eidôlon

9

The term eidôlon is etymologically related to eid-, eidos (lit. “that what is seen,” shape) and conveys the notion of visibility (see Said 1987, 310). Eidôlon typically denotes a likeness of the surface or of the material form of an object, almost like a ghost or phantom (see Od. 11, 476), but it can also be used more broadly for a statue (see the golden statue of a woman, γυναικὸς εἴδωλον χρύσεον [gynaikos eidôlon chryseon], in Herodotus 1, 51⁷). Eidôlon and eikôn both have a long and rich history in Platonism (and other philosophical traditions) (see Kunz, n.d.; Meyer-Schwelling, n.d.; Donohue, n.d.). In Platonism, an eidôlon represents the artificial imitation of the visible appearance of something, thereby pointing to its surface and not its real being (which already conveys a rather negative associative context in the sense of a trompe-l’œil, see Said 1987, 326–27; Steiner 2001, 5).

10

In a Christian context, the delusive character of an eidôlon already found in certain Greco-Roman polytheistic philosophical traditions is maintained, and the term eidôlon becomes the central term to pejoratively denote pagan (divine) images and their worship (eidô(lo)latria, see Tertullian, De idololatria). This ambiguous or even negative association of an eidôlon is perceivable until today, for instance in the English term “idol” or German Idol (particularly with worship: ‘idolatry’).⁸

eikôn

11

Just like eidôlon, the term eikôn signifies an appearance/representation resembling something else. However, eikôn has the connotation of a more general (symbolic) resemblance (see the adjective eikelos meaning “like” in a more symbolic or metaphorical sense)⁹. The eikôn can also signify a concrete object, such as a statue. However, the term eikôn is more sophisticated in the sense of a likeness of something that does not necessarily need to have a visible shape or material form (eikôn tinos), for example the Platonic ideas (see again Meyer-Schwelling, n.d.; Horn, Müller, and Söder 2017, 219, 227). The eikôn—from a philosophical and particularly Platonic perspective—is thus closer to representing the assumed reality of an object because it is not restricted to imitating its surface, but it refers to what is beyond the material representation (see Said 1987, 326–27; Steiner 2001, 5).

12

From a religious perspective, the potential to represent or point to invisible and abstract ‘objects’ makes this term naturally more suitable for the representation of transcendence. Not least due to this (Neo-)Platonic history (for the even more positive use of eikones in Plotin’s Enneads, see Said 1987, 327), the eikôn later becomes the term for Christian images¹⁰ in contrast to the negatively connotated eidôlon.

agalma

13

[…] agalma, an object that through its high quality and craftsmanship inspires delight in its viewer and should prompt the goddesses’ own reciprocal gift of charis (CEG 414). (Steiner 2001, 16)

14

The term agalma commonly denotes statues and images (of ancient gods) set up in temples. The term agalma underlines the honorable character of these images as a “pleasing gift” (LSJ). Due to its frequent use in Greco-Roman polytheistic Greek texts, for instance in Pausanias, and its sparse use in Jewish and Christian contexts, I have decided to add agalma as a complement to the analysis because “unlike the eidôla critiqued by later philosophers, these representations do not set out to mask their ‘factural’ nature, nor do they seek to dupe their audiences by persuading them of the reality of the pictured scene” (Steiner 2001, 20). The agalmata thus add an interesting layer to the analysis, namely that of impressive man-made artifacts to honor and to remember the gods in the sense of valuable votive offerings void of discussions about their representative qualities. In addition, they will hopefully help to further examine the material dimension of images in both Greco-Roman polytheistic and Jewish as well as Christian texts.

Diorisis Ancient Greek Corpus

16

The Diorisis Ancient Greek Corpus is a digital collection of ancient Greek texts (from Homer to the early fifth century AD) compiled for linguistic analyses, and specifically with the purpose of developing a computational model of semantic change in Ancient Greek. The corpus consists of 820 texts sourced from open access digital libraries. The texts have been automatically enriched with morphological information for each word. (Vatri and McGillivray 2018b)

17

Besides providing a relatively large and diverse text basis, the rich annotations of the texts in the Diorisis corpus are another crucial factor for the examination of agalma, eidôlon, and eikôn. On a word level, these annotations include (among others) lemmas and Part-of-Speech tagging (POS). On a document level, the genre and additional author/date information are provided for each text, which makes it relatively easy to subdivide the corpus during the analysis, for instance, when examining the use and meaning of the three terms in philosophical treatises or religious texts. The annotation of this information in XML format facilitates the processing of the corpus with Python and LancsBox.

18

For this article’s comparative focus on the use and meaning of agalma, eidôlon, and eikôn in Greco-Roman polytheistic and Jewish as well as Christian texts, the Diorisis corpus has been subdivided into two subcorpora.

