It is impossible for us with our subjectivity to appreciate what it was like. It is one god who makes Achilles promise not to go into battle, another who urges him to go, and another who then clothes him in a golden fire reaching up to heaven and screams through his throat across the bloodied trench at the Trojans, rousing in them ungovernable panic. In fact, the gods take the place of consciousness. To another, a man seems to be the cause of his own behavior. But not to the man himself.
Gods always have their way.
And I am saying that he did not have any ego whatever. Even the poem itself is not wrought by men in our sense. If we erase all our preconceptions about poetry and act toward the poem as if we had never heard of poetry before, the abnormal quality of the speech would immediately arrest us. We call it meter nowadays. The function of meter in poetry is to drive the electrical activity of the brain, and most certainly to relax the normal emotional inhibitions of both chanter and listener.