Mimetic Contagion

The ancient Greeks and Romans sometimes conceived of works of art having a dynamic effect on viewers, inspiring them to direct imitation of what they saw represented. This ‘mimetic contagion’ might operate alongside aesthetic or rational communication in art and was in some cases integral to how mimesis itself was conceptualized. This book explores mimetic contagion as a widespread discursive pattern across the ancient world, discernible in both popular and elevated cultural forms, but it also situates this phenomenon within a particular historical moment, mid-second century BCE Rome, to see which aspects of mimetic contagion emerge as most salient in the culture that produced the final flourishing of Roman comedy. Terence’s Eunuch provides a particularly vivid instance of mimetic contagion, one the reader is now in a position to recognize and appreciate both as an example of a very extensive pattern across antiquity and within its specific historical context. As with several other literary examples considered in this book, the instance of mimetic contagion in the Eunuch readily serves as a figure for mimetic representation within the work more generally. Thus the painting at the centre of the play becomes emblematic for a pattern that ramifies throughout the whole. The book expounds mimetic contagion as one available Greco-Roman strategy for understanding the power of art, and offers an extended reading of a single work of literature to show what closer attention to this strategy might mean for modern readers.