Anonymous
09/23/25(Tue)15:33:51 No.24745136

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Anonymous 09/23/25(Tue)15:33:51 No.24745136

>There is in general no consciousness in the Iliad. And in general therefore, no words for consciousness or mental acts. The words in the Iliad that in a later age come to mean mental things have different meanings, all of them more concrete. The word psyche, which later means soul or conscious mind, is in most instances life-substances, such as blood or breath: a dying warrior bleeds out his psyche onto the ground or breathes it out in his last gasp. The thumos, which later comes to mean something like emotional soul, is simply motion or agitation. When a man stops moving, the thumos leaves his limbs. But it is also somehow like an organ itself, for when Glaucus prays to Apollo to alleviate his pain and to give him strength to help his friend Sarpedon, Apollo hears his prayer and "casts strength in his thumos". The thumos can tell a man to eat, drink, or fight. Diomedes says in one place that Achilles will fight "when the thumos in his chest tells him to and a god rouses him". A word of somewhat similar use is phren, which is always localized anatomically as the midriff, or sensations in the midriff, and is usually used in the plural. It is the phrenes of Hector that recognize that his brother is not near him; this means what we mean by "catching one's breath in surprise". It is only centuries later that it comes to mean mind or ‘heart' in its figurative sense. Perhaps most important is the word noos which, spelled as nous in later Greek, comes to mean conscious mind. It comes from the word noeein, to see. Its proper translation in the Iliad would be something like perception or recognition or field of vision. Zeus "holds Odysseus in his noos.” Another important word, which perhaps comes from the doubling of the word meros (part), is mermera, meaning in two parts. This was made into a verb by adding the ending -izo, the common suffix which can turn a noun into a verb, the resulting word being mermerizein, to be put into two parts about something. Modern translators, for the sake of a supposed literary quality in their work, often use modern terms and subjective categories. Mermerizein is thus wrongly translated as to ponder, to think, to be of divided mind, to be troubled about, to try to decide. But essentially it means to be in conflict about two actions, not two thoughts. It is always behavioristic. It is said several times of Zeus, as well as of others. The conflict is often said to go on in the thumosy, or sometimes in the phrenes, but never in the noos. The eye cannot doubt or be in conflict, as the soon-to-be-invented conscious mind will be able to. There is also no concept of will or word for it, the concept developing curiously late in Greek thought. Thus, Iliadic men have no will of their own and certainly no notion of free will.
WTF bros is this true? Did the greeks literally invent SOVL?