91Cooks, Warriors and Metaphors in Comic Fragments

This paper examines the interplay between the metaphorical domains of cooking and warfare, a pattern prominent in New Comedy, from the perspectives of “mindreading”, “conceptual metaphor theory” and “conceptual blending theory”. The interaction between food and war is discussed in Aristophanic comedy, where military and political strategies are often presented in terms of cooking, and in later comedies such as Dionysius of Sinope, Sosipater and Posidippus, where this pattern is reversed and cooking is presented in terms of warfare. Insights from socio-cognitive and bio-cognitive approaches can offer a productive way of illuminating comic fragments when certain verses are taken out of their (comic?) context.