Chapter 2

Literature and Moral Psychology:

From Homer to Sophocles

Introduction

Aristotle, we’ll discover, pursues the same problem as Sophocles, the

conflicted nature of reason and its relation to the irrational, though in
a purely conceptual register, and transposed fully into the language of
theoretical psychology. At no point before Aristotle do we find a the-
ory of psychic conflict in exclusively conceptual language, apart from
images or dialogue, in the absent third person voice of science.1 This
leap in methodology is what makes him such an essential case, histori-
cally. His attention to lived experience, especially the concreteness
of emotion and desires, as well as the many dues he pays to common
sense, make his work as practically relevant as it is interesting from
the standpoint of historical psychology. The story of how this became
possible is in part a revolution in how the Greeks thought about the
soul or psuchù.
What had been anything but personal and immortal, two centuries
before Aristotle’s time, was transformed into an immortal and fully
personal thing with which the individual identified completely.2 The
idea and therefore experience of one’s ‘soul’ was remarkably new, and

1
See W. K. C. Guthrie “Plato’s Views on the Nature of the Soul” in Plato II, ed. by
Vlastos, pp. 241 f. “To ask: ‘what then is the nature of the ‘motion’ of God, and of
souls absorbed into his being?’ would be, for a man like Plato, to exceed the bounds
of logos. Here mysticism steps in. […] Nevertheless this is just the sort of question
that the irrepressible Aristotle did ask. […] [F]or Plato, however far dialectic might
go, the veil between it and mythos must always remain, since it existed in the nature
of things. For Aristotle, to take refuge in mythos at all was nothing but a confession
of weakness.”
2
Werner Jaeger Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers, p. 73. On Orphism and
the soul: “We may think of this Greek conception of the soul as beginning to de-
velop in the sixth century. Its roots may well reach deep into the pre-historic strata
of human existence; but during the sixth century the belief that the soul was divine
48 Part I: Ancient Greece

ultimately a hybrid of Greek thinking and the ingress of foreign reli-

gious ideas from the east, across the trade routes of the Black Sea. Be-
fore Socrates (and the sophists and medical writers from which Plato
drew in illustrating him, who also distinguished importantly between
soul and body), we hadn’t had souls the way we do now. 3 And without
that Orphic watchword: “I, too, am of godly race,” the Socratic care of
the soul, with the infinite value it placed on the individual personality,
would have been inconceivable, as would the science of the soul and
human action Aristotle proposes a century later.4
For Aristotle, desire combined with thought is the cause of human
action, and all human action ought to be guided by an idea of the
good life, or what it is to flourish (eudaimonia). In order to obtain this
blessed form of happiness, then, we need a science of the soul to lay
out the structures of reason and desire, so that they can be ordered in
the way that best disposes us towards this flourishing. This is an echo
of the problem of logos as Sophocles imagined it in the figure of Oedi-
pus, but the terms of the problem have taken on new meanings, been
transcribed into the substance and language of psychology as opposed
to religious poetry. Just as Aristotle’s thinking, we’ll find, in its early
phases retains a trace of this divine transcendence in the irrational
element of the human soul, Euripides gives us two shining examples
of this psychologizing of the irrational within the tragedy of the pre-
ceding century, both in the characters of Medea and the Phaedra of
and had a metaphysical destination took on the intellectual form that enabled it to
conquer the world, and this will always remain a decisive historical event.”
3
Charles Burnet “The Socratic Doctrine of the Soul” in Essays and Addresses,
p. 160. Burnet, in the landmark essay of 1916, argues that Socrates’ genius lay in
this re-invention of psuchù as the site of a moral self care, or therapeia. “Socrates, so
far as we could see, was the first to say that the normal consciousness was the true
self, and that it deserved all the care bestowed on the body’s mysterious tenant by
the religious.” And so the philosopher’s care of the self, in Socrates, was originally
modelled on the Orphic-Pythagorean concern for katharsis of a divine, immortal
self.
Cf. David Claus Toward the Soul, pp. 6, 108, 181-183, and, more generally, Part iii,
ch. 4, pp. 141-155 & ch. 5. Claus gives a more nuanced and painstakingly etymological
argument for a general shift in popular 5th c. usages of the word among sophists such
as Antiphon (v.) and Gorgias (Encomium of Helen); the pre-Socratic philosopher,
Democritus (fr. B191, et al.); and the pairing of psuchù-sķma in the medical texts,
Airs, Waters, Places and Regimen I, which theorize a technù of the soul. Cf. pp. 182 f.
Plato developed this psycho-physical pairing (The psuchù was “the psychosomatic
physis of a man, amenable to therapy and doctrines like those furnished by scientific
medicine for the body.”) into the opposition with which we are now familiar.
4
See Werner Jaeger Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers, p. 89. Orpheus, fr.
B19.
 Literature and Moral Psychology: From Homer to Sophocles 49

the Hippolytus: “I know what crimes I am about to commit, but my

anger is stronger than my reason, anger which causes the greatest af-
flictions among men” (1078), 5 says Medea, or, in Phaedra’s companion
monologue, “We know and recognize what is right, but we do not act
on it, for we are in the grip of passion” (380).
This overlap between the problem of the irrational as both the poets
and the philosophers conceived it begs the question of their common,
intellectual inheritance, especially concerning the soul in which phi-
losophy located the problem.6 While Sophocles’ concern for human
action and choice opened the space for Aristotle’s theory of the hu-
man, like all poets, he perceived reality in terms of “living shapes, not
as concepts.”7 This chapter’s task will be to trace the lineage and tra-
jectory of this transformation of ‘soul’ which allowed something like a
full-fledged moral psychology, such as Aristotle’s, to emerge from the
popular inheritance from which tragedy eclectically draws.
Practical science, the science of man and human action, full-fledged
in Aristotle for the first time in history, concentrates itself on the na-
ture and care of the soul. By closely following this shift in the soul’s
conception, from that of religious poetry to the philosophically scien-
tific register of investigation and conceptualization, we can stage the
background for the shift, more specifically, in the troubled relation
between reason and the irrational. Following Aristotle’s own advice,
as students of ethics we “must learn the facts about the soul” (EN,
1102a18-20). So before turning to the state of tragedy in Aristotle and
its implications for his ethics and psychology, I want to distinguish his
view of the soul from that of Sophocles, by churning the literary-cul-
tural soil in which philosophy went digging for the roots of its ‘psuchù’
as custom and the poets had traditionally conceived it. We’ll find that
the altogether mortal soul of Homer and the lyric poets, before taking
on its personal, immortal character somewhere between Socrates and
Plato, and then, in a compromised form in Aristotle, was forced into
conversation with a belief in the divinity and immortality of certain
individuals foreign to Greece at this time: the image of the Thracian
theologos.

