Homer and the Soul
There is no ‘soul’ in Homer.
The Greek word usually translated ‘soul’ is ψυχή (psyche). There was never any question in the ancient world, ‘does the psyche exist?’ There really is no such question nowadays either; it amounts to the question ‘does life exist?’ not ‘does the soul exist?’ and there is not much controversy involved. To be sure, the definition of life is in no sense a settled thing, and the legal and ideological struggles over the moment of its inception and demise, in the human being at any rate, have probably made an impact on most of us. But there is no question that there is a difference between a corpse and a living being, and that this difference is ‘life’. Similarly, the presence or absence of the psyche meant the difference between life and death, in Homer and afterwards.
My own developing medical experiences have rather forced forward an internal conversation which had already ticked on from reading Homer, about how consciousness is seated in the body (or in bodies). I had never felt much attachment, let alone common cause or fellow feeling, with my liver, now a transplant; nor do I with my malfunctioning kidneys. But we are all long since familiar with the feelings, or the logic, of ‘affairs of the heart’; and we speak what we feel ‘in our gut’, or we think (some of us) ‘with our dick’. It is not unusual to hear all kinds of behaviour, including in men, described as ‘hysterical’. Just how are these various organs (which means ‘instruments in a system’), these hearts, guts, phalluses and wombs, conscious, or related to consciousness, speech and action? We often assume that we think with our brains, but how does that work exactly? What am I supposed to do while my brain is thinking—twiddle my thumbs?
Between Homer and ‘the Greeks’ there is in fact an unbridgeable gulf—no history of Homer himself, and no account of how he came into their hands. In Plato, and I venture to guess, in everyone but Homer, although nowhere more explicitly than in Plato, there was a notion above and beyond mere life, of an integral and integrated consciousness in human experience, most often also referred to by the term for the life-bringing force, the ψυχή. In Plato the psyche is that whole of our being which seems not to be bodily, the vehicle that bears our personality and memory as distinctively as one’s body bears its thumbprint. It is the soul that responds to poetry and closing arguments. It begins to make sense to wonder whether it has parts. It is the soul that can be educated.
Indeed, one may well wonder which came first: an Athenian obsession with innovations in education, or the belief in the soul which makes it possible, by supplying a subject and a pupil. Yes, belief. It is this post-Homeric conceptual leap—or slide, or plummet—that has shifted the question ‘is there a soul?’ from the biological to the quasi-religious status it has today. It does not seem to have occurred to Plato as a problem, however, as it perhaps does to us, that the human soul was being required by him to do more than to keep us alive. Something is doing more than keep us alive, after all. Why not refer the ethical, political, mathematical and erotic also to the psychic? Your soul is your ‘true self,’ the thing that has exclusive access to your memories. Whenever modern people acknowledge the usefulness of ‘psychology’, they also, albeit implicitly, reify the psyche as a subject and an object.
Consider lines 3 and 4 of Iliad I:
μῆνιν ἄϝειδε θεά, Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆϝος
οὐλομένην, ἣ μυρί᾽ Ἀχαιοῖς ἄλγε᾽ ἔθηκε,
πολλὰς δ᾽ ἰφθίμους ψυχὰς Ἄϝϊδι προΐαψεν
ἡρώων, αὐτοὺς δὲ ἑλώρια τεῦχε κύνεσσιν
οἰωνοῖσί τε δαῖτα …
Anger sing thee, Goddess: Peleus’ son Achilles’ wrath,
A towering damned indignance, that set ten thousand griefs upon ‘men of woe,’ Achaeans;
So many and so mighty the souls, jettisoned to the invisible realm—
Ghosts of heroes—they themselves left as takings for jackals,
For ominous birds a dinner …
The subject of the sentence is the anger of Achilles, the opening word of the first line; the object is psychae: ‘hurling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls,/great fighters’ souls, but made their bodies carrion,/feasts for the dogs and birds … ’. This is from the Fagles version. Translations often use the word ‘bodies,’ but this is highly misleading, because in English ‘body’ carries with it oppositions to both ‘soul’ and ‘mind’. There is no such opposition in Homer. The word often so translated is not even a noun: it is αὐτούς, a pronoun that is sometimes personal and sometimes intensive. Here it is both. Consider well the implications of the following translation: ‘many and mighty were the souls [his anger] hurled into Hades, souls of heroes, but they themselves it made a spoil for jackals.’ The distinction is between heroes’ souls, and the heroes themselves. The latter stayed on the battlefield: their departed souls were not them.
Note that it is not Achilles ‘himself’ who hurls these heroes’ souls to Hades, but his indignant rage (μῆνις)—a strangely ‘disembodied’ force that seems to have to run its course in the Iliad before Achilles can begin to respond to different stimuli.
