Menos

Menos (μένος) is the Homeric term for the surge of vital force, battle-fury, and focused energetic determination that comes upon the warrior — often given by a god, sometimes rising from within — and that carries him through the deed the ordinary condition of the body could not sustain. It is one of the faculties of the Homeric plural self, alongside thumos, phrenes, noos, kradiē, and psyche, each with its own idiom and none yet unified under a modern concept of will or mind.

Menos differs from thumos in that it is more purely kinetic-energetic — the force that makes the limbs move, the eyes flash, the breath quicken — whereas thumos carries a stronger admixture of feeling, desire, and deliberation. When Athena breathes menos into Diomedes in Iliad 5, she is not changing his mind; she is pouring into him the vital intensity by which he becomes capable, briefly, of fighting gods. The philological tradition — Onians‘s [[origins-of-european-thought|Origins of European Thought]], Sullivan‘s work on Homeric psychological terminology — has reconstructed the semantic field with care. See homeric-plural-self.

Menos

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