Anne Sheppard
The English word “imagination” is the standard translation of the Greek phantasia.1 In this chapter I shall be considering two contrasting ways in which the term phantasia is used in ancient aesthetics. I shall be talking first about phantasia as visualization and then about a different, much less common use of the term, to refer to the imaginative capacity to reach beyond our everyday experience.
A well-known passage of the work On Sublimity attributed to Longinus, probably written in the first century AD, neatly encapsulates the first use of phantasia: “the word has also come into fashion for the situation in which enthusiasm and emotion make the speaker see what he is saying and bring it visually before his audience” (15.1). Phantasia here is connected explicitly with visualization by the writer and the recreation of such visualization in the audience. Both here and in the discussion of examples which follows the writer of On Sublimity is explicitly talking in terms of the seeing of images “in the mind’s eye,” a seeing which is brought about by “enthusiasm and emotion.” This way of talking about visualization is very common in ancient literary criticism and is closely linked to the concept of enargeia (“vividness”). Although Aristotle does not use the term phantasia in the way it is used in On Sublimity, the connection between visualization and vividness is already present in his work and adumbrated in some earlier writers.
We may begin, as the Greeks themselves liked to do, with Homer. Already in the Odyssey Odysseus praises the bard Demodocus for telling about the Trojan War as if he had been there: “Very beautifully [kata kosmon] you sing the fate of the Achaeans, their deeds and sufferings and toils, as if you were there yourself or had heard from someone else” (Odyssey 8.489–491).
Gorgias, perhaps the most famous rhetorician of the fifth century BC, included in his Defence of Helen some reflections on the power of speech (logos), including poetry under that heading: “Those who hear poetry feel the shudders of fear, the tears of pity, the longings of grief. Through the words, the soul experiences its own reaction to successes and misfortunes in the affairs and persons of others” (§9).
Homer and Gorgias make no use of the terminology of phantasia and enargeia but the seeds of the later theory are already present in their comments: Homer is concerned with the poet and his ability to tell a story as if he had been present himself; the idea that he makes his audience feel as if they in their turn had been present is at best implicit. Gorgias, the rhetorician, turns his attention to the audience and their emotions, as a reaction to “successes and misfortunes in the affairs and persons of others.” In later writers, we shall find the emphasis sometimes on the author, sometimes on the audience, and the effect of successful visualization described sometimes more in terms of author and audience feeling as if they had been there, sometimes more in terms of their emotional reactions.
Homer and Gorgias offer no suggestions as to what techniques an author should employ in order to achieve such an effect but the idea that visualization could be deliberately induced is arguably implicit in the fun which Aristophanes pokes at Agathon in the Thesmophoriazusae. Agathon appears dressed as a woman and explains his strange appearance to Euripides’ puzzled kinsman in the following terms: “I change my clothing according as I change my mentality. A man who is a poet must adopt habits that match the plays he’s committed to composing. For example, if one is writing plays about women, one’s body must participate in their habits” (148–152). It could be argued that Aristophanes here is mocking the effeminate style of Agathon’s poetry, rather than his subject matter, especially as Agathon has just sung a set of lyrics which presumably parody that style. Euripides’ kinsman, however, takes it that subject matter is referred to and seizes the opportunity for some jokes about what Agathon will have to get up to if he needs to imitate Phaedra or a satyr. It would clearly be unwise to try to extract an elaborate theory from a comic scene which would be funny when performed even to an audience who knew little or nothing about Agathon and his work. But Aristophanes’ contemporary audience did know about Agathon; they would have seen his plays and might have known that he was an admirer of Gorgias. The scene is based on the assumption that a poet should project himself imaginatively into his work – just the assumption which we find, in a more specific form, in later theories of phantasia as visualization. For Aristophanes to use this assumption in the way he does means that it must have been familiar at some level to at least some of his audience.
