φόβος

φόβος (phobos, "FOH-boss"), the Greek word for fear, appears 795 times across 124 works — a wide spread with no single owner. Its heaviest surfaces are historical and philosophical: Herodotus's History (48) and Plato's Laws (48) lead, followed by the Iliad (34), the wisdom-book Siracides (Sirach, 30), Xenophon's Cyropaedia (24), and Diogenes Laertius's Lives of Eminent Philosophers (24). Fear lives here in the war-narrative, the law-code, and the argument about how a soul should be governed.

The one lexicon entry catches an older sense the corpus half-remembers. LSJ (Liddell–Scott–Jones, 9th ed., 1940) glosses φόβος first not as "fear" but as "panic flight" — the rout itself, the running-away, before the word turned inward to name the feeling that drives it. LSJ marks this as the usual sense in Homer. Beneath it the entry records only the related verb form φέβομαι (phebomai) with no English sense; no gloss for it is matched in the record, so I can say no more than the entry does.

Two etymology pointers are matched — Beekes (Etymological Dictionary of Greek, Brill 2010) and Frisk (Griechisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, 1960–72) both carry an entry s.v. φόβος — but the record notes only that they treat the word, not the root or cognates they reconstruct; on that history I can say no more than the record does.

The cited passages the record gathers cluster entirely in the New Testament, where the word has become wholly inward. It stands in the dative φόβῳ (phoboi, "in fear") in 1 Peter (1.17, 2.18, 3.1) and Paul's 1 Corinthians (2.3); it takes the accusative φόβον (phobon, "fear") in 1 Timothy (5.20) and 2 Corinthians (5.11, 7.11); and most densely in 1 John 4.18, where φόβος is named three times in one breath. The running has gone quiet, only the trembling left.

If the word first meant the running and only later the trembling, when did fear stop being something the body did?