In the ancient world, gods were seen, the experience of their presence conceptualized in visual terms. In a departure from more traditional, philological treatments of religious phenomena, Verity Platt’s Facing the Gods: Epiphany and Representation in Graeco-Roman Art, Literature and Religion highlights the visuality of epiphany. Engaging also with related cognitive and hermeneutic issues, she brings a new perspective to the recent wave of scholarly attention to the subject of epiphany in Graeco-Roman culture. In each of the book’s eight chapters, Platt places particular emphasis on viewing practices and their representation in images and texts. She explores how epiphany can be both an “aesthetically mediated religious experience” and a part of visual or literary tradition (392), and how, even though the “battle between art and text must always be ostensibly won by literature,” this privileged “libation of discourse” (1) is nevertheless at times “dependent upon modes of viewing established by images themselves” (211).

The book’s chronological organization falls thematically into three main parts: part 1 explores Greek cultural and material artifacts from the Archaic through Hellenistic periods, examining the relationships between vision and representation, divinity and human artistry; part 2 examines the philosophy and literature of the Second Sophistic (a cultural movement in the first to third centuries CE), the connection between Greek notions of education and identity (paideia) and piety, and the role of epiphany in the context of Roman imperium; part 3 focuses on funerary art from the second and third centuries CE, particularly the interactions among epiphany, representation, and paideia, and the movement toward the symbolic. Throughout the book, Platt continually relies on what she terms “cognitive reliability,” a method through which she evaluates the relationship between the representation of a god or its phenomenological effect and the ontological status of the deity as an actual, existent presence.

An example of Platt’s interdisciplinary approach is evident in chapter 1, as she examines how both Attic votive reliefs from the fourth century BCE and a selection of Homeric Hymns depict encounters between mortals and deities. Reliefs, when set in their topographic contexts, become almost like participants in ritual; they “simultaneously symbolize and constitute divine presence” (47; emphasis in original). Similarly, the Homeric Hymns fulfill the invocatory function through poetic performance, ensuring the occurrence of an epiphany. This interplay between material and textual epiphany is examined further in chapter 3, with examples of Hellenistic cult images from the Peloponnese and monumental inscriptions (for example, Damophon’s statues at Lykosoura and the honorific decrees that formed an essential complement to the viewing of his statues). In both statue and inscription, the presence of the divine was carefully constructed or alluded to through reliance on earlier artistic, literary, or religious models, such as the quotation in the Lykosoura statue group of Phidias’s cult statue of Olympian Zeus. The very words of the inscriptions—records of previous invocations and appearances of the god, testimony of ritual performance and artistic interventions in the sacred imagery—validates and gives precedence to the act of epiphany and symbolically represents the protective force of the deity over both the individual and the state.

The complex relationship between the visual and the verbal in epiphanic models also encompasses a dynamic interplay between the modes of ritual viewing and connoisseurship—a self-conscious awareness of the artistic and literary principles, techniques and manufacturing processes (technē) that enliven the religious status of the representations (theosebeia) (chapter 3). For Platt, “cognitive reliability” is maintained through the mediation of divine form by the hand of a skilled artist (140). For example, in chapter 4’s discussion of Callimachus’s hymns and Hellenistic ekphrastic epigrams, Platt emphasizes the human skill of the producer and the “secularising model of cultural production . . . [in which] any vestigial religiosity could be experienced only through the prism of human technē” (172). Platt addresses not only the effect and process of production, but also the “connoisseurial eyes” of those who view the object or read the epigram, constructing “a visual medium through the power of the verbal,” a form of “verbal viewing” (193, 208).

Chapter 2 stands out in its almost exclusive focus on material cult objects, the most “insistent, direct and powerful means of experiencing divine encounter” (77). Platt does not limit her material study of epiphany to anthropomorphic cult statues such as Phidias’s Athena Parthenos or Polyclitus’s statue of Hera from the Argive Heraion, but also, importantly, includes a discussion of the aniconic objects (100–105) that were so often the focus of ritual, objects that effectively negotiated the relationship between materiality and divine presence without benefit of figurative imagery. A minor quibble: in her treatment of aniconic objects, Platt very briefly alludes to altars, observing that the ash altar of Zeus at Olympia preceded and perhaps stood in place of a cult image. A reader might wish that she had gone further and paid a little more attention to the epiphanic role of the numerous monumental altars throughout the Greek world as the actual points of contact of the material, human, and divine. In a further examination of the role of visual culture in the joining of worlds, chapter 8 examines funerary depictions from the second to third centuries CE. Here, Platt links the inherent ambivalences of epiphanies and representation with those associated with death. She investigates how the presence of divine figures (in mythological scenes of encounters between mortals and deities) on sarcophagi may influence the status of the tomb as a place where the living and the dead may coalesce (343).