5
See Bruno Snell Discovery of the Mind, pp. 126, 128. His translation.
6
See Werner Jaeger Paideia, vol. 1, p. 353, for more on tragedy – Euripidean in particu-
lar – as character psychology, containing a theory of psychic conflict: “Euripides was
the first psychologist. It was he who discovered the soul, in a new sense – who revealed
the troubled world of man’s emotions and passions. He never tires of showing how they
are expressed and how they conflict with the intellectual forces of the soul.”
7
Bruno Snell Discovery of the Mind, p. 112.
50 Part I: Ancient Greece

Homer: Opening the Path for Psychology

As odd as it may seem to apply the term psychology to Homer, the sto-
ry of Greek psychology begins with the father of poetry, whose proud
achievement it was to distinguish the soul (psuchù) from the corpse it
survives.8 Aristotle identifies Homer as the seed bed of tragic lyric, and
Sophocles’ conception of the soul, we’ll see, also draws from this Ur-
poet. In fact, the Iliad and Odyssey provide us with the first model for a
general psychology which the West has to offer.9 Socrates taught that the
soul was “‘the intellectual and moral personality,’ and in consequence a
thing of unique and priceless value,” wrote Guthrie. All Europe “has a
reason to be grateful for his teaching.”10 This soul as Socrates redefined
it was a literary conjuring, as far as Greece was concerned, and by no
means a popular inheritance. Nor was it popularly received. Homer,
we’ll find, understands by soul almost the exact opposite of the indi-
vidual character that Socrates describes and Plato confirms as immor-
tal and god-like. In the very first lines of the Iliad, Homer identifies the
individual man with the body which the breath or shade of soul leaves
behind, the husk on which the birds and dogs feed.11
Homer became a hero for a chthonic thinker like Nietzsche, not so
much because of what is there, but because of what isn’t. In Homer’s
two epics the reader discovers the significant absence of any interest
whatsoever in a life other than this one. Homeric man hated nothing
more than death, where the divine order, beauty, and strength of life,
in dying, really did become carrion for birds and dogs. There was no
apologizing for the ugly certainty of man’s future. “‘Do not try and ex-
plain away death to me,’ says Achilles to Odysseus in Hades;” Death
is beyond interest, “for when death comes it is certain that life – this
sweet life of ours in the sunlight – is done with, whatever else there
may be to follow.”12 The idea that earthly existence was somehow
false, a training ground or a shadow of some other realm, is foreign to
Homer. Death is merely the shuttling away of the thin psuchù-image
of the embodied man to the house of Hades.

8
E. R. Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational, p. 136.
9
Bruno Snell Discovery of the Mind, p. 1. Beyond the esthetic, and the intellectual-
historical, “there is a third side to the Homeric phenomenon which we might call
the ‘philosophical.’”
10
Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. xi.
11
Werner Jaeger Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers, p. 74. Cf. Iliad i. 3-5;
xxiii. 105.
12
Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. 4.
 Literature and Moral Psychology: From Homer to Sophocles 51

But what then are the qualities of this soul?

Rohde, the first to till this field, qualifies the soul initially by what
it lacked. We can work our way back towards Homer’s concept by
stripping away the alien layers of our own thinking, until we get to the
hollow center that is Homer’s psuchù. “It [the psuchù] is described as
being without feeling, deserted by mind and the organs of mind.”13 All
of the capacities we typically ascribe to ‘soul,’ such as spirit (thumos),
mind (noos), and desire (boulù), for Homer appear to be functions of
“the empire of the body.”14 There is no one term which contains them.15
These powers we customarily ascribe to the unitary soul are referred
to through physiological metaphors of the heart, the diaphragm, or
other bodily organs associated with affection and drive.16 Will, feeling
and intelligence are expressions of the midriff (phrùn).17 ðtor, a seat of
feeling, seems to have designated the throat, and kardia, functioning
similarly, the heart.18 The closest Homeric analogue for something as
abstract as our ‘soul’ appears to be thumos, an agent variously of pas-
sion, will and knowledge – though tied, like phrùn, to the midriff.19
But Homer’s use of thumos implies that treating ‘psychic’ phenom-
ena more generally as manifestations of the literal body was already
somewhat a thing of the past. Thumos, though still closely tied to the
midriff, was an immaterial function. The terms of psychology had be-
gun to slip from the body into a symbolic register, the germ of an

13
Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. 5.
14
Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. 51 (58n).
15
Bruno Snell Discovery of the Mind, p. 8. “Homer has no one word to characterize
the mind or the soul. Psuchù, the word for soul in later Greek, has no original con-
nexion with the thinking and feeling soul.” Cf. David Claus Toward the Soul, p. 7,
and chapter 1 generally. The soul functions are divided by Claus into ÆÓÊÍÐÊÃËÍÐ
ÅÒÍÏÈÅÏÈÏ¿ÂÇÅÔÏÅËÔÏÃËÃÐËÍÍÐ, all of which can “denote human psycho-
logical agents.”
16
Werner Jaeger Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers, p. 74.
17
Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. 30.
18
J. de Romilly Patience Mon Coeur, p. 43.
19
See David Claus Toward the Soul, pp. 16-26. Claus makes clear that all of the ele-
ments of the soul could exhibit agency, for Homer. But on my reading of him, and
others already referenced, especially Rohde, thumos distinguishes itself in combin-
ing a relative abstraction from the body with a passionate, existential situatedness,
compared to these other forces. In this sense it anticipates the ‘soul’ developed and
studied centuries later by Greek moral psychologists. Although, as one of a number
of forces and agencies that overlap in a person, it does this only barely. On the im-
material nature of thumos and its similarity to phrên, both in function and location,
Cf. Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. 29 f.
52 Part I: Ancient Greece

inner life somehow separate from the world of bodies and force. 20
Powers such as noos, boulù, menos (courage), and mùtis (cunning) are
thought of as “independent, free-working, and incorporeal.” 21 They
are of, but not precisely in, the body. Homer conceals this primitive
intellectualizing of man and world in the dust and blood of battle,
retaining its root in the body, while, at the same time, providing an
abstract psychology that reflects the meaningful order he brings to
man’s world, mirroring the orderly realm of Olympus. 22 He is the first
stage of psychology and of European thinking. 23
Even those scholars who question to what extent the Homeric soul-
words essentially designated disparate parts of the body admit that
insisting on the distinction between the mental and the physical is to
impose an anachronism on not only the poet, but the age. There are,
of course, tensions that exist within the Greek words for soul.24 And
we can elaborate on these tensions, using the language and concepts
we have spent ages developing. But to fully succeed at this task would
be to destroy the essential value of archaic psychology for us now. It
offers an alternative model from the ground up of what it means to
think and feel, the relation between an individual’s thought and feel-
ing and the common world. To the archaic Greek speaker our mod-
ern distinctions between ‘inner’ and ‘outer,’ subject and object, were
simply not possible. 25 We’ve already found this ambiguity, original to
20
David Claus Toward the Soul, pp. 25 f. Claus, for example, contests this traditional
understanding of soul-functions in Homer, taking Snell as an example. Rohde, he
argues, misses the influence of the development of secular disciplines, alongside
Orphic-Pythagorean ones, on the 4th c. philosopher’s conception of the soul. Even
in Homer, he believes, these soul-functions are somewhat free of the body, and
together express a “life-force” which carries through the pre-philosophical litera-
ture, and enables, along with the Orphics, the 4th c. philosopher’s conception of
the immortally rational, personal soul. His study is extremely systematic, covering
every single instance of psuchù’s usage from Homer to Plato, and cannot possibly
be glossed here.
21
Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. 30.
22
We might see the mighty Cyclops whom Zeus enlisted in his struggle to establish
this order as a precursor to the spirit element of the soul, in Plato and Aristotle,
which serves reason, a kind of divinity, in its rule over the appetites (the violence of
the chthonic Titans subdued by Zeus in the realm of Tartarus). For a discussion of
the institution of order in the Greek cosmos by Zeus, against the Titans, see Nor-
man Brown’s introduction to his edition of Hesiod’s Theogony, p. 20.
23
Bruno Snell Discovery of the Mind, p. 22: The lawfulness of Olympus will be in-
fused into the human mind, which, in Homer, is constructed as a part of the order
they govern.
24
David Claus Toward the Soul, p. 7.
25
David Claus Toward the Soul, p. 7.
 Literature and Moral Psychology: From Homer to Sophocles 53

