Latin novels contain a large number of verbal lexemes used to designate or introduce speech. Alongside the most common forms, which unambiguously refer to saying, novelists use certain verbs that they borrow from semantic fields that are often far removed from, or even entirely unrelated, to the domain of speaking: their use as uerba dicendi involves a shift in meaning and constitutes a metaphor that is still vivid and still perceptible to the Latin reader. The aim of this study is to explore this lexical-semantic field of saying in the novel corpus, in order to identify the metaphors that are used in this lexicon, and thus to gain a better understanding how the Latins conceptualized the activity of speaking. While the metaphorical matrices at work in this field are diverse, the majority of uses essentially reflect the writers' pragmatic view of language: speech is seen as an act of language, and its introduction through the metaphors used underlines its illocutionary force.