ABSTRACT
The study of the ancient treatments of ekphrasis shows that it was understood to be a type of speech that worked an immediate impact on the mind of the listener, sparking mental images of the subjects it 'placed before the eyes'. The key to the nature and function of ekphrasis is its defining quality of enargeia, the vividness that makes absent things seems present by its appeal to the imagination. In epideictic contexts, the effects of ekphrasis could be particularly subtle, involving an interaction between the audience's knowledge of an actual sight and the verbally induced mental image. The category of 'ekphraseis of works of art' may not have been central to the definition of ekphrasis as it was conceived and discussed by the rhetoricians, but the analogy with the visual arts, not to mention the theatre, underlies the idea of ekphrasis and enargeia.
