the head of the Gorgon that Persephone
sends an encounter to those who claim to enter the realm of the living
dead: the Gorgon, magical instrument of death that changes to stone those who
they look at it. 25 May death appear as a petrification of the living
results from a series of clues: Pindar does not use the expression lithinos thanatos,
"Stone death"? 26 No doubt the transformation of the living body,

Page 81

lithe, animated and warm in a rigid, mute and icy corpse allows
at first glance these symbolic relationships. But we need to identify
more precisely, each of the characters which, by opposing term to term
life and death, define one in relation to the other and delimit it
respectively the fields.
In contrast to the sonorous world of voices, cries and songs, death is,
first, the universe of silence. Certain priestesses dedicated to rituals
funerals, in which all music is forbidden, bear the name of Silent. 27
Animate a statue, made of stone or earth, give life after modeling it -
as in the case of Hermes who animates Pandora or living statues in service
of Hephaestus - it is to put in it a "voice", a phone.28 Therefore Theognis,
Summoning the moment when it will be underground, devoid of life, he writes that it will be ὣστε
λίθος ἂφθογγος, "like a stone without a voice". 29 Against the stones
metal rings that resonate when beaten, such as bronze, or pottery
that crackles in the oven when it is cooked, are considered as animated and
alive, because they escape the common silence of silent stones. Even the cold
of stone is related to death. In opposition to the heat of the living, the
psyche evokes the "cold", psychron.
As hard, arid and rigid, the stone may appear to be drying
of the living, which is rich in humor, supple, full of sap as long as it is in the flower
age. Already old age is, for the Greeks, a drying out: the young man is similar to one
plant, full of juice in its greenery, but which becomes dry and withers
over time. A gloss of Hesychius comments the word alibantes with the two
terms nekroi and kolossoi: the "dried up" are the dead, the kolossoi. 30 Moreover,
 the psychai of the dead are thirsty. Only watering them with the different liqueurs of
life you can bring them to light by giving them back for a brief moment,
together with memory and thought, a vague reflection of ancient vitality.
But the fundamental opposition is that of the visible and the invisible. There
death, Haides, is precisely the "invisible" ( Haides ) and that which the Greeks
they call the "Haides helmet", the kyne, confers invisibility. The dead are
heads "dressed at night". Now, for a sort of reciprocity between the faculty of
see and the property of being visible - both closely related to light
of the day -, the disappearance of the living outside the luminous universe and his
entry into the world of the night can also be expressed with the image
of its transformation into a block of blind stone. Contrary to the
precious stone, which is alive because it sparkles, because it reflects light or is left behind
entirely penetrate from it,31 the block of dull and opaque stone, the kolossos
"From the empty eyes" of which Aeschylus speaks, 32 may appear as representative of the
world of the night.

Page 82

Between the psyche of the dead, invisible mist, dark shadow, and stone, form
visible but opaque and blind, there is an affinity that comes from their common
opposition to the bright field of life, characterized by the binomial see-
to be seen. 33
The stone and the psyche of the dead also contrast with the living man, the
first for its fixity, the second for its elusive mobility. The man
vivo moves upright on the surface of the soil, always remaining in contact
with the earth through the soles of the feet. The kolossos, stuck in the ground, planted
in the depth of the soil, it remains fixed in immobility. The gloss of Hesychius
that we have mentioned has sometimes been read replacing alibantes with abantes,
"Who do not walk": the kolossoi are, in the strict sense, those who do not
they can spread their legs to walk. The psyche, on the other hand, yes
moves without touching the ground: flutters under the ground, perpetually mobile and
elusive. Kolossos and psyche therefore oppose man's gait
alive as the two extreme positions in relation to the median condition:
rooting in the earth ( kolossos ) - contact with the soil surface (man
alive) - no contact with the earth ( psyche); total immobility ( kolossos) -
progressive shift to subsequently occupy a series of positions
on the surface of the soil, finding the same individual at all times in
one point and one (living man) - presence at the same time more
places across the whole space ( psyche ). But, on this level of mobility,
the link between the kolossos and the psyche does not derive only from the fact that they
they are, as extremes, closer to each other, under certain relationships than to
average position represented by the living man;34 the antithetical traits appear, in
this case, as an expression of that complementary bond that the ritual
of the kolossos has precisely the function of establishing with the psyche:
sticking the stone in the soil you want to fix, immobilize, locate in
a definite point of the earth this elusive psyche, which is at the same time
everywhere and nowhere.
The history of Actaeon is, in this respect, significant. Actaeon was dead
without burial and his eidolon, his spectrum, he began to torture in various ways
the population. The oracle of Delphi is consulted and he commands to do
an effigy of Actaeon and to attach it with iron chains to the very stone on which
the presence of the ghost was manifested. The inhabitants obey: the statue
it is erected and chained. And the soul of Actaeon, now fixed, ceases to
 persecute men. 35
You can see clearly, based on this example that belongs to an era in which
the human figure has replaced the rough stone, which was originally the value
operating of the kolossos: it serves to attract and fix a double which is found
in abnormal conditions; it allows to restore, between the world of the dead and the

Page 83

world of the living, correct relationships. The kolossos possesses this virtue of
fixation because it is itself ritually confined to earth. It is not
therefore a simple figurative sign. Its function is at a time of
translate the power of the dead into a visible form and insert it,
in accordance with the order, in the universe of the living. The plastic sign is not
separable from the rite; does not cover all its meanings except through the
ritual procedures it is subject to.36 The sign is "acted" by man and closes
itself an active force. It has an effective virtue. In the kolossos the figuration
of the power of the dead, the active manifestations of this power, the
regulation of his relations with the living man go hand in hand.
Finally, the last point: for its "double" character and its function
As a mediator between two opposing worlds, the kolossos presents, as a sign,
of the aspects of tension and how of oscillation: in it comes to the fore
now the visible aspect, now the invisible aspect. We know what the fate of the
kolossos: the Greeks soon forgot the affinity of the stone
funerary with the dead, in order not to preserve any more, in it, nothing but his own
visible form; in the stele, raised on a cenotaph or on a sepulcher, they do not
they have seen more than just a mnema, a sign destined to recall
the memory of a deceased in memory of the living. But sometimes it turns out to be a
different attitude: when the ritual libations were scattered, the ram
black slaughtered and, three times, the officiants call the dead by name, is
truly the "double" that is seen rising above the sepulcher.37 Nello
wild scenery in which a rough stone is raised, rooted in the soil, is
the aspect of infernal power to manifest itself, in the eyes of the living, under the figure
of the kolossos. Perhaps here we touch on a problem that surpasses very widely
the case of the kolossos and which responds to one of the essential characteristics of the sign
religious. The religious sign does not present itself as a simple instrument of
thought, does not aim only to evoke sacred power in the minds of men
to which he refers, but he also always wants to establish a true communication
with it, to really insert its presence in the human universe. But,
thus trying to throw a sort of bridge towards the divine, he must do the same
time to emphasize the distance, to blame the incommensurability between the power
sacred and everything that manifests it - necessarily inadequately -
in the eyes of men. In this sense the kolossos is a good example of the
tension that lies within the religious sign and that gives it its own
own size. For its operational and effective function, the kolossos has
the ambition to establish a real contact with the afterlife, to realize it
presence down here. However, in this same attempt, he emphasizes what
the afterlife of death implies, for the living, of inaccessible, of mysterious, of
fundamentally different.

Page 84
 1 Text presented at the interview on "The sign and the systems of signs" organized by the Center de recherches
de psychologie comparative, Royaumont, 12-15 April 1962.
2 E. Benveniste, Le sens du mot κολοσσός et les noms grecs de la statue, «Revue de Philologie»,
1932, pp. 118-35; cfr. also P. Chantraine, Grec κολοσσός, «Bulletin de the Institut Français
Oriental Archeology », 1930, pp. 449-455.
3 See G. Roux, Qu'est ce qu'un κολοσσός ?, «Revue des Etudes Anciennes», 1960, pp. 5-40.
4 The xoanon of Artemis Orthia, in Sparta, is held by the priestess during the ceremony of
flagellation of children: the idol is small and light (Pausanias, III 16.10-11). The xoanon of
Tethys, whom his priestess Kleo carries on herself, secretly from Messenia to Sparta, must not be
bigger or heavier state (Pausanias, III 14.4). The same can be noted for the Hera bretas , a
Samo, whose robbery per rat was mimed each year and the subsequent finding in a bush
baskets near the shore (Athenaeum XV 672).
5 See G. Roux, Qu'est ce qu'un κολοσσός? cit., and S. Broc, L'Hermès d'Héron et le nom de l'Hermes
en grec, «Revue des Etudes Grecques», 1963, pp. 39-51.
6 AW Persson, The Royal Tombs at Dendra near Midea, Lund 1931, pp. 73-108; MP Nilsson, The
Minoan-Mycenaean Religion and its Survival in Greck Religion, Lund 1950, pp. 600 ff .; cfr. in
part. Charles Picard, Le cénotaphe de Midéa et les colosses de Ménélas, «Revue de Philologie»,
1933, pp. 343-354 and Les religions préhelléniques, Paris 1948, pp. 269 ff. and 291. Statue-menhir
similar to those of Midea they were found in Thera, in a tomb, and in Atchana, near one
city gate.
7 See Iliad XXIII 70 ff.
8 See P. Guillon, La stèle d'Agamédès, «Revue de Philologie», 1936, pp. 209-235. More so
general, on the relationships between the funerary stele and the kolossos, cf. E. van Hall, Over den Oorsprong van
de Grieksche grafstele, Amsterdam 1942. On the ritual value of epiklesis, of the triple call of
died by name, when it comes to a deceased whose body is missing, E. Rohde writes:
"The soul of those who died in a foreign land must be called; if the call turns them over
from the friend it is made according to the rites, it forces the soul to follow him to his homeland, where one awaits him
"Empty tomb" », 5-6 ( Psyche. Seelencult und Unsterblichkeitsglaube der Griechen (1890-1894), 2
vol., Mohr, Tübingen 1910, here vol. 1, p. 66 [tr. en. by E. Codignola and A. Oberdorfer, Psyche. Cult
of souls and faith in immortality among the Greeks, preface by S. Givone, Laterza, Rome-Bari
2006]).
9 See Charles Picard, Le rituel des suppliants trouvé à Cyrène et le champ des "colossoi" à
Sélinonte, «Revue Archéologique» 11 (1936), pp. 206-207.
10 At Lebadea dedications have been found to Zeus Meilichios on herms surmounted by cones
onphaloids, which can be combined with Selinunte cippi. The Zeus Meilichios of Sicione was
depicted by a rough stone, in the shape of a pyramid (Pausanias, II 9.6). On the symbolism of Zeus
Meilichios see Charles Picard, Sanctuaires et symboles de Zeus Meilichios, «Revue de l'Histoire
des Religions », 1943, pp. 97-127.
11 SEG, IX, 72: F. Sokolowski, Lois sacrées des cités grecques, supplément, Paris 1962, n. 115; cfr. there
translation and commentary by J. Servais, Les suppliants dans la loi de Cyrène, «Bulletin de
Correspondance Hellénique », 1960, pp. 112-147.
12 SEG, IX, 3; cfr. F. Chamoux, Cyrène sous the monarchy des Battiades, Paris 1954, pp. 105 ff .;
Louis Gernet, Droit et prédroit en Gréce ancienne, "L'Année Sociologique", series III (1948-
1949), Paris 1951, pp. 65-66.
13 L. Gernet writes (p. 66): «If something is accomplished immediately by combustion, it is
that immediately the contractor is also engaged by his "double" ». The ritual of the figurines
of burnt wax is found in an Aramaic treatise of vassalage that can be dated to 754 BC:
cfr. A. Dupont-Sommer, Trois stables araméennes provenant de Sfiré: a traité de vassalité du VIII
siècle avant J.-C., «Les Annales Archéologiques de Syrie. Revue d'Archéologie et d'Histoire ", 10,
1960, pp. 21-54. The juxtaposition of the Aramaict and Greek texts, which are clarified with each other, is
made by Charles Picard, Le rite magique des εἴδωλα de cire brulés attesté sur trois stèles

Page 85

araméennes de Sfiré, «Revue Archéologique», 1961, pp. 85-87.

14 As T. Zielinski, De Helenae simulacro, "Eos" 30 (1927), pp. 54-81. On other forms
of eidola see E. Monseur, L'âme pupilline, «Revue de l'Histoire des Religions», 1905, pp. 1-2.3;
W. Déonna, L'âme pupilline et quelques monuments figurés, «Antiquité Classique», 1957, pp. 59-
90; J. Bayet, idéologie et plastique. L'expression des énergies divines dans le monnayage des
Grecs, "Mélanges d'Archeologie et d'Histoire (Ecole Française de Rome)" 1959, pp. 65-106.
15 Iliad XXIII 59-107.
16 The psyche is sometimes called smoke, kapnos, or shadow, skia, or dream, oneiros.
17 Aeschylus, Agamemnon 410-26.
18 Picard, Le cénotaphe de Midéa et les colosses de Ménélas cit., Pp. 343-354. Roux, Qu'est ce qu'un
 κολοσσός? cit., proposes, of this passage from the Agamemnon, a different interpretation, which does not
it seems to us to take into account a context in which the "double" theme returns almost obsessively. Yes
remember, moreover, that Elena's character is naturally associated, in the eyes of the Greeks, with
"double" theme. It is known that there is not one Elena, but two. The one that Paride had kidnapped, though
which was fought under the walls of Troy, was not the real Helen, but a ghost of her, an eidolon
modeled by Zeus, or Era, or Proteus. The real Elena, according to Stesicoro, had been transported to
Egypt (Plato, Republic 586b; Fedro 243a); but it was also said that she was there
on the White Island, living in the midst of constant feasts, in the place of stay of the blessed: see V.
Pisani, Elena and the εἴδωλον, "Journal of Philology and Classical Education", 1928, pp. 481 ff.
19 To the absence of Elena - manifested by the presence of ghostly rooms in the palace - corresponds
the absence of Greek warriors - manifested, in every house in mourning, by the presence, instead of the
men who have seen themselves alive, of urns filled with vain ashes: "But in all the houses, from which of the
warriors left far from the Greek land, mourning reigns overwhelming for each of them. A
obsessive thinking hurts hearts. The faces of those who have seen themselves leave are remembered; but instead of
men, they are urns, ashes, which return to every house "( Agamemnon 429-435).
20 Euripides, Alcesti 342 ff.
21 Ivi, 353-354. In its romantic and purely profane form, the story of the Alcid eidolon
perhaps it preserves the memory of pre-Hellenic funeral rites, such as the practice of placing in the tomb of the
female figurines, analogous in their form to the kolossoi and who have the role of
"Concubines of the dead", in the Egyptian manner (Herodotus, II 129-132). See Charles Picard, Les
"Colossoi" de Dorak (Anatolie du Nord ), "Revue Archéologique", 1960, pp. 106-108; E. Dhorme,
Rituel funéraìre assyrien, "Revue d'Archéologie Orientale", 1941, pp. 57-66; M. Rutten, Idole ou
substitut, «Archiv Orientalni», 1949, pp. 307-309; C. Desroches-Noblecourt, «Concubines du
mort »et mères de famille au Moyen-Empyre, BIFAO, 1953, pp. 7-47.
22 Apollodorus III 30.
23 Hyginus, Fables 104.
24 Pausanias, VIII 15.2; Aristotle, Constitution of Athens VII 1 and LV 5; cfr. Gernet, Droit et prédroit en
Gréce ancienne cit., P. 68.
25 Odyssey XI 634-635. It is also a stone which, at the confluence of the two infernal rivers, marks
the entrance to the house of Hades ( Odyssey X 515).
26 Pindar, Pitiche X 48. Stones are sometimes called the bones of the earth: Ovid, Metamorphosis I
1350; Schol. in Apollonius Rodius, III 1086. Cf. also Pausanias, IX 16.7 and Br. Hist. Gr., I, 82,
Müller.
27 The cult of the Semnai in Athens was to be performed in silence. It was entrusted to one
guild of priestesses, the Hesychides, so called from the name of the founder of the cult,
Hesychos, the Silent: Schol. in Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus 489; J. Harrison, Prolegomena to the
Study of Greek Religion, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1903, pp. 243 ff.
28 Hesiod, Works 79; Iliad XVIII 419.
29 Theognides, 569.

