Patterns of human error in Homer

Abstract

It has become habitual to approach Homeric man's mental functioning with the categories used today, only to show how different this man was from the later Greek and, moreover, from the modern individual. The studies in Homer's mental terminology begun by Bruno Snell and other German scholars before World War II illustrate this tendency. Although the scholarly value of these studies, which have led us to realize that the Homeric vocabulary lacks terms explicitly designating the person as a whole, is incontestable, in everything concerning the better understanding of Homeric man their effect has been, paradoxically enough, rather negative. Indeed, insofar as such ideas as ‘self’, ‘soul’, ‘character’ are said to be irrelevant to Homer, and what is proposed instead is a loose conglomerate of the so-called ‘mental organs’, Homeric man is turned into an incognizable entity altogether estranged from everything understood as human today or in classical Greece. At the same time, the essential humanity of Homeric man is immediately felt by every reader of Homer, and the incompatibility of this experience with the image created by terminological speculations about Homeric man is strong enough to call in question the relevance of the results obtained through the terminological approach.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 27 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.