Homer, reflected in the world of Sophocles’ Oedipus, which the lit-

erature intervening between Homer and tragedy will confirm, as will
Aristotle’s psychology as late as the 4th century.
The nature of Homeric psuchù, essentially embodied and alive, re-
sists the kind of analysis I am skirting here as I try to align his innova-
tions with those static analyses of philosophy to come. Not only was
there no one soul to contain the personal life we now identify with the
entity, but perception, thought, feeling, these things we now think of
as somehow ‘inside’ the person were for Homeric man implicit in the
world each man shared with the rest. Seeing, for example, in the verb
derkesthai, denoted a “visual attitude” towards the world, an image
of the eye itself, as gleaming, or menacing, etc., and not the function
of the eye or the mind as such.26 It is an objective look someone has
which is seen in the eyes of another, or, other times, when the verb is
used with an object, a kind of visual beam which falls upon it, or cuts
through to it: what we might call a gaze or a stare. There is no first-
person seeing in the modern sense of a purely psychological function.
Like the other verbs for seeing, it expresses outward qualities of an
action, dependent on gesture and feeling, not an immaterial, passive
function of the mind or soul, or the seeing or knowing related to it. 27
Mind (Noos) was still too closely connected to the eye and this eye
to the world (as one body among others) to be itself a source of any-
thing.28 Seeing (idein) and knowing (eidenai) were determined by their
object. The same would be true for the passionate intellect of thumos
with which noos is often mingling. The difference for both of them
from other physical organs is so slight that they become merely other
elements of the person, an aggregate of bodily and quasi-psychological
parts which respond to the touch of the world upon them, the many
forces which penetrate him, each of which are connected with specific
actions, parts of the body, and types of experience (fiery menos in
ambitious limbs, for example, or defensive alkù in battle, sthenos in
the force of muscle, the kratos of the ruler, etc.). 29 Homeric man is a
26
Bruno Snell Discovery of the Mind, pp. 2 f.
27
Bruno Snell Discovery of the Mind, p. 4.
28
Bruno Snell Discovery of the Mind, p. 18.
29
Bruno Snell Discovery of the Mind, p. 20. Cf. pp. 5-8. Like the disunity of the self or
soul, the body, too, which opposes it as an organic whole, has not yet been thought
of in Homer. “[T]he Homeric Greeks did not yet have a body in the modern sense of
the word; body, sķma, is a later interpretation of what was originally comprehended
as melù or guia, i. e., as limbs. Again and again Homer speaks of fleet legs, of knees
in speedy motion, of sinewy arms; it is in these limbs immediately evident as they
are to his eyes that he locates the secret of life.”
54 Part I: Ancient Greece

loose connection of living parts infused with bodily forces, drawn or

compelled by the shine or menace of the face of things, behind which
lay the surge and power of the gods, or by the gods themselves. He is
not yet the source of his own actions.30
There is an added irony in looking for Homer’s psuchù since the
soul in Homer only becomes active in death. It has no function in
the living man “except to leave him.”31 So long as the body breathes,
the psuchù lies within, imperceptibly dormant. Likewise, sķma, for
Homer, is only the corpse.32 The life of the body is divided between
the many forces and objects compelling the limbs, muscle, heart, eyes,
and other living organs, which are neither our body nor our soul. As
the body (sķma) is a corpse in which the formerly active limbs come to
rest as a generic whole, the soul is a “feeble double of the self.”33 Not
only is this soul not immortal, it “can hardly be said to live even, any
more than the image that is reflected in the mirror[.]”34 Both psuchù
and sķma, the separate entities of soul and body, as we conceive them,
Homer considered dead.
In addition to the departed shade, Homer sometimes uses the word
psuchù when “unmistakably we should say life.”35 This vague breath
unites the independent powers of the body in a generic “living.”36 It is
through the more original sense of breath that the shade and this life-
force were bound together. 37 The verb apopsuchķ, in Homer, meant to
breathe out. When we die, we breathe out the soul, a principal of animal
30
Bruno Snell Discovery of the Mind, p. 31. In other words, he has no spontaneity of
the mind, will, or any purely spontaneous impulse of emotion.
31
E. R. Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational, p. 138.
32
Bruno Snell Discovery of the Mind, p. 5.
33
Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. 6.
34
Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. 9. Cf. Charles Burnet Socratic Doctrine of the Soul, p. 142.
Rohde alludes here to Apollodorus, who described the soul as an eidolon or image
with “no more substance than the reflection of the body in a mirror.”
35
Cf. Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. 31 (59n).
36
Homer Iliad xxii. 161. Cf. Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. 51 (58n). Cf. Werner Jaeger The-
ology of the Early Greek Philosophers, p. 74. Homer often uses the word psuchù in
the sense of life. Rohde recognizes this usage, but projecting the famous passage
from Pindar back into Homer, discovers an indwelling soul in the person, freed in
dreams and in sleep. Jaeger, following Walter Otto’s landmark critique, reduces this
sense of psuchù to merely generic life. See Walter Otto Die Manen oder Von den
Urformen des Totenglaubens. Claus takes this to the extreme, reducing all the soul-
words in Homer to a mortal “life-force” which is nevertheless not identically a part
of the body.
37
Ernst Bickel Homerischer Seelenglaube, p. 259. As Jaeger explains, this connection,
now natural to any discussion of Homeric psuchù, was first made by Ernst Bickel.
Jaeger brings Rohde, Otto, and Bickel together in his discussion of the priority of
 Literature and Moral Psychology: From Homer to Sophocles 55

life shared by both man and all the lower species. 38 The flight of the soul
to Hades and the loss of this force of animal life easily coalesce in the
physical metaphor of the breath, and exhalation.39
Homer’s world is a kosmos, “a perfect organization such as men try
to establish in their earthly states.”40 But in certain isolated passages
of Homer, such as the funeral games, and the nourishment of the dead
with wine and flesh, as well as the cremation of the body along with a
man’s possessions, weapons, etc., the belief in a life for the soul after
death still peeks back at the reader, despite the poet’s veils, from a more
primitive past.41 These, Rohde believed, were the relics of an ancient
soul-worship, a more primitive, chthonic-daimonic cult.42 In Homer
these rituals occur only on “special and isolated occasions” and appear
to be only “half-understood.”43 Time has removed from us exactly what
led to the abandoning of this animistic cult of ancestor worship, the

