What If Our Ancestors Didn't Feel Anything Like We Do?

Perhaps because I'm a layperson and haven't studied the topic enough, but I find there to be an almost incomprehensible gap with the emotions and psychology of classical antiquity.

Most of us learned in school that the ancient Greeks had no single word for our concept of love: they distinguished eros, philia, agape, xenia, etc, and did so in ways that don't directly map to our modern feelings.

It's not just love. All of their emotional and mental vocabulary was aligned to a different internal axis. From my interpretation, there was no word or concept that cleanly equates with our concept of either mind, or emotion.

What we call the mind correlates to what the Greeks called logos, pathos, pneumos, psyche, phrene, nous, thymos, eros. These concepts map to our concepts like will, desire, mind, soul, reason, consciousness, emotion. But they don't map in a straightforward way.

There was a generally rich emotional vocabulary for what could be called non-corporeal passions. Phren could be translated as brain, heart, mind, soul, thought, reason. It's where heavy sad thoughts sit, underneath your heart. It's also where you form your rational intentions. Thymos is somewhere between a thought and an emotion. It's related to blood pounding in the head and ragged breathing. But it's not a bodily sensation. At least not primarily. It's the feeling of surging towards the finish line in a close race, but for the soul. Thymos is a wet emotion, by the way. Cold and wet. As in the classical elements of water and air, which are what breath is made of, which is related to the mind and soul.

There's a world model that informs the emotions, even which parts of the body they are associated with, and why, and that model is now quite alien, which makes the emotions also rather alien.