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The Homeric Plural Self

The Homeric Plural Self

The Homeric self is not a unity. The opening thesis of Onians‘s Origins: “In Homer, one is struck by the fact that his heroes with all their magnificent vitality and activity feel themselves at every turn not free agents but passive instruments or victims of other powers” (Onians 1951, ch. I). Snell anchors the philological claim: The Iliad “did not yet have a body in the modern sense of the word; body, soma, is a later interpretation of what was originally comprehended as μέλη or γυῖα, i. e. as limbs” (Snell 1953, p. 8), and the “soul” is no more unified than the body — distributed among psyche, thumos, phrenes, and noos, each treated as a semi-autonomous organ with its own function.

When Odysseus says “another thumos held me back” (Od. 9.302), the phrase is not metaphor. Each impulse is itself a thumos; the person addresses the organ and the organ answers. The organs are not parts of a prior whole, “for those parts presuppose a psychic whole of which Homer has no cognizance” (Snell 1953). The self is a federation. Menos is breathed in by a god (Il. 17.451); ate descends from Zeus to cloud the phrenes; psychē flutters from the limbs at death; moira is spun from outside. The double-motivation this produces — divine agency and mortal agency naming the same act — is ordinary grammar, not theological ornament (Dodds 1951).

The consensus refines Snell. Bremmer names Greek soul-belief “multiple” rather than dualistic: a free soul (psychē) plus body-souls thumos, noos, menos (Bremmer 1983). Caswell shows thumos as breath-vapor and wind, chest-organ and autonomous agent, never reducible to “emotion” or “will” (Caswell 1990). Padel reads the innards as kosmos: the splanchna are divinatory organs “made of the same fabric as the physical universe” (Padel 1994). Williams corrects the progressivist note: the Homeric language “does not fail to refer to the person; it refers to the person through a set of faculties that are not our set” (Williams 1993).

This is the philological seat of what Jung will later name the complex psyche: the natural plurality of partial personalities out of which the modern ego is constructed and to which it returns under stress, dream, and possession. When psychē unifies after Homer and absorbs the chest-faculties, the plural self is not dissolved — it is folded into the new word. The Jungian recovery of the complex as little personality, and Hillman‘s polytheistic psychology of native plurality, restore to consciousness a model that was always in the tradition’s ground. The ego is not master in its own house — Homer never imagined otherwise.

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