“breath” over “life” and “shade” in the ordinary usage of soul-words in archaic
Greece.
38
Jaeger Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers, p. 77. Homer uses thumos, how-
ever, almost exclusively for this principle of life in the lower animals, preserving the
language of psychù for man. The exceptions to this only reinforce the rule.
39
It is retained by the Orphic poets of the sixth century who represent the soul enter-
ing the child on the wings of the wind. Here, the Homeric conception takes its turn
towards the Socratic, and eventually the scientific psychology of Aristotle. This is
an important point, presupposing the connection between Homer and the Ionians,
especially Anaximenes, who had identified both intelligence and life with the air,
and, as we’ll see in part five of this chapter, made the Orphic adoption of the tradi-
tionally Greek philosophical impulse possible, preparing Greek soil conceptually
for the cultivation of a profoundly new and strange sense of psuchù whose coinage
we attribute typically to Socrates: our ‘true self,’ a personal divinity and immortal-
ity attributable to the rational element in us which is in some sense independent of
the body.
Whether the soul is immortal for Socrates is an imposing question, and not one
I pretend to answer here. But it was divine, rational, and apparently set against
the normal desires of the body. Though Rohde’s study excludes Socrates for just
this reason: a “doctrine” of immortality was not part of his teaching. Burnet’s, in-
fers a doctrine of immortality from the Apology, but not one essential to Socra-
tes’ project. Charles Burnet Socratic Doctine of the Soul, pp. 158 f. More recently,
Claus’s exhaustive philological study concludes that the Socratic “invention” of the
soul as the cognitive and moral identity of the individual does not until the Gorgias
become “the fully realized psychological version of the Pythagorean soul.” David
Claus Toward the Soul, p. 183.
40
Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. 29.
41
Erwin Rohde Psyche, pp. 12-19.
42
By soul, Rohde apparently means any non-material double which survives the death
of the body, but not necessarily anything denoted by the word ‘psuchù’ itself.
43
Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. 23.
56 Part I: Ancient Greece

belief in an animation of the souls of the dead after the body’s expira-
tion.44 But when the primitive past seeps through the cracks in this new
foundation, it does so as daimķn. Yet, for Homer, the arbitrary power
of individual daimones is limited both by the notion of an ordered fate
(moira) and by “the will of the highest of the gods.”45 There is a notori-
ous suppression in Homer of these aberrant powers, part of no larger or-
der, which disturb the authority of Zeus’ Dikù. The epic, then, provides
the germ of the Greek dialectic between reason and a more primordial
irrationality, which, in asserting itself, reason is forced to suppress:
The irrational and the unaccountable is the natural element of the belief in ghosts and
spirits; this is the source of the peculiar disquiet inspired by the province of belief or
superstition. It owes most of its effect to the instability of its figures.

The Homeric world, on the contrary, lives by reason; its gods are fully intelligible to
Greek minds and their forms and behaviour are clearly and easily comprehensible to
Greek imagination. And the more distinctly were the gods represented, the more did
the spirit-phantoms fade away into the shadows.46

The epic poet was of the same stock which “in a later age ‘invented’
(if one may be allowed to put it so) science and philosophy.”47 With
the chthonic opacity of the daimones removed, a near perfect order
was composed in which the soul-functions and their burgeoning meta-
physics could become clearly ordered, and orderable. Aristotle’s De
Anima, from this angle, is an amendment to Homer. In both Homer
and Aristotle the soul distinguishes itself from inanimate matter, first
as life, breath, and shade, as well as the spiritualized yet mortal body
of thought and feeling, and, later, as “the form of the living body.”
This “mental attitude was a distant threat to the whole system of that
plastic representation of things spiritual which the older antiquity had
laboriously constructed.”48
Tragedy, the art of terror before the unknown, would be the return
of reason’s primeval opponent in Greece for the last time.49 Luther
44
Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. 28.
45
Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. 29. See also E. R. Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational,
pp. 23 (65n), 42, 58 (79n). Dodds echoes Rohde, while rejecting the notion that
the Homeric Erinyes represent what was once an ancestor spirit. It is, though, an
element of the ancient notion of daimķn. When daimonic madness ensues, it is an
effect of some violation of cosmic order, a dispensation of moira.
46
Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. 29.
47
Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. 29.
48
Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. 29.
49
Bruno Snell Discovery of the Mind, p. 33-38. Now and then, as during the early stag-
es of Attic tragedy, the dark forces regain their power, and the terror of the mysteri-
ous asserts itself once more. The wonder in one’s eyes, before the Olympians, does
 Literature and Moral Psychology: From Homer to Sophocles 57

will reintroduce this enemy of reason to modernity, again, just as rea-

son itself is getting a foothold. Kierkegaard, in his spirit, charged with
both the light of Greek reason, the ecstatic daimķn and suffering of
the mysteries, and the imagination of the poet, will stage the tragic
contest on the invisible, inner stage of the infinite dwelling within
him. The construction of this inner stage, however, requires that the
self acquire a depth which, we’ve just seen, it never had in Homer. 50

Homer and the Lyric Poets: A “Psychology” of Conflict

In what sense were Homer and the lyricists to follow doing psychology,
addressing the same problem of the irrational that the philosophical
prose of ethics and politics would later take up as moral science? As
a rule, when a person is emotionally distressed, Homer neither names
nor analyzes the nature of the emotion. The Iliad’s Agamemnon is a
perfect example, overcome by distress, his army on the brink of ruin,
and unsure of which direction to turn:51
Agamemnon lay beyond sweet sleep, and cast about in tumult of the mind. As when
the lord of fair-haired Hera flashes, bringing on giant storms of rain or hail, or wintry
blizzard, sifting on grey fields –, or the wide jaws of dread and bitter war –, so thick
and fast the groans of Agamemnon came from his heart’s core, and his very entrails
shook with groaning. (X, 5-10)

This is one of two examples of the strife of anxiety in the Iliad. The
other involves the Achaeans as a group:
So Trojans kept watch that night.
To seaward
Panic that attends blood-chilling Rout
now ruled the Akhaians. All their finest men
were shaken by this fear, in bitter throes, as when a shifting gale

not affect the whole man as does terror before the daimonic. The eye distances the
gods of Olympus, making them objects of admiration, peers, almost, more remote,
but also familiar. This wonder and admiration for the Olympian order, which the
disordering terror of the daimonic necessarily interrupts, issued in philosophy.
50
Cf. Heraclitus, fr. B45, as trans. by Kathleen Freeman Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic
philosophers, p. 27: “You could not in your going find the ends of the soul (psuchùs),
though you travelled the whole way: so deep is its Law (logon).” The first discussion
of the psuchù per se as something with inner depth shows up in Heraclitus. As we’ll
see, the lyric poetry of Ionia and Aeolia will be an important precursor to this in-
vention of an infinitely deep, inner territory in man.
51
J. de Romilly Patience Mon Couer, pp. 38 f. This is one of two examples of anxiety
(l’angoisse) in the Iliad given by Romilly. The other involves the Achaeans as a
group, at ix. 4-8.
58 Part I: Ancient Greece

blows up over the cold fish-breeding sea,

north wind and west wind wailing out of Thrace
in squall on squall, and dark waves crest, and shoreward
masses of weed are cast up by the surf:
so were Akhaian hearts torn in their breasts. (IX, 1-10)