19

1. The first subcorpus includes 91 texts from a primarily Jewish and Christian background. Most of these texts stem from the Greek New Testament and the Septuaginta. Yet, texts from other authors, such as Flavius Josephus, Clement of Alexandria, and Eusebius of Caesarea, are also included. Note that some of the texts have a Jewish background (such as Flavius Josephus and the Septuagint). The relation between early Christianity and Judaism is a complex topic which is beyond the scope of this article (Fialová, Hoblík, and Kitzler 2022; Schäfer and Peterson 2015; Boyarin 2004), not least regarding their views towards images. Consequently, the inclusion of Jewish and Christian texts as part of the same corpus is to some extent problematic. Yet, Jewish texts, their reception in early Christianity, and the “Jewish background” of Christianity (as problematic as this topic is) are still relevant for the shaping of the meaning of the terms in question (the Septuaginta in particular), which is why I have decided to include them in the same corpus.
2. The second subcorpus consists of the remaining 729 texts of the Diorisis corpus, which are consequently classified as “Greco-Roman polytheistic” (often abbreviated as GRP in the following diagrams and charts).

20

The distribution of the texts between the two subcorpora has a considerable bias. Instead of manually adding additional (particularly Jewish and early Christian) texts, I have decided to restrict the analysis to texts in the Diorisis corpus to keep the data basis consistent. Adding additional texts, for instance from Greek church fathers, or adding a third subcorpus with Jewish texts only would have meant to preprocess and annotate these texts similarly as the creators of the Diorisis corpus did, which was not possible for me. Thus, adding more (preferably Jewish-Christian) texts to the analysis remains a desideratum.

21

From the rich annotation of the texts in the Diorisis corpus, the analysis in this article considers the following fields. On a word level, the annotated lemmas and the morphological information are added to the data set. On a document level, the information about the text genre and the creation date of the texts are collected.

22

The collocation analysis and the word vector analysis are based on the lemmatized version of the texts, which I have manually created from the annotation in the XML file with the help of a Python script. The lemmatized texts have also been stripped from stop words (such as articles).¹² Stop words are words that are commonly used in a language but have little meaning on their own. These words are typically filtered out of natural language processing tasks, such as information retrieval and text mining, because they don’t contain useful information and can often hinder the performance of the algorithm.

Methods

23

The mixed-methods approach in this article applies three quantitative and computer-driven methods:

24

1. Word distributions (lemmas and types).
2. Collocation analysis (lemmas only).
3. Word vectors (lemmas only).

25

The distribution analysis of the types and the creation of word vectors was done in Python using Jupyter notebooks (and gensim for word vectors). The collocation analysis and the analysis of word distributions (lemmas) was conducted with LancsBox (Brezina, Weill-Tessier, and McEnery 2020; Brezina 2018).

26

A qualitative close reading of selected sentences will complement and evaluate the results of the quantitative analysis. In the following parts, each of these methods will be introduced in more detail.

Word Distribution—Overview

39

The tables and figures in this section display the distribution of agalma, eikôn, and eidôlon in the following subcorpora:

40

1. The full Greco-Roman polytheistic text corpus (word count: 8,634,297; text count: 729).
2. The Greco-Roman polytheistic text corpus with philosophical texts only (word count: 1,292,595; text count: 56).
3. The Greco-Roman polytheistic text corpus with religious texts only (word count: 17,022; text count: 41).
4. The Jewish and Christian text corpus (word count: 1,418,531; text count: 91).¹⁷

41

The visualizations in figures 1, 4, and 7 display:

42

1. The relative frequency of agalma, eikôn, and eidôlon in each subcorpus per 100,000 words, including all texts in the subcorpus (figure 1).
2. The relative frequency of agalma, eikôn, and eidôlon in each subcorpus per 100,000 words, including only texts in the subcorpus in which the term appeared (figure 4).
3. The absolute frequency of agalma, eikôn, and eidôlon in each subcorpus (figure 7).

43

This threefold analysis helps to evaluate the relative and absolute frequencies of each term in the full text (sub)corpora, while also visualizing the importance of each term in the texts they appear in. For instance, a high number of one of the terms in the latter distribution could prove that the term plays a central role in those texts it is mentioned in. The last distribution including the absolute values provides an overview of the raw distribution of each term in all four subcorpora.

44

In addition to the visualizations in the figures, the corresponding numbers are also shown in distribution tables in the following parts, where I will discuss the distribution of each term in more detail.

