Facing the Gods: Epiphany and Representation in Graeco-Roman Art, Literature and Religion

by Verity Platt

Overview

This is the first history of epiphany as both a phenomenon and as a cultural discourse within the Graeco-Roman world, exploring divine manifestations and their representations, in visual terms as well as in literary, historical and epigraphic accounts. Verity Platt sets the cultural analysis of epiphany within a historical framework that explores its development from the archaic period into the Roman empire. In particular, a surprisingly large number of the images that have survived from antiquity are not only religious, but epiphanically charged. Verity Platt argues that the enduring potential for divine incursions into mortal experience provides a structure of cognitive reliability that supports both ancient religion and mythology. At the same time, Graeco-Roman culture exhibits a sophisticated awareness of the difficulties of the apprehension of deity, the representation of divine presence, and the potential for the manmade sign to lead the worshipper back to an unmediated epiphanic encounter.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521861717
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	07/28/2011
Series:	Greek Culture in the Roman World
Pages:	502
Product dimensions:	6.90(w) x 9.80(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Verity Platt is Associate Professor in the Departments of Classics and Art History at Cornell University, New York, having previously taught at the University of Exeter and the University of Chicago. Her research interests include attitudes to the sacred image in antiquity, ancient theories of representation, the relationship between image and text, and Roman wall-painting and funerary art. This is her first book.

Table of Contents

Introduction; Part I: 1. Framing epiphany in art and text; 2. Material epiphany: encountering the divine in cult images; 3. Epiphany and authority in Hellenistic Greece; 4. The poetics of epiphany in Hellenistic epigram; Part II: 5. Virtual visions: piety and paideia in Second Sophistic literature; 6. Dream visions and cult images in Second Sophistic literature; 7. The apologetics of representation in Philostratus' Life of Apollonius of Tyana; Part III: 8. Dying to see: epiphanic sarcophagi from Imperial Rome.

Editorial Reviews

"Original and important."
The Times Literary Supplement

"… a stimulating, wide-ranging work that that should be of interest to all those studying the classical world; it will certainly become standard reading for anyone with an interest in Greek religion, Greek and Roman iconography, or the literary and philosophical discourses of the Second Sophistic. Elegantly written and argued."
Jenny Wallensten, Time and Mind

From the Publisher