The Imagines of the Elder Philostratus, written in the early third century A.D., is antiquity’s most exhilarating extant account of the complex relations between words and pictures. Philostratus sets out to describe a gallery of paintings on the bay of Naples: he frames the text as a series of addresses to the young, instructing them in the art of interpretation (hermêneuein). In doing so, though, Philostratus also acts out the question how we ‘see’ images – and what it means to read about such seeing through the lens of an ‘ecphrastic’ text.

This lecture will look at the opening tableau from the Imagines’ first book, dedicated to a supposed painting of the Homeric Scamander episode (as narrated in the twenty-first book of the Iliad). Philostratus’ short description, I argue, sets up the theoretical issues that frame the text as a whole. On the one hand, the choice of literary episode resonates against a longer history of both artistic and literary critical responses to the Iliadic episode: the decision to open with Scamander is deliberate – and highly programmatic. On the other hand, this short passage sheds light on a deep-seated scholarly problem within the field of classical archaeology: the challenge of determining ‘Homeric’ registers of meaning in ancient art.