A New Painting of Calypso in Pliny the Elder

In Book 35, chapters 147-148 of his Natural History, Pliny the Elder offers valuable information on female painters from the Greek and Roman worlds1. I reproduce below the Teubner text of Mayhoff 1897, followed by my own translation:

Pinxere et mulieres: Timarete, Miconis filia, Dianam, quae in tabula Ephesi est antiquissimae picturae; Irene, Cratini pictoris filia et discipula, puellam, quae est Eleusine, Calypso, senem et praestigiatorem Theodorum, Alcisthenen saltatorem; Aristarete, Nearchi filia et discipula, Aesculapium. Iaia Cyzicena, perpetua virgo, M. Varronis iuventa Romae et penicillo pinxit et cestro in ebore imagines mulierum maxime et Neapoli anum in grandi tabula, suam quoque imaginem ad speculum... pinxit et quaedam Olympias, de qua hoc solum memoratur, discipulum eius fuisse Autobulum.

There were also works of women painters:
A. Timarete, daughter of Micon: 1) a Diana at Ephesus, a panel painting in a very old style2;
B. Irene, daughter and student of the painter Cratinus: 1) the girl who is at Eleusis [presumably Kore], 2) Calypso, 3) an old man and the conjurer³ Theodorus, 4) Alcisthenes the dancer;
C. Aristarete, daughter and pupil of Nearchus: 1) Asclepius;
D. Iaia of Cyzicus, who never married, painted works at Rome when Varro was a young man both with a brush and with a graver on ivory: 1) portraits of women mostly, 2) an old woman in Naples depicted on a large wooden surface, 3) a self-portrait done with a mirror;...
E. a certain Olympias painted as well. Our only record of her is that Autobulus was her student.

For convenience of reference, my translation lists in tabular form each of what appear to be five women artists. It is likely that the comprehensive Pliny will have included every female painter and any of their associated work known to him, especially considering that for the final figure listed, “somebody named Olympias”, he provides only her name and that of a student, with no works attached. Even though the precious information provided here is well known, I wish to show that a reassessment of Pliny’s Latin text offers an additional intriguing detail about the artistic production of one of them, namely, Irene, a painter who seems to have flourished in the mid-third century BC4.

Pliny specifies that three of these five women are daughters of established male artists, while a fourth, Olympias, seems to owe her inclusion in the list to the fame of her otherwise unknown male student, Autobulus. And yet, despite the clear masculine bias that dominates this catalogue, I wish to nuance the claim made in the popular handbook Women in the Classical World that the artists “seem to have worked on the same sorts of subjects as their male contemporaries”5. Granted that depictions of Diana, Kore, and Asclepius are ubiquitous in ancient art and so would have been the subject of many works created by men, it is nevertheless suggestive that the subject matter listed by Pliny here involves predominantly female figures6. The only two examples of male humans being portrayed involve a conjurer and a dancer – characters that offered public entertainment rather than those that have achieved fame through politics or war. Indeed, the one remaining male, the god Asclepius, was a curative deity likely as important to women as to men, and so his presence in the catalogue rather than more popular and daunting deities such as Jupiter, Mars, or Neptune also intrigues7. Outside of these three figures, the only male remaining is the anonymous “old man” painted by Irene. I fear, however, that he will not be with us for long.

Jerzy Linderski has discussed various difficulties associated with the transmitted text of this passage, in particular the interpretation of its first sentence. A chief item of dispute involves the precise number of painters that Pliny lists here8. The relevant portion of the text, underlined above, treats Irene, daughter of Cratinus. Since the nineteenth century, scholars of Pliny and of ancient art history have alternated over whether the Calypso of this sentence was in the accusative or nominative case, both options being possible for this single morphological form9. Fröhner seems to have been the first to interpret Calypso as accusative, offering three reasons in particular10. First, if Calypso were a nominative name, she would be the only artist in Pliny’s catalogue without a qualifying apposition, be it a designation of parentage or place of origin or, failing that, an admission of ignorance (as with Olympias). Second, Fröhner observes that the name Calypso is attested only as a slave name, making her profession as painter less likely11. His third point is a positive one: if Calypso represents the accusative form – which is how I have rendered it in the translation above – she represents a subject of art attested elsewhere (Plin. nat. 35.132; Dio 48.50.4). In this case, she would join company with the other figures painted by Irene – “the girl at Eleusis”, an old man, a conjurer, and a dancer.

