Thumos
This is by far the most common and important hypostatic word in the whole poem. It occurs three times as often as any other.
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Originally, in the Objective Phase, I suggest, it meant simply activity as externally perceived. And nothing internal about it.
This Mycaenaean usage is found frequently in the Iliad, particularly in the battle scenes, where a warrior aiming a spear in the right place causes the thumos or activity of another to cease.
The internal Phase II, as we have seen in Achilles' wrath occurs in a novel stressful situation during the breakdown period when the stress threshold for the hallucinated voice was higher. Thumos then refers to a mass of internal sensations in response to environmental crises. It was, I suggest, a pattern of stimulation familiar to modern physiology, the so-called stress or emergency response of the sympathetic nervous system and its liberation of adrenalin and noradrenalin from the adrenal glands.
This includes the dilation of the blood vessels in striate muscles and in the heart, an increase in tremor of striate muscles, a burst of blood pressure, the constriction of blood vessels in the abdominal viscera and in the skin, the relaxing of smooth muscles, and the sudden increased energy from the sugar released into the blood from the liver, and possible perceptual changes with the dilation of the pupil of the eye. This complex was, then, the internal pattern of sensation that preceded particularly violent activity in a critical situation. And by doing so repeatedly, the pattern of sensation begins to take on the term for the activity itself. Thereafter, it is the thumos which gives strength to a warrior in battle, etc. All the references to thumos in the Iliad as an internal sensation are consistent with this interpretation.
Now the important transition to the subjective Phase III is already beginning even in the Iliad, although not in a very conspicuous way. We see it in the unvoiced metaphor of the thumos as like a container: in several passages, menos or vigor is 'put' in someone's thumos ( i 6 : 5-8; 17: 451; 22: 312). The thumos is also implicitly compared to a person: it is not Ajax who is zealous to fight but his thumos (13: 73); nor is it Aeneas who rejoices but his thumos (13: 494; see also 14: 156). If not a god, it is the
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thumos that most often 'urges' a man into action. And as if it were another person, a man may speak to his thumos ( u : 403), and may hear from it what he is to say (7: 68), or have it reply to him even as a god (9: 702).
All these metaphors are extremely important. Saying that the internal sensations of large circulatory and muscular changes are a thing into which strength can be put is to generate an imagined
'space,5 here located always in the chest, which is the forerunner of the mind-space of contemporary consciousness. And to compare the function of that sensation to that of another person or even to the less-frequent gods is to begin those metaphor processes that will later become the analog 'I5.
Phrenes
The second most common hypostasis in the Iliad is the phrenes. Its Objective Phase origin is more questionable. But the fact that it is almost always plural may indicate that the phrenes objectively referred to the lungs and perhaps were associated with phrasis or speech.
In the Internal Phase, phrenes become the temporal pattern of sensations associated with respiratory changes. These come from the diaphragm, the intercostal muscles of the rib-cage, and the smooth muscles surrounding the bronchial tubes which regulate their bore and so the resistance of them to the passage of air, this mechanism being controlled by the sympathetic nervous system. We should remember here how extremely responsive our breathing is to various types of environmental stimulation. A sudden stimulus, and we 'catch our breath'. Sobbing and laugh-ing have obvious distinct internal stimulation from the diaphragm and intercostals. In great activity or excitement, there is an increase in both the rate and depth of breathing with the resulting internal stimulation. Either pleasantness or unpleasantness usually shows increased breathing. Momentary attention
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is clearly correlated with partial or complete inhibition of breathing. A surprise, and our rate of breathing increases and becomes irregular.
Apart from rate, there are also unique changes in the proportion of time occupied by inspiration and by expiration in a single breath cycle. This is best measured by determining the percent of the duration of the breath cycle taken up by inspiration. This is about 16 percent in speech, 23 percent in laughter, 30 percent in attentive mental work, 43 percent when at rest, 60 percent or more in excitement, 71 percent in subjects imagining a wonderful or surprising situation, and 75 percent in sudden fright.3
The point I am trying to make here is that our phrenes or respiratory apparatus can almost be looked at as recording everything we do in quite distinct and distinguishable ways. It is at least possible that this internal mirror of behavior loomed much larger in the total stimulus world of the preconscious mind than it does in ourselves. And certainly its changing pattern of internal stimulation makes us understand why the phrenes are so important during the transition to consciousness, and why the term is used in so many functionally different ways in the poetry we are examining in this chapter.
In the Iliad, it can often be translated simply as lungs. Agamemnon's black phrenes fill with anger (1:103) and we can visualize the king's deep breathing as his fury mounts. Auto-medon fills his dark phrenes with valor and strength, or takes deep breaths (17:499). Frightened fawns have no strength in their phrenes after running} they are out of breath (4:245). In weeping, grief 'comes to' the phrenes (1:362; 8:124) or the respiratory phrenes can 'hold' fear (10:10), or joy (9:186). Even these statements are partly metaphoric, and thus associate a kind of container space in the phrenes.
A very few instances are more clearly in Phase III in the sense 3 By inspiration here I mean from the beginning of taking a breath to the beginning of exhaling. The measure thus includes holding one's breath. These determinations collected from various sources. See Robert S. Woodworth, Exferimental Psychology (New York: Holt, 1938), p. 264.
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of inner mind-space. These are where the phrenes are said to
'contain' and perhaps 'retain' information. Sometimes this information comes from a god (1:55) or at other times from another human (1:297).
Laboratory studies have demonstrated that even simple sensory experience of an object, its recognition, and the recall of the name associated with it, all can be observed in recordings of respiration taken simultaneously.4 It is thus not surprising that when some internal sensation is first connected to such functions as recognition and recall, it is located in the phrenes. Once it is said that the phrenes can recognize events (22:296), it is making a metaphor of the phrenes with a person, and the paraphrands of 'person,' that is, something that can act in a space projects back into the phrenes to make it metaphorically spatial and capable of other human activities metaphorically. Similarly we find that like a person the phrenes of a man can occasionally