Concepts that fit in a (Roman) hand
The cognitive dimension of manus ‘hand’ in Seneca’s figurative language
The Roman author Lucius Anneus Seneca (4 BC–65 AC), the main representative of Stoic philosophy in Latin
literature, wrote several tragedies in verse in which the Latin noun manus ‘hand’ has a remarkable incidence,
almost doubling the occurrence of other terms more related to tragic themes, such as scelus ‘crime’ or
mors ‘death’. This paper is based on the hypothesis that this high frequency is linked to the concept of
embodiment as well as on the metonymies and metaphors used in Seneca’s figurative language to encode abstract concepts. The
occurrences of the term manus in a corpus composed of Seneca’s dramatic and philosophical texts have been
analysed, paying attention to the metonymic and metaphorical contexts where it appears. As a result, it has been observed that
this word can refer to multiple realities such as individuals, actions, identity, control, or power.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Theoretical background: Embodiment, metaphor, and metonymy
- 3.Corpus and general results
- 4.Hands and metonymy
- 4.1
the hand for the body; the body for the person
- 4.2Hands and actions
- 5.Hands and metaphor
- 6.Combining metaphors and metonymies
- 7.Discussion and final remarks
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
- Abbreviations
-
References