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The concept of intermediality arose in the theoretical discourse about the relations between different systems or products of meaning, such as the relations between music and art, or image and text. The word gained currency in the 1980s in German- and French-language studies of theatre performance, and in scholarship on opera, film, and music, in order to capture the notion of the interconnections between different art forms. For reasons of utility, the concept has been divided into three kinds: intermediality may refer to the combination of media (as in opera, in which music, dance, and song are conjoined into one aesthetic experience); the transformation or transposition of media (as in a film version of a book); and intermedial references or connections, whereby attention is drawn to another system of meaning, as in the references in literature to a work of art. The term has entered the field of classics especially via the study of the relations between the narrative and inscriptional modes in literary epigram. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article advances the interpretation of Antimachus Thebaid Fragment 51 (Matthews) as part of an ekphrasis. It examines the literary features of Fr. 51 in light of epic ekphrastic conventions; it considers the relevance of allusions to this fragment in later poetry; and it determines that the lines concern a shield-description. Other literary evidence for the legend of the Seven against Thebes is adduced in order to contextualize the passage in the narrative of the poem. The article concludes that this description forms an important link in the tradition of epic ekphrasis from Homer to the Hellenistic period and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses Hellenistic ekphrasis, or artistic description, in works by Vergil and Theocritus. Unconventional use of `caelatum' to describe the decoration of beechwood cups in Vergil's `Eclogue 3.37'; Ekphrasis of the ivy bowl in Theocritus' `Idlyll 1'; Interplay between epic and pastoral modes in `Idyll 1'; Theocritus' purposeful conflation of qualifiers of metal and wood.