Word Distribution agalma

45

The distribution of agalma in both the visualizations and the table shows that this term is much more important in Greco-Roman polytheistic than in Jewish and Christian texts, although it appears relatively seldom in the Greco-Roman polytheistic texts as well (~15/100k words). Agalma is also more present in Greco-Roman polytheistic religious texts than in Greco-Roman polytheistic philosophical texts, which underlines the assumption in section 2 that eikôn and eidôlon have a rich history in philosophical thought, whereas agalma is mostly used as a descriptive term for votive statues. Yet, the rather high distribution of agalma in Greco-Roman polytheistic religious texts should be treated with caution, since the text basis and thus word counts of these religious texts are rather low.

46

The distribution of agalma in the subcorpora is also reflected in the following overview of the top texts in each subcorpus in which the term most frequently appears (based on relative frequency per 10k words):

Full (GRP)

47

Pausanias – Description of Greece (‘word_count’: 215,792; ‘ἄγαλμα’: 694; ‘rel_frequency/10k’: 32.16).

Philosophy (GRP)

48

Plato – Critias (‘word_count’: 4,942; ‘ἄγαλμα’: 3; ‘rel_frequency/10k’: 6.07).

Religious (GRP)

49

Homeric Hymn to Dionysus (‘word_count’: 139; ‘ἄγαλμα’: 1; ‘rel_frequency/10k’: 71.94).

Jewish and Christian

50

Clement of Alexandria – Protrepticus (‘word_count’: 23,015; ‘ἄγαλμα’: 54; ‘rel_frequency/10k’: 23.46).

51

The high relative frequency of agalma in the Homeric Hymn to Dionysos is due to the short character of the text, in which the term only appears once. However, the concrete use of agalma in this short hymn underlines what was stated in section 2 about the votive nature of agalma and its strong focus on materiality, which is why I have kept it despite the term appearing only once:

52

… καί οἱ ἀναστήσουσιν ἀγάλματα πόλλ᾽ ἐνὶ νηοῖς

53

… and men will lay up […] many offerings in […] shrines. (Homeric Hymn to Dionysos; transl. by Evelyn-White)

54

Regarding the Jewish Christian subcorpus, the high frequency of agalma in the Protrepticus is noteworthy (54), particularly considering the rather low frequency of agalma in the rest of the Jewish and Christian corpus (67). This demonstrates that the text by Clement of Alexandria includes a major part of the occurrences of agalma (~81%). Consequently, agalma is only rarely used in the remaining 90 texts in the Jewish and Christian corpus.

55

That agalmata are extensively mentioned in Pausanias Description of Greece also fits into the overall picture of agalmata as precious votive offerings in temples, because large parts of Pausanias’ work are dedicated to the description of temples, shrines, sanctuaries, and their interiors. The use of agalma in these contexts is almost exclusively applied in the description of the history and material appearance of statues, for example in the following passage:

56

θέας δὲ ἄξιον τῶν ἐν Πειραιεῖ μάλιστα Ἀθηνᾶς ἐστι καὶ Διὸς τέμενος: χαλκοῦ μὲν ἀμφότερα τὰ ἀγάλματα, ἔχει δὲ ὁ μὲν σκῆπτρον καὶ Νίκην, ἡ δὲ Ἀθηνᾶ δόρυ.

57

The most noteworthy sight in the Peiraeus is a precinct of Athena and Zeus. Both their images [agalmata] are of bronze; Zeus holds a staff and a Victory, Athena a spear. (Pausanias, Description of Greece 1.1.3; transl. Jones et al.)

Type Distribution of agalma

58

The type distribution of agalma in the pagan full corpus is shown in figure 2, whereas the distribution in the Jewish and Christian corpus is displayed in figure 3.

59

In both the Greco-Roman polytheistic and the Jewish and Christian subcorpora, the term agalma is mostly used in the nominative/accusative cases; however, in the Jewish and Christian corpus, the term frequently occurs in the plural form, thereby referring to multiple images, whereas the focus in the Greco-Roman polytheistic corpus lies on individual agalmata in the singular form. This can be explained considering the previous examinations and shows that an agalma in the Greco-Roman polytheistic corpus often denotes precious individual statues (made by well-known artists such as Praxiteles), whereas the use of agalma in the Jewish and Christian subcorpus refers to a more abstract quantity of agalmata (pl.) in the (often polemical) sense of “all pagan images.”

Word Distribution eidôlon

60

The distribution of the term eidôlon shows significant differences compared to the examination of the distribution of agalma. First of all, eidôlon does not appear in the Greco-Roman polytheistic religious corpus (which must be interpreted with caution, since there were only few texts annotated as “religious” in the Diorisis corpus). Yet, the term has a relatively high presence in few philosophical texts (with an exclusive frequency of ~27 words per 100k) and is also mentioned in almost 50% of the Jewish and Christian texts. Thus, eidôlon can be considered to play an important role in some philosophical discussions and to have a relatively widespread use in Jewish and Christian texts.

