Metaphor in Homer

BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS Metaphor in Homer: Time, Speech, and Thought. By Andreas T. Zanker. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2019. Pp. x, 263. Although the use of metaphor in the Homeric poems has been studied extensively, the present book contributes a fresh and helpful perspective. The key is the introduction of Conceptual Metaphor Theory, designed by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in 1980.1 In this approach, metaphor is seen as a function of thought rather than of language, and therefore as more than a poetic ornament, motivating common sayings such as “going through life” or “coming to the end of the road” (related to the metaphor of “life as a journey”). The realm of metaphors even extends to established vocabulary—Zanker cites the verb “forget” as formed from for- (“abstain”) + *getan (“get”) and therefore meaning “losing something” (6–7)—and to the system of cases and prepositions indicating temporal and spatial relations. By applying this broader concept of metaphor, Zanker demonstrates that the phenomenon exists on a foundational level in Homer’s texts, whereas studies based on a more traditional understanding of metaphor as a consciously used poetic device have long claimed a scarceness of metaphors in Homer, as is shown in the first chapter, in which ancient and modern views of metaphor are discussed. Chapters Two to Four are dedicated to a selection of conceptual metaphors in Homer, namely, Time, Speech, and the fields of Mind, Intention, and Self. In this core part of the book, Zanker presents a wide range of important findings. Starting with the chapter on Time, he addresses Hermann Fränkel’s influential claim that Homer had an undeveloped concept of time, which was partly based on the observation that the word xr—now never appears as the subject of a sentence.2 While Fränkel’s argument has been contested before, Zanker manages to show in detail that Homeric metaphors of time are quite similar to its definition in modern linguistics. The spatial metaphors of an ego moving along a path (to “go through” time), an object moving towards an ego (days “going by”), or events without an ego situated in relation to one another along a timeline (“Wednesday is before Thursday”) are all found in both Homeric and modern language. Zanker does not limit his study to these categories but establishes new ones, one of which seems particularly interesting in view of Fränkel’s argument: time itself may not be an agent in Homer, but smaller units like months and nights are viewed as living beings that “perish” and “wane” (e.g., Od. 11.182–183 and 14.162). In his chapter on Speech, Zanker finds an important difference between Homeric and modern use of metaphors: the former’s lack of the so-called “conduit metaphor,” i.e., the concept of words as vessels for ideas (“put an idea into words”). Zanker demonstrates that in Homer’s texts, words and ideas are designated by the same expressions (namely the interchangeable Ápow and māyow). Among the physical metaphors for linguistic communication , there is a preference for the likening of words to missiles, which extends 1 G. Lakoff and M. Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago 1980). 2 H. Fränkel, “Die Zeitauffassung in der frühgriechischen Literatur,” in id., Wege und Formen frühgriechischenDenkens (Munich 1955) 1–22; originally published under the title “Die Zeitauffassung in der archaischen griechischen Literatur,” Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 25 (1931) 97–118. PHOENIX, VOL. 74 (2020) 1–2. 142 BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 143 to the much-discussed expression “feathered words” (Ápea pter—enta). Zanker gives a new twist to this old problem by applying the idea of Conceptual Blending, which was developed by Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner.3 Instead of assuming just a metaphor and the object it stands for, Conceptual Blending assumes four different spaces: Inputs I and II, i.e., “words/Ápea” and “arrows” (Zanker falls in line with earlier scholars rejecting the idea of “birds”); the Generic Space (the tertium comparationis), i.e., “straightness of flight, irrevocability, unpredictability, effectiveness, etc.”; and the Blend, i.e., the metaphoric expression Ápea pter—enta (136–140). Again, Zanker finds

Art · Conceptual metaphor · Epistemology · Figure of speech · Linguistics · Literature · Meaning (existential) · Metaphor · Phenomenon · Poetry · Realm · Simile · Verb · Vocabulary · Classical Philosophy and Thought · History · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Philosophy