Thumos as Hero-Address

A specific Homeric form: the hero turns inward, names his own thumos with the second-person address, and speaks to it as to another. The diagnostic formula recurs five times in the Iliad — ἀλλὰ τίη μοι ταῦτα φίλος διελέξατο θυμός; “But why has my dear θυμός discussed these things in me?” (XI.407, XVII.97, XXI.562, XXII.122, 385) — and the exemplary scene is Odysseus alone on the Trojan field at Iliad XI.401–411 (Caswell 1990, p. 45):

Ὀίωθη δ’ Ὀδυσεὺς δουρικλυτός… ὀχθήσας δ’ ἄρα εἶπε πρὸς ὃν μεγαλήτορα θυμόν· “ὤ μοι ἐγώ, τί πάθω;…”

Odysseus reknowned for the spear was left alone… grieving, he spoke to his great-hearted θυμός: “O woe is me, what am I to endure?…” (trans. Caswell 1990, p. 45).

Caswell groups this form with two cognate verbs of inner debate — ὁρμαίνω and μερμηρίζω — and isolates διαλέγομαι as carrying the metaphor of inner dialogue proper: the hero is divided not into two reasons but into two psychic agents (Caswell 1990, pp. 45–47). The θυμός is φίλος — dear — to him; it is also other than him. The grammar of address requires both.

This is not internal monologue in any modern sense. It is the philological substrate of the depth tradition’s claim that the psyche is plural before it is one — see homeric-plural-self — and the lexical ancestor of the practice Jung will recover as active-imagination: deliberate speech with what is in oneself and not oneself. The Homeric hero already does what the Jungian patient is asked to do: name the inner figure, address it directly, listen to what it answers. The structural autonomy of what later tradition will call the complex is here a grammatical fact of the epic.

Relationships

• thumos — the inner faculty addressed
• phrenes — the location in which the dialogue occurs
• homeric-plural-self — the substrate the address presupposes
• active-imagination — the modern recovery of the practice
• complex-as-classical-daimon — the modern naming of the addressed agent
• double-motivation — adjacent grammar of partial agency
• homeric-psychology

Primary sources

• caswell-study-thumos-early (Caswell 1990, pp. 45–47)
• iliad (XI.401–411; XVII.97; XXI.562; XXII.122, 385)
• odyssey (Homer)