If Calypso is construed as being in the nominative case, by contrast, then the meaning of the passage changes considerably:

Irene, Cratini pictoris filia et discipula, puellam, quae est Eleusine; Calypso, senem et praestigiatorem Theodorum, Alcisthenen saltatorem.

Irene, daughter and student of the painter Cratinus, [painted] the girl who is at Eleusis; Calypso [painted] an old man and the conjurer Theodorus [and] Alcisthenes the dancer.

With a simple change of punctuation, this interpretation of the text reduces Irene’s known corpus of four (or, less likely, five) paintings to one, and creates a sixth female painter, Calypso, to whom are ascribed what seem to be two genre scenes.

Linderski, in elaborating on Fröhner’s suggestion that Calypso is painting and not painter, draws particular attention to the noun senem. Before turning to the details of his argument, however, it is necessary to consider an alternative reading for this word that Linderski does not address12. In opposition to the remainder of the tradition on the passage, the codex Bambergensis M.V. 10, from the first third of the ninth century (B), contains the seemingly nonsensical sinem. Reynolds characterizes B as a manuscript “of outstanding quality, which... must stand very close to the ancient exemplar whose notae it carefully reproduces”13. Its evidence, accordingly, should not readily be discarded. Sinem, in fact, does have a plausible claim of representing the Latin accusative of the proper noun Sinis, the name of a mythical bandit slain by Theseus. Although the Latinate accusative form seems not to occur in extant classical Latin, the Grecizing Sinin does appear once, where it is restored by plausible conjecture in Statius14. The possibility of accepting the reading Sinem on the evidence of B, or of emending to Sinin, depends upon the grammatical status of Calypso. If the latter name is read as an accusative, as most scholars accept and as is argued in more detail below, one would have to imagine Pliny juxtaposing inelegantly the Grecizing Calypso with the morphologically Latin form Sinem. If one sidesteps this problem by supposing that the reading of B conceals the Greek form Sinin, or if one chooses the unlikely interpretation of Calypso as nominative, then one is faced with the difficulty of explaining the otiose et (on which see below; I am assuming that “Sinis and the conjurer Theodorus” could not belong to the same composition). The most efficient solution, therefore, is to construe B’s sinem as a copyist error of an earlier senem.

If one acknowledges the unlikelihood that sinem/Sinem, the reading of B, offers access to Pliny’s original text, then it still remains to account for the presence of the reading senem that the rest of the tradition transmits. Who is this “old man” that Pliny mentions immediately after Calypso’s name, and how is the reader meant to construe the ensuing conjunction et? In a manner uncharacteristic of Pliny’s practice when listing works of art elsewhere, this old man lacks an epithet – such as a personal name, place of origin, or occupation. If we restrict ourselves to those places in which Pliny lists the elderly as subjects of particular pieces, all but one elaborate on the person’s status: one is designated, for example, as “an old man with a lyre teaching a boy”, another as “an old woman carrying torches”15. As a result of this lack of distinguishing epithet, most scholars conclude that the old man does not of himself constitute a work of art. Accepting this interpretation, however, does not make the sentence any clearer, as one must now decide among three further options. First, senem could be construed as an epithet describing Theodorus together with praestigiator – “the old conjurer Theodorus”. Such a construction, however, understanding senex not as a noun but as an adjective with accompanying noun and proper name, makes et otiose16. A second possibility treats the word as an adjective, but one describing not Theodorus but Calypso. By this reading, the text attributes to Irene a painting of Calypso as an old woman. This view, while making perfect sense syntactically, seems highly unlikely since there are no known references, visual or textual, to Calypso’s old age – in the Odyssey, after all, she tempts Odysseus to stay with her by offering to share with him her immortality (7.256-257). A third option, adopted in my translation, construes senem as an independent old man who constitutes part of a tableau featuring Theodorus the conjurer. This interpretation accords well with the typically masculine gender of the substantive senex, and provides a natural construction for the conjunction et17.

