Proceedings of 3rd Asia-Pacific Business Research Conference
25 - 26 February 2013, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, ISBN: 978-1-922069-19-1
Branding of the Shield of Achilles: Rhetoric as Mediated
Context
Pragyan Rath
Marketing Communication is precisely different from any other form of
communication in its definitive agenda: the communicator should be able to
sell his/her idea to the target audience. Thus, such forms of communication
have to be strategised for success, or, in Max Weber‟s words, they have to
have a “means-end-rationality” (Bürger 1984). I take up for analogy three
different situations of consumption, where the object of consumption is
same or similar, but the contexts are different with different
motives/agendas. The three texts chosen have a common object of
reverence, a shield of great legacy and hence great social „aura‟. Let me
position the „shield‟ as an object of great value and subsequently worthy of
consumer ownership. The situations in the chosen texts display branding
processes as not different from the contemporary in their capacity to
eternalise the continuance of the success, legacy and glamour of their
brand. In the context of the saleability of a commodity, the branding
process involved in the manufacture of such commodity, and its brand
image, marketing communication as mediated contexts becomes the
vantage point for understanding communication as a strategised human
endeavour for profitable branding.
Field of Research: Marketing Communications
1. Introduction
Using the text of Homer, Virgil and Ovid, and their representation of the shield of Achilles,
the researcher attempts to pitch the attempt of marketing the shield as an exercise in
brand-building within the context of Integrated Marketing Communication. She contends
that the texts chosen are replete with basic marketing communication techniques that are
so predominant in contemporary times.
2. Literature Review
The pitching of the product for a target audience is more an effort in visual communication
(Berger 1972). In the contemporary world of commodification, famously known as postcapitalist (Jameson 1991) or postmodern (Lyotard 1984), meaning-making has become a
prolific activity in political production of visual symbols (Baudrillard 1981). Taking into
consideration the inherent impact of grand narratives and myth-building on consumers in a
capitalist market (Lyotard 1984), the researcher attempts a similar analysis of creation of
grand narrative or myth-making of product significance to sway an audience in its favour;
an attempt exemplified in texts as old as Homer, Virgil and Ovid, written in pre-capitalist
economies.
Dr. Pragyan Rath, Business Ehtics and Communication Group, Indian Institute of Management Calcutta
(IIMC), India. Email: pragyan@iimcal.ac.in, pragyanrath@gmail.com
1
Proceedings of 3rd Asia-Pacific Business Research Conference
25 - 26 February 2013, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, ISBN: 978-1-922069-19-1
3. The Methodology and Model
Within the school of Interpretive philosophy, the researcher uses the methodology of the
Frankfurt School Critic, Walter Benjamin. She contends that the creation of ‗aura‘ through
ritualistic means (Benjamin 2008) is no different from creation of brands through myths.
She first considers 3 texts as models of brand-building. All 3 texts are structured around
the same product having its independent identity in each text, but with different dependent
contexts.
4. The Findings/Discussions
A. “Ritualisation” of the Shield: Homeric Branding
Homer‘s description of the shield of Achilles in Book XVIII of the Iliad (8 century BC)
highlights the manufacturing process rather than the finished product. Let us look at the
whole situation as a possible economic premise:
1. Achilles is the future owner of the shield: the ‗reputed‘ consumer;
2. Thetis, his mother bids Hephaistos, the craftsman, to build the shield which should
protect her son from paradoxically his already professed death: Thetis is the
‗reputed‘ stakeholder in the entire process of manufacturing of the shield;
3. Hephaistos is the manufacturer of the shield; a manufacturer of great prominence,
since he has a stakeholder of Thetis‘ social position; he is the ‗unique‘
manufacturer of a ‗unique‘ product; he metaphorically is also the company that
manufactures the shield.
Now let us look at the product in more details. The shield is represented by Homer, the
narrator, or, we may say, the advertising agent, as
1. a product that accomplishes a reconciliation (mediation) between
i. what it is (a shield, an object of use), and
ii. what it represents (the shield of Achilles, who is doomed to die, and hence an
object with a particular lineage that distinguishes it from any other object of
similar kinds).
Thus, a shield is an object, which when sold in the market is like a replication of many
other such objects, and hence can be a product of mass reproduction: all the warriors
would need similar shields. On the other hand, the shield of Achilles is a distinguished
object with a special or ‗unique‘ value for society such that it cannot be mass reproduced.
Thus, an ‗aura‘ is created around the shield on account of its distinction as Achilles‘ shield.
