Under the Roman Empire, competition for attention among rhetoricians, pantomimes, and other performers played out in part through contrasting claims about the value of seeing and hearing. Rhetoricians were keenly aware of pantomime’s success in competition for attention.^ Rhetoricians appealed less visually to their audience than pantomimes did to spectators. Moreover, rhetoricians speaking in Greek or Latin weren’t intelligible to the share of the population who didn’t understand those languages. Just as for epigramists writing about visual art, a challenge for rhetoricians was to out-perform verbally visual effects.^ In competition for attention, out-perform meant in part to evoke more effectively a wide range of emotions.

Philostratus’s Imagines is a telling textual artifact of competition for attention. Seneca, a politically prominent philosopher of the first-century CE, complained:

Who respects a philosopher or any liberal study except when the games are called off for a time or there is some rainy day which he is willing to waste? And so the many schools of philosophy are dying without a successor. … But how much worry is suffered lest the name of some pantomime actor be lost for ever! The House of Pylades and of Bathyllus continues through a long line of successors. For their arts there are many students and many teachers.^

Pylades and Bathyllus were leading Augustan-era pantomimes. In celebrity (and wealth), they far exceeded any philosophers. Philostratus seems to have been a sophist, a type of rhetorician, in the period now called the Second Sophistic. Philostratus is generally thought to be Philostratus the Elder (Philostratus of Lemnos), born about 190 CE. In any case, Philostratus’s position relative to pantomimes probably wasn’t any better than that which Seneca described for philosophers.

Philostratus’s Imagines seems to respond to Seneca’s lament. According to Philostratus, Imagines records his discourses at a villa outside the walls of Naples. Philostratus stayed there in the days of the public games in Naples. According to Philostratus, despite the public games in the city, young men kept coming to his villa-lodging outside the city and importuning him to speak. Unlike rhetoricians longing for a large audience such as gathered for public games, Philostratus was reluctant to speak publicly to the young men pleading for his teaching. His host’s son, a ten-year-old, an “ardent listener and eager to learn,” persistently sought from Philostratus his interpretation of the paintings covering the villa’s walls. Philostratus, “in order that he {his wealthy host} might not think me ill-bred,” agreed to teach the boy.^ Philostratus placed the importuning young men as a secondary audience to the boy. Philostratus described a rhetorician’s fantasy. It reverses Seneca’s lament.

Wealth was associated with performative success in the Roman Empire. In the Introduction to the Imagines, Philostratus highlights his luxurious accommodations:

I was lodging outside the walls in a suburb facing the sea, where there was a portico built on four, I think, or possibly five terraces, open to the west wind and looking out on the Tyrrhenian sea. It was resplendent with all the marbles favoured by luxury, but it was particularly splendid by reason of the panel-paintings set in the walls, paintings which I though had been collected with real judgment, for they exhibited the skill of very many painters.^

Persons who traveled to see public games generally had crude accommodations. A second-century-CE text discussing popular travel to Olympia states:

Well, aren’t difficulties found at Olympia? Don’t you get hot? And crowded? Isn’t bathing a problem? Don’t you get soaked through in your seats when it rains? Don’t you finally get sick of the noise, the shouting and the other irritations? I can only suppose that you weigh all those negatives against the worth of the show, and choose, in the end, to be patient and put up with it all.^

For physical comfort, being with Philostratus was much more appealing than being at public games.

In his Imagines, Philostratus verbally evokes emotional experiences even more labile than those of pantomime performances. Consider, for example, the section entitled Antilochus. Philostratus first uses phrases and events from Homer’s Iliad to interpret for the boy a scene mixing eros, joy, grief, and fear:

That Achilles loved Antilochus you must have discovered in Homer, seeing Antilochus to be the youngest man in the Greek host and considering the half talent of gold that was given him after the contest. And it is he who brings word to Achilles that Patroclus has fallen, for Menelaus cleverly devised this as a consolation to accompany the announcement, since Achilles’ eyes were thus diverted to his loved one; and Antilochus laments in grief for his friend and restrains his hands lest he take his own life, while Achilles no doubt rejoices at the touch of the youth’s hand and at the tears he sheds.^