Plato too is familiar with the assumption and Plato too pokes fun at it. Characteristically, however, Platonic irony, while no less deadly in its effects than Aristophanic parody, is more subtle and has a more complex theoretical background. In Plato’s Ion, Socrates suggests to Ion, a professional rhapsode, or reciter, of Homer, that he, like Demodocus in the Odyssey, imagines himself present at the events he describes:
When you recite epic verses well and most amaze your audience – whether you are singing about Odysseus leaping on the threshold, making himself known to the suitors and pouring arrows out at his feet, or about Achilles rushing to attack Hector, or singing some sad passage about Andromache or Hecuba or Priam – are you then in your right mind? Or are you beside yourself and, under the influence of inspiration, do you imagine you are present at the events you are describing, whether in Ithaca or at Troy or wherever the story of the epic is actually set? (535b–c)
Ion’s reply makes clear that, like the audience described by Gorgias, he enters into the story he is telling to such an extent that he experiences the emotions which would be felt by someone present at the scene: “When I recite a sad passage, my eyes fill with tears; when it is something frightening or terrifying, my hair stands on end with fear and my heart jumps” (535c). What is more, Ion transmits his emotions to the audience: “I look down at them from the stage and see them weeping and looking terrified and marvelling at what is being said” (535e).
However, there are some problems about this picture of the rhapsode who feels as if he were present at the scenes he acts out for his audience and so transmits the emotions on to them. First, the emotions he feels at the plight of Homer’s fictional characters are to some extent artificial, for when he performs he is, as Socrates points out, “at sacrifices and festivals … standing among more than 20,000 friendly people” (535d). Furthermore, if Ion is to earn his living from his profession, he has to remain aware of the artificiality. As he himself admits, “if I make them weep, I shall be laughing myself as I take my money but if I make them laugh, I shall be weeping myself because I will lose money” (535e). There is a tension, not further explored in the dialogue, between the claim made by Socrates, that Ion’s skill in reciting Homer is simply a matter of inspiration, not knowledge, and the suggestion that there is some deliberate artifice involved in Ion’s imagining himself present at the scenes he describes and so influencing the emotions of his audience.
Earlier ideas about deliberate imaginative visualization by both poets and orators are picked up and developed by Aristotle, both in the Poetics and in the Rhetoric. Although Aristotle does not express these ideas in quite the same language as we find in Hellenistic and Roman writers, his presentation of them lays the foundation for the later theory. In the Poetics he draws attention to the importance of visualization by the dramatist when working out a plot:
A poet should compose plots and work them out in language by putting things before his mind’s eye [pro ommatōn] as much as possible. For in that way, by picturing them very vividly [enargestata], as if he were present at the actual events, he can find what is appropriate and is least likely to overlook incongruities. The criticism made of Carcinus is evidence for this. For Amphiaraus was coming back from the temple, which would have escaped notice if it had not been seen, but fell flat on the stage, because the audience did not like it. One should also, as far as possible, work plots out by using gestures. For, given the same natural ability, those who are actually experiencing emotions are the most convincing: someone who is distressed most authentically portrays distress, and someone angry most authentically portrays anger.
(17.1455a22–32)
Aristotle here is recommending that the poet should indeed behave rather as Aristophanes mocks Agathon for doing, and rather as Socrates teases Ion for doing (although Ion is a reciter and interpreter, not a poet). He should imagine the events as if he were there and should feel the appropriate emotions in order to express them in his work. Little is said here about the audience; there is only an allusion to their annoyance at Carcinus’ failure to foresee a problem with the presentation of events on the stage, in a play which is otherwise unknown. However, we can infer from this, first, that Aristotle is thinking of the dramatist as visualizing his play in performance, and second, that when such visualization is successful, the audience’s reaction would be very different from their irritation with Carcinus.