The shield is also represented as
2. a consumer product, that also mediates
i. the world of which it is a part (the world of war and weapon) and for which it is
produced in bulks for all the warriors (assuming that ‗shields‘ were mass
produced for all warriors), and
ii. the world that is represented upon it (the aesthetic beautification of it as a
‗beautiful‘ product).
Thus, the shield becomes an object of aesthetics, and a priceless one at that which only a
few like Achilles can own.
2
Proceedings of 3rd Asia-Pacific Business Research Conference
25 - 26 February 2013, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, ISBN: 978-1-922069-19-1
Homer‘s narration itself recreates an older bardic tradition of mediated description. In preHomeric times of Greek antiquity, wandering minstrels or bards would travel from one
antique land to another and recount heroic tales and myths from these distant lands along
with descriptions of their landmarks, cultural artefacts and strange natural formations.
Occasionally they would pause in their narrative vividly to describe associated
architectural features, fetishes and other interesting objects. These images would arouse
an imaginative vision of the described events and their corresponding landscapes in the
minds of the listeners who usually gathered in taverns or other popular places to listen to
the bards. This bardic (and hence ritualistic) ethos is imaginatively engraved on the shield
described by Homer in the figure of the boy with the harp and the singing bard. These
singers thus became folk historians or historiographers, and their description became a
kind of travel literature. And most of these stories were often centred around a very
significant object, place or person; an exhaustive description of these subjects would be
an integral part of the narration.1 This ‗mediated‘ centre was often a metonymic
transcription conveying the spirit and life of the stories or rituals. Bardic narration bestows
an intangible-symbolic value (Munter 2012) to an otherwise common object. The
description of such objects as centres of narratives helps establish the researcher‘s model
for what she would like to call as ―ur-branding‖:
The earliest examples of [. . .] [such narratives] are [. . .] principally focused
on [. . .] utilitarian objects that happen to have ornamental or symbolic visual
representations attached to them [rituals]. Goblets, urns, vases, chests,
cloaks, various sorts of weapons and armor, and architectural ornaments like
friezes, reliefs, frescoes, and statues in situ provide the first objects of [. . .]
[such] description [. . .]. Occasionally one of these objects is singled out for
special attention and extended description, and these occasions are the
origin of [. . .] [cult objects]. (Mitchell 1992)
The manufacturing signature in the production of the brand object is evident in the selfreflexivity of Homer‘s narration. His description of the maidens and the youths dancing on
the green in a circle is compared to the potter‘s wheel upon which objects are being
moulded. And the bard in the shield who seems to listen and react to the images of the
shield is Homer himself (Dällenbach 1989). It just does not stop here. The manufacturer
and the advertiser are very much present in the aesthetics of the shield. We find in one of
the scenes the gods Mars and Pallas Minerva wearing what the text calls armour befitting
gods, thereby also referring to itself (the shield), since it was the god Hephaistos who
fashioned for Achilles an armour fit for a god. Similarly, in another scene we find the
double of Homer in the figure of the bard who sings to the people gathered joyously about
the green and plays the lyre. Such mise en abyme (James 1996) effects are a
characteristic of the mediated self-reflexivity inherent in the rituals. Thus, Homer‘s own
mediated description reflects upon the creators and the creation of rituals centred on ‗cult‘
objects. The scenes upon the shield record the creative activities of Hephaistos, its
creator. These scenes are themselves scenes of creation in that they constitute a
cosmogony. The advertising agent, Homer, who sings about Hephaistos and the shield
that he made for Achilles in turn, is the master creator as the creator of the creator of the
shield. The shield is thus a functional mise en abyme which inaugurates the practice of
―Beschreibungsliteratur‖ or ―a descriptive epic in which characters are reduced to objects‖
(Buch, and Lund discussed in Bruhn) or ―iconic projection‖ (Lund discussed in Bruhn).
With Homer‘s ‗iconic‘ description, the shield of Achilles therefore becomes a standard
3
Proceedings of 3rd Asia-Pacific Business Research Conference
25 - 26 February 2013, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, ISBN: 978-1-922069-19-1
generic component of all heroic narratives. The first conscious imitation of Homeric shield
tradition occurs in Virgil‘s Aeneid towards the end of the first century BC.
