an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 14, Spring
2017, ISSN 1552-5112
The Body and the Unity of the Homeric Man
Introduction
The ‘corporeal’ is one of the
most important themes in Homeric epic[1]. Even if it has been studied by contemporary
scholarship in many ways, the subject remains open to further investigation. My lecture aims at
analysing the meaning of the word sōma
in the Homeric poems in order to get a clear picture of Homer’s
conception of man. Homeric language possesses a rich vocabulary with regard to
the ‘body’ and the ‘corporeal’, and the reader finds a
range of diverse terms for ‘body’, none of which match the
contemporary notions of the human body. Before talking about the body, and in
particular, about the notion of sōma,
I need to describe the Homeric conception of man. First, I will consider the
unity of the Homeric man and its relation to the human body, and then I will
move on to the notion of sōma
and its meaning. I will conclude my discussion with a brief analysis of the
occurrences of sōma in the
Homeric poems and in two passages from the Hesiodic Works and Days and
Pseudo-Hesiodic Shield of Heracles.
The Homeric conception of man
I shall then begin with some questions: Does Homer's language have a
word for a unitary conception of the soul and body of a living man? Was the Homeric man a unitary being?
What kind of self-conception did the Homeric man hold?
We can approach the first question by comparing
a famous theory on the subject with some methodological approaches. Bruno
Snell, in his influential book, The Discovery of Mind, has attempted to
reconstruct how the Homeric man regarded himself. He assumed that the Homeric man did not
conceive neither the body nor the soul as unitary: the word for
‘soul’ (psyché)
is only used for the image or shade (eidōlon)
of the dead; on the other hand, the word for the body (sōma), which is translated as ‘body’ in
Post-Homeric Greek, means ‘corpse’ in Homer. According to Snell, of
course, the Homeric man had a body just like the later Greeks. He did not, however, conceive it as
unitary, but rather as the mere sum resulting from smaller parts. Instead of ‘body’, Homer says either gyia (indicating the limbs as parts of the body moved by the
joints) or melea (the limbs in their
muscular strength). Among the early expressions designating what was later rendered as sōma or ‘body’, gyia and melea
(both in the plural) are the only ones which refer to the physical nature of
the body; for khrōs, instead, is
merely the limit of the body, and demas
represents the frame, the structure, and it only occurs in the accusative of
specification.[2] As it is, the physical body of the
Homeric man was conceived not as a unit but as an aggregate. The same argument
can be held with
regard to the soul. In this
case too, said Snell, Homer would use a plurality of words, such as kardia, kēr, ētor, phrenes, thymos, prapides and noos - so as to designate the mental and
spiritual features of man. There would be, however, no unified concept of the
soul, but only a collection of multiple cognitive and emotional parts. In the course of my lecture I will refer to this paradigm of a
fragmented body as the conception of Homo disgregatus.
When
facing a fragmentary being, we may resort to two ways of attempting
unification. The first way is to combine all the elements into a larger unit. The
second way is to separate all individual components from the bundle and
distinguish them from one another, as Homer does with detailed and vivid
descriptions of the bodily parts acting physically and of mental states of a
human being. Only the
latter proves a successful way of unifying a plurality: the bundle of elements thus becomes an
organic whole.[3] As such, the aggregated individual parts do not generate an artificial unity, but rather every single body or mental
feature allows us to better specify the unit that
contains this aggregate of parts. It follows that the Homeric man is neither a unified multiplicity nor a homo disgregatus, but a whole described
from multiple points of view. I would like to thank Professor Di Giuseppe for the important advise he gave me about this archaic conception of man, and
for encouraging me to continue these studies.