Aristotle’s talk of the poet “putting things before his mind’s eye” sounds casual and colloquial but in fact the phrase “ before his mind’s eye” (pro ommatōn) functions, both here and elsewhere in Aristotle’s work, almost as a technical term for visualization. It is used in this way in some passages of Aristotle’s Rhetoric which are relevant to my topic. In particular, in Rhetoric 2.8 Aristotle discusses pity, and, with an eye to the techniques by which defendants in the law courts attempted to arouse pity for their situation, says:
And since sufferings are pitiable when they appear near at hand and since people do not feel pity, or not in the same way, about things ten thousand years in the past or future, neither anticipating nor remembering them, necessarily those are more pitiable who contribute to the effect by gestures and cries and displays of feelings and generally in their acting; for they make the evil seem near by making it appear before [our] eyes [pro ommatōn] either as something about to happen or as something that has happened, and things are more pitiable when just having happened or going to happen in a short space of time.
(1386a29–36)
Here it is the audience, or rather the jury, who visualize the sufferings of the defendants; the Greek phrase, pro ommatōn, leaves it open whose eyes are meant but the sense requires that it be the eyes of the jury and in English we have to specify that, as George Kennedy does in his translation by inserting “our.” The jury are not quite made to feel as if they had been there, but the sufferings are made to appear “near at hand;” the arousal of their emotions is explicitly the object of the exercise.2
By the first century AD phantasia had become the standard term for “visualization,” used by critics of both literature and visual art. Talk of visualization, of putting things before the mind’s eye, and of vividness can be found in a wide range of discussions of poetry, oratory, historiography, and painting. Quintilian, writing on the education of the orator, uses the term phantasia not of the ability to visualize but of the images called up by such an ability, declaring that the orator who is most effective in moving his audience will be the one who has a good stock of what the Greeks call phantasiai and the Romans call visiones, “by means of which images of absent things are presented to our mind in such a way that we seem to see them with our eyes and have them before us” (6.2.29). Similarly at 8.3.63–65 Quintilian praises Cicero for his skill in describing Verres in such a way that his listener, or reader, feels as though he is seeing the object of Cicero’s prosecution himself. The Roman poet Ovid, who was well educated in rhetoric, describes himself in his exile at Tomis on the Black Sea as visualizing in imagination the home, city, and wife no longer physically present: “My house, the city and the appearance of the places wander before my mind’s eye [ante oculos] … The image of my wife is before my mind’s eye [ante oculos] as if she were present” (Tristia 3.4.55–60); “My mind sees everything clearly, using its own eyes [oculis suis]” (Ex Ponto 1.8.34).
Typically when a writer, or a painter, is praised for realistic imitation or representation (mimēsis), he is praised for the vividness of his work (enargeia) and his success both in visualizing what he is depicting and in recreating such visualization in his audience. The effects of such visualization are described primarily in terms of emotion. We can see in more detail how this cluster of ideas is used by a variety of authors if we turn to some further texts.
Aelian’s Historical Miscellany is a collection of anecdotes and historical material, dating from the early third century AD. In 2.44 Aelian describes a painting by Theon and its use in what we would call a multi-media experience:
Many works attest the fine technique of the painter Theon, and in particular the painting of a hoplite coming to the rescue when the enemy suddenly invade and bring death and destruction to the land. The young man clearly looks as if he is about to do battle with great spirit; you would say he was inspired, as if he were possessed by Ares. His eyes have a fiery look. Having snatched his weapons, it appears, he makes for the enemy as fast as his feet will carry him. Already he holds his shield in position on one side and brandishes a drawn sword, with a blood-thirsty look and ready to kill, and shows by his whole bearing that he will spare no one. Theon has added nothing else to the picture – no comrades, no commanding officer, no subaltern, no cavalry or archers; this one hoplite was enough to satisfy the demands of the picture. However, the artist did not reveal the picture, or show it to the public that had come to look at it, before he had summoned a trumpeter. He ordered the man to play the call to attack as loud and clear as possible, as if it were a summons to battle. The strident, terrifying notes rang out just as trumpets summon the infantry to immediate action, and at once the picture was revealed; the soldier could be seen, and the music made the impression of the man dashing into battle even more vivid.
