Plato, Euripides, New Testament: In ancient world, not only Homer’s Odyssey had multiple personality or its literary metaphor, the theme of the double

In December 2017, I discussed multiple personality in Homer’s Odyssey, but in 2014 and 2015, I cited it in Plato, Euripides, and The New Testament.

June 28, 2014

Plato and Euripides say Helen of Troy had Multiple Personality

If multiple personality is a real, observable, psychological phenomenon—and not just a modern fad—it should be reflected in the history of literature, even in antiquity. And since multiple personality is often represented in literature by the theme of the double, it would be interesting to know how far back that theme goes.

Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey say that Helen really went to Troy. But there was another version of that story in Ancient Greece, one in which it was Helen’s double, and not Helen herself, who went to Troy.

Plato, in both his Phaedrus and Republic, cites Stesichorus’s Palinode, which is a recantation of Homer’s story that Helen went to Troy. According the Stesichorus version, which is dramatized in Euripides’ play, Helen, it was not Helen, herself, who went to Troy, but only her eidolon (ghost, shadow, image, phantom), which impersonated her.

“In 412/411 B.C.E. [Euripides] produced Helen, a play in which he takes up the theme of the eidolon, to dramatize two confrontations—the one in the mind of Menelaus between the true Helen and her fickle double, and the other between Helen herself and the image of her for which the Greeks and Trojans fought at Troy…Euripides’ Helen is the only surviving treatment of the phantom-Helen theme from antiquity…splitting Helen into her self and her image…Across the Greek world the disjunction between essence and phenomena was the chief topic of conversation among the philosophers and mathematicians, and one of the principal themes of Athenian tragedy. What plot more topical in late fifth-century Athens than the story of a woman divided into her real and her imaginary selves?” (1, pp. 8-9).

Of course, Plato and Euripides did not use the term “multiple personality,” but the theme of the double is close enough.

1. Austin, Norman. Helen of Troy and Her Shameless Phantom. Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1994.

February 11, 2015

Theme of the Double (Multiple Personality) in The New Testament: Jesus’s Exorcism of Two Demoniacs in The Gospel According to Matthew

Dissociative identity disorder (multiple personality disorder) is defined as a “disruption of identity characterized by two or more distinct personality states, which may be described in some cultures as an experience of possession” (1, p. 292).

The most famous case of possession in The New Testament is that of the Gerasene demoniac, described in Matthew 8:28-34, Mark 5:1-20, and Luke 8:26-39.

In Mark: “Jesus asked him, ‘What is your name?’ He replied, ‘My name is Legion; for we are many.’”

In Luke: “Jesus then asked him, ‘What is your name?’ And he said, ‘Legion’; for many demons had entered him.”

However, in Matthew, when Jesus came, “two demoniacs met him” (2).

Thus, Mark and Luke represent multiple personality as one person who has more than one identity. But Matthew, in describing the same event, uses the literary device known as the theme of the double, in which two identities of one person are incarnated as separate people, as in Dostoevsky’s The Double.

1. American Psychiatric Association: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition. Arlington, VA, American Psychiatric Association, 2013.

2. Herbert G. May and Bruce M. Metzger (Editors). The Oxford Annotated Bible: Revised Standard Version Containing the Old and New Testaments. New York, Oxford University Press, 1962.