Metaphor and subversion of the city in Euripides' Cretans

The second lecture will focus on a shocking detail from The Cretans, a fragmentary drama by Euripides that was probably staged in the 430s B.C. It involves the image of a ceiling or roof made of cypress wood, assembled with taurine glue. Commentators have shown little interest in this metaphor. But it is a disconcerting vision, for the poet describes the beams using a verb that essentially applies to liquids, and more specifically to the mixture of wine and water. This image blurs the distinction between fluid and solid: the ceiling appears as a perilously unstable liquid. While this nightmarish metaphor does not conform to the standard model envisaged by cognitive theories of metaphor, we shall see that it represents another incompatibility explored by tragedy: that of the body of the Minotaur, half-man and half-bull, whose birth is the point of departure for the Cretans. The image thus reflects the anguished subversion of the social and religious order.