Page 86

30 See G. Roux, Qu'est ce qu'un κολοσσός? cit .; C. Lawson, Περὶ ἀλιβάντων, «Classical Review»,
1926, pp. 52-58; G. Pugliese Carratelli, Ταρχύω, "Archivio Glottologico Italiano", XXXIX, 1954,
pp. 78-82.
31 For the Greeks the charis does not emanate only from the woman, or from every human being in general, whose youth
beauty makes the body (in particular the eyes) "shine" with a splendor that causes love; it
it also emanates from chiseled jewels, from worked gems and from some precious fabrics: the sparkle of the
metal, the reflection of stones from different waters, the polychromy of the texture, the variety of the
colorful designs depicting, in more or less stylized forms, a plant decoration and
animal that directly recalls the powers of life: everything contributes to doing work
of goldsmith's art and the product of weaving a sort of concentrate of bright light, from which it radiates
charis.
32 Aeschylus, Agamemnon 418. To the "emptiness of the eyes" of which Aeschylus speaks for Elena's kolossos
replies the formula of Callimachus concerning Tiresias, which Athena makes blind for having seen that
that no man should see: "The night took its eyes" ( Lavacri of Pallas 82).
The juxtaposition is perhaps even closer: when the goddess takes away his sight and the light of
sun, Tiresias «ἐστάθηδ'ἄφθογγος, ἐκόλλασαν γὰρ ἀνῖαι γώνατα, καὶ φωνὰν ἔσχεν ἀμηχανία»: upright,
without eyes, voiceless, motionless (legs together), Tiresias himself becomes a sort of
kolossos, image of death among the living. He will have his revenge with the dead: in the midst of the
inconsistent shadows, will be the only one to preserve the phrenes and the noos, their own sense and knowledge
of the living ( Odyssey X 493). Like the kolossos, the soothsayer belongs both to the world of the living and to
that of the dead. The image of the "blind seer" translates precisely this ambiguity.
33 A passage from the Iliad clearly illustrates this dialectic of the visible and the invisible. To
Aulis, before leaving, the Greeks make sacrifices at the foot of a plane tree. Suddenly
a terrible omen appears: Zeus calls to light a snake, which flickers from under an altar and yes
falls on a brood of sparrows, which devours with their mother. Immediately after, "the god, who
he had made it appear, removed it from the eyes (literally: it makes it invisible); in fact the son of
Kronos changed it to stone "( Iliad II 318-319). The affinities of the serpent, chthonic animal, are known
 with the world of the dead, and in this case with the psyche. Turning it into stone, Zeus, who had it
for a moment called to the light, it returns it to the invisible.
34 A comparison, in the Iliad, underlines this link between the psyche's and its own mobility
fixity of the funerary stele. The horses of Achilles, beasts of the infernal world, as fast as the wind, yes
they immobilize all of a sudden, as a sign of mourning for Patroclus, in the image of death. "Such as
a stele remains motionless, once erected on the grave of a dead woman or man, so they
they remained there, motionless, with their heads glued to the ground "( Iliad XVII 434 ff.; see also XIX 405). THE
Achilles horses, fruit of the union of the god Zephyrus and the Arpia Podarge, the fast, belong
to the category of kidnapping demons that make the living disappear without a trace (see Rohde,
Psyche cit., Vol. 1, pp. 72-73). These invisible and elusive wind spirits that move
without touching the ground, they become - when they immobilize themselves and take root in a point on the ground - gods
images of the stele, in the same way that the stele is their counterpart to one another
property.
35 Pausanias, IX, 38.5.
36 This inseparability of the plastic sign and the ritual act appears very clearly in the case of the
kolossoi from Midea. The two quadrangular plates carry, on one of their faces, a series of
bowls dug into the stone to receive nourishment for the dead, certainly the
panspermia. The "idols" are also offering tables.
37 Thus, for example, the shadow of Darius, ritually evoked, appears in the eyes of the queen and gods
Persians "above the crown that crowns his tomb" (Aeschylus, The Persians 659).

Page 87

5
THE PLASTIC SYMBOL

1. Symbolism and figuration

As announced in the inaugural lecture, we chose to concentrate the

our teaching, over the next few years, on the subject of symbolism
religious considered in its plastic aspects. Our investigation therefore concerns
on the different forms of figurative expression of the powers of the beyond, on the way
in which they are presented in the eyes of the faithful.
Why this general theme? And what justifies the use of the example
Greek to illustrate the interest? Defining the big pictures of our research
and its aims, we have provided answers to both questions.
We tend today because of the advantage obtained by linguists in the field of
human sciences, to pose the problem of the symbol in terms of language
and to address it through linguistic models. The myth thus finds itself to be
projected at the center of the reflection on symbolism, and the debates produced by
his interpretation have remained almost enclosed within the camp
of linguistic realities. When the validity of the
structural linguistics schemes to explain processes and effects
symbolic, it was done to search in the discourse, at the level of the utterances, this
that the syntax and semantics seemed to be incapable of bringing about: yes it is
 asked rhetoric - a rhetoric of figures - to provide the basis for a theory
general capable of founding the difference between a symbolic proposition and
another one. Dan Sperber, who has traveled this route more than others, wondered if
all this did not amount to reducing the symbolic to the minutes and depriving oneself of means
to understand the facts of figuration and ritual. Your negative answer
does not seem convincing to us: in addition to an explicit rhetoric, he admits, in
case of a symbol expressed in a figure or mimed in a rite, a kind of
implicit rhetoric, a chain of propositions unfolding in the depths of a
subject and constituents, at the level of thought, a sort of commentary
propositional of what is visually perceived or gestually

Page 88

performed. This double verbal - or at least propositional - of which one is

presupposes the presence implicit in the spirit of both the silent viewer
as for the silent actor, and without which neither the perceived figure nor the act
product may make no sense, implies the problem of specificity
of different languages, in particular plastic language, and heterogeneity
of the multiple types of symbolism. Understanding a painting, deciphering a work
musical, does it mean to elaborate a glossary? There are perhaps no plans of the
symbolism that escapes what we might call "logic
propositional "? The paradoxicality of Sperber's position seems obvious
in the assimilation that he is forced to operate between the belief and a figure
stylistics; certainly, the figure is given as a simple way of saying, while the
belief is placed as true, but the difference would be reduced, second
Sperber, to the fact that, in the case of the figure, the symbolism is explicit, while
in the case of belief it would exist only in an unconscious manner. This
nevertheless, as soon as one places oneself, as he does, in the thought of the subject,
in the perspective of his mental operations, it is not clear what he is
it could consist of an unconscious symbolic signification: how one
proposition or conceptual representation can be placed between
brackets, that is extracted from the encyclopedic knowledge (to resume the formulas of
Sperber), when the subject, to the extent that he believes in it, treats them as
a part of the encyclopedia? But above all, for the one who believes in it, not
only it does not exist and no mass can exist in brackets, but, al
contrary, propositions or symbolic figures, far from being brought back
also implicitly to ways of speaking, to stylistic figures, they constitute what
there is more real, more full, more effective.
In short, the theory of symbolism that is proposed to us today is
general only to the extent that, favoring a particular language -
the written or oral word -, elevates it to the condition of every form of language in
every moment of history. This universalization of a language
particular is inscribed in a precise cultural context: it goes hand in hand with the
clear awareness, through linguistics, of the "artificial" character of the
language phenomena, defined as human communication facts
interindividual.
It should be noted, in this regard, the great change of approach to the
symbolism that occurred in less than two centuries. For Friedrich Creuzer,
one of the founders of the symbolist school in religions
of antiquity, there is no other authentic form of the religious symbol or, as
he writes, of the divine symbol, that the figurative representation of the god, his
plastic image. Only a concrete, sensitive, concise image
delimited, can allow us to embrace with a single look, an intuitu, the
presence of what, as divine, escapes the limitations of the concrete, of the
Page 89

sensitive, of the finite. The symbol is the Idea that manifests itself immediately in the
sensitive through a form in which it seems that the divinity is revealed in
person. In the figurative image the whole is shown in an instant. To the
contrary, in the allegory, of which the myth constitutes a species, it is necessary
"Go through a series of moments that follow one another". The myth is therefore in
second position with respect to the image. Forced to spell over time,
piece by piece, what the plastic form offers to the whole vision
the presence of all the parts, the myth is nothing but a by-product, one
symbolic derivative, deviated, the indefinite commentary of the divine figures that,
in their plastic evidence, they are external to the comment.
This conviction of a symbolic pre-eminence of the figured image on the
speech is echoed by a character like Cassirer who nevertheless prepares,
in many respects, the contemporary problematic of symbolism in myths.
Cassirer does not particularly deal with figurative facts as such.
But in the passages in which he faces the problem, he expresses himself in terms that
curiously they recall Creuzer's formulas on the divine image as
tension of the infinite and the finite, incarnation of the Idea in a form
sensitive. The representation of a god, observes Cassirer, contains two
distinct feelings; she absolutely does not want to be taken for a vernacular
copy, instead intends to capture the god in his immediate living presence: «It is
the god himself who takes shape and acts in it ". But, on the other hand, this
the presence of the divine is also a particular, limited representation, a
"Here and now" which refers to something that belongs to the order of everywhere
and forever. The divine image has a symbolic value because it renders
present a being in a form that this being goes beyond and each time
surpasses; the being that most directly manifests itself in the image, in the
at the very moment in which it is revealed to you, it also makes it appear as limited,
occasional, insufficient and partial.
For Cassirer, as for Creuzer, one of the characteristic features of the symbol
religious consists in its ambition to open access to a reality that is
it would be more than manifesting, performing, actually inserting into the world
visible, which to represent. Linguistics, to become a discipline
scientific, it must delimit its object and reserve its analysis to the suns
aspects of the sign that depend on the human fact of language: the signifier and
the meaning. The referent is excluded from the scope of language, to which he does not
it belongs, since it is in "nature". The religious symbol implies presence
in itself the referent, placed as a power of a certain type, a power that is
exercises in a defined area. In this sense the religious symbolism is wanted
divine language more than human language. It is the divine power that
it communicates with men through symbols or, rather, it is being, the real
that is caught in its depth as a language, a language understood as

Page 90

that mediating element by which being manifests itself to men

in the form of power or order.
To illustrate a situation of this kind, in which «the meaning and the referent
they are never differentiated [...] and where the only really true word is that
 that says the real without making the speaking subject intervene in any way ", ci
we are based on the thesis of Madeleine Biardeau, Théorie de la connaissance et
philosophie de la parole dans le brahmanisme classique, Paris 1964, of which yes
will find a summary, under the title "Théories du langage en Inde", in La
traversée des signes. Next to the Vedic example, which constitutes a case
limit since the text recited orally is considered not created, without
origin, without author, self-composed and self-composed, to the point of appearing in
so eternal as the world and coextensive with reality, we have examined
some aspect of the poetic image and the figurative expression, on the one hand,
within a graphic civilization, the Chinese, on the other, in a culture in which
there is a transition from the oral to the written, that of archaic Greece.
We want to show how, in archaic Greek poetry, organization
rhythmic, phonetic, semantic, aims to produce an effect on the public which
prolongs the action of the power celebrated by song. The symbolic value of the
archaic poetry procedures consists in the fact that the verbal image, much
as the figurative representation, it does not work as a simple copy,
a tracing or an analogon; it is instead effective; offers to
listeners the impression that, through expressions evoking a definite
kind of power, this particular force is found to be actually
mobilized, that it unfolds, through the performance of the poetic text,
to carry out the work that belongs to him. Three studies have been used e
commented in this perspective: Charles Segal, Eros and incantation. Sapho
and oral poetry, «Arethusa» 7 (1974); B. Gentili, I frr. 39 and 40 P of Alcmane e
the poetry of Mimesi in archaic Greek culture, in Studies in honor of
Vittorio di Falco, Naples 1971; Jean Lallot, Xunbola kranai. Réflexions sur la
fonction du symbolon dans l'Agamemnon d'Eschyle, «Cahiers internationaux
du symbolisme »26.

2. The Greek example

Our investigation brings us closer to Creuzer as it takes symbols into consideration

figurative rather than aspects of symbolism in speech. But he leaves it
also to the extent that, at Creuzer, the conception of the symbol is founded
on a philosophy of the spirit, a religious philosophy, a philosophy of art that
we find it impossible to accept. Opposition between Idea and sensible; definition
of the divine as infinite; belief that Greek art represents the
perfect realization of the divine symbol - all these evidences, which

Page 91

lead Creuzer to see in the anthropomorphism of the Greek statuary the

only type of figuration capable of resolving the tension between the Idea and the form,
the infinite and the finite. According to him there would therefore be continuous progress
that goes from the rough stone to the animal or monster representation, up to the
human figuration of the god. Our way of proceeding does not depend on these
assumptions; we do not judge a priori what the symbol is, nor what
both the divine. Instead, let us look for the forms of symbolic expression that they are
they were used by the Greeks to depict such or such a god; we ask ourselves which one
is the kind of relationship that unites this figuration with this aspect of the divine. Not
we postulate no progress at all; we see that the Greeks have known
all forms of symbolic expression of divinity: rough stone, beam,
pillar, mask, animal figure, monstrous, human representation; us
we question the reasons that led, depending on the moment, to:
to favor a specific form for a specific category of gods.
Rather than stages, we prefer to talk about forms, multiple levels of
figuration of the divine.
 In this perspective, what does the Greek example suggest? In
first two historical reasons. The constitution, under the influence of the
oriental models, of a repertoire of images, of a palette of figures, and,
secondly, the elaboration of a plastic language in ceramics, in the
relief and sculpture in the round, a language that was born in Greece towards
the eighth century starting from a sort of tabula rasa. As P. Demargne notes,
this restart with respect to earlier periods is operated in a state
of such absolute deprivation that it takes the value of a creation ex nihilo.
That we can guess, within the Greek culture, something like the genesis of a
figurative symbolism, is confirmed by the observations of É. Benveniste a
about the fact that the Greeks had no name to speak of
statue. The linguist's analysis intervenes on this plan to continue e
to deepen the observations of the archaeologist: «The people who established the
canons and the most complete models of plasticity for the Western world »has
had to borrow from other peoples, writes Benveniste, "the notion
itself of the figurative representation ». Perhaps you can go even further: the high
Greek archaism not only had to invent a language from scratch
of plastic forms and, at the same time, the category of figuration, but there
it has also developed in a sufficiently original way to reach, a
starting from the idol, symbolic expression of the divine, to the image
properly called, conceived as an artifact reproduce, in the form of
fictions, the outward appearance of real things. Between the fifth and fourth centuries the theory
imitation, mimesis, marks the moment when this transformation
it is accomplished. The figurative symbol of God has become an image, a product
by an expert imitation, who, for his technical character as much as

Page 92

illusory, it is linked to the field of aesthetic fiction rather than to that of

religious realities.
To follow this path, signal the turns, the ramifications, the
multiple modes, we first explored the Greek vocabulary
of the statuary, indicating for each term or group of terms its origins, i
its primary and derivative meanings, its characteristic uses at different times,
its semantic fields, its fields of application, its fields
specificity and its interference with other nearby words. They have been so located
one with respect to the others and often grouped in more or less convergent series i
following terms: βαίυλος and δόχανα; κολοσσός with στήλη, κίων, ρμῆς;
βρέτας and ξόανον; εἴδωλον; ἄγαλμα; ἔδος; εἰχών and the set of words
connected to ἔοιχα, εἴσχω; ἀνδρίας; μίμημα.

