The Seba library treats Menos in 9 passages, across 4 authors (including Padel, Ruth, Gregory Nagy, Jan N. Bremmer).
Menos fills phrenes, soul, and thumos. The menos of thumos "boils," like choli. Menos is often coupled in these contexts with thumos, but their relationship is mobile and inconsistent.
Padel establishes menos as a dynamic, physically conceived force occupying and inflaming the psychic innards, resisting reduction to a single stable meaning.
, In and Out of the Mind Greek Images of the Tragic Self, 1994thesis
When Homeric warriors "breathe menos," for example (as they often do), do they breathe it in or out? Sometimes several warriors together "breathe menea" (plural of menos).
Padel argues that the Homeric ambiguity of menos — simultaneously internal and external, inhaled or exhaled — is not a deficiency but constitutive of an entire Greek way of seeing the self in relation to feeling and world.
, In and Out of the Mind Greek Images of the Tragic Self, 1994thesis
Rather than speak of menos as a liquid that "once" meant blood, or that by the time Homer uses it is only an abstract force, I would follow its diversity.
Padel advocates a methodological pluralism that refuses to fix menos as either archaic blood-substance or later abstraction, tracing instead its productive ambiguity across Homeric and tragic usage.
, In and Out of the Mind Greek Images of the Tragic Self, 1994thesis
"Once, phrenes meant lungs, menos blood, psuche breath or semen. Then they developed, i. e., came to mean things more like what we recognize: abstract things, like mind, vigor, soul."
Padel critiques the developmental narrative that evacuates Greek psychic vocabulary of its somatic density, arguing that menos retains physical reference alongside emotional meaning in tragedy.
, In and Out of the Mind Greek Images of the Tragic Self, 1994supporting
Like cholos and menos, thumos is central to anger. When it is the subject of an active verb, it is often translated "anger." But people are also angry in or with their thumos.
Padel positions menos alongside cholos and thumos in a dense cluster of anger-related psychic substances, each grammatically and semantically overlapping with the others.
, In and Out of the Mind Greek Images of the Tragic Self, 1994supporting
The expression "yielding to the thûmos" at XXIV 42-43 (thumôi /eixas) is a reflexive equivalent of the active expression "[the menos and] the thûmos impel," as at XXII 346 (menos kai thumos aneiê).
Nagy traces the formulaic pairing of menos and thumos as the heroic impulse-complex that drives Achilles, analyzing how the reflexive construction mirrors the active one to reveal the hero's self-consuming energy.
, The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry, 1979supporting
Kratai-menês 'whose menos [might] has kratos'.
Nagy demonstrates that menos enters into heroic name-compounds encoding the systemic relationship between force (menos) and sovereign power (kratos) in archaic Greek poetic tradition.
, The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry, 1979supporting
The soul of the dead was not dual or multiple and lacked the psychological traits associated with thymos, noos, and menos.
Bremmer establishes menos as one of the defining psychological attributes of the living soul, whose absence from the dead marks the categorical distinction between the animate and post-mortem psychic constitution.
, The Early Greek Concept of the Soul, 1983supporting
the communication of power from god to man. In the Iliad, the typical case is the communication o[f menos]
Dodds, in his framework of 'psychic intervention,' identifies the divine infusion of menos into warriors as the paradigmatic case of supernatural power entering the human soul in Homer.
, The Greeks and the Irrational, 1951aside