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Customary Law is in the news again, but the Greek Gods aren’t. Maybe they should be, perhaps their old dramas and poems would allow us all to see in dreaming a non-kissing cousin in the dance we have no choice but to partner. Remember a good dancer has good balance and that nobody wants to be a wallflower.
The Classical scholar Bruno Snell in The Discovery of the Mind, in Greek Philosophy and Literature attempts to show how the Greek origins of our modern ideas of body and soul developed from a pre-Homeric culture when there was no emphasis on individual agency, where guilt and a perpertrator’s moral culpability mattered not a whit in the application of the Law. In pre- Homeric Greece there were three terms used which could be translated into our ‘body’. But they are in no way direct equivalents, and assume a world completely at odds with our own. For body there are ‘limbs’, an aggregate of these, which might have an overall shape (demas) or limit (chros) (think of those muscley well-defined bodies on those ancient Greek urns) but no unity in itself. At this time the later Classical Greek for ‘body’, soma, only referred to corpses, lumpy piles of flesh of no movement or breath. For ‘intellect’ and ‘soul’ there are similar deficits from our modern point of view. For Homer the word psyche is the force which keeps us alive, and not a corpse (soma) from which the breath of life has gone. The other words used at the time were thymnos and noos. Thymnos is the organ of e/motion, it determines physical movement and the emotional life. Noos is the mind as a recipient of clear images, clear ideas.
But none of these organs the terms refer to are given any unifying responsibility for an individual’s ultimate cause or attitude, even if thymnos could be seen as ‘will’ or ‘character’. The ‘limbs’, moving as they may according to a particular thymnos, while receiving clear images of where to go in its noos.
The first writer to mention such a unity in terms of ‘body and soul’, was Heraclitus, in Homer’s time there was no such thing. Snell says Homer would not even have the language in order to predicate one on the other.