61

A closer look at the top texts in each subcorpus supports this assumption:

Full (GRP)

62

Aristotle – De divinatione per somnum (‘word_count’: 1,199; ‘εἴδωλον’: 5; ‘rel_frequency/10k’: 41.70).

Philosophy (GRP)

63

Plato – Sophist (‘word_count’: 16,018; ‘εἴδωλον’: 13; ‘rel_frequency/10k’: 8.12).

Religious (GRP)

64

-

Jewish and Christian

65

Septuaginta – Bel et Draco (‘word_count’: 840; ‘εἴδωλον’: 1; ‘rel_frequency/10k’: 11.91).

66

The top texts in the full Greco-Roman polytheistic and the philosophical Greco-Roman polytheistic text corpus are philosophical treatises. Of particular interest is the text by Aristotle, since it deals with a religious topic (divination or “prophetic dreams”) from a philosophical perspective. The following quotes from this text demonstrate that eidôla, in this text, are regarded as ephemeral reflections of an object that cause dreams:

67

[…] τοιόνδ΄ ἂν εἴη μᾶλλον ἢ ὥσπερ λέγει Δημόκριτος εἴδωλα καὶ ἀποῤῥοίας αἰτιώμενος.

68

[…] the following would be a better explanation of it than that proposed by Democritus, who alleges ‘images’ [eidôla] and ‘emanations’ as its cause. (transl. by J. I. Beare)

69

λέγω δὲ τὰς ὁμοιότητας͵ ὅτι παραπλήσια συμβαίνει τὰ φαντάσματα τοῖς ἐν τοῖς ὕδασιν εἰδώλοις͵[…]

70

But, speaking of ‘resemblances’ [homoiotêtas], I mean that dream presentations [phantasmata] are analogous to the forms [eidôlois] reflected in water, […]

71

The use of eidôlon in Plato’s Sophist is of a similar kind and mainly designates a (negatively) connotated illusion or phantasma (eidôlon is often used synonymously with phantasma in the Sophist). Plato’s Sophist also includes the important differentiation between “representative art” (technê eikastikê) and “imitating art” (technê mimêtikê), which are both important for Plato’s understanding of images. The first (technê eikastikê) is positively attributed and concerned with the representation of the archetypes (paradeigmata) and attributed to the eikôn, whereas the latter (technê mimêtikê) is an imitation of a representation and thus a work of eidôla.

72

The top text in the Jewish and Christian subcorpus, which stems from the Septuaginta, is another example of a short text in which the term eidôlon only appears once, thereby causing its high relative frequency.

73

καὶ ἦν εἴδωλον τοῖς Βαβυλωνίοις, ᾧ ὄνομα Βηλ, καὶ ἐδαπανῶντο εἰς αὐτὸν ἑκάστης ἡμέρας σεμιδάλεως ἀρτάβαι δώδεκα καὶ πρόβατα τεσσαράκοντα καὶ οἴνου μετρηταὶ ἕξ. καὶ ὁ βασιλεὺς ἐσέβετο αὐτὸν καὶ ἐπορεύετο καθ᾽ ἑκάστην ἡμέραν προσκυνεῖν αὐτῷ· Δανιηλ δὲ προσεκύνει τῷ θεῷ αὐτοῦ.

74

Now the Babylons had an idol [eidôlon], called Bel, and there were spent upon him every day twelve great measures of fine flour, and forty sheep, and six vessels of wine. And the king worshipped it and went daily to adore it: but Daniel worshipped his own God. (transl. King James Bible)

75

The text with the highest absolute number of appearances of eidôlon is once more the Protrepticus by Clement of Alexandria (24) followed by Eusebius’ Church History (20).

Type distribution eidôlon

76

The type distribution of eidôlon in the Greco-Roman polytheistic (full) corpus is shown in figure 5, whereas the distribution in the Jewish and Christian corpus is displayed in figure 6.

77

Similarly to the distribution of agalma, the eidôlon frequently occurs in the nominative/accusative singular in the Greco-Roman polytheistic full corpus. Yet, it also appears in nominative/accusative/genitive plural, although to a lower extent. There is a remarkable difference between the use of eidôlon in the Greco-Roman polytheistic and in the Jewish and Christian corpus. In the latter, the term eidôlon is mostly used in the plural form, including the dative and genitive cases, whereas its singular form is only seldom found.