If the Homeric man is not a mere aggregate of parts, but a whole, then the body/soul division is at least problematic. The difficulty of distinguishing between ‘body’ and ‘not-body’ is, in other words, a difficulty of perceiving the difference between the so-called psychic/mental and the somatic phenomena ‘within’ the Homeric man. Both are more or less corporeal/physiological on the one hand, and ‘mental’ on the other. If we turn to the nouns kardia, kēr, ētor, phrenes, thymos, prapides and noos, we can immediately see that these things are manifestations in action of an indivisible human whole, a whole in which the complexities of mental life make sense best if apprehended without trying to divide the man into mind and body. In Homeric epics, indeed, the verbs ‘to see’ and ‘to know’ tend to include both the mental act and the corresponding physical action in a single word, suggesting that the emotional, cognitive, and active sphere are not distinguished.[4] We can explain this by the primal unity of mind in which perception or cognition is associated, with or immediately followed by, an emotion and a tendency to action which varies in degree and kind according to the nature of the object.[5] A simple fact corroborates this interpretation. Nowhere do the entities listed above behave in opposition to each other, in the same way as, for example, reason and passion or heart and mind might be opposed in our own language:
The implication of all this is that Homer does not oppose mental life to the life of the body but takes them as an undifferentiated whole. There is no ‘ghost in the machine’: Homeric man does not have a mind, rather his thought and consciousness are as inseparable a part of his bodily life as are movement and metabolism.[6]
Now, we can go back to the questions we began with and
answer them. First question: Does Homer's language have a word for a unitary
conception of a living
man’s soul and body? We can say: no, Homer
does not have a unitary conception of body and soul because he does not have a
conception of body and soul as entities in which the man is divided. In the
light of what I have already said, we can say that seeking a word for
‘body’ or ‘soul’ is to ask Homer a wrong and
unanswerable question. That a man should have a body makes sense only if he has
another part to be distinguished from it, for example the soul, and vice versa.
Second question: Was the Homeric man a
unitary being? I say: yes, because it follows from the previous answer that the
body, as the soul, is indistinguishable from the human whole. In both the psychological and physical life, the bodily and spiritual continuum can
be identified unambiguously in many ways – anthrōpos, autos,
the character’s name, and so on. Moreover, there is no place for a name
for either half of a dichotomy that does not exist. So, the thesis held by
Snell of the Homo disgregatus is incorrect, the Homeric man is a unitary
being.
Last question: What kind of self-conception
did the Homeric man hold? About this question, I would quote a notorious
definition of Homeric man given by Hermann Fränkel:
Not in his lifetime, but only in death
[…] was Homeric man divided into body and soul. He felt himself not as a
cloven duality but as a unitary being. And because he felt himself such, such
he was in fact. […] Homeric man is not the sum of body and soul, but a
whole. But of this whole, specific portions, or better, organs, can sometimes
occupy the foreground. All individual organs appertain directly to the person.
Arms are as much an organ of the man himself, rather than of his body, as thymos
[…] is an organ of the man, himself, rather than of his soul.
The whole man is equally alive in all his parts; activity which we would term
‘spiritual’ can be attributed to each of his members.[7]
In the course of this brief analysis,
then, it is possible to show that Homeric man is a whole continuum in which the
sources and processes of his mental life are inseparably united with the
substance of what we would nowadays call the ‘body.’
The concept of sōma
At this point, we can move on to the word sōma. I
will first state my definition in relation to the concept of sōma in Homer. Subsequently, I
shall analyse all the uses of the term and the proposals advanced by scholars so far, in order to test my assumption. In Homeric
poems, sōma is the notion which
designates a precise point of view regarding the human being as a whole: it is
the physical mass which makes up a singular man or animal. The key concept here is that the sōma does not move itself: it is a
motionless thing. We can also describe this by using the vocabulary of physics.
In physics, the mass is a property of a physical body. It is the measure of an
object’s resistance to acceleration (a change in its state of motion)
when a net force is applied. Therefore, there has to
be an external force so that the physical mass moves from its inertial state to
another state. In my opinion, then, the term has a broader meaning than corpse,
in that it can also be used when a living being is described with respect to
its physical mass.[8]
Let us begin now with the analysis of the
term and its occurrences in Homer.
