Homeric Dictionary

Name: Homeric Dictionary
Author: Georg Autenrieth

Homeric Dictionary is a work by Georg Autenrieth (1891).

Core claims

Autenrieth’s dictionary is not a neutral reference tool but an inadvertent map of the Homeric psyche’s internal architecture—every entry on θυμός, νόος, or ψυχή encodes a pre-Platonic psychology that depth psychology spent the twentieth century trying to reconstruct without knowing its lexicon.
By isolating the semantic fields of Homeric vocabulary from later Attic usage, the dictionary preserves a moment before the soul was unified into a single metaphysical substance—making it an indispensable counter-text to every modern psychology that assumes a monolithic self.
The dictionary’s philological precision inadvertently demonstrates that the Greek Middle Voice and its associated verb forms (μυθέομαι, βούλομαι, σέβομαι) are not grammatical curiosities but records of psychological operations that have no equivalent in English—operations that Jung’s Active Imagination and Hillman’s imaginal psychology labored to reinvent from scratch.

How does Autenrieth’s distinction between Homeric psyche (life-breath departing at death) and thumos (seat of deliberation and desire) challenge Hillman’s use of “soul” as a unitary term in Re-Visioning Psychology?
In what ways does Peterson’s analysis of the Middle Voice verb dielexato in The Iron Thūmos depend on the kind of lexical containment Autenrieth’s dictionary performs, and how does this compare to Jung’s formulation of Active Imagination in the Red Book?
Kerényi argues in The Gods of the Greeks that mythology must be “translated back into its medium” to be understood—does Autenrieth’s lexicon accomplish this at the level of individual words, and what are the limits of philological recovery without mythological narration?