The Discovery of the Mind

Today, we take for granted that our thoughts and actions originate in our minds — but this was not always the case.

In Book I of The Iliad — the oldest extant piece of Western literature — Achilles, the world’s greatest warrior, argues with Agamemnon, the Greek King of Kings, over who should sacrifice their spoils to appease an angered god. When Agamemnon threatens to take Achilles’ slave Briseis by force, Achilles is overcome with anger. But just as he is ‘pulling his great sword from the scabbard’, the goddess Athena — visible only to Achilles — ‘came down from heaven’ and restrained him, stating, with a ‘fearful gleam in her eyes’, that she has come to stop his fury: ‘if you will obey me… There will be a day when three times these splendid gifts will be laid before you because of this insult. Restrain yourself, and do as we ask’. Achilles heeds Athena’s warning and ‘stayed his massive hand on the silver hilt, and pushed the great sword back into the scabbard’.

This scene is often used as an example of the Snell-Dodds view of Homeric psychology — in which there is not an autonomous self, but one ‘influenced by external forces, typically gods or divinely sent portents’ (Russo). Bruno Snell (author of The Discovery of the Mind) and E. R. Dodds (author of The Greeks and the Irrational) released their studies in the same year (1953), and, despite subsequent criticisms, they…