Politropia: retoryka Odyseusza
Polytropia: Odysseus’s Rhetoric

Summary/Abstract: In the first verse of his epic poem about Odysseus’s return to Ithaca Homer describes his hero using the complex adjective polytropos. Ryczek discusses interpretations of this multivalent epithet, focusing on the most frequent characterizations of ‘the man of twists and turns’ (to borrow Robert Fagles’s English translation of the Greek anthropos polytropos). For Socrates, Plato and Antisthenes, Odysseus embodies practical wisdom; for Sturm, Sokołowski and Rybiński the wandering Odysseus represents a leader in search of wisdom, while Pucci and Peradotto stress that the hero describes the game of signification within the epic tradition. As a rhetorical competency that links invention (the search for effective arguments) with elocution (the use of many rhetorical figures in speech), polytropia constitutes a regulative idea that signals a masterful use of words when it comes to calling a thing by its name. As a figurative art, i.e. the ability to use a broad range of tropes and figures of speech, it remains an attempt to diversify linguistic forms in response to the diversity of the world and the multiplicity of human experiences.

• Details
• Contents