This description of Theon’s painting makes it clear that its vividness, or enargeia, consisted in the representation of the hoplite’s feelings and attitude, as they might be inferred from the behavior depicted in the painting. Notice the two references to the look in his eyes and to his “showing by his whole bearing that he will spare no one.” Also interesting is the story at the end of the passage about the artist summoning a trumpeter to play as the picture was revealed. It seems that music also has a part to play in achieving vividness, even though many of our sources talk as though this concept relates only to the sense of sight. We may ask what was the point of using the trumpeter. Was Theon engaged in trompe l’oeil, in trying to make the spectators believe they were actually seeing a real hoplite? Perhaps, but it seems much more likely that he wanted to make them feel as if they were there, while of course knowing perfectly well that they were looking at a painting.
Another, similar, but less detailed, description of a painting, this time by Euphranor, can be found in Plutarch, On the Fame of the Athenians 346e–347a:
This was the action which Euphranor depicted, and in his portrayal of the battle one may see the clash of conflict and the stout resistance abounding in boldness and courage and spirit. But I do not think you would award judgement to the painter in comparison with the general, nor would you bear with those who prefer the picture to the trophy of victory, or the imitation to the actuality.
Simonides, however, calls painting inarticulate poetry and poetry articulate painting: for the actions which painters portray as taking place at the moment literature narrates and records after they have taken place. Even though artists with color and design, and writers with words and phrases, represent the same subjects, they differ in the material and manner of their imitation; and yet the underlying end and aim of both is one and the same; the most effective historian is he who, by a vivid representation of emotions and characters, makes his narration like a painting. Assuredly Thucydides is always striving for this vividness in his writing, since it is his desire to make the reader a spectator, as it were, and to produce vividly in the minds of those who peruse his narrative the emotions of amazement and consternation which were experienced by those who beheld them.
The battle shown in the painting was one in which the Athenians and the Spartans together defeated the celebrated fourth-century Theban general, Epaminondas. Plutarch’s description does not explain just how Euphranor depicted “the clash of conflict and the stout resistance abounding in boldness and courage and spirit,” although a slightly earlier passage (346a–b) suggests that Euphranor liked military subjects and was admired for his success in painting martial-looking human figures. Plutarch was something of a Platonist and that is why his admiration for the realism of Euphranor’s battle picture is somewhat grudging. Note his comment: “But I do not think you would award judgement to the painter in comparison with the general, nor would you bear with those who prefer the picture to the trophy of victory, or the imitation to the actuality.”
In his Life of Aratus (32.3) Plutarch alludes to another painting of a battle, this time by Timanthes, which was particularly vivid in its composition. All these references to vivid, realistic paintings, including Aelian’s description of the painting by Theon, are to paintings of military scenes. At least as far as Plutarch is concerned, the interest in paintings of battles goes together with an interest in descriptions of similar scenes in historiography. If we return to On the Fame of the Athenians 346e–347a, we can see that Plutarch moves from the comments on Euphranor’s painting to some interesting remarks about Thucydides’ skill in vivid representation. He does so by means of what was by his time something of a commonplace, the comparison between poetry and painting attributed to the Archaic Greek poet, Simonides. When Plutarch comes to talk about history here, he writes as though representation in painting is straightforward and unproblematic, whereas representation “with words and phrases” is less easy to explain: “the most effective historian is he who, by a vivid representation of emotions and characters, makes his narration like a painting;” Thucydides wants “to make the reader a spectator, as it were.” Although the idea that representation is easier to understand in the visual arts than in literature might seem an obvious one, I suspect that Plato is again lurking in the background here. Other things are lurking too. Plutarch is thinking of the historian as something like a dramatist and something like an orator. The Greek word for “narration” in Plutarch’s text – diēgēsis – is the word used for the narrative of events given by a forensic orator, writing a speech for the law courts. The word translated “characters” is prosōpa, a word which means not “characters” in the sense of “personalities” but in the sense of “characters in a play,” “dramatis personae.” So, according to Plutarch, an effective historian, like Thucydides, will use similar techniques to those used by the dramatist and the orator to make his narrative “like a painting” in its vividness. Despite the Platonist background, this vividness is clearly not just a matter of accurate copying of physical detail; the historian makes his narration like a painting “by a vivid representation of emotions and characters [i.e. dramatis personae].”
