Abstract

This paper aims to reconstruct the history of the link drawn up by Pseudo-Longinus and Quintilian between phantasia, defined as a faculty of mental visualization, and enargeia, that is the self-evidence of the speech. Actually, the two notions are already linked in the Stoa, which associates enargeia with the « comprehensive representation » (phantasia kataleptike), defined as the support of knowledge and action. The treatise On the Sublime suggests a shift from the Stoic definition of phantasia, considered as « common », to the rhetorical definition of phantasia, presented as the result of a specialization of the first phantasia and still associated with the enargeia. This original relation, taken up by Quintilian, allows to grasp the philosophical background of the rhetorical theories of image and reveals the permeability between the two fields during the Roman period.