Clearly the psyche in Homer is not the Platonic soul. It is not even really the animating principle; this seems more in Homer to be the θυμός, the ‘hot breath’ that leaves a warrior’s lungs not to return upon his death. It dissipates. If he recovers, as does Hector in Book XV, after he has been struck by Ajax while Zeus is distracted in bed with Hera, his thumos is said to be ‘regathered,’ I think literally in the lungs—he can breathe again. This thumos is also the best candidate in Homer for the repository of consciousness; it is the place where emotions are felt. It can be objectified, however, outside the personality; Odysseus is famous for chiding his thumos, encouraging it to ‘bear up’. While the departure of the psyche is certainly also a marker of the moment of death, the psyche itself seems rather to be a kind of remnant, a shadowy, gibbering entity, bat-like, as befits its abode in the dank darkness of the invisible realm. Typically it bewails the loss of true life and youth; the human himself has been left behind. When Andromache first sees Hector being dragged behind Achilles’ car toward the ships, she is said to exhale (καπύειν) her psyche (XXII.467); the verb suggests that it is a thing of smoke. Elsewhere its departure appears to be associated with the blood leaving a mortal wound.
When Andromache recovers enough to sing her heart-rending paean to the orphan, her thumos is said to be regathered into her phrena (φρένα, XXII.475). Usually this latter term seems to refer to the lungs, but it is also sometimes used in the singular. The prapides (πραπίδες) seem also to refer to the lungs, or perhaps the ribs; they are always plural. Both these terms, phren (φρήν)/phrena and prapides, are often translated in non-material terms, as the ‘mind’ or the ‘heart’. They along with the ker, etor, and kardie (κῆρ, ἦτορ, καρδίη)—each of them, it would seem, literally and metaphorically the ‘heart’—are the loci for the drama of human consciousness.
What is intriguing in Homer is this thoroughgoing duality of reference. Consider the lines from early in Book I, when Agamemnon gets angry at Calchas the prophet: ‘furious, his dark heart filled to the brim,/blazing with anger now, his eyes like searing fire.’ (tr. Fagles, I.103-4). The ‘furious … anger’ (μένος) that fills his ‘heart’ (plural φρένα) is, at once and simultaneously, a fluid that fills his black lungs (perhaps so as to make them black).
In casting about for parallels to this curious Homeric way of thinking, the only one that has occurred to me over the years is in the American William James. He was an anatomist, and hence someone with a feeling for the fine structure of the body. I am not sure if medical education produces such people any more; physiology presumes to subsume anatomy—the distinction is between function and form—as though anatomy were an afterthought of its larger concerns. (Anthropology presumes to subsume linguistics in a similar, and equally false way.) In his Principles of Psychology James espouses a notion of correlation or correspondence. Like most moderns, he has a preoccupation with the brain, which was unusual in the ancient world; there it is the chest and lungs that are the seat of consciousness; they are also the bellows that exhale the shapes of air that we call ‘words’. Words are ‘winged’ according to Homer’s epithet, because they must fly across a material medium in order to impinge upon another human’s sense apparatus, before they can penetrate his consciousness. As James well understood, the transition from the physical to the cognitive in this process is not just difficult, but impossible to understand. His brain fetish led him to formulate his principle in the following way: for every mental state there is a brain state, and vice versa. Ostensibly this proposition seems as though it could be empirically demonstrable; but James articulates it as a rational principle.
The claim might seem innocuous unless one sees it in its positive light. Correlation does not imply causation. The claim is in fact very strong: that nothing more can be said about the relation of mind to brain, except that there is this thoroughgoing correspondence. The whole of recent psychiatry depends upon a fundamentally opposite premise: that brain states cause mental states. It is certainly the case that the experience of joy can be correlated with a certain configuration and chemistry of the brain. What James understood, correctly, is that it is impossible to model theoretically—not difficult but completely impossible in principle—the transition from chemistry to joy. Material can only affect material. It is possible to induce a certain chemistry in the brain, with drugs, and the lucky subject will more than likely feel joy. It is, all the same, an impossible fact. It is possible to induce the same brain chemistry by giving the subject good news. Good news also produces joy; how does this good news, translated at some point into packets of winged air, ever come into contact chemically with the nerve fibres of the brain?
One need only think about blushing to realise the fundamental quality of this conundrum, a mystery always under our noses that we avoid confronting or thinking through. How is a blush possible? What possible connection could there be between shame, and the flow of oxygenating blood in one’s facial capillaries? It is impossible that there be one. And yet blushing is a fact. It is a fact that reminds us of the principle of correlation without causation, in the relation between the physical and the mental.