Emotion is presented forcefully, but this force is matched by the sim-

plicity, evidence, and externality of its cause. Homer divides a man
from himself neither in thought nor feeling. 52 When characters reflect,
Homer, in place of showing them in the train of thought, presents
them in conversation with themselves, as if they were two. 53 Charac-
ters dialogue with their thumos, or their kardia. Where we should find
a struggle against oneself, just as hesitation is broken by outside influ-
ence, either of the gods or companions, these errant forces come simi-
larly from the outside, as Athena calms Achilles in Song I, restraining
him from attack on his general, staying his sword through a psychic
intervention. 54 A true division in the self is so rare in early Greek lit-
erature generally that a single episode in Homer remained, as late
as the fourth century, the classic example of psychological torment.
Rapping himself on the chest to stay the murders for which his heart
literally cries out, Odysseus cries in reply, “patience, my heart!”55 The
scene returns three times in Plato (twice in the Republic [390d, 441bc]
and once in the Phaedrus [94d]) as a vision of the soul’s struggle with
itself. More so than the lover’s torments of the lyrics, it is this moment
in Homer which remained paradigmatic of psychic strife. But even
this example depicts the heart as a contestant which comes upon man
from without, not from within.
The lyric poet, like Homer, “inscribes the life of men in their actions
and reactions.” But the lyricists do introduce a few changes. They slow
things down, concerning themselves less with history and more with
perception and feeling, the aesthetic absolute of attunement to a mo-
ment, to an episode such as the close of Sappho’s wedding hymn:
… like the gods
… this thronged crowd
drove speedily … to Ilium.
The sweet piping flute mixed with the lyre
and the rattling of castagnets; brightly the
52
Bruno Snell Discovery of the Mind, pp. 19, 31.
53
J. de Romilly Patience Mon Couer, p. 31.
54
J. de Romilly Patience Mon Couer, pp. 34 f. Romilly refers us here to Iliad i. 193-
200. “The Gods direct the game. And this fact rids the poet of the need to search
for psychological explanations.” Romilly, Patience Mon Couer, 37.
55
J. de Romilly Patience Mon Couer, p. 41.
 Literature and Moral Psychology: From Homer to Sophocles 59
maidens sang a sacred song, the divine sound
reached the aether …
along all roads …
mixing bowls and platters …
myrrh and cassia and frankincense rose in the air.
The women raised a cry, those who were older,
and all the men raised a delightful song, triumphant,
calling upon the far-shooting lord of the Lyre, and they
sang of Hector and Andromache, like to the gods (GL, fr. 44). 56

Despite their unmatched sensitivity to impressions, the immensity of

their feeling, Greek lyric rarely expresses the life of the soul. It was
pithy, and less analytical than Homer. 57 With the exception of three
minor developments, the tendency to avoid psychologizing character
and action “shows clearly that no major difference has intervened
since the epic.”58 There is not much mention of psuchù in the popular
lyrics (elegiac and iambic poetry), and when there is, it is Homeric. 59
Homeric psuchù remains the touchstone, despite the growing depth
of mind and feeling in the lyric and the eternities of sensibility and
sensation they explored.
There were three developments in the lyric beyond Homer which pre-
pare the ground for the tragic problematizing of the relation between
the autonomy of human thought and feeling and the force of the world
and its gods driving man from without. First, some of these poets talk
about themselves in terms of “I,” exposing their feelings. “Wretched I
lie, dead with desire, pierced through my bones with the bitter pains
the Gods have given me” (EI, fr. 84), sings Archilocus in one epode.60
Second, while Homer had occasionally presented hesitation, and even
more rarely a conflict with externalized desires or feelings, lyricism in-

56
As cited and translated by Bruno Snell. Bruno Snell Discovery of the Mind,
pp. 62 f.
57
J. de Romilly Patience Mon Couer, p. 46.
58
J. de Romilly Patience Mon Couer, p. 47.
59
Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. 411. Jaeger also confirms Rohde. “It is only natural that the
poets imitating Homer should have retained his terms with their old significations.”
Werner Jaeger Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers, p. 79. Claus gives an
exhaustive list and analysis of its post-Homeric usage, and comes to the same con-
clusion. With relatively rare exception, the use is essentially Homeric. David Claus
Toward The Soul, ch. 2. Cf. p. 193, his index to citations of psuchù, for references to
fragments.
60
Cf. Archilocus EI, frs. 2 & 68: “In the Spear is my kneaded bread, in the spear my
Ismarian win, when I drink, I recline on the Spear”; “I long to fight with thee even
as when I am thirsty I long to drink.”
60 Part I: Ancient Greece

sisted on the fact that people often act in spite of themselves.61 Perhaps
it is in this experience of paradoxical feeling that the tincture of the
self first impresses itself on literature and thought: “Lo! I both love and
love not, and am mad yet not mad” (LG, fr. 104), sings Anacreon. The
lyrical self is a source of delayed or obstructed action, a place where
the memory or hope of action thrives poetically, as a kind of frustrated
longing. It is a place where tensions thrive between contrary desires,
such as Sappho’s “bitter-sweet Eros” (GL, fr. 130), part of the unstable
world in which the back and forth of Anacreon’s conflict flourishes.
Sappho, for example, writes of herself that she is divided between the
desire to speak and a shame that holds back her tongue (GL, fr. 137).
Finally, even in the evocation of an overwhelming love, the place
where lyric takes the most remarkable step forward, they have “re-
prised the Homeric principle which consists in describing the proper
emotion by evoking physical symptoms.” Instead of sentiments, Sap-
pho describes sensations, as the following fragment demonstrates
perfectly:62
For when I look at you for a moment,
then it is no longer possible for me to speak;
my tongue has snapped,
at once a subtle fire has stolen beneath my flesh,
I see nothing with my eyes, my ears hum,
sweat pours from me, a trembling seizes me all over,
I am greener than the grass,
and it seems to me that I am little short of dying (GL, fr. 31).63

The psychological in lyric is still the physical. It happens on the sur-

face of things. The source of these physical assaults is still the action
of the gods64 – a savage exteriority, as were the psychic interventions
in Homer. Eros and Aphrodite are capitalized, unable to fit within
the psychological miniature of the human breast or skull. The force of
love which the lyric expresses, having, yes, introduced the “I” in order
to evoke it even more tensely, is still centrifugal, directs the versifier
out towards the lover or the god, not inside towards a ‘self.’ They are
61
Sappho GL, fr. 1, 24: “she will love even against her want (ÈÍ×ÈÃÆÃÉÍÇÑ¿)” adj.
trans.; fr. 94, 5: “truly I leave you against my will (¿ÃÈÍÇÑ’)”; cf. Theognis EI, 388:
“and, acting forcibly against his want, to carry much shame” (adjusted trans., ÒÍÉÊ¿
ÂqÍÓÈÃÆÃÉ×Ë¿ÇÑÕÿÎÍÉÉ¿ÔÃÏÃÇË). Cited by Romilly in addition to other frag-
ments. J. de Romilly Patience Mon Couer, p. 47.
62
J. de Romilly Patience Mon Couer, p. 50.
63
As cited in J. de Romilly Patience Mon Couer, p. 50 (my trans. from the french).
64
Bruno Snell Discovery of the Mind, pp. 52 f. According to Snell, all of the violent
emotions, for the lyricists, were the result of the action of the gods.
 Literature and Moral Psychology: From Homer to Sophocles 61

always uncovering through their individual, lyrical person a greater

source of value, such as Justice in Solon, whose “price” should the
guilty escape “the pursuing destiny of Heaven,” is paid by their inno-
cent children or else by their seed after them.”65 It is Solonian Justice
which “paves the way for Attic tragedy,”66 generating “the very core
of the religious doctrine” which it dramatized a century later.67 The
lyrically ambivalent subject, divided in thought and feeling, anticipates
the ambiguous innocence of tragic guilt which Aristotle, we’ll find, re-
thinks in the purely cognitive terms of hamartia.

