There was no single “Greek view of the mind.” From Homer’s epics to the philosopher Epicurus (341–270 BCE), Greek-speaking poets, doctors, and philosophers argued. The epics spread thinking and feeling across several body-and-breath words. One medical writer put joy, grief, and understanding in the brain; Aristotle put sensing in the heart. Plato’s Socrates argued the soul can exist apart from the body, Aristotle called it the living body’s “form,” and Epicurus said it scatters at death. Greece also isn’t where thinking about the mind began: Mesopotamian and Egyptian texts, covered on their own pages, have their own words for heart, body, and suffering.
What did “mind” even mean in Greek?
No single Greek word lines up with the English “mind.” In Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, psychē (usually translated “soul”) is mostly the life you can lose. It is risked in battle and leaves at death for the underworld, where it lingers as a shade. Homer never has anyone do anything with their psychē while alive (Lorenz, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, §1).
Thinking and feeling happen in other places. The busiest is thymos, a word related to “smoke.” It appears more than 750 times in the two poems, about twice as often as phrēn/phrenes, another thinking-and-feeling word. The heart gets mental jobs too (Cairns, “Thymos,” pp. 1–2).
An analogy, not a translation: picture a group chat where your chest, your heart, and your breath all post messages about a plan or an insult. It’s still one person talking.
An older line of scholarship, led by Bruno Snell, read this vocabulary as a sign that Homer’s people had not yet “awakened” to the source of their powers lying in their own souls. Classicist Douglas Cairns writes that more recent scholarship has made that approach “untenable.” The words overlap, and they still describe one person acting (Disputed historically; Cairns reports that recent scholarship rejects Snell’s reading).
By the end of the 400s BCE, psychē had stretched to cover pleasure in food and drink, sexual desire, courage, and moral qualities like self-control and justice (Lorenz, §1).
Brain or heart?
This was a live argument, not a relay race with one right answer passed forward.
Alcmaeon of Croton, a Greek city in southern Italy, probably wrote between about 500 and 450 BCE (Plausible; the date is estimated). None of his own sentences on this topic survive. The later writer Theophrastus reports that Alcmaeon separated understanding from sense perception and linked the senses to the brain. Scholar Carl Huffman thinks Alcmaeon may have cut out an animal’s eyeball and seen channels running toward the brain (Plausible), but finds no evidence that he dissected the eye itself or the skull (Huffman, SEP “Alcmaeon,” §§1, 2.2–2.3). Whether he was the first person anywhere to link thinking and the brain is Unknown.
On the Sacred Disease is a medical treatise probably written around 400 BCE by an author whose name is lost (Plausible date; the work was later filed under the name of Hippocrates). It argues that joy, laughter, grief, fear, dreams, understanding, and also madness come from the brain, and it rejects the heart and the phrenes as the seat of understanding (Adams translation).
Aristotle (384–322 BCE) disagreed. In Parts of Animals, Book II, he makes the heart region the center of sensation (chapters 1 and 10) and the brain a cooling counterweight to the heart’s heat (chapter 7). He still thought a brain that was too fluid or too solid could cause disease, madness, and death (chapter 7; Ogle translation).
Did Socrates and Plato split the soul from the body?
Socrates (469–399 BCE) wrote nothing. Everything we know about him is secondhand, mainly from Plato, the writer Xenophon, and the comic playwright Aristophanes (Nails & Monoson, SEP “Socrates”). In the Apology, Plato’s version of Socrates’ defense speech, Socrates says he spends his days urging Athenians, young and old, not to put their bodies or property ahead of the care of their souls (Apology 30a–b). In 399 BCE an Athenian jury condemned him on charges of impiety and corrupting young men, and he was executed with hemlock (Nails & Monoson).
Plato (born 429 BCE or close to it; died 347 BCE) wrote dialogues starring Socrates, and it is hard to say where Socrates’ ideas stop and Plato’s start (Kraut, SEP “Plato”). In the Phaedo, Socrates describes death as the soul and body coming apart (64c). He argues that the soul resembles unseen, unchanging things more than the body, which falls apart (78b–80b; Lorenz, §3.1). In Book IV of the Republic, he separates the part of the soul that reasons from the part that hungers, thirsts, and desires (439d), then adds a third, “spirited” part attached to honor (Lorenz, §3.2).
Today people often call this “dualism.” That label is ours, not Plato’s. His psychē is also what keeps a body alive: two of the Phaedo’s four main arguments for the soul’s immortality don’t depend on thinking at all (Lorenz, §3.1). “Plato argued the soul could exist without the body” is closer to the texts than “Plato split the mind from the body.”
What did Aristotle change?
Aristotle’s On the Soul (De anima) ties the soul tightly to the living body. He describes it as what makes an organized natural body a living thing (Shields, SEP “Aristotle’s Psychology,” citing De anima II.1, 412b5–6). Asking whether soul and body are one, he says, is as unnecessary as asking whether wax and the shape a stamp presses into it are one (II.1, 412b6–9; Smith translation).
His soul comes in layers. Plants have only nutrition: feeding and growing. Animals add perception. Humans add thinking (II.3). So in Aristotle’s scheme, animals have perceiving souls.
