Concepts that fit in a (Roman) hand

Abstract

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.