3. The kolossos

We then tackled the study that constitutes the first stage

of our investigation: the kolossos. Presenting the file, following G.
Roux ("Revue des Etudes Anciennes", 1960), we tried to define the
conditions that allow you to connect with each other and illuminate each other i
archaeological documents, epigraphic evidence and literary texts. From
this point of view, the first stasimon of Aeschylus 's Agamemnon covers
particular importance in our eyes: it is through its precise analysis and
subtle that one can access the mental universe in which the notion of is placed
kolossos, in which it acquires a meaning and an operational value. Would be
a mistake to isolate verses 415-419, where we talk about eumorphoi kolossoi, of bei
kolossoi, from the whole of the passage, perfectly coherent, which it evokes
 the mourning of Menelaus in front of the void created in the palace by Elena's escape. THE
kolossoi are associated here with the phasma, the ghost, and the oneirophantoi, le
dream appearances, both forms of Elena's presence-absence which
arouse pothos, the nostalgia of love, in the heart of the king
she who is not there (see, among others, Plato, Cratylus, 420 ab: the pothos is the
desire "of he who is elsewhere and absent; therefore it was called that pothos
wish that, when its object is present, it is called himeros,
when instead it is absent, the same feeling is called pothos " ).
This game of presence absence is expressed at the level of the kolossos,
from the emptiness of the eyes (the eyes are the way and the instrument of the
erotic seduction), the disappearance of Aphrodite, the inverted charis (to the same
so the charis of the oneirophantoi is vain, empty; cfr. 422). The set of
passage, on the other hand, must be related to what precedes and
what follows. With what precedes: there is total symmetry, in the themes and in the
vocabulary, between the situation of Paris and that of Menelaus compared to Elena.

Page 93

Paride, the seducer, finds himself in the end to be compared to the child who runs
behind a flying bird (394), that is, behind a dream, a cloud, a
inaccessible ghost (see, for Menelaus, the vain, ungraspable vision, that
escapes on the winged paths of sleep, see 426). Between the two men and the two passages
concerning Elena, evoked in some verses and presented as the one who
escapes quickly through the gates (407: βέβαρχε ῤίμφα διὰ πυλᾶν, which
we will approach verses 423-424: παραλλάξασα διὰ χερῶν βέβαχεν ὃψις οὐ
μεθύστερον, "slipping between the hands, the vision [of Menelaus] escapes immediately").
With what follows: to the mourning of King Menelaus, in his palace, because of
Elena's disappearance, the mourning of every argive woman, in her own home, responds
for the death of the groom (G. Thomson rightly points out that
the attitude of Menelaus, sitting, silent, aloof, is that of mourning;
on the other hand, eràνειρόφαντοι πενθήμονες of verse 420 will be compared (in the
palace), at πένθεια of verse 430 (in each house).
The convergence of images, formulas and vocabulary is rigorous.
Here then is what the presence-absence of the Argo consists of
own husband: in place of men, urns and ashes (v. 435); as a bridegroom,
well ordered ash (vv. 443-444); or, in the case of warriors whose ashes
the graves occupied by their corpses have not been brought into the house,
qualified as eumorphoi, all around the walls, in the land of Ilium. It seems
imposing, therefore, a juxtaposition of the eumorphoi corpses , which disappeared
far away in a foreign land, and the eumorphoi kolossoi, raised inside the
palace, but whose empty eyes say, with the disappearance of Aphrodite, the absence
of Elena.
Aeschylus' text thus led us to ask ourselves about the meaning
of eumorphia, beauty in the case of the dead, as in that of the kolossos. In
what can a corpse be, like a kolossos, eumorphos? The survey
it is therefore oriented in the direction of funerary practices, to try to
decipher in them what kind of treatment should be applied to the body
so that the deceased may access the new state that is right in the afterlife, e
in order to acquire, in the eyes of the group of the living, the social status which
from now on it will belong to him: that of the dead. Death is not simply
deprivation of life, death: it is a transformation of which the corpse is at the time
the object itself and the instrument, is a kind of transmutation of the individual
operated in and through the body.
The purpose of funeral practices is revealed even more clearly, however
contrast, in situations where these practices are not perfect and, above all,
 through the analysis of the outrage procedures of the enemy corpse, when
that is, it is ritually denigrated. Aikia, the outrage, consists in the fact of
to disfigure, dehumanize the body of the adversary, to destroy everyone in him

Page 94

those values that are embodied in it, values that are indissolubly social, religious,
aesthetic, personal. The body is soiled with dust and earth that it loses
its particular physiognomy and become unrecognizable; it is left in the meal
to the dogs, to the birds, to the fishes so that, dispersed, torn to pieces, scattered,
it loses its unity, its formal integrity; it is left to rot and
decompose to the sun so that it can no longer assume, in the invisible world,
those values of beauty, youth and life that the human body, here on earth,
must reflect; finally, instead of laying it down in a tomb, it is reduced to becoming,
inside the belly of the animals that have devoured it, flesh and blood of
wild beasts, to lose all traces of human character. You try that way
way to deprive the enemy of the human status of the dead, to refuse him that
change of state, that ambiguous promotion normally carried out by the
funerals: disappeared from the world of the living, erased from the fabric of the
social relationships within which his presence constituted a link, the
dead is now an absence, a void. But it continues to exist, on a
another plan, in a form of being that escapes destruction in the first place
through the permanence of his name and the splendor of his fame, present
not only in the memory of those who knew him in life, but
also of "all men to come"; secondly, through
the building of the various forms of mnema, capable of assuring the deceased if
not a body of ambrosia - a privilege that belongs only to the gods, and indeed
because they have no body, no blood - at least a dubious substitute for it
that the body represents in life, as a support to individuality e
guarantor of the permanence of the social subject. Kolossos, sema and stelae have,
regarding this, converging functions: they translate, in forms and levels
different, the paradoxical inscription of absence in presence. At the end
of the funeral rites, the human body, thanks to its definitive entry into the sphere
of death, it takes the form of a two-sided reality, each of which
refers to the other and implies its counterpart: a visible, localized face,
hard and permanent like stone, and an invisible, ubiquitous face,
elusive and elusive as the psyche, exiled in the elsewhere. There
psyche resembles the body; it is a miniature body, a corpuscle; and the
double of the living body, a replica that can be taken for the body itself, which
it has the same appearance, way of dressing, gestures and voice. But this total
similarity is also complete inconsistency, the psyche is nothing, a void,
an elusive evanescence, a shadow; it is like an airy and winged being, a
flying bird.
The stone is the exact opposite: compact, massive, continuously
present in the place where it was fixed to the ground. But this consistency
material resembles not the shape of the living body, its appearance of
once, but to the radical otherness of his current state of death, to the foreignness

Page 95
 of its overseas status, to its exile in an elsewhere where all the realities of
down here they are reversed. The stone is cold, hard, dull, opaque, wrinkled, rough and
stiff, as much as the young and living body is hot in the sunlight,
flexible, shining in his eyes, soft to the touch, agile and mobile in his
movements. Kolossos and psyche translate in two complementary ways the
new social status of the dead, his existence in an afterlife that manifests itself
to the human universe under the mode of absence. As for the
psyche, the evidence of the appearance, in the accuracy of the most concrete details, and the
total similarity with the figure of the living are a kind of covering of
a void, the illusory veil cast on a non-being: the psyche is not the body
which is seen in it, but it is its phantasmic image, its double, and a
eidolon like the dream, the chimera, the illusion and the phasma.
As for the kolossos, its materiality is exactly the opposite
of the inconsistent shadow, of the winged dream, of the elusive chimera; but
the being that the kolossos evokes as a substitute that is given in the form
of stone, through the emptiness of the eyes, the disappearance of Aphrodite, the
lack of charis, is like the absence of what has fled far, flown
elsewhere in the manner of a dream, an apparition, a dead psyche : a
eidolon, a double.
Within the framework of our seminar dedicated to the gods of cunning,
we have largely developed our analysis of the Prometheus character,
his physiognomy, his position and his functions within the pantheon
Greek.
Denise Paulme and Claude Brémond have done us the honor of exhibiting, in
of four sessions, the results of the important research by them
jointly conducted on the typology of African trickster stories .
Jean Bottéro has granted us the privilege of presenting us, in three interventions, the
conclusions of a work, prepared specifically for us and oriented towards one
comparative perspective, on Enki-Ea. Finally, our gratitude goes to Charles
Malamoud who offered us anticipations of his reflections on the image,
divine and human, in Vedic India.

Page 96

6
THE FIGURE OF THE DEAD I
 This year we have tried to respond to the difficulties that the investigation on
kolossos, as we have conducted it until today, seems to raise.
Emphasizing the fact that at the end of the funeral rites, through which the
corpse disappears in the invisible, the figure of the dead clothes for the living
the appearance of a two-sided reality, each of which refers to the other as
to its necessary counterpart, we put a close relationship of
complementarity between the kolossos and the psyche; both, say, translate the
new social status acquired by the dead through funerals and his
survival in the memory of the group in a very particular form:
socially, the dead exists and manifests itself in the mode of absence.
To evoke it, to celebrate it with song, means at the same time to speak of its glory and
to emphasize the distance that separates it from the world of the here and now; see him,
it means to see that he is not present.
Our approach had many implications. It was assumed
above all, with regard to values and meanings, a proximity of the
kolossos, at least at the origin, with the mnema and the funerary stele. He connected
then the kolossos to what, to distinguish it from the image, we have
called the category of the double, which corresponds to what the Greeks
of the archaic age they meant with eidolon. Like the psyche that, exiled in the
the world of the beyond, it offers itself to the sight only to escape from every grip, with the
its perfect resemblance to the dead in the individuality of the bodily form
living that holds a total inconsistency, a full emptiness, so the
kolossos, for the disconcerting effect of the presence-absence that it causes,
it operates in the paradoxical manner of a double: it inscribes absence and emptiness
inside itself, what is shown as present. The being that it evokes,
in the same way as a substitute, it manifests itself in the form of stone as this
which escapes far away, which cannot be there, which belongs to an inaccessible
somewhere else.
Many problems were then posed accordingly. First of all: how

Page 97

explain the cases in which the term kolossos is applied to statues that not only
they do not possess a funerary meaning, direct or derivative, but that does not
they do not even seem to have the value of a double, a substitute for a being whose
essential property would be absence? Also: how to escape the
consequences that the relationship of symmetry and at the same time of opposition
between the kolossos and the psyche would it seem to impose? The psyche is something
afterlife; when it manifests itself here in the form of apparition, it is the
phantom of the body, a double that reproduces all its singularities; but, in
as an entity of the beyond, it possesses on this earth a status of nonreality;
it is a "nothing", a shadow, a wisp of smoke. The kolossos, on the other hand, is a thing
down here. It is consistent, massive, immutable, continually present in the
place where humans have built it. If it evokes the deceased dead
in the world of shadows, he will not do it by simulating the living appearance of a
time, but expressing, through the raw stone remained more and more or
less aniconic, the aspects of extraneousness, otherness and non-form that
they belong to the dead from the moment he left the sunlight.
The similarity between the psyche and what appeared of the individual when he was in
life is the other side of his unreality or, if you prefer, of his
supernatural. The reality of the kolossos seems to exclude any effect
of similarity, every imitative project. To evoke the absent disappeared, the
stone must show the waste, the distance to the person's shape
living.
 Now, in the text of the Agamemnon that constituted the starting point of the
our analysis, the eumorphoi kolossoi are not rough stones, aniconic idols,
but human figures. Surely it could be answered that the tragic poet uses
the term kolossos in a metaphorical way, since, by virtue of its ancient
resonance, well corresponds to the status of a character like Elena, whose
presence is all the more problematic the more it, already in this very life, yes
split in its eidolon; and also, since the statues, which they should
summon his absent person from the building, are defined in the text to start
not from their similarity, but from what they lack to be able to be, in
image, the equivalent of a real woman, object of desire of the groom:
the emptiness of the eyes, the hateful charis in its emptiness, an appearance
feminine entirely abandoned by Aphrodite. The difficulty is not however
resolved. The problem goes far beyond the framework of the tragic expression
dell'Agamennone. If the kolossos really has the task of evoking the absent,
to replace it by giving body to its non-presence, and if it does it through
an aniconic form, as is explained by the fact that in the sixth century the rough stone
raised on the tomb, under the various aspects known to us, it gives way
to the all-round figure of the funerary kouros and, on a new type of stele a
images, to the painted or engraved representation of the dead? In other words, the

Page 98

the problem that must be faced is that of the transition from the double
to the image, from the aniconic symbol to the figurative representation of the dead.
What are the social, psychological and aesthetic conditions that have made
is this surprising mutation possible and what is its significance? Such as
understand the link that connects the figure, which from now on will be engraved
on the stone, to the individual in his status of dead? What aspects of the body
human being are taken from the figure and which elements of the person, live or
dead, are they concerned? Which are, for the spectators who watch, the functions and the
meanings of these funerary figures?

1. Eidolon. From double to image

Our research has developed along three main lines.

A systematic investigation of the semantic field of eidolon, from Homer to
Plato, to put to the test, to specify, to extend an interpretation that is
is based on the notion of double. In Homer there are three modes of
supernatural apparition which, by virtue of their kinship, come
equally characterized by the term eidolon. First, the ghost,
phasma, produced by a god in the image of a living person, like that
that Apollo builds "similar to Aeneas himself and identical to his weapons"
( Iliad, V, 449-453; same meaning as eidolon in Hesiod, fr. 23 to 17 ff. For
the eidolon of Ifimede [Iphigenia]; fr. 260 = scolio to Apollonio Rodio, 4, 58, per
the ghost of Hera chasing Endymion; fr. 358 = Licofrone scolio, 822, per
double Elena). Secondly the chimera, the dream image,
oneiros, conceived as the appearance, during sleep, of a double
imagined by the gods in the image of a real being ( Iliad, II, 56-58;
Odyssey, IV, 794 ff.). You will notice that these two uses correspond,
in Agamemnon, two forms of evocation of Helen: next to the kolossoi,
Elena manifests her presence in the building in the form of phasma and di
oneirophantoi. Thirdly, and above all, the psychai of the dead, called
eidola kamonton, ghosts of the dead ( Iliad, XXIII, 72; Odyssey, XI, 476;
XXIV, 14). One turns to the psyche as one would do with the person himself
( Iliad, XXIII, 65 ff .: Odyssey, XI, 152 ff. And 475 ff.; Bacchilide, 5, 68).
 The psyche has the exact appearance, although it lacks real existence, the
that makes it, in its similarity, comparable to a shadow or a dream
( Odyssey, XI. 207 and 222), to a thread of smoke ( Iliad, XXIII, 100). In Pindar
(fr. 131, 62 Bergk-Schroeder - Trains, 2, Puech) the psyche, like eidolon, is not
plus the ghost of the deceased after his death. Present in the living man,
it no longer covers the form of the phantom double of the missing body; and the
double of the living being, in its continuity: aionos eidolon. This
double, of divine origin and capable of escaping the destruction to which it is subjected