Linderski employs textual criticism to offer yet another solution: he neatly dodges the problem of this old man by denying his textual reality. The Thesaurus Linguae Latinae lists two common alternatives from antiquity for the accusative of Calypso18. Of these, the Latinate Calypsonem has four extant attestations. Quintilian tells us that he does not prefer this Latin formation, despite its having the endorsement of Julius Caesar, since contemporary usage (consuetudo) favors the Grecizing accusative Calypso19. This precious evidence provides strong support that Quintilian’s slightly older contemporary Pliny would also have employed the accusative form Calypso in his text. And outside Quintilian, the Grecizing accusative has four more extant occurrences in Latin literature, including a probable one in Ovid20. Linderski conjectures that the text was altered when an overly meticulous scribe glossed the Calypso that was in Pliny’s original text with the more common form of the accusative used in later antiquity, Calypsonem, and that the form Calypsonem was subsequently incorporated into the text itself21. Then, at some point before the beginning of the ninth century, the date of our oldest codices (V and B), the form Calypsonem was miscorrected to Calypso senem (or, in the case of B, to Calypso sinem)22. Linderski therefore proposes deleting senem/sinem as an intrusive gloss, thereby restoring the original reading of Calypso as accusative23. A passage from the fourth-century Latin grammarian Charisius caps the argument with the kind of rare kismet that cannot but bring joy to the laboring philologist:

‘Didun’... ut refert Plinius, consuetudinem dicens facere... ‘hanc Calypso’. (Char. gramm. p. 162.6-11 Barwick = Plin. dub. serm. frg. 60 Mazzarino).

“Didun” [is understood by some as the accusative of Dido,]... as Pliny states, saying that usage determines [also the accusative form] hanc Calypso.

Contemporary usage during the time of Pliny, then, dictates the accusative form Calypso. Pliny’s use of the Grecizing genitive form Calypsus at nat. 3.96 provides additional evidence that he would not have written Calypsonem24.

The steps reconstructed by Linderski from what Pliny originally wrote to what the majority of the codices have transmitted can be presented schematically as follows: Calypso (accusative) > Calypsonem (“corrected” accusative) > Calypso senem. I reproduce his emended text and apparatus here (accompanied by my translation):

Irene, Cratini pictoris filia et discipula, puellam, quae est Eleusine, Calypso [senem] et praestigiatorem Theodorum, Alcisthenen saltatorem.
Calypso probavit, senem damnavit L[inderski]25

Irene, daughter and student of the painter Cratinus, [painted] the girl who is at Eleusis [and] Calypso as well as the conjurer Theodorus and Alcisthenes the dancer.

One final point requires elucidation: the function of et. Linderski notes in a parenthetical aside that with his emendation “et now conjoins and opposes... two different subject matters”, namely, two young female figures and two male performers26. He does not cite explicit parallels from Pliny or elsewhere for this function of the conjunction, although it does seem possible; I would propose instead, however, deleting et alongside the now condemned senem.

Linderski’s argument has placed it beyond any reasonable doubt that the Calypso of Pliny’s text is a painting. Building upon this conclusion, however, I would like to propose an alternative form of manuscript corruption that, while less indebted to the testimony of our grammarians, nevertheless strikes me as more plausible palaeographically and, of greater importance, it brings Irene’s painting of Calypso in line with the few other depictions of the nymph that are known from antiquity. Visual representations of Calypso are limited presumably because, as literary scholars have long hypothesized, the nymph’s mythical persona is likely a creation of the Homeric poet, who invented her affair with Odysseus as a convenient way of accounting for seven of the ten years that Odysseus needed in traveling between Troy and Ithaca – as a result, “she has no place in myth independent of the Odyssey”27. In accordance with this limited literary function, it is unsurprising that the representations of Calypso that do survive, both literary and visual, concentrate almost exclusively on Odysseus’s departure from her28. According to Rafn’s entry “Kalypso” in the Lexicon Iconographicum, visual images of Calypso’s role in the Odysseus myth fall into two main types. In the first, for which five certain examples are extant, the nymph is standing. In two of these she is unaccompanied, while in the remaining three she stands beside Odysseus as he sits on the shore of Ogygia (the earliest example of this type is reproduced at Figure 1)29.
 

