ABSTRACT
The proem to the Imagines or Eikones of Philostratus proposes two separate theories of the origins of art, both of which suggest a close connection between the creativity of human beings and that of nature and the gods. These ideas are further developed in several of the ekphraseis themselves, which comment upon human creativity through descriptions of landscape. ‘Islands’, the longest ekphrasis in the collection, reflects on human art and viewing through its depiction of a complex landscape. Two ekphraseis of rivers (‘Andrians’ and ‘Meles’) make new use of the long tradition of metapoetic rivers. While the former develops through landscape a poetics which is at once Bacchic and Callimachean, the latter becomes an oblique celebration of Homeric epic, through an image of the poet’s supposed father, the river Meles, and his mother Critheis.
