Euripides' Use of Psychological Terminology by Shirley Darcus Sullivan (review)

186 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 conclude the volume. (ROBERT HAYWARD) Shirley Darcus Sullivan. Euripides= Use of Psychological Terminology McGill-Queen=s University Press. xiv, 234. $65.00 The ancient Greeks have been accused of a lack of clarity when it comes to psychological understanding. Although they had several words belonging to psychological vocabulary, they do not appear to have distinguished the physical location of feeling or cognition from the experiences of psychic life, whether cognitive, volitional, or emotional. Further, Greek texts do not seem to separate such psychological experiences from the result of these. Greeks shuddered with fear in their phrenes, they could have >stubborn= or >untroubled= phrenes, or the phrenes could be >unjust.= An additional shortcoming of which the Greeks have been accused is their apparently slow development of an integrated notion of a self that could act as a centre of psychological activity. Heroes and poets engaged in dialogue with their thumos or psyche, and spoke >outside of= their phrenes. Were they then in some way detached from their emotions or powers of cognition? Lest we proceed with the assumption that we moderns reflect mathematical clarity in our description of cognitive states, or regularly distinguish these from emotional ones, consider what imaginary constructs could lie behind expressions such as >narrow= or >broad= minded, being >out of your mind,= having a >love-sick= mind, >speaking= or >losing= your mind, or having a mind that >wanders.= Were an ancient Greek to analyse phrases such as these, we might be described as people who have a cognitive apparatus that stretches or contracts, one that we can leave behind, one that becomes unwell, one that can have a voice or be mislaid, and one that can move aimlessly away from us. Shirley Darcus Sullivan has been concerned with the psychology of the ancient Greeks for more than a decade. She has presented us with a study of psychological terms in Homer (1988), in Aeschylus (1997), in early Greek thought generally (1995), and now in Euripides. As with her earlier work, she looks at the phrenes as the seat of deliberation, intelligence of a practical or reflective nature, and different from the nous or prapides, which engaged the intelligence in quick assessment or a close observation of a situation. The thumos, location of emotions, provides a motivating force for action. In the kardia or kear, the >heart,= emotional life also occurred, but in Euripides most frequently as such negative feelings as pain, fear, or grief. Psyche in Euripides frequently retains its Homeric sense of >life-spirit,= animating humans while alive or surviving as a shade-soul after death. In the plays it also moves beyond this to represent the >inner self,= to indicate personal identity, a designation that appears fully developed in Plato. HUMANITIES 187 Sullivan is conventional in her assessment of the meanings of these terms; her contribution lies principally in the extensive database she provides for the occurrence of these words in Euripides, with over seventy pages of appendices demonstrating combination of the seven terms with epithets, participles, and their appearance in cognate verbs, adverbs, etc. She is cautious about arguing for Euripides as revolutionary in his use of the terms, preferring in her (brief) analytical comments to see him as primarily a traditionalist, who only occasionally reflects the sophistic thinking of his age, such as occurs with nous in Helen. One limitation of using the lexical approach to understanding Euripidean psychology is the fact that the terms are found in tragedy, a literary genre that explores and plays with the liminal and superhuman regions of cognitive and emotional experience, and double entendres abound. When in Bacchae, for example, there are references to >wisdom= or >good judgment= we routinely expect to find a contrapuntal dialogue between the conventional and cultic understanding of terms indicating intelligence. Equipped with Sullivan=s book, we can tackle these larger questions with a wealth of comparanda. (BONNIE MACLACHLAN) A.M. Keith. Engendering Rome: Women in Latin Epic Cambridge University Press. xii, 150. US $52.95 It is a pleasure to welcome this book, which offers interesting new perspectives on the role of women in Latin epic. More precisely, A.M. Keith=s study shows how ancient...