2ĤA different (and more famous) example will reinforce the point. The “skipping” of the expression of meaning contrasts with what we might perhaps expect of an author such as Herodotus or Plato in the articulation of the thought-processes of a character: Achilles simply asserts the conclusion without linking it to his observation by means of a verb like “σηµαίνειν”. 2 Compare Edwards’ paraphrase of this episode in his commentary: “Akhilleus realizes that the rout of (.)ģIn this excerpt, Achilles interprets what has happened from the evidence to hand, but does not avail himself of any verb of meaning in order to describe what the retreat of the Achaeans signifies: he simply introduces his inference with the emphatic “ἦ µάλα” (“surely”).Indeed, I commanded him that he was to return to the ships when he had pushed away the destructive fire, and not to contend in might with Hector” (Homer, Iliad 18.6-15). Surely the powerful son of Menoetius is dead, headstrong as he was. “Ah, woe is me, why are the long-haired Achaeans once again being driven to the ships in rout over the plain? Let it not be that the gods have brought to pass woes grievous to my heart, as my mother declared to me, telling me that even while I lived the best of the Myrmidons would leave the light of the sun beneath the hands of the Trojans. Nevertheless, Achilles independently infers from the fact that the Trojans have gained the upper hand in the battle that Patroclus must have been slain:ġ. At the beginning of Iliad 18, for example, Achilles is waiting for news from the battle and has yet to be informed of the death of Patroclus Antilochus, who bears the news, has not yet reached him. The Interpretation of Ordinary Phenomena in HomerĢFirst of all, we should note that the Homeric narrator does not describe the Achaean and Trojan heroes as having recourse to a vocabulary of meaning in reasoning about the purport of standard observed phenomena that do not have an intention behind them that is to say, the subsequently attested terminology does not appear in the context of the interpretation of events, actions, and non divinatory signs. The Greek material is particularly important for our investigation it is worth investigating at some length. We shall then move on to discuss the Archaic period as a possible context for the transference of the vocabulary. In this chapter, we shall go through a representative selection of points a twhich an expression of meaning might have been employed, surveying examples where both linguistic and inanimate meaning more broadly conceived are in question.
The absence of this terminology does not, of course, entail that the concept of meaning did not exist – language does not necessarily reflect the intellectual furniture of its users, and, as we shall see, the Homeric narrator had other ways of negotiating scenarios in which the words “to mean” and “meaning” might have appeared – but the finding is nevertheless of clear interest for our investigation since it introduces the possibility of tentatively fixing a period for the initial set of metaphorical transferences considered in Chapter 4. While it is perhaps difficult for speakers of English to conceive of language without one, these early poems present no verb for talking about what (I) normal observed phenomena, (II) divine portents, (III) language, or (IV) dreams signify. We have yet, however, to comment on a feature of Homeric diction that emerges from the preceding discussions – that there is in fact no word for “meaning” or “to mean” (used of inanimate subjects in the sense of “to signify”) in the Iliad or Odyssey at all. 1ġIn Chapter 3, we established that the verb “σηµαίνειν” was not used in the Homeric epics in the sense of “to mean”. “It is entirely necessary, then, for philosophers either (a) to use unusual terms that are alien to ordinary speech, since they are the interpreters of things that are unknown to the general public, or (b) to employ ordinary speech and transfer words that have been established for other things” (Dexippus, on Categories 6.10-13 Busse).
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