The examples from Thucydides which Plutarch goes on to give confirm that the portrayal of emotion, through the description of behavior, is what interests him. He first summarizes Thucydides 4.10–12, an account of quite a complex battle, and then quotes some sentences from Thucydides’ account of the ill-fated Sicilian expedition (7.71): “‘because of the continued indecisiveness of the struggle they accompany it in an extremity of fear, with their very bodies swaying in sympathy with their opinion of the outcome.’” He comments: “Such a description is characterized by pictorial vividness both in its arrangement and in its power of description” (On the Fame of the Athenians 347b–c). Notice that Plutarch chooses a sentence from Thucydides which describes physical behavior (the swaying bodies) that is indicative of an emotion (the extremity of fear). He is quite right – this scene could be portrayed by an artist, and Thucydides’ selection of this particular detail is remarkably vivid and effective.
I suggested earlier that the painter Theon, by having a trumpeter play the call to attack as his painting of a hoplite was unveiled, was trying not to deceive his audience with trompe l’oeil but to make them feel as if they were there. For Plutarch, Thucydides has a similar aim. Let us return once more to the final sentence of the description of Euphranor’s battle painting: “… it is his desire to make the reader a spectator, as it were, and to produce vividly in the minds of those who peruse his narrative the emotions of amazement and consternation which were experienced by those who beheld them.” Thucydides is trying not just to make his readers feel as if they were there but also to feel the emotions they would have felt if they had been. No wonder, then, that one of his examples is the sentence from Thucydides 7.71. That sentence describes the behavior, and emotions, of those who were watching the final battle in the harbor at Syracuse – no drama on a stage but a battle on which their lives depended. According to Plutarch, Thucydides’ description turns his readers into spectators of these spectators within his narrative, enabling them in some sense to feel the emotions which those real-life spectators felt.
Another interesting text comes from a work attributed to Plutarch but not by him:
If one were to say that Homer was a teacher of painting as well, this would be no exaggeration, for as one of the sages said, “Poetry is painting which speaks and painting is silent poetry.” Who before, or who better than Homer, displayed for the mind’s eye gods, men, places, and various deeds, or ornamented them with the euphony of verse? He sculpted in the medium of language all kinds of beasts and in particular the most powerful … He dared also to give the gods human shapes. Hephaestus, making the shield of Achilles and sculpting in gold the earth, the heavens, the sea, even the mass of the sun and the beauty of the moon, the swarm of stars that crowns the universe, cities of various sorts and fortunes, and moving, speaking creatures – what practitioner of arts of this sort can you find to excel him? Let us examine another of the many examples that show that he imitated things so well that we seem to see them rather than hear about them. Talking of Odysseus’ scar he speaks of Eurycleia: [Here ‘Plutarch’ quotes Odyssey 19.467–477]
Here, while everything that can be displayed to the eye is presented as if in a painting, there is still more – things that the eye cannot grasp, but only the mind – the surprise that makes her drop the foot, the noise of the bronze bowl, the water splashing out and the old woman’s simultaneous joy and anguish, and the things said to Odysseus as well as those that she is on the verge of saying, as she looks towards Penelope. Many other things are described in the same graphic manner by the poet, as one can see simply from reading him.
