ABSTRACT
Personification is a meeting of linguistics, morality and religion in the house of rhetoric. Personification is right there with Homer and Hesiod, it constitutes an integral part of poetic craft in Pindar, it dominates the pronouncements of wisdom, and it is hardly less productive in later poetic and philosophical texts. Personification is a complex phenomenon which unfolds at several levels, linguistic and poetic, speculative and religious; it is the interaction or confusion of these aspects that makes it fascinating. This chapter demonstrates the part of a Near Eastern-Aegean koine. Imagery seems to imply images but there is a long step from rhetorical metaphors to actual art, be it pictorial or sculptural, especially as this sector of culture has its own conventions and lines of development. Making pictures of abstracts means a very special bridge between representative art and linguistic clarification.
