Homeric Pluralism

The early Greeks did not have a word for the unified self. They had several words for several seats of psychic activity, and the seats did not coordinate the way a modern ego coordinates its faculties. This is the central finding of the philological tradition that runs from erwin-rohde through bruno-snell, richard-onians, caroline-caswell, and shirley-sullivan, and it is one of the load-bearing facts behind the depth tradition’s recovery of psychic plurality.

Sullivan’s catalogue is the most exhaustive late-twentieth-century statement of the position. The Homeric person is a topology: noos perceives and intends; phrenes (most often plural, phrenes) deliberates and holds counsel; thumos surges with affective-evaluative life and decides; kradie-etor-ker register feeling at the heart; psyche is breath and, after death, shade. None of these is the soul. Each is a partial agency, and each is also a partial patient — phrenes can be “removed” by Zeus, noos “stolen” by Aphrodite, thumos “deprived” by an outside agent. The Homeric person is acted upon, in his interior, by forces both inside and outside himself, in a grammar that rutger-j-allan formalizes as the middle-voice.

The Jungian inheritance is direct. carl-jung‘s recognition that the psyche is a society of complexes, each with its own affective charge and its own fragmentary will, names in modern terms what the Homeric vocabulary already articulates. james-hillman‘s polytheistic-psychology reads Homeric pluralism not as a primitive stage to be transcended but as a permanent truth of psychic life that the unified-ego tradition has obscured. The philological recovery and the depth-psychological recovery are two arcs of the same recognition.

Sources

• shirley-sullivan: catalogues the multiple psychic entities across Homer, Hesiod, lyric, and Presocratics
• bruno-snell: argues that the Homeric self is constituted by its faculties before any unifying ego
• richard-onians: traces the somatic locations and substances of the Homeric psychic entities
• caroline-caswell: provides the focused study of thumos in early epic
• carl-jung: develops complex theory as the modern recognition of psychic plurality
• james-hillman: re-reads polytheism as the perennial psychology of the soul