The tales told in the cycle are recounted by other ancient sources, notably Virgil's Aeneid (book 2) which recounts the sack of Troy from a Trojan perspective; Ovid's Metamorphoses (books 13-14), which describes the Greeks' landing at Troy (from the Cypria) and the judgment of Achilles' arms (Little Iliad); Quintus of Smyrna's Posthomerica, which narrates all the events after Achilles' death up until the end of the war; and the death of Agamemnon and the vengeance taken by his son Orestes (the Nostoi) are the subject of later Greek tragedy, especially Aeschylus's Oresteian trilogy.
Homer on Life and Death (Clarendon Press Paperbacks)
The Homeric view of man shows interesting differences from later theories. There was no unified soul, contrasted with body, as in the Pythagorean-Platonic tradition; instead, the psychic functions were distributed without much consistency over a number of entities. The psyche, which held the position of greatest importance from the time of Pythagoras, was merely a life-soul in Homer; it played no part in the thoughts, emotions, and actions of the living man. The psyche survived after death; it did not, however, retain the complete moral personality, as in the Platonic eschatology, but was a bloodless, helpless shadow. The thoughts and feelings of the living man were attributed to the phrenes (roughly speaking, the organs of the chest, although in later Greek the word means "diaphragm"), the heart, and the thymos (a mysterious entity probably connected, like psyche, with breath). Nous (mind), which became the most important part of the psyche in the psychology of Plato and Aristotle, was generally restricted in Homer to the intuitive understanding of a situation (like the English "to see" in its metaphorical sense); consequently, it was often connected with sense perception, not contrasted with it as in Plato. Unlike phrenes, nous was not a physical thing for Homer but a function. 2ff7e9595c
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