I have zero competence in Latin, so I’m mostly trolling here. I hope the OP will forgive me! This thread has some similarities with this thread: http://discourse.textkit.com/t/homeric-psychology/16932/1 which deals with the question of how the ancients viewed their emotions.
But what does English “how are you?” actually mean? I ask this because there are cultural differences that even today are not too evident. I’m a Finnish physician, I work at present in a lab setting but I used to be a general practitioner. One day this American man steps into my office, 40 or 50 years old. We knew each other passingly since he’d consulted me once before. After I call him in, he says (in English) “Hi Paul, how are you?”.
This made me very surprised for a fraction of a second. My first mental reaction was something like “I’m the doctor, I ask the questions!” (I didn’t say that of course!) In Finland nobody ever asks their doctor how they are, and certainly not a doctor whom they are only seeing for the second time. Not that people don’t care about their doctor’s wellbeing, but there’s a difference in that (to exaggerate a bit) in the US “how are you?” is more like a greeting, while in Finland it’s an actual question that expects a actual answer. What I mean is that if someone asks you that in Finland, it’s more socially acceptable than in the US to start a long rant about how overworked you are, how your knees hurt, how constipated you are and how your marriage isn’t going too well. Nobody wants to hear that sort of thing from their doctor and no doctor in their right mind would tell it to their patient, and for that reason, nobody asks such a question. Anyway, after 0.2 seconds reflection I understood that this was a cultural thing and that this American guy was just being polite, not nosy about his doctor’s private life. So I gave him the expected answer: “I’m fine thanks, how are you?”
I know this is not very closely related to the original post, but just to illustrate that the question isn’t as simple as it seems.