Weather Phenomena and the Well-Adjusted Construction in Ancient Greek Poetics
Phoebe Giannisi PhD.,Architect, University of Thessaly, School of Architecture, Lecturer
Abstract
The paper discusses the phenomenology of weather phenomena as a metaphor for mortality in Homeric poetry and ancient Greek architecture. Homeric similes in the Iliad compare elements of landscape in moments of extreme tension (as objects of weather phenomena influence), to the heroes’ bodies during battle. Just as the result of the martial combat, so the outcome of the encounter between weather, especially wind and rain, and men or landscape elements is never certain. It can result to either death and destruction or life and resistance.
In the similes, the landscape elements range from natural such as a rock or a tree, to human produced such as walls, towers or ships derived from stone or wood. A multiple metaphoric association is in place, consisting of different acceptances of bodies: the human body, a natural element’s body, the body of a construction and finally the body of the poem itself. Weather, mainly water, becomes thus the symbol of destructive natural and divine forces threatening to death whatever is the product of humans.
The key notion in Greek epos (Iliad) representing resistance to destruction and death is coherence, the perfect junction of parts, rendered by words relative to the root *ar, having the sense of “fitting, , arranging, attaching, connecting, joining, uniting, articulating, being in accord with, being adjusted”, a semantic range of words adjacent to “harmony”. Resistance to weather (thus immortality) is a quality of the well-adjusted construction. That is meant as perfect articulation of body parts, words and myths, construction parts. For the ancient Greek temples, the iconography of their upper structure, can be analyzed as a visual rendering of the combat between human artifact and weather forces, mainly water.
As for the poet, he places himself in the side of immortality because of the immateriality of its composition. By contrasting his product to the material building constructions, he assumes for the superiority of his craft which assures memory (immortality) without being subject to deterioration due to time and weather.
Biography
Phoebe Giannisi. Born in Athens, Greece. Architect (National Polytechnic School of Athens, 1988). Ph. D in Langues, Histoire et civilisations des Mondes anciens (Université Lyon II- Lumière, 1994). Lecturer at the School of Architecture of the
1University of Thessaly at Volos. Member of the group for actions in the city “Urban Void”. Books: Classical Greek Architecture, (with ?.Tzonis), Flammarion, 2004 (also in French and German) and Récits des Voies. Chant et Cheminement en Grèce archaïque, Grenoble, 2006. She has also published three poetry collections in Greek (1995, 1997, 2005).