ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the distinctive way of looking at things and how it becomes — with a characteristic self-reflexivity — itself the topic of poetry. It is in the description of works of art and of looking at works of art that this theme is pervasive and it will be with such ecphrastic poetry. For the topos of ecphrasis is repeatedly placed in a rather narrow — though undoubtedly important — rhetorical tradition that opposed description and narrative, and which locates ecphrasis as the privileged model of description. The Hellenistic epigrams, together with Theocritus' Idyll, will show that Hellenistic ecphrasis needs to be seen in a far wider and more complex set of cultural ideas about vision, reading and the production of meaning. It has long been recognised that Hellenistic poetry plays a crucial role in the development of ecphrasis : the scope and range of this writing has rarely been appreciated.
