"In English, images for the tongue and words are perhaps more drawn from storms and light and winds; for the Greeks the tongue was generally a dangerous instrument, a weapon. Sometimes it launched arrows of language, Homer’s winged words, or the gold or rippling shafts of poetry; more often it had a cutting edge: to slice my word, διακέρσαι ἐμόν ἔπος, the metallic tongue which could, like Pindar’s, be sharpened on the shrill whetstone, hammered on the anvil of truth, launched like a bronze javelin, shivered or splintered like Sappho’s."
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Emily Vermeule, Aspects of Death in Early Greek Art and Poetry, 197-198.
(via spanishleather)
(Source: clarabeau, via exempli-gratia-deactivated20120)