(‘Plutarch’, On the Life and Poetry of Homer 216–217)
The essay On the Life and Poetry of Homer probably dates from the second century AD and claims that Homer is the source of knowledge and skills of all kinds. So Homer has to be “a teacher of painting” as well, and able to excel the painters in their art. The author quotes Simonides again before going on to praise Homer’s ability to depict all kinds of things “for the mind’s eye” (or “for visualization in thought,” phantasia tōn noēmatōn). Then he discusses a particular example of Homer’s skill, the description in Odyssey 19 of Odysseus’ old nurse, Eurycleia, washing his feet on his return to Ithaca and recognizing him by a scar on his foot. Interestingly, this is precisely the example of Homeric realism used by Erich Auerbach to start off his famous book on the development of literary realism, Mimesis. According to On the Life and Poetry of Homer, Homer surpasses the painters in being able to reveal things which the eye cannot grasp but only the mind: these are emotional reactions (surprise, joy, anguish) and sounds (the noise of the bronze bowl, the splashing, the things said to Odysseus). Yet in the end the author falls back on describing Homer as writing like a painter (“in the same graphic manner”) and enabling his reader to see what he describes.
My final examples of texts which use the term phantasia in the sense of “visualization” and connect it with vividness, realistic representation, and effects on the emotions come from the fifth century AD. The Neoplatonists of late antiquity were well educated in literature and in rhetoric. Here is a passage from the commentary, or rather collection of essays, on Plato’s Republic, written by Proclus. He is discussing Plato’s qualities as a writer and his debt to Homer:
Plato first of all follows meticulously the stylistic form of the Homeric mimēsis. The characters of all those who appear in the dialogues are developed and the qualities of their lives passed on to us with a vividness [enargeia] equal to that with which Homer described the heroes, and both writers present their characters virtually as if they were present and expressing their own opinions and alive before us … Indeed the representation [mimēsis] of these men moves our imagination [phantasia] in many ways and changes our opinions, adjusting them to the changing subject-matter, so that many are moved to cry with Apollodorus as he wails in distress, and many as well with Achilles as he laments for his friend, and at such a great distance in time they experience the same things as those who were then present. We seem to be actually present at the events on account of the vivid presentation [enargē phantasian] of the things imitated, generated in us by the representation [mimēsis]. (1.163.19–164.7)3
The word phantasia is used in two different senses in this passage. In the first sense, which I have translated “imagination,” it refers to the faculty of imagination, which, for Proclus, comes below the intellectual faculties, and is therefore susceptible to being moved by vivid literary descriptions. The second sense, translated here as “presentation,” might be understood simply as “appearance” or “impression,” a common meaning of the word in philosophical contexts. However, given the widespread collocation of the terms phantasia, enargeia, and mimēsis in ancient literary criticism, it must refer specifically to the visualization which both Plato and Homer successfully produce in their readers.
Another writer who combines the philosophical and the literary critical senses of phantasia is the Christian Neoplatonist, Synesius of Cyrene, who in his work On Dreams, written at the very beginning of the fifth century AD, a few years before Proclus was born, offers an idiosyncratic version of the Neoplatonist philosophical view of phantasia as the faculty of imagination. Toward the end of the work Synesius emphasizes the strength of our emotional reactions to the images seen in dreams and the need to use the right words to convey such reactions, in a way which recalls the descriptions of the emotional effects of successful visualization found in texts such as On Sublimity or On the Life and Poetry of Homer (On Dreams 154A).
So much for phantasia as visualization. My second notion of imagination, as that which is capable of reaching beyond our everyday experience, is much less common in ancient thought but, in the form of “creative imagination,” has become the most common use of the term in modern aesthetic contexts at least since the time of the Romantics. Those who seek for the ancient roots of the modern concept of creative imagination regularly cite a passage from Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius of Tyana (6.19) which contrasts imitation (mimēsis) and imagination (phantasia).
“What about sculptors like Phidias and Praxiteles? Surely they did not go up to heaven, model the forms of the gods and then reproduce them by their art? Was there something else which presided over their moulding?”
“There was something else,” said Apollonius, “something full of wisdom.”
“What sort of thing was that?” asked Thespesion. “You cannot mean anything other than imitation [mimēsis].”