Page 99

necessarily the body sleeps when the bodily limbs are in activity;
wakes up when the body is asleep and manifests itself in the form of dreams,
revealing to us the fate that awaits us in the other world. In Plato the inversion
of the values assigned to the soul and body is total: the eidolon is moved
from the sphere of the supernatural to that of the sensible universe. In place
of the individual intimately linked to his own living body, whose psyche is
presents as the eidolon of this body, its phantom, is the psyche
immortal that constitutes, in the intimate of each one, the reality of his being. The
then the living body changes its status: it is "derealized" to become
the inconsistent, illusory, transitory image of what we really are.
In the phantom world of appearances, the body is "what is shown to
likeness of the soul ". Consequently, the "eidola of the dead" does not
they are more psychai, but they are "the bodies of the dead" ( Acts, XII, 959 a5-b3). Yes is
so passed by the soul, double elusive of the body, to the body, reflection
phantom of the soul; and this reversal of the soul-body relationship
sheds light on the reasons why Plato, the first theorist of the image as
artifice and fiction, uses, to designate the mimetic work in general, the
term more loaded with archaic values, the less "modern" among those offered a
that age from the image vocabulary. In the perspective of the philosopher, yes
it's about disqualifying the image, lowering its value compared to reality.
The image is eidolon as it depends on a kind of magic, it charms him
spirits taking the exact appearance of everything of which it is image; you do
pass for what is not. It is nothing but resemblance and pure
similarity that defines its image nature and gives it the seal
of total unreality. The image thus retains the character of a double
phantom, but the appearance of a supernatural being, at the break-in
of the afterlife in the world below they have replaced themselves, as soon as they limit themselves
to the sphere of simple appearing, the spells of appearance, the illusion of
similarity. In this regard it would be necessary to analyze also the uses of
eidolon, in the meaning of "simulacrum", near Empedocles and, above all,
Democritus and Leucippus in their theory of vision. You will notice, in particular,
the opposition between the eidola, continually issued by things as replicas
exact of themselves, doubles that reproduce in depth the shape of things,
and the eikon, the image that these eidola produce in the eyes (Empedocles,
31 B, fr. 109 a, DK; Democritus, 68 A. fr. 77. 1. 32, DK ); appearance
phantasmagorical or "demonic" of these eidola, cf. Empedocles, 31 A, fr. 72,
1.3, DK and Democritus, 68 A, fr. 74, 77-79, 118, DK
Next to mimema and eikon, more recent and more technical terms
the image in its function of similarity intended for a model, the
persistence of a word like eidolon - in its primary meaning of
double phantom or in its attenuated value of emptiness, non-being, while giving
Page 100

the illusion of fullness and reality - is not only signaled within the
philosophical vocabulary, with the transpositions we have indicated.
Relatively rare in lyric poetry, the word appears among the Tragics. To the
beyond its use in accordance with the epic tradition, in the meaning of phantom and
of ghost (ghost of Helen: Euripides, Helen, 34; specter of Argos: Aeschylus,
Prometheus Bound, 566 ff.), The word serves to qualify beings who,
emptied of their strength and their substance, they now have nothing but
an appearance of life and pursue an illusion of existence as if, ever since
down here, they were reduced to living in the condition of fleeting shadows (Sophocles,
Filottete, 947; Oedipus at Colonus, 109); more generally, the word designates this
which is believed to be real, stable and secure, but which turns out to be empty and inconsistent
(Aeschylus, Agamemnon, 839; Sophocles, Ajax, 126). Retaining the idea of a
nothing that hides behind appearances of solidity, the word brings into play,
more than the problematic of the image in its relationship with the model, that
of the unreal capable of producing an effect of reality, of the phantom of being
who wants to pass through being itself, of the double void of what is full
(as in Aristophanes, The clouds, 975, the little boy, after sitting on the
sand, it must smooth it out as soon as it rises, to erase the eidolon of his
virility, eidolon to which, in the absence of the thing itself, they could stick
the erotic fantasies of his lovers). Profane value, but where
the humor implies, in the background, rather the idea of the double than that of the
portrait, also in the fragment of the satyr drama by Aeschylus Theoroi o
Isthmiastai, Pap. Oxyr., XVIII (1941, 2162, fr. 1, you. I, 1. 6). Even in cases,
more numerous, in which the reference to the supernatural is no longer a
of the size of the eidolon, they remain and emerge from the Tragics
often the affinities between what the term designates and the dream, the ghosts of the
dead, shadows and all other forms of apparition. An example: Phoenician,
1543. Antiphon enters the palace to look for his father. Oedipus addresses the
daughter in these terms: «You have taken from the darkness of his room a
hoary ghost appeared in the air, polion aitherophanes eidolon, a dead man of
underground world, a winged dream ». There is not, as in the case of the eidolon of
Elena, a double supernatural aroused by the gods in the image of Oedipus. IS
Oedipus himself to be no more than a double, the ghost of him
that was and that others still imagine they see before them, a dream
flown away, a shadow disappeared underground in Hades (see also Oedipus a
Colonist, 109-110, where Oedipus defines himself as a miserable
ghost, an eidolon of the Oedipus man). Nevertheless, even here the values
primary of the eidolon are not canceled: become, due to the misfortunes that it
afflict, the ghost of himself, similar to a living specter, Oedipus yes
finds it to be suddenly covered with a powerful sacred charge.
At a historian like Herodotus there are three different uses of the term

Page 101

eidolon. The first is in accordance with the Homeric use: it is the spectrum of
Melissa, wife of Periander. This spectrum appears in front of the
ambassadors sent by the tyrant to the land of the exiles to consult the oracle
of the dead (Herodotus, V, 92). The other two cases are of particular interest to us,
since they concern "artificial" images, manufactured by the hand of man: in
VI, 58, the image of the lacedemone king, who died in the war, of whom a
 eidolon that is brought back to Sparta on a parade bed, in the guise of remains,
to place it in his grave; in I, 51, the statue of a woman, gynaikos eidolon,
that Croesus sends to Delphi and of whom the inhabitants of Delphi speak as
of the image ( eikona ) of his baker. The use of eidolon is not random nor
in the case of the king of Sparta, who died abroad on the battlefield, nor in that
of the baker of Croesus (she saved his life and is to pay his own
debt of gratitude to him that Croesus, now king, puts it below
form of a votive statue in the custody of the gods, as a testimony of the
charis receipt, see Plutarch, Moralia, 410 f). It is no longer a matter of double or of
ghosts, but of figurative images. Nevertheless, the term, in both cases,
imposes or justifies itself for the value of substitute that it entails - substitute
of the corpse of the absent king but of which the ritual demands, contrary to the bodies
of ordinary fighters buried on the spot, who returned to Sparta;
substitute for the woman who, dead, is made forever present by the god
next to which it is located permanently. Hinge between
the double and the figurative representation, these two uses of eidolon allow
to clarify, we believe, some exceptions of the kolossos as a substitute
funeral in the absence of the corpse, as a substitute for the person in
certain forms of commitment or in the case of votive dedication. We'll have
opportunity to return. With the same meaning you will notice the use of eidolon from
part of Xenophon ( Symposium, 21-22) to designate the "image" of Kleinias
that Critobulo, his lover, preserves in his soul with one
such precision that if he were a painter or sculptor he would be able to reproduce them
appearance without the need to see the loved one in front of him. Also here
the choice of eidolon, instead of eikon (see Memorabili, III, 10, 1-18) aims at
emphasize the double aspect of this image that haunts the spirit
Sweetheart. Similar to being real to the point of being confused with it,
however, the image remains marked by the seal of unreality; envelops absence
in presence. The vision of it, instead of cheering as does the sight of
real person, it does not produce pleasure, but precisely the pothos, the regret
nostalgic of the absent.
In this interim dossier concerning eidolon , a
last case, much later than Plato. It is a text by Pausanias who,
making one play with respect to the other eikon and eidolon, allows to specify
their mutual relations and to situate them in the context of funeral practices

Page 102

(Pausanias, IV, 38). A ghost, eidolon, devastates the district of Orcomeno.

The oracle of Delphi is consulted, ordering to find the remains of Actaeon and
to bury them. Classic theme of the dead without burial, whose corpse is not
passed through the funeral ritual and that, wandering between the world of shadows and
that of light, rejected by the dead, takes revenge on the living raging on them
with his own ghost. To satisfy this spectrum or, better, for
get rid of it, it is not enough to bury it. It's too late, the damage has been done.
Need to repair. The oracle then orders to fashion a bronze statue of the
ghost ( tou eidolon chalken eikona ) and to chain her to the stone with a
iron ring. L ' eidolon is the psyche of the dead, the psyche in the form of
double, with a phantom body; although it has no terrestrial existence, this
double continues to manifest his presence here, unless
be sent to Hades according to the rules. For this unreal body to be
elusive, but terribly operative, it finally vanishes in the afterlife
to which it belongs, it is necessary to crown the funeral building with an image - a
kouros - which translates, on the register of pure visible appearance and of the
figurative representation, exactly what eidolon embodied in the
mode of the supernatural: the figure of the dead, his corporeal form.
 We need to build a simulacrum of what was double. Chaining this
statue to the rock overhanging the burial, the dead is fixed to the tomb by
sanction the end of its ancient wandering, the end of the ubiquity of a double
body like an aerial shadow, a winged dream. Give the dead a point of
immutable anchorage on this earth means at the same time to open them
doors of that other world to which he still could not have access. The
death status automatically implies a funeral presence in a
determined place of the land, and a complete absence from human space,
a departure towards the shores of elsewhere. Finally, making sacrifices to Actaeon
as a hero, a privileged place is secured within the memory
social; the whole group unites to give them, through reproduction
of his image and the public cult rendered to his tomb, a continuity of
existence in the normal status of the dead and, in this particular case, of the
dead heroicized; this implies that we evoke his memory, that we do
remember him, but through forms of memory that make him absent
and that take it away forever from the world of the living.

2. Pothos. Mourning desire

An investigation into the forms, the effects, the more or less ritualized functions of the
memory of the deceased during and after the funeral. Engage on this road has
meaning to follow the trail that was immediately suggested to us by some
elements present in the text of the Agamemnon concerning the kolossoi. Atmosphere

Page 103

and mourning vocabulary, links between the absence of Elena, which is expressed in the beautiful ones
kolossoi with empty eyes , in phasma , in oneirophantoi and the absence of
Argo warriors, fallen in Troy and of which they remain, as object of
lamentation, only the ashes or the beautiful dead in faraway land. Finally the pothos,
Menelaus' love nostalgia for the missing bride, sprinted
away beyond the seas, pothos that colors the whole scene and whose effect is that of
populate the entire palace of ghosts, of Elena 's eidola , rendering however the
charis of the beautiful statues not charming, but hateful; it can be
fully understood only if we refer to the pothos of mourning, as
regret of the beloved that death makes disappear. To be convinced of it, it is
it is enough to note that the passage of Agamennone resumes, under another
form, the theme already developed by Aeschylus in the Persians, concerning women
whose husbands, who left for the war, will never return (133-139): "The beds yes
they fill with tears for the regret ( pothoi ) of the bridegroom; every woman
Persian, in mourning, is what remains of the couple; accompanies his relative
impetuous fighter with regret ( pothoi ) who tries for man "(see
also 541-545). The theme of a statue, an illusory substitute for the dead for the
joint inconsolable, will be resumed later, as we know, with a distance
ironic towards Aeschylus by Euripides in the Alcestis.
We have therefore examined, especially in the epic but also in other texts,
the framework and the manifestations of the pothos towards the absent, and in
particular of that absent par excellence who is the dead. We saw it in
play in situations where such exclusivity is required with such intensity
that memory is found to be almost entirely invaded by thought
obsessive of the missing person. It is then that the psyche of the deceased is
show in the phantom form of eidolon ( Iliad, XXIIIl, 58 ff); so
that the living, entirely submerged by the pothos of mourning, no longer has the strength to
to live ( Odyssey, XI, 202). Such are the role and scope of pothos in ritual
of mourning: it determines the continuous, wanted and almost obligatory memory of the
 dead, determines the rejection of everything that could divert the spirit from
remembrance, distracting him and directing him towards a moment of oblivion: meals,
conversations, sweet sleep. The case of Achilles, when Patroclus dies, is a
this exemplary purpose. In the crowd of Greek warriors he appears, in the
towards his companion, like the hero of remembrance. In strict compliance
of mourning, he, of his will, consecrates himself to the memory of the dead who becomes
his obsession, and distances himself from the community of men, is excluded
from ordinary life. It is in order "not to forget" that he no longer consents to the
sleep, neither to food, nor to alleviate one's spirit in any way: he remembers
( Iliad, XIX, 314); he does not forget and will not forget Patroclus (XXII,
387). His heart is fasting, he refrains from eating and drinking for
pothos of the friend (XIX, 320). He remains seated crying in the memory of his friend

Page 104

while others eat or sleep (XIX, 345; XXIII, 57-60). So it does

Demeter, also sitting on the sidelines - like Menelaus in Agamemnon -,
silent, without a smile, without eating or drinking, consummated by the pothos
daughter ( Homeric Hymn to Demeter, I, 201 and 204). As soon as Achilles,
exhausted, he yields to sleep for a moment, rises before him to reproach him
the lack of a funeral duty, the eidolon of Patroclus; and the ghost tells him:
"Achilles, you have forgotten me" ( Iliad, XXIII, 69). On the phantasmatic aspect
and almost haunting of the pothos amoroso towards no more than the dead, but
of the absent whose love is dead and which, consequently, appears to be
lost forever as an erotic partner, refer to the Palatine Anthology, 5,
139; 140; 166; 212; 235; 264. On the funerary aspect of the pothos, we refer to
Theophrastus, HP, 6.8 , 3; Pliny, Naturalis Historia, XXI, 67; Athenaeum, XV, 659.
Three texts have been the subject of a more detailed comment. First of all Iliad,
XVII, 426 ff. For the pothos of their charioteer (Patroclus who has just been
killed), the horses of Achilles, immortal and swift as the wind or as le
psychai, they stiffen in the ritual attitude of mourning, they become immobilized,
they are planted like a funerary stele erected on a tomb, destined to remain
motionless forever, to preserve the memory of the dead. Then Odyssey, IV, 78
ff. In his Sparta palace, Menelaus, next to Elena found, celebrates the
wedding of his two sons, of which one, the male, bears the very significant name
of Megapente. This wedding party, in a palace whose splendor
evokes the stay of the Blessed, is presented under the sign of mourning and
regret, penthos and pothos. Not compared to Elena, who is there, but to the warriors
dead, in particular to Ulysses. Their absence creates a void in the building and
in the life of Menelaus. Mourning means that he no longer enjoys reigning
on his land (93). Due to the pothos of which Ulysses is the object, the incessant
memory of the friend makes sleep and the party unbearable to the king ( apechthairei );
as in the Agamemnon, the pothos towards Elena causes the charis
statues are unbearable for the groom ( echthetai ). Then Elena appears,
like a being somehow supernatural, unreal, a mirage of which one is
serve the gods. His speech is closely related to Ulysses, whose pothos
mournfully invests the palace. Elena's arrival has the gift of getting rid of the
nostalgia, tears, sorrow. Through two ways: a magic filter,
first of all, that its name designates as an antidolore, an antelutto,
nepenthes. It is "the oblivion of all evils", kakon epilethon apanton: anyone in it
he has drunk he will also be able to see his parents die and will not shed a tear, he will remain
without memory. Then a story that will shine, as in the singing of a
aedo, the exploits of Ulysses, or at least some of them specially chosen for
the occasion. This remembrance of the absent's big actions instead of
revive the pothos, procure pleasure; introduces to the joy of meal and sleep;
 take away the pain. The evocation of the hero through the remembrance that he is

Page 105

proper to the story, aims, thanks to its resemblance to the deeds of the hero,
more to the indefinitely present glory of Ulysses than to Ulysses himself absent
(see Roselyne Dupont-Roc and Alain Le Boulluec, Le charme du récit, in
Écriture et théorie poétique, Presses de l'ENS, Paris 1976).
At this point the opposition between this type of memory is already affirmed
social represented by the public story and the world of emotion
"Personal": complaints, tears, groans - expressions, these, more or less
ritualized of what might be called the "private" aspect of mourning and
remember, the pothos of the neighbors, relatives and intimates, which corresponds to the place that the
deceased occupied in the social fabric of the group, now empty, felt place
as a lack, a painful deprivation, for the duration of the time in which one is there
it reminds of the dead as of a living, in which one strives, through such
ascetic memory, to keep in touch with him in that area
intermediate between life and death which, for those who mourn, precedes the
moment of the funeral - in short, for the duration of the time in which one is there
he refuses to forget the dead in the personal relationship he has with it.
Crying the dead in this register of lament, as they do especially the
women, it is on himself that one cries, on oneself in mourning, abandoned by all this
that in his own life he represented the deceased (see Iliad, XIX, 302 ff .: «Le
women apparently wept on Patroclus, but actually each on
own pain ». In XXIV, 770, it is Elena who speaks: «I therefore weep over me
same, unhappy, how much about you ». See also XIX, 290-302, where Briseide
complies with Patroclus in these terms: «For me, pain is always followed by
pain. " In XIX, 323 sgg., Are no longer women, but the intimate friend of
Patroclus, Achilles, who recalls his pothos by saying: "I could not suffer
nothing worse ", even if my old father or my young son
they should die. And the old men answer him sobbing and "remembering this
that each had left at the palace ").
However, there is a different form of relationship with the dead than the ritual
funeral seeks to establish, but can only achieve by going beyond
to elaborate another type of memory, purified by its contingent elements
details, in which the memory of the dead, through public evocation
which celebrates it, manifests itself in glory. When the deceased is represented
no longer as one who has been torn from life and his own, but how
definitively established in the statute of the dead, for future generations, the
his memory then provokes more admiration and envy than pain and lament.
He is placed, in his absence, as the presence of an undying value: the
gloria, kleos, with its two aspects, virtue, arete, which is celebrated by the
memory of song, and beauty, of which the funeral memorial will be charged
through figurative representation.

