Metaphor in Herodotus' Histories

This dissertation examines metaphors in Herodotus’ Histories. It focuses on the different ways in which metaphors function within the Histories and argues that Herodotus uses metaphors to structure his work, to characterize his protagonists, to give judgement on events, and to further his audience’s engagement with the content he offers.
The study also explores how metaphors act as a bridge between poetry and prose and thus by extension how Herodotus is influenced by a literary tradition that in his time was still largely poetic. It shows how Herodotus invites his audience to bring their familiarity with imagery from precisely that literary tradition to bear on the events and persons described in the Histories: he uses poetic images to link his prose work to the tradition of poetry, or in other words, to anchor his prose in poetic imagery.
Methodologically, the study adopts the communicative approach to metaphors that Steen proposes in his Deliberate Metaphor Theory. In addition, it draws on the reader response theories of Jauss and Iser. Its four chapters offer four different case studies of how Herodotus uses one specific kind of metaphor: the war-as-sport metaphor (Ch. 1), the bridge-as-yoke metaphor (Ch. 2), the lion image (Ch. 3), and the state-as-a-body metaphor and other corporeal imagery (Ch. 4).