The Early Greek Capacity for Viewing Things Separately

Παντάπασιν, ἦ δ᾽ ὅς, διελήλυθας βίον ἰσονομικοῦ τινος ἀνδρός.

(Plato, Republic 561e)

The first part of this essay defines and describes more fully the psychological phenomenon mentioned in the title, indicating the range of its manifestations in Greek life and literature. The second part (pp. 410–427) illustrates the matter concretely and points out its bearing upon certain problems of literary interpretation.

If modern habits of mind were the same as those of the pre-Socratic Greeks, we should not often err in the interpretation of their literature and thought; but since the psychological differences between them and us are considerable, it frequently happens that modern critics, too much influenced by their own patterns of thought, either find something in early Greek literature that is not there, or else are puzzled and even disappointed by not finding there something which they feel ought to be there. Since this is so, it behooves us as interpreters to keep in view at all times, and in many different connections, those particular characteristics of the early Greek mind which can be recognized as such, and which stand in contrast to modern ways of thinking. I am about to describe and illustrate what I conceive to be one of those fundamental characteristics—a Greek way of looking at things which is quite familiar, to be sure, in many of its separate manifestations, but which deserves to be recognized more clearly than it has been, and to be conceived in broader perspective, considering that the failure to recognize its application in specific instances has often resulted in the raising of unnecessary problems (with a resultant crop of false solutions), or in a simple lack of understanding. [403|404]

The title chosen for this paper is not quite adequate. What I have in mind might be further indicated by such captions as “the occasional disregard of logical, moral, or aesthetic sequence in early literature,” or “the triumph of parataxis over hypotaxis in thought as well as in grammar,” or “immediacy of interest in the early Greek mind,” or, more fully still, “the capacity for contemplating only one thing or one aspect of a thing or person at one time, purely for its own interest and without regard to the ulterior implications or associations that an early Greek narrator might indeed be concerned about, but often is not, and that a modern person with his more schematic habits of mind would almost inevitably bring in.” I find abundant illustration of this in the language, mythology, religion, and life, as well as in the literature of early Greece.

In the sixth book of the Iliad, for example, the meeting between Diomedes and Glaucus is described at length in a spirit of the highest ethical idealism, but that does not prevent the poet from adding at the end what seems to us the disconcerting and incongruous remark that Glaucus was a fool for allowing Diomedes to get the better of him in the trade of armor. We are startled by this sudden transition from the poetic to the comic and shrewdly materialistic aspect of the same transaction, by the fact that Glaucus appears first as a hero and then as a simpleton. The fancy of a modern poet, and indeed that of Homer himself on another occasion, would have been so dominated by the ideal aspect of the preceding scene, and by the heroic personality of the actors, that he would have continued to the end in the same spirit; in other words, he would have been governed by a very common yet conscious and literary principle of aesthetic or artistic unity which in this episode is conspicuously ignored. Why is it ignored? Because, I believe, the poet’s mind is here functioning in a purely natural and unrestrained fashion. He contemplates in succession two very different aspects of the same act, the second of which is mentioned solely for its own [404|405] interest and in spite of the fact that for us it is artistically incongruous with the first.

The succession of thoughts and images in the human mind is not regulated by considerations of logic or choice; they present themselves automatically...