In attempting to define the meaning of sōma, the first consideration is
its etymology. A large number of guesses have been brought forth, but none of them is sufficiently
convincing. In his Griechisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch, Hjalmar Frisk makes a list of the attempts on the
etymology for the word. Sōma has been variously connected with the
roots seen in σῶος (intact), σῶτρον
(saviour, preserver), σοῦσθαι (to be put in
quick motion), σωρός (heap),
σίντης (ravening),
σήπεσθαι (rot, moulder). Not one of
these etymologies, however, is really conclusive or persuasive. Unfortunately, etymology is of no help here to determine the
meaning of the word.
Nevertheless, a source has been used by all scholars as a starting point
to define the meaning of sōma.
In the Lexicon Homericum of Apollonius Sophista, we can read the
following definition given by Aristarchus: σῶμα Ὅμηρος οὐδέποτε
ἐπὶ τοῦ ζῶντος
εἴρηκεν (Homer never said sōma of a living being). On the
ground of this phrase, many scholars have argued the perfect equivalence
between sōma and corpse, but the likeness is not that simple.[9] As Robert Renehan pointed out, indeed,
Aristarchus does not tell us that sōma
has the same meaning of ‘corpse’ or ‘dead body’, but
only that in Homer it was not used with regard to a living body. In other
words, the meaning of a motionless physical mass is not excluded. I want to point out a
different analysis, which I deem appropriate, of another word meaning
‘corpse’ in Homeric Greek. This word is nekys or nekròs
(the two
forms are fully synonymous, presumably interchanged for metric reasons). Nekys/nekròs is the Homeric usual label for a dead man, and its
uses are quite different from those of sōma. Accordingly, in Michael Clarke’s
book, Flesh and Spirit in the Songs of
Homer:
«This word [namely nekys/nekròs] differs crucially from modern words like
‘corpse’, because it goes with the nominative rather than the
genitive of the noun denoting the person who has died: a nekys/nekròs is not the corpse of
someone, rather it is unambiguously identified with them [...] Those who lie on
the battlefield are not men’s mortal remains but ‘men who have
died’, νεκροὺς κατατεθνηῶτας. Consistently nekys/nekròs stands in apposition
with the proper name».[10]
The use of the term sōma instead occurs within a distinct grammatical context. Sōma differs from nekys/nekròs in that it always puts
the name of the person in the genitive, thus implying a different perspective:
the sōma of someone is not quite the same thing as the man
himself. This proves that Homer distinguishes the dead man (nekys/nekròs) from the physical
mass (sōma) of someone. The sōma never goes to the kingdom of
Hades; nekys and nekròs often do. Sōma
is used for animals as well as for humans; nekys
and nekròs only for humans.
If, as Clarke suggests, both in the mortal world and in Hades the dead are
regularly called by the same name, nekys/nekròs,
‘corpse, dead man’, we can then state that the meaning of sōma is not restricted to
‘corpse’, but it must be wider. On the one hand, nekys/nekròs is the word for the dead man or the
corpse, and it represents the entirety of the person who was alive once. This
is why nekys/nekròs stands as an apposition to the proper
name. On the other hand, sōma is the term for a particular point of
view applied to a person or an animal, namely to their physical mass. In
conclusion, the term sōma encloses a broader meaning than
‘corpse’, and it is a particular aspect of the whole human being.
We can now compare the term sōma with the other words that
specially refer to physical parts of man. We have already seen how rich the
Homeric vocabulary may be that indicates the parts of the body: this could be
explained by the fact that both poetry and popular speech conspicuously tend to
be as specific as possible. Not by chance, each of these terms has a specific
meaning in relation to the totality of the human being. Demas, cognate with demō, refers to one’s physical
‘build’, and it represents the frame, the structure. Eidos refers to
one’s appearance, or look. Gyia, from guion, is always plural in Homer’s poems: they are the
limbs as moved by the joints. Melea, from melos, is always plural as well, and it means
the limbs with respect to their muscular strength. Khrōs means the skin, the complexion (color) or
flesh of the human being. Phyē
refers to one’s growth or stature. It has been correctly observed by
Snell that these words tend to occur in the accusative of specification, but
the inference drawn from this grammatical fact has been made only by Renehan.
