There is in general no consciousness in the Iliad … The words in the Iliad that in a later age come to mean mental things have different meanings, all of them more concrete. … Achilles will fight “when the thumos in his chest tells him to and a god rouses him” (9:702f.). But it is not really an organ and not always localized; a raging ocean has thumos [69].
… Iliadic men have no will of their own and certainly no notion of free will [70].
The characters of the Iliad do not sit down and think out what to do. They have no conscious minds such as we say we have, and certainly no introspections. It is impossible for us with our subjectivity to appreciate what it was like. When Agamemnon, king of men, robs Achilles of his mistress, it is a god that grasps Achilles by his yellow hair and warns him not to strike Agamemnon (I :197ff.). It is a god who then rises out of the gray sea and consoles him in his tears of wrath on the beach by his black ships, a god who whispers low to Helen to sweep her heart with homesick longing, a god who hides Paris in a mist in front of the attacking Menelaus, a god who tells Glaucus to take bronze for gold (6:234ff.), a god who leads the armies into battle, who speaks to each soldier at the turning points, who debates and teaches Hector what he must do, who urges the soldiers on or defeats them by casting them in spells or drawing mists over their visual fields. It is the gods who start quarrels among men (4:437ff.) that really cause the war (3:164ff.), and then plan its strategy (2:56ff.). It is one god who makes Achilles promise not to go into battle, another who urges him to go, and another who then clothes him in a golden fire reaching up to heaven and screams through his throat across the bloodied trench at the Trojans, rousing in them ungovernable panic. In fact, the gods take the place of consciousness. The beginnings of action are not in conscious plans, reasons, and motives; they are in the actions and speeches of gods [72].
But ultimately Jaynes’s account is reductive and disappointing. Because he lacks Steiner’s understanding of the evolution of consciousness, Jaynes can only conclude that the ancient myths were mass hallucinations, literally a kind of schizophrenia (hence “bicameral mind”) afflicting not just individuals, nor even isolated communities, but the whole of humanity.