It's an overly literal and reductive claim in the first place. There are places where homer clearly uses nous to indicate the "inner workings" of someone's reas

It's an overly literal and reductive claim in the first place. There are places where homer clearly uses nous to indicate the "inner workings" of someone's reasoning and planning, separate and different from the actions they take. I can't find a quote right now but look at how misdirection and dishonesty are represented in homer, you'll find some examples of what I'm talking about. They may not have had an explicit concept of a unified entity containing all of reason, imagination, sense perception, and morality, the way we think of the mind now. But they did have an understanding of these processes and an experience of them being interrelated. And also remember that "ancient greece" was a period spanning like a thousand years with hugely varying degrees of cultural and linguistic homogeneity over that period. Scholars of antiquity are very careful about qualifying their claims as to who and when they apply. It's notable that Alexander doesn't take that care. We have a ton of information about how certain philosophers thought at a certain time. But their focus is narrowly technical, they're as much defining their jargon than they are describing how words are used and understood broadly among greeks. We should be careful not to absorb their confidence into our understanding.