In grammar, the accusative of specification must refer to something, and that
something is a unit, the whole man in the Homeric poems. When we read:
«Tydeus was small with respect to his build (Τυδεύς τοι μικρὸς μὲν ἔην δέμας)» we refer demas to a man, a physical and psychological unit, a living human being.
Now, if we
accept the use of sōma in
reference not only to the corpse of a dead man but also to living beings, then sōma could be read in the same way
as demas, eidos, gyia, melea, khrōs,
phyē, etc. - namely as a point
of view on the human being as a whole.
At this point, we are ready to deal with the analysis
of the passages in which Homer uses the term sōma. There are eight occurrences of the word
in Homeric poems (Il. 3.23, 7.79,
18.161, 22.342, 23.169, Od. 11.53,
12.67, 24.187). In two of these passages sōma
is perhaps used in relation to a living being. I will start with those passages
in which the connection with the meaning of ‘corpse’ is more
evident (English translations by A. T. Murray revised by W. F. Wyatt).
Iliad, book VII, lines 77-86. In this passage, Hector is
delivering a speech to challenge the best of the Achaeans to fight in a duel,
and so to decide the outcome of the Trojan War. He describes his future in case
of defeat or victory in this way:
|
εἰ μέν κεν ἐμὲ
κεῖνος ἕλῃ
ταναήκεϊ χαλκῷ, τεύχεα
συλήσας
φερέτω κοίλας ἐπὶ
νῆας, σῶμα δὲ οἴκαδ᾽
ἐμὸν δόμεναι
πάλιν, ὄφρα
πυρός με Τρῶες καὶ
Τρώων ἄλοχοι
λελάχωσι
θανόντα. εἰ δέ κ᾽ ἐγὼ
τὸν ἕλω, δώῃ
δέ μοι εὖχος Ἀπόλλων, τεύχεα
σύλησας οἴσω
προτὶ Ἴλιον ἱρήν, καὶ
κρεμόω προτὶ
νηὸν Ἀπόλλωνος
ἑκάτοιο, τὸν δὲ νέκυν
ἐπὶ νῆας ἐϋσσέλμους
ἀποδώσω, ὄφρά ἑ
ταρχύσωσι
κάρη
κομόωντες Ἀχαιοί, σῆμά τέ οἱ
χεύωσιν ἐπὶ
πλατεῖ Ἑλλησπόντῳ. |
“ [...] if that man slays me with the
long-edged bronze, let him strip me of my armor and carry it to the hollow sips, but my body [sōma] let him give them to take
back home, so that the Trojans and the Trojan wives may give me my share of
fire in my death. But if I slay him, and Apollo gives me glory, I will strip
him of his armor and carry it to sacred Ilios and hang it on the shrine of
Apollo, the god who strikes from afar, but his corpse [nekyn] I will give back to the well-benched ships, so
that the long-haired Achaeans may give him burial, and heap up for him a
mound by the wide Hellespont. |
Why does Homer use sōma and then nekys
so closely, in both cases to refer to a corpse? I would suggest a possible
answer. In the former occurrence of the term, Hector is talking about his
corpse (σῶμα ἐμὸν). Here, the Trojan hero wants to refer to that part of himself that
will remain without movement once his breath (thymos) flies away and his ego is dead. The perspective is that of
a person who is talking about a part of his whole. In the latter case, instead,
Hector is talking about the possibility that he will be the winner of the duel
against his still unknown Achaean opponent. Here, the term nekys means the indivisible unity of the enemy warrior who in those
circumstances is a living man, but could be a dead man. Consequently, nekys indicates the corpse as if it was
the self of the dead person.
