ABSTRACT
‘The question, “Why did vase-painters so frequently show women clutching at their clothes?” cannot be answered simply by saying that, in real life, women must have handled their clothing a great deal. Even if this were true (which it may well have been) painters would still have had to decide to depict these particular gestures in preference to all the other actions that they saw women performing regularly’ (S. Blundell, in L. Llewellyn-Jones (ed.) Women’s Dress in the Ancient Greek World. London 2002, 144). In this chapter Blundell’s aperçu, which concerns material culture and the interpretation of gesture, is extended to shoe-talk in Greek poetry: why did Greek poets, under given circumstances, mention shoes in preference to other aspects of attire or material possessions? This chapter comprises two complementary discussions, one devoted to archaic poetry and one to Hellenistic poetry. In archaic poetry (Homer; Anacreon; Hipponax), shoe-talk is framed in a variety of socio-economical, philosophical and erotic discourses; like other commodity-talk, shoe-talk allows the audience of a poetic performance considerable latitude in projecting his/her own desires in interpreting these discourses. The invention of the poetry book in the Hellenistic age allowed poets like Theocritus, Leonidas and Herodas to invest shoe-talk with a more definite significance, as their readers are invited to coordinate the mention of shoes across different poems. In Theocritus and Leonidas, shoe-talk becomes a way of talking about poetry itself as well as about its objects; but the greater part of the discussion concerns Herodas’ seventh Mimiamb, in which Kerdon’s shoe-shop is made to reflect the expanded scale of the Hellenistic world. In conclusion, the discussion of shoe-talk is used to reflect on the definition of literary ‘realism’, as applied to Greek poetry.