Then comes a cliffhanger. The soul can’t be separated from the body, he says, or at least some parts of it can’t; yet some parts might be separable because they aren’t the working of any body part (II.1, 413a3–7). Thinking (nous), he adds, seems to be a very different kind of soul, one that might be able to exist on its own (II.2, 413b24–27). What he meant is still argued (Disputed). Shields reads Aristotle as steering between “reductive materialism” and “Platonic dualism.”
That sentence had its own adventure. In 2023 scholar Jawdath Jabbour compared two medieval Arabic translations of De anima. The one linked to the translator Isḥāq ibn Ḥunayn keeps the words saying this kind of soul alone might be separable. The other, known as “pseudo-Isḥāq,” leaves them out. Jabbour could not determine whether the gap came from the Greek copy, the translator, or later copying (Jabbour, pp. 152 n. 39, 154–155).
What happens after death? Greek texts disagree
- In Odyssey Book 11, the dead appear as insubstantial shades (lines 475–476). Achilles says he would rather be a poor man’s hired hand on earth than lord over all the dead (lines 488–491). Odysseus also sees Tityos, Tantalus, and Sisyphus being punished (lines 576–600) (Butler translation).
- The Phaedo ends with a myth of judgment. Souls that lived neither very well nor very badly are purified, paying penalties for wrongs and receiving rewards for good deeds; people judged incurable are thrown into Tartarus and never come out (113d–114c). Socrates adds that a sensible person wouldn’t insist it’s exactly like that (114d; Benjamin Jowett translation, Project Gutenberg #1658).
- Epicurus, who taught in Athens, held that the soul is made of atoms that disperse at death. He therefore argued that death cannot be experienced as a harm by the person who has died (Diogenes Laertius X.124–125; Konstan, SEP “Epicurus,” §4).
Where did healing fit?
Doctors didn’t simply replace the gods. The Sacred Disease author blames the disease’s holy reputation on purifiers and charlatans who use religion to cover their failures. Yet he ends by calling its causes (cold, sun, and ever-changing winds) divine, so every disease is divine and human alike (Adams translation, closing section). Historian Jacques Jouanna describes this idea, which also appears in another Hippocratic treatise, as a “universal order that is both divine and natural.” He also notes the author defends traditional religion and accuses his rivals of impiety (Jouanna, pp. 107–108).
Meanwhile, sanctuaries of the healing god Asklepios spread. His cult reached Attica, the region around Athens, at the end of the 420s BCE (Barrenechea, pp. 256, 259). At Epidauros, a stone carved around 350–300 BCE is headed as a record of healings by Apollo and Asklepios. It tells of visitors who slept in a special hall, the abaton, and saw the god in dreams and visions (IG IV²,1 121, lines 1–33). Francisco Barrenechea argues that sanctuary staff chose, adapted, and published these stories to proclaim the god’s power (pp. 255, 258). They are the sanctuary’s claims. Whether anyone was actually cured is Unknown.
How we know
What survives. Mostly texts copied by hand for many centuries, often read today in translation. Some ideas survive only as later reports: Alcmaeon through Theophrastus, Socrates through Plato and others, and earlier thinkers through Aristotle. Aristotle reports, for example, that Thales thought all things are full of gods (De anima I.5), that Democritus built the soul from round, fire-like atoms, and that Anaxagoras made Mind (nous) the cause of motion (I.2; Smith translation). That mix alone shows “the early philosophers all saw the mind as purely natural” is too tidy.
Whose voices are missing. Every named ancient author on this page is a man. Women, enslaved people, and poor people mostly appear inside other people’s writing. The medical casebook Epidemics I identifies some patients only by their tie to a named man, as his servant or slave in English translations, and some women only as someone’s wife or daughter; their own words aren’t recorded (Adams translation). Rival healers appear only through their critics. The sources selected for this page do not include a diary written by a person describing their own distress.
How power shaped it. Someone decided which texts got recopied, and sanctuaries carved success stories, not failures. Translators, from medieval Arabic to modern English, chose words like “soul,” “mind,” and “madness” that can hide very different Greek ideas.
Then vs. now
Then: brain or heart; a soul that is the life of a body; madness blamed on a brain too hot, cold, wet, or dry (Sacred Disease), while rival healers, as their critic tells it, blamed the gods.
Now: The U.S. National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke says all sensations, movements, thoughts, memories, and feelings result from signals passing through neurons (NINDS) (Strongly supported). The Sacred Disease author’s bet on the brain sits closer to that picture than Aristotle’s cooling brain, but his mechanisms aren’t modern science, and a lucky match isn’t a discovery of neuroscience.
What the mind-brain relationship ultimately is remains open. In the 2020 PhilPapers Survey, of 1,733 philosophers who answered, about 52% accepted or leaned toward physicalism and about 32% toward non-physicalism (PhilPapers Survey 2020) (Disputed). So “modern science proved mind and body are one thing” goes too far. And the ancient word “madness” is not a modern diagnosis: comparing Greek ideas with today’s means comparing questions, not scoring answers.