What were people like before personalities?

It might seem strange that I've just begun thinking about ancient concepts of personality, considering that I'm 50 pages into a novel narrated by a Mycenaean Greek. But it's true -- my protagonist has just set sail for Troy, and I find myself wondering what he would have thought about for those ten years, and what would have motivated him to commit war atrocities like flinging children off of towers. 

Historical fiction is based on the premise that you can 'know' people from the past -- understand their lives and motives well enough to want to read about them for pleasure. How strange were people from the past? How could they do some of the awful things they did, and still think of themselves as good? Did they care about thinking of themselves as good people? If not, how did they want to see themselves? When questions like this start coming think and fast, I know my fiction writing is going to be stalled for a bit.

Many years ago I remembered reading- or hearing about - somebody who argued that the archaic Greeks formed their self-concept based on what other people said about them, which is why Hector fights in order to avoid "feeling shame before the Trojans and the Trojan women with trailing garments." I think the idea originated with Bruno Snell, but I can't find the passage. His chapter "Homer's View of Man" seems to be building towards some such point through a discussion of how Homeric Greek sees spirit, mind and psyche as separate entities, self-contained like any other bodily organ. 

How do you write about someone like that? What do that person's thought processes look like? I had little trouble showing Odysseus at home in Ithaca and marrying him off. These are universal, uncontroversial experiences. But leading soldiers in the Trojan war is an experience utterly unique to that (mythical) place and time, and so the character's motives become harder to imagine. There's the added difficulty of dirus Ulixes, the scarily detached and cruel Odysseus of the Iliad who seems so at odds with the intellectually curious explorer and dedicated husband of the Odyssey. If his spirit, mind and psyche operate separately, that might make it easier for him to commit atrocities like the betrayal of Dolon or the killing of Astyanax. On the other hand, where is the 'real' person in all this, the individual with whom a modern reader can sympathize? A tentative answer in my next post.

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