Sophocles and the 5th century

The tragic poet, Rohde writes, is “committed to the search for an ad-
justment between the mental attitudes of an older and a newer age.”
He must “assimilate and make his own the spirit that actually called
forth the dark and cruel legend of the past” to his own time.68 As we’ve
seen, these ‘ages’ can be classed in terms of the proto-philosophical
Homeric religion, well-ordered and perspicuous to the human mind,
and an older, daimonic religion which threatened and disturbed the
burgeoning rational order. No tragedian is as focused by this task of
reconciling them as Sophocles, with Aeschylus still rooted so liter-
ally in archaic religion, and Euripides overtaken by the philosophi-
cal spirit which ultimately triumphed over the age. Though Rohde
may have been too much a creature of his own time when he claimed
that ancient drama was “an artistic product based on psychological
interest,”69 he does have his reasons. In posing the modern question of
rational autonomy, the tragic poets must problematize human agency,
and, by implication, venture into the realm of psychology. Individual
psychology springs first from the moral quandary tragedy presented.
The Homeric soul remains an essential element in the popular con-
ception of the soul in the classical age with which both academic phi-
losophy and tragic poetry would have to contend. Along with Homer-
ic ‘life’ the idea of the soul in the fifth century confused several other
notions. The influence of a new form of religious belief contradicting

65
Solon EI, fr. 13, 28-32. Cf. fr. 4, 14-16. “Justice, who is so well aware in her silence of
what is and what hath been, and soon or late cometh to avenge.”
66
Bruno Snell Discovery of the Mind, p. 64.
67
Werner Jaeger Paideia, vol. 1, pp. 144 f.
68
Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. 422.
69
Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. 421.
62 Part I: Ancient Greece

Homer’s already shows itself in the poetic and philosophic belief that
the unconscious activity of dreams and visions manifests a divinity
within man.70 The Homeric shade also mingled with the notion of the
living corpse which Homer had done his best to erase. Pindar can
speak of Hades conducting the mortal bodies of the dead to his un-
derworld estate and early Greek vases and later Euripides speak to us
of the psuchù dying.71 Add to this medley the idea of the soul as the
living self which appears to have cropped up first in 6th c. Ionia on
the graves of sailors, for example, and the writings of Anacreon, and
Semonides,72 and you have a mess of conceptual indistinction.
The concept of ‘soul’ in Sophocles, however, is much narrower in
scope and more easily managed. There is no mention of the living
corpse, and no immortal, divine substance repressed within the body.
The influences bearing on Socratic thinking about the soul’s personal-
ity and divinity had not penetrated the popular, earth-bound quarter
of tragedy.73 It is most similar to the initially Ionian and later Attic
conception of the living self, a trope for what in Homer went by the
name thumos.74 Sophocles’ psuchù can be the seat of many capacities,
like courage, passion, pity, anxiety, and appetite, but before Socrates,
and while he perambulated Athens, the soul was seldom, if ever, the
seat of reason.75 When the soul did constitute a self, it was a bodily self
whose imagination was strictly emotional. It did not experiment in or
identify with a purely rational reality independent of the body. The

70
E. R. Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational, p. 135 (3n). This belief shows up in
a fragment of Pindar’s, as emphasized by Rohde. Pindar The Odes of Pindar, fr.
131. Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. 415. Rohde also directs us to Xenophon Cyropaedia,
8.7.21, Plato Republic, 571d, and Aristotle Fragmenta, ed. by Rose, fr. 10.
71
E. R. Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational, p. 138 (18n). Dodds cites IG, I2.920;
Euripides Helen, 52; Euripides Daughters of Troy, 1214; Pindar Olympian Odes,
9.33 in The Odes of Pindar.
72
E. R. Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational, p. 138. This notion repeats in Sophocles.
Sophocles Oedipus Tyrannus, 64. It is used interchangeably with body (sķma) at
line 643 to refer to the person of Oedipus.
73
David Claus provides a close analysis of psuchù in the tragic poets. David Claus
Toward the Soul, pp. 69-85. He concludes that barring some exceptional instances
in Euripides, the soul has not yet, in the tragic lyric of the 5th c., taken on the quali-
ties of personal character which become essential to its development in Socratic and
post-Socratic thought.
74
See discussion on pp. 97 f.
75
E. R. Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational, p. 139. Dodds follows Burnet’s lecture,
“The Socratic Doctrine of the Soul.” This language would have been extremely
unusual to the ear of the 5th century Athenian, as Aristophanes satire in the Birds
and Clouds attests.
 Literature and Moral Psychology: From Homer to Sophocles 63

soul in Sophocles is no reluctant prisoner of the body; it is the “life or

spirit of the body, and perfectly at home there.”76 And so Sophocles
can speak of the soul as dwelling in the blood.77
It may be possible, however, to extract even a little more detail,
approaching something like technique, from Sophocles’ notion of
psuchù. In almost proto-Platonic fashion Sophocles’ Antigone con-
trasts the emotive self (psuchù) with two other elements of character:
intellectual judgement (gnomù) and moral judgement (phronema).78
Phronema seems to act as a middle term involving both, a kind of
gate passing between them, as Plato’s thumos will act as a mediator
between the purely reasoned activity of the logistikon and an unrea-
soning epithumia. Of course in Plato, and then Aristotle, all three
elements are inscribed within a single psuchù. Here the psuchù is part
of loose talk about the self which aligns it with two other elements in
a suggestively philosophical way. This only further demonstrates the
contrast, since the psuchù itself is one of the elements, as was thumos
in Homer, which also had a sort of umbrella function psychologically.
A single psuchù comprising the whole of a man is clearly absent.
Sophocles, more than any other poet, maps the interstices between
the germ of an inner life of freedom and rational responsibility, on the
one hand, developed by philosophy, and an opposing religious neces-
sity, a divine dikù contesting this autonomy of reason. He does this,
however, without any official training in either theology or philoso-
phy.79 The reasoned element for Sophocles would not have been the
philosopher’s psuchù, but, like Homer, most often the thumos, and
in some cases nous.80 The multifaceted entity of thumos along with
the other abilities typical of human life could not by any account be
interpreted as the single substance of individual character that the
soul becomes in the human-scientific imaginations and moral psycho-
logical techniques of 4th century philosophy. The moral substance of
a man which the educations of reason sculpt, imposing the shape of
it’s harmonies from without through a reason within, was not part of
Sophocles intellectual repertoire. Neither Homer nor the lyric poets
showed any sign of its psuchù, and it was they who conceptually set
the tragic stage.

76
E. R. Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational, p. 139
77
E. R. Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational, p. 159 (27n.). ÒÍÓÊÍË ÃÈÎÇËÍÓÐ ¿ÃÇ
ÖÓÕÅпÈÏ¿ÒÍË¿ÇÊ¿ Sophocles Elektra, 785.
78
ÖÓÕÅËÒÃÈ¿ÇíÏÍËÃÊ¿È¿ÇÁË×ÊÅË. Sophocles Antigone, 176.
79
Rohde Psyche, p. 431.
80
See Romilly’s discussion of Sophocles, generally. J. de Romilly Patience Mon Couer.
64 Part I: Ancient Greece