Correlation seems to be the key to what is sometimes misleadingly called ‘Homeric psychology’. James is a psychologist, because for all the peculiarities of his notions, in particular the ‘stream of thought,’ he still believes in the integral consciousness. (To be sure, the ‘I’ emerges in James only as an integrative act within a discrete packet of the stream, not as some self-subsisting entity.) But Homer has the whole body for his canvas, when he tries to depict the human experience of consciousness. He is clearly fascinated by anatomy, in the way that this is disclosed by body armour, or by the penetration of a weapon. There is an erotic component to this fascination; when Achilles strips Hector naked, all Achilles’ comrades admire Hector’s beauty, and none fail to stab him with his spear. When Homer wishes to depict an inner awareness or life, it would seem that he focalizes the consciousness within certain organic seats, in particular the lungs and heart, the complex without which it would be impossible to produce a winged word. Hence what results can seem to us a thoroughgoing equivocation: the menos is at once ‘might’ or ‘rage,’ and a fluid; the phrena are the lungs, and the vessel of consciousness.
There is nothing primitive about all this. Indeed, what seems crude by contrast is the overwhelming presumption in favour of the integrated consciousness in almost all authors but Homer, and not just in the school of Greece. We should avoid hand-waving at ‘primitivism’ or ‘polytheism’ and pay attention in detail to the reality Homer takes care to present. The academy in so many disciplines now seems to live within its own lingos, and to forget to open the window.
When Achilles proposes to Agamemnon the burial of Patroclus, he speaks of preparing everything necessary for a corpse’s journey into the murky gloom. The word translated ‘corpse’ is nekros (νεκρός, XXIII.51). It is not clear whether it is a way of referring generally to a man who has died, or if it connotes (as in English) the material corpse. The main task required is the gathering of wood for a pyre. Homer nowhere explains why the dead are burned, but one is tempted to adduce Shakespeare: ‘I am fire and air; my other elements/I give to baser life …’ Is the burning in fire a purification of matter? Does the psyche depart in the smoke? Or has it already departed, leaving behind a nekros fit to be burned? Achilles does not elaborate how exactly the pyre prepares the dead for a journey into invisibility.
Later in the night, he is visited by Patroclus’ restless spirit. We learn from the ghost that he (his body?) must be buried before he (his soul?) can join the other ghostly souls across the river. We always learn the crucial rules from the revenant, whether it’s Hamlet’s ghost or the Vampire. Was this horror movie trope an old one when Homer used it? Achilles exclaims in realisation, in the aftermath of this encounter, that there ‘is after all a something (τίς ἐστι) in the halls of Hades, a soul and image (ψυχή καὶ εἴδωλον), although the phrenes are not at all within it’ (XXIII.103-4). He has had a sort of epiphany. Later, during the funeral procession, Homer shows Achilles holding on to the head of Patroclus; ‘for it was his blameless comrade that he was sending [or escorting] to Hades.’ At this point neither the corpse, nor the psyche, is the journeyer to Hades; this time it is his comrade (hetaron, ἕταρον). Achilles holds on to the lifeless head of his friend, while the rest of Patroclus is covered surreally in the Myrmidon’s shorn hair (XXIII.135). It is striking that he keeps clinging to his friend’s head: Patroclus’ psyche had been an unsatisfying, unhuggable something, for all that it spoke real words to Achilles in the night.
To be sure, the revelation of an afterlife, or more properly, a remnant of life, for Achilles in the shade of Patroclus, may be all for the sake of a knowing audience who already share this belief. Achilles’ realisation in the scene then becomes a somewhat patronising or motherly witnessing of a young Achilles coming into his audience’s awareness. There is also Homer’s famous scruples about narrative causality—a god cannot just appear, he or she must travel from there to here in order to appear. If he needs Patroclus to send a message to Achilles, there must be some account of how this is possible, and Achilles’ encounter with the ghost supplies it. But I think that what works best here, the reason why the poet invests Achilles with this moment of epiphany, is precisely that she thereby allows herself to experience the mystery and even the doubtfulness of this possibility, which she elsewhere seems to take for granted: that there is after all something there after death, in an invisible realm; even if it is only a wasted vainglorious spirit, a ghostly image.
There is a first person pronoun in Homer’s language, an ego. To what does it refer? When you say ‘I’ to what do you refer? Arthur Koestler called this first person pronoun the ‘grammatical fiction’. Every writer, when she sits down again to her own work, knows this fiction.
Achilles opens his mind to the appearances that present themselves. Being like Achilles perhaps does not mean emulating the soul of an hero, as is generally advertised. These heroes’ souls end up tossed into Hades in the afterthought of his wrath. Perhaps one should be watchful and awake to all the possibilities, like Achilles briefly, upon his encounter with the soul of his dead beloved. He does not confuse this lamentable intangible psyche with Patroclus himself, whose lifeless head Achilles can hold amidst shorn hair and grief, unappeasable through multiple rounds of public ritual.