78

This observation demonstrates that the eidôla in the Greco-Roman polytheistic corpus, similarly to the agalmata, are regarded as individual phenomena. On the contrary, the use and meaning in the Jewish and Christian corpus conveys a more abstract quality of eidôla by referring to abstract quantities, which can be interpreted as a more general discussion of images as illusions.

Word Distribution eikôn

79

The frequencies of eikôn have a similar distribution as those of eidôlon. Yet, the eikôn appears more often in the Jewish and Christian corpus than eidôlon, although in fewer texts (31%). In contrast to the use of eidôlon, the eikôn also occurs in religious Greco-Roman polytheistic texts. It appears to a similar extent as eidôlon in Greco-Roman polytheistic philosophical texts.

80

The top two texts in each category are:

Full (GRP)

81

Lucian – Imagines (‘word_count’: 3,183; ‘εἰκών’: 19; ‘rel_frequency/10k’: 59.69).

Philosophy (GRP)

82

Plato – Cratylus (‘word_count’: 17,880; ‘εἰκών’: 21; ‘rel_frequency/10k’: 11.75).

Religious (GRP)

83

Julian the Emperor – Hymn to the Mother of the Gods (‘word_count’: 5,690, ‘εἰκών’: 3, ‘rel_frequency/10k’: 5.27).

Jewish and Christian

84

Septuaginta – Daniel (‘word_count’: 10,507; ‘εἰκών’: 15; ‘rel_frequency/10k’: 14.28).

85

Of particular interest in this list is the reappearance of a Platonic dialog in the category of Greco-Roman polytheistic philosophical texts. Furthermore, the text by Julian the Emperor (“Hymn to the Mother of Gods”) is a notable observation since it views a religious cult (that of Cybele and Attis) from a Neo-Platonic perspective and deals with statues and their behavior in various ways. Julian applies several terms to describe the statue of Cybele, among them ksoanon and agalma. Different from material objects, the statue of the Phrygian mother in Julian’s hymn is not lifeless, but her independent behavior demonstrates …

86

ὡς οὔτε μικροῦ τινος τίμιον ἀπὸ τῆς Φρυγίας ἐπήγοντο φόρτον, ἀλλὰ τοῦ παντὸς ἄξιον, οὔτε ὡς ἀνθρώπινον τοῦτον, ἀλλὰ ὄντως θεῖον, οὔτε ἄψυχον γῆν, ἀλλὰ ἔμπνουν τι χρῆμα καὶ δαιμόνιον.

87

[…] that the freight they [the Romans] were bringing from Phrygia had no small value, but was priceless, and that this was no work of men’s hands but truly divine, not lifeless clay but a thing possessed of life and divine powers. (transl. by Emily Wilmer Cave Wright)

88

In the passages where Julian discusses statues as concrete objects, terms such as ksoanon or agalma are applied, whereas the term eikôn is used in a more abstract sense as a philosophical likeness or even a “symbol”¹⁸:

89

κάθαρσις δὲ ὀρθὴ στραφῆναι πρὸς ἑαυτὸν καὶ κατανοῆσαι, πῶς μὲν ἡ ψυχὴ καὶ ὁ ἔνυλος νοῦς ὥσπερ ἐκμαγεῖόν τι τῶν ἐνύλων εἰδῶν καὶ εἰκών ἐστιν.

90

And the right kind of purification is to turn our gaze inwards and to observe how the soul and embodied Mind are a sort of mould and likeness [eikôn] of the forms that are embodied in matter.

91

καὶ μὴν καὶ τῶν δένδρων μῆλα μὲν ὡς ἱερὰ καὶ χρυσᾶ καὶ ἀρρήτων ἄθλων καὶ τελεστικῶν εἰκόνας καταφθείρειν οὐκ ἐπέτρεψε καὶ καταναλίσκειν

92

Moreover in the case of trees it does not allow us to destroy and consume apples, for these are sacred and golden and are the symbols [eikonas] of secret and mystical rewards.

93

In Plato’s Cratylus, the term eikôn frequently appears in the last third of this treatise that is concerned with the correct naming of objects. Alongside other words for images, such as zôgraphêma, the term eikôn in its relation to the depicted object is applied as an analogy of the word-object relation:

94

ἆρ᾽ ἂν δύο πράγματα εἴη τοιάδε, οἷον Κρατύλος καὶ Κρατύλου εἰκών, […]

95

If these only were two distinct objects, just like Cratylus and Cratylus’ image [eikôn], […]

96

(Pseudo-)Lucian’s dialog eikones about the physical and mental beauty of a certain Panthea from Smyrna is another interesting example of the diverse and complex meaning of eikôn in the texts in the Diorisis corpus. In Lucian’s dialog, the term eikôn is frequently used as a term for statues whose appearance is compared to that of Panthea, thereby once more revealing the ‘referring nature’ of the eikôn.

