Williams is pressing against the modern reflex of picturing the Homeric self as merely primitive — a loose federation of organs waiting to be gathered into a proper subject. His point is more unsettling than that. The *thūmos* does not think on its own; it requires a person. But the person, equally, cannot think or feel without the *thūmos*. Neither term is foundational. The relation is constitutive in both directions simultaneously, which is precisely what the Greek middle voice was built to hold: the self as site of events that are genuinely its own without being authored from above by a sovereign will.

What we lost in the long move toward an interior that was unified, transparent, and legible to itself is not a quaint archaic structure but this very grammar of mutual necessity. The project of becoming a coherent subject — one centre, one will, one feeling at a time — required that the *thūmos* be subordinated or dissolved. What remained was a person who could deliberate cleanly, and who found, eventually, that clean deliberation produced a peculiar silence where feeling had been. Williams does not romanticize the Homeric arrangement. He simply refuses to let us call its disappearance progress.