He wishes to say: "Having got back his breath."
Plato and Aristotle considered the soul incorporeal, but always associating with the body and needing it as a vehicle. On this account, then, it drew along the spiritual matter with it, oftentimes as an image, which had the shape of the body impressed upon it. So therefore Homer is never in his poetry found calling the soul body, but to what is deprived of soul he always gives the name, as we have mentioned in what has gone before.
The soul has, according to the views of the philosophers, a rational part, seated in the head, and an irrational part of which one element, the passionate, dwells in the heart and another, the appetitive, in the intestines. Did not Homer see this distinction when he made in the case of Achilles, the rational struggling with the passionate, deliberating in the same moment whether he should drive off the one who had filled him with grief or should stay his anger (I. i. 193):—
Up to this time he revolved these things in his mind
and heart,
that is, the intelligent part and what is opposed to it? The emotional anger is represented by him as overcome by prudence. For the appearance of Athene signifies this. And in these places he makes reason admonish the emotions, as a ruler giving orders to a subject (O. xx. 18):—
Endure my heart; yea, a baser thing thou once didst bear.
And often the passionate element gives way to reason (I. xx. 22):—
Pallas indeed sat silent and though inly wroth with Jove,
yet answered not a word.
Likewise injury (I. xviii. 112):—
Though still my heart be sore,
Yet will I school my angry spirit down.