Building on the concept of enargeia, Chapter 4 examines the cinematism of epic ecphrases: passages containing detailed descriptions of remarkable objects. To the ancients, Homer’s vividness of presentation put him in the forefront of painters, while film directors, chiefly Eisenstein, have repeatedly referred to him as a precursor. In particular, the stories told on the shield of Achilles in the Iliad validate Eisenstein’s concept. Eisenstein wrote extensively about Lessing’s thesis, advanced in his influential Laocoön, about the limits of painting and poetry; both authors’ approaches are evaluated here, with Eisenstein’s argument proven the stronger one. The story of Theseus and Ariadne depicted on the coverlet in Catullus’ poem 64, the most complex ecphrasis in classical literature, is then treated as the basis of a film adaptation, which reveals the astonishing sophistication that can be discovered from the perspective of cinematism. Shorter observations about Virgil and, in passing, Juvenal round out this chapter.

This chapter prepares the ground for everything that follows. With the advent of photography, ways of seeing static images from earlier eras (paintings, statues, etc.) radically changed. Cinematography further increased, even complicated, traditional understandings of the past in both text and image. New ways of interpreting and appreciating Greek and Roman culture, too, are thus called for. Terms like Sergei Eisenstein’s cinematism and Pierre Francastel’s pre-cinema point to such new ways of approaching arts and literature from the vantage point of our technological media, which show sequences of static images that appear to be moving. Since the era of silent film, numerous directors have expressed the close connections of their medium with antiquity, among them Abel Gance, Jean Renoir, Manoel de Oliveira, Theodoros Angelopoulos, and Eisenstein himself. The chapter also addresses the question of how faithful modern screen versions should or could be to their sources.

This chapter takes us to the classical precursors of the cinema and its pre-modern origin. The camera obscura was the earliest film apparatus, and Aristotle was believed to have known of it. The chapter next describes pre-cinema and traces this concept’s influence and its ramifications. While the moving bodies in prehistoric cave paintings were the first to exhibit cinematism, archaic Greek poet Simonides expressly pointed to the affinities between word and image; the Augustan Roman poet Horace later put them in canonical terms: ut pictura poesis. The chapter then surveys the pre-cinematic nature of ancient visual arts by interpreting a variety of examples (the Minoan fresco of bull jumpers, Greek vase paintings, the Roman Alexander mosaic, Trajan’s Column, many others) and introduces the rhetorical principles of enargeia (“vividness”) and epic ecphrasis. The chapter closes with an appreciation of the ingenious stage automata of Damascius and Heron of Alexandria.