2024/12/27 by Caitlin Hines · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · #Historical and Religious Studies of Rome
paper · pdf · doi:10.3998/mpub.14513088
openalex publication_date 2024/12/27 · openalex created_date 2024/12/28 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/02
In ancient Rome, the Latin word <I>viscera</I> denoted the inner parts of the body, where physical sensations related to fear and anger could be felt and whose injury meant certain death. <I>Viscera</I> were also entangled with religious, political, and reproductive imagery: the word could refer to cuts of sacrificial meat, the inner workings of a governing body, a mother's fertile womb, and the offspring she has carried. It appears in scientific descriptions of human anatomy, in elaborations of violent deaths, accusations of political conspiracy, and the laments of parents who must watch their children die. The sudden expansions of<I> viscera</I> into vivid metaphors for the body politic, the violated womb, and the desecrated sacrifice materialized in parallel with watershed moments in Roman history, reflecting urgent contemporary anxieties about politics, reproduction, and succession. <I>Rome's Visceral Reactions </I>traces and interprets the semantic history of <I>viscera</I>, whose progressive acquisition of new meanings offers a compelling case for the dynamic interaction between body metaphor, semantic change, and political crisis at Rome.<BR /><BR /> Caitlin Hines follows the history of <I>viscera </I>from its earliest attestations through the end of the Julio-Claudian period and considers the works of Lucretius, Cicero, Vergil, Livy, Ovid, Seneca, and Lucan. Applying theories of embodied cognition and semantic change, Hines demonstrates how Roman authors influenced the development of their language through the invention, reception, and affirmation of innovative meanings and how pressing political and cultural crises could shape, and be shaped in return, by the sophisticated linguistic games of the Roman literary elite.