> According to Jaynes, the earliest Greek text of sufficient size to test the question of whether there is any evidence of consciousness is the Iliad. In fact,

> According to Jaynes, the earliest Greek text of sufficient size to test the question of whether there is any evidence of consciousness is the Iliad. In fact, the Iliad does not seem to mention any subjective thoughts or the contents of anyone’s mind. The heroes of the Iliad were not able to make decisions, no one was introspecting or even reminiscing. Apparently, they were noble “automata” who were not aware of what they did. Iliadic man did not have subjectivity as we do; he had no internal mind-space to introspect upon. Some lexical oddities in the Homeric text (such as the absence of a single word translating “consciousness”, “mind”, “soul”, or even “body”) led Jaynes to formulate the hypothesis that the Iliad was composed by nonconscious minds, which automatically recorded and objectively reported events, in a manner rather similar to the characters of the poem. The transition to subjective and introspective writings of the conscious mind occurred in later works, beginning with the Odyssey. I was speaking with an actor friend of mine recently, and the topic of novels came up. I asked him when the first novel was written, and he cited some book I'd never heard of written in England hundreds of years ago. The definition he gave was that the piece of literature, in order to be a novel, must spend a good bit of time dwelling on character's introspection. Next time we speak I'm going to have to mention this conclusion of Jayne's for him.