“It was imagination [phantasia], a wiser craftsman than imitation, which made those things,” he replied. “Imitation will fashion what it has seen, whereas imagination can also fashion what it has not seen, since it will conceive of that with reference to what actually exists. Moreover imitation is often disrupted by shock; nothing disrupts imagination which proceeds unperturbed in pursuit of what it has conceived.”
However, this passage is not really about creative imagination in the modern sense. The imagination which, according to Philostratus, has made it possible for Phidias and Praxiteles to model the forms of the gods is a faculty which has given these sculptors the ability to conceive of divine entities they cannot see, not an ability to create something entirely new. To understand the words Philostratus puts into Apollonius’ mouth, we need to investigate philosophical uses of the term phantasia more fully.
The noun phantasia is related to the verb phainomai, “I appear,” and is always connected in some way with appearance. Hence the use of phantasia to mean the appearance or impression we receive when we perceive something. This use is especially important in Epicurean and Stoic epistemology but is not directly relevant to my discussion in this chapter. Rather than spending time on the epistemological sense of the term, we need to go back, once again, to Plato. Plato, notoriously, is dismissive of appearances. For him the supreme element in the human soul is rational and he always places the highest value on knowledge and intellectual endeavor. Of course Plato is ambivalent, to say the least, in his attitude to the arts but he does sometimes seem to place some value on them, despite his consistent view that artists lack knowledge. In the Platonic tradition art is seen as arousing the emotions, as we have already seen, and artistic creativity is associated with inspiration rather than imagination. However, there is a “minority view,” also ultimately derived from Plato, which puts imagination and inspiration together, although in connection with prophecy rather than with the arts (Sheppard 1997a ). At the same time both Cicero (Orator 2.8–9) and Seneca (Letter 65.7) suggest that the artist imitates not an object in the physical world but an idea within his mind, derived from the world of Platonic Forms, and Cicero, like Philostratus, refers to Phidias as an example of a sculptor who could portray the divine by contemplating such an idea. Philostratus’ contrast between mimēsis and phantasia should be seen in the eclectic, but broadly Platonizing, context to which these passages of Cicero and Seneca also belong.
The final stage of Greek philosophy, Neoplatonism, inherits and develops a combined Platonic and Aristotelian tradition and here we find some interesting uses of the concept of imagination, although its full potential is not developed. Much Neoplatonist psychology is based on Aristotle. Phantasia does have a specific place in the psychology of Aristotle’s De anima, between perception and thought. What in Aristotle are psychological capacities, things we do with our souls, are presented as faculties in Neoplatonism. For the Neoplatonists the soul has a hierarchical structure, parallel to the hierarchical structure of their metaphysics. Intellectual faculties come at the top, sense-perception a good deal lower down. Phantasia falls between thought of any kind and sense-perception, sometimes above and sometimes below doxa, opinion or belief.
The crucial Neoplatonist discussion of imagination is that of Plotinus in Ennead 4.3.30–31. In this text Plotinus argues that there are two “image-making powers,” one which receives images from sense-perception, as in Aristotle, and one which receives images from the intellect. He even talks about “two souls” – that is, “higher” and “lower” parts of the soul. This notion of a “double imagination” seems to be original to Plotinus. It is not much used as such in later Neoplatonism, but the idea that the imagination can receive images from the intellect as well as from sense-perception is developed by others.
