The linguistic treatment of metaphor in Quintilian

Quintilian’s treatment of metaphor has always been regarded as belonging to the fields of rhetoric and stylistics. This paper argues that, in fact, Quintilian does not discuss metaphor simply as a decorative figure. Rather, he analyses metaphor within the linguistic and philosophical domains. Aristotelian semiotic and cognitive approaches are significant in Quintilian’s study, though he also treats metaphor along semantic and pragmatic lines. The word contextus first employed in a linguistic sense by Quintilian is examined as particularly important for the pragmatic aspect of metaphor. This has not been thus far explored by scholars.