Erwin Rohde

Erwin Rohde was a German classical philologist whose Psyche: Seelencult und Unsterblichkeitsglaube der Griechen (1894) — Psyche: The Cult of Souls and Belief in Immortality Among the Greeks — remains the foundational scholarly treatment of the Greek experience of soul from Homer through the mystery religions. Rohde was a close friend of Nietzsche’s and shared with him the conviction that the Greek religion of the dead was the generative matrix from which later philosophical conceptions of soul emerged.

Rohde’s distinction between the Homeric psychē as breath-soul departing at death and the thymos as the living faculty of the breathing body anchors the philological work the depth tradition later takes up — in Snell, Onians, and ultimately in Jung’s reading of the classical substratum. See rohde-psyche-cult-of-souls for the work itself.

Relationships

• rohde-psyche-cult-of-souls
• free-soul-and-body-soul
• homer
• psyche-breath-soul