Writing (and reading) Silver with Sidonius: the material contexts of late antique texts

Abstract

While scholars have begun to examine the potent visual dimensions of the inscribed word in antiquity, texts written onto smaller objects have yet to receive the same amount of attention. This article examines a poem composed by the fifth-century Christian author Sidonius Apollinaris, which its author states is to be written onto a silver bowl in the shape of a shell. While the bowl does not survive, and may never have existed, the poem and its frame within a letter (written by Sidonius to his friend Evodius) force readers to reconsider the flexibility of the ancient relationship between word, image, and object. The epigram creates a verbal–visual icon of its intended recipient, the Visigothic Queen Ragnahild, as a rival to the goddess Venus, but also challenges the queen and other readers. Comparing himself to a silversmith, Sidonius straddles word and image, using the rhetorical techniques of ekphrasis to invite readers to ruminate on the roles of the visual and the verbal—the appearance of the bowl, and the queen’s own appearance, all communicated via text—and on the physical, material, and intermedial modes in which different types of texts were meant to be read. By reading the text of the poem in its multiple contexts—in Sidonius’s letter, on the silver bowl, and in the minds of readers—this article teases out the implications of the visual dimensions of verbal texts in the period, as well as the striking fluidity with which such texts were endowed.

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