The distinction between body and soul, the existence of logical thought or the notion of a self responsible for its actions are the result of a slow and difficult evolution that began in Greece more than two millennia ago. In The Discovery of the Spirit, Bruno Snell, one of the most important Hellenists of the 20th century, traces the origin of these ideas, fundamental in the intellectual history of the West. In a wise combination of philology and philosophy, Snell traces a route that starts from the Homeric vision of the world and that, crossing archaic Greek lyric, pre-Socratic philosophy and the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, concludes with the original formulation of the concept of humanism and the creation of the spiritual landscape we call Arcadia. A true monument of the history of ideas, this book investigates, with extraordinary lucidity and erudition, the very foundations of European civilization.