Character Psychology and Strife in the Soul

How then can we speak of a tragic psychology without a psuchù to

identify the thinking person?81 As we observed in chapter one, the in-
ner life of thought and feeling and the outer realm of nature and the
gods intertwined in Oedipus’ world. The answer to this question lies
outside of the notion of soul, then, in the strict sense. It is found in-
stead in the literary evolution of the idea of personality, or character,
with which Socrates aligned the psuchù. It was the personal nature
of Socrates’ soul that revolutionized the concept, and not the immor-
tality assigned it by his student, Plato.82 As we’ll see with Sophocles,
we need not have a soul to explore character and disposition, though
the technique of the self which philosophy introduces will require it.
While Homeric man “is not yet thought of as the source of his act,”83
the tragic poet rethinks action in order to extend as far as his abilities
and inclination allow the degree to which individual responsibility can
be thought.
A new interest arose in the 5th century in what drives man from
within, and tragedy was the literary genre most committed to this
reflection on the sense of human acts.84 It examined through figures
like Sophocles’ Oedipus and Ajax, Euripides’ Hecuba, and Aeschy-
lus’ Clythemenstra the potentially disastrous conflict between the old
mysteries and violence on the periphery of the city (ritually explored
by adolescent boys as ephebes of Artemis the huntress, or the bac-
chant women on the mountain of Kithaeron) and the new reason, de-
marcating this outland of violence from the sanctioned order of the
polis. Tragedy’s manner of expression was the first attempt to animate
the individual agent artistically. This manner – the mask – forced the
inner regions of this persona into the open air. The art form empha-

81
J. de Romilly Patience Mon Couer, p. 45. Romilly asks this question of Homer,
which given her work, would extend just as well to the lyric poets. It is in tragedy
that something which we might legitimately begin to call psychology first shows up.
But even here the nature of the soul is not at issue, as it will be for philosophy.
82
This is why Jaeger’s Paideia objects to Rohde’s study, which excludes Socrates for
this reason: a doctrine of immortality was not part of his teaching. See Guthrie’s
introduction to Psyche for the reply to Jaeger’s objection (and also Burnet’s, in “the
Socratic Doctrine of the Soul,” which is the same – though Guthrie doesn’t mention
it). Cf. Charles Burnet “Socratic Doctine of the Soul,” pp. 158 f. Burnet infers a doc-
trine of immortality from the Apology, but not one essential to Socrates’ project. In
addition, see note 39, ch. 2.
83
J. de Romilly Patience Mon Couer, pp. 45 ff.
84
J. de Romilly Patience Mon Couer, p. 53.
 Literature and Moral Psychology: From Homer to Sophocles 65

sized the collective significance for the city gathered in the theatre.
It instinctively turned away from the intimacy of personal sentiment
explored earlier by the lyric toward the objective potency of action.85
Sophocles was especially well placed for the literary development
of ‘character’ which could only proceed once religious explanations
of human action were on the wane. This psychological interest and
the literary developments that accompany it are grounded in an un-
precedented interest in disposition as a source of human action. 86 This
finally is the sense in which psychology begins first with the moral de-
liberations of tragic lyric, and ethics, the science of human action first
opens the doors to interiority.87 It doesn’t matter that Oedipus never
chooses, that his character doesn’t affect the action, that the serious
psychological conflicts are always objective ones between opposing
characters, character and situation, character and the gods, never a
matter of characters at odds with themselves. The way that he un-
dergoes the action is a powerful comment on both his character and
the others with which he collides, such as Teiresias, and Creon. As
we saw in the first chapter it is not as a source of action – and so, in a
way, we are still with Homer – but rather as a reverberation of it that
an innovative psychological nuance first takes the stage of Greek life
in Sophocles. Suffering follows character. Though he doesn’t choose
his path, or have an interesting inner life, Oedipus the king is irre-
placeable, caught in the web of his past and future, and, as a literary
figure, the complex of tradition. Because of who he is, he suffers in an
exemplary way.
This occupation with ethical categories such as character, disposi-
tion, action, and the moral debates between characters, the language
of which tragedy borrowed from the legal and political discourse of
rhetoricians and sophists occupying the city, introduced a level of psy-
chological conflict unheard of in any previous genre, even more radical
than that of the lyricists.88 But Sophocles never analyzes the ‘nature’
of this conflict. He does not inquire into its mechanism. Feeling (more
often than not, suffering and despair) is presented concretely, actively,
as living in a way that still recalls Homer.89 Sophocles doesn’t explore

85
J. de Romilly Patience Mon Couer, p. 54.
86
See Winnington-Ingram Sophocles: an Interpretation. Romilly, additionally, ar-
gues that the invention of the third actor was necessary in order to stage the debate
between characters qua characters. J. de Romilly Patience Mon Couer, pp. 74 f.
87
J. de Romilly Patience Mon Couer, pp. 76 f.
88
J. de Romilly Patience Mon Couer, p. 78.
89
J. de Romilly Patience Mon Couer, p. 81.
66 Part I: Ancient Greece

‘who’ the character IS, his substance, or soul, but rather the moral
compass they carry, how they act, what kind of person they want to
be.90 Though the individual pain is real, resolution comes when one
yields to another, to a god, not, as with the philosophers to some, as
Aristotle, we’ll find, codifies for the first time into theory, when one
conquers oneself.
No one educates Oedipus and he never struggles with himself inter-
nally. This could be said of Sophocles’ characters in general. They are
never uncertain, or wavering in their actions.91 They are unified and
steadfast as characters. Aristotle was right: through their action, they
represent types of thinking. There are occasionally conflicting emo-
tions, but Sophocles consistently refuses to give his protagonists divi-
sions in the soul or self.92 They don’t have the formal nature93 which
a soul provides, which the philosophical mind will impute, and which
90
J. de Romilly Patience Mon Couer, p. 78.
91
J. de Romilly Patience Mon Couer, p. 82. See Sophocles Ajax, 457: “And now what
to do,” Ajax asks, return home, or go to Troy. But this is a false problem. The de-
cision, like all decisions in Sophocles, has been made ahead of time. It is oratory.
Both choices are unsatisfactory. He has already decided to die.
92
J. de Romilly Patience Mon Couer, p. 83. See Sophocles Oedipus Tyrannus, 673-
675 (re: fluctuations of anger), 1303-1305 (re: the mix of fear and curiosity). In The
Trojan Women, Romilly observes, Hyllus acts despite himself. See the final scene,
where he burns his father, Heracles, on the pyre, and resolves to marry Iole, the
woman responsible for his mothers’ death and his father’s stricken condition – es-
pecially lines 1202-1208, 1230-1231.
As Dodds observes, line 176 of Antigone suggests otherwise, a hint perhaps of
the philosophical conception to come. Romilly also cites this line as evidence for a
possible counter-claim, in order to point out that these are not divisions in the soul,
but rather in the person, which includes the soul. Still, it pushes the boundary of her
claim that no such division exists, without necessarily contradicting it.
93
See C.E Hadjistephanou The Use of Physis and its Cognate in Greek Tragedy with
a Special Reference to Character Drawing. Hadjistephanou, in a systematic study of
Sophocles’ plays, concludes that physis is used consciously to “to describe character
either on the basis of duties and rights, or by virtue of general characteristics, or by
ascribing to them individual traits, his main concern being to portray characters of
noble birth and nature, and characters who display hubristic behaviour and are led
to destruction” (Abstract). Only class characteristics are relevant to our question,
and all of these are closely associated with the idea of birth, especially in cases of
nobility. “Nobility of nature always presupposes nobility of birth” (pp. 30 f.). The
original meaning from out of which the physis of individuals, in terms of character
traits, develops, likewise, is birth (p. 9). The usage breaks down into six clear-cut
categories relevant to character drawing: “birth,” “suggesting social rank and sta-
tus” which is tied to birth, “growth,” suggesting stages of it, as in the growth of
wisdom, “the ‘growth’ of man” as a species of life, “the differentiation of the sexes,”
“‘character’ or ‘nature’” which is either noble or of another specific trait. There
are no instances of “nature” used to describe something like the soul or essence of
 Literature and Moral Psychology: From Homer to Sophocles 67

any moral psychology in the full sense requires (as a moral substance
to mold).94 Aristophanes’ satirizing of Socrates’ language is our best
witness to how odd the language of the soul applied to the ‘true self’ of
normal consciousness would have seemed not only on stage, but in the
mouth of the ordinary Athenian.95 If we look at the plays themselves,
we see that thumos, an element of the Platonic soul, in the Tyrannus
strikes the soul like an arrow from without.96 Emotion, even speech
and thought, like the words of prophecy emanating from the earth or
the appeal of “the land (47-48)” which calls Oedipus its saviour, like
tragic knowledge, issues from a divine exteriority latent in all things.
Emotion such as thumos is there to justify or explain character and
action, never as a point of independent interest. The thumotic, for ex-
ample, for Oedipus’ chorus, are the unjust. It is with arrows of thumos
that the Gods punish these people. Emotion has an essentially dra-
matic significance.