B. Politicisation of the Shield: Virgilian Branding
Herman in Teaching Management through Literature: A Bibliography (2004) writes about
the managerial issue of political change in her assessment of Kazuo Ishiguro‘s An Artist of
the Floating World:
This is a text about change and also about reputation management. It is
explicit throughout this novel that issues which were important in a previous
regime are now viewed in a different light. This is a matter of serious concern
to organisations that are trying to change their image or disassociate
themselves from earlier administrative styles or structures.
Virgil writes at a time when the Roman empire is building its fortress and hegemony
everywhere. The description of the shield of Aeneas is not the only ‗iconic projection‘ in
this text. When Aeneas gets shipwrecked off the coast of Africa, he and his companions
visit the temple of Juno in Carthage.2 They are moved to tears on seeing scenes from the
battle of Troy in which they had been vanquished participants. If it is the failure of the
Trojan empire in the past that is depicted upon the walls of the temple at Carthage, the
shield of Aeneas makes up for that defeat through its depiction of the building of Rome
and the defeat of the Egyptians at the battle of Actium by Augustus Caesar. Thus, Virgil
uses the ‗mediated context‘ model to implement a certain poetic or artistic justice in which
the pains of one depiction are offset by the joys of another. The Roman overcoming of
Greece amounted to a takeover rather than a wholesale destruction of Greek political
structures, religion, culture and civilization: thus Roman gods for example, were merely
Greek gods with Roman names. The same god who fabricates the shield of Achilles
fabricates one for Aeneas as Vulcan. Virgil‘s attitude towards the Roman triumph over
Egypt is one of gloating superiority. The war at Actium is as much a war between the
Romans and the Egyptians, and between Augustus and Antony, as between the gods of
the Romans and the gods of the Egyptians. In effect, the Egyptian gods are reduced to
animal caricatures like the barking Anubis. In defeating Antony and Cleopatra, Virgil
seems to suggest, Augustus Caesar had proved the superiority of the Italians and their
gods over the whole of the East, its gods and its civilizations. Thus Virgil‘s imitation of
Homer‘s ‗iconic projection‘ is an act of homage as well as a triumphant assertion of the
final and destinal victory of Rome.
It is interesting to find out just how Roman this history is and just how carefully and
prejudicially Roman it is. In others words, the deliberate construction of the ‗iconic
projection‘ as politically motivated is here to stay. In one scene, Virgil begins with Vulcan‘s
depiction of Aeneas‘ son Ascanius, who would be recognised by any Roman as the
founder of Alba Longa, the city from which Rome was founded. He then makes Vulcan
encrypt the story of the founders of Rome, the illustrious twins Romulus and Remus, who
had a she-wolf as foster mother. Twelve generations after the rule of Ascanius, Alba
Longa was ruled by the brothers Numitor and Amulius. Wishing to take control of the city,
Amulius imprisoned Numitor and forced his daughter to be sworn to eternal celibacy so as
to forestall any threat to his power from her children. But Roman fate got the god Mars to
4
Proceedings of 3rd Asia-Pacific Business Research Conference
25 - 26 February 2013, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, ISBN: 978-1-922069-19-1
take advantage of the daughter, to whom consequently, the twins were born. A furious
Amulius ordered that the children be drowned in the river Tiber. But the babies not only
floated to safety in their basket, but also were mothered by a she-wolf. In Vulcan‘s
depiction, the she-wolf is shown licking into shape the future shapers and builders of
Rome. The twins grew up to avenge their uncle Numitor by destroying Amulius, and also
to build the city of Rome on the Palatine settlement. What Virgil‘s Vulcan‘s depiction fails
to show is that the fraternal strife that had tried to rob them of their lives also leads
Romulus and Remus to fraternal strife themselves, for Romulus assassinates Remus for
jumping over the walls and trespassing upon his side of the divided settlement.
Similarly, the last scene on the shield shows a victorious Augustus sitting among the
conquered peoples from the Numidians to the Gelonians. He is shown inspecting the gifts
sent to him by the conquered nations (Barchiesi 1997). He divides these nations into
legions and fixes them into majestic columns. But Virgil‘s Vulcan does not show that
Augustus could not establish tenable frontiers for the Rhine and Danube provinces. In
fact, he could not push beyond the Rhine, since Rome could not win over the Germanic
peoples (the Roman army under Publius Quinctilius Varus was nearly mopped away in the
Teutoberg Forest), leaving Augustus humiliated and shattered and no more interested in
expanding the Rhine and Danube frontiers. Virgil has no time to deal with the history of
violence, injustice and failure that was an integral part of Roman history.