In the second general type, Calypso sits, seemingly alone30. The most clearly attested example of the nymph seated survives in Pliny’s verbal description earlier in Book 35 of a painting by Nicias:

[Nicias] fecit et grandes picturas, in quibus sunt Calypso et Io et Andromeda; Alexander quoque in Pompei porticibus praecellens et Calypso sedens huic eidem adscribuntur (Plin. nat. 35.132).

Nicias made large paintings as well, including a Calypso, an Io, and an Andromeda; also ascribed to him are the fine Alexander in the Portico of Pompey and a seated Calypso.

It is generally assumed that the seated example is contrasted with the first Calypso attributed to Nicias, which without further details would seem to belong to the standing type31.

In light of this parallel for the motif of the seated Calypso, I propose to read Calypso sedentem (“Calypso sitting”) for the transmitted text at 35.147. The resultant text and translation read as follows:

Irene, Cratini pictoris filia et discipula, puellam, quae est Eleusine, Calypso sedentem, praestigiatorem Theodorum, Alcisthenen saltatorem.

sedentem Corbeill: senem (sinem B) et codd.

Irene, daughter and student of the painter Cratinus, [painted] the girl who is at Eleusis, a seated Calypso, the conjurer Theodorus, [and] Alcisthenes the dancer.

Five points speak in favor of this proposal. First, the addition of sedentem provides Calypso with an epithet, like most of the other works listed by Pliny in this passage such as the dancer Alcisthenes or the old woman at Naples; the single exception to this pairing of name and epithet is in Pliny’s description of Aristarete’s painting of Asclepius. The absence here can be attributed to the nature of the god; in the entry on “Asklepios” in the Lexicon Iconographicum, Holtzmann notes that the majority of the god’s representations are identical, and that among these Asclepius rarely participates in any type of narrative32. In support of this contention is the fact that, of the four remaining mentions by Pliny of artworks depicting the god Asclepius there also does not occur a distinguishing epithet whereas, as we have just seen, Pliny’s other mention of Calypso differentiates between standing and sitting versions33.

A second supporting argument centers on the present participle sedentem. Pliny often employs the verb sedere (“to sit”) to characterize a work of art: of the thirteen instances of this present participle in the Natural History, ten describe a figure in a painting or sculpture34. It is worth mentioning as well in the context of the verb sedere that our literary evidence from the imperial period uses Calypso as an exemplum of one who mourns a lost love35. This conception is post-Homeric, since in the Odyssey Calypso, although at first resistant, ultimately accepts the will of Zeus and helps Odysseus plan for his departure. As an example of the changed view, Propertius describes the nymph as she sits weeping alone by the seashore after Odysseus has left. The pose that Propertius envisions is of Calypso seated: “for many days she sat (sederat), grieving, her hair disheveled”36. Scholars have well documented Propertius’s debt to visual art in constructing his mythical allusions, and it is possible that here too he has an artistic example in mind while writing these lines37. Indeed, the conceit of the grieving goddess creates a memorable framing device for the visual artist: just as our first sight of the hero Odysseus in Homer sees him sitting on the shore of Ogygia in tears (Od. 5.151-153), so too the Hellenistic conception figures Calypso in the same pose after Odysseus’s protracted sojourn on the island has ended38.

A third attraction of this emendation is that it is palaeographically easy. I offer here one possible reconstruction, principally exempli gratia. The original reading, sedentem, appeared in an early manuscript in an abbreviated accusative form, e.g., sedentê. A misreading of the abbreviated accusative [ê] became confused with a ligature for et. Subsequent to this misunderstanding, the resulting sedent made little sense and so was changed to sedem, an alteration perhaps aided by the close resemblance of nt and m that is found in several early scripts39. At this point, senem is conjectured for the syntactically nonsensical sedem to credit Irene with a painting of an old man. Schematically, this reconstruction can be represented as follows:

sedentê > sedent et (ê interpreted as et ligature) > sedem et (nt confused with m) > senem et by conjecture.

Such a conjecture of senem would not be so difficult for an attentive scribe, since the genre figure of the old man had been mentioned several chapters earlier, in 35.100, and that of the old woman, here the anus from Naples painted by Iaia, appears in the next sentence.