In another
passage, Iliad, book XXII, lines 339-343, we
can see an identical use of sōma
(it is a formulaic expression). Hector has fallen to the ground and is
addressing Achilles with his last plea:
|
λίσσομ᾽ ὑπὲρ
ψυχῆς καὶ
γούνων σῶν τε
τοκήων μή με ἔα
παρὰ νηυσὶ
κύνας
καταδάψαι Ἀχαιῶν, ἀλλὰ σὺ μὲν
χαλκόν τε ἅλις
χρυσόν τε
δέδεξο δῶρα τά
τοι δώσουσι
πατὴρ καὶ
πότνια μήτηρ, σῶμα δὲ οἴκαδ᾽
ἐμὸν δόμεναι
πάλιν, ὄφρα
πυρός με Τρῶες καὶ
Τρώων ἄλοχοι
λελάχωσι
θανόντα. |
I beg you by your life and knees and your own
parents, do not let the dogs devour me by the ships of the Achaeans; but take
heaps of bronze and gold, gifts that my father and queenly mother will give
you, but my body [sōma] give to be taken back to my home, so that the
Trojans and the Trojans’ wives may give me my share of fire in my
death. |
A similar use
of sōma is to be found in the Odyssey, book XI, lines 51-55, where Odysseus has
just completed the ritual to talk to the souls of the dead:
|
πρώτη δὲ
ψυχὴ Ἐλπήνορος
ἦλθεν ἑταίρου: οὐ γάρ πω ἐτέθαπτο
ὑπὸ χθονὸς εὐρυοδείης: σῶμα γὰρ ἐν
Κίρκης μεγάρῳ
κατελείπομεν ἡμεῖς ἄκλαυτον
καὶ ἄθαπτον, ἐπεὶ
πόνος ἄλλος ἔπειγε. |
The first to come was the spirit of my comrade
Elpenor. Not yet had he been buried beneath the broad-wayed earth, for we had
left his corpse [sōma]
behind us in the hall of Circe, unwept and unburied, since another task was
then urging us on. |
In this passage, the word sōma refers to that part of the
human whole which has remained unburied and unwept in Circe’s house. The
use of the term is identical to that seen above in the case of Hector. The fact
that Hector was alive, whereas Elpenor here is dead, does not change anything:
as Clarke has brilliantly shown, the Homeric man preserves the unity even after
death. Not by chance, when Odysseus returns to retrieve the corpse of Elpenor
in book XII, lines 10-13, and celebrates the funeral with his companions, the
word used is always nekys/nekròs. Furthermore, we can read the expression
‘νεκρὸν Ἐλπήνορα’, the ‘deceased
Elpenor’, where nekròs stands as an apposition to the proper
name.
In another
passage, Odyssey, book XXIV, lines 186-187, we
can see an identical use of sōma.
Here, the souls of the suitors killed by Odysseus are talking with the soul of
Agamemnon:
|
ὣς ἡμεῖς, Ἀγάμεμνον,
ἀπωλόμεθ᾽, ὧν ἔτι
καὶ νῦν σώματ᾽ ἀκηδέα
κεῖται ἐνὶ
μεγάροις Ὀδυσῆος: |
Thus we perished, Agamemnon, and even now our bodies
[sōmata] still lie uncared-for
in the halls of Odysseus. |
In the Iliad, book XXIII, lines 166-169, the Achaean
heroes are preparing the pyre for the cremation of Patroclus:
|
πολλὰ δὲ ἴφια
μῆλα καὶ εἰλίποδας
ἕλικας βοῦς πρόσθε
πυρῆς ἔδερόν
τε καὶ ἄμφεπον:
ἐκ δ᾽ ἄρα
πάντων δημὸν ἑλὼν
ἐκάλυψε νέκυν
μεγάθυμος Ἀχιλλεὺς ἐς πόδας ἐκ
κεφαλῆς, περὶ δὲ
δρατὰ σώματα
νήει. |
And many noble sheep and many sleek cattle of
shambling gait they flayed and dressed before the pyre; and from them all
great-hearted Achilles gathered the fat, and enfolded the dead [nekyn] in
it from head to foot, and about him heaped the flayed bodies [sōmata]. |
Here again, we can see the difference in
the use of the two terms. Nekys
stands for the dead Patroclus, as a whole person, and this word is also used
with the same meaning in the previous lines (160; 165). The specification
‘from head to foot’ (ἐς πόδας ἐκ κεφαλῆς) makes even clearer the idea of the
unitary being and indicates a totality. Sōma, instead, refers to the flayed bodies of the animals sacrificed
for the funeral rite. In this case, the emphasis falls on the physical mass of
these inert bodies: of course, this σώματα are corpses, but their identity is not
relevant in this passage. In other words, the focus does not revolve around the
animals’ death, but it deals with the accumulation of motionless bodies
about dead Patroclus.