man, as found in Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle (see Hadjistephanou’s appendix of

extraneous usages of physis).
94
See Michel Foucault History of Sexuality, vol. 2, pp. 37, 88. Foucault breaks the
art of the self down to ontology, deontology, ascetics, and teleology. It is ontology
which gives us the ‘what’ that we are to shape. Also, in Oedipus Rex, for example,
the soul (psuchù) shows up three times, at lines 64, 727, 894. In none of these places
does it have a ‘psychological’ significance. It merely refers, as was common, to liv-
ing people, with an emphasis on emotional life. There are two noted exceptions in
the rest of the corpus, both in the Philoctetes, one of his latest plays. At line 55, a
psuchù is said to be capable of being entrapped by words, suggesting it is the seat
of knowledge. At line 1013, “the mean soul of Odysseus peering through crannies”
suggests it is the seat of character. Burnet cites both as exceptions to the rule, in the
5th century, where in “no other place is it even suggested that the ‘soul’ has any-
thing to do with knowledge or ignorance, goodness or badness, and to Socrates that
was the most important things about it. Charles Burnet “The Socratic Doctrine of
the Soul” in Essays and Addresses, pp. 156 f.
95
Aristophanes Birds, 1555; Clouds, 94. Aristophanes plays on the ambiguities be-
tween the traditional Homeric meaning of “ghost” and the Socratic identification of
the soul with the individual personality. Cf. Burnet, “The Socratic Doctrine of the
Soul” in Essays and Addresses, pp. 157, 160 f. To care for the soul would typically
have meant to be physically careful, to “mind one’s ghost.”
96
Sophocles Oedipus Tyrannus, 894: ÆÓÊÍÓÀÃÉÅÒÃÓÌÃÒ¿ÇÖÓÕ¿Ð (shafts of passion
hitting souls). Here, the Chorus uses “souls” to mean individual people, who will
suffer passions, if the gods punish injustice; 63-4: ÃÊÅÖÓÕÅ. Oedipus uses soul here
to refer to the self which mourns, “equally for the city and for myself and for you.”
In both cases of use the “soul” is generically emotive; 727: ÖÓÕÅÐÎÉ¿ËÅÊ¿. Here
Oedipus refers to the loss of balance, emotionally, distinct from the stirring of the
mind also named. This coincides with the mourning and the passions in the first two
examples.
68 Part I: Ancient Greece

Sophocles does speak of man’s ‘nature’ in one sense. The ‘growth’

of man – his origins in a specific type of birth – which characterizes his
physis as a member of one of life’s species, as animals and plants also
distinguish themselves specifically with respect to life, implies that
man has certain natural limits which he should not transgress.97 Man’s
nature is distinct from the gods. The fortune of a character can stand
or fall on whether or not this limit is respected, namely, on the pursuit
of sophrosynù and the avoidance of hubris.98 Physis in this sense is still
tied closely to natural growth. The word is never used to characterize
a god, as part of a class or in any other way, since, for Sophocles, gods
are perfect and cannot ‘grow’ as men do.99 Physis as growth exempli-
fies the vegetal in man, as much as it is a word which in its Ionian
modifications points to what this nature, in particular, might be.
As with the cult of Dionysus from which tragedy grew, Sophocles
understood human life dialectically as part of a more primordial liv-
ing in which all things that grow and whose lives are eventually spent
are embedded.100 There is no content to man’s physis other than this
imperfection which being physikos represents. We are still a long way
conceptually from Aristotle’s devising the universal essence of man, a
soul defined by the unborn governance of reason over the unreasoned
animal elements with which it has been forced into collaboration.
What then will Aristotle as the first scientist of man make of this
Dionysian art that had insisted so awfully on man’s inevitable part in
the violences of nature, on the destruction of the human categories
ordering sexuality and violence, as well as Homer’s distancing of men
from the gods, especially in matters of reason?101 If tragedy is to be al-
lowed back into the city from which Plato barred it, the tragic view of
reason will have to yield to the universal pretensions of philosophical

97
See Sophocles Ajax, 758-761, and, regarding the use of reason, Antigone, 683-684
with 720-721. As cited by C. E. Hadjistephanou in The Use of Physis and its Cog-
nates in Greek Tragedy with Special Reference to Character Drawing, p. 53.
98
C. E. Hadjiestphanou The Use of Physis and its Cognates in Greek Tragedy with
Special Reference to Character Drawing, p. 54.
99
C. E. Hadjiestphanou The Use of Physis and its Cognates in Greek Tragedy with
Special Reference to Character Drawing, p. 25n1.
100
Karl Kerenyi Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life, pp. xxxi-xxxvii.
Kerenyi explains what on page 239 he calls the “dialectic” immanent in the Diony-
sian outlook.
101
For Homer, mortality was something to enjoy while strong, and fortune was with
you, and then lament as life was taken away. In the Dionysian religion, death and life
intertwine in the ‘indestructible living’ of organic nature, capable not only of physi-
cal reproduction, but of ecstasies and visions. It had essentially divine properties.
 Literature and Moral Psychology: From Homer to Sophocles 69

knowledge.102 As a part of a universally rational nature, even Oedipus,

the most tragically excommunicated of figures, like all men, is gov-
erned by its logos. What he is – ‘human’ – will have to be redescribed
in a way that makes him, as much as any part of nature, and much like
a patient is for a doctor, intelligible.103
Before turning to Aristotle’s ethics and psychology, where he pur-
sues this science of the soul and human action, we first need to exam-
ine the Poetics’ complementary interpretation of tragedy.

102
Aristotle’s sympathy for tragedy ought to be seen within the context of Plato’s
rejection of the art form. See Republic, 606b, specifically on the threat of tragic
emotion. Aristotle claims that rather than exacerbating the emotions of pity and
fear, tragic provocation mollifies them.
103
See G. E. R. Lloyd In the Grip of Disease, pp. 176-179. Lloyd provides a discussion
of the relation of the doctor (iatros) to the natural scientist (physikos) in Aristotle,
and the naturalizing of medicine in terms of the physis of the Ionian philosophers.
For Aristotle, the investigation of first principles and causes of disease, as part of
nature, is the job of the natural philosopher as well as the doctor. The best doctors
must derive their principles from the study of nature. Cf. Aristotle OS, 436a17, and
OB, 480b22-4, as cited by Lloyd.