Page 106

Our third text is Odyssey, I, 342 ff. Penelope enters the hall where,
 at the
she request
begs of to
her not thecontinue
suitors, Femio
a storysings the returnher
that rekindles from Troy. The bride of Ulysses
in mourning
inconsolable, penthos alaston. In what way this mourning, penthos, is renewed
from the song? The evocation sung revives the pothos of a spouse of whom
Penelope remembers ceaselessly, memnemene aiei.
The situation is therefore inverse with respect to the story of Elena, who does not
it causes the painful memory, but the oblivion of the pains and the pleasure of the meals and of the
rest, refused to mourners.
The episode of Femio's song, through the comparison with pleasure
aroused by Elena's story, it seems to play on a double register, on two
opposite planes simultaneously. As addressed to Penelope during the
time in which the Odyssey takes place , this song actualizes the pothos of a man
whose disappearance has created a void in the existence of his neighbor. But in
how many verses of Homer that narrate the song of Femio and are addressed not to
contemporaries of Ulysses, but to his current audience that listens to the deeds of the
men of the past, it produces an opposite memory effect. Thanks to
mediation of this social memory embodied by the Muses, the memory of
Ulysses, no longer merely as a husband, father or companion, but in his own
dimension of a man of the past, of a hero of another age, is no longer "mourning
unforgettable », but« forgetfulness of mourning », no memory of the evils that
protects the present life. As Hesiod says: "A man bears mourning,
penthos, in his heart? Let a singer, servant of the Muses, celebrate the great ones
feats of the men of the past [...]. Here he immediately forgets
his sorrows and more he does not remember his sadness "( Teogonia, 98-103).
The reversal of the status of memory and oblivion, depending on whether it is
of the dead as an object of remembrance for relatives at the very moment of the
his loss or his death, or as the object of that memory
institutionalized that constitutes the heroic legend sung by the aedi «for the
men to come », has multiple consequences in our research.
It illuminates one of the major functions of the ritualized staging of the
pothos in funerals. It is a matter of giving the deceased a statute that separates him from
living in a radical and definitive way, to give back to the living a universe
in which the absence of the dead person is no longer felt exclusively as one
personal laceration, but above all and above all as another dimension
of existence, like access to immortal glory.
Like any rite of passage, funerals involve an intermediate phase,
when the dead is no longer alive, but the still visible presence of his
corpse creates an obstacle to its entry into the world of shadows, when i
alive they can no longer communicate with him, but they are not yet

Page 107

completely separated. This is where the fracture occurs, this is where the
pothos in its ritual expression: refusal to eat, drink, sleep,
segregation with respect to the group of the living, ugliness of the face,
soiling with ash and dust. These customs, connected to the practice of
remember, they bring the living closer to the dead to whom it was bound, placing them both in a
common intermediate state from which they later diverge, the one
reintegrating, after the necessary purifications, into the world of the living, the other
moving away, at the end of the funeral, at the dead.
With respect to this it is necessary to signal the presence, within the practices of the
mourning, if not oppositions, at least of differences between plans which, in the epic, are
significant. It is first of all a question of the difference in perspective that exists in
mourned for the dead, in case the dead is seen by the inner circle
of relatives, especially women, and in case the dead person comes instead
 seen by the largest group of his comrades in arms. In the first case it is
invoked according to the cost of its end in terms of tears, pain,
mourning, for his intimates. In the second, we remember how much it cost to
enemies, as a warrior hero, in terms of loss and suffering. So,
already in Andromache's statements before Hector's body, yes
manifests a polarity, in the lament for the dead, between the lament on himself and the
celebration of the dead and his excellence. Next, the distinction between
funeral weeping and trenodia. In Iliad, XXIV, 720 ff., We have on one side the
aedi, professional singers, masters of the trenody they sing, and
on the other hand the women who respond sobbing and Andromache who gives the
signal of funeral cries. In Odyssey, XXIV, 58-62, on the corpse of Achilles le
Nereidi, his relatives, complain crying; the Muses, which among the gods are
the equivalent of what the gods are with men and which they represent
a more elaborate form of mourning, the poetic form, obeying the canons
traditional "sing the trenody, answering all with one beautiful voice".
For the trenodia to pass to praise it is sufficient that the pathetic element comes
content, be put in the background. In the funeral ceremony the trenodia can
stand out from the eulogy : in the Agamemnon the choir questions itself: «Who is it
will he bury, who will sing his trenody? "and immediately adds:" Who
will he shed the eulogy with tears? »(1544 and 1547, with a revival in 1565 and
1570). Now, in the eulogy the dead can be evoked only on the subject of his
arete, of his andreia, of his deeds, of his high offices, not of his
private life. The kind of praise normally excludes the effects
excessively pathetic and purely personal references.
Mourning and regret, through the regulation of their expression
and dramatization, with its different levels and planes, become the object
of a "purification" similar to that produced by the tragic action on the
viewer. Pain, through the rhythmic form, the structure in verse of the

Page 108

trenodia, integrates itself, in its own expression, into a ceremonial process that
it transforms it and at the end of which it finds itself depersonalized, deprivated
to the extent that the dead, broken the bonds that held him to the living, can
to be evoked only in his deceased status. In other words, what
the funeral brings into play through one of their aspects is the transition from
pathetic memory of pothos to a more distant and objective memorization, one
institutionalized memory according to the social code of a heroic culture:
erection of the funerary mneme , evocation through memory, song,
so that, in the centuries to come, the memory of a name, the fame of the
deeds performed. To take the example of Ettore, the hero character who
funerals contribute to building, it is not so much the one on whom they mourn
women, but above all the one who is admired by comrades-in-arms. His
the statute of the dead fixes it, for the men of the future, in the fear inspired by the
enemies of his audacity, in the courage of his last battle, of sacrifice
accepted, even more than in the pain aroused in those who loved him from his loss.
The epic song, with its function of social memory, appears as the
fulfillment, the culmination of a process already implemented by the ritual of
funerals: transforming an individual who has lost his life in the shape of a
dead, whose presence as a dead is definitively inscribed in the
group memory. Through the oral tradition of epic poetry the
past is made indefinitely present and placed at the same time a
distance; it is the heroic act, the story of the deeds of the men of the past; to say
the ancient time means, thanks to the sung word, to represent in glory the
figure of the dead, whose memory keeps the weave of continuity
 socialI'm.
here and allows each generation to escape the narrow limits of life

3. The dead man

We have started the investigation on the set of conditions that explain it

development, towards the end of the 7th century, of the figurative representation of the
dead, or at least some dead; figuration that continues, with regard to
the Attica, until the beginning of the fifth century and here it stops (we know that the stelae
figurative, after an eclipse of almost three quarters of a century, reappear in Athens, but
with another form and, it seems to us, on another register).
A preliminary observation concerning the mourning vocabulary (see
Margaret Alexiou, The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition, Cambridge
University Press, London 1974). The term kedos (dor. Kados, allotrope
archaic: kedar ), in connection with kedo, kedomai, worrying, caring,
it is glossed by Hesychius as penthos. It means mourning, funeral honors and
marriage, acquired kinship. Kedeuo has the double meaning of "to render

Page 109

funeral honors "and" to enter into a marriage contract ". Maybe it's possible
to establish a similar relationship between penthos, pain of mourning, pentheo, crying the
dead, and pentheros, father-in-law, son-in-law, brother-in-law, every kind of acquired relative
marrying a woman.
This connection between mourning and alliance corresponds to the fact that those who are
Subjugated to the rules of mourning are those who belong to a well circle
defined of relatives and the like, the same circle that, in case of homicide,
assumes the obligation of blood revenge. There is therefore a parallelism between
two orders of phenomena that put the reaction of the
family group facing death, especially violent death. Such as
we know, the birth of the law, within the city, attributing to the
community the jurisdiction of the murder, subtracts the obligation to family groups
of revenge, leaving them the indictment initiative.
Likewise it happens with regard to the warrior, in the flower of his
youth, fallen on the battlefield with weapons in hand. His death
in the city context, it appears at the same time as a common business and a
family mourning. Thus the pothos, enlarged, torn from the domestic sphere e
private in which it originally took root, takes on a new value and a new one
new function. Intimate and temporary expression of the bond that must unite
the dead to his own during the period of mourning that prepares their separation, the
pothos now becomes public sentiment, awareness on the part of
group, awareness of their own perenniality, when an individual,
sacrificed for the community, it rises to the status of agathos aner, of man
valiant, exemplary man; status in which the ancient heroic ideal survives,
but moved to a position of balance between the virtue proper to the citizen and
the excellence that defines the superiority of the aristocratic value. These aspects there
we see drawing, affirming, and defining oneself through a long series of texts
that mark this transformation. Contrary to Archilochus, who
marks a break in the heroic tradition by stating that "a man,
as soon as he dies, he is no longer respected by his fellow citizens ( aston ), the glory
forget it "(fr. 117, Lasserre and Bonnard), Callino, in the 7th century, not
content to give honor and glory to him who fights for the land of
his city, for his woman and his legitimate children. It is the whole laos it has
regret, pothos, of the brave dead warrior; he is loved, he is regret,
potheinos, from all the people, demos (1, 18 ff.). Theme taken up by Tirteo for the
fighter who was able to stay on the front line. He is glorified as
 "The common good for the city and for all the people". If he fell in front of the
enemy: «The young and the old mourn him in equal measure and the whole city does
plagues in a sad regret ( argaleoi pothoi ). His grave and his children
are noteworthy ( arisemoi ) among men and again the children of children and the
his descendants. Never will his noble glory perish, nor his name, and, though

Page 110

he resides underground, he is immortal "(9 D, 27 sd. C. Prato). It will be observed that

the city takes charge, through the grave and the special honors rendered to the descendants
of the deceased, of this memory function that once belonged to the epos. Yes
will also notice that the "glory" of the dead is at the same time personal, civic,
familiar. It is this same theme that is found in the epigram of Potidea (la
city and the people of Erechtheus "regret" the dead warriors), and throughout the series
of epigrams attributed to Simonides; it is this same theme that continues
in the epitaphios of Demosthenes, 33, and of Lysias, 71. Gorgias will give it its most
evident expression in the form of what designates it, pothos athanatos:
«So, although they died, the pothos of them did not die with them, but,
immortal although it resides in bodies that are not immortal, this pothos
it does not cease to live for those who are no longer living ». By becoming
immortal and simultaneously public and common, the warrior's regret
dead tends to identify with the endless glory conveyed by tradition
of epic chant; the pothos is made kleos. If you are the subject of an immortal pothos
one has not really died, although one is no longer alive, for one can never
more to be forgotten and since the function of the private pothos was of
to announce, thanks to an intense memory, that form of inherent oblivion
in the definitive removal of the dead, at the end of the funeral, in his
double status of the deceased: absence of the living with respect to his ( pothos ),
presence of the dead in the memory of the group ( kleos ).
The tombs, the visible aspect of the funeral monuments, the inscriptions on them,
the epigrams in verse, the eulogies and, in the 5th century Athens, the funerals
public for citizens who fell in the war during the year, they translate in a way
different these new aspects of pothos towards the fighter,
fallen gloriously in the splendor of his youth and that, with
the halo of the "beautiful death" - that of the Homeric hero - penetrates into the beyond
with the face of the agathos aner.
To better understand this story we can compare the two rings
extremes. In the epic the funerary mneme plays a relative role
marginal. The part of honor due to the dead, their geras, consists of
burn its corpse, collect its white bones distinguishable among the ashes,
overturn on the container that contains it of the earth to raise a mound,
raise on the top of this a sema. This sema does not bear the name of
deceased, it is neither decorated nor figurative. In a civilization that ignores writing, the
memorization of the dead is entirely entrusted to the oral tradition. There
survival of glory is realized in and through poetic singing that
preserves and transmits the memory of some dead, individualized by their own
feats, giving them a "heroic" dimension (in the sense of the epic and not)
of the cult).
Page 111

Let us now consider the democratic Athens, when the use of public funerals
to celebrate the sacrifice of the fallen citizens in battle has now taken
this institutional aspect, this form of nomos present after 464
in the funeral oration. Through the official tribute given to them in public, the
city tears all those who honor their individual peculiarities, empties them
of every single existence. It brings them back, or elevates them, to the status of pure citizens,
statute to which they have had full access, independently
from their life or their merit, thanks to their "beautiful death". Thanks to
"Choice" made by them to die for the city, it is as if they, as for the
rest, were made transparent; ceasing to belong to the private sphere, they
have become entirely public.
Stripped of everything that is not Athenian in him, directly reconnected
on the obituary to his tribe, without mention being made either of
patronymic or demotic, the individual no longer exists as a subject
living, neither in its biographical dimension, nor in its genealogy. Exists in
how dead, that's what made him his death. It is canceling, merging
in the city, that its name subsists, inscribed on the demosion sema, in its place
next to others. It is in this paradoxical way that he reaches the
heroic model and reconnects with the tradition of warlike deeds: ceasing of
to be himself, and ceasing to be living - to only embody the idea
abstract of Athens - he "becomes", he becomes aner agathos. Nicole Loraux speaks
rightly, in this regard, of myth without a hero: the citizen fallen into
war is torn from the condition of a common mortal, raised to this
superior level of existence that the city represents, but this "heroisation"
it also implies that the individualization of the hero no longer exists.
The mnema that symbolizes immortal glory is collective and egalitarian, e
not individual and elitist. There is no place in it for the figure of such or such
another dead. As in the epic, it is the word, no longer sung and poetic, but
political, prosaic, the official logos of the city, which assumes essentially the
storage weight. Nevertheless, this word can no longer
express the life of those who celebrate as much as the stone can no longer
represent their figure of beautiful dead. The only image that governs the
rhetoric of the epitaphios is that which Athens, through its dead
memorable, it gives of itself, of its own past, of its own
stay.
What about the figurative facts? Until the end of the seventh century we find in
Attica is a type of stele very close to that described by the epic: a stone
more or less rough indicating the place of the tomb. A century later, towards the
end of the sixth century, undoubtedly after the laws of Clisthenes that
they regulated the pomp of the sepulchres, the figurative representation of the dead

