“And down they went into the house of Hades”: Metaphors of Death and Mythology in Early Greek Epic
CERES Palais, room "Ruhrpott" (4.13)
Metaphor Talk by Dr. Fabian Horn (LMU Munich)
In cognitive linguistic metaphor theory, the traditional trope of metaphor was reexamined and its scope has been expanded considerably. Thus it has been argued that metaphor is not merely a form of stylistic embellishment, but a process of cognition by which we think, speak, and make sense of our environment, especially when it comes to abstract, difficult, or otherwise inaccessible concepts. One such difficult concept is the idea of death, which has been demonstrated to be frequently and predominantly conceptualized metaphorically.
After some introductory remarks on conceptual metaphor theory, I will present examples of the copious metaphorical language of death in Early Greek epic poetry, particularly drawn from the Homeric poems, our earliest extant works of Ancient Greek literature. In a second step, I will consider the relationship between metaphor and mythology and argue that many Greek mythological ideas about death and the realm of the dead seem to be metaphorically motivated.