Despite Platt’s careful attention to material objects, most of what is known about epiphanic experience is text-based, and the “libation of logos” seems of necessity to shape the book as a whole. Nearly two-thirds of the book is concerned with literary epiphanic examples, textual accounts that Platt describes as giving voices to “mute” art objects (211), bringing “structure and meaning” to epiphanic experiences (289). In part 2, encounters with the arts are mediated through a pedagogical process in which knowledge and experience of the divine are combined with Greek paideia. Chapter 5 focuses on Dio Chrysostom, Pausanias, and Philostratus, who valorize contemporary religious culture through their engagement with popular artistic exempla of the past. The use of artistic models, the potential superiority of rhetoric and philosophy to image-making, and the process by which viewing sacred images is guided by pedagogical or philosophical paradigms appear again in chapter 7. Here, in her discussion of Philostratus’s Life of Apollonius of Tyana, Platt shows how contemporaries had come to question the extent to which traditional, figurative images of the gods could perhaps be replaced by more allegorical or symbolic modes of viewing.

But it is in the dream-worlds of Aelius Aristides and of Artemidorus, strikingly and effectively discussed in chapter 6, that the distinction between gods and their images and between reading and seeing is most easily collapsed. In Platt’s analysis of the heightened rhetoric of the Second Sophistic, dreams themselves can serve as “dematerialised images” that might correspond to actual visions from the dreamer’s waking life, yet that, in the dream-state, seem closer to the immateriality of the divinity (258). In the dream world, mortals, unencumbered by ontological or practical constraints, can personally view and interact directly with the gods.

Early on, Platt introduces the issue of ritual contexts and “the ontological status of ritual performance” (17), and throughout the book she consistently alludes to the general importance of the question of in situ epiphanies. The reader, however, might like to know more about in situ objects and the contexts of these sacred images, about how their settings and their surrounding architectural and natural topography might contribute to (or detract from) their epiphanic nature (topics that are rewardingly addressed in the discussion of cult images in chapter 2, but lacking in chapter 4’s examination of human cultural production). While very few of these cult statues remain in situ today, a discussion of the temples and the larger sanctuaries in which they stood would have undoubtedly added to Platt’s already cogent argument.

If, moreover—as is evident in Platt’s discussion of Philostratus’s account of Apollonius’s viewing of the statue of Memnon (299–312)—questions of placement in space and time, of precisely how one might have viewed the object in its original physical settings, of the proper hour of day were of ultimate importance for achieving epiphany and accessing the divine, then original context is in fact an essential component of epiphanic experience. Along these same lines, even more important questions remain: who exactly was the audience for these statues, texts, and inscriptions? How would reception vary locally, or over many generations? Would everyone who saw, for example, the sarcophagus depicting Venus and Adonis (now in Palazzo Ducale, Mantua) have been able to read the myths and the epiphanic allusions with the same acuity as Platt does so masterfully in chapter 8? This lack of emphasis on material and social context is, however, nicely compensated for by the book’s notion of a displaced object continuing in a kind of allusive relation with its former, more embedded existence (172–73). For, though a statue is physically removed from its sacred setting, the statue retains in itself the capacity to signify epiphany indirectly through allusion, accessing the divine by means of past models and previously associated sacred contexts, since “epiphanic modes of representation are often also a form of citation” (216).

Facing the Gods is a well-conceived, well-constructed, comprehensive, and effective discussion of the subject of epiphany in the Graeco-Roman world, presenting very different and yet quite complementary kinds of evidence across a broad chronological and geographical range. A refreshing interdisciplinarity, a thoughtfully argued interweaving of sculpted images, dream narratives, votive reliefs, and pilgrimage reports, combined with an ease of prose (and of the English translations of the cited Greek passages), as well as a laudably thorough and extensive bibliography make Facing the Gods an important, useful, and readable contribution to the study of representations of divine manifestations in art, literature, and religion.