Page 112

on the stele or in the round it begins to disappear for a long enough period.
It is during the sixth century, in the intermediate period, that of the cities
aristocratic, which develop the kinds of figured stelae and the series of kouroi
funeral.
The progress of the plastic arts, in their internal logic, plays
of course a certain role. The impact of the
writing on the social forms of memorization and preservation of memory,
especially as between the change of status of the poetic function, the
 laicization of memory, the spread of writing, the use of
representation as a mnemonic procedure, the relation of the
poetry and figurative image, there is a synchrony of which Simonides is
witness and of which Marcel Detienine recently showed the importance
from the point of view of the forms of social memory.
But we can also say that, in terms of the history of the institutions,
the advent of the figurative representation of some deaths corresponds to the
moment in which aristocratic values have already been integrated into the community
civic, in which the beautiful death of the young warrior is already devoutly hopeless,
without, however, already being fully absorbed in the political sphere. Come on
this point that the texts of Callino and Tirteo are illuminating. The fighter
it is haloed with heroism because it puts at risk and offers its life to the homeland;
he is the object of the pothos of the whole city and not only of his own, but preserves the
his individuality, his family belonging, his private ties. IS
object of an admiration that distinguishes it from others and that makes it
particular from the point of view of its excellence at the very moment in which
he is glorified for his dedication to the common cause.
Finally, he is glorious both as a living person and as a dead man. If he has
fought bravely and returned safe and sound, participates in the same
glory of those who died, and his descendants benefit from it after
he.
In Attica, figured stelae and kouroi have an evident aristocratic character.
They are expensive monuments, built by eupatrids often outside Athens, on
own lands. They symbolize the glory of the dead youth by showing him not
under the impersonal gaze of the city, but in competition with other genes,
as evidence of exceptional quality.
The noble young man, full of value, no longer has his own
glorification, of the epic. If you were a winner at the games, you can imagine
that a epinicio, or a poem, may celebrate it, or that a vase should boast its beauty. The
he presents a funerary monument on the square surface of the stele, very much
often in profile, not in the act of performing an action, a heroic gesture or in
an episode of his life, but outside any indication that qualifies him

Page 113

as a fighter or as a young man in the gymnasium, he reduces him to his

body shape, expressing that beauty in the form of the body
youth, that vitality that death has fixed on him forever
catching it in the flower of age.
This funerary stele does not represent the heroic gesture, nor the anonymity of the
pure citizen. It translates the moment when the beautiful dead of the epic, inscribed
already in the context of what is common to the group, it has kept its values of
rivalry between individuals, of confrontation, of proof of prestige among the great
families. It translates the moment when the life and death of the warrior are
still linked to each other, as reflections of a single superiority; the moment
in which the one who obtains glory at home is considered as predestined
to this by virtue of the excellence of his lineage, in which the beauty of the young
corpse is also a natural quality, so its figure on the stele is
represents at the same time as living and as dead, I live forever in
beauty because he died in a state of definitive youth.
We therefore find between the world of the epic and that of public funerals
this century in which the task of remembering the deceased is assumed
mainly from the funerary monument and in which the figure of the dead
it constitutes an essential element of its everlasting glorification. The
 dead is no longer summoned through the rough stone, without inscription, but
through the visible beauty of a bodily form that the stone sets for
always, with the name, as death fixed it on the corpse of the young man
heroic warrior, admired by everyone because in him, also and above all
dead, "everything is beautiful, everything is fitting", as Homer and Tyrtaeus say.
Among the beautiful dead of the epic, sung in action, while performing his
feats, and the beautiful civic dead, celebrated only because he died, there is this
beauty figure on the funerary stele that has no other function than that
to offer one's own image to the admiration and regret of all, of
to be continually there and to make a name, of a person, thanks to his
presence, the object of an exceptional glory and also, indissociably, one
common moral lesson for fellow citizens.
To better capture this moment and this difficult balance we have
examined the set of texts in which it finds its place, in one form or another, the
problem of the glory or memory of the dead in relation on the one hand to the
praise and the poetic word (memory for the ear), on the other to the monument
funeral (memory for the eyes). Many lessons have been devoted to this
perspective, to the study of the poem dedicated to Scopas of Simonides, starting
from the analysis presented by Jesper Svenbr, in La parole et le marbre, J. Svenbro,
Lund 1976. 1

Page 114

Much of the seminar was devoted to the theme of the beautiful death, of the bel
corpse in the epic, in relation to the concept of heroic honor. Nicole Loraux
has expanded and enriched our course and seminar analyzes through
comparison between the beautiful death in the Athenian funeral oration and epic death.
M. Cazeaux presented us with a model of analysis of a text from Genesis
particularly suggestive for the Hellenists, due to the differences between them
how much of the similarities. Daniel Saintillan, in the course of two lessons, has us
presented some of the essential themes of his research on Greek charis .

1 [Tr. en. The word and the marble, Boringhieri, Turin 1984.]
Page 115

7
THE FIGURE OF THE DEAD II

Continuing our investigation on the representation of the dead during the course
of the sixth century and on its position with respect to the development of the categories
of the image in ancient Greece, we have oriented our research into two
main directions.

1. Sing the dead, erect his figure

Returning to the poem by Simonides dedicated to Scopas and to the interpretation that
it was recently proposed by Jesper Svenbro, we asked ourselves about the
reasons and on the extent of similarity, so strongly emphasized in
this text (as also in others of the same author, of Bacchilide or of
Pindaro), between the sung word of commemorative poetry and the engraved figure o
carved of the funeral monument. The praise of the poet, according to Simonides, must
to carry out a difficult task, since "it is a difficult man really worthy
to become ( aner agathos alatheos ), in the hands and feet and in the steady mind
tetragonos ), built without defect ( aneu psogou tetygmenos ) ». Become
aner agathos means to have access, thanks to the memory of the song that
celebrates excellence, in a form of glorious existence analogous to that
conferred by the erection of a funerary or votive kouros . Like the figure
monumental of the dead, so the poetic praise offers stability and permanence a
he who underlies the vicissitudes of time; it fixes in a continuity
to be a success, a joy, a merit that appear, between the VI and the V
century, contrary to the heroic deeds, as fleeting, inconstant, transitory,
evanescent depending on the circumstances.
The combination of poetic singing and figurative representation (and often
their comparison about the respective ability to escape the wear and tear of time),
the analogy between professional skill, of which the poet is consciously aware
increasingly precise in the exercise of his art (instead of inspiration
delle Muse), and the technical savoir-faire of the sculptor are connected to
Page 116

changes of the poet's status within the city.

Changes, first of all, towards the public, which is no longer the audience
with which the singer makes body during his whole performance, but that is, beyond
and regardless of the concrete circumstances of the acting, one
civic community: a city or cities. The poem, "placed at the center" (Pindar, fr.
234, 3-5 Bowra), becomes common good in the abstract and permanent space of the
group. In this new form, which implies the emergence of the notion of
text and that of author, the poem is placed under the gaze of the city, put
available to the social body, as well as the figurative image is made for
to be seen, and to be seen by all. But this relationship, more
distant and objective, of the poet with his audience or with the anonymous readers, ha
a lapel. The commemorative poet works for a private individual. His work is
for a client whose exceptional merit is sung. The poet sells
his ability as a versifier to glorify a specific character
has entrusted the commission, just as the sculptor performs, for a fee,
the requested work. A bond is established through commemorative poetry
between the civic community and the eminent individuals that rank, origin, i
successes, donations (even towards the poet) make them worthy of being
sung and to enter, thanks to this, into the collective memory as figures
specimens. It is striking the analogy with the statute of the dead figure, as is the case
we defined the previous year: a private individual, tied to his family,
through the image of the human body, with the values that this body embodies
when it is in the bloom of youth and integrity, it is made so present
permanent to the whole group; likewise, the young warrior
dead celebrated by Tirteo - according to which, if he fell in the front row,
"Everything is beautiful" - he continues, with the halo of glory obtained with death, a
to be himself, to remain attached to his lineage, to his parents, to his
offspring, while at the same time representing the "common good" of the
city.
Change also regarding the relationship of the poet and his work with
the object of poetic singing. The poet celebrates a living man. It glorifies it
making references to characters and heroic legends. The waste does not exist
only between the contemporary client, object of the praise, and the past
heroic that, in the background, gives it meaning, but between an always revocable excellence,
submissive to the vicissitude, to the symphore, and excellence perfectly
accomplished, realized forever. Thus it exists, inscribed in poetry
commemorative, a distance between the matter of the song, its point of
departure, and the song itself in its form of praise, its function of remembrance.
The character celebrated by singing exists beyond and independently of
song that glorifies it; there are other means to know it, other ways to
evaluate its merit. Singing therefore appears as a way of presenting it, a

Page 117

poetic work of embellishing the object to give it, thanks to the splendor e
to the seduction of the verb, that dignity, that memorable value of which,
otherwise, it would risk being lacking.
 The situation is totally different in the epic: the characters and the deeds that
they constitute the matter of the song they have no other existence outside of
this song. Since it is klea proteron anthropon, these deeds are
absolutely included in the epos. They form that "past" of which the epic is
custodian. Their way of being is entirely made up of their existence
in the collective memory. Achille or Ettore are what of them transmitted the
epic tradition. How to find them, how to reach them outside the different
stories that work like a memorized tradition? Like the past
it has no other depth or other content than the great actions of the men of
a long time ago, so the epic heroes have no other consistency than that
given to them, through the continuity of the song, from social memory. In
this sense singing does not work like a mirror: it is not imitation
embellished with something that would have been given elsewhere, in a place other than the
group memory. The song is not an image; contains and discovers the reality of this
which is sung. This is precisely the meaning of the Muse: he says to the singer,
inspiring him, what he is, was and will be. This saying is revealing of the real. IS
formulating the being that epic song reveals and makes it visible. The word
poetic is not creative, as in India; it does not generate reality, but neither does it
it imitates, rather it gives it access to that light outside which everything is
it loses in oblivion and ceases to exist.
From this point of view the figure on the stele and the funerary kouros are more
close to the epic that to commemorative poetry. What they show
to the agathos aner, through the form of an intact young body, he is a dead man,
that is, a being on which the risks of life no longer have any grip, a being
whose existence is as concentrated in the mnema that evokes its memory. IS
a person who has reached his telos, his fulfillment and whose
excellence is now achieved. We then understand that poetry, too
when he wants to affirm his superiority over the figured image,
even when it appears as more permanent and lasting at this stage
of his story, he can only do it by starting to claim his
analogy with the plastic representation, claiming to be no less
monumental and consistent with this. The situation will be reversed, a century more
late, when the category of the image will be deprived of meaning. For
Plato assimilating poetic singing to painting is a way of devaluing the
poetry, to make it a simple fiction, a pure "imitation" without anything
real.
In commemorative poetry, however, if there is already a distance between the object

Page 118

or the motif of the song (this success, that character) and the song in his
beauty and its purpose (to make the splendor of merit shine and make it
unforgettable), and even if, within this gap, they begin to be made
street a series of questions, since the poet wonders about his relationship with
the work, placing itself, in front of it, like a craftsman decorating,
plasma, embellishes a material to create a product that will bear the mark
of its destination and will, at the same time, imply towards the
public, an element of fiction, of deception, all this does not mean
not at all that the notions of image and imitation appear to you as already
clearly elaborated, nor that in this type of poetry it has already been delimited
the ambit of the false appearance, of the fictitious, in opposition to the real.
Taking up the previous analyzes in this regard, we have shown that
the conception of the mimetic status of poetry, as well as the arts
plastics, if he found his first theorist in Plato, developed however,
during the fifth century, on a double ground: the new theater experience e
 postparmenical philosophical reflection.
Tragedy puts you in front of the public, makes people talk and act in front of you
to the spectators the legendary figures of the heroic age. The staging implies
1 "to be there", in all its dimensions, of what is at the same time placed
like something that can't be there. This presentation is not complete
through the discourse of the poet that tells what happened to others,
elsewhere, in other times; it is produced by covering the forms of real existence
in the actuality of the show. The tragic poet totally disappears behind the
characters who act and speak on the scene each on their own
as if they were alive. And it is precisely this direct aspect of the discourse and of the
vision that constitutes, in the analysis of Plato, the proper element of the
mimesis: the author, instead of expressing himself by telling the events
from the outside, it is hidden within the protagonists, wearing theirs
appearance, their way of being, their feelings and their words. In the sense
precise of mimeisthai, to imitate means to simulate the actual presence of a
absent. Faced with this representation, only two attitudes are
possible, one of which to be discarded a priori: staying out of the game, take
the show for reality itself, or, entering it, understanding what it is
of a specific area that must be defined as that of theatrical illusion.
The consciousness of fiction is constitutive of the dramatic spectacle: it appears
at the same time as his condition and his product.
On the other hand, after Parmenides, it is within rhetoric and sophistry
that the disjunction between appearance and reality is consummated; being and appearing
they are constituted in distinct areas. The road is opened by a Gorgias that exalts
appearance to the detriment of being, showing that appearing, thanks

Page 119

to the "effect of reality", he has every power to act on the spirit of the
men, of every force of impact that is usually attributed to being; there
street is also traced, by backlash, by a Plato who devalues
appearance with respect to being and which denounces similarity as false
appearance, fiction.
In commemorative poetry things are far from being like this
clearly separated. On the one hand, the technical ability of the poet, his sophia, is
often presented as a natural quality, a gift, and not as the fruit of
a learning: the Muses are not far away. On the other hand, between singing and what
it is sung there is not such a clear break. Between the poetic saying and the act
once the relationships are completed they are less complex than between the image and the model.
From ergon to logos, in spite of waste and deformation, what dominates is the
continuity or even connaturality. One cannot exist without the other.
The deeds are authentically such only if recognized and celebrated. The singing,
on the other hand, it is rooted in the deeds that it celebrates: it extends and accomplishes them thus
how the prize consecrates the winner, like the funerary monument crowns the
tomb. If there were no singable matter in the world, the poet would be without it
voice; his song responds to the need for that which has a vocation to glory.
He could not disguise what is humble, vile, not worthy of memory, not
exemplary. Art cannot transmute what it touches; it can't make that beautiful
which is ugly.
Certainly, sophia can deceive, deceive, speak beyond or on this side of
what really happened. But this "fraud" which is in the word does not
it belongs to the poet as such. What sometimes seduces and disturbs us in art
of poetry is that same power of apate that, in real life, allows
for example, to the astute to speak of Ulisse to cover of shade the value of Aiace
 and to make one's own shine, in the eyes of the Greeks who were to judge them, of a
false splendor. How the beauty of singing directly extends beauty
of heroic deeds, like the poet's song and the deeds of the winner
they share the same nature, they shine with the same glory, they find themselves
united in one splendor, associated in admiration and envy
provoked by commemorative praise, so the poet's techne , with his
cunning, his silences and his emphasis, is no different, as power
of deception, from those verbal wiles that the hero must employ when
he confronts his adversary on the field, on pain of remaining "without a tongue" himself,
aglossos, and to see its own value buried forever in oblivion (Pindar,
Nemea, VIII, 42-43). Art can deceive, like any man. His
to simulate is not fantasy, but malice and lies. The poetic word, for having
value and reach the goal, must be "proportionate to the act", prosphoros
ergoi; must praise the laudable, praise the authentic glory, blame the
villains (Pindar, Nemea, VIII, 66-67); but when it deviates from the norm for