97

Turning to the Jewish and Christian corpus, the use of eikôn in Daniel 2:31-34 denotes a concrete statue. It oscillates between underlining its resemblance to physical attributes and its function as a representation that points to something beyond the material object. It also reflects a more pejorative view on images than in most of the other texts discussed so far:

98

καὶ σύ, βασιλεῦ, ἑώρακας, καὶ ἰδοὺ εἰκὼν μία, καὶ ἦν ἡ εἰκὼν ἐκείνη μεγάλη σφόδρα, καὶ ἡ πρόσοψις αὐτῆς ὑπερφερὴς ἑστήκει ἐναντίον σου, καὶ ἡ πρόσοψις τῆς εἰκόνος φοβερά· καὶ ἦν ἡ κεφαλὴ αὐτῆς ἀπὸ χρυσίου χρηστοῦ, τὸ στῆθος καὶ οἱ βραχίονες ἀργυροῖ, ἡ κοιλία καὶ οἱ μηροὶ χαλκοῖ, τὰ δὲ σκέλη σιδηρᾶ, οἱ πόδες μέρος μέν τι σιδήρου, μέρος δέ τι ὀστράκινον. ἑώρακας ἕως ὅτου ἐτμήθη λίθος ἐξ ὄρους ἄνευ χειρῶν καὶ ἐπάταξε τὴν εἰκόνα ἐπὶ τοὺς πόδας τοὺς σιδηροῦς καὶ ὀστρακίνους καὶ κατήλεσεν αὐτά.

99

31. You saw, O king, and behold, a great image [eikôn]. This image [eikôn], mighty and of exceeding brightness, stood before you, and its appearance was frightening. (32) The head of this image was of fine gold, its chest and arms of silver, its middle and thighs of bronze […] (34) As you looked, a stone was cut out by no human hand, and it struck the image on its feet of iron and clay, and broke them in pieces. (transl. English Standard Version)

100

This passage from Daniel is of particular interest for the triad of anti-, an-, and iconism mentioned in the introduction of this article. It could be interpreted as an anti-iconic action in which an aniconic object (the mountain) destroys an icon. Even though it might first appear that way, the eikôn in Daniel is more than a mere physical presence or decorative object (such as an agalma), it is the representation and likeness of the king, which is not evoked through any physical resemblance but through genuine functions such as might and awe. This episode about the statue (eikôn) of the king is further elaborated on in Daniel 3, where the Judaeans resist obeying the imperial order to worship the golden image of the king. Overall, this passage demonstrates that the term eikôn, although later more positively connotated in Christian thought, still had a rather negative meaning in various Jewish and Christian contexts depending on the object it represented.

Type distribution eikôn

101

The type distribution of eikôn in the Greco-Roman polytheistic (full) corpus is shown in figure 8, whereas the distribution in the Jewish and Christian corpus is displayed in figure 9 .

102

Different from the distributions of types of agalma and eidôlon, the type distribution of eikôn is very similar in the Greco-Roman polytheistic as well as in the Jewish and Christian subcorpora. The term eikôn is mostly used in accusative singular, thereby referring to a single eikôn. This could hint at a continuity in the use and meaning of eikôn in the Greco-Roman polytheistic as well as the Jewish and Christian subcorpora that will be discussed in more detail in the following sections.

Word Distribution Summary

103

The distribution of agalma, eidôlon, and eikôn revealed important differences between the various subcorpora analyzed in this article. Agalma only appears to a lesser extent in Jewish, Christian, and Greco-Roman polytheistic philosophical texts. Yet, this term is frequently found in the other Greco-Roman polytheistic texts, and to a large extent in those that focus on the description of the materiality of statues and images, such as in the account by Pausanias. Consequently, the examination of the use and meaning of agalma is of central importance for the understanding of the role of materiality in the discussion of images, and its absence in the philosophical as well as most of the Jewish and Christian texts can rightfully be interpreted as a shift from the material to the cognitive dimension in the understanding of images.

104

Both eidôlon and eikôn are more frequently found in philosophical as well as Jewish and Christian texts than the term agalma. The term eidôlon is very present in Greco-Roman polytheistic philosophical works dealing with dreams or illusions, such as Aristotle’s De divinatione per somnum or Plato’s Sophist. The term eikôn appears to a similar extent in all the subcorpora examined in this article. Its use and meaning covers a wide spectrum, from a more positive (Lucian) to a rather negative perception (Daniel) and from a term that signifies a concrete object (such as the statue of Nebukadnezar in Daniel or Panthea in Lucian’s work) to an abstract understanding in the sense of a “likeness” or “symbol.”

