Painters and colours

Use in the book

B 232 offers a sustained analogy for the production of diversity from a limited material stock. Trained painters take pigments, mix some in greater and others in lesser amounts, and produce likenesses of trees, human beings, animals, fish, and gods. The list matches the range of living and divine forms described elsewhere in the cosmological account. The painter's activity gives the hearer an intelligible example of how visible variety need not require a separate source for every kind of thing.

Proportion is crucial. The passage does not simply say that colours touch each other; more of one and less of another yield different appearances. This makes the analogy relevant to mixtures such as the recipe for bone and the near-equal constituents of blood and flesh. Its endpoint is explanatory confidence: the hearer must not be deceived into supposing another source of the manifest mortal things.

The analogy also has limits. A painted animal is a likeness, and the Greek explicitly marks resemblance. The fragment does not say that natural beings are lifeless pictures or that a human-like painter stands outside the whole world creating it. The stated lesson concerns the relation between constituent material and resulting diversity. The divine claim at the ending belongs to the authority of the telling.

Two aspects of the vocabulary connect this scene to other parts of the poems. The image-makers work on offerings rather than necessarily on modern autonomous works of art; and pharmaka is the same word translated remedies in B 1112. The local context determines whether it refers to colouring materials or healing agents. That breadth should be preserved without inventing a hidden pharmacological explanation of painting.

Places to read

1. B 23.1–112The complete painter analogy links trained mixing, proportion, likeness, and confidence in a common source.
2. B 21.9–142The catalogue of trees, humans, animals, fish, and gods parallels the images made by painters.
3. B 71.1–42Forms and colours are explicitly a problem for the explanation through mixed constituents.
4. B 111.1–2The same noun used for pigments appears for remedies in a different context.

Translation in this edition

“Votive tablets” is the edition's concrete rendering of anathēmata. It gives the scene a plausible object but should not be expanded into an independently documented painting workshop. “Pigments” and “remedies” translate different uses of pharmaka, not two unrelated Greek words.