A fourth and final advantage of reading sedentem is stylistic. Our senex, the old man over whose syntax scholars have registered continual disagreement, now disappears from the record. In his stead we have an admirable double chiasmus in asyndeton (Calypso sedentem, praestigiatorem Theodorum, Alcisthenen saltatorem). Chiasmus as a stylistic device obviates the need for the now lost conjunction et, and offers an elegant variatio by which Pliny can elsewhere be shown to enliven the bare lists that pervade Book 35 and other sections of his encyclopedic work40. Fifth and finally, adding the accusative epithet sedentem as a modifier of Calypso places beyond doubt that Calypso is a painting and not a painter, a claim still repeated in the literature, including Croisille’s Budé of 198541.

Since I have demonstrated the likelihood that Irene is the painter of a seated Calypso, can something be made of this small addition to our knowledge of ancient art? The only female practitioners of the fine arts that Pliny mentions in his work are these women painters42. Their uniqueness is further enhanced by the fact that, in contrast with how Pliny depicts professional women elsewhere, the author here casts no aspersions on the achievements of these painters43. Indeed, in his only assessment of their individual qualities, he praises the speed of Iaia’s production and comments that, as a result of her skill at portraiture, she fetched greater prices than her two best contemporary male portraitists44. Baldwin has further shown that Pliny’s opinion of these women is in keeping with extant assessments of female artists by other ancient authors, where they are credited with equal, and occasionally superior, status to men45. Since no example of the work of any of these women is known to survive, perhaps the only way in which we can reconstruct the reasons for their special status is through their choice of subject matter. Art historians of Rome have alerted us to the predominantly passive poses adopted by women in the visual arts – one thinks of Ariadne sleeping, Andromeda enchained, wandering Io –, and so it is interesting to note that, according to our sources, these accomplished female artists chose in contrast themes that present women in what appears to be a positive light – a girl from Eleusis (Kore, or perhaps a human intitiate), the goddess Diana, an old woman, a self-portrait; in fact, we are told that Iaia’s very specialty was female portraits. And as noted above, the two exceptions to pictures of women in Pliny’s list portray not male heroes but a dancer and conjurer, men occupying the fringes of society, especially of Roman society.

So what does this review tell us about the only remaining known subject, our new painting of Calypso sedens? Does this ancient portrayal present an aggrieved woman, as the tradition of the male Roman poets describes her? Since there does not survive a certain image from antiquity of a seated Calypso, I offer here as an aid to our imaginings a reproduction of Draper’s painting of Calypso reclining on her beach, back to the viewer (Figure 2).
 

There is of course no way of knowing for certain, but let us imagine Irene’s considerations while choosing such a pose. Calypso is alone, claiming status as a work of art unaccompanied not only by a man but by a great epic hero. She is seated and pensive – a woman occupying the kind of “pregnant moment” that Bettina Bergmann has discussed for a set of paintings in Pompeii’s House of Jason46. The idea of a seated Calypso has textual as well as visual resonance. As noted above, it provides a nice foil to the initial impression of the seated and weeping Odysseus, but simultaneously it also recalls visual imagery of Calypso’s female counterpart, Penelope, herself waiting patiently back in Ithaca. The well-known image of Penelope sitting in her “thinker” pose exceeds by far all extant ancient representations of her, whether she is depicted alone or in a group47. As with our imagined Calypso, the viewer is seduced by Penelope’s body language to decipher its ambiguity, as the gesture simultaneously calls up images of deep thought and grief48. Perhaps Irene means to recall Penelope in Calypso’s new role and so compare the two situations by having the beautiful and magical mistress reflect the pose of the patient and faithful wife. It is then left up to the viewer to decide what Calypso may be thinking.

I would like to conclude by confessing my sole regret in presenting this argument. If what I have offered has proven to be at all persuasive, it prevents Prof. Linderski from realizing his wish that, unlike Odysseus, he will himself spend immortality with Calypso in the apparatus criticus of a future edition of the Historia naturalis49. But even a great scholar cannot change destiny, and it is Calypso’s destiny to sit and, alas (or is it not “alas”?), to do so alone.