with lightest breath.

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.

Sometimes he shows the passionate element getting the better of reason.
This he does not praise, but openly blames; as when Nestor speaks
upbraiding the insult offered by Agamemnon to Achilles (I. ix. 108):--

Not by my advice
I fain would have dissuaded thee; but thou,
Swayed by the promptings of a lofty soul,
Didst to our bravest wrong dishonoring him
Whom ev'n the Immortals honor'd.

Achilles speaks like things to Ajax (I. ix. 645):--

All thou hast said hath semblance just and fair,
But swells my heart with fury at the thought of him,
Of Agamemnon, who, amid the Greeks
Assembled, held me forth to scorn.

So, too, reason is paralysed by fear, where Hector deliberates whether
he w