Philostratus declares “such is the scene in Homer.” Homer’s scene, however, is emotionally quite unlike Philostratus’s scene. Homer’s epic relentlessly moves forward with much more unified emotion. The eros and joy in Antilochus and Achilles’s relationship is completely submerged in the action of the relevant Homeric passage:

And the women he and Patroclus carried off as captives
caught the grief in their hearts and keened and wailed,
out of the tents they ran to ring the great Achilles,
all of them beat their breasts with clenched fists,
sank to the ground, each woman’s knees gave way.
Antilochus kneeling near, weeping uncontrollably,
clutched Achilles’ hands as he wept his proud heart out –
for fear he would slash his throat with an iron blade.
Achilles suddenly loosed a terrible, wrenching cry^

After emotionally re-coloring this Homeric text, Philostratus describes a related painting ostensibly present on the wall before him. Color in the painting adds terror to Homer’s story:

Memnon coming from Ethiopia slays Antilochus who had thrown himself in front of his father, and he seems to strike terror among the Achaeans – for before Memnon’s time black men were but a subject for story

Grief is pervasive among the figures:

the army mourns the youth, standing about him in lamentation; and, their spears fixed in the ground and their legs crossed, they stand, most of them in their grief bowing their sorrowing heads on their spears. … {Achilles} laments, throwing himself on the breast of Antilochus

Philostratus’s account ends figuring Antilochus’s bloody, dead body with eros and joy:

Let us next look at Antilochus. He is in the prime of youth, just beyond the period of downy beard, and his bright hair is his pride. He leg is slender and his body proportioned for running with ease, and his blood shines red, like colour on ivory, where the spear-point penetrated his breast. The youth lies there, not sad of aspect nor yet like a corpse, but still joyous and smiling; for it was with a look of joy on his face (because, I fancy, he had saved his father’s life) that Antilochus died from the spear-thrust, and the soul left his countenance, not when he was in pain, but when gladness prevailed.^

The description “his blood shines red, like colour on ivory, where the spear-point penetrated his breast” may allude to royal female sexual initiation.^ Philostratus’s Imagines associates paintings’ use of color and shading with more effective, intimate reading of eyes and with the ability “to recognize the look, now of the man who is mad, now of the man who is sorrowing or rejoicing.”^ Pantomimes evoked intense, labile emotions. Philostratus’s Imagines also does so to an extraordinary extent.

Philostratus’s Imagines seems to have been historically influential in shaping understanding of the philosophical enterprise. In the intellectually vibrant culture of ninth-century Abbasid Baghdad, the eminent scholar Hunayn ibn Ishaq described the origin of schools of philosophy in picture rooms:

These philosophical gatherings originated from the fact that the rulers of the Greeks and of other nations used to teach their children philosophy and instruct them in various kinds of literary culture. They erected for them houses of gold, decorated with a variety of pictures, which were to serve to refresh hearts and attract eyes. The children stayed in these picture houses in order to be educated with the aid of the pictures found in them.^

Refreshing and engaging hearts and eyes describes emotional response. Hunayn’s aetiology of philosophical teaching probably was based on Philostratus’s Imagines. As a section in Hunayn’s book Anecdotes of the Great Philosophers, Hunayn’s description circulated widely across western Eurasia. Ibn Abi Usaybi’ah copied it into his Lives of the Physicians, written in Damascus in the thirteenth century. Echoes of Hunayn’s text seem to exist in the thirteenth-century Spanish Sindibad work, Book of the Wiles of Women.^ All these works are within the main stream of Greco-Roman-Islamic intellectual culture.

Emotional dynamics depend more on the structure of symbolic competition than on the nature of the media. A scholar of sophists like Philostratus stated:

Competition for status was the foundation upon which the entire edifice was built: sophistry was at once a collective celebration of the exclusivity of elite culture, and a forum within which individual members of the elite could vie for personal prominence.^

Entry into competition with sophists was quite open, formal institutions for judging merit and bestowing acclaim were quite weak, and attracting attention and followers was the primary path to sophistic success. The status of sophists like Philostratus was determined in intense competition for attention. The magnified emotional dynamics of Imagines are characteristic of such competition for attention.