Page 120

to say too much or too little, remains however linked to the real, obedient, fine
to the use of fraud, to the ordinary rules of cunning.
Spelled as needed, the praise of the poet creates fame, reputation
( logos, doxa ) showing the alatheia of the heroic gesture, that is authenticating it and al
at the same time snatching him from oblivion. For this reason, it ranks among the
piaggeria ( parphasis ), emphasis ( kompos ), excess praise and jealousy
slander ( momos, phthonos ), denigration ( psogos ), whose double
"Violence" (see Pindar, Nemea, IX, 31: parphasis biatai, and Bacchilide, 13,
199-200 Snell = 38 Edmonds: phthonos biatai ) the encirclement, especially since,
necessarily, the praise arouses in reality, within the social group, much
the flattering admiration as much as malevolence. Threatened on two fronts, for
excess and defect, the uncertain status of the poetic word is expressed
in the ambiguity of the terms logos and doxa. The logoi are the words of the poet; there
doxa is a character's reputation and public opinion. The logos
praise of the poet creates the glorious reputation, establishes the doxa of the
winner, as appropriate; but the opinion of the crowd, of the multitude
of fools, he can also disavow and veil the authentic arete. At the same
title of the parphasis and of the phtonos, the opinion in its form of doxa, can
" Rape " the alatheia, the authenticity of merit: to dokein kai tan alatheian
biatai (Simonides, fr. 93, 598 Page).
Of this continuity between saying and doing, kept within the tensions that
they manifest themselves between the poetic word and the deeds accomplished, the poem dedicated to
Scopas seems to us an example as much more precious as Simonides is, among the
commemorative poets, the one who goes further in proclaiming the character
"Artificial" of one's art, the most modern from this point of view.
If the praise that the poet must perform on commission is between
the amplitude of the parphasis and the pettiness of the momos or psogos, on the other
part the celebrated arete , to correspond to the etogio, must be located on a
average register. It is no longer the heroic excellence of Achilles or Hector, nor virtue
of the warrior, who became agathos aner by sacrificing his own life and his own
youth; but it cannot even be the baseness of the first comer, of the
peasant whatever.
The praise is rooted in the artery of the man of value, sufficiently rich and
generous because his commission responds to his desire to
glorification and talent of the poet, so that he establishes himself between the two
characters, a personal relationship of trustful friendship, a philia.
 What does the poet give him? Success, the completion of success,
excellence accomplished are things that only gods can grant, ed
exclusively to those among the men who care ( phileosin ). For
how lucky, powerful, rich one is, one can never be sure of either

Page 121

obtain or maintain such a privilege. Thus, "to be" esthlos o

agathos aner permanently and forever is impossible; only the divinity
owns this geras. Therefore it will not be the heroic gesture and its value that
makes immortal to define, for the poet, the agathos aner that he must create,
erect, stable as a statue, giving it the memory of song.
If the god gives, together with success, the aristeia of a success definitively
completed, the poet, for his part, gives praise to those whom he loves ( phileo ), and
so he makes them, makes them "become" alatheos andres agathoi, that is, confers them
the authenticity of exemplary men in people's memory. To achieve this
it is necessary and it is sufficient that the person who commissioned the praise of the poet does not
has ever performed, voluntarily, any vile, vile, ugly, aischron act ;
then its beauty can be sung. This game of kalon and aischron
recalls, with a touch of controversy, the contrast set by Tirteo with much
rigor between the one who has "become aner agathos in war" and those whose life is
it is ruined in the baseness: according to Tirteo the corpse that has the spear is disgraceful
enemy stuck in the back; the stripped corpse is also ugly
bleeding of the fallen old instead of the young; on the contrary, it is beautiful
death of the young man, fallen in the front row, of a brave man ( agathos aner )
in front of the enemy; and on his body, desired by women, admired by the
men when he was alive, everything is convenient, everything is beautiful when it falls on
battlefield. The fact that Simonides refers to this tradition
directly rooted in the epic is especially evident in fragment 531, in
which evokes "this burial of brave men ( andron agathon ), whose
death is beautiful ( kalos ho potmos) ". But in the poem dedicated to Scopas he
he distances himself from the heroic ideal. To sing the praise he does not
it requires neither the superhuman perfection of total success nor the transfiguration
of death in glory nor the blameless life of the Panamanian man ; asks
instead a virtue to measure of the city, that of the man of common sense, hygies
aner, who is neither petty nor inept, but who knows what «justice is
useful to the city ». It is this man, his friend, that the poet will celebrate if he does not
has committed nothing degrading with knowledge of the facts ( hekon ). At his
praise will not mix any blame ( ou min ego momasomai ) though
the individual of whom he has merit is not "irreproachable". Such praise
without envy (see Pindar, XI Olimpica, 7 and Sch. a Nem., 7, 61-63) and
the absence, in the intentions, of every element of blame or reproach
they normally define the attitude towards the dead rather
that of the living, since the dead are as if they were consecrated by the passing that there
has removed conflicts and hostilities from the human sphere (see
Archilochus, fr. 83 Lasserre-Bonnard; already Odyssey, XXII, 412; Demosthenes,
Against Boetos, II, 49; Against Leptine, 104; Iscorate, Attelage, 22; Antidosis,
101; Plutarch, Life of Solon, 21, 1). But this time, if the blame has no more

Page 122
 his place is not because the hero is fulfilled and sacralized by his death. The
panta kala which Homer and Tyrtaeus reserved for the warrior fallen in battle in the
flower of his youth becomes, with Simonides, the panta kala applicable to
all cases in which the character glorified, without being panamomos - which
pertains only to the gods -, he has accomplished nothing aischron that he is
personally imputable: "Everything is beautiful where no villain mingles".
Blame cannot mix with praise where the ugly does not mix with
actions. Then the panta kala and the praise of the poet, in the city, of the singer up
commission can express themselves in the language and in the forms made for
memorize the heroic deeds, to sing the men of the past or the warriors
dead in battle.
Through this adjustment of the values in the commemorative poetry,
the agreement between the word and reality is not really broken. The poet can
to celebrate the praise, to build his memorial of "imperishable glory", since
l ' agathos aner does not translate the most heroic of the ideal requirements. Purity"
of praise is rooted in the purity of an arete that appears glorious e
memorable if nothing is mixed with aischron.
Poetry does not claim to be able to give beauty to those who are not themselves
he would have it, nor, having a proper ambit, to be able to have access to another
plan of existence he who chooses to sing; it shows rather than
its mode of celebration, of glorious memorization, corresponds to the
new form that excellence and exemplarity take in the context of
civic community.

2. Simulacrum of the absent. Double, substitute, equivalent

Second aspect of this research: the different ways of figuration through i

which the dead is made present, without yet being able to speak of
image in the proper sense, that is, of imitation of outward appearance. In
During the past year we have highlighted the aspects of the "double" that we have
they seemed inherent in the terms kolossos and eidolon. Recalling the
archaeological evidence about the presence, inside
cenotaphs, stone blocks, small columns and figurines placed in place of
dead, and comparing these documents with some significant texts, we have
tried to make explicit the functions of the "substitute" that the figure of the dead, in
intermediate position between the double and the image, is in some cases charged with
to hire.
When the Spartans manufacture an eidolon of one of their dead kings in
war and they carry him on a parade bed up to his tomb (Herodotus, VI, 58),
it is not, contrary to the opinion of Hans Schaefer (Das Eidolon des

Page 123

Leonidas, «Festschrift Langlotz», 1957, pp. 223-233), of a form of portrait,

but of the need to bury, to keep in place, in Sparta, because of
its religious value for the city, the corpse of the king or, failing that, a
"Equivalent" which stands in place of that. The kings of Sparta, compared to theirs
remains, are therefore treated as heroes and not as men (Xenophon, La
Spartan constitution, XV, 9). The tombs in which their remains rest have
virtues and functions similar to those that the colonists attribute to the oikist or
all'archegeta, generally buried on the agora. Again it is
necessary to bring the body back home, to avoid the risk,
abandoning it, to leave it in the hands of possible enemies. If it is impossible
 repatriate the body, smeared with honey or wax to preserve it (Xenophon,
Hellenic, V, 3, 19; Plutarch, Life of Agesilaus, 40, 4; Diodorus Siculus, XV, 93,
6), it is necessary to fall back on an eidolon, whose presence, during the funeral and
in the tomb, he plays the role of substitute for the absent corpse. Although it is not
aniconic, but fully human in form, this eidolon is not
an image; it does not represent the traits of the person of the dead person, he presents it.
It does not aim to give an illusory impression of similarity; inserted into
funeral ritual, it works immediately as a substitute for the deceased.
In this sense the eidolon of the king of Sparta is not radically different from that
that, as legend has it, Laodamia had made its own husband
Protesilaus, to unite, beyond death, with this unhappy fallen, first
among the Greeks, under the blows of Hector (Euripides, Trag. Graec. Fragm., Nauk 2 , p.
503; Apollodorus, Chronicles, III, 20; Igino, Fabulae, 104; Ovisio, Heroides, 13).
He also remembers that block of stone that Hermes, after making the
body of Alcmena, puts in its place in the cist where the dead rested. IS
this stone, double aniconic of Alcmena, which the Heraclids will withdraw from
cista to "raise it" in the grove where the heroion of Alcmena will be established
(Anton. Liber., 33 = Ferecide, Br. Hist. Gr., 1, 83 Muller; Pausanias, IX, 16, 7.
On this association between the aphanismos and the metamorphosis in stone yes
will compare Iliad, II, 318-319: after making "appear" a snake, Zeus lo
returns to the invisible transforming it into stone).
That the kolossos could have played a similar role - both by giving body to
an absent person, who cannot be "evoked" by his name or by himself
lost in the other world, either replacing a living individual for
allocate it immediately to death, in the event of perjury, through figurines interposed
- is what the two inscriptions of Cyrene show in an irrefutable way
on the one hand to foreign supplicants, on the other to the oath made by the founders
of the colony at the time of their departure from Tera. These two texts
they date back to the second half of the fourth century; but the rituals to which they refer and i
kolossos values in this context refer to the archaic age. We have
commented on both inscriptions, extrapolating, starting from the elements

Page 124

linguistic, the procedures that allow establishing a link, in both directions,

among the living and the dead. Communication between the two worlds requires, in order to be able
to make a "hold" on the person, alive or dead, that occurs
has means of action on it. In the absence of the person one operates
through the mediation of "substitutes" or "equivalents" that make it
present down here in a concretely manipulable form, even when
it has definitively ceased to be there, or, on the contrary, that they do
disappear, dissolve and merge in the invisible when it is still presented to the
our eyes. Means of grip can be the name (of the absent and above all
of the dead), called three times loudly (on the ritual of the ekklesis of the
deceased cf. Odyssey, IX, 65-66; X, 521; Pindar, IV Pitica, 159; Herodotus, VII,
117; Pausanias, II, 12, 5; II, 39, 6, and Plutarch, Life of Aristide, 21, 5, all of the
passage concerning the archon of Platea). It can also be a figurine
( kolossos ), of wood or earth, received under its roof like a guest
( hypodechomai ), in the absence of the absent or the deceased, and removed in
followed, after completing the ritual, "raising it", sticking it ( hermit )
far away in a untouched forest. To get the opposite, a figure of is modeled
cera ( kerinos kolossos ) and throw it into the fire so that, through it, the
double of the living person steps into the afterlife ( katarreo, kataleibo, teko; see,
in addition to the oath of the Founders, Iliad, III, 300; Theophrastus, Maghe, 38). The
replacement figurines have nothing of the portrait; do not involve anything else
sign of distinction in addition to sex; so that they work as double is
 necessary, in the context of the ritual, that the figure be recognizable as
female or male. In Herodotus, about Egypt, it seems to us that two
uses of the kolossoi present this meaning of substitute of the individual to whom there is
refers (II, 130 and 141): figurine that every priest must manufacture during
his life to fix it in his place in the complete series of all those who,
having had the same function, they constitute, thanks to mediation
of the figures, the repertoire or memorial of the different past generations;
figurines of handmaids placed next to the dead mistress that they
they accompany in death as well as in life.
Then, widening the problem, we asked ourselves about the different forms of
"Substitute", recognized by the Greeks as "equivalents" of the person. Without
look like him, the equivalent can represent someone, take his
place in the game of social exchanges. He does this not by virtue of his resemblance to
the outward appearance of the person (as in the case of the portrait), but through one
commonality of "value", a concordance in the order of qualities related to
prestige: metal or precious object, weight of gold or silver; or if yes
it is a figure, through an identity of the dimension or form-model
of the human body which, in its young beauty, corresponds to the same
exemplary value of the arete of the represented character.

Page 125

In this perspective we have studied the mechanics of redemption and its

implications concerning the personal and social status of the warrior in return
of which the ransom is paid. Refuse the offered ransom - and of
consequently selling the prisoner as a slave - means, pocketing
less, at the same time lower the dignity of the vanquished, deny it in what
constitutes its price; accepting redemption means, instead, recognizing and
enhance the value of the opponent. The higher the ransom is raised, the more
man has value. The repurchase of the corpse allows us to better understand the
substitute function. In Iliad, XXII, 351-352, Achilles warns Hector of
fact that he will refuse to return his body to Priam, even if the old one
king "had his weight placed on the scale in gold". When the mass of gold
piled up on the scale is exactly in balance with the weight of the
corpse, then it is equivalent to it; as a precious, regal, incorruptible metal,
the gold of redemption is equal to the value of the dead warrior and allows
the exchange operation, expressed through the adverb anti that combines two
ideas: that of substitution (the same weight of gold "takes the place" of the
corpse returned to his own) and that of equality maintained in the exchange
(the corpse of the hero, object of the ransom, is entirely worth its weight in
gold). The weighing of the corpse of Hector and his equivalent in gold was
object of representations to which the whole series of
images concerning the weighing of warrior psychai before
combat (on this theme, the texts are Iliad, VIII, 68 ff., XXII, 208
ff .; Pollux, IV, 130; Plutarch, De aud.poetis, 2, 17 a; Quinto Smirneo,
Postomeric, III, 510). Kere can sometimes appear on the scales
of death with their wings, sometimes appear the "double" of the warriors
rivals, their eidola, in the same position and with the same
equipment of the fighters, sometimes even a figure of a young man
naked.
Among the redemption and the kolossoi used by the founders of Cyrene for their
oath would be the procedure attested to the Athenian archons in the
time of their appointment: the commitment with the promise of
pay the redemption of oneself in the event of perjury is made through
the intermediary of his "equivalent" in the form of a gold statue. The
 men and women of Tera, like those who leave for Cyrene, vote in the
death in the event that, in the future, they should swear the forgery, dissolving, in
present, the kolossoi of wax that represent them. The Athenian archons yes
commit, in the case of their perjury, to consecrate themselves as a votive gift,
through gold figurines whose value is equivalent to their magistrates,
as these have their same weight and their same size.
Offering in anathema to Delphi golden anthropomorphic statues, substitute for theirs
people ( andrianta chrysoun isometreton anathesein en Delphois: Aristotle,

