From Homeric plurality to Platonic unity

The Lineage’s central philological fact is that the Greek word for soul — psyche — does not yet mean soul in Homer. It means breath and the shade of the dead. The inner life of the living Homeric person is distributed across a plurality: thumos, noos, phrenes, ἦτορ, κραδίη, μένος, splanchna. Each term has its own province. None is the whole.

Plato inherits this plurality and unifies it. The tripartite soul of the Republic — reason, spirit, appetite — “deliberately echoes Homeric ideas,” in Snell‘s phrase, and the distinction between nous and thumos that Plato keeps alive is Homer’s (Snell 1953, ch. 1 n. 20). But in Plato psyche is now the comprehensive term: “the immortal and divine part of man, the self as a center or microcosm of his whole being, the seat of the rational intelligence and thus of moral choice” (Claus 1981, Introduction).

The hinge between the two is Homer’s own handling of the shades. Once enhanced by blood, the psychai of the Nekyia “can understand and communicate. They can remember and anticipate. They have received powers usually connected with psychic entities such as noos, phren, and thumos. This enhancement of psyche allowed it to be represented in ways that would probably influence a similar portrayal later in the living” (Sullivan 1995, p. 120). The casual shift in Homeric diction from naming the shade to naming the person — psyche of Anticleia, then Anticleia — already foreshadows the later absorption of personality into the single word.

Sources

• bruno-snell: Homer has no single term for mind or soul; Plato inherits and unifies.
• shirley-sullivan: the Nekyia’s shades, enhanced by blood, acquire the powers of noos and phren.
• david-b-claus: psyche is idiosyncratic in Homer; later development is sui generis, not analogy.
• caroline-caswell: the plurality of thumos itself resists the wish for a logical system.