The Iliad is complicated by the presence of 55 gods who enter and leave the action unpredictably. But the gods serve many purposes. Warriors occasionally act wildly and defy the roles and rules which govern them. These aberrations have to be explained and Homer resorts to external explanations: the gods intervene directly into human bodies. When we say that a friend has a job but his ‘heart’ is not in it, and he lacks the ‘brains’ to succeed and the ‘guts’ to resign, we are following Homer’s practice of explaining human action by reference to bodily organs.
Homer’s belief that human action is initiated through the body by the gods was to suffer a serious setback when, about 200 years later, 54 of his 55 gods were retrenched. The ancient Greeks then needed a different way of explaining human action, particularly those actions that violated the heroic code. If a warrior expresses fear in the face of the enemy, contrary to the dictates of his role and training, Homer assumes that he lacks menos which can be corrected by the intervention of a god. But if the gods are subtracted from Homer’s psychology, he is left with roles, rules and rewards as explanations of internal experiences, and these concepts cannot carry the burden placed upon them.
Rules, roles and rewards are useful explanatory concepts but they cannot help us understand feelings and actions that stand in opposition to them. When the gods were removed from Mt. Olympus Homeric psychology had to change radically. The obvious solution to the problem was to reverse causes: human action is not externally caused, it is internally caused. This has led, in our time, to the popular view that human behaviour is caused by personality traits which reside in us. Whereas Homer might have said that Achilles was bothered by the (external) angers, many people today believe that individuals are angry because of their angry personalities. A moment’s reflection reveals the circular reasoning involved in attributing angry behaviour to an angry personality. Some people are angry because of an angry personality; they have an angry personality because they are angry. We might say that Homer’s gods have been removed from the mountain and have taken up residence inside human beings as personality traits.
Reading the Iliad it is obvious that Homer’s heroes are subject to violent changes in mood which would nowadays be called mental instability. The fiercest warriors weep openly before their colleagues, sometimes in rage, other times in sadness. They are quick to acknowledge their fears, worries and wishes. They live and fight intensely, the very opposite of modern movie heroes who stare unblinkingly at the danger that confronts them and have the emotional life of a machine. Living was an intense, emotional affair and those who failed to express appropriate emotion were regarded as incomplete human beings. It was to be several centuries before Plato would argue that Homer’s characters were child-like because emotions overpowered their rational faculties. But Homer does not have a language for rationality. His characters argue and debate but they do not think in terms of an overarching, standard of rationality. Their actions are judged pragmatically rather than rationally and their debates are conducted against the background of practical necessity. The forceful expression of emotions is an important aspect of this background because, in a world dominated by power, it is often necessary to intimidate enemies and colleagues alike.
Of course, this begs the question: where do emotions come from? As Homer does not use a language of psychological causes, his machinery of gods vividly portrays the surging emotions of his heroes. While it is true that he is not innocent of ascribing behaviour to bodily organs, he nonetheless avoids a language of mental events. He interprets the ‘irrational’ elements in human nature as an interference with human life by human-like gods who put something into warriors and thereby influence their conduct and thinking.
Homer’s men, women and gods ‘know’ things and knowledge reveals character which is not an internal possession but the total of what they have been and probably will be. If knowledge is character, what is not knowledge is not part of character but comes to heroes from outside. So when they act in a manner contrary to the character which they know, their actions are not their own but have been imposed upon them. What we should call irrational impulses are, therefore, not theirs but emanate from alien sources. Above all, Homer’s characters know that they cannot escape their fate. After listening to Lycaon beg for his life, Achilles tells him that he must die, like his friend Patroclus who was a better man by far than Lycaon. Achilles knows that he too must die. A day is coming when somebody is going to kill him in battle with a spear or an arrow.
Homer’s psychology is a form of behaviourism since there is no psyche to study. His psyche is composed of material (like breath) that resides in the body while people are alive, and at death flies down to Hades through a bodily orifice. From there it may be summoned to address the living. Psyche has no mental function in the living person; it is simply that whose existence ensures that the person is alive: it is the breath of life.
Today ‘I’ is used to designate that which takes decisions. But in Homer there is much less emphasis on ‘I’. The closest word to ‘I’ is thymos which is used as a source of power. Homeric characters act as their thymos directs them. The thymos of warriors tells them to eat, slay the enemy, or take an appropriate course of action. Lacking the linguistic framework to distinguish between a psychological function and a bodily organ meant that thymos was felt as a hot sensation in the chest, a surge from within. Thymos is also associated with consciousness: it feels emotions and is conscious of that feeling. It is the thymos in which internal debates occur: it is the dialogue within.
As he prepares to face Achilles in mortal combat Hector groans at his plight and takes counsel with his thymos. In short, he debates with himself. He tells himself that if he retires behind the wall, Polydamas will be the first to remind him that when Achilles returned to the battle, he, Hector, did not take his advice and order a withdrawal into the city. Having sacrificed the army to his own perversity, Hector tells himself that he cannot face his countrymen and the Trojan ladies in their trailing gowns. He contemplates putting down his shield and helmet, propping his spear against the wall, and on his own authority making overtures to Achilles. But he berates himself for considering this course of action because he has every reason to fear that when he approaches Achilles he will be killed like a woman, naked and unarmed. So he firmly rejects flight or compromise and decides to waste no time and come to grips with his situation. Then he will know to whom the Olympian gods intend to hand the victory. Here, in this poignant inward debate, we have the main heroic themes: courage, doubt, shame, virility, power, glory and fate.
Judged by today’s standards, Homer’s language is very different; some would say primitive. Yet there is a beautiful simplicity in employing an action language stripped of dubious abstractions and the circular reasoning involving abstract nouns which claims that people act aggressively because they have aggressive personalities. Homer describes the world in human terms; he does not concern himself with a mysterious inner world of mental events or personality traits. This was soon to change, however.
In his dramas, Aeschylus suggests that when people act some psychological process is involved. Philologist Bruno Snell, in The Discovery of the Mind in Greek Philosophy and Literature, notes that Aeschylus emphasises human choice, by which he means a deliberate act of decision. Homer does not speak of such a dilemma; his warriors merely know that it is their fate either to die as young men in a blaze of glory, or to live long and mediocre lives. Aeschylus is less interested than Homer in what his characters do because he believes that the essence of human action is to be discovered in the act of decision. Action involves a commitment to the future: it is more than a mere reaction to events. So when people are about to act, they weigh alternatives and assume the responsibility for their decisions, and this is what gives the dramatic tension to Aeschylus’ plays.
Aeschylus composes tales of what happens to people when they make crucial choices. When Homer makes the meaning of human events depend upon the actions of gods, these deeds are unalterable facts in the face of which human choices are impotent. In the world of Aeschylus, the power of gods has been replaced by personal power. But these powers are also a burden which many people find onerous. In Aeschylus’ plays they wear people down and isolate them from the support of gods. This inexorable path to isolation continues in the plays of Sophocles