Metaphorical language use

[mwh]

Why does Greek have so little, and Latin so much?

Here, for instance, is Cicero in the 2nd Catilinarian (thanks to swtwentyman’s thread on the Latin board):

iacet ille nunc prostratus, Quirites, et se perculsum atque abiectum esse sentit et retorquet oculos profecto saepe ad hanc urbem quam e suis faucibus ereptam esse luget: quae quidem mihi laetari videtur, quod tantam pestem evomuerit forasque proiecerit.

Catiline has left Rome. Leaving aside the somewhat absurdly sustained image of the first part of the sentence, one moment we have the city snatched from Catiline’s jaws, the next we have her happy at having barfed the pestis up. The two images clash. Any views?

[Qimmik]

Enthralled by the sound of his own voice, Cicero lost control of his rhetoric. This sounds more like the Apocalypse of John.

In answer to your question (Why does Greek have so little, and Latin so much?), Cicero's speeches are the only major body of speeches in Latin. Maybe that's just the kind of person Cicero was.

But in Greek, after the "classical" Attic orators, the "Asianic" strain of rhetoric emerged. For the most part much of Greek rhetoric after the end of Greek city-state independence fell into the "apodeictic" genre, i.e., it was aimed at entertainment rather than persuasion, and likely to have been more extravagant than one whose purpose was to sway public opinion. I don't know much about it, but I suspect that elaborate metaphors were part of the stock-in-trade. And there was probably more of it than has survived. Cicero must have studied this style and appropriated elements of it as well as the more austere Attic style.

And what about the "second sophistic," e.g. Aelius Aristides and others?

[Qimmik]

The earlier pre-Hellenistic Greek rhetoric had its excesses, too. Think of Gorgianic men de, where sometimes ludicrously nonsensical contrasts are developed just for the sake of rhetorical artifice. Isocrates did this, too. Plato parodies this in the Gorgias, I think.

[mwh]

Enthralled by the sound of his own voice, Cicero lost control of his rhetoric.

I doubt it. The speech was written up for publication to serve as rhetorical education for the young, so it was meant to be exemplary, and surely Cicero has everything strictly under control. I think he compartmentalizes. Once he’s done with one image he just drops it and takes up another, without any regard to the previous one. Here we have a damsel in distress rescued in the nick of time from the dragon’s jaws, and a virulent pestis that the city literally could not stomach and has projectiled out. Each is appropriate (however overwrought) in its immediate context, but not beyond, so we get a rapid succession of mutually incompatible images, and have to be agile to make the leap from one to the next without bringing them into contact. I find it jarring, and that can hardly be because I read too self-consciously. We’re meant to read it self-consciously—and admiringly.

More later on the larger question, but I stick to the narrower and more approachable one for now.

[mwh]

As to the larger question, yes it’s possible that there is some postclassical Greek influence on Cicero’s metaphor-laden style, but if so it’s very hard to find, and what he labels “Asiatic” (a made-up Roman catch-all category applied to anything not qualifying as “Attic”) doesn’t seem to have much in common with it. He thinks of himself as Demosthenic, he distinguishes his own style from “Asiatic,” and nothing could be less like Gorgias.

Now here’s where I may be wrong. I tend to think of Latin as having metaphoricity built in to it, as it were, an inherent property that Cicero exploits to the full. (Is there a single verb in Cicero that doesn’t embody metaphor? Other than est.) Greek, while its lexicon readily enough lends itself to semantic extension (what grammarians would call catachresis), seems to be different—not intrinsically, perhaps, but at least in its general behavior. Cicero’s extravagance intrigues me less than the paucity of such metaphorical usage in Greek oratory, or Greek in general, Greek of any period.* Or am I just imagining that?

* I suppose Aeschylus is something of an exception. Not Aelius Aristides or Second Sophistic. Nor the Apocalypse, which is perfectly literal.

[Qimmik]

I tend to think of Latin as having metaphoricity built in to it, as it were, an inherent property . . . (Is there a single verb in Cicero that doesn’t embody metaphor? Other than est.)

I don't think your perception is wrong. Is the reason for this the fact that Greek simply has a much larger vocabulary than Latin, and in particular more extensive and productive derivational devices for fashioning verbs: -izw, -azw, -ow, etc.? Latin has to make words, and especially verbs, play multiple roles to a greater extent than Greek.

[mwh]

I hadn’t thought of that, but yes, Greek has all those denominative verbs, as well as classes of nouns like –μα and –σις, and can easily form new words as needed, while the Latin lexicon is very much smaller and has to work correspondingly harder. (Lucretius famously complains of the language’s poverty as compared with Greek, but he’s talking of philosophical-scientific vocabulary.) That must be at least part of the story—Latin compensating for lack of Greek’s precision with more figured language—but I can’t help feeling there must be more to it than that. It’s strange. You don’t think of Romans as having richer imaginations than Greeks (at least, I don't), but ….

[jeidsath]

Van Hook's The metaphorical terminology of Greek rhetoric and literary criticism is basically a lexicon of Greek metaphor. What is rare, I think, is for the Greeks to hit you over the head with metaphor. They prefer subtle.

I came across this today:

ἡνίκα μὲν οὖν ἐν ἀναπεπταμένῃ τῇ θαλάσσῃ ταῦτα ἔπραττον, ἠφανίζετο ἡ βοὴ χεομένης τῆς φωνῆς εἰς πολὺν ἀέρα· ἐπεὶ δὲ ἄκρᾳ τινὶ ὑποδραμόντες εἰς κόλπον μηνοειδῆ καὶ κοῖλον εἰσήλασαν, μείζων μὲν ἠκούετο βοή, σαφῆ δὲ ἐξέπιπτεν εἰς τὴν γῆν τὰ τῶν κελευστῶν ᾄσματα.

Note ἐξέπιπτεν, which evokes a striking image in the context.