Virgilian aesthetic description of the shield renders explicit the intimate way in which
representation is bound up with power. Compared to Homer, Virgil‘s shield displays
historical truth, at least as far as Virgil is concerned. Homer‘s shield, on the other hand, is
content modestly to present allegories rather than truth itself. In other words, Virgil‘s
narrative gets carried away by the implied narrative of the scenes depicted on the shield.
Paradoxically, it is Virgil‘s mediation that contains less narrative. Its implied reader is
ideally a Roman sympathiser, well informed about the events and the histories involved. It
is as if Virgil forgets that he is supposed to describe a shield when he is actually
describing his triumphalist version of Roman history.
C. “Rhetoricisation” of the Shield: Ovidian Branding
It is important to remember Berger‘s Ways of Seeing, where he talks about ‗publicity‘ and
the creation of ‗glamour‘ that also depends upon creation of social ‗envy‘. Berger says that
today the images in advertisements offer us an alternative way of life through the
language of word and image. And he also adds that envy (and this is social and not
merely personal) is for glamour; and publicity is the process of manufacturing glamour.
Keeping Berger in mind, let us concentrate on Ovid again. The scene depicted is the
debate between Ajax and Ulysses and the rightful owner of the shield of Achilles
(Metamorphoses written between 1 AD and 8 AD).
For Ajax, the shield is a military shield used in warfare. The depictions on the shield –
―[w]ith scenes that show the whole wide world [. . .]‖ (Ovid 1986)—also add to the military
and responsible weight of the shield. Ajax has no eye or intention for the artistic
representations carved on the shield. He himself expects that words are not required to
prove his actions, and that he need not prove his worth to get the shield, which he thinks,
should come to him anyway. He defines his own value as absolute and unquestionable;
5
Proceedings of 3rd Asia-Pacific Business Research Conference
25 - 26 February 2013, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, ISBN: 978-1-922069-19-1
his actions have ontological priority, and they are autonomous in themselves. He feels that
actions are irreducible and primeval, and so is the shield in that respect—―[. . .] Yet, I‘m
sure, no words, / My friends, need tell my exploits‖ (Ovid 1986). In this way, he isolates the
shield and himself from the world of relative, interchangeable and controvertible value
(that value which is determined by its relative position in relation to other such lucre in the
booty of which it is a shared component), thus placing himself above the concept of
exchange. In this way, he denies the shield speech, which Ulysses magnanimously
supplies.
Ulysses projects the ‗glamour‘ of the shield; the shield is an artistic representation; the
shield is a visual object; the shield is what you can see in it. Ulysses‘ rhetorically complex
speech valorises the essential ability of being able to describe the shield as more
significant than the ability merely to wield it in battle. Against the frontal attack by Ajax,
who claims the shield on the basis of his superior prowess in battle, Ulysses wields a
plethora of rhetorical devices and figures, which not only shield him from this attack but
also launches a devastating counter-attack. It is significant that Ovid makes Ajax speak
first. Ulysses is thus able to use the very text of Ajax‘s speech as an occasion for a fatally
critical and mediated re-description of Ajax‘s discourse. An analysis of the rhetorical
figures used by the two speakers depicts clearly the critical role that the art of rhetorical
mediation plays in both the conduct and the outcome of the Ajax-Ulysses debate. In other
words, amidst the abundant tropes with which Ulysses‘ speech is filled, it is mediation that
clinches the argument and wins the prize for him; this is in direct contrast to Ajax‘s own
plain speech and artistic shortcomings.
Within the premises of anticategoria, a classical rhetorical figure of speech3 in which
opponents indulge in mutual accusation or recrimination against each other, Ajax primarily
intends to realize martyria, a trope used to confirm an opponent‘s unworthiness by one‘s
own experience; in this case Ajax intends to confirm Ulysses‘ ineligibility for receiving
Achilles‘ shield by citing different exempla of Ulysses‘ misdeeds, a rhetorical figure that
exemplifies deeds to illustrate a moral truth. In contrast, Ulysses‘ own answering martyria
and exempla are polyvalently deliberate and plurisignificatorily effectual in that he not only
slanders Ajax but also conciliates the influential members of the audience whose votes
matter; he involves the voters in all his deeds as conspirators or collaborators, and
establishes ―that all the feats of other men that have been decisive in the fall of Troy are
‗really‘ his‖ (Ovid 447n). Thus, Ajax‘s exempla proceed on a merely monovalent
progressio, the rhetorical trope of advancing by steps of comparison—here the
comparison is between Ulysses‘ cunning and his bravery—while Ulysses‘ proceed selfconsciously from the very premises of Ajax‘s own arguments in its equivalent trope known
as argumentum ex concessis. He also employs peristrophe by which he converts his
opponent‘s arguments into his own.