In the Odyssey, book XII, lines 66-78, Circe is telling
Odysseus about the perilous sailing past the Planktai:
|
τῇ δ᾽ οὔ
πώ τις νηῦς
φύγεν ἀνδρῶν, ἥ
τις ἵκηται, ἀλλά θ᾽ ὁμοῦ
πίνακάς τε νεῶν
καὶ σώματα
φωτῶν κύμαθ᾽ ἁλὸς
φορέουσι
πυρός τ᾽ ὀλοοῖο
θύελλαι. |
And thereby has no ship of men ever yet escaped that
has come thither, but the planks of ships and bodies [sōmata] of men are whirled
confusedly by the waves of the sea and the blasts of baneful fire. |
Here, Koller and Harrison deny that the sōmata are dead, and they may be
correct.[11] But the characterization of the term is
clarified through a careful reading of the passage: the question of whether the
bodies are alive or dead is not fundamental. Homer presents the reader with a
parallel between the sōmata of
men and the planks of ships: what is the connection between these two things?
Wooden planks were the primary material in ship building, and we could say that
the planks are the physical mass of a ship. Similarly, the sōma is that part of matter which physically constitutes the
man. This poetic description of a sea disaster depicts the planks and the sōmata as dispersed among the
waves, like any physical object taken from the fury of the sea.
The second possible example of a living sōma occurs in Iliad, book III, lines 21-28, when Menelaus sees Paris:
|
τὸν δ᾽ ὡς
οὖν ἐνόησεν ἀρηΐφιλος
Μενέλαος ἐρχόμενον
προπάροιθεν ὁμίλου
μακρὰ βιβάντα, ὥς τε λέων ἐχάρη
μεγάλῳ ἐπὶ σώματι
κύρσας εὑρὼν ἢ ἔλαφον
κεραὸν ἢ ἄγριον
αἶγα πεινάων:
μάλα γάρ τε
κατεσθίει, εἴ
περ ἂν αὐτὸν σεύωνται
ταχέες τε
κύνες θαλεροί
τ᾽ αἰζηοί: ὣς ἐχάρη
Μενέλαος Ἀλέξανδρον
θεοειδέα ὀφθαλμοῖσιν
ἰδών: |
But when Menelaus, dear to Ares, caught sight of him
as he came out in front of the throng with long strides, then just as a lion
is glad when he comes upon a great carcase [sōmati], having found a horned stag or a wild goat when he
is hungry; for greedily doth he devours it, even though swift dogs and
vigorous youths set on him: so was Menelaus glad when his eyes beheld godlike
Alexander; |
Here, the mega sōma refers to
Paris, who is alive and remains alive. Can we say then that sōma can also be referred to a
living body in Homer? Yes, we can. Nonetheless, as in the previous example, the
main point of the issue is another thought. I would argue that the meaning of sōma in the simile matches exactly
with the definition given earlier. When a lion comes across a large animal,
such as a horned stag or a wild goat, he is pleased with his prey’s
stature and physical mass, because the reward of the fight will be greater.
Therefore, sōma means the
material constitution of an animal.
