Richard Broxton Onians

Onians was the Hulme Professor of Latin at the University of Liverpool and, later, Mildred Carlile Professor of Latin at Bedford College, London. He is remembered for a single monumental book: The Origins of European Thought about the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time, and Fate (Cambridge, 1951), a work of nearly six hundred pages that remained under revision for decades before publication. He wrote almost nothing else of comparable stature.

In the Seba lineage Onians stands with bruno-snell, erwin-rohde, e-r-dodds, and ruth-padel as one of the philologists who recovered, against nineteenth-century intellectualism, the somatic and distributed character of the archaic Greek psyche. Where Snell works from faculty-words outward, Onians works from organs outward. Where Rohde reconstructs the cult of souls, Onians reconstructs the life-substance carried in marrow, breath, and seed. His method is philological in the strict sense — etymology, formulaic analysis, comparative evidence from Roman, Celtic, Germanic, and Hebrew sources — but the payload is psychological: the demonstration that the ancients located consciousness, feeling, and fate in particular places in the body.

He is cited directly by james-hillman in Mythic Figures (2007) on the myth of Er and the spindle of Ananke, and is load-bearing — though often unattributed — wherever depth psychology speaks of thumos, the feeling function, or the body as imaginal terrain. He does not write as a Jungian; he supplies the evidence the Jungians and post-Jungians use.

Key concepts

Major works

origins-of-european-thought