Moreover, if Ajax only thinks of himself, Ulysses is more interested in the prize. He cleverly
uses chreia, the rhetorical figure for narrating anecdotes, to vividly describe the great feats
of Achilles by using pragmatographia, the rhetorical figure that allows for vivid description
of an action or event of the actual owner of the shield, and also the favourite of all the
masses and the leaders. Moreover, he subtly transposes his misdeeds onto Achilles and
Achilles‘ bravery onto him. After all, if Achilles can be sly or cowardly, so can Ulysses, and
Ajax‘s accusations then are levelled on the owner of the shield, which is blasphemous for
all the captains and the warriors. As a counter-attack on Ajax and his accusations of guile
and cowardice, Ulysses shows how Achilles, who was ill-fated to know that he would have
6
Proceedings of 3rd Asia-Pacific Business Research Conference
25 - 26 February 2013, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, ISBN: 978-1-922069-19-1
to die, was disguised by his Nereid mother in woman‘s clothes and the entire world was
tricked, and so was Ajax. But though this was a fact, Ulysses cleverly interpolated Ajax in it
though Ajax was hardly present then. Thus, the owner of the shield and also the one who
ordered the shield used guiles and wit to overcome difficult times. Just like Achilles,
Ulysses disguised himself as a girl and managed to smuggle arms to Achilles so as not to
excite the suspicion of the men. And when Achilles in a girl‘s dress held the shield and
spear, Ulysses revealed to him that Troy would fall only when Achilles undertook the
expedition to Troy. Thus, it was Ulysses who convinced the gallant lad to perform his feats
of gallantry. In this way, Achilles‘ brave deeds are in a way his own because it was he who
had brought Achilles to conquer Hector, and Achilles finally killed Hector. Moreover, to
counter-attack Ajax‘s accusations of being a coward and joining late, he uses Achilles to
defend his late entry into war. Ulysses claimed that he was earlier than Achilles. A loving
wife held him back, as a loving mother her son. Table 3 establishes the difference in
rhetoric of Ajax and Ulysses.
Table 3: Ajax’s Speech vs. Ulysses’ Branding
Strategy
Communicator
Communicator
Audience
Mediated Message Strategy
Ajax’s Speech
Shield as military weapon
Ulysses’ Branding
Shield as aesthetic
tradition
Direct accusation to confirm Begins from Ajax‘s
opponent‘s worthlessness
premises and turns
those arguments into
his favour by posing
national agenda in
them;
e.g.
Rhesus
incident or the Statue
of Minerva incident
Has
no
audience Uses emotions and
involvement except direct body language to buy
accusation against opponent audience
into
his
and direct self-display
favour; visual display of
body
wounds
as
against
Ajax‘s
breastplate; also uses
Ajax‘s accusation as
involving
audience
decisions as in the
case of Philoctetes and
Palamedes
Iconic projection of self- Iconic projection of
bravery through breast plate ―manipulation‖ in the
that stands for iconic bravery original owner of the
of Achilles, the iconic and shield
through
cooriginal owner of the shield.
relation of his own
accused manipulations
with those of Achilles:
disguise
7
Proceedings of 3rd Asia-Pacific Business Research Conference
25 - 26 February 2013, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, ISBN: 978-1-922069-19-1
Through the force of persuasion, Ulysses glamorises artifice as wit over brawn and as
courage, whether that be the descriptive artifice on the shield or the valour of manipulation
for ethical cause (manipulate for nation‘s victory), if not as ethical process (manipulation).
Thus, from the three texts, the researcher concludes:
a. aestheticisation of ‗objects‘ eternalises them as myths
b. politicisation of aesthetics camouflages the ‗constructed‘ nature of a ‗cult‘, and
c. ‗rhetoricisation‘ of ‗cults‘ converts the ‗mediated‘ nature of contexts into brands.