Page 126

AP, 55, 5; Plutarch, Life of Solon, 25, 3; chrysen eikona isometreton eis
Delphous anathesein: Plato, Fedro, 235 d 8-c), the archons redeem themselves, but
they redeem themselves to the extent that these "images" work not like
portraits but as replacement figures.
When they raise, in the sanctuary of the god, their substitute in gold as a gift
votive, the archons do nothing but consecrate themselves as perjurers;
they strip themselves of what, in them, is linked to error; freed from the debt that they
they contracted perjury, paid the full price, they find again
in life that personal integrity that the stain of the false oath had
product. The situation is at the same time analogous and inverse in the case in
which the votive image, erected in the sanctuary, instead of referring to a living that
"Abandons" a statute, an aspect, an old state of one's person, is
the image of a man caught by death in the height of youth, in the
intact splendor of its value: what the figure translates of this
character, who at the cost of his life has stripped himself of all that
he was transitory, uncertain and mortal to access the status of a dead person
glorious is perfection, the definitive fulfillment ( telos ) of the one who is
«Become exemplary». Here we find the poem of Simonides dedicated to
Scopas, to which it is necessary to approach, as did Svenbro, the text of Herodotus on
Cleobi and Bitone, whose twin kouroi , which date from the early 6th century,
I am currently at the Delphi museum (Herodotus, I, 31). The enterprise of the two brothers,
realized before the eyes of the whole assembly gathered in the sanctuary of Hera,
as Erodoto recounts, he brought them «the best end of life ( teleute tou
biou ariste ) ". All those who had assisted congratulated so much with the
boys as much as with their mother; she, full of joy for their business e
for the praise that followed (toi te ergoi kai tei phemei ), prayed the goddess, in front
to the statue, to grant their children, in recognition of their piety, "the
better ( ariston ) that a man can get ". Then the deity did
clearly understand that for man it is better to be dead than alive. THE
two young men fell asleep in the sanctuary; they did not wake up again and there
they found, with their end ( telos ), happiness ( eudaimonie ). Herodotus concludes:
"The Argives, having made two statues ( eikonas ), consecrated them in the temple of
Delphi, like those of men who had shown themselves excellent (hos andron
ariston genomenon) ». Seated in the custody and, so to speak, the gaze of
god, the two kouroi express the exemplary value of the person for whom
the akme of life has been fulfilled, dying in the splendor of youth and
of the heroic enterprise. The radiance radiated from the human body and expressed in
figure of the kouros is then equal to that emanated by the gods in the happiness of the
their eternal youth. In its impersonal form, a kouros - as we know -
it is not a portrait; it is not even an "image" in the meaning that the word
eikon will take between the fifth and fourth centuries. Represents a deceased and has the purpose of
Page 127

place it forever near the god to which it belongs, a deceased who is not
seen in its physical appearance, but in its "excellence", in that set of
values that define his person and that only death can preserve in
eternal, taking them away from fluctuations and the passage of time, making them
disappear in the afterlife.
Now it is interesting to consider a text of Thucydides (I, 134)
particularly enlightening. Because the king of Sparta, Pausanias, has made himself
guilty of treason, the efori, informed, are preparing to arrest him.
Pausanias escapes them and takes refuge in the sanctuary of Atena Calcieco. The ephors ne
then they have all the doors walled up; destroyed by hunger, the king comes out only
to die on the threshold. The ephors bury him not far away. But the god of
Delfi orders the lacedemoni to transfer his tomb to the entrance of the enclosure
sacred, where he had died; also, "because their behavior had been
sacrilegious, the god ordered to give Athena Calcieco two bodies instead of one
( duo somata anth'henos [...] apodounai ). They built two statues of
bronze and dedicated them to the goddess to redeem the death of Pausanias ( chalkous
andriantas duo hos anti Pausaniou anethesan) ». Therefore, erecting a statue has
redemption value as in the case of the Athenian archons, and the translation by J. de
Romilly is justified. But the anti also emphasizes the substitute function of
votive figures (see Jean Ducat, BCH, 1976, vol. C, p. 243 and note 29).1 Per
to pay for the mistake made, to cancel the stain, Apollo demands two bodies
instead of just one corpse. The spoils gifts, whatever the fault of
Pausanias, have undergone unworthy treatment and, while still living, the king is
was taken away from the protection of the goddess; to restore balance, he will have to
to be twice present in his death status with the goddess, thanks to the two
Kouroi.
Death is a change of state, indeed a change of state for
excellence, the one that closes the cycle of "passages", the series of
transformations that rhythm the course of human life. We therefore have
analyzed the use of anti in the case of votive figures erected on the occasion of
a change of state, to mark the abandonment of the old at the same time
statute and access to the new one (when the childhood is abandoned, the
virginal condition, one's profession, always with the implication of values
religious) and in the case of the funerary epigrams that make the stelae or i speak
kouroi and korai on graves. Some examples: Aristotle, referring that,
according to some, the knight class includes all those who can
keep a horse, mentions, in support of this opinion, existence,
on the acropolis, the image of Difilo consecrated to the gods by his son «after having
exchanged the status of knight with that of thetes ». Aristotle adds that
a horse is placed next to the human figure to testify that the class of gods
Cavalieri has exactly this meaning (The Constitution of Athens, 7, 1). There

Page 128

votive statue attests and consecrates the promotion; through the human figure and the
horse that accompanies it, it fixes the result of the passage, confirming the
new statute acquired by the person at the end of the change, bylaws that
"Took the place" of the previous one that was stripped ( thetikou anti
telous hippad 'ameipsamenos ). Similarly, the figure on the stele or the kouros
 funerary
living rise on
person; "Inthe tombanti,
place", "in place"
meansof
atwhat it was,
the same didthat
time andthe
was worth
figure is the
itself
replaced to the person as his "equivalent", which it in a certain
so does the same thing that the living did (see, on the stele of Amfarete, of the
end of the fifth century, the inscription: "It is the dear child of my daughter that I hold here,
the one I held on my knees when, living, we looked at the light of
Sun; and now that we are both dead, I still keep it "), which he owns
the same beauty, the same value that belonged to him; but,
simultaneously and inversely, it also means that it translates a new one
mode of being, different from the old, that is, this status of a dead man
the deceased acquires disappearing from the sunlight forever. «I am fixated
here in the Paro marble, in place of a woman ( anti gynaikos); in memory of
Bitté, painful mourning for his mother "proclaims a funerary inscription of
Amorgos, dating from the mid-5th century. "In place of a woman", so
like Apollo "in place of a body" he wanted two; but the formula, in his
variants, shows that the person the substitute takes the place of is considered
exclusively starting from its own value. He is "in place of his youth and
of her beauty »that the groom of the young Dionisia builds the
funeral monument, is "in place of his noble character" that the bridegroom of
Aspasia has built a mnema for this exemplary woman ( esthle ), is «al
place of his virtue and his wisdom "which the father Cleobulus erected for
Xenophorus dead a sema.
As in commemorative poetry there is continuity between praise and enterprise,
between the beauty of one and the splendor of the other, so in representation
figurative of the dead the beauty of the image extends, like his
equivalent, that of the deceased. A stele from Athens, crowning the tomb of a
young man, he recommends the passerby to mourn the fact that the boy is
dead so beautiful, hos kalos on ethane. This young beauty, that death
he fixed before he was spoiled, he now shows himself on the monument in succession
Some years; on a kore of the mid-sixth century, by Phaidimos,
we can read: "He [the father] made me raise, sema of the daughter
Philé, nice to see. " And on an inscription from Thasos, from the end of the sixth century:
"Beautiful is the mnema of the deceased Leorete that her father built, why ever
the more we will see her again alive "(see Jean Dicat, BCH, 1976, vol. C, pp. 241, 251).
We have reserved a more in-depth commentary on the Phrasikleia sema ,
found in Meranda (the ancient Myrrinos) and of which we now possess, besides

Page 129

the funerary statue, an archaic kore , is also engraved on the base

holding a lotus flower. The text says: "Sema of Phrasikleia. Me
I will call Core forever [I will forever carry the epiclesis of Core] that the gods
they attributed me instead of the wedding ( anti gamou) ». This second name
of Core is that of the funerary figure who speaks in the first person, in the name and
instead of Phrasikleia, of which it is sema ( sema Phrasikleias ), and to which it is
it is replaced forever, making them be dressed, through its representation
funeral, the form of a kore. The expression anti gamou reminds «the bel
privilege »granted by Zeus to Estia, offering them, anti gamoio, instead of
wedding, to preside forever in the center of the house ( Homeric Hymn ad
Aphrodite, 30). Match for Hades, as Core daughter of Demeter before having
known the hymen, Phrasikleia found itself to be fixed by the death in the
her condition as a virgin. The privilege that the gods offer her and her
a funerary image expresses is that of having become forever in his
death statute, the virginal kore depicted on his own grave (see
Sophocles, Antigone, 916-920).
Finally, to illustrate this course, we have projected and commented on
 archaeological documents concerning funerary monuments and in particular la
series of Attic Stelae and archaic funerary kouroi .
The seminar was dedicated to the deepening of two topics:
the ideology and status of animals in sacrifice.
On the first point the debate was formed starting from the contributions of the
professors M. Godelier and M. Louy, and with the participation of François
Bresson and Mare Augé. On the second point, M. Cartry investigated the
analysis, of which he has already published the first elements, on the status of animals
in the gourmantchè sacrifice .
Together with these scholars, we want to thank our foreign colleagues,
Bruno d'Agostino of the Oriental Institute of Naples, Geoffrey ER Lloyd of
Cambridge and Gregory Nagy of Harvard, who agreed to hold
seminars within our Center, both at the Collège and at the École des
Hautes Études.

1 [In the Italian translation, Luciano Canfora, Bari-Rome 1986, translates precisely: "Two statues of
bronze in surrogate of Pausanias ».]

Page 130

SOURCES

Naissance d'images, «Journal de psychologie» 2 (April-June 1975), pp. 136-175, with the title Image
et apparence dans la théorie platonicienneenne de la Mimesis; then in Religions, histoires, raisons,
Maspero, Paris 1979, pp. 105-137. Tr. en. by A. Montagna, in J.-P. Vernant, Birth of images and others
writings on religion, history, reason, tr. en. by A. Montagna, premise of M. Vegetti, the Assayer,
Milan 1982, pp. 119-152.
De the presentification of the invisible to the imitation of the appearance, in Image et signification. Rencontres
de l'École du Louvre, Paris 1983, pp. 25-37. Tr. en. by A. Ghilardotti, From the presentification
of the invisible to the imitation of appearance, in J.-P. Vernant, Between myth and politics, edited by G.
Guidorizzi, Cortina, Milan 1998, pp. 165-182.
Figuration et image, «Métis» 5 (1990), pp. 225-238. Tr. en. by A. Ghilardotti, Representation e
image, in J.-P. Vernant, Between myth and politics, edited by G. Guidorizzi, Cortina, Milan 1998, pp.
183-199.
Figuration of the invisible et catégorie psychologique du double: the colossos, in Mythe et pensée chez les
grecs. Études de psychologie historique, Maspero, Paris 1965, pp. 251-264. Tr. en. of M. Romano and B.
Bravo, Figuration of the invisible and psychological category of the double: the kolossos, in J.-P. Vernant,
Myth and thought among the Greeks. Studies in historical psychology, Einaudi, Turin 1970, pp. 219-230.
Le symbole plastique (1975/1976), in Figures, idoles, masques, Paris, Julliard, 1990, pp. 17-30. Tr. en.
by A. Zangara, The plastic symbol, in J.-P. Vernant, Figures, idols, masks, the Saggiatore, Milan
2001, pp. 17-28.
La figure des morts I (1976-1977), in Figures, idoles, masques, Paris, Julliard, 1990, pp. 31-59. Tr. en. of
A. Zangara, The figure of the dead I, in J.-P. Vernant, Figures, idols, masks, the Saggiatore, Milan
2001, pp. 29-52.
La figure des morts II (1977-1978), in Figures, idoles, masques, Paris, Julliard, 1990, pp. 60-82. Tr. en.
by A. Zangara, The figure of the dead II, in J.-P. Vernant, Figures, idols, masks, the Saggiatore, Milan
2001, pp. 53-72.
Page 131

Philosophies
Series directed by Pierre Dalla Vigna and Luca Taddio
Published in 2010:
- Pietri Susi, The inaugural work. The writers-readers of the Comédie Humaine I
- Rainone Antonio, The double world of the eye and the ear
- Giacomantonio Francesco, Introduction to Habermas political thought. The dialogue of reason
rampant
- Perfumes Emanuele, Autonomy possible. Introduction to Castoriadis
- Vander Fabio, Being and non-being. The Science of Logic and its critics
- Verrucci Gianluca, Practical reason and normativity. The Kantian constructivism of Rawls, Korsgaard e
O'Neill
- Mariani Emanuele, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. The Christ and the Antichrist
- Meschesi Viviana, System and transgression. Logic and analogy in F. Rosenzweig, W. Benjamin and E.
Levinas
- Brianese Giorgio, Arch and Destiny. Interpretation of Michelstaedter
- Cavicchioli Roberta, A brief history of an ingratitude. Victor Cousin in the family album of the
republican school
- Crotti Ornella, The beauty of good. Hannah Arendt's debt to Immanuel Kant
- Magliulo Nicola, Cacciari and Severino. Quaestiones disputatae
- Scheu René, The weak subject. On the thought of Aldo Rovatti
- Andrea Amato, At the beginning of being there. Still lacking the sense of good and evil
- Manti Franco (edited by), Res publica
- Marchetti Luca, Beyond the image
- Di Giacomo Giuseppe (edited by), Rethinking images
- Bonito Oliva Rossella, Labyrinths and constellations. A path on the edge of Hegel
- Gasparri Luca, Philosophy of Illusion. Outlines of glottology and conceptual criticism
- Pontius Julia, Mininni Joseph, Pontius Augustus, Solimini Maria, Petrilli Susan, Ponzio Luciano,
Roland Barthes. The dull vision
- Duarte German A., The disappearance of the universal clock. Peter Watkins and the audiovisual media
- Cavicchioli Roberta, A brief history of an ingratitude. Victor Cousin in the family album of the
republican school
- Lavecchia Salvatore, Beyond one and the many. Good and be in the philosophy of Plato
- Sacchi Dario (edited by), Passioni and reason between ethics and aesthetics
- D'oriano Pietro, Rocchi Draga (edited by), Il male e il essere . Proceedings of the international conference of
studies - Rome
- Alcaro Mario (edited by), The oblivion of the body and the world in contemporary philosophy
- Arcella Luciano, The innocence of Zarathustra. Considerations on the first book of Thus spoke Zarathustra of
 F. Nietzsche,
- Carena Tiziana, The theological and aesthetic pneumatology of Vincenzo Gioberti

Page 132

- Zampieri, Introduction to the philosophical life

- Vincenzo Comerci, Philosophy and the world. The comparison of Carlo Sini
- Felice Accame, Mario Valentino Bramè, The strange copy. Correspondence between two opponents on nature and
function of philosophy with documentation to support both
- Carlo Burelli, And it was the state. Hobbes and the dilemma that imprisons
- Di Chiro Antonio, The night of the world. Places of meaning, places of the divine
- Lucchini, the good as a possible concrete process. Nature and social ontology
- Cruz, Memory is said in many ways
- Giovanni Invitto, Marleau-Ponty par lui-même. A philosophical practice of self-narration
- Valentina Tirloni, The enigma of color. A phenomenological and symbolic approach
- Alessia Cervini, The search for the method. Anthropology and history of forms in SM Ejzenštejn
- Luciano Ponzio, The icon and the article. Configurations of iconic writing
- Giacomo Fronzi, Contaminations. Aesthetic experiences in society
- Giorgia Bordoni, Names of God
- Filippo Silvestri, Signs meanings intuitions. On the problem of language in the phenomenology of
Husserl
- Romeo Bufalo, Giuseppe Cantarano, Pio Colonnello (edited by), Natura Storia Società. Studies in
honor of Mario Alcaro
- Stefano Bracaletti, Methodological individualism, reductionism, microfoundation. Issues and
developments of the individualist paradigm in the social sciences
- Giovanni Invitto, The Lantern of Diogenes and Aladdin's Lamp
- Andrea Camparsi, Irene Angela Bianchi, Self-awareness and the perspective on the world
- Veronica Santini, The philosopher and the sea. Marine and nautical images in the Republic of Plato

Page 133
 INDEX

I NTRODUCTION
by Pietro Conte
N BIO BIBLIOGRAPHIC EIGHT
N OTE AL TEXT
1. N ASCITI OF IMAGES (1975)
2. D TO THE PRESENTIFICATION OF THE INVISIBLE TO IMITATING THE APPEARANCE
(1983)
3. R AFFIGURAZIONE E IMMAGINE (1990)
4. F IGURATION OF THE INVISIBLE AND PSYCHOLOGICAL CATEGORY OF THE DOUBLE: IL
KOLOSSOS (1965)

5. I L PLASTIC SYMBOL (1975/1976)

6. THE FIGURE OF THE DEAD I (1976-1977)
7. THE FIGURE OF THE DEAD II (1977-1978)
F ONTI