Lucian's ideal historian is like the sculptor Phidias both in the sense that he gives shape to the "raw material" (hyle) of history, and in the sense that his work has a powerful visual appeal for the reader. "[The historian] has to organize his facts (ta pepragmena) skillfully," Lucian stresses, "and express them as vividly (enargestata) as he can" (Hist. conscr. 51). In his emphasis on the vividness of the historian's representation and on the reader's "visual perception" of the events he recounts, Lucian raises the issue of enargeia, the technical term that ancient critics employ to describe how language creates a vivid, visual presence, bringing the event described, and all the emotions that attend its perception, "before the reader's eyes."2 The term enargeia and the