In his
imitation of this passage, the author of the Pseudo-Hesiodic Scutum
corroborates the assumption that the sōma could be referred to a living being. Here
are verses 425-428 (translated by G. W. Most):
|
αὐτὸς δὲ
βροτολοιγὸν Ἄρην
προσιόντα
δοκεύσας, δεινὸν ὁρῶν ὄσσοισι,
λέων ὣς σώματι
κύρσας, ὅς τε μάλ' ἐνδυκέως
ῥινὸν κρατεροῖς
ὀνύχεσσι σχίσσας ὅττι
τάχιστα
μελίφρονα θυμὸν
ἀπηύρα· |
And as mortal-destroying Ares attacked he himself [Heracles] observed
him closely, glaring terribly with his eyes, like a lion that has come upon
an animal [sōmati] and,
very ravenously rending the hide with his strong claws, deprives it as quickly
as possible of its sweet spirit. |
The meaning of the term here is identical
to the previous passage of the Iliad,
and even more striking is the fact that the lion’s prey is alive. In this
case, indeed, sōma certainly
refers to a living being. The lion’s simile is also used in book XVIII of
the Iliad, lines 161-164. Here, the
Achaeans are trying in vain to recover Patroclus’s body from
Hector’s fury:
|
ὡς δ᾽ ἀπὸ σώματος
οὔ τι λέοντ᾽ αἴθωνα
δύνανται ποιμένες ἄγραυλοι
μέγα
πεινάοντα
δίεσθαι, ὥς ῥα τὸν
οὐκ ἐδύναντο
δύω Αἴαντε
κορυστὰ Ἕκτορα
Πριαμίδην ἀπὸ νεκροῦ
δειδίξασθαι. |
And as shepherds in the field cannot in any way
drive from a carcase [sōmatos]
a tawny lion when he hungers greatly, so the two warrior Aiantes could not
frighten Hector, Priam’s son, away from the corpse [nekru]. |
Here, the lion is close to his prey, which
can be already dead or about to die, and he is making the recovery of the
animal’s body impossible for the shepherds. Even in this passage the term
sōma means that part of the animal
which is his mass and cannot move itself without the intervention of another
force, for example the menos.
Patroclus’ corpse, on the contrary, is defined as nekròs, because the Achaean hero has just died and his unity
as a person is still in the corpse lying on the ground. Good evidence to
support my interpretation is that the term is subsequently used with the same
meaning in the next lines (173; 180).
At the end we have a passage from Hesiod, The Works and Days, lines 536-540
(translated by G. W. Most):
|
Καὶ
τότε ἕσσασθαι ἔρυμα
χροός, ὥς σε
κελεύω, χλαῖνάν
τε μαλακὴν καὶ
τερμιόεντα
χιτῶνα· στήμονι
δ' ἐν παύρῳ
πολλὴν κρόκα
μηρύσασθαι· τὴν
περιέσσασθαι, ἵνα
τοι τρίχες ἀτρεμέωσι μηδ' ὀρθαὶ
φρίσσωσιν ἀειρόμεναι
κατὰ σῶμα· |
And that is when you should
put on a defense for your skin, as I bid you: a soft cloak and a tunic that
reaches your feet. Wind plenty of woof on a puny warp: put this around you,
so that your hairs do not tremble nor stand up straight shivering along your body
[sōma]. |
It has been noted by scholars that in this
passage Hesiod clearly refers to a living body. If we wanted to accept the
original meaning of ‘corpse’ for sōma, we should then assume that there has been a change in
perspective from the Homeric texts to Hesiod’s. But a semantic transition
from ‘corpse’ to ‘living body’ is hardly plausible.
Renehan’s opinion is that «if sōma
meant originally ‘dead body’, then it is very difficult to explain
the semantic development whereby it came to be used, as it was, of a living body».[12] In any case, this change of meaning comes
to be unnecessary. The definition I gave of the word sōma appears to work also for the passage of Hesiod. Here, the
term means the physical support, without motion, on which the hair can stand up
straight.
Conclusion
After analysing all the
occurrences of the term in Homeric epics, I can restate my definition of sōma. Sōma is the notion which designates a precise
point of view regarding the human being as a whole: it is the physical mass which makes up a singular man or animal. The development of the idea of the body
from Homer to later Greek is thus understandable in this way. The meaning of a
physical mass without movement remains: we find it even in Plato, where the
thing moving is the soul, whereas the body is motionless. But the general
concept of man changes completely, and while Homeric sōma is a point of view on the whole person, in later thinkers sōma is one of the two parts into which man is divided.
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Notes