Contents:
Debra Hawhee opens and closes with plastic art. The "Introduction" displays the Antikythera youth, a statue some scholars identify as Hermes the "guardian of the gymnasium," others as Hermes Logios, "the god of words, or a mortal rhetor standing on a bema speaking to an assembly alii alios. And more broadly, Hawhee sees her book "as a response to the 'Myth of the Mind' found in Raphael's painting, particularly the ways in which histories of rhetoric have been erected upon and hence perpetuated that myth.
Given my own unease with her mode of argument, it will be only fair to quote a couple of the author's own summaries before I go on in what will be a mostly skeptical vein. Early in the book p.
The role of athletics in ancient Greece extended well beyond the realms of kinesiology, competition, and entertainment. In teaching and philosophy, athletic . The role of athletics in ancient Greece extended well beyond the realms of Detailing how athletics came to be rhetoric's "twin art" in the bodily aspects of.
Ancient rhetoricians and orators gleaned this lesson from athletic training and performance, after which they fashioned their art. This curious syncretism had important effects on rhetoric's development, as the nascent art came to share taxonomies, agonistic flair, conceptions of intelligence and time, pedagogical strategies, and cultural value with the already established and well-regarded athletic enterprise p. In the first chapter , "Contesting Virtuosity," we meet some examples of the interpretive moves Hawhee uses throughout the book. She claims p.
Pindar's phrase at Ol. Gorgias is said to have performed at the Olympia dressed in purple. Then there are arguments resting on athletic metaphors, particularly from wrestling, applied to rhetoric. Hawhee wants to insist that athletics and rhetoric were so closely bound that what we might regard as metaphors striking because the vehicles in I. Richard's terminology are different, are not metaphors at all. In defense of her readings, she adduces a remark of Ruth Padel on metaphorical language that is "not a vehicle for explanation.
It is the explanation" p. This too is slippery, and I miss Padel's own warning, which comes very soon after the passage Hawhee quotes: "It is always hard to know if we rightly distinguish literal from metaphorical in another culture's use of words" In and Out of the Mind Princeton, Now, one means to help discriminate the meaning of an apparent metaphor is to look for the author's general intent.
Consider a passage to which Hawhee draws attention, Isocrates Antidosis Isocrates is here hard at work explaining what he does for a very comfortable living and attempting to refute the prejudice that supposedly led to his defeat in the legal action for which the speech is named. True, the orator's use of schemata connects the rhetorical and the athletic, but that seems to me an opportunistic device to make his readers believe what the jury did not believe, viz. More plausible is Hawhee's description of the shared vocabulary as "taxonomical crossover" p.
The chapter concludes with a discussion of the Clouds at p.
Later in the book Hawhee anticipates this objection: she argues pp. But many of her arguments are exaggerated. I doubt her optimistic opinion that undressing rooms were "apparently a common [emphasis added] spot for sophistic exchanges" p. Some are overly credulous of ancient authors; for instance, on p. And full of ghosts is the porch and full the court, of ghosts that hasten down to Erebus beneath the darkness.
The sun has perished out of heaven and an evil mist has run over all. This metaphorical clothing represents at once their own deaths their ghosts go to the darkness of Erebus and their lamentation at their own deaths the wailing and tears. Similarly, in Homer, the metaphor of darkness skotos as a covering is not applied to simple environmental phenomena, but is exclusively a metonymy for death. Such clouds regularly function as garments, as in the case of the golden cloud with which Zeus promises he will envelop himself and Hera before they make love Iliad For with such a golden cloud shall I envelop amphikalyptein us.
Not even Helios could see us through it, and his eyesight is sharpest of all. This cloud clearly functions as a blanket. Clouds as supernatural forms of concealment are not only like blankets or garments, they are explicitly said using the verbs eilyein, hennysthai , and stephanousthai to be worn as garments or garlands. The homology between grief and dying as processes is mirrored also in the use of dress in external ritual expression: the dying cover their faces and the corpse is covered during the funeral, 48 while veiling is both a spontaneous expression of grief and an element in mourning ritual.
