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Psychological and Ethical Ideas: What Early Greeks Say
Psychological and Ethical Ideas: What Early Greeks Say
Sullivan’s 1995 volume (Leiden: E. J. Brill, Mnemosyne Supplementum 144) is the most comprehensive lexical study of pre-Platonic psychological vocabulary in the philological literature. Across six chapters it maps noos, phrenes, thumos, kradie-etor-ker, and psyche through Homer, the Homeric Hymns, Hesiod, the lyric and elegiac poets, and the Presocratic fragments — from the seventh century into the end of the fifth. The book’s fourth and fifth chapters extend the method to the related ethical vocabulary (aretē, dikē) and into the transitional territory where Plato begins his consolidation.
The governing chapter for seba is Chapter 2, “Psychological Activity,” which establishes that early Greek psychological life is distributed across several named psychic entities each of which “is distinct, similar to the others but possessing particular traits. These entities exist to be relied upon and to be used but they are not in any way simply submissive. On the contrary, they have their own independent activity and sometimes need to be checked or controlled” (Sullivan 1995, ch. 2). Chapter 3, “Soul,” tracks the dramatic transformation of psychē from Homer’s breath-and-shade into the unified soul of plato and the Presocratics — a change that is lexical first, metaphysical after.
The method is quantitative throughout. Sullivan provides occurrence counts for every term in every author and cross-tabulates ranges of function. The book is the granular evidentiary layer below snell-discovery-of-the-mind (Snell) and origins-of-european-thought (Onians), and it is seba‘s primary philological apparatus for homeric-pluralism, plural-psyche, and agent-function-ambiguity.