Butler Shane - Synaesthesia and the Ancient Senses

SYNAESTHESIA AND THE ANCIENT SENSES

THE SENSES IN ANTIQUITY

Series Editors: Mark Bradley, University of Nottingham, and Shane Butler, University of Bristol

Like us, ancient Greeks and Romans came to know and understand their world through their senses. Yet it has long been recognized that the world the ancients perceived, and the senses through which they channelled this information, could operate differently from the patterns and processes of perception in the modern world. This series explores the relationship between perception, knowledge and understanding in the literature, philosophy, history, language and culture of ancient Greece and Rome.

Published

Synaesthesia and the Ancient Senses

Edited by Shane Butler and Alex Purves

Forthcoming

Sight and the Ancient Senses

Smell and the Ancient Senses

Sound and the Ancient Senses

Taste and the Ancient Senses

Touch and the Ancient Senses

First published in 2013 by Acumen

Published 2014 by Routledge

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Editorial matter and selection Shane Butler and Alex Purves, 2013.

Individual essays the contributors, 2013.

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Notices

Practitioners and researchers must always rely on their own experience and knowledge in evaluating and using any information, methods, compounds, or experiments described herein. In using such information or methods they should be mindful of their own safety and the safety of others, including parties for whom they have a professional responsibility.

To the fullest extent of the law, neither the Publisher nor the authors, contributors, or editors, assume any liability for any injury and/or damage to persons or property as a matter of products liability, negligence or otherwise, or from any use or operation of any methods, products, instructions, or ideas contained in the material herein.

ISBN: 978-1-84465-561-8 (hardcover)

ISBN: 978-1-84465-562-5 (paperback)

Marvin Bell, excerpt from The Book of the Dead Man #10 from The Book of the Dead Man, copyright 1994 by Marvin Bell.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

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Shane Butler and Alex Purves

James I. Porter

Alex Purves

Mark Payne

Mario Tel

Ashley Clements

Ralph M. Rosen

Katharina Volk

Brian Walters

Mark Bradley

Curtis Dozier

Sean Keilen

Joshua T. Katz

Shane Butler

Mark Bradley is Associate Professor of Ancient History at the University of Nottingham. He is author of Colour and Meaning in Ancient Rome (2009) and editor of Papers of the British School at Rome.

Shane Butler is Professor of Latin at the University of Bristol. He is the author of The Hand of Cicero (2002) and The Matter of the Page: Essays in Search of Ancient and Medieval Authors (2011).

Ashley Clements is Lecturer in Greek Literature and Philosophy in the Department of Classics, Trinity College Dublin.

Curtis Dozier is Visiting Assistant Professor of Greek and Roman Studies at Vassar College.

Joshua T. Katz is Professor of Classics and Member of the Program in Linguistics at Princeton University.

Sean Keilen is Associate Professor of Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of Vulgar Eloquence: On the Renaissance Invention of English Literature (2006).

Mark Payne is Associate Professor in the Department of Classics, the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought and the College at the University of Chicago. He is author of Theocritus and the Invention of Fiction (2007) and The Animal Part: Human and Other Animals in the Poetic Imagination (2010).

James I. Porter is Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine and author, most recently, of The Origins of Aesthetic Thought in Ancient Greece: Matter, Sensation, and Experience (2010) and The Sublime in Antiquity (forthcoming).

Alex Purves is Associate Professor of Classics at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of Space and Time in Ancient Greek Narrative (2010).

Ralph M. Rosen is Rose Family Endowed Term Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is author of Making Mockery: The Poetics of Ancient Satire (2007), and co-editor (with Ineke Sluiter) of Aesthetic Value in Classical Antiquity (2012).

Mario Tel is Associate Professor of Classics at the University of California, Los Angeles. His text of and commentary on the Demes of Eupolis appeared in 2007.

Katharina Volk is Professor of Classics at Columbia University. She is the author of The Poetics of Latin Didactic: Lucretius, Vergil, Ovid, Manilius (2002); Manilius and hisIntellectual Background (2009) and Ovid (2010).

Brian Walters is Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His translation of Lucans Civil War is forthcoming.

Shane Butler and Alex Purves

Synaesthesia is best known as the name of the condition of those individuals who regularly experience one kind of sensory stimulus simultaneously as another and who almost universally regard their atypical kind of perception as a gift rather than an affliction. The commonest variety of synaesthesia associates particular sounds with particular colours, a phenomenon that is itself best known by the French term audition colore. Roughly contemporary, however, with modern interest in this clinical phenomenon has been the broader application of synaesthesia to the sensory blending experienced by all readers, synaesthetes or not. This happens through literatures use of metaphors in which terms relating to one kind of sense-impression are used to describe sense-impressions of other kinds, as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it, providing an example of this usage from W. B. Stanfords Greek Metaphor (1936), which introduced the term to many classicists in a discussion On Synaesthesia or Intersensal Metaphor.

Interest in both kinds of synaesthesia has its roots in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which saw an explosion of philosophical and scientific enquiry into the nature of sensation, cognition and aesthetic pleasure. The very term aesthetic in its modern meaning first appeared in this period, applied by the philosopher Alexander Baumgarten to our sensual experience of a work of art, something which, he argued, both preceded and transcended our mental or noetic appreciation of the same.

Synaesthesia and the Ancient Senses takes the complex resonances of its titles term to heart, offering a collection that is synaesthetic in a variety of ways. (Indeed, the only sense of