Some particularly interesting, but fragmentary, material can be found in Iamblichus, a philosopher who belongs to the generation of Neoplatonists following Plotinus. A commentary on Aristotle’s De anima attributed to the sixth-century AD Neoplatonist Simplicius, but possibly in fact by Priscian, reports Iamblichus’ view of phantasia as follows: “For even if, as Iamblichus wants, <phantasia> takes an impression of all our rational activities, nevertheless it produces images of Forms which have shape and parts in the manner of perceptible things” (Simplicius, Commentary on the De anima 214.18–20). The phrase “takes an impression of all our rational activities” may be an Iamblichean way of expressing Plotinus’ higher image-making power. This is taken further in a long passage of Priscian’s Metaphrasis of Theophrastus where Priscian presents as “the views of Iamblichus” the idea that phantasia has a dual role: on the one hand it awakens reflections from perception to doxa, and on the other it holds out secondary reflections of intellect (nous) to doxa. According to Priscian, Iamblichus saw phantasia as existing as subsidiary to all the faculties of the soul and as characterized by its power to form images (Metaphrasis of Theophrastus 23.13–24.20).
What is included in “secondary reflections of intellect”? Mathematical images would belong here (Sheppard 1997b), and also prophecy and divination, picking up the “minority view” referred to above. I said earlier that in the Platonic tradition artistic creativity is usually associated with inspiration rather than imagination. We can see the “minority view” or “variant tradition” lying behind two passages of Iamblichus’ De mysteriis, 3.14 and 3.2–3. In 3.14 Iamblichus is discussing how the power of imagination can become inspired by the gods in prophecy, while in 3.2–3 he discusses divination in dreams and argues that the soul receives purer images of gods, incorporeal substances, and the intelligible when it is asleep and only its intellectual and divine part is active. However, Iamblichus does not develop this notion of imagination to include literature and art.
We have seen that both Synesius and Proclus, a century and more after Iamblichus, are still familiar with the literary critical concept of phantasia as visualization. Synesius is part of the “variant tradition” which does associate phantasia with inspiration but, like Iamblichus, he is primarily interested in prophetic dreams (Sheppard 1997a, 204–206). Proclus uses a theory of inspired poetry to defend Homer against Plato’s criticisms in the Republic. He subjects such poetry to allegorical interpretation, arguing firmly that most of Homer is not mimetic – not realistic representation, we might say – but he makes no appeal to any connections between phantasia and inspiration.
Allegorical interpretation was widespread in late antiquity but the writing of extended deliberate allegory, such as we find in the Christian writer Prudentius, for example, was only just beginning. The idea that art represents transcendent realities in an allegorical or symbolic way would fit well with a theory of imagination such as we find in Kant, which stresses art’s power to conjure up an image that points beyond itself (Kant, Critique of Aesthetic Judgement §49). We might expect that Plotinus, Iamblichus, Synesius, or Proclus would have developed such a theory, but they do not seem to have done so. By the Neoplatonic period all the materials were present for developing a notion of imagination as conveying a “higher world” in literature and art but no thinker puts them all together, perhaps because the influence of Plato’s denigration of appearances is still too strong.
The editors are grateful to Bloomsbury Publishing for permission to publish Anne Sheppard’s chapter on Imagination, which appears in an expanded version as Chapter 1 of her book, The Poetics of Phantasia: Imagination in Ancient Aesthetics (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014).
Bundy (1927) offers what is still the fullest available survey of ancient views of imagination while Cocking (1991) is a less detailed survey which extends from Classical times to the modern period. Watson (1988) presents a descriptive account of phantasia from Plato to Augustine and Boethius; Watson (1994) is another version of chapters 4–6 of Watson (1988), with some abbreviation. Particular aspects are covered in more detail by other authors: the first chapter of Meijering (1987) discusses phantasia as visualization, offering many examples of relevant texts; Zanker (1981) is a study of the development and use of the concept of enargeia (vividness) in ancient literary criticism, with some discussion of its relationship to the concept of phantasia; Dillon (1986) is a study of Plotinus’ view of imagination, with some remarks on its relevance to aesthetics and on later Neoplatonist views. Translated source material on phantasia from Aristotle and his commentators, with brief comments and useful further bibliography, can be found in Sorabji (2004). The most recent book on the whole topic is Sheppard (2014), which deals not only with phantasia as visualization but also with Neoplatonist views of imagination, inspiration, and related topics at greater length than has been possible in this chapter.