The Judgment of Animals in Classical Greece: Animal Sculpture and ...

that is, an image held by memory. This evidence confirms the meaning of zw|~on as
image. It also provides a glimpse into how viewers approached this kind of image: as an
object of speculation. Informative is also Aristotle’s additional comment that when one
contemplates the object merely as a gegramme/non zw|~on, which has been translated as
“painted picture,” then this object appears in the soul as a mere thought. 624 This
clarification suggests that, apart from being an image in its own right, zw|~on was also
understood as visual material that registered directly in the thinking faculty. This
evidence, in turn, qualifies zw|~on as an important term in the fourth-century discourse on
optical theory.
Philemon
The last Classical zw|~on to be associated with the arts appears in a fragment of
Philemon, a comic poet of the mid-fourth to the mid-third centuries B.C. Athenaeus,
writing in the second century A.D., cites a fragment of Philemon, which relates the story
of a man becoming enamored of a stone zw|~on. Athenaeus uses the fragment of Philemon
as supporting evidence for Alexis’s description of similar behavior attributed to someone
whom he identifies as Cleisophus of Selymbria:
For he [Cleisophus of Selymbria], becoming enamored of the statue
[a)ga&lmatoj] in Parian marble at Samos, locked himself up in the temple,
thinking he should be able to have intercourse with it; and since he found that
impossible on account of the frigidity and resistance of the stone, he then and
there desisted from that desire and placing before him a small piece of flesh he
consorted with that. This deed is mentioned by the poet Alexis in the play entitled
A Picture: “Another case of a like sort occurred, they say, in Samos. A man
conceived a passion for a stone maiden, and locked himself up in the temple.”
And Philemon, mentioning the same, says, “Why, once on a time, in Samos, a
certain man fell in love with a stone zw|&ou; thereupon he locked himself in the
624 Painted picture: Hett, Aristotle VIII 293; Sachs, Aristotle’s On the Soul 172; White and Macierowski, St.
Thomas Aquinas. Commentaries 202, ns. 17, 19.
324