ut pictura poeta

The leitmotif of this volume is the concept of “author images”, which is used in modern literary studies to describe processes of production and reading of literary works and is here applied for the first time to the study of ancient works. As a means of analysing ancient literature, it captures the aspect of personification, which is characteristic of ancient author concepts, and at the same time points to the fact that there is a difference between “image” and “author” and that it is only an image and not the author himself that can be seen and grasped by readers.

This makes the “author image” particularly suitable for examining the intersections of material, rhetorical and mental representations of literary authorship that form the subject of this volume. Using selected examples from Latin and Greek literature, the contributors explore the fields of cultural experience that nourish authorial images. They discuss the manifold possibilities of visualising and representing a person’s quality of being an author in general or being an author of specific works, be it physically through artworks or pictures, metaphorically through evoked authorial figures, through thematised representations of authors in a text, or through the combination of authorial images and texts.

These issues are addressed in four overlapping sections, each focusing on different areas of the metaphor’s application, namely material images in the form of artworks, knowledge about persons, textual images as authorial strategies and images in reception.

ut pictura poeta. Author Images and the Reading of Ancient Literature / Autorbilder und die Lektüre antiker Literatur (Ute Tischer, Ursula Gärtner & Alexandra Forst)
The Cultural Imagination of Authorship (Wolfgang Hallett) 

I. Images of Authors and Author Images as Material Representations
Pliny the Elder and the Portraits of Ancient Authors (Eva Falaschi)
Menander daheim. Die pompejanische Casa del Menandro als Autorbild (Katharina Lorenz)
sequens philosophos fecit. Abbildungen griechischer Philosophen und Dichter und deren Rezeption in der antiken Literatur (Margit Linder)

II. Authorial Images between Text and Biography
Symmachus als pagane Galionsfigur. Die dritte relatio und ihre Bedeutung für ein wirkmächtiges Autorbild (Alexandra Forst)
Servius velut latenti similis. Das Autorbild des Vergilkommentators Servius (Ute Tischer)

III. Authorial Images as Created by Authors
Medial Representation of the Author “Naso”. Rhetorical Strategies of Self-dramatization in Ovidʼs Epistulae ex Ponto (Therese Fuhrer)
Aesopi ingenio statuam posuere Attici. The Author Image in Phaedrus’s Fables (Ursula Gärtner)
Autorbild und Autorfiktion bei Babrios und Minoides Mynas (Lukas Spielhofer)
Nobody’s Home. Surrogacy, Substitution, and the Failed Search for “Calpurnius Siculus” (Tom Geue)

IV. Authorial Images from a Historical Perspective
Author as Audience. Staging Virgil in Tacitus’s Dialogus de oratoribus (Talitha Kearey)
Virgil the Wise. Genesis of a Myth (Fabio Stok)
Fathers and Sons – and Daughters. Genealogical Co-authorship, Offspring Metaphors and the Language of Legitimacy (Markus Hafner)

Index locorum