The kalyptein metaphors for night, darkness, clouds, and death are not merely visual or descriptive images, but have a strong affective charge. They represent a generalized, intersubjective version of a first-person perspective, an attempt to get inside what it feels like to die, to swoon, or to fall asleep. They are, in the strict sense, phenomenological. Accordingly, when directly applied to an emotion such as achos , the image of the cloud of grief or of grief itself as an enveloping garment amplifies the notion of the emotion as something that comes from outside the normatively functioning self and emphasizes it as a phenomenologically passive, irruptive mental event.
According to Gyges in Herodotus and to Theano, the wife of Pythagoras, in Diogenes Laertius , when a woman takes off her clothes, so she takes off all these social and moral accoutrements.
In either case, an actual garment stands for an emotional disposition itself conceived as a garment. German Schamteile.
The notion of grief as a cloud-like covering emphasizes the occurrent emotion, the sudden onset of an irruptive mental state. This fits with the non-garment metaphors for achos as an external force, as an opponent in a struggle, and the like. These physical expressions are then available as symbols for the emotional concepts that they express. All of the emotions for which garment metaphors exist can also be expressed or referred to metonymously by means of dress. At Iliad In contrast to this group stands a second, in which imagery of putting on, taking off, and wearing is used to represent emotion as what we might call habitus , both dress and disposition.
In the case of both groups, the actual use of garments in emotional and ritual behaviour underlies the metaphor: garment metaphors recur in the conceptualization of those emotions that are most associated with the use of garments in their physical expression. But there are some emotions for which garments are common as expressions and metonymies, but which seem not to generate garment metaphors. There are, as far as I can see, no garment metaphors for anger, fear, or despair, though all of these emotions can be expressed and symbolized by the veiling of the head.
To some extent, the data that we use to study these can be supplemented by material, especially visual evidence, for example from vase painting and sculpture. But even in interpreting gesture and non-verbal communication as such, we need the corroboration of textual evidence if we are to avoid the charge of solipsism, of simply seeing the conventions of our own culture reflected in our interpretations of the visual culture of the ancient Greeks.
The way that these metaphors and metonymies draw on the body and its interactions with the natural and social environments reflects the fact that both the primary and the non-primary ways in which we make sense of the world depend on our experience as holistic, physically embodied organisms in sensory contact with the environments through which we move. First, it shows us that the historical study of emotions via language, literature, and texts is not just a matter of specifying historical developments and cross-cultural differences in the semantics of the conceptual terms that cultures use to label emotions.
The latter is an important enterprise, but there is much more to the language of emotion than that enterprise suggests. Second, it is the study of emotion metaphor, rather than the investigation of the sense and reference of emotion labels, that allows us to get as close as we can to the ways in which a culture, and especially a culture of the past, seeks to encapsulate the phenomenology of emotion in the intersubjective medium of language.
What we get in these cases, through language and literature, is a sense of what it felt like, or at least what it was supposed in a given culture to feel like, to feel an emotion of a certain sort. Language and literature are primary sources for this sense of the intersubjective phenomenology of emotion; and through the language and the literature of the past we can at least get a little closer to something of that phenomenology in historical contexts that otherwise give us no direct access to the felt experience of long-dead individuals.
Gibbs ed. Gibbs and Gerard J. In Galen, the figures are , 49, and 86 respectively. Hippocrates , Aphorisms 7. Mainz, , p. In the Aristotelian Problemata , see esp. Ideler, Physici et medici Graeci minores vol. I, Berlin, Reimer, , p. Bencinii, , p. Berrettoni , Il L essico tecnico , p. Galen, however, insists on the existence of other causes, e. Schurtz , Sarai Blincoe , Richard H. Smith , Caitlin A.
Presents the names of hardcover nonfiction books. Rather, choric invention is attuned to moving through digital-material environments—spaces in motion—where rhetorical invention takes place. Euripides , Medea with Douglas L. Early in the book p. Atwill, Janet.
Powell , David J. But the association with fear and fear-like states is dominant in the ancient Greek context. On the genuine relation between physical temperature and the metaphorical concepts of emotional warmth and coldness, see Lawrence E. Williams , and John A. Apollonius Dyscolus , De constructione On this aspect of the wider context, see Douglas L. Shop Books. Add to Wishlist.
USD Overview The role of athletics in ancient Greece extended well beyond the realms of kinesiology, competition, and entertainment.