A Roman Folk Model of the Mind

In Latin, ways of speaking about the mind are largely metaphorical. Moreover, while the metaphors that deliver this vocabulary are drawn from different sources, they reflect a coherent “folk model” of the mind that motivates and structures certain dimensions of Roman society’s thought and behavior. In this paper, I present evidence of Latin speakers’ metaphorical conceptualization of the mental domain and reconstruct the folk model from this evidence. Finally, in a culturally comparative perspective, I explore how Latin speakers’ “preferential conceptualization” of mental activity in terms of spatial motion conditions Roman understandings of the literary tradition and of literary imitation.