105

In summary, the analysis of the word frequency lists and selected examples revealed a rather diverse use and meaning of agalma, eidôlon, and eikôn both between and within the subcorpora, and particularly in the case of eikôn and eidôlon. For instance, the assumption of a clear distinction between the negatively connotated eidôlon and the eikôn as the term for more accepted images, at least from a Christian perspective, is difficult to maintain since the eikôn could have a negative connotation as well. A good example is the book of Daniel and the chapter of “Bel and the Dragon” where both terms are applied with a negative connotation for divine/royal statues.

Greco-Roman polytheism (Full)

106

The following collocation analysis will further elaborate on the results from the previous frequency analysis by examining the semantic context in which agalma, eidôlon, and eikôn appear in the documents of the various subcorpora. The first part of the collocation analysis examines the collocation of agalma, eikôn, and eidôlon in the full Greco-Roman polytheistic corpus.

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The top 10 collocates of agalma, eikôn, and eidôlon in the Diorisis Lemmatized Greco-Roman polytheistic Corpus (No Stop Words) are identified using log-likelihood as an association measure (06 – LogLik (6.63), L5-R5, C: 3.0-NC: 3.0).

Jewish and Christian Corpus (Full)

139

Following up on the discussion of the collocation analysis in the Greco-Roman polytheistic full text corpus, I will now continue with the analysis of agalma, eidôlon, and eikôn in the Diorisis Lemmatized Jewish and Christian Corpus (No Stop Words).

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The top 10 collocates identified using log-likelihood (06 – LogLik (6.63), L5-R5, C: 3.0-NC: 3.0) are displayed in the following tables.

Collocation Analysis Summary

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The collocation analysis of agalma, eikôn, and eidôlon has revealed both continuities and differences in the use of each term between the Greco-Roman polytheistic and the Jewish and Christian subcorpora.

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The frequent and widespread application of agalma in the Greco-Roman polytheistic texts disappeared in the Jewish and Christian texts. The term was almost exclusively found in Clement of Alexandria’s Protrepticus. The formerly positive attribution of the precious and artistic character of agalmata turned into the opposite: In the Jewish and Christian context, it was precisely this focus on “dead” materials such as wood or gold that made these statues worthless or even dangerous.

178

Even though it was not immediately visible from the two collocation tables, the use and meaning of eikôn between the Greco-Roman polytheistic as well as the Jewish and Christian subcorpora was more continuous than in the case of the two other terms. In the Greco-Roman polytheistic texts, the use of eikôn was already twofold: It could denote concrete objects, such as images or statues; however, its reference to that what was represented in these images (“likeness”) or even the abstract use of eikôn void of any concrete objects (such as in the context of metaphors in Aristotle) was perceivable as well. This ambiguous meaning oscillating between the object (signans) and that what it refers to (significatum) was also visible in the Jewish and Christian texts. Here, the eikôn in the sense of a material object was often negatively connotated, whereas the more abstract use of eikôn (“man as a likeness of god”) was positively attributed, for instance via a direct connection to the Christian god.

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The application and meaning of eidôlon revealed an interesting shift in meaning between the two subcorpora. The partly negative connotation of an eidôlon in the sense of a superficial/incomplete representation in the Greco-Roman polytheistic texts was taken up in the Jewish and particularly Christian subcorpus and established as the pejorative notion for images no longer signifying a visual phenomena (such as reflections) but the entirety of Greco-Roman polytheistic images.

agalma

182

The comparison of the two word lists displays significant differences between the closest words to agalma according to the word vector analysis. The word list deriving from the Greco-Roman polytheistic corpus mostly includes objects, adjectives related to materiality, and various words related to statues and images, which often have a religious connotation. These words thereby underline the descriptive character of agalma already outlined in the previous parts of this article. The closest word is ksoanon with a cosine similarity of 0.83, which indicates a close semantic relation between both terms.

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The word list from the Jewish and Christian corpus also includes words that stem from the semantic field of materiality. Yet, there is a more reflected perspective at play, since the mere materiality is further associated with “lifelessness” and “insensibility.” Particularly the term anaisthêtos is very close with a cosine similarity of almost 1 (0.98). Consequently, the material character of an agalma is also evoked in the Jewish and Christian corpus, but it is interpreted negatively and with a strong emphasis on the lifeless character of material images. Lastly, it is noteworthy that only one other term for statues appears in the Jewish and Christian list, namely andrias. This hints at a more differentiated use of terms related to images than it was the case in the pagan subcorpus, where most of these terms, such as andrias, ksoanon, or anathêma were used interchangeably, at least according to the word vector analysis.

