Homeric Imagery and the Natural Environment by William Brockliss

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS Homeric Imagery and the Natural Environment. By William Brockliss. Cambridge , MA and London: Harvard University Press (Hellenic Studies 82). 2019. Pp. x, 293. This book adds to the small but growing number of studies dedicated to the application of cognitive linguistic insights to ancient texts. In the publisher’s description it is prominently presented as a response to George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s influential analysis of metaphor, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago 1980), which has sparked renewed interest in metaphor and figurative language in many fields. In short, their claim is that metaphor is a universal cognitive process (rather than a mere figure of speech), drawing on concrete concepts from a “source domain” to illustrate and facilitate understanding of more abstract concepts of a “target domain.” After brief introductory comments on the Greek natural environment, the idiosyncrasies of Homeric poetry, and the work of Lakoff and Johnson (1–15), William Brockliss proposes to study images of nature in epic poetry, especially vegetal imagery, and how they are employed to aid the audience’s understanding of abstract concepts.The point of origin of his investigation is to query what information about the concrete source domain of Greek vegetation can be gleaned from its representation in vegetal imagery.1 Despite taking a particular source domain as its starting point, the book’s main section is divided into three parts according to target domains that are frequently illustrated through floral and arboreal images in Homeric poetry, “Flowers and Erotic Bodies” (17–83), “Cosmic and Civic Order” (85–172), and “Youth and Death” (173–235), each again subdivided into three shorter chapters presenting the individual arguments. In Part One, Brockliss investigates floral imagery in reference to eroticism. On the basis of a comparison with occurrences in the lyric poets, he argues that floral imagery can explore two different configurations of the relationship between subject and object: while in lyric poetry flowers are employed to highlight the beauty of the object of desire, adornment with flowers in erotic contexts in Homeric poetry is often a means of indicating the deception and seduction of the gazing subject. Brockliss proceeds to explain these different configurations expressed through floral imagery with the concept of poik’lon, which encompasses ideas of both variegation and vicissitude, pointing out that the colorful blooming of the Greek flora occurs only for a brief and fleeting period of time before disappearing again, yielding to the arid landscape and thereby providing the grounds for the notion of deception. Part Two adopts a parallel procedure in comparing the floral and arboreal imagery of Homeric poetry with the Hesiodic epics, where these images illustrate the concepts of cosmic structure and civic order. However, the Homeric imagery is more complex in this regard and also covers the negative counterparts of disorder and upheaval. Brockliss proposes a sensible differentiation between wild vegetation and managed growths, which shows how the Greeks must have perceived their environment. This approach leads to 1 Note that another recent study of Homeric metaphor following cognitive linguistic theory, A. T. Zanker, Metaphor in Homer: Time, Speech, and Thought (Cambridge 2019), takes the opposite approach, looking at the target domains and their respective metaphors with no restrictions of the source domains. PHOENIX, VOL. 73 (2019) 3–4. 394 BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 395 a fourfold schematic of plant imagery, each with its own distinctive linguistic markers, arranged along an increasing scale of organization: smaller plants and especially flowers (indicated through present, future, and aorist tenses of fœv, “[to] grow, sprout”) are particularly unruly and indicate both cosmic and civic disorder, while larger wild plants and trees (expressed with perfect or pluperfect forms of fœv) can signify both cosmic order on the basis of their stability and civic disorder due to their unregulated growth; on the other hand, both cultivated cereals (marked out by use of the root *úr-, “[to] plant”) and the controlled growth of trees in orchards (characterized through the substantival stem futo/e) are indicators of civic order, but the latter to a higher degree. In Part Three, Brockliss develops the argument that vegetal images in Homeric epic serve as a means of pointing out death...