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The Iliad

The Iliad

The Iliad is the poem of thumos and of the body in battle. Its subject is the mēnis of Achilles and the war it precipitates, but its psychological subject is the faculties of the pre-unified self as they move, contend, and are acted upon by gods. The body in the Iliad is “the sum total of his limbs” — melea, guia — not yet soma in the later unified sense (Snell 1953, p. 8). The inner life is correspondingly distributed: thumos rages and deliberates, phrenes and phrenes are filled with menos and tharsos, kradiē beats with courage, psyche is risked and sometimes lost.

Key Homeric loci for the psychology of the Iliad, as attested in retrieved philology: Achilles refusing to return to fight says that all the wealth of Troy is not worth his psyche, which once “has passed the barrier of teeth” cannot be regained (Il. 9.401–9; Sullivan 1995, pp. 80–82). The formula κραδίη καί θυμός — heart and thumos — recurs at Il. 10.244, 12.247, 16.266, 21.547 (Snell 1953, n. 19). The formula at Il. 22.67–68, where thumos leaves the rethea (limbs), and at Il. 16.856 / 22.362, where psyche flees the rethea to Hades, gave the ancients and their modern commentators their hardest philological problem (Snell 1953, pp. 10–11).

The Iliad is also the poem of double-motivation. Poseidon tells Idomeneus that a man must keep swimming while he has strength; Zeus grants Hector the helmet but Euphorbus strikes the blow; the combination of god and hero is formidable and yet the mortal agent remains responsible (Adkins 1960, on Il. 13 and 16). This is the psychology the Jungian tradition will recover under the name daimon and complex. Beyond the lexicon of psychic organs and the grammar of joint agency, the poem also names the conditions — ate, moira-thread, the Erinyes — that structure the cosmos within which the hero acts. The Iliad is the Apollonian, martial half of the Homeric diptych; its counterpart, the odyssey, belongs to Hermes and the journey home (Kerényi 1944). Together they constitute the headwaters from which every subsequent depth-psychological account of the soul descends.

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