eikôn

184

The closest terms to eikôn in the full Greco-Roman polytheistic subcorpus are, similarly to the observations in the case of agalma, related to statues and materiality. However, nouns connected to “to write/draw” (graphein), such as writer or inscription, are present as well. These words did not appear among the top entries of either the collocation analysis or the word frequency lists. They point to the important interplay between images and writing, for instance on the basis of a statue. A typical example of such an epigramma is given in the following quote from Pausanias:

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γέγραπται δὲ ἐπὶ τῷ τοίχῳ γράμμασιν Ἀττικοῖς ἔργα εἶναι Πραξιτέλους. τοῦ ναοῦ δὲ οὐ πόρρω Ποσειδῶν ἐστιν ἐφ᾽ ἵππου, δόρυ ἀφιεὶς ἐπὶ γίγαντα Πολυβώτην, ἐς ὃν Κῴοις ὁ μῦθος ὁ περὶ τῆς ἄκρας ἔχει τῆς Χελώνης: τὸ δὲ ἐπίγραμμα τὸ ἐφ᾽ ἡμῶν τὴν εἰκόνα ἄλλῳ δίδωσι καὶ οὐ Ποσειδῶνι.

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[Hard by is a temple of Demeter, with images of the goddess herself and of her daughter, and of Iacchus holding a torch.] On the wall, in Attic characters [grammasin Attikois], is written that they are works of Praxiteles. Not far from the temple is Poseidon on horseback, hurling a spear against the giant Polybotes, concerning whom is prevalent among the Coans the story about the promontory of Chelone. But the inscription [epigramma] of our time assigns the statue [eikona] to another, and not to Poseidon. (Pausanias, Description of Greece 1.2.4)

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Yet, most of the terms listed in the eikôn table of the Greco-Roman polytheistic subcorpus have a relatively low cosine similarity, at least compared to the cosine similarity in the other tables. This indicates that there is an observable but relatively vague connection between the field of writing and images, which differs in its significance from the strong relation between eidôlon and eikôn in Table 4.

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The closest terms to eikôn in the Jewish and Christian subcorpus are more difficult to interpret. The appearance of eidôlon as the closest term is a good example of the necessity of complementary qualitative examinations in a mixed-methods approach. Even though the term eidôlon is indeed used in a close interplay with eikôn, particularly in Clement of Alexandria, both terms have crucial differences in meaning in the Jewish and Christian subcorpus which are not directly visible when only considering the word vector analysis.

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Notably, some other words are also related to the materiality of the objects (such as “goldsmith” or “carved”), but most words refer to more abstract concepts, such as mimêma (“copy”), horismos (“limitation”), and anastrophê (“conversion”), indicating the complex use and meaning of the terminology in the Jewish and Christian context (which is, particularly in a Christian context, still based on ancient discussions, since terms such as mimêma were already found in Plato’s discussions of eikôn).

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Interestingly, only few of these terms and subjects were part of the collocation analysis or word frequency lists. The word vector analysis thus adds a valuable layer to the overall examination by revealing relations that were otherwise not visible.

eidôlon

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The terms in both word lists representing the closest terms to eidôlon in both subcorpora resemble the outcome of the collocation analysis. Yet, they also include words that appeared in neither the frequency lists nor the collocation analysis. Similar to the words in Table 3, the words in Table 5 only have relatively low cosine similarity scores, thereby indicating a more distant connection in meaning (at least according to the Word2Vec analysis).

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The words closest to eidôlon in the Greco-Roman polytheistic full text subcorpus are mainly concerned with different modes of visibility, with a dominating connotation of rather negative phenomena such as “shadow” and “obscure.” The words in the list from the Jewish and Christian subcorpus underline the negative character of the eidôla in the Jewish and Christian texts, where words such as “abomination” (bdelygma) or “disgrace” (atimia) are used similarly to eidôlon.

Word2Vec Summary

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The comparison of the word lists from the word vector analysis revealed interesting additional insights into the use and meaning of agalma, eikôn, and eidôlon. Most intriguing was the frequent appearance of words related to graphein in the context of eikôn, thereby pointing out an observable interplay between writing and images. This observation that was not visible in the other examinations fits perfectly to the previous hypothesis that the eikones are more concerned with “what is represented” (and thus also referenced through text) than the other terms (such as agalma). It also demonstrates that “what is represented” is not always sufficiently visible in the images but might need to be addressed separately (among others, to avoid ambiguous attributions).

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The analysis of the word lists from the word vector examination also resulted in additional words absent in the other examinations. These words, however, pointed into a similar direction as the words from the previous examinations (such as materiality), which can rightfully be taken as a proof that the combination of several quantitative (and qualitative) methods delivers the best results since each method helps to complement the shortcomings of the others.