In the Greco-Roman worldview, the sea forms a permeable boundary between the realms of humans, the gods, and the dead. This article demonstrates that seabirds embody the connective role of the sea in Greco-Roman mythology. Seabirds nest on land, feed by diving into water, and fly in the air. Therefore, these birds are imagined connecting the world of mortals with that of the dead and the gods, and they illustrate the transitions humans live through in their interactions with the gods and their experience of death.

I find it fascinating that some of the arguments about the role birds play in Greek myths become visible in such analyses. For instance, one of the things we've observed in the data is that the words/concepts "female" and "metamorphosis" appearing in a myth fragment are strongly associated with some form of "diving into the sea" also appearing (the metamorphoses in question often being death-related, and diving into the sea, as the above paper argues, represents death to the ancient Greeks).

#writing #AcademicPublishing #AcademicWriting #AncientGreece #GreekMythology #birds #death #FormalConceptAnalysis #FCA #RoughSetTheory #RST