Metaphor in Early Greek Poetry

Proponents of conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) – and of cognitive approaches in general – have focused primarily on systematic aspects of Homeric language found throughout the epics, for instance metaphors for the mind (e.g. Cairns 2014), death (e.g. Horn 2018), surprise (e.g. Forte 2018), and time (e.g. Zanker 2019). This has been crucial for the demonstration of the pervasiveness of conceptual metaphor within the corpus, but the approach has yet to be tested on an individual block of text spoken by a Homeric hero.

This paper analyzes personified metaphors of Death in the Homeric poems, arguing for their grounding in cross-cultural continuities of embodiment and for their subtle poetic function within the Iliad and Odyssey. Due to death’s phenomenological elusiveness, it is paradoxically construed through conceptual metaphors and metonymies that emerge from lived bodily experience (Crespo-Fernández 2006).

Since pain is a private, subjective, and poorly delineated experience, its conceptualization across languages is complex. Subjects experiencing pain have trouble describing it in language that is comprehensible to others, as recent literature in medicine and cognitive linguistics attests. Not surprisingly, metonymic and metaphorical language abounds in this domain, since it facilitates the communication of what pain is (SEMINO 2010). In contemporary English, for example, terms such as burning, piercing or biting are commonly used to describe pain.

The current most prolific and influential metaphor theory is the cognitive linguistic approach (and conceptual metaphor theory) following the seminal work of George Lakoff and his collaborators (esp. Lakoff and Johnson, 1980 and Lakoff and Turner, 1989). Their approach established metaphor as a fundamental pattern of human thought, cognition, and language (rather than a mere figure of speech) which makes it possible for human beings to think and speak about abstract and often phenomenologically inaccessible concepts by employing images drawn from more concrete and relatable source domains.