5. Summary and Conclusions
Thus, a work break down structure of the mediation of the communicator- and audienceagenda of the branding agent would establish the following typology for the role of
communication in the development of branding:
Fig. 1: Typology for Role of Communication in Branding
Construct
context for
object
Objectification
of brand
Aestheticise
context as
ritual: iconic
projection of
object
Politicise the
functionality of
the aesthetics of
the object: brand
development
8
Proceedings of 3rd Asia-Pacific Business Research Conference
25 - 26 February 2013, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, ISBN: 978-1-922069-19-1
End Notes
1
The Grail legends, for example, centre around the vision of a magical chalice. Another
example would be the tales of King Arthur in which the finding, appropriation and
relinquishment of a magical sword figures prominently.
2
The mythological accounts that follow have been constructed from information and data
gathered from Jobes; McLeish; the Encarta; the Britannica; Hornblower; Cary; and Willets.
.
3
The rhetorical figures of speech that the researcher has used have been garnered from
the following sources: ‗Silva Rhetoricae‘; American Heritage; ‗Figures of Thought‘;
‗Personification Humour‘; and ‗Dictionaries‘.
References
Baudrillard, Jean 1981, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, Telos P.
Barchiesi, Alessandro 1997, ‗Virgilian Narrative: Ekphrasis‘, The Cambridge Companion to
Virgil, edited by Charles Martindale, Cambridge, Cambridge UP, pp. 271-81.
Benjamin, Walter 2008, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Penguin
Books Limited.
Berger, John 1972, Ways of Seeing, London, Penguin.
Bruhn, Siglind, ‗A Concert of Paintings: “Musical Ekphrasis‖ in the Twentieth Century‘,
EUNOMIOS Home page, available from <http://www.eunomios.org/contrib/bruhn
1/bruhn 1.html>. [29 June 2004].
Bürger, Peter 1984, Theory of the Avant-Garde, Minneapolis, U of Minnesota P.
Cary, M., et al., ed. 1968, The Oxford Classical Dictionary, Oxford, Clarendon P.
Dällenbach, Lucien 1989. The Mirror in the Text, Cambridge, Polity.
‗Dictionaries‘, 2004 farlex, Inc, available from <http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Diallage>
[10 July 2004].
Encyclopedia Britannica, CD_ROM, 2002 Deluxe Edition, 3 discs.
‗Figures of Thought‘ 2002-2004 Thomas J. Kinney, available from
<http://www.etymonline.com/p10etym.htm> [10 July 2004].
Herman, Ruth 2004, Teaching Management through Literature: A Bibliography, British
Council.
Homer, The Iliad, translated by Samuel Butler, available from
<http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~joelja/iliad.html> [28 June 2004].
Hornblower, Simon, and Antony Spawforth ed. 1996, The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 3rd
ed., Clarendon, Oxford UP.
Jameson, Fredric 1991, Postmodernism, or,The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Verso.
James, Paula 1996, ‗Inheritors of the Shield: An Homeric Mise En Abyme‘, available from
<http://www2.open.ac.uk/ClassicalStudies/GreekPlays/conf96/ james.htm>. [28 June
2004].
Jobes, Gertrude 1962, Dictionary of Mythology Folklore and Symbols, New York,
Scarecrow P.
Lyotard, Jean Francois 1984, The Post-Modern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, U of
Minnesota P.
Mcleish, Kenneth 1996, Myth: Myths and Legends of the World Explored, Leicester, Blitz.
9
Proceedings of 3rd Asia-Pacific Business Research Conference
25 - 26 February 2013, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, ISBN: 978-1-922069-19-1
Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia Standard International, 1993-2001, available from
<http://www.microsoft.com/mswish>.
Mitchell, T 1992, ‗Ekphrasis and the Other‘, The South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 91, no. 3 pp.
695-719.
Munter, Mary 2012, Guide to Managerial Communication: Effective Business Writing and
Speaking, Boston, Prentice Hall.
Ovid 1986, Metamorphoses, translated by A. D. Melville, New York, Oxford UP.
‗Personification Humour‘, available from
<http://facstaff.uww.edu/shiblesw/humorbook/h7d%20prsf.html> [10 July 2004].
‗Silva Rhetoricae‘, Gideon O. Burton, available from <http://rhetoric.byu.edu/> [10 July
2004].
The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language 2000 by Houghton Mifflin
Company, available from <http://www.yourdictionary.com/ahd/e/e0272400.html> [10
July 2004].
Virgil 1956, The Aeneid, translated by W. F. Jackson Knight, Harmondsworth, Penguin.
Willets, R, Introduction. 1984, Lemprière‟s Classical Dictionary of Proper Names
Mentioned in Ancient, Authors Writ